Tales of Times Square: Expanded Edition (41 page)

“All the cops at the Tombs grew up with me. But I’m handcuffed and treated like shit. They take my medicine away, I’m a diabetic, I’m really sick, for ten hours I’m trying to get to Bellevue, no one cares, I’m having a diabetic attack, they don’t care if you fuckin’ die.”

If convicted of these new charges for harassing Gina—his third wife and the mother of his son—Goldstein could get several years. The D.A. decided Goldstein was a flight risk and bail was set at $50,000. After thirty hours, he was released.

“So I took Joe and his wife to Katz’s Saturday night to reciprocate for the pastrami sandwich. I invited him to an editorial meeting. He loves cigars, he loves his wife, loves pussy, loves to fuck. He loves pregnant women’s milk. He’s a great cop.”

Mr. Freedom of Speech has always worn the First Amendment around his neck like a cross to ward off puritanical witch burners. He joined the ACLU when he was fifteen. His father denounced him as a Communist. The ACLU once told him he gave freedom of speech a bad name.

“But the issue here,” insists Goldstein, “is that I never called Gina personally, like with Lozinski. The First Amendment. I have a better chance of winning on this second arrest because I did not make an actual phone call.”

Goldstein didn’t use the phone, but his readership did. A full-page photo of Gina ran in
Screw,
headlined “A World-Class Cunt.” It was requested that readers phone her at the Allen Stevenson School and “ask her to stop being a cunt.” Over a hundred people called. She became afraid. The Manhattan D.A.’s office issued an order of protection.

Gina was married to Goldstein for over a decade. Enacting the classic Madonna/whore mindset, Goldstein tried to separate his life in two—that of urbane businessman with family hearth in a five-story townhouse on the upper East Side, with a perfectly sane, upstanding wife. A school teacher whose husband just happened by day to be the clown prince of pornography. The most outrageous smut peddler in history. Like all close relationships in his life, romantic or business, it eventually went bad.

“She didn’t like strangers phoning her business school to call her a cunt,” shrugs Goldstein. “So she had me arrested.”

Goldstein is particularly irritated about this because he thought she was well paid off in the divorce. “The reason Gina got $3 million is I wanted joint custody of Jordan. I knew no judge would give me joint custody, so I would have seen Jordan only two weeks a year. It was extortion, but I did it willingly. What more commitment can you make? He stayed with Gina half the time, we lived five blocks apart.”

After twenty-four years of family calm, mother and son have teamed up against him. So he began running full-page spreads: “How America Got AIDS” depicts Gina naked, about to fellate a black witch doctor, accusing her of introducing the disease to America after a 1980 trip to Cuba. In another, his ex-wife rolls around naked with a hog, called “a dirty pig-fucker,” whose “cunt ain’t kosher.” Goldstein pools his enemies together, printing mockups of Gina having sex with Manhattan D.A. Robert Morgenthau and Brooklyn D.A. Charlie Hynes.

It’s as if Photoshop was created just for Goldstein.
Screw
has blossomed into an open book of Goldstein’s failed relationships, lawsuits and personal hatreds. The magazine and
Midnight Blue
remain his salvation, his weekly therapy to vent frustration. Like Lenny Bruce, his life is degenerating into a series of arrests and trials. But they’re becoming harder to categorize as trailblazing First Amendment issues.

When not the target of lawsuits, Goldstein is busy instigating his own. He is The Shopper from Hell. Mercedes, for instance, recently neglected to repair an electrical problem on his new Benz. Mock ads began appearing in
Screw
of the Benz USA president’s head superimposed over a Nazi SS uniform: “Buy a Benz—kill a Jew.” Rather than even press the issue, they bought the car back and paid him thirty grand to just drop the whole matter. He did. “Nobody can fucking believe I got $30,000 from Mercedes,” says Goldstein. “They told me I can’t divulge the amount of the settlement. Fuck them.”

Goldstein is usually right in his grievances. There is a sense he’s striking a blow for all the Common Joe Screw readers who spend their miserable lives in a silent scream. Surly flight attendants, rude sales people or arrogant CEO’s who cross Consumer Goldstein receive stiff public rebuke in a place they’d
really
rather not be mentioned—
Screw
and
Midnight Blue.
The Curse is rationed out to the worst of them. Citizen Al can smear political candidates by merely
endorsing
them.

Nine months ago in Brooklyn is where Goldstein was arrested on charges brought by Jennifer Lozinski. The incident: He cussed her out on the phone because he had to wait at LAX airport for a rental car. Cussing out secretaries was nothing new for Lovable Al. He would rain abuse into secretaries’ answering machines in the wee hours. In the morning they soberly typed up his complaints into minutes.
Oh that Al
—it’s just a routine part of the job.

But Lozinski, thirty, claimed to be unaccustomed to such foul language and quit. Goldstein then accused her of conspiring with a former
Screw
Ad Director who allegedly embezzled $130,000. He accused her of pilfering petty cash. He called her a “miserable lowlife” on
Midnight Blue,
flashing her address and number. And in the phone call that sealed his fate, Goldstein told her “I’m going to take you down.” This phrase became the linchpin of debate in his misdemeanor trial.
Take her down
in the “Strawberry Fields” sense? In a sexual context? Lozinski feared he meant take down in a mob sense. Goldstein stood his ground under the mantle of Free Speech. His defense came up with a dozen definitions for the meaning of
take you down.
But this speech, for the first time in thirty years, didn’t come free. The court found the threat a less than honorable extension of the First Amendment. Goldstein was convicted on six counts of misdemeanor harassment and given four concurrent sixty-day jail sentences.

Lozinski claimed she didn’t know what
Screw
was, never saw explicit material during the eleven weeks she worked there. But it came out in court that she herself mailed vitriolic videos and copies of
Screw,
by Goldstein’s directive, to friends and family of the very secretary who preceded her. Goldstein turned the trial into a circus. Dressed in prison stripes before sentencing, he told reporters outside Brooklyn Criminal Court that “Judge Chun makes a nice lo mein, but put too much starch in my shirt.” He ran an editorial suggesting someone “slam a 747” into the office of Brooklyn D.A. Charles J. Hynes, complete with aerial directions to the building. As the trial progressed,
Screw
ran photos of the prosecutor being schtupped in the ass and blowing O.J. Simpson. He repeated these quips on the
Howard Stern Show.
Stern responded with a lecture on sanity.

When cross-examined by the assistant D.A. about his 747 editorial, Al went into a tirade about the First Amendment. Judge Daniel K. Chun—whom Goldstein addressed as “Judge Chopstick”—cleared the courtroom and charged him with contempt, setting bail at $100,000. But this order was rescinded when the shaken judge was reminded he couldn’t charge Goldstein with contempt without a warning first. When the jury was led back in, ninety-one-year-old Al “Grandpa Munster” Lewis took the stand as Goldstein’s character witness. In what was described by the
New York Post
as a “rambling discourse,” Lewis was nearly ejected from court.

All four New York dailies gave him sympathetic coverage. Jimmy Breslin wrote two
Newsday
columns acknowledging Al as the media’s foremost First Amendment martyr.

In his final address before sentencing, Goldstein told the judge, “You weren’t in this country when I was out fighting for you—I’m a Korean War veteran... This is the proudest day of my life... Let’s not forget that Lenny Bruce was not vindicated until five months after he was dead... When a movie is made about this trial, Richard Dreyfuss will play me and Howdy Doody will play you, your honor.”

Judge Chopstick ordered him to start serving sixty days at Riker’s.

“Jail means nothing to me,” Goldstein trumpeted to
The New York Times
after sentencing, “because freedom means so much to me.” He said he was intrigued by the prospect of having a big black boyfriend violate his love holes.

Herald Price Fahringer, who won for Goldstein in Kansas, is appealing. Goldstein has great hopes that the harassment statute he was convicted under will be declared unconstitutional.

Lozinski’s Revenge

It had been over thirty years since Goldstein was at Riker’s Island. He takes a long pause and the tone of his voice softens:

“You can’t anticipate how horrible it is. Riker’s is the vilest, it’s gotten much worse. I was thirty-two then, now I’m sixty-six, I’ve got diabetes, I’m on fifteen medicines. So I was put in the methadone center. I’m with fifty
schvartzas,
all of them doing methadone in the bathroom. I’m with the Bloods, the Crips, I’m the only white person, the oldest there. Handcuffed all the time. There’s no diabetic food. Breakfast, lunch and dinner is the same—pieces of bread and jelly. Like a third world country, everything at Riker’s was broken—the toilets, the sinks, the copying machines. Nothing to do but stare at space. It’s filthy, there are cockroaches, everyone hates you, it’s a fuckin’ horror.”

Some corrections officers asked Goldstein for his autograph. But the twenty-year-old gangbangers had no idea who The Great Pornographer was. Even supporters within the NYPD were unable to sneak in pastrami sandwiches.

“I’m not some Mafia guy who can do time standing on my head. Theoretically, you’re allowed to have visitors, but they wouldn’t let me. I’m not talkin’ theory, I’m talkin’ truth. You can have
Penthouse, Playboy
and
Hustler,
but they wouldn’t let me have
Screw.
They took
Newsweek, Time,
they took every magazine I had. They gave me only two—
Cigar Aficionado
just to aggravate me ‘cause I can’t smoke, and
Time Out,
the restaurant issue, since I wasn’t allowed to eat. They’re playing mind games, they’re trying to break you.” Lozinski got her revenge. In case there was a dearth of such creatures at Riker’s, the guards got themselves one fat, angry, loudmouth New York Jew to aggravate. Not enjoying his stay, Goldstein was taken to the medical ward, where his
attitude
made him the ideal prisoner to torture. After seven hours waiting for permission to use a bathroom, Goldstein shit his pants. He refused to take a shower. “If I am to be in hell, I want to smell like hell,” he told the guards. He began hallucinating, seeing double and hearing voices after being injected with God knows what.

“They performed surgery on me illegally. They put a catheter up my leg against my will in Riker’s hospital. They stopped giving me my own diabetic medicine, they switched my anti-depressants to Zoloft, which I don’t take. They injected insulin in my arm, which I don’t take. It was Dr. Mengele. The corrections officer said I would leave in a pine box.”

Watching CNN one night, an old man whose legs were amputated wheeled in and changed the channel over Goldstein’s protest. “That was my one fight in prison and I yielded to a legless cripple,” he says. “Let the cripple watch his nigger shows,” Goldstein thought to himself, “I fucked Seka and Linda Lovelace. I’m sure the only girls this guy ever fucked were members of his own family.”

Goldstein daydreamed of the steaks, lobsters and hookers he would ravish when he got out. He prayed for the first time in forty-two years—since he was jailed in Cuba for photographing Raul Castro and told he would be executed as an American spy. Fahringer’s legal assistant, Tricia Dubnow, came to Goldstein’s rescue. “She saw me laying on the floor shaking, puking, crying. She would not leave without me.”

Tricia got locked up herself for twenty-five hours trying to bail Al out.

His bail was accepted after nine days in Riker’s. He still owes them fifty more days. His passport confiscated, he can’t travel a radius of more than twenty miles from his Florida home or his New York apartment.

“They won, they broke my spirit,” Al told
The New York Times,
stumbling out of Riker’s nearly comatose. It was the first time he ever cried during an interview.

Jordan

“The first arrest embarrassed my son, who graduated Harvard Law School,” Goldstein continues. “Now that he’s Mr. Harvard he’s so ashamed. Two weeks ago he called me at eight o’clock in the morning and, are you ready for this, here’s the message he personally delivered to me: he said, ‘Dad, the reason I didn’t invite you to Harvard Law School’s graduation wasn’t because of Mom—but because
I
did not want you there. I cannot wait for the day I read your
New York Times
obituary.’ I said, Fuck you, and I hung up. That was worse than all the other shit. I wake up in the middle of the night crying.”

Before Harvard, Jordan Goldstein finished first in his class of 781 students at Georgetown University. The chart is framed on Goldstein’s office wall. Al’s son was offered graduate scholarships to NYU and Oxford. But Al Goldstein—a fat, former bed-wetting stutterer from Williamsburg, Brooklyn—
lived
for the day he could send his son to Harvard.

Al’s own father was a small timid fellow who said “sir” to elevator operators. His last years were spent with a job in the
Screw
mailroom. Rather than live in fear and resignation, Goldstein became the opposite of his father. And now his son Jordan has become a conservative beacon of respectability. They now hate each other as only family members can.

Immediately after their fallout, Goldstein declared his son dead in the pages of
Screw.
This is how Goldstein vents his rage, the only way he knows how, the way he is designed. The ads Proud Papa Goldstein has been running of his son and ex-wife are clearly the rantings of a divine madman. The
pièce de résistance
of his career. Jordan is surrounded by an In Loving Memory wreath with his 1996 Georgetown Summa Cum Laude report card: “His academic achievements will not be forgotten by his grieving former father—who’d like to remind you that Jordan’s Ivy League education cost him nearly $700,000.”
Screw’s
subscription ads feature a mockup of Jordan in the gym: “Order...today, or you might end up turning into a spoiled, thieving, faggot Harvard boy...” Jordan’s baby picture (“Wahhhh! I want my
Screw
!”). A “Who’s Jordan’s Dad?” contest to determine who knocked up Gina—with photos of possible impregnators Mike Tyson, Hitler, bin Laden, Nixon, Arafat and blind Egyptian cleric Omar Abdel-Rahman. A full-page Reward offer appears each week, seeking Jordan Ari Goldstein’s current whereabouts and number. A mockup photo of Gina blowing Jordan; Jordan blowing the President of Georgetown University; and one mockup entitled “Nigger Lovin’ Jews,” showing Jordan and Gina copulating with Afro-Americans.