Tales of Times Square: Expanded Edition (21 page)

“There aren’t that many runaways now that go there, just mostly castaways from the city. They’re a tough group, and if you’re a runaway from the Midwest, you’re not gonna last there,” says Father Rappleyea about the Covenant youth mission two blocks from his church. He, too, finds kids on the steps of Holy Cross: “If they were a New York City kid, I would send them to Under 21 [the street name for Covenant House]; if they were a runaway, I would send them to the Port Authority Youth Squad, which would attempt to get them home, whereas Under 21 eventually would attempt it, but their policy is not to ask any questions, which has created problems. Father Ritter felt if you became too inquisitive, the youngster wouldn’t come.”

“A lot of the kids that we pick up,” says Sergeant Poggioli of Port Authority Youth Service, “tell you they live at Under 21, rather than tell you they’re on the street. A lot of police don’t care for it. They feel it’s a haven for runaways, which it is. We have our problems with them, but constantly have meetings with them to work it out. We come from two ways of thinking. They take a complete advocacy role for the children.”

For example, continues the sergeant, “Under 21 had one kid who said he was getting beat up by his father with an extension cord. They filed an abuse petition, strictly from the kid’s point of view. Then we picked up the same kid. He says, ‘You can’t do anything to me, Under 21 filed a petition against my parents.’ ‘Okay, baby, but it’s my obligation as a police officer to find if you have any alarms.’ He had a missing-persons alarm. We call his local police in Jersey and they said, ‘Oh, you got him?’ I said, ‘This kid’s claimin’ abuse.’ They said, ‘Abuse, that crumb?’ He had shot out his neighbor’s windows with a .22. His father spanked him and took away his radio. As he pulled out the radio, the kid got hit in the arm with the cord.”

After they walk in, new kids are assessed by volunteers during a process called “intake”—their name, age, health, whether they’re selling their ass. Father Bruce’s reconditioning program tries to crack the “lying-cheating-stealing” cycle from the street by aiming “our kids” toward the bottom rung of civilized society. A menial job might be held up as a long-term goal. While a licensed public school on the compound handles younger kids, job seminars and vocational counseling are given to older boys. They’re taught that the despairing cry—“Yo, man, I need a
job!
”—is not the proper way to interview for a position. When the kid is assessed on his first day, he’s asked what kind of work interests him. “I wanna be a rock singer!” is the common plaint. This is neutralized by the counselor’s callous answer that it “isn’t realistic.” Aspiring to a counter job at McDonald’s, after proving yourself for six months at the participating Dove Messenger Service, is, however. But only for their most motivated kids.

Eighty percent of the kids admitted suffer from severe emotional disturbance or suicidal depression. The first floor contains medical and legal services. Volunteer doctors treat VD, drug abuse, and rape or send kids with wounds off to hospitals. Above this is a floor for girls, and then a floor for boys aged fifteen through eighteen. The next floor is for pregnant girls and mothers. “‘What’s your baby’s name?’” Father Bruce once asked, reflecting in an Under 21 brochure: “‘Aurora,’ she said. Lots of our girls give their babies exotic, wistful, wishful, dreamy names.... Somehow that seems to give their children a stake in beauty and faraway things that are not part of their mothers’ lives.”

Father Bruce cloaks himself in secrecy these days, and his secretaries dismiss interview requests from everyone but puritanical media. Reagan’s 1984 State of the Union address singled out the priest as “Times Square’s Good Shepherd.” His fund-raisers and Young & Rubicam radio and TV commercials help perpetuate the “Minnesota Strip,” years after its demise. This titillating fantasy of an Eighth Avenue consumed by kidnapped blond teen hookers prompted a team of Minneapolis detectives to search Times Square in 1983. They could not turn up one girl from their home state. Though no traces of kiddie porn, on paper or film, are available in Times Square, Father Ritter won’t differentiate between child abuse and porn, or the fact they are two separate animals. Though young flesh, particularly chicken hawking, appears on the streets, Ritter claims it is “under the protection of organized crime,” where “the multi-billion dollar sex industry continues to flourish, feeding off the bodies of these victimized youths—who are raped, beaten, and sometimes murdered.”

Two thirds of the kids fall through the cracks, return to the street. They can’t cut rules—no drugs, booze, or violence on premises, a 9
P.M.
curfew. They are banned from Covenant House up to a month. If or when they return, they might be so dizzy, they won’t even recognize their former social worker. (“The street is a brutal parent,” says Father Bruce.) About a third, Covenant House says, are “set on the path to a better life.”

Pross and Pimps

After Eighth Avenue’s streetwalker monopoly was terminated by 1980, girls gravitated to a dozen crosstown thoroughfares, as if dispersed by some antitrust action. The whole city combined would never contain the volume of streetwalkers that Times Square once did. When hookers were still wearing hot pants, blond dime-store wigs, and go-go boots, missionary Arlene Carmen took to the sidewalks of Times Square: “What we call the ‘immersion process’ in the church—immersing myself in
the life
to find out what it was, whether there was a place the church could be of service.”

Carmen believes hookers today “have been affected by the women’s movement, there’s a greater sense of independence than eight years ago. More are renegades who live without men. The women stand out less visibly than they used to in dress, there’s less decoration of the body.”

Judson Memorial Church, Carmen’s headquarters on Washington Square, acquired a National Car Rental bus once used for airport shuttles and made it their mobile unit for hookers: “The bus is to give the women access to the square world, to help them with social services, baptize their babies, marry them, bury them. It’s a church.”

The mobile church snakes its way up Eighth Avenue in winter, offering hot coffee to cold-legged wildlife. No males whatsoever are allowed in, except the priest who drives. A sign on the door reads
IF YOU’RE RUNNING, RUN RIGHT BY, IF YOU’RE WALKING, WALK RIGHT IN
. Speaking in a whisper at her church administration desk, Arlene Carmen says she won’t open the bus door for girls evading cops. Middle-aged, with frizzy black hair, she is solemn, humorless, possibly a bit shell-shocked after being engaged in “the ministry of prostitutes” since 1976. Judson Church’s denomination is American Baptist/United Church of Christ. Judson’s goal is to decriminalize prostitution.

Carmen deals only with streetwalkers, bottom feeders in the hierarchy of hookers: “They prefer working outdoors because they have a choice about who to go with. When you work inside, management doesn’t permit you to say no. That’s the only freedom in that life—to move around and choose who she goes with. Some have tried and just couldn’t hack the boredom indoors.

“Most of these women are mothers,” Carmen continues. “In this city there are baby-sitters who care for the children of prostitutes twenty-four hours a day in their own apartments. The mothers pay up to $150 a week for that care, a very informal network. The women don’t know if they’re going to jail, so they can’t keep their kids with them. Children are very important in that life.”

All of Carmen’s hookers bring pictures of their babies to paste up in the van: “It was their idea to put up the board. That was the only thing they ever asked us to do. Because they can’t carry anything—any minute they could go to jail. They can’t open bank accounts for the same reason they can’t get apartments, you need references. You move to a hotel, but you can’t stay in a hotel with a child for any length of time. So they move around a lot. Then they get arrested and they lose their hotel room, all their clothes and belongings, and are always rebuying. These things come together to make for a terribly unstable life. You can’t save, you don’t have an apartment, you can’t have your kid, you’re a criminal, you’re labeled and you go to jail. So life is filled with instant gratification, on impulse rather than planning. You spend all your money, there’s no place to save it.”

Carmen claims prostitutes could break out of this cycle if they ceased being chased by cops, having to pay fines, and spending three-to-ten-day stretches at Riker’s. On the other hand, she won’t acknowledge residential neighborhoods that are plagued by whores turning tricks and littering rubbers in their lobbies and courtyards.

“You think of it as a short-term profession, maybe eight years. She’s thinking about getting out by her late twenties or early thirties. An athlete has a short life span, and a woman is pretty much in the same business—she’s using her body, and her body gets tired. She’s tired of going to jail, she’s ready for something quieter. But we’ve criminalized her. Her opportunity to move into the square world is restricted. She’s got a record, so she sees her choices as being narrow; either go into another illicit activity that carries a harsher penalty, like car thefts or drugs, or go on welfare.”

In the early 1970s, Times Square police felony warrants were rife with pimps who beat or killed their troops like so many expendable pawns. King George, for instance, poured boiling water into a bathtub that he made his whores sit in. Fast Black, one-time possessor of a twenty-bitch stable, staged shoot-outs when acquiring other pimps’ girls. A decade later, there’s a less flamboyant
man
, steering a budget pimpmobile, perhaps a white-walled Skylark instead of the customized Eldorado of Superfly’s day.

Though Carmen has recently conducted four memorial services, she believes, oddly enough, “There are some really nice pimps who are good to their women, just as nice as anyone might be. It’s her choice to be with a pimp, because not everybody is.”

Carmen takes a softer line on pimps, stating that “Tricks are very dangerous people. Here is a population of women who are criminalized by society. Therefore they’re easy targets. ‘Cause nobody gives a damn what happens to them. When a woman gets murdered who’s a prostitute, no one’s going to waste much time trying to solve it, it’s a low priority. I’ve known more women than I could possibly count who’ve been murdered out there, died anonymously. For me, if a dozen people I know die, that’s a lot.”

“The pimp squad was dissolved five months ago,” says Officer DeMerle of Public Morals, the division from which the squad operated. “There just weren’t enough complaints against pimps anymore.”

“Pimps are
slime
,” counters DeMerle’s partner, Officer Lenz. Heavily pockmarked and indignant, Lenz assumes the bad-guy role. The Public Morals division (formerly the vice squad) is on the fourth floor of the Traffic Precinct on West 30th. In the mildew-green office, a dozen plainclothes protectors of our morals plot out routine busts and roundups at Times Square’s sex shows, sometimes in concert with Midtown Enforcement.

Plainclothes make “righteous arrests” of the pross, playing the Johns, catching them with their skirts down. Uniforms just round them up when loitering-for-the-purpose-of. The Morals boys go to swing clubs, peeps, burlesque shows—all of which they soberly return from, leading a handcuffed chain of girls and managers. Conversely, DeMerle says he gives full protection to hookers as citizens, should they need police. But the lawmen here consider all porn joints illegal, despite their ability to operate freely in Times Square. “The police are not an entity unto themselves,” explains Lenz, who would personally banish the blatant stuff: “I can’t bring my wife and kids to Times Square, even though I’m an officer with a gun. Who my gonna look after first—my wife, my daughter?”

Morals cops only stay in this division for two years, then are transferred before becoming too comfortable with the Square and its bribe system. Every nationality is represented here—only their regulation .38’s in their shoulder holsters are the same. They spend most of their time out in the field, working toward the gradual elimination of the porn machine, which they’re confident will crumble. Cupid’s Retreat, the last massage parlor in Times Square, was shuttered in May 1984. Roundups of Show World booth girls and Harmony Theatre strippers, though seemingly futile, continue. Mention the Harmony to one seasoned dick at the front desk, and he sneers: “Don’t worry, we’ll get ‘em.”

Castrate the Bastards!

October 20, 1979: It is a cool, bright Saturday in late fall, and between five and seven thousand women assemble at Columbus Circle to march on Times Square. This spectacular turnout will deliver the crowning war cry, thus far, of Women Against Pornography. Thousands arrange their placards and banners and move into parade formation at 1
P.M.
, bristling with revolution. They will stampede down Broadway to 42nd Street, the pornography capital of America. Midtown traffic has been rerouted for the day; hundreds of police barricades are in place. Forty-second Street is sealed off, and it will be theirs. These girls
know
how to apply for a right-to-demonstration permit.

TAKE THE HARDCORE OUT OF THE BIG APPLE

WOMEN SAY NO TO MEN WHO READ PORN

Women Against Porn was given a storefront at cost by the 42nd Street Development Corp., at Ninth and 42nd, a former hooker soul-food restaurant. Martin Paints sold discounted whitewash to cover the slimy walls. Tony’s Bar provided hot water and a sink. “It’s about time!” said the neighbors, and the exclamation became the slogan of WAP buttons. A former
Newsday
reporter, and a California activist who’d spent four years with the United Farm Workers, were full-time directors of the office. Carl Weisbrod, Midtown Enforcement director, gave the feminists their first Times Square porn tour. Susan Brownmiller, who spawned the porn-equals-rape belief—a fantasy fueled by wishful propaganda, contrary to what every scientific study had thus far concluded—led twice-weekly smut tours. Giddy groups of women, each donating five dollars, had a high old time touring the peeps, though always emerging nose-up and indignant. Show World was most cooperative in admitting the broads—maybe they could help clean up the area, close the sleazier joints, make it safer for three-piece-suits, the favored customers.