Tales of Times Square: Expanded Edition (36 page)

“So I say, ‘Wanna go to the Palladium, Studio 54? Come to the city with me, I’ll take ya to a few parties.’ Then I say, ‘Oh, wait, I gotta stop over Show World a minute.’” Bring ‘em up to the dressing room, say, ‘Girls, may I ask this big favor of you?’ There were 125 old guys out in the audience, and these two rich seventeen-year-old knockout twin bitches came out onstage and fucked like animals. With me and each other. I abused ‘em with this under the spotlight,” he said, clutching his unit. “Soon as we get offstage, I go ‘So long, ladies,’ and pretend I’m the janitor, don’t know ‘em from Adam. Bye, bye!

“I got this stage partner now, I don’t know how old she is. My boss tells me sixteen, but I say, No way, get outta here. But he says if I tell anybody, the vice squad comes up and we’re all out of biz. So the first time I screw her, I say, this chick’s got a
cunt,
a woman’s cunt, ain’t no sixteen-year-old’s cunt. So I feed her a lot of coke, a rock this big, that’ll loosen her lips. And she tells me she’s sixteen, I swear to God.

“So last night, she doesn’t show up. So I gotta go grab some girl out of a booth downstairs at Show World. Those girls downstairs get forty percent of their booths—which could amount to two dollars or $300 in one night. Me, I get $60 a shift, I work five double shifts, that’s a $600 paycheck. But whenever I ask a booth girl if she wants to do a live show with me, you can bet she’ll say yeah. No one’s ever turned me down. But for me to grab a girl out of the booth, ya gotta ask the manager first, clear it on the schedule. So I’m in my new Cerruti suit, decked out, strut into the boss’ office, boy is he glad to see me. ‘Damien,’ he says, ‘have I got a girl for you.’ Yeah? ‘A young blonde, white girl.’ Yeah? ‘And I want you to fuck her this show.’ Do I ever wanna. I’m feelin’ my oats. Where is she? ‘Here,’ he says, and out she walks.”

Damien feigned a puke. “I brought her here tonight.” Sure enough, out of the powder room she comes with a big smile. Sammy winces, muttering what a fat pig she is. Damien puts his arm around her. He turned as he left, with a humble bow. “Some things you gotta do for the company,” he said. Off they went into the night.

Sammy and I entered the Mike Todd Room, and that’s where I saw Meg for the last time. She walked past everyone in the crowd, oblivious to stares, and slid right up to me. Sammy said nothing, astonished. He automatically knew this was the one and only Meg. Her astonishing tits are practically bursting out of her bustier tonight. She seemed downright mischievous, a tattooed punk-rock model girlfriend at her side. She spoke. Words came out of her mouth.

Sammy leaned into me. “I can’t believe she’s talking to you,” he whispered in my ear. “She likes you, she’s confused, she never had anyone not call her back. Chase her.”

“Shut up,” I ordered Sammy. He continued whispering in my ear as though Meg and her girlfriend weren’t there. This was the redwood tree of a girl that neither I or the Stud could chop down. The one Shark wouldn’t even bother to fix Sammy up with.

“Seen Francis?” asked Meg.

“She’s asking you questions,” whispered Sammy in my ear.

“Francis Ford Coppola?” I asked.

Meg let out a huff of displeasure, but actually drew closer.

“Yeah, that Francis.”

“Now she’s rubbing into you,” Sammy gasped. “I can’t believe this is happening.”

Meg and her friend decided not to notice Sammy. But they indicated they’d like drinks. Sammy dashed off to the line at the bar, usually a thirty-minute wait. “Oh my God, oh my God,” he wheezed, cutting through the crowd like a linebacker. He was back in two minutes flat, drinks in hand. Each model accepted her glass from Grubman without acknowledgment. Sammy then went to grab us a table. This was heaven—a girl-less evening turned resplendent with hot, cleavaged Ford models. But the moment he returned, a table secured, Meg waved
ta-ta.
Then went off into the crowd, leaving Grubman and myself stranded like the idiots we were. We watched them take the drinks he’d bought and over-tipped for so they could sit with someone else.

“Oh, my God. So that’s Meg Calendar,” he calculated. “Her left tit sags.”

Adding to Sammy’s anguish, the dyke bartender was glaring at him. She held up a pair of scissors and pantomimed cutting off his dick. This would be the last time Sammy came to the Palladium.

Sammy imagined a noose tightening around his neck. He started removing his tie at the office. He had bad dreams. In one he envisioned a doomsday scenario at The Exercise Tape. A
New York Post
headline came to him that read: DEAD MINOR IN PORN KING’S BED. Then Sammy dreamed of himself in a tight jail cell with a Puerto Rican AIDS victim, one who sensually picked his nose in Sammy’s face and lovingly offered him some.

Who could blame Sammy for his castration fears after becoming the poster-boy for Women Against Pornography? They had his mug shot pasted all over town in their recruitment literature, along with an editorial he wrote—in good humor, of course—for a certain men’s publication. He’s sorry his photo appeared in the editorial because it’s now reprinted in Women Against Pornography’s pamphlets. He has spawned a rallying cry. Amongst the thousands of WAP’s, all it would take was one diesel dyke with a pair of garden shears. It could even happen at The Exercise Tape.

Sammy’s regrettable editorial:

FACING UP TO THE PROBLEMS OF WOMEN

Let’s be reasonable and logical, and face up to facts. Women aren’t human; they’re not even like monkeys or orangutans. Those muddle-headed, pea-brained, waste-your-money liberals might want to brainwash you into thinking that girls are good for something other than sucking cock, but you and I and every other sensible man knows better. These sluts were put on earth to steal your money; be whining, complaining and arrogant; and to serve as reasonably comfortable holsters for your erections when one is aroused by the call of nature.

First off, scientific research has it that women just aren’t the same as men. They don’t like things like cameras or computers or state-of-the-art stereos, simply because the higher centers of their brains aren’t developed as well as a man’s. Furthermore, according to a very fine article in
The National Enquirer,
it’s been proven that women aren’t as smart as men. It takes real guts to admit it, but women are mindless creatures... Don’t let those detestable, ugly, disgusting, sour-pussed lesbian diesel-dyke Women’s Libbers fool you, along with their cotillions of homo yes-men. Women are most happy when they are serving their twin gods of Mammon and King Cock...

Men work hard, make money, grind the wheels of business, only to fall victim to early deaths dealt out by the insane caprices of vengeful sluts... They should be rounded up in a pen with pigs and fucked with sticks and forced to eat filthy offal, and maybe then they would appreciate a fine figure of a man who wants to own and take care of them, even if he is perhaps just a wee bit nervous and high-strung and suspicious of some people’s motives ...”

The editorial was reprinted in the brochures, though it faded out into broken type after a few paragraphs.

I asked Sammy, Was nothing about womanhood sacred? Had he a sister, a daughter, a wife? Well, he had a mother, but she never loved him. She fawned over his younger brother, Jonah.

“My younger brother, who I no longer talk to, married some ugly pig,” said Sammy. “They’re having a kid. He never cheats, stays home. When we were kids walking down the street, I’d see some girl and crane my neck 180 degrees, panting, Good God, did you see that? And he’d stand there going, ‘Huh, huh?’”

Sammy felt some competitive pressure over his younger brother’s marriage. So he decided to get him a wife, too. The lucky lady was a genteel Southern girl of twenty-two from Florida.

She came to interview for a job at Stephanie Mason’s office. Sammy met her in the hallway, and for once, he didn’t strike out. She agreed to a date. He phoned me afterward. “I just got reamed, steamed and dry cleaned,” he said. “The girl blew me incredibly then fucked me twice. I’m happy.”

Within two months of this date they were engaged. Sammy said her father owned a small oil company and was wealthy. “I’m thirty-four, desperate, and keep seeing myself in my forties, ugly, wrinkled, bent over, without a woman, and at that point with no chance. So I’m getting married.”

After the engagement, Stephanie called, taking a pool of bets from everyone who knew Sammy. They were all placing $5 on when she’d dump him. Not particularly friends with any women in New York, Sammy made the bad call of asking Stephanie, his only female associate, to go out with his future wife, show her the city, take her shopping. So Stephanie, a worldly consumer, took the fiancée to the most expensive shops in Soho, encouraging her to break the bank with Sammy’s credit cards. “These wives are expensive,” he complained over the phone. “Mine’s been spending $400 a shot on the card.”

Unbeknownst to Sammy, his comrades at the office picked a week and bet $5. Stephanie felt Sammy’s bride-to-be was terribly naive and latched onto him in a desperate moment. Her previous husband was an Iranian who worked in her father’s oil business. Sammy proudly hoisted their Dade County divorce papers. She’d been treated so badly by men—she even had to make an appointment whenever she wanted to see her father—that Sammy’s initial kindness was new to her. Of course, he would soon offer psychological torment, as opposed to the physical punishment inflicted by her former Iranian husband.

The girl had been raised with Southern table manners and she was offended when they walked into a restaurant. Only one chair was available; Sammy pulled it out, then sat down himself. She blew up over this delicate seating matter which left Sammy bewildered. He’d never held out a chair or opened a door for a woman in his life. He ate loudly with his mouth open making squishing, whistling noises. Whenever they reached a red light at the curb, Sammy took an extra step, crossing the street before her. Then he’d wait for her to catch up.

Sammy’s fiancée was in for another shocker at the first meeting of his family. Seeing the whole clan of Grubmans threw the genteel lady from the South askew. They all ate with their mouths open, masticating.

Sammy arranged “How To Be A Jew” lessons from a cut-rate rabbi. He’d convert her in twelve easy lessons. Sammy insisted this was
her
idea, she wanted to convert. She may have harbored an exotic taste for deranged men, having run off to New York to marry a mockey pornographer, escaping her Iranian husband, a reputed terrorist. But she hadn’t foreseen the degradation of a Jewish conversion and a wedding, à la Grubman.

“I’m going to introduce her to all the interesting men I can,” said Stephanie, who began chumming up to Sammy. “I’ll take her to the most expensive shops in Soho, even though the same stuff’s available down the street on Orchard for half the price. I’ve taken out a bank account of the twenty bets in the pool so far about when she’ll dump him. The winner gets interest.”

Ultimately, what Stephanie was gifted at was turning girls out. She would introduce Sammy’s wife to playboys and
playas,
dope kingpins and debonair blades with fancy cars and dubious backgrounds. She was dead set on turning Grubman’s ever-suffering, Jewish-converted wife out as a call girl.

Sammy’s marriage crashed on the rocks after a few miserable months. The ex-wife tried to ream, steam and dry-clean him in court. He faced further court battles as his jailbait lawsuit came to a head. The mother of the seventeen-year-old dildo model cost
Oui
a dainty dime, which prompted Sammy’s departure from the sinking magazine.

But Sammy Grubman never went down like a captain with his ship. Whenever disaster lurked, Sammy was always able to crawl out of the bowl as troubled waters were about to swirl down the toilet. His attendance at beauty contests and discos began to wane. He kept to his apartment more, adding an extra lock or two and a security alarm. Flyers of his face were papered all over town like a Wanted Dead Or Alive poster. His waking moments became a brightly lit hell in which Sammy was convinced that members of the fairer sex were out hunting for his balls.

Postscript:
Eighteen Years Later

Sometime after I left New York, Shark was run over by a truck. That’s how he tells it. Whatever actually happened may never be established. The fact is, Shark is now a quadriplegic. He’s hooked up to a high-tech wheelchair on the seventeenth floor of an East Side apartment building. Two gay assistants with Continental accents work for him. He is centrally positioned in the room.

“Diz operation is ten times bigger than when you last saw it,” claims Shark. “This is my top girl,” he says, gesturing to a swimsuit calendar on his desk. “She’s gonna make a million dollars in diz business. I’ve got hundreds of girls. Showgirls fly in from Vegas every week with their managers.”

Shark’s ankles are turned out at a grotesque unnatural angle, secured by metal clamps. His midsection protrudes like Humpty Dumpty. He resembles something of the great British physicist, Stephen Hawkins, albeit now with a visible colostomy bag. His fingers are frozen in a spastic curl, each knuckle horribly bent. Yet his hands, though immobile, are able to hook a finger around the phone on his wheelchair to answer. A phone repairman is there. “If diz phone wasn’t broken, you’d hear it ringing off the hook all day.” And then it does.

“Tops Models,” he answers. Some girl talk ensues. The walls are papered with model’s promos, calendars, tearsheets. “We do some wonderful things here,” Shark tells me. He has a relative who’s a Brigadier General in the Army. Shark is fixing the General up with an Indian chief friend out West who’s an expert tracker. “Diz guy can track anybody,” says Shark. “So, I figure he’s the only guy who can find Osama bin Laden. They’ve got a cave in Afghanistan that’s thirty-one miles deep. That’s nothin’ to diz guy when he puts his ear to the ground. So he’s flying in tomorrow to meet the General, I arranged a meeting here at Tops Models. The General has an appointment with President Bush the next day. If he likes what he sees in diz Indian, he’ll bring him to meet Bush the next day, and then to Afghanistan.”