Tales of Times Square: Expanded Edition (40 page)

We did theme issues with cover lines that screamed Armageddon & Dingleberries, or Voodoo & Vomit. Piled high at newsstands right alongside the
New York Post,
we knew millions of New Yorkers had a chance of at least
seeing
the cover lines. Goldstein might complain whenever we got too cerebral, like Gil Reavill’s bogus Goldstein interview with Hitler’s Third Reich architect, Albert Speer, which many people believed. “This is not a college paper!” bellowed Goldstein. “Get back to fuck shots!”

A particular brainchild of mine was our Sex and Diarrhea issue. Every page covered some form of shit. Goldstein was scheduled to appear on BBC radio in London, where he hoped to score a distribution deal. As with any business trip, his secretary packed two dozen of that week’s issue.

I heard the BBC radio tapes, one appalled British interviewer after another. “Mr. Goldstein, if this is a sex periodical, how come every single page has defecation, feces or diarrhea?”

Al grabbed the paper and was himself surprised to see the Sex & Diarrhea cover theme. BBC hosts raged on: “Mr. Goldstein, you are a revolting man. Get out of this studio! Get out of this country!” The business trip was cut short.

Though he was like a “Gandhi with his dick out,” Goldstein liked to say that if he were assassinated, they could fill up Yankee Stadium with suspects. He even went on TV in Southern California, daring rednecks to get out their rifles and take their best shot. Californians were so inept, he said, they couldn’t possibly shoot straight. There were alternate print crews at the plant where
Screw
was printed. When the Pope issue came out, Catholic pressmen walked off. But backup crews of blacks, Puerto Ricans, Polish, Italian or Jewish pressman stood at the ready, to fill in for any offended ethnic group.

I have but one remaining Times Square “mole,” to this day. Uncle Lou, the beloved chauffeur, who’s driven hundreds of porn stars to their club dates. He still calls me in Texas in the wee hours with news from Show World. Doesn’t quite believe that I left the beat twelve years ago.

Lou befriends strippers for life, remaining loyal long after other fans have abandoned them. I once went to dinner in Times Square with Uncle Lou, who brought along a depressed, overweight ex-stripper. When she went for the powder room, he leaned over and said out the side of his mouth, “If you play your cards right, you got a shot with her.”

“But I don’t want a shot with her,” I said.

“I think she likes ya,” Lou continued, “she likes ya ‘cause you don’t come on like gangbusters.”

Even if she’d been smashing, I’ve long since left the life. I married the girl who first answered the phone at the Markle. Followed her back to Texas, where we reside in a palace in Dallas.

—1998

THE RISE AND FALL OF AL GOLDSTEIN

Mr. Freedom of Speech

We called him The Great One. Every Friday afternoon he came up to the eleventh-floor editorial offices to check
Screw’s
bluelines before we went to press. Managing Editor Richard Jaccoma got the call from the fourth floor that he was on his way. Jaccoma would scurry from room to room like a headless chicken, trumpeting the emperor’s arrival. He did this in the voice of Indian peasant boy Sabu, rolling his R’s: “De Grrreat One, de Grrreat One is coming!”

They called John Gotti the Teflon Don when charges didn’t stick. But Goldstein was the Teflon Pornographer. He weathered nineteen arrests in the late ’60s, petty arrests, not righteous ones, when they busted blind news dealers for selling
Screw.
Weekends and overnighters in Riker’s. The magazine debuted on newsstands the day after Nixon was elected President. It gave the world’s oldest profession its first advertising medium and enabled the man on the street to get laid within an hour. It also made enemies fast. Goldstein was once arrested eight hours after grafting Mayor Lindsay’s head on a naked photo composite. A typical 1970 trial concerned dildo ads. The State of New York argued in Superior Court that dildos could be used for criminally immoral purposes.

Screw
was the first to call J. Edgar Hoover a faggot, when he was alive. Once dead, everybody called him a faggot. Finally, forces within the Nixon Administration initiated a mighty offensive to lock
Screw’s
publisher up for sixty years. Legend has it that Hoover’s very last directive was, “Get Goldstein.” A trial was held in Wichita, Kansas, a hamlet where the Federal government figured the local citizenry most likely to convict him for postal indecency. Postal inspectors in Kansas subscribed under fictitious names to entrap him. Nine of the jurors said
Screw
didn’t arouse their prurient interest. After three years of trial and error, a hung jury exonerated him in 1978. Goldstein flew his Kansas jury to New York to celebrate at Plato’s Retreat, and took them all out to dinner on the anniversary of his acquittal. This landmark victory thereafter insured the right of Americans to view buck-ass naked sex—with or without redeeming social value.

Al Goldstein is now an obese, diabetic, cigar-chomping trainwreck of sixty-six. He has faced down his own mortality many times. Goldstein has undergone more litigation than any publisher in America. He has endured fat farms, liposuctions, tummy tucks, gall-bladder removal and a tracheostomy while on trial in Kansas. He has enriched four ex-wives and put a son through Harvard Law School. He’s taken enough medications to kill ten Elvises, for God knows how many personality disorders and imbalances. Downing pastrami sandwiches and pints of Häagen-Dazs ice cream, the Goldstein girth has fluctuated between a svelte 175 and an unsavory 350 pounds, which he is now.

But Al Goldstein’s court battles could endow an entire law library. Leaf through the annals of
Screw’s
legal history and you will be amazed by the rogues’ gallery of public puritans who tried to crush
Screw
—whose lives and careers then went down in flames or disgrace. These figures were branded with the “Goldstein Curse”—a dark omen bestowed by Goldstein in his weekly editorial. It works like Jewish voodoo.

It began with Mayor Lindsay, whose vice squad busted six blind news dealers for selling
Screw,
arresting Goldstein nineteen times on charges of second degree obscenity. Lindsay’s presidential aspirations, star career and health fell into ruin after his last term. Nassau County D.A. Bill Cahn handcuffed Goldstein for obscenity, then ended up in Federal prison for tax fraud. Staten Island Congressman John Murphy was jailed in the Abscam investigation after he fought to remove Goldstein’s cable-TV show
Midnight Blue
from the air. Even those who survived the Curse encountered misfortune of some kind. Mayor Giuliani’s prostate cancer was announced soon after he received his Goldstein Curse for cleaning up Times Square.

Raving morality figures who aggressively targeted
Screw
include Charles Keating, founder of Citizens For Decent Literature. The same Charles Keating later imprisoned for robbery in the multi-billion-dollar Lincoln Savings & Loan scandal. Televangelist Jim Bakker was ruined by fraud and sex scandal a month after Goldstein vacationed at Bakker’s Heritage USA Christian theme park in South Carolina. Attorney General Ed Meese resigned over corruption charges after heading The Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography. Among Meese’s firebrand anti-smut Commissioners was Rev. Morton Hill, head of Morality in Media—who soon dropped dead. Also on the Reagan-era Commission was Times Square’s most insidious anti-porn crusader. “Father” Bruce Ritter’s career shattered when it was revealed he’d been molesting homeless boys in his care all along, while squandering Covenant House funds on male prostitutes.

Corporate raider Carl Icahn bankrupted TWA and lost his chairmanship in 1993. He too had been cursed after sparring with Goldstein. In 1996, Goldstein bested longtime foe Time-Warner Cable of New York in Federal court, for scrambling
Midnight Blue’s
cable signal. Even the
U.S.S. Intrepid
went into bankruptcy the moment it canceled a party they found out Goldstein had booked.

Goldstein’s millions have gone into
Screw’s
Defense Department budget. It cost a dapper dime defending the right to degrade the high and mighty, and underwrite the First Amendment law firms of Herald Price Fahringer and Ken Norwick. A model named Angie Geary filed a $29-million defamation after
Midnight Blue
parodied her 1988 Wasa Crispbread commercial. It was eventually thrown out. During my own time at
Screw
there appeared a mild parody of the Poppin’ Fresh doughboy humping the doughgirl while she had a yeast infection. Pillsbury responded with a $50-million lawsuit. Goldstein owned two shares of General Mills and flew to a stockholder’s meeting in Minneapolis dressed as the doughboy. He reprimanded them for wasting shareholders’ money on frivolous lawsuits. Once the suit was dismissed, Al co-opted the doughboy as
Screw’s
cover logo for a year. Japanese
Screw,
franchised at that time, was unfamiliar with American baking products. They assumed Poppin’ Fresh was
Screw’s
cover logo. Though Japanese
Screw
was short-lived, Pillsbury’s corporate symbol graced every cover.

Screw
has prevailed in lawsuits leveled by ambitious D.A.’s trying to make their bones. But Goldstein barely escaped ruin after settling a lawsuit from the wife of an assistant D.A. Her phone number somehow penetrated
Screw’s
security check. She appeared in the hooker ads “Willing to Suck Nigger Cock Free.”

Any major loss could have bankrupted
Screw
on the spot. But Goldstein prevailed. It seemed God himself was on the side of this fat, Hebrew action hero whose attackers lined up one by one, oblivious to each other’s defeats, only to get chopped into herring.

He bested them all. Until now. The Great Pornographer has finally been brought down by a thirty-year-old former secretary, Jennifer Lozinski. This “filthy Jew whore,” as she’s described in
Screw,
has proven to be his most formidable enemy.

In July of 2002, Richard Jaccoma and I visit
Screw,
together there for the first time in twenty years. Goldstein hobbles in by cane, unseemly flesh billowing down from his waist. He has recently been bailed out from Riker’s Island after “the worst nine days of my life.” He owes Riker’s another fifty days for harassing Lozinski.

“The Mafia said I’d be dead by this weekend,” says Al.

“So what else is new?” I ask.

“If I get shot this weekend, you should be thrilled having my last interview.”

Goldstein takes a load off his sockless, diabetic feet. “My life is not boring,” he sighs, sinking into a chair. This week he’s got a son who disowned him, he’s taking over the Mafia’s distribution of his paper, and he’s been arrested for the
second
time in six weeks. His longtime distributor, Astro News, a Gambino Family newsstand supplier, threatened that he wouldn’t live through the weekend if he switched distributors. Defiant, Goldstein will solidify the final switch today. The new distributors await in another room. Goldstein claims he lives for hate, and won’t die because it would make too many people happy.

“I want you to hear this story,” says Al, “it’s un-fuckin’ believable. I travel with Jean-Marc. Jean-Marc is a cigar buddy, ‘cause I get lonely in the big castle in Florida. I date a little bit. But mostly I’m alone. So he and I, we smoke cigars, we go out, we go to Trapeze. Bottom line is, he’s my buddy. His professional job is, I swear to God, he’s a gigolo. He’s a biker, he’s got tattoos, he fucks older women. He’s from Marseilles, living in America for twenty-two years, has his own home in Boca, a sports car and a Harley Davidson. He travels with me as my bodyguard.”

Listening attentively in the office are the balding bon vivant Frenchman, Jean-Marc himself, and another finely tailored gent basking in Goldstein’s presence.

“We get off the plane Wednesday, Jet Blue, and we arrive at a quarter to six. I’m comin’ into town cause I’m takin’ on the Mafia and going with a new distributor and I’m very excited. We’ve got four bags, we walk out to the taxi, and three guys in suits walk over, shake my hand. ‘How are you, Al?’ I said, ‘Hi, how are you,’ and they said, ‘You’re under arrest.’

“I thought it’s a joke. I said, ‘What, are you fuckin’ guys kidding?’ They said, ‘No, we’re sorry, Al, we’ve got to take you.’ I explained I was already arrested three weeks ago, what’s this about? I’m with my luggage, I said, ‘C’mon, I wanna go home and take a shower.’ They said, ‘No, you’re under arrest. Gina, your ex-wife, has brought charges against you for harassment.’”

The Great One revels in the daily melodrama of his life. Each incident is fodder for the inevitable Hollywood epic of his life story.

“Anyway, they all shake my hand, they’re total gentlemen. So they let me bring the luggage upstairs where [
Screw
Art Director] Kevin’s waiting for me. I’m more stunned than anything. They put me in the car without handcuffs. They bring me to the 67th precinct because that’s where Gina lives and she’s the one that brought the charges. The cops are all gentlemen, and this guy Joe here is saying, ‘I’m the greatest fan of yours, read
Screw,
love your work. I’m just following orders. We’re not gonna cuff you or put you in a cell. We’ll put you in that room over there, we have to lock the door, we’ll keep you here a few hours cause once you’re in the Tombs you’re gonna be with the animals.’

“It’s now like 6:30, they keep me there till 10 o’clock. Then they bring me to the Tombs, I’m on the floor with fifteen people and 400 cockroaches. Then Joe here does something that makes me love him deeply.”

The man in the expensive suit, sitting here as if we’re huddled around a
shtetle
campfire being serenaded by the town’s 350-pound rabbi, is Joe—one of the arresting officers. The detective now hangs with Al on off-duty hours.

“He says, ‘Listen, I can get you a pastrami sandwich at the Stage Deli,’ so he orders me a sandwich. And he knows every porno film, he’s done 600 hookers, he loves Times Square. As any old hooker will tell you, cops are among the most frequent patrons. 90 percent of all gonorrhea and herpes cases come from women who’ve slept with cops.