Tales of Times Square: Expanded Edition (39 page)

The Harmony offers an easier life than the lowly peeps and topless bars, where girls must beg for tips, then split commissions with management. Here, the hardest thing is killing two hours between each twenty-minute set (she does four shows daily). She briefly dated a gent whom she met during Mardi Gras. But now she becomes embarrassed when she encounters attractive guys in the audience and won’t talk to them.

Though she leaves nothing to the imagination during her act, she scruples at posing for mags or doing porn flicks.
Playboy
or
Penthouse
maybe, but precious few Times Square maidens make that grade. “You’ve got to have a
body-body,”
Maria says. Like other street-smart strippers here, she knows it won’t advance her career in any way to do a third-rate layout for, say,
High Society
or
Swank,
which pay as low as $200 [half up front, half on publication (heh, heh)]. The only big payoffs come from
Playboy
or
Penthouse,
but even if you’ve got a body-body, you still need a face-face.

Gene Krupa used to headline the Metropole, now a Times Square topless bar, formerly a jazz club. “I danced there. Told ‘em, ‘My father used to work here.’ But I didn’t tell them who my father was.”

Maria doesn’t own any of his records, but wants to build a collection when she settles down someday. She plans to quit the biz when her trust fund arrives in several years. She kept secret about her father for over a year at the Harmony, until she found out that Bob Anthony, former big-band crooner, had worked with him. Now, Anthony is especially protective of Maria, keeps the guys off her.

She deflects many propositions and feels no sexual heat within when she performs. “I never get turned on, this is just a job. I’m in another world when I’m here—there’s no feeling, just the money. You can’t really dance, ‘cause the music’s too low. I’d like to do modern dance, like Solid Gold dancing! I wanna be some kind of star, I really do... but not a porno star.”

She doesn’t kiss during Mardi Gras, or allow patrons to paw anything other than her knockers. “I’m scared. I go to a gynecologist once a month. If customers look clean, during Mardi Gras,
sometimes
I’ll let them suck my tits, but rarely. If they try to go underneath, I slap them. I don’t know where their fingers have been. ‘Just touch me here, that’s it,’” she explains, mammary-wise, “and I don’t even like that. Then they complain because they can’t do anything else. I say, ‘You can’t even buy
Playboy
for a dollar, you spend three and all you get is pictures. Here you get to touch a girl for a lousy dollar.’

“When I’m sixty,” says Maria, ‘if I don’t look good anymore, I’ll pay money to get laid. I’ll take a young guy out, think nothin’ of it. As long as I’m not married... But now—I’m still just a baby.”

—1985

(Not long after this interview, Maria Krupa died of a heroin overdose sitting on a barstool in Times Square. The other strippers at the bar immediately ran off so they wouldn’t be questioned.)

MEMORIES OF
SCREW

More than several milestones in my life occurred during my tenure at
Screw.
Some of these events may sound like a fairy tale, but they are true. First, I met my wife through the window of the eleventh floor, when she was staying at the Markle—run by the Salvation Army for young Southern women attending school in New York. Secondly, I met my best friend, Richard Jaccoma, at
Screw.
I published my first story there at age twenty, and soon after, the first comic strips with my brother Drew; the Friedman Bros, soon became the most feared cartoonists in New York. And finally, through the entrée of my
Screw
press pass, the hot gates of Times Square opened before me. This culminated in my 1986 book,
Tales of Times Square.

My first month or two at
Screw
was miserable. I had vied for a writing job at
Saturday Night Live,
and attended their pre-season meetings. When it fell through, the opening at
Screw
(to replace the brilliant J.J. Kane—now reviewing movies for the
Daily News
as The Phantom of the Movies) seemed like a pitiful consolation. But I needed a job. Shortly after I arrived, John Lennon was assassinated. But when Richard Jaccoma appeared as Managing Editor things started to soar.

I was twenty-four, with privileged access to gorgeous, albeit demented, young porn starlets. There was no such thing as AIDS.
Saturday Night Live,
by comparison, went through its most disastrous season, its emasculated staff swamped in failure. But
Screw
offered a fascinating underworld, New York’s avant-garde during those last few precious years of the great sexual revolution.

Our crack editorial team galvanized when Jaccoma hired Gil Reavill, who’d just arrived from the Midwest. How a corn-fed Midwesterner adopted the Goldstein persona, as his ghostwriter for fifteen years, was uncanny. Sydney, our editorial assistant, another Jaccoma hire, was a gorgeous Creole girl. She would brave catcalls and lewd propositions during her walk along 14th Street each morning, until she reached the sanctuary of
Screw.
After an afternoon he spent observing us, Philip Roth labeled us “nine-to-five anarchists.”

The first time I entered the offices of
Screw
was in 1977. Oddly, the editors were all huddled around a telescope. There were stacks of hardcore stock shots, dildos littered about the floor, 8 mm porn loops and magazines piled everywhere. But the three editors paid me no mind as I walked in, and fought like schoolboys for the scope view. Fifty blocks away, a girl lay on a roof sunbathing topless.

Everything about
Screw
was the opposite of what outsiders might imagine. It was the only magazine out of dozens where I freelanced whose editors dealt straight, looked you in the eye and handled your work respectfully. It was the only men’s magazine that paid like clockwork. The scale was low, but freelancers got paid from the same revolving two-week payroll as staffers.

Goldstein was the only man alive who could legitimately claim hookers as tax write-offs. Likewise,
Screw
reporters were reimbursed or fronted petty cash for research in the field, like peeps and whorehouses. Before I took over the Naked City listings, I was a stringer.
Screw’s
comptroller, Philip Eisenberg, was a Soviet bureaucrat who kept Goldstein’s tax ledgers neat as a Torah scroll. He was also in charge of expenses. When someone needed petty cash for undercover reviews, Philip counted it out as if he were donating blood. “Nothing more than a handjob,” he’d soberly remind you.

In the late ‘70s, however, New York boasted a dozen spectacular “leisure spas,” which were theme park whorehouses, like Tahitia and Caesar’s Retreat. The managers would routinely comp the guy from
Screw.
The girls were spectacular, about twenty lined up as you walked in. The boss would let you pick out any two you desired, each one of
Penthouse
caliber, then whisper instructions for them to give their best, he’s the man from
Screw.
You were given a palatial suite for a few hours, a Vegas recreation of Caesar’s bedroom or a Tahitian paradise.

When I was editing the Naked City listings, I farmed out a lot to other stringers. Believe it or not, you could even grow weary of sex joints. But the leisure spas were so much fun that the city of New York closed them all down.

Jaccoma and I were also responsible for overseeing
Midnight Blue.
We’d planned to shoot mock interview vignettes of Goldstein and budding starlet Veronica Hart, whose porno film acting remains unsurpassed to this day. I was smitten. I wrote some sketches and personally delivered them, along with flowers, to her loft, hoping to do a little “pre-production” work.

Veronica was new to Manhattan and had just returned from a tough day on the set. She sat down in the kitchen and began to luxuriously brush her hair and unwind. She began to blush while describing the leading man’s attempt to keep his dick in her ass, but it kept popping out and they had to keep reshooting. Just another nine-to-five workday.

“Here, let me,” I said, reaching for the brush.

She pulled back, slapping my hand. “What are you doing?” she said. “You know, I thought were friends.” She could handle the task herself, thank you, and mentioned her fiancée, a cameraman whom I believe shot some of her films, would soon be home. This was a monogamous woman. Encountering porn actresses with prudish behavior was always jarring.

Most women were fascinated, after an obligatory snicker, to hear you were an editor at
Screw.
They would often confide something sexual. A whole courtroom would burst out laughing during jury duty, when you were asked what your job was. But not everybody approved.

A hardboiled newspaper reporter who’d gone to college with my father took me out to dinner. “I’m ashamed of you, Josh,” he confided over drinks. “Aren’t you ashamed to work there? You’ll never be able to get a job at the
Daily News
. You need to do a few stories for
New York
or the
Voice,
sweep all that dirty crap away.”

And then, out the side of his mouth: “Geeze, I bet you meet some broads there. Whaddya say, me and you, we take on a few of those porno broads one night? Geeze, that Goldstein must be rich. How much is he worth? Anyway, I’m ashamed of you. I’m tellin’ ya, get outta there.”

In the summer of 1981, when I was Senior Editor, I began to notice some interesting activity across the eleventh-floor art director’s window. Ballerinas and cheerleader types scurried about in the windows of the building behind us. Incredibly, for twelve years, no other
Screw
staffer before me had ever noticed this phenomenon. I hollered out our window, about twenty yards, to a blonde knockout, for her phone number. Her roommates clasped their hands over her mouth, but not before she yelled back the downstairs phone exchange and their room. I dialed her up.

The girl who answered said it was her second day in New York from the Texas panhandle.

“Don’t
ever
give out your phone number to strangers in this city,” I advised.

“Well, just who are y’all?”

“We’re
Screw
magazine,” I said. “And thank God you gave your number to us. If you’d been across from Time-Life, you would have really fallen in with some perverts.”

Within an hour, giddy college girls were hanging out of all the top floor dorm windows. I arranged dates for them with
Screw
personnel. It wasn’t long before I became a regular “gentleman caller” at the waiting area in the quaint lobby of the Markle Evangeline Hall on 13th Street. Although men were strictly forbidden beyond this point, I was soon known by Major Anderson, the Salvation Army
commandant.
I enjoyed breakfast in the Markle cafeteria, just me and 500 nymphs in their morning bathrobes. In a
coup de grace,
the girls snuck me upstairs to the dorms, where I hid in their bunk beds. (Even the
Screw
press pass couldn’t deliver like this!). The female hormones were so prevalent in these halls that hundreds of young ladies experienced their menstrual cycles simultaneously. When outside girlfriends visited at that time of the month, they too automatically began their periods. I dare say, the female hormones were so fragrant, I almost began to menstruate.

“It’s the mother lode,” gasped the editor
of High Society,
as word quickly spread throughout the men’s magazine world. But I protected the girls from such swine:
Screw,
and only
Screw
would be the Markle Evangeline Hall’s official male fraternity. Even the geeks from
Midnight Blue
on the fourth floor nearly ruined everything, exposing themselves like mongoloid idiots before our magic window.

Several elderly men also resided at the Markle. The qualifying age for men was a mere fifty-five. In the Salvation Army’s world, gentlemen over fifty-five couldn’t possibly be a threat to young girls, and indeed, the few living there were retired clergymen types, fuddy duds. The Markle was oblivious to the impending possibility that Al Goldstein himself would soon qualify (which I never told Al, for fear he
would
move in).

Larry Flynt’s charades always seemed minuscule, pale imitations of the great Goldstein. Al feared no man alive (save for perhaps gangster John Gotti, and gay power broker/attorney Roy Cohn, who represented his third wife in their divorce). During a street confrontation one evening, as we led a Times Square tour for visiting ladies, Al cut down some porn store goons whom I thought were about to stomp us. Goldstein stood fearless before their threats, said he would see them dead first. They backed down, contritely apologizing. Though I witnessed some of Al’s grand achievements, it’s the little things that stand out. Like the time Annette Haven came up for her interview. She was in her prime and generated awe over the fact that such a stunning creature would actually do hardcore (and nothing but hardcore—she loathed “nudie-cutie” stuff). She was a woman of principle with a sexual mission. Goldstein had a mission too, and spent most of the interview whining for a blowjob.

“Oh, Al,” she would say, bemused. But Goldstein wouldn’t let up, as if begging for his life. If he landed a part in one of her movies, could he have one? No, she declared, that would be too contrived. And not for any amount of money. She liked Al but wouldn’t do it as a matter of principle. I’d never seen a human being grovel to that degree. He followed her on his knees to the elevator, and onto 14th Street, until her limousine door slammed. He yelled after the limo for her to make an old Jewish man die happy. It was a heroic failure.

The Great Pornographer suffered grand excesses. Several donut shops along 14th Street were actually paid off to refuse Goldstein service. I believe one shop was bribed to lock their door, should Goldstein come a-knockin’. Sort of like the Wolfman begging his neighbors to keep their doors locked at night, no matter how much he howled. Al’s four secretaries received calls from donut proprietors when Goldstein went off the deep end, swallowing donuts by the baker’s dozen. All four secretaries from the fourth-floor business office at Milky Way would have to dash over and coax him out. Sort of like farm hands herding a berserk prize hog back into its corral.