Tales of Times Square: Expanded Edition (35 page)

And then he ruminated: “Imagine Jean Service going back to Connecticut, getting between some crisp, fresh sheets, clicking on her TV... thinking about the dirty New York Jews who taped her. Such a white girl. You could proudly take her on a date, always sweet, doesn’t go insane... You’d probably have to go horseback riding, or some horrible thing she considers fun. Roller skating... she’s probably got some disgusting yeast infection from rubbing up and down the horse all day. Her panties are shit-encrusted from sliding up her ass. Probably stinks like hell. Imagine the nightmare weekend you’d have up in Connecticut with her parents and the horses, the worst weekend of your life. Ugggh, forget her.”

Hawaiian Tropics

A whole industry stalked the legions of blemished, fat-tushied teenybopper
gurls
wanting to break into glamour. Leading the charge were teenage fashion magazines, their back pages littered with model academy ads—institutions that used to be called “charm school” or “finishing school” in a more innocent era.

“You can’t use the word Petites any more,” bemoaned Shark. “The mob owns that word.” The
Village Voice
had the corner on Petites Needed ads. This approach fed off the fact that all the major agencies rejected anyone under 5’8”. As a result, thousands, maybe millions, of attractive girls felt hopeless. There were also ads seeking shoe and hand models. They told some prospect she’d make a great hand model, all she needed was a $500 portfolio. A cottage industry spun off each agency. There were requisite consultations with a hairstylist, photographer, makeup and fashion coordinator. The tri-state secretarial pool provided endless marks. Some agencies sent them on bullshit rounds. One ad had a talent search culminating in an appearance on the
Joe Franklin Show.

“We pulled diz great scam,” said an ecstatic Shark, the next time I came to his office. “Ads in the
New York Times
and everything.” He proudly held open his ad in that week’s
BackStage:

MUSIC VIDEO: MADONNA & MODEL TYPES
Major video production company now in final casting stage seeking 22 Madonna prototypes for international label music video. Time must be flexible, shooting to fit around schedules of recording artists. Also casting for fashion video. Fiorucci-type look needed for national runway show and department store designer. Auditions to be held at Marymount Manhattan College in the Mezzanine... .

An old cunt-hound professor pal of Shark’s at the prestigious feminist institution somehow secured the main auditorium at Marymount. Sammy looked over the mug shot of the Tops model Shark used in the ad.

“Some Bloomingdale’s whore?” he asked, squinching his face.

“The criticizer,” Shark came back. “Look, I make a living in this business. She’s a very attractive girl. Don’t get me wrong, I value your opinion dearly. But the proof is in the pudding, pal. She made $400 yesterday modeling at the fur show.”

Shark had a particular fondness for furs and wore a full-length coat during the Superfly era. There were furry pictures of him in his “Russ Meyer stash,” a cobwebbed shoebox storing old photos. In the ’70s, Shark worked Vegas, where his sartorial taste ran to Wayne Newton outfits, now stored in the closet.

As a five-year-old boy in 1947, Shark’s parents forced him into the illicit sport of kiddie boxing. It was an old Southern pastime. In his Alabama hometown, Fifty miles from the Florida border, he’d be thrust into a boxing ring with other five-year-old boys to slug it out. Spotlights hung over the ring at night. A crowd of revelers made bets, sort of like cockfighting. There was a whole backwoods Alabama circuit.

“Scary as hell,” Shark remembered. “And real patriotic. This was right after the war. They’d blare records of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ and ‘God Bless America’ right before the bouts. Then you’d be pushed out into the ring, lights glaring. They didn’t have headgear in those days, but we wore sixteen-ounce gloves with handwraps and shorts. Then, after the fights, they took me over the Florida state line at night. The guy who ran the fights and the races was diz big, scary-lookin’ man. They’d drive the boys to this lagoon with the blackest water I’ve ever seen. They’d tie a rope around our waist. Then we’d race from one end to the other, about eighty yards, while all the men placed bets in a hat. The lagoon was filled with alligators. Whenever an alligator swam up close, the guys holding the ropes along the bank would lift you outta the water for a moment till the alligator swam past.”

Shark had learned to swim with the alligators in the blackest lagoons of show business. One of those lagoons was the Hawaiian Tropic International Pageant. Many professional model chasers converged upon Daytona Beach, Florida for this perennial event. Sammy himself flew down. It’s run by the fabulously rich suntan oil mogul, Ron Rice. Rice’s oily empire also had humble beginnings, back in North Carolina. In high school, Rice dated and then married a girl who would go on to become Miss America 1963. As a young chemistry teacher and gym coach, Rice was fired for showing progressive sex education films to his junior high classes. He then became a lifeguard. Not satisfied with Coppertone or Sea ‘n’ Ski, Rice mixed his own batches of coconut oil, bananas and avocados in a garbage can. That garbage can was now silver-plated and resided on Rice’s palatial estate in Daytona, with four pools and a disco. He was also a great white hunter of alligators, endangered ones at that. He was the only man to have allegedly fucked Meg Calendar, when she took the title in his contest.

“This slob is The King of Girls,” said Sammy, breathless, on the phone from Daytona. “Ron Rice
owns
Daytona, everybody defers to him, the cops pay homage, high school girls run all his errands.” Sammy met with Rice, trying to acquire rights for the first Hawaiian Tropic Model Agency in NYC. “He’s got this insane trophy room with clippings of himself with Paul Newman and racing cars. He’s got leopard skin rugs everywhere and sits on this huge polished wooden throne like some ancient Hawaiian king.”

Sammy donned a rumpled Hawaiian shirt and Ray-Ban sunglasses. Three hundred incredible girls, ages eighteen to twenty-one, from all over heartland America were put up at some budget convention hotel. Sammy entered the main commissary.

“They’re dressed worse than nude,” moaned Sammy on the phone. “They look sweet at seventeen and everything that comes out of them is sweet—but come nineteen, they start to turn a tad overripe and begin to stink.”

The girls were lined up at the cafeteria with pert nips, bubble butts, flesh so tantalizing. The air was electron-charged with teen hormones that nearly made him faint. To Sammy’s great regret, each and every female prospect was accompanied by a father, or “total moron boyfriends in farmer hats and overalls.” Or, worse yet, contingents of lady sponsors from their little hometowns. One of the events involved this million-gallon vat of coconut oil. Rice watched an assembly line of eighty gorgeous eighteen-year-olds in bathing suits dip in, one by one. And there sat Sammy, alone with his Nikon, the publisher of
Oui,
a porn rag that spelled poison to all present. Particularly in the recent wake of the Miss America scandal, where Vanessa Williams lost the title after her naked lesbo pix were unearthed in
Penthouse.
Sammy didn’t have a prayer.

“All ya need down here is a hot car, and you can have all the blowjobs ya want,” said Sammy. “Unfortunately, I don’t drive.” Ron Rice’s personal Lamborghini cost a quarter-million and was featured in the Burt Reynolds
Cannonball Run
series. Rice sponsored NASCAR racers whose cars bore the logo
It ain’t the motion, it’s the lotion.
Paul Newman, whose motion moved to Rice’s lotion, once drove the winning Hawaiian Tropic Porsche at LeMans, France. The prized celebrities young contestants “get to meet” included Donald Trump, Julio Iglesias and Burt Reynolds himself. For contestants who wanted to “go in that direction,” as Rice put it, he “feeds” girls to the Playboy mansion. (Even with vats of oily girls in abundance, Rice would soon become embroiled for years in sexual harassment lawsuits from female employees.)

For Sammy, the whole trip provided another series of strikeouts. “This waitress I was pursuing at the commissary went off with a Negro at the end of her shift,” Sammy sighed. “These girls are all gonna get AIDS, they experiment with Negroes and everything.

“Next year,” said Sammy, debriefing in Chinatown, “maybe
I’ll
be the King of Girls.” Sammy was able to convince Ron Rice he was some important media kike from New York. If all went according to plan, next time he’d be flying down as publisher of a
Hawaiian Tropic Teen Model Magazine,
yet another brainstorm.

“These girls are total hicks. I overheard two at the commissary breakfast table talking about the great Chinese dinner they had last night. ‘Ah
nevuh
did have Chinese.’ Turns out they were speaking about McChicken Shanghai or some crap at McDonald’s, a new test market item on the menu down there. ‘Ah wish they had Chinese at mah McDonald’s.’”

Sammy told me of his own entrepreneurial dreams for a future restaurant:

“It would be an expensive place for the rich. A dome surrounds the main dining area upstairs. Underneath the glass dome, on the ground below, is a clearly visible walk-in dirt grounds populated by derelicts, bag ladies, families on welfare. Clientele are invited to throw their leftovers over the dome and watch the starving grapple for it. Have a few niblets left on your corn on the cob? Toss the cob over. Leave a few bites on your lamb chop bone or a slice of your filet mignon—toss it over, and watch ‘em scrapple. Oh, it would get a few bleeding heart protesters at first, but then things would settle down and it would be a big success.”

This would have been the perfect restaurant for Mayor Koch’s New York, a crumbling Roman Empire, where you had to step over the homeless on every block. Sammy’s next horror restaurant would be a rib joint, where huge roast suckling pigs revolved around open spit ovens in view. A glassed-in mud patch would contain live pigs—which patrons could individually pick for the slaughter. And then, stuffed to the gills with hog, the slobs would be wheeled backward on chairs with coasters by their waiters to a scented lounge with soft music, where their dining seats would automatically recline so they could fall into satiated slumber.

Cast Party

While Sammy was in Daytona, I took Meg to the
SNL
cast party, our second date. Each week,
SNL
throws an after-show cast party at some unannounced locale. Two company limos dump off carloads of insiders, then return to 30 Rock for more.

My ever-lovin’ darling fiancée down in Texas was still awaiting my long-postponed move there. The force was against me. I felt like Tom Ewell in
The Seven Year Itch.
If I were even briefly involved with a creature like Meg Calendar, I would dread a subway ride. Walking past a construction site would cause pandemonium. Could Meg ever wash dishes or do laundry? Could she found a leper colony on the streets of Calcutta like Mother Teresa? Would lepers and legless cripples start hooting and yelping like dingoes?

Meg struck out with Francis. He couldn’t afford to be impressed with in-your-face beauty. The cycle of rejection came round. He was just as unattainable to Meg as she was to the model-chasers. Including suckers like me. Going home in the cab I entered some psychic condition beyond blue balls. I sensed these were to be my last minutes, my last shot with Meg Calendar.

“Want to come up for some herbal tea?” I asked, feeling pathetic.

“No way!” she snapped. Then she turned her head with a tight laugh of contempt.

But that wasn’t quite the last I saw of her. A few nights later, Sammy and I were at the Palladium.

“There are seven females to every man in the world,” claimed Sammy, watching all the girls go by. “Millions of women alone in the country, thousands of attractive ones, maybe thousands of beautiful ones. And not one for me. I get physically sick on the street, seeing legs, tits, wiggling asses that I can’t have. I have to take codeine pills to sleep. It’s amazing how miserable you are without a girl, how depressed and utterly ugly you feel every second. This craziness starts to feed on itself as the weeks go by. And then when you’re with one, it’s as if you’ve always been getting laid, you can’t imagine otherwise, the world is right and normal. I’m amazed at these girls. They experiment with sub-racial, sexually ambiguous types, that’s what they want. Not me. I might as well be that old fuck right there,” said Grubman, pointing to a fat sixty-year-old bathroom attendant. “I look no different to these girls than him. Young models want rock stars with long hair, pro athletes. They want these heavy metal buffoons, idiotic baboons without a thought in their heads who mistreat them. They go for oily blue Negroes. But not me. I’m shocked every day.”

One of the buffoons Sammy referred to was Damien. Damien was twenty-three, a suave, dark-skinned stud who performed at Show World. He high-stepped through the Palladium like a Puerto Rican peacock in a cheap zoot suit. He earned his living doing six-to-ten live sex shows on Show World’s Triple Treat Stage. He scouted here and at Long Island discos. He laid romantic bullshit onto seventeen-year-old JAPs from Great Neck so thick, some actually followed him into New York afterward, fellating him onstage during the late show at Show World. Sometimes two at once. Just for kicks.

“Of course, I gotta lay some rock on ‘em first, rocks this big,” said Damien, holding his fists in circles of imaginary coke. “Then they start havin’ fun and wanna get crazy in front of strange guys and freak ‘em out. There were these twin sisters whose mother dropped ‘em off in front of the disco in a Bentley, then waves bye bye, they’ll be home at midnight. These girls live in Lake Success, Great Neck, their father is president of Ideal Toys, or Hasbro or some shit, and God forbid if he ever found out, he’d turn me into a Cabbage Patch Corpse. They don’t just live in a mansion, they live on an estate. They bring me into their bathroom, it’s got a marble bidet, a urinal, one regular toilet and one you can swim in.