Tales of Times Square: Expanded Edition (8 page)

Dancing on the Frying Pan

A swarm of five black boys, each under ten years old, are trying to break into street-corner show business. They scatter out from the Hotel Carter’s new welfare rolls in Times Square, before the Broadway curtains rise. They run alongside pedestrians on 45th and Broadway, the folks headed toward Shubert Alley and a dozen surrounding theaters, and force people to watch them dance. They are fledgling break dancers, executing spontaneous beginner dips and dives and spins, not yet matured into dance steps or acrobatics. But tourists are charmed, and every minute some ticket holder stops to smile, clap, or dance along and toss a coin. Other kids may wash windshields on 42nd Street, but these are minstrels. Street urchins without parental guidance. They have no ghetto blasters, no rap or funk tracks to dance to, which makes them an a cappella dance troupe. All of them wear slum-certified Keds sneakers, and know how to walk on the insides of their ankles, an old comedian’s trick that is their most advanced move. The head kid, who whispers instructions to the rest, wears a black cap and carries a cane.

A potbellied, jolly fellow stops to join them, as his wife watches, charmed. He loves little kids, obviously, it makes no difference what kind. He pulls some change from his trousers and has them guess which hand. Making direct eye contact, he matches them step for step, dancing along, belly abounce, a real hoofer. Next he pulls out a dollar bill and throws it in their shoe box. Paper money is a rare and euphoric acquisition, which sets them to yelling and pulling at each other.

“Yo, mister!” shouts one of the breakers, tugging the coat of the potbellied gentleman, now twenty steps down the block with his wife. “Tell ‘em it’s for me, all right?” The five of them argue over whom the buck was intended for, but then scurry off to another corner, as if they’d already milked this corner for its spoils. Wow!

Next to the Orange Morris (formerly Julius) on Seventh and 46th, the four best break dancers in Times Square are passing the collection plate to a dozen spirited passersby. “Pay up, pay up!” demands the collector with the box. “If you watched, you gotta throw in at least a penny!” Only three or four cough up. The collector hams about in a duck walk, an ankle walk, but nothing so tricky as to spill over the coin box. On a warm spring night such as this, they might get $15 apiece. These are the big boys, about sixteen years old—though the fourth member is eight. They have a high-volume JVC blaster with plenty of rap cassettes. They wear uniforms, or at least their own cultivated personal dress. Two of them have windbreaker jackets and pants, the fat one named Jelly wears a brown stocking over his head, and the small fry just wears corduroys. They are joined by friends who come and go, subwaying down from Harlem, but basically they are known as the Fantastic Four; they were once picked by Pee Wee Herman to do a guest set during his engagement at Caroline’s Comedy Club.

When the five undomesticated street urchins arrive before the Fantastic Four, they are too intimidated to speak and merely take their place among other spectators on the sidewalk. In fact, they’re treated with disdain by the Four, who keep yelling for them to make room “so the people can see.” None of the urchins would dare break dance in such presence, but they study the motions with mouths agape, especially the little member of the Fantastic Four, whom they follow enviously. This little fellow is advanced, born into rap and backbeat funk tracks, knowing no other music before this electronic genre—not Motown, not James Brown, not Bach.

The Four’s rival breaker group, Float Committee, spills past Orange Morris. The pavement heats up now, the Four breaking harder, screaming louder, pushing back the five little squirts, who can’t seem to stay out of the way. Someone yells for a face-off—Fantastic Four versus Float Committee. This is dance gang war!

The fat guy with stockinged head glides out to face Float Committee’s fat guy. They dance off. The first fat guy falls to the ground in a seal imitation, rocking like a seesaw, flapping his fins. He maneuvers his hands over his torso, simulating quivering belly flab. His rival merely holds out his arms, as though electricity is snaking through them, then falls to the sidewalk, ending in a hand pirouette. One of the little urchins dares to try a back Spin, but is shoved off by the big boys. “Get the fuck back!”

The next cat from Float has his routine interrupted by a Four who wears a tanktop T-shirt and toothpick far back in his mouth. “This be you,” says Tanktop, mocking his opponent, a sluggish, bulky dancer in a windbreaker. Tanktop executes some cliched robot moves, à la James Brown ten years ago, to demonstrate his point. Then he starts to do his own moves, his nostrils flaring angrily. Spastic, jerky muscle twitches, quick-changing face contortions. He measures his challenger’s head between his hands, then prances about, as though still holding the head. This is Tanktop’s take on Japanese electronics, robots, computers, and video games, all coming back at you on the street corner.

“Okay, we through,” announces the collector, flatly and suddenly, without any flourish. The partying stops on a dime, the crowd disperses, and they’re finished on this block.

Pee Wee Is Not a Happy Man

The short-tempered black midget, a Times Square novelty since 1943, paces at the doorway of Hawaii-Kai like Napoleon. He’s been serving time here since 1960, greeting folks with his cane, pointing the way upstairs at the schlock tourist restaurant next to the Winter Garden. His domain resembles a tropical Hawaiian Disneyland exhibit with a coat check and rest rooms. Business is terrible. If you grease his palm, he’ll sit you down by the mock waterfall and tell you his life story:

“I’m Pee Wee, been on Broadway almost fifty years. I come up from Nashville in August 1943. I was singing and dancing with the late Frances Craig, owned a white band down South who had a black man performin’. After he gave his band up during the war days, he give me a hundred dollars, ticket, and letter of introduction.

“I had met the great Billy Eckstein down in Nashville, gave me his Harlem address, told me whenever I come to New York City I could stay with him till I got something to do—” A personage interrupts him at the door. “Don’t come over here ‘n’ bother me now, this
my
b’niss!” Pee Wee shouts, lording over the Hawaiian forest like a Cornish hen. Upstairs, the Hawaiian revue of hula girls and singers are starting their chant on the dining stage, which Pee Wee has no part in. Pee Wee performed at the Three Deuces Club on 52nd Street during his first few years in the city. “Ballads, jazz, rhythm, that was my act. But I stopped singing in the nightclub b’niss after ‘44. They made me greeter and host. I preferred that to singing, because so much red tape getting started. I had more fun as emcee. Did that for ‘bout twenty-five, thirty years.”

Pee Wee worked Times Square joints like the Royal Roost, and Zanzibar’s at 49th and Broadway, his favorite because of its old-time mobsters and decor. But it was at Birdland that he became a fixture: “I introduced onstage Miles Davis, Teddy Wilson, the late Charlie “Yardbird” Parker, late Fats Navarro, late Bud Powell.... Never went to their funerals, always wanted to remember them as I saw them.”

Pee Wee dresses in an old-fashioned blue-and-gray doorman’s uniform that he “messes up” with a rose in his lapel, a police button, an American flag, two religious emblems, a diamond stickpin under his bowtie, and gold jewelry, making him look like a tiny, decorated general.

“I lived in Harlem, the Hotel Theresa. That’s when Harlem was Harlem. It was clean, weren’t no muggin’, nobody think about stickin’ ya up, everybody was beautiful. Times Square was so clean in those days, you could eat off the sidewalk. When you get offa your job, you’d go to the
all-night
movies in Times Square. I don’t mean no bad, ugly movies. Legit movies, reg’lar, clean. Then I’d go down to Romeo Restaurant with a friend for spaghetti and meatball, prices were right.”

Pee Wee cites the closures of the Strand, the Capitol, the Roxy, and the Paramount, “where the great Frank Sinatra performed,” as the “beginning of the downfall of Broadway. It used to be a Great White Way, everybody was dressed up, tuxedos, gowns, no overalls, no short pants, no khakis, none of that mess. They had cops on the beat all night long, kept the peace, nobody mad at nobody. Walked anywhere I want anytime, never look back. Now? I can’t get home fast enough.” Though he lives around the corner from Hawaii-Kai, Pee Wee takes a cab home. “Thank God, I haven’t been mugged, because the man upstairs always takes care of me, so I don’t worry ‘bout nothin’.”

After Birdland closed, Pee Wee “wanted to be with the people on the street.” Characters of questionable deeds continually wander in from the avenue to whisper in the midget’s ear, then dart back out. “Sometime I enjoy working here, sometime I don’t. These crazy nuts off the streets walks in and I straighten ‘em out, tell ‘em, ‘I’m sorry, you can’t come in, you in the wrong place.’” The four-foot-eight, sixty-eight-year-old midget carries a metal cane: “And know how to use it, too. First their legs; when they bend down, their stomach, then their head. That’s it.”

Was The Pee ever married?

“Never got hung up with nothin’ like that. They got a big mouth. All women got a big mouth, gettin’ in people’s b’niss. Not one of ‘em I know today I would trust goin’ ‘cross the street. Don’t get me wrong, I had my girls, crazy ‘bout beautiful women, sexy, decent, clean women.

“Hey, baby, how you doin’?” booms the Broadway greeter into the street—where rumor has it he’s really a woman in drag. He remembers Police Commissioner Ben Ward walking a Harlem beat (“He was tougher then than he is now”), and scolds the governor for not putting criminals in the electric chair. It was the sixties assassinations that first messed everything up in the country. He then admits having been scared to death last night during an electrical storm, the likes of which he never before saw strike the Broadway pavement: “The signs of the time. All over Broadway, b’niss is terrible. In the next few years, all hell will break loose over the world. The battle of Armageddon is already started. People minds is boggled on pornography, all that ugly filth and stuff. They all dope addicts, their minds turn to ugliness. We in the last days.”

Pee Wee looks far above his prison perch at the schlock Broadway waterfall and breaks into hymn:

When your bod-y

Suffer pain

And your health you can’t regain

Take your troubles to the Lord

And leave it there
.

LOWDOWN

Inside the Peeps

The scene is a crowded weekday lunch hour at a modern Times Square sex emporium in the late 1970s. Outside stands “Dudley Arnholt,” commodities broker, tough guy with a tax form, mid-forties, divorced, paranoid neurotic, Times Square Everyman at the moment. He’s so horny that the crack of dawn ain’t safe—he followed the direction of his erection all the way here, like a donkey following a carrot. But he freezes near the entrance—passersby are onto his game, he fears. Checking all directions to make sure the coast is clear of any clients, neighbors, or nieces, he sighs woefully and steps briskly through the door. Arnholt is home free in an evil candy store of gaping fuck holes, lassoed bazooms, twelve-inch cannons of shooting manhood, electrifying hardcore sound loops, and a blatant subculture of fetishes, all arranged in McDonald’s-style elegance. But the pang in his gut leads him past all this to an even greater spectacle—the fantastic, featured “Live Nude Girl” peep show.

There are twenty occupied booths, each with a glowing red bulb that indicates a quarter has been inserted, giving the viewer his thirty seconds. Cocks of every age, race, and size are being drawn out in the booths. Some will spurt onto the walls, some into Kleenex, some will even discharge into fifty-cent French-tickler condoms from the store’s vending machine. These will be discarded on the floor.

Arnholt waits his turn, careful to avoid the jolt of eye contact. A crowd of gawkers stare aimlessly at the women on display in the “one-on-one” booths. An Eisenhower dollar buys a minute on the phone with one of these broads—but a full-length glass partition, dripping with ejaculate, keeps you at bay. Arnholt never springs for the telephone gimmick—what if the peep girl spots him later at a debutante ball?

Roving quarter-cashiers double as barkers, trying to perpetuate some cosmic momentum of flowing cash. “C’mon, fellas, keep those quarters comin’, take a booth or clear the aisle, get your change here for live sexy girls, four for a quarter”. Every ten minutes, one of the four sexy girls is replaced. A hidden female emcee announces each new entry, guaranteeing they’ll love her.

“Foxy Bertha joining the sexy girls now, big daddy, all for a quarter, love to love you, baby, come in your pants, yeah, right now!” A fat man, barely able to stuff his huge belly into the narrow booth, responds to the mating call. Unsatisfied customers linger in the aisle, checking at each interval until they find a girl worthy of their jizz. They’ve come in blue jeans, in cowboy hats, on crutches; there are even palsied spastics. But this being the workaday lunch hour, the business community prevails in suit and tie. After all, this is a commercialized form of voyeurism, a modern way to go girl-watching, you might say.

Arnholt regrets missing the “Boy-Girl Duos”—Cuban refugees who fuck on a revolving platform (which switches off with “Lesbian Love Teams” on weekends). Current disco Top 40 shakes the walls; Arnholt knows of this only as peep show music. Two black guys are about to tear into each other with Afro picks, but the cashier spots something more distressing—some nitwit peering into the crack of an occupied stall for a free peek. This unfortunate is verbally assaulted the hell out. Arnholt doesn’t dare interfere. He’s humiliated to find himself here, straining not to draw attention, eyes downcast to the floor.

A central booth opens and Arnholt makes his move. The soles of his Oxfords skid for a moment like ice skates and he notices a sopping Kleenex contemptuously wedged into a crevice. The management expects this, it’s part of the operation. The adjacent booth is being mopped by professional scum-scrubbers; mop-and-pail Leroys, urban descendants of dung-shoveling stable jockeys. They work their roll mops like dance partners, soaked in Fast & Easy ammonia, which they slide into unoccupied booths in sync with the disco backbeat. With the outward boogie-oogie-oogie sweep comes a trail of used Kleenex. Arnholt takes a freshened booth. He hangs his coat and briefcase on the hook and flips the lock. In the womblike confines of his own private stall, Arnholt stands like a horse in heat. A hefty supply of quarters jingles in his pocket and he knows he better keep ‘em comin’ or the management will slam on his door. This is a peak turnover hour and others are anxious for Arnholt’s booth. He has seen certain customers try to settle down and make the booth their permanent living quarters. But the management is fast to catch on and charge them 25¢ per minute rent (or $10,800 a month, according to Arnholt’s quick mathematical brain). He flips a quarter into the slot, which triggers an ascending metal curtain. The partition slowly rises to reveal a naked Times Square maiden writhing about on a rotating platform. Spread-eagled twats and hind ends float by the window, ecstatic aquarium fish with ghetto-girl faces. The booths form a semicircle around this naked parade and he can see the shadowy faces of other masturbators peeping out across from him. Fortunately, the blaring disco drowns out any cries of passion from neighboring booths.