Tales of Times Square: Expanded Edition (23 page)

Any midnight, a pedestrian might grab a free paper fallen from the loading docks of the
Times
delivery trucks. But most midnight people on this block don’t read the
Times.
Round the corner—past the Playland, Joe Franklin’s Memory Lane studio at 1481 Broadway, the Rialto I, the Funny Store gag shop, and finally La Primadora Quality Cigars—you’ve reached the Crossroads of the World. Stand on the corner of Broadway and 42nd, the old legend goes, and you’ll eventually meet everyone you’ve ever known.

Forty-second Street, at midnight. Denizens of the old Times Square might not appreciate the romance of this sublime ugliness. Slum snot, hatefully hawked out of flaring nostrils, strands of phlegm coughed out onto the sidewalks, each offering an opinion of the world. Characters up to no good from every slum within subway fare come to bathe in the neon. Let an entrance stay blocked too long—any store owner’s Little League bat will chase most of ‘em a mile. The actual corner is Seventh and 42nd, but establishments on both avenues use Broadway for their address.

Victory’s Defeat

If we stroll around the corner, the first joint of note is the Victory Theater, 209 West 42nd, where sidewalk evangelists are handing out tracts warning “There Is No Water in Hell” to porngoers. This is the Brandt Organization’s only porno house. The box office woman seems disgruntled: “Nobody stays too long. Even men who come here with their women don’t stay that long—just long enough to get hot. Then they leave.”

On the first balcony, however, is an enfilade of slobs, the same wasted, drowsy bums who’ve been farting up there since this was Minskys’ Republic burlesque in the Depression thirties. None of them, who shelled out three bucks for the triple bill, are watching the triple bill, though several absentmindedly yank their schmucks. Only difference between now and fifty years ago is that most are Negroes. Ask any theater manager his take on the customers and he’ll shrug: “This is 42nd Street.”

The Victory is the oldest theater on the strip, built in 1899 by Oscar Hammerstein I (“The Father of Times Square”).
Gypsy
and
The Night They Raided Minsky’s
took place here. The interior has a splendid old European quaintness, now raw and worn. The third balcony and four opera booths are seated. Even the quaint bidet-style urinals in the men’s room date back to pre-burlesque days, when
Abie’s Irish Rose
played here. A beefy security guard is on the prowl. Brandt theaters are the most professional on 42nd—they know their popcorn. Each bucket movie seat has probably felt the weight of a hundred thousand asses each. With a little spit ‘n’ polish, you’d think you were back in the balcony of Minsky’s, farting along to Gypsy, Ann Corio, and Pisha Pasha from Persia.

Back out on the strip, rookie police come to attention as mounted cop Barney Devine rides by. A trim, tan, and gruff sixty-three years old, Devine is a cop skells won’t mess with or taunt. Every night, in his leather jacket, boots, helmet, and custom-fit striped knickers, he patrols the shadows of fifteen marquees on the block. His faithful partner, Jim, is an immaculately groomed horse, Devine’s third mount in thirty-seven years on the force. Devine makes the law look stylish, even pretty. He dismounts at the curb with more authority than any cop on the beat, ready to clear the sidewalk, smack a skell’s beer bottle out of his hand, or kick some ass. He is fighting in court to stay on the job since passing the NYPD’s mandatory retirement age.

So drab is the interior of Cupid’s Retreat, across from the Victory, that when the hookers change sheets between sessions, it is a moving experience. Inside are six fully pitched camping tents, where quickies are available to the Times Square outdoorsman. The next entrance, sandwiched between Blackjack and the New Amsterdam, was the short-lived Keystone Books. The racks of this tiny outlet were divided into she-male, transsexual, and hermaphrodite sections, and no hermaphrodite should have passed up a visit when in the nabe.

Skill’s Nutrition

An endless stream of scar-faced skells appear at the window of Al-saidi’s candy stop, at 678 Eighth Avenue, off 42nd. Abdul Steve, from Casablanca, Morocco, runs the Friday night late shift, when the store gleans its profit for the week. This is one of a handful of support systems where the world-renowned lowlifes of 42nd Street come for their nutrition. The grubby kiosk is stocked with potato chips, beer, soda, candy, cigs, and headshop gear. Abdul Steve can grab a forty-ounce Bud or a pack of Newports, bag it, make change and toss in a straw without turning his head or taking a step. It’s real cozy inside—there’s always a moonlighting friend or two among this small society of Arabs who interchange work shifts at a dozen tiny all-night headshops in Times Square. Rent is about three grand a month, but the owner can make himself a thousand-dollars-a-week profit.

A couple of burnt-out white kids from Jersey appear at the waist-level open window. “Two packs of Marlboro, box of whippers,” says one. “Whippers” come in ten-packs for eight bucks, and are ostensibly used as charges for whipping cream. The little metal torpedoes have a warning on the package: “Pure N
₂
O under pressure. Do not inhale.” Popular items with girls mostly, Abdul says. A black swish appears at the window, contemplating whether to buy a tiny bottle of Rush, Quicksilver, or Hardware, inhaled as an orgasm enhancer, or for a fifteen-minute kick. Abdul tells him each brand is identical, they just put a different label on the bottles. But Rush is preferred among junkies. Next in line, a fat welfare woman, dressed to party, says, “I’ll have me a Pink Champale—the big bottle!” Abdul Steve is like your friendly downtown flying-carpet salesman. He calls the ugliest, most haggardly drunken faces “sir,” thanks each one, listens to their orders, and smiles in such an unthreatening manner that virtually no one gives him a hard time. Most of his 2
A.M.
customers on an August Friday night are up to no good—predators and gutter alcoholics.

“Quart a Colt 45!” demands a skell, fist hitting the narrow wooden counter.

“I cain’t drink no Colt 45,” whines his crony, “my stomach won’t take it.”

“I seen this muthafucka drink gasoline,” says the skell, swiping the bottle in the bag. “A buck fifty, shit!”

An old, ravaged white face appears next at the window, bags hanging miserably under his eyes. “Camel filters,” he wheezes. He’s a quarter cashier at Show World finishing up a sixteen-hour double shift; each shift pays $39. Show World employees are among the best customers, they buy a lot of orange juice, and security guards, forbidden from drinking, sneak their beer in paper bags.

A massive rhino, who looks like a pro wrestler in a suit, thinks a white Jersey boy has cut ahead. “There’s a line here!” he snarls, half laughing that anyone has the audacity to step in front of him. It seems the whole store might collapse if he expands his rib cage in anger. “You are not part of this conversation!” he belches to some skell mumbling behind to
hurry up.
Abdul cools him out with a flying-carpet smile.

“That was my best customer,” he says of the rhino. “He work nearby, and every day at six o’clock, he go next door to the Blarney Stone and sits drinking till four in the morning. Every day.” The guy who was not part of the conversation is now hanging in a seasick manner over the counter. Two tall Ballantines, he manages to sputter, his hands a mass of scar tissue and scabs. “Whazza matter, you don’t like the way Spanish look?” he says to the ghetto-blaster boy behind in line. Abdul says this bozo works as a janitor in one of the bogus burlesque dives around the corner, he drinks too much Ballantine every day, and he doesn’t sleep. Ever.

Little kids drop by for potato chips after 2
A.M.
“Their mothers are drunk in the hotel,” says Abdul, of the welfare families who now stay at the Carter, around the block. “I have little daughter, I’d
never
bring her here.” A fellow in an athletic jacket wants a tube of Sta-Hard stud cream. The proprietor sells only five Sta-Hards a week, which, like the Gold Star-brand rubbers, are bought mostly by black and Puerto Rican girls. Abdul can’t recall seeing a white woman come up to his window after 11
P.M.

A serious request for the evening’s biggest order—six-pack of Bud, Kools, rubbers, glass pipe, ammonia—this dude’s got a lot of party left in him tonight. Abdul refrains from all vices sold in the headshop. Some of his beer drinkers, he says, claim they get higher if they drink through a straw. Every customer gets a straw with their beer, and even the most gruesome of faces become pacified when he tosses the straw in their bag.

Abdul Steve likes to sweep up, pull down the heavy metal gate, and close shop after 3
A.M.
“This is when the type of people out there get really bad,” he grins.

Morning on 42nd Street. Thornton Wilder imagined archaeologists pausing with their pickaxes over the Square someday, saying, “There appears to have been some kind of public center here.” Times Square is the only part of the city whose very architecture seems to sleep with a hang-over from the night before. The hulking neon voltage takes a hard-earned snooze to fuel up for another shift. Commuters from the tri-state area flood into Port Authority, Grand Central, and the stations of five converging subway lines, which disgorge here. These were the daytime invaders who poured in at sunrise when actors and gamblers in the Times Square of yore donned their eyeshades and earplugs for bedtime. Thousands of phrases were coined here, one of them being “out-of-towner.” Rosy-cheeked, corn-fed, star-gazing, hand-holding couples who say, “Excuse me, please.” They used to be called the “white-shoe trade” each summer at the hotels; “hicksters” by bus drivers; “farmers” by lunchroom managers; “popeyes” to the theater.

If Marquees Could Talk

A limo stops at 229 West 42nd this morning to let off Martin Levine, head man of Brandt 42nd St. Theaters, with the organization through six decades. He leaves every afternoon before the ghetto brigades arrive. Levine’s office is on the top floor of the six-story Brandt Building, above the Grand Luncheonette hot dog counter and Selwyn Theater. An old patch-cord switchboard operates up front, taking calls for all seven Brandt-owned movie houses on Forty Deuce—the Victory, Lyric, Apollo, Selwyn, Times Square, Liberty, and Empire. All were among the thirteen legit theaters built on 42nd Street between 1899 and 1920. Wire spools of ticket stubs represent the daily take—each Brandt movie house on 42nd grosses between $25,000 and $75,000 a week.

“We had a good diversification down here,” says the white-haired Levine, in his seventies, the son-in-law of founder William Brandt. “We developed this into the biggest movie center in the world.” The hall leading to his dark, professorial office contains publicity stills from Levine’s heyday. Here he sits at a dinner with Jack Kennedy and Eleanor Roosevelt; a bland-looking businessman posing with Cary Grant, Gina Lollobrigida, or Nelson Rockefeller.

Levine defends the epochal Brandt takeover of 42nd Street’s legit theaters, resulting from the Depression in 1933: “The banks had foreclosed and taken them over. The dominant party back then in legit theater, as today, was Shubert Theaters. They were very happy to see these theaters convert to motion pictures ‘cause it removed potential competition. They might have been demolished if we didn’t take over.”

Levine was particularly proud of the Apollo, 223 West, his “art house.” Honorary plaques from the French, German and Russian governments decorate his wall: “For thirty-five years, the Apollo Theater was the most successful art house in the country. It played nothing but foreign films and art films, films dealing with opera and ballet. One of the first pictures we played there was
The Life of Beethoven.”

The Apollo was also the first to exhibit foreign nudity, making it, perhaps, the archetypal American theater imagined to be attended by truck drivers, murderers, and raincoat wankers. Levine supervises today’s bookings on 42nd Street, even approves the custom-made showcards depicting mutilations, for which Forty Deuce is infamous. “What we call ‘Fronts,’” says Levine. “As long as I’ve been in this business we’ve used Fronts.”

“Action-oriented,” he describes the movies he books, some of them first-run, which he couldn’t get in the old days.
“Broadway
was first-run in those days, big gala openings, lotta hoopla. We never had that ‘cause we were second-and third-run.” (Hollywood studios booked movies into their own theaters, until a federal antitrust suit opened up the business.)

“A lot of people have their own impressions,” shrugs Levine, defensive about 42nd Street’s fare. “Look at today’s bookings: At the Lyric we’re playing a picture called
Conan,
which is playing all over the city.” Levine fumbles with schedules on his desk. “The Apollo is playing
Beat Street.
The Selwyn is playing
Cannonball Run II,
a major-company release. The Empire is playing
Escape from Women’s Prison,
also at the Criterion on Broadway, for example.”

Levine neglects to mention
Trap Them, Kill Them,
playing at the Liberty. He says he’d like to see porn eliminated from 42nd Street but doesn’t acknowledge the weekly bill of Seka reruns at the Victory. He won’t mention
Splatter University.
Or next week at the Times Square:
Doctor Butcher, Medical Deviate.
(“He is a depraved, sadistic rapist, a bloodthirsty homicidal killer ... and he makes house calls.”)
Make Them Die Slowly,
a regular return engagement at the Liberty, is chock full of graphic castrations and disembowelments, highlighted every day on the TV monitor outside.

These flicks would be forever relegated to Southern drive-ins and sleaze-film fests, if the $1.6 billion redevelopment project succeeds in condemning all fourteen theaters between Seventh and Eighth Avenues on 42nd Street. Half would be demolished, while the others would allegedly be consigned to the Nederlanders for legit theater conversion. Although if they remain dark without bookings, developers would likely soon convert the remaining old palaces to office space. The Brandt Organization filed three antitrust suits in 1984 against the government to save their business chain. The Great Black Way versus The Great White Way. The Brandts cling to this volatile issue, the “low-income, minority group” defense, championing a last stand to save the last wildlife preserve of cheap-ticket, ghetto entertainment for “the masses.”