Tales of Times Square: Expanded Edition (29 page)

But Shark had become spiritually rejuvenated by the discovery of this protégé. He referred to him as the Stud. Through the Stud, he could vicariously live out the longest roll of his career.

“The kid’s incredible, like DiMaggio on a hitting streak,” claimed the agent. “There’s no one can touch him. He’s got fifteen broads a day callin’, beggin’ to go out, Ten more from last week beggin’ for seconds. Walks out of clubs with three, four at a time, the best-lookin’ ones. He’s not interested in amenities, he don’t send flowers. He don’t wanna know their names, their jobs, where they’re from… I hung out with Namath. I hung out with Elvis. I hung out with Engelbert. None of these guys could hold the Stud’s jockstrap.”

I was suddenly struck by the antithesis of Grubman. The Stud seemed heroic, swimming upstream like an erect salmon against the tide of ’80s abstinence in the face of AIDS. The Stud’s reputation drove Grubman crazy. I decided to do two articles: One on New York’s premier pickup artist, and then one on New York’s foremost strikeout king (a title no man would relish). I would take a journey like Gulliver; I had been to the land of the Lilliputians. Now I would visit the land of giants.

God’s Gift

Mike Florio is the Stud’s name, a special effects man in Local 52 of the movie business. At thirty-one, he’s been on a twelve-year roll, according to Shark, who passed the Stud my number. On the phone Florio is a far cry from Cary Grant. The timbre and accent of his voice could be that of any Brooklyn garage mechanic. Florio makes it clear, at first, that he hates men. “I always go out alone,” he explains. “I don’t need dead weight dragging along.”

A nephew of rib restaurateur Tony Roma, Florio began his career as a stunt man on
Kramer Vs. Kramer.
The production chief wanted him fired, Florio recalls, for “bangin’ dozens of chicks on the set.” So this very morning, a decade later, he reports for work on the Michael Douglas film,
Fatal Attraction.
He’s setting up special rain effects, which he feels will garner him an Oscar nomination. The same production chief is on the movie, says he’s impressed with how Mike’s “matured,” become professional, not chasing skirts on the job. “Then SAG calls the set this morning,” huffs Mike, “claims there are four sex harassment complaints about me, looking up girls’ dresses and stuff.”

The Stud claims to be immune from disease, refuses to wear protection: “The last time I wore a rubber it ended up in forty pieces.” As we talk by phone, the Stud’s call-waiting device is constantly clicking. These are the frustrated attempts of girls phoning around the clock. Mike clicks in some of his call-waiting gals, then phones a list of this week’s conquests, with me listening on the party line. His voice is a haunting reminder of a night in which they slept with a stranger. In a dozen calls, the Stud arranges dates with roommates of girls who aren’t home; a secretary will risk being fired and see him that instant; a girl in bed with a fever will come out that night; three girls are each assigned to visit a different club—Arena, Limelight and the Milk Bar—pick up another girl, then come to his apartment, at two-hour intervals. Each girl whispered her willingness to sleep with him again. Mike has fucked many of them up the ass, he says, within an hour of meeting each one.

Perhaps these were self-destructive wackos, from amongst the exploding buyer’s market of girls out there. Nightclubs are bursting with available females. There must be a dozen Studs in every city, I told Shark. Why glamorize the bastard in print?

“You’ve heard him with one type of girl over the phone,” Shark insisted. “But he’s a high roller. Take him out. There’re a lot of supermodels at the clubs around Christmas. The Stud’s as good at scoring broads as Picasso was at painting.”

That Saturday, I made the rounds with one of New York’s premier pickup artists. Strikeout kings, read on.

Café Pacifico, 10 p.m.

We decide to rendezvous at Pacifico, a Columbus Avenue café which looks like a rejected stage set from
A Clockwork Orange.
“You’ll
know
who I am,” he predicted over the phone. Sure enough, several girls are milling about the front barstool. The hottest blonde in the joint is stroking some bloke’s generous brown curls. He’s wearing black suede boots, pleated slacks, a T-shirt under a fluffy cockpit jacket that momentarily makes him resemble a Saint Bernard pup. It’s the Stud. He looks like some indeterminable pretty-boy corporate rock star. Somebody girls can’t quite pinpoint.

“I love this chick. She’s so sweet.” Mike narrates the situation as if she’s not in the room. Having just arrived himself, he removes his coat, professing to love all his jackets. He has dozens. Each jacket carries “a unique vibe,” whether it cost twenty bucks or $500. As a matter of fact, some chick wouldn’t leave his apartment last night. He finally tossed her clothes in the hall to get her out. But the heap included one of his beloved jackets, a Willywear, which she kept. It was like losing a friend. The Stud had no way to contact her to retrieve the jacket. Why get bogged down with names when you’re banging several chicks a night?

The blonde stroking his hair has just signed with some new modeling agency. She’s dripping with homemade jewelry. Her painfully long legs are twisting around the barstool, and she’s terribly bored with everything in the world except this foxy guy who just took the adjacent stool. The Stud whispers in her ear, to her utter delight. Then her girlfriend enters the restaurant.

It’s the girlfriend’s twenty-fourth birthday, they’re out to celebrate. Round of champagne, says Mike, an $18 pouring for the three of them.

“Yeah, I like this chick,” he says aloud of the blonde, “but I like her girlfriend better.” And
voilà,
the brunette birthday girl, an expensively decked-out lady with profound cleavage, is slayed by one insincere Mike Florio smile. The Stud reaches around the wall where the bartender unquestioningly allows him to rearrange the mood lighting for the entire bar. In this darkened atmosphere, he takes the birthday girl’s hands, introduces himself as her birthday present, and begins soul kissing. The blonde model is miffed, a spurned pout on her haughty face. I feel invisible to both girls. The Stud’s girl-mechanic hands travel over the outside of Birthday Girl’s body like sonar, taking a reading on what’s underneath those Bergdorf threads.

“Let’s leave this dump and go to Columbus,” demands the Stud, to both dames.

“I don’t wanna go,” whines the rejected blonde, swaying her jewelry to Huey Lewis on the jukebox. “I wanna dance at the Palladium.”

“I don’t wanna
,” sing-songs the Stud, in mock imitation. “The Palladium’s a dump.”

In actuality, the Palladium, Stringfellow’s and Nell’s have banned Mike from their premises—as pool sharks are banned from pool halls.

“You’re giving me trouble,” spits the blonde.

“The world is full of trouble,” counters Mike. “Trouble makes the world go round. But imagine how much fun we can have when the trouble stops....”

The blonde giggles at this lame philosophy. Florio’s style is to
parody
pickup clichés, with a wink—women love to laugh along, part of a spontaneous joke. Birthday Girl has her hands all over him, and pleads with her stubborn friend to follow us guys to Columbus. But the Stud feels he’s given them both too much of his time, and stands to leave. Birthday Girl is deflated. But they exchange phone numbers. She enters his right into her address book in pen. He takes hers on a napkin, which he’ll blow his nose with later.

Columbus, 10:45 p.m.

The way most guys work a bar, Mike explains, reminds him of a moronic stop-action silent film. They flicker around in a circle. Mike centers himself at the middle barstool, where he can track all girls coming through. He sucks them over in two’s and three’s. “I’ve got eyes in the back of my head for chicks,” he says, surveying the room like a speed reader. “That table’s all married; forget the blonde in the corner, she’s with a Colombian coke dealer; I already fucked the shit outta that table…”

Columbus Restaurant is this year’s celebrity hangout on Columbus Avenue. Its vacuous soul is that of a mall—there’s no hearth, just unadorned windows for celeb gazing. The Stud comes through like a barroom Frankenstein. Ice-breaking one-liners spew out rapid-fire.

“Hey, I like you, what can I do about it?”
Bam,
one chick at his side. “A woman is a noun. I am a verb.”
Zap,
a second girl takes up position. “I got brand new bed sheets, never been slept in.”
Kapow.
“Take off your hat, what’re you trying to cover up, chemotherapy?” he cracks, grabbing the hat off a passing girl’s head.

Before you know it, he’s got an admiration society. All are TKO’s, any of them ready to leave with Mike should he so desire. I am virtually invisible at his side. Even the two at Pacifico were scored as TKO’s. “They’ll call,” Mike shrugs, matter-of-factly, “I’ll bang both of ‘em.”

Every line he speaks with blushing boyish charm, a sarcastic, Ultrabrite smile, creating instant camaraderie. “I’m married,” one girl retorts to his come-on.

“That’s your problem,” says the Stud, quickly disinterested, his Saint Bernard puppy expression fraught with disgust, making her feel it really
is
her problem.

When Florio sees a chick he likes, all he merely has to do is “Give her one of these.” He demonstrates waving his finger with effortless superiority, like Buddy Love in
The Nutty Professor.
This draws the attention of two curious girls. He introduces himself as the “lead singer of Cinderella.”

“Yeah, I’m headlining The Garden next week, wanna go?” One of the chicks nervously jots his phone number down, thinking she’s scored some heavy metal clod. “Yeah, gimme a call, I’ll be waitin’ by the phone
like a dog
.”

After several Heinekens, the Stud hiccups obnoxiously into every girl’s face at the Columbus meat rack. He intermittently apologizes, or snaps at them to “Shut up!”

“Wha’d he say?!” demands some guy, joining his girlfriend after a respite in the restroom. “Should I belt him?”

“… I hate men,” replies the Stud, with a cosmic sigh to the complainant. He leans over in confidence toward two mouseburger girls, out of the side his mouth: “I’m so horny. Just gotta get laid. But there’s no
good
pussy here tonight, you dig?” He hiccups in their faces.

“Please don’t do that in our ears,” say the homely girls, unflattered. The Stud gets more obnoxious with each downed beer.

“Would you prefer I do it up your ass?
Brrappp.
You know, you two remind me of Mutt & Jeff. I won’t say who’s Mutt.”

The Stud approaches a group of hardened, out-of-work actresses in their early thirties. They’re indignant over his demeanor, having overheard the last ten minutes. They’re onto his game and they don’t approve.

“I’ll tell you something, all you women,” he announces, with histrionic presence. “If you didn’t own a pussy, you wouldn’t have a friend in the world.” After a half-dozen beers, the Stud seems to have slipped. This group doesn’t want him. So, he blows his cover and confides to them he’s a barroom pickup artist: “I’m God’s gift to women. I really am. That’s why he put me here—for you, and you and you. I live for women. I was born for you. I have a great job, in the movies, I work two, three hard days a week. Make lots of money, then come out at night for pussy. If I don’t get it here, I go across the street. If I don’t get it from you, I’ll get it from her. But I’ll
get
it,” he shrugs.

The group listens with amused disdain. “I have a great penthouse apartment, full of
life.
It’s filled with plants and Pacific Ocean fish tanks.” Indeed, the Stud keeps two sharks on the premises in his living room aquarium. The first is a one-and-a-half-foot leopard shark, the other a three-foot nurse shark. Both are capable of taking a serious bite out of a man, but they have a hypnotizing effect on women.

Still holding their attention, Mike quiets down to a soulful confession. “Don’t analyze me in ten minutes, baby, I got hours.” Florio never had sex as a teenager, he says, was rejected throughout high school. Then when he was nineteen, he fell deeply in love with a girl. They planned to marry. Shortly after, one day, a doctor told him his father had ten months to live. This hit him like a sledgehammer, since his dad was closest to him in the world. Thank heavens his girlfriend’s father was chief radiologist at New York Hospital, who could provide the saving care Mike’s father needed. But on the same day he planned to ask his fiancée for her family’s help, she showed up arm in arm with another guy. Mike was dumped on the spot, at New York Hospital. “From then on,” the Stud recalled, “I decided that
I’m
the one who’ll do the fucking over, not girls.”

The actresses are moved. They’re talking softly with Mike now. Three more TKO’s for the Stud. “I’m God’s gift to women!” he bellows, a jungle cry to the bar at large.

“God’s gift to women is a dildo!” screams back some drunk.

“Hear, hear,” toast some hearty male voices at the bar.

Florio needs some grub before he can reach a second wind. The hostess seems hot for him and gives us a reserved table. This is an exclusive area at night, beyond the meat rack. The table next to us contains four young, high-toned models, strategically placed at Columbus’ front window like an advertisement. Some heavy metal millionaire sits with them. At the table in front of them, however, is a big-time beauty with several male escorts. “Point me to whoever you want, I’ll get her,” he says, like a hunting dog. I tell him to turn around for the first true 10 of the evening. This knockout will be his target for tonight, he decides, deciphering her body as if wearing X-ray specs.

The moment the heavy metal idiot goes to the john, the Stud reaches over and taps a model on the shoulder. She’s a black-haired heartbreaker with a cute, upturned nose job and pyramid tits.

“What’s your name?”

“Courtney.”

“Hi, Courtney. Joe Perry,” says the Stud, extending a sturdy handshake. For the rest of the evening, he’ll pose as a member of Aerosmith. “Say, Courtney,” he goes, waving her closer in confidence. “Who’s
that
?”