Tales of Times Square: Expanded Edition (37 page)

His physical condition aside, Shark seems more successful and happy than ever. For all the scams and make-believe show-biz, he does scrounge out scraps of work here and there for his models. He sends them to some ninety-year-old retired theatrical agent who knows Joe Franklin. The old agent occasionally wangles a blowjob. All told, Shark provides cattle-call auditions for thousands of dreamers who’d otherwise never have such excitement in their lives.

Sammy Grubman moved to some high-rent real estate in lower Manhattan with a Hudson River view. When the World Trade Center was hit, his windows were blown out. Thousands of naked girl test shots scattered into oblivion. Emergency workers found body parts in his apartment. In the chaos that ensued, Sammy moved to Fort Greene, Brooklyn. Someone convinced him Fort Greene, a former ghetto, was becoming gentrified. But he found it wasn’t.

“It takes three hours just to go to the supermarket,” says Sammy. “The cashier doesn’t know the prices, then goes back to check and disappears for thirty minutes. People wait on huge lines. It’s bedlam. If these people didn’t have managers or officials of some sort, it would be like Somalia.”

Since leaving publishing, Grubman went into the business of “mail fraud.” Fake ads for psychics, shenanigans with lottery tickets, various and sundry items where you mail in a dollar. The operation requires a “designated convict” to run his P.O. Box. This is a partner who picks up the mail: “Chances are nothing will happen, but there’s also a chance you could get in a little trouble. Or a lot of trouble. If, say, an FBI stake-out decides to pick you up.”

Sammy spent thousands on plastic surgery. There were complications, infections. After two years of repairs, his face settled down. He now has a strong jaw and clefted chin, like the young Kirk Douglas. He has a full head of hair, no bags under his eyes and taut, clear skin. He can easily pass himself off for a decade younger and gives his age to girls as thirty-eight. He had glamour shots of himself in a suit taken by noted girlie photographer Warren Tang.

“I had the photos retouched and airbrushed to perfection,” says Sammy. “Then I put an ad in all the classifieds throughout Japan: ‘Rich American businessman looking to introduce young women to New York.’ I had it running like a well-oiled machine. I’d be dropping one off at JFK at the same time as picking up a new one, fresh from Tokyo. I had the flight schedules working like clockwork.

“These girls have no criteria whatsoever to judge American men, no point of reference, they know nothing. They have no idea of social strata, who to stay away from. This JAL flight attendant I have in the house now went out with Negroes before me. As far as they know, I’m the prime catch amongst American men. They never even heard of Pearl Harbor or Hiroshima, they’ve just heard that Americans did something bad to them a long time ago; they don’t even know about World War II.

“But they like hip hop, that they’ve heard. So they all come over with the same guidebook. Each one says her favorite movie is
Titanic,
as if they’re programmed. They all want to go shopping at the same stores for some stupid overpriced designer handbag and some jewelry. So I take them shopping, blow a few hundred. And they all want to go to the Met. I’ve taken dozens. They stand there before the same Dali exhibit. I ask them, ‘What do you see in these paintings, what appeals to you?’ And then they turn to a page in their guidebook, without a clue as to what they’re looking at, then read some description and look up at me. ‘Surreal, yes?’

“But they’re incredibly proficient and dedicated when it comes to blowjobs. They’ll spend hours diligently applying oil and working you up.”

After redesigning his face, Sammy has now learned that “When it comes down to it, men’s looks mean nothing to women. Oh, they might have some crush on poster-boy pop stars when they’re teenagers, but after that, at bottom, they’re all looking for two things: security and power.

“These Japanese girls who come to America are considered out of their minds back home. Total rebels. No respectable Japanese girl would ever fly to New York on her own to hook up with a strange man. But if it wasn’t for them, I’d have no sex life whatsoever. If it wasn’t for Asian girls, I’d have nothing.”

The Stud did time in a mental hospital. He made a lot of enemies, just by nature of being the Stud. But he’s no longer on a roll. He leads a quiet existence with one girlfriend in a place he once would have been embarrassed to be seen in—New Jersey.

Shark got Meg Calendar a double episode on some cop show from an old friend, an ex-NFL player who co-produced and appeared in the series. The football player took her on a weekend climbing excursion in the Valencia Mountains. The guy had a pet chimp who went everywhere with him, even mountain climbing. He was a well-behaved critter, cute as a kewpie doll. At the end of the trip, as Meg was leaving, she reached over to pat the chimp on the head and it bit off one of her nostrils. One savage crunch. She was rushed to the hospital and had several operations to fix her disfigured nose. Shark then lost touch with her. But he heard the former Ford model was now hooking out of Los Angeles. Ruined for modeling or even being an actress, she now possesses a new cavity on her face with unique possibilities in the hooking biz.

BABES ON BROADWAY

I always figured I’d lose my virginity on 8th Avenue. I was titillated over the idea that just forty blocks down the same avenue as my old Eldorado building was a shantytown of massage parlors. A sexual slum had risen out of Times Square that held strange mysteries of women, as if a hellish Land of Oz were in the city.

At this point in history, 8th Avenue became clogged with over a thousand hookers every night. They emerged like vampires after sunset. The white ones looked like little girls who snuck into their mommy’s room and applied too much eyeliner and smeary lipstick, then stepped into klutzy high heels. They were lopsided, coulda-been cheerleaders in silver hot pants. Back home, they’d received their sexual initiations from colored boys on the wrong side of the tracks. Now, many had mulatto babies stashed away somewhere. Shunned in their hometowns, these hot young mamas migrated to New York in demented droves from California and the Midwest. They worked out of the parlors, they snagged customers into flophouses, they performed in cars, subway stairwells and parking lots of Times Square.

My very first morning living in New York, I felt the magnetic pull of Times Square. Within minutes after the moving trucks unloaded, I subwayed down to Child’s Pancake House on 42nd and 8th for breakfast. Emerging from the recesses of the IND subway for the first time, I took a deep breath of crisp morning 42nd Street air. I must have been reincarnated from some show-biz personage who haunted the Square in the 1920s.

I discovered another dimension to the world of Broadway, which I’d known through my parents. Decrepit tenements hung storefront signs that said Hungry Hilda, Tina’s Leisure Room, Christy’s Mix and Mate, Rabbit Hutch, Psychedelic Grape, on and on, ad nauseam. I imagined all their customers were elevator men. Oh, lucky elevator men. Here was the last salvation of my virginity, which I didn’t have the nerve to lose with some schoolgirl. It took me a year to build up the courage to call upon Times Square.

And so, with only Roy, one of my building’s elevator men, briefed on my whereabouts, I was off to see the wizard, where females would serve up their naked bodies for the mere exchange of green paper. Sex with girls didn’t seem like something that could be equated in financial terms then. No matter how you sliced it, I was certain, the man had a bargain.

At 10
P.M.
, I checked into the Sherman Hotel on 47th and 8th, a $10 room. It was the first time I’d ever checked into a hotel alone. I wanted my own safe room for the event, not some five-dollar roach trap, where the proverbial stick-up man might jump out of a closet. I bought my first Trojan for the occasion, a sly purchase, which gave me goosebumps.

An old man sat behind a sealed glass partition in the shabby lobby. He gave me the key to room 316. Then his sour breath came through the grill. “I just saw a pip run into the building next door. Big ruckus. Went upstairs to his whore, then cut the guy’s balls off who was wit’ her.”

“You mean a pimp?” I asked, unsure now of whether to go through with the evening.

“Yeah, a pip. But it can’t happen in here. We don’t allow no prostitutes here.”

I surveyed my room. The old black phone had a Circle-5 exchange. A huge toenail clipping was wedged into the carpet. I placed my rubber on the night table, proud of myself so far. Between the rubber and the room, I was halfway home.

It was a warm autumn night and 8th Avenue felt like another planet. There was an otherworldly fizz to the atmosphere, thick with prostitution, female hormones gone haywire. I stood on the strip at 47th Street. I would cruise down to 34th on 8th Avenue, then back up 9th Avenue to 50th Street. It was a thirty-block sweep. I’d make the trek several times, if necessary, until I found the most gorgeous whore in Times Square, one who would move the earth for me. I feared it would be so ecstatic an encounter that I might faint. But I was determined not to come home a virgin.

I peered into a storefront called Honey Hut, the windows boarded with plywood. Orange paint advertised “Lovely Exotics” waiting behind the gates offering “Body Rubs for $10 Complete.” “Try Us,” pleaded the sorry-looking scrawled letters. I opened the plywood door.

“What the fuck you want?” spat a bitter, leotarded black girl at the desk.

“Body rub?”

“I’ll body rub yo’ ass!” she said, reaching for a bat under the table. I meekly backpedaled out.

Thirty girls on each block stood at their designated posts. They beckoned to me, nodded out, ate pizza, scurried like minnows when the paddy wagon cruised by. Some were sloe-eyed, acned, welted, stoned and sick. Others had bright farm faces, not yet urbanized. Men trolled by in cars, as if it were an Arab trading post, haggling and bargaining. The prettiest white girls stood back in doorways, not having to exert salesmanship.

Seated behind the window at a Howard Johnson’s was a bored pimp. He was treating four happy whores to banana splits—their reward for handing in over a thousand a week.

Below 42nd Street, I encountered 200-pound cleaning ladies in ten-dollar blonde beehive wigs from Woolworth’s. They wore gold hot pants and beige hosiery, to make them seem racially ambiguous.

“Suck yo’ dick, suck yo’ dick,” they chanted in taut vocal outbursts, as I walked by.

“Want some thex?” offered one buck-toothed, oh-so-sincere black girl. She kept knocking down her price. “I’ll give you a
nice
suck and a fuck,” she pleaded, going from $20 to $5. Then she offered for free—“C’mon, buckeroo, you cain’t beat that.” I was not about to perform the blessed event here, beside the 39th Street Rap Parlor, even if they paid me. But I felt honored.

My senses heightened after one thirty-block sweep, I paused to catch my breath. There were a half-dozen girls I would have chosen. Yet I just walked past them, afraid to make contact. Maybe I was kidding myself. The second time around, they would know I was hunting, not just on my way to Grandma’s. Roy, the elevator man, and I, had taken indecisive treks like this. And Roy had surely embarked on self-pitying marches like this alone.

I walked further west to 11th Avenue, where the New York Central Railroad graveyard lay forgotten. I passed a plane hangar-sized Greyhound depot and the United Parcel Service warehouse. There were limousine companies in the area and taxi collision repair shops, all closed. I saw several maverick hookers, strayed far from the pack. Horse and buggy carriages returned to Centennial Stables at 38th Street, where the hookers stood outside petting filthy horses after their long shifts in Central Park. Both seemed like beasts of burden. I heard the patter of stiletto heels blend with the click-clack of horse’s hooves on cobblestone. I imagined myself in the nineteenth century. Blonde heads bobbed up and down over laps in parked trucks.

“You for sale?” I inquired of a hard-faced 11th Avenue whore.

“I don’t take walking gigs,” she said. This was strictly car trade in the boondocks.

Whore faces kept spinning in my head as I crossed back to 8th Avenue. Each was a fiercely desirable virginity stopper. A new roster appeared on the streets, while some of the previous lineup were now occupied in hotel rooms. At 44th Street my eyes fixed upon the classiest-looking dame of the evening.

“Hey, you know it’s good luck to give money to hookers,” she said, the thinnest smile creeping through her lips. Heavenly cleavage in a black evening dress, milky complexion, full red lips and splendidly styled layers of black hair. She had curves from her hips to her stockinged legs that made me high. No platform-stilt heels, dime-store wigs or hokey hooker attire. I wondered whether she was padded up with foam rubber or Frederick’s underthings, some kind of false advertising. How could she just stand there without being propositioned by fifty guys a minute?

A short Puerto Rican girl in polyester clothes stood at her side. “Whaddya think, should we give this guy a tumble?” asked the knockout to her sidekick, who shrugged. I had broken through the barrier. Like a trained athlete, some other part of me took over the motor functions.

“I got a room three blocks away,” I said, breath shortening.

“Naw, that’s too far. I like the Fulton, only one block away. Costs five bucks a room, not including me.”

“... How do I know you won’t rob me up there?” I asked.

“Believe me, honey, I’m more scared than you. You’re a guy, and guys are ten times stronger than girls. Even if I had a knife, you’d just pull it away and cut me.” She drew a finger across her throat and made a sound like a guillotine.

“But what if you have a gun?” I said.

“Here, you can check my pocketbook,” offered the hooker, handing it over. I got goosebumps rummaging through the innards. It brought back an ancient memory of examining the pocketbook of a slumbering babysitter. Inside the bag was a mess of girlie goods—lipsticks, eyeliners, pancake pocket mirror, crumpled receipts, loose change and condoms. Of the many aromas that leaped out of the hooker’s pocketbook, her Chiclets chewing gum hypnotized me.