Tales of Times Square: Expanded Edition (31 page)

The I.D. girls

As any network news program told you with relish, drinking by teenage girls was on the rise. Lushes by eighteen. So many a teen alcoholic got caught in a bind when New York State raised its legal drinking age to twenty-one in 1985. Nymphs who’d been swigging it down legally suddenly had to come into the city for fake I.D.’s. Enter the Playlands of Times Square.

A pal of mine, Sammy Grubman, took immediate notice of this political situation. A men’s magazine editor in his thirties, Sammy spent many a lunch hour enraptured by the teenagers lining up at Playland headquarters—Broadway between 42nd & 43rd Streets. Mobs of boppers would subway into Times Square at school break to purchase fake I.D.’s. The I.D. girls became a New York phenomenon.

Sammy had a self-admitted weakness for young bloods, and he gazed for hours at girls in braces. His office was just around the corner, and since the liquor age rose, he often returned late from lunch, drooling like a dingo. They subwayed in from Jersey, Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx and Staten Isle. Sammy imagined them later in the evening: “Carloads of liquored-up dirty girls going 100 mph, talking about blowjobs until they get into a wreck.”

The Playland off 42nd & Broadway became the most booming fake I.D. franchise in the city. (This was the same location where I got my
Screw
press pass laminated every year.) Gals filled out a form at the counter, in English or Spanish, which was then promptly punched out along with a tiny Polaroid onto an official-looking $8 card.
Voilà,
they instantly came of age. A bartender’s signal to pour. The girls left squealing, their freshly laminated Times Square I.D.’s at the ready, so they could go out club-hopping with their underage boyfriends and become drunk-driving fatalities.

“Let’s go to a bar and get fucked up!” said a Puerto Rican tamale to her accomplice as they nervously scattered out of Playland one Friday. A new wave entered, affecting phony tough-girl façades. “Remember, you gotta be anonymous,” said the ringleader to her girlfriends. Some lost their nerve at the entrance. Strangers to this funky Times Square locale—the Crossroads of the Third World—they were afraid they’d be stopped, questioned or arrested.

“You’ve got bumper crops of ‘em coming in to Penn Station from Long Island,” said Sammy, leering near the arcade entrance. “They have braver girlfriends who’ve done it first, told ‘em how ya walk eight blocks up from Penn Station. This is the first time they’ve been to the city, they don’t know anything about it, they’re terrified of getting lost. They’re doing something naughty, they think they’re going out drinking in the city. After they buy the I.D., they look around a few blocks on the way back to Penn, but they won’t find anything. Maybe they’ll stop in McDonald’s, the only thing they recognize. Then they run back to the train before dark. That’s the whole I.D. Girl itinerary… Here’s a new I.D. train from Great Neck,” Sammy sputtered. “Look at King Bozo, the protector,” he fizzled, over their young male chaperone.

“You can’t overestimate their intelligence,” explained Sammy, who rarely ever actually talked to one. “They’d be terrified if some older guy came on. There’s no way to pick them up. They don’t know the Palladium or Studio 54, you can’t show them tickets, they’ve never heard of anything. You’d have to tell them something they can relate to in TV terms, like you’re an actor trying to make it in New York, something they’ve seen on soaps. You’re a photographer, you shoot rock bands like Kiss.

“Look, there’s a group that just went shopping, they’re dressed just like a commercial for The Gap.” The girls giddily made themselves up in a photo booth mirror before their Polaroids were snapped. They wore leg-warmers and pre-faded jeans. “You also get your real
goyisha
Dirty Girls,” he added, panting after a new group entered, dressed up to get messed up. “You might as well just pass out,” sighed Sammy at his pervert’s perch.

Just what makes them so appealing?

“Young sluts are adventurous,” Sammy explained. “They don’t smell, everything that comes out of them is sweet. Another few years, they start to stink.”

Trains indeed pulled into Penn Station with new waves of I.D. Girls, images Sammy would toss and turn over. But he never had the gumption to approach them. He knew well the dangers of procuring jailbait, what with cops and plainclothes all over this corner.

“There goes Mr. Racial Ambiguity,” he said of another chaperone, wishing it could be him.

The Palladium

I accompanied Sammy on his nightly rounds pursuing females by the thousand. He always returned home alone. An industrious fellow, Sammy’s workaday world was permeated with endless ruses: “All my desires, the magazines, my movie company dealings, the exercise tapes, all stem from wanting to meet girls,” said Sammy. “Every idea I have, every motivation, comes from my obsession with girls. I hate the Palladium, you’d never get me there unless I had a good friend giving a party or some business deal. It’s repulsive, the music is sickening, the people are pathetic. It’s only good for taking some dumb slut, using my invites to proposition some bimbo who has to wait on line and can’t get in, but thinks it’s hot shit to go. If I had a girlfriend, I’d never go there. My idea of a great evening is to go to Chinatown, order off-the-menu, run home, fuck her, then watch TV in bed while she tells me how great I am, how happy she is to be with me.”

In his unkempt midtown apartment, littered with watches and hot Panasonic racing bike parts (not his), Sammy splashed on a handful of Paco Rabanne cologne, arranged his skinny black tie and donnned the rumpled black Brooks Brothers suit bought wholesale at Syms. He’d worn it all week. His black glasses were thick, as was the scent of Sen-Sen upon his breath. He popped two Valium. He carried a pocket full of special passes to upcoming oh-so-exclusive Palladium events, which he would flash to females. These were easily obtained by New York media mockeys like Sammy—whose primary vocation was nine-to-five editor of
Oui
magazine. We cabbed it to the Palladium.

Sammy also fronted a semi-legitimate office for exercise and swimsuit models seeking “print work.” He called such prospective amateurs “Cargo Models.”

“Fly ‘em up for a look, if I’m not satisfied, send ‘em back down in five minutes, it’s only a few hours to Miami. Are you kidding, a modeling interview in New York, fashion capital of the world? They gab to all their friends, ba-bah-bah-bah, I’m flying to New York. This is the dream they see in every stupid TV show and magazine. But ya gotta ask to see
all
their pictures, not just skin photos. You wanna see their contact sheets, any stupid Polaroids. You can never tell from model pictures, they always look different, you tell ‘em to Fed Ex all of ‘em up quick. That way you can almost insure it won’t be a total bust. Some models look terrible in person, they’re great picture girls, not fuck girls. You need a front, an office with the bullshit, a secretary, sit there in a suit with phones ringing, a switchboard. A front is essential. Have ‘em sign some stupid paper, makes it look important.”

Two of his recent prospects were the Bai Sisters (pronounced
bah-hi
). Sometimes, he hired girls for an actual project, and in this case, he flew the Bai Sisters up for a video box cover. He arranged the shoot to take place at the Palladium. “It was terrible, a disaster session,” Sammy moans. “The Bai Sisters have huge tits, like half watermelons. But I noticed they sagged a bit. They wore these huge wire bras that threw me off. Wouldn’t let me touch ‘em. Then the cameraman, the Palladium guy, the lighting guy, all went crazy as soon as the tits came out, started using every come-on they could think of. I demanded that they behave professionally, but they didn’t and I couldn’t control ‘em. The sisters freaked out.”

Sammy cut their visit short and sent the sisters back to Miami. He waved them off at the airport with a fond “Bah-hi!”

Outside the Palladium—
AKA
“the torture club”—were what Sammy called the “Line-Up Girls.” Fifty of them, a bit older than the afternoon I.D. Girls, anxiously awaited selection for the honor of paying tonight’s $10 entrance. Exclusion was the currency here.
Let’s all get excited about parties to which we’re uninvited.
Even more rarefied were Friday nights in the Mike Todd Room, where Ladies Only roamed. The backroom bar was known as Shescape. Not even Don Johnson and David Lee Roth were allowed to crash it.

Hundreds of chumps also braved the line each night, raising their hands like schoolboys, dying to get in. A few gutter blacks outside worked a tired scam (“I’m friends with the do’ man, gimme twenty, I getcha in.”) Sammy scanned the line. One chick, with boyfriend, struck up a friendly chat. When she asked how he acquired the special passes he flaunted, Sammy said, “We’re bigshots from Hollywood.” Sammy cemented a friendship with the Palladium’s mailroom clerk for invitations. Feeling gregarious, he handed an extra pass to her. He conceded to me, “half your power is lost” at this point.

Sammy presented two passes to the goons at the door. Once inside, he set sight on his first prey at the bar. He took a seat next to the lass, but couldn’t rev his engine for a few minutes. Finally, he hit with the lamest of come-ons: “What do you do for a living?”

She rolled her eyes and soured her expression without an answer. Three of her girlfriends strolled over, all oblivious to Sammy and myself. They were bubbling over about Boy George, who was in the Mike Todd Room upstairs. The four were trading off their one special pass to get in. Sammy volunteered that he possessed a pass and that “Boy George works” for his company.

“Would you like to meet Boy George?”

The sour-faced cutie became animated, suddenly interested as Sammy pulled out abundant Mike Todd Room passes. “Would you like me to introduce you?”

“Would you?!” she cried.

“No,” said Sammy. “You could have said ‘No Thanks,’ or said you weren’t interested politely. But you made a face and didn’t answer. You sit there for twenty minutes in the Palladium then get upset when some guy approaches? Fuck you. Now I’m leaving to go up and see Boy George.”

Sammy walked off smugly, having scored himself a rare TKO.

“They’re just girls, sometimes out of high school,” said Sammy, veering off to observe the female powder room exit. “Yet trying to land one requires all the cunning of a corporate takeover.”

We walked upstairs where the cocktail party was in progress for Boy George. Boy and 500 of his very closest friends. There was an open bar manned by a butch bartender. “I like seeing barmaids in uniforms, with their hats tilted at a jaunty, subservient angle,” said Sammy, from the side of his mouth. The butch bartender happened to be a charter member of Women Against Pornography, I would later learn. She spotted Sammy. As Grubman recovered our drinks to leave, a large bouncer laid a beefy hand on Sammy’s shoulder. He ordered him to halt.

“I thought it was Open Bar?” cried Sammy.

“You
pay,” yelled the bartendress from behind the bar, eyeing him with venom.

The Mike Todd room had a more elite clientele, barring most Line-Up Girls. Remember,
exclusion
was what made the Palladium’s engine tick. While models flitted about us, Sammy imparted this theory: “Their whole career is trading their body one way or another to get ahead. What’s modeling but a life of what they think is glamour, meeting famous people, traveling, show biz? So they’re another form of hooker, basically.

“Unfortunately, a beautiful girl is the highest status symbol in the world. I don’t care what car you have, what clothes, how much money. When you walk in the room with a beautiful girl, even if you look like a slob in jeans, everyone thinks you must be hot shit, you must know something… ‘Look at that old fuck with the models, he must be the owner of a famous design company.’”

A Continental chap named Fritz was Special Events coordinator at the Palladium. Sammy didn’t fancy Euro Trash. Every one of the regulars here who seemed to score with models was named Lars, Horst, Otto, Helmut, Hans, Sven, Rudolph or Da-vid. A Venezuelan beauty queen, whose airfare to New York was paid for by one of Sammy’s ventures, escaped his clutches. Instead, she made her way through every Tom, Dick and Adolf here at the Mike Todd Room. Fritz, a high-roller with the broads, let out a cosmic sigh of cigarette smoke.

“I’m so sick of zeze hard, stressed-out professional chicks with zere insane schedules,” he told Sammy.

“How’d you do with the Venezuelan?” asked Sammy.

“Ze girl takes so much coke—not just enough to get high, enough to kill somebody,” complained frazzled Fritz. “She orders sushi at the restaurant—every single piece on ze menu. Zen she doesn’t touch any of it. I hear her doing bulimia in my bathroom. She
j’accuse
me of trying to poison her with sediment at the bottom of the wine. She call my penis ‘Mr. Droopy.’ She hit her female roommate over the head with a bottle during an argument, so she can’t go home. She crashes in my bed at 7
A.M.
and sleep the sleep of ze dead. She awake at 4:30 in the afternoon and demands tea and caviar on crackers. So I take her to Zabar’s. She wants the $110 tin of caviar. Oh, no, I say, you can have the $20 crab meat. We went back to my apartment. She washes her hair over ze sink in Evian. Zen she takes three hours putting on makeup, blow-drying, doing ze hair. Zen back out to the clubs for same routine. You want her back?”

“No thanks,” said Sammy. “What do I need with another night of horror and humiliation.”

Fritz said hello to Mike Florio, the Stud, who was also working the Mike Todd Room. “The reason I’m not in a band,” he told Fritz, “is I know I’d be goin’ through fifteen or twenty girls a night. I like to keep it down to four or five.”

“I know what you mean,” agreed Fritz.

Sammy observed the Stud casting out his own line and reelin’ ‘em in. “I’ve made a study of this for years,” Sammy explained. “The most fucked-up jerks are fucking the hottest sluts. You have five seconds to catch their attention before they walk away, so anything you say is going to sound ridiculous. You have to scream, so you use words that trigger their interest, like ‘millionaire’ or ‘MTV producer,’ mention a few dumb celebrities. That’s why they get all dressed up and slutty and come to the city. They’re tired of shlubs from Brooklyn, some plumber asking them out on a date. The media has created this whole fantasy you already have to work from. Mention the trigger word, the fantasy of jets around the world, the Rolling Stones, fur coats, coke. Their biggest dream is to come to New York and meet someone in a limo they think is glamorous, who’ll rescue them from selling nail polish behind the Woolworth’s counter.
They’re interested in the sizzle, not the steak.”