Tales of Times Square: Expanded Edition (9 page)

After a forty-second introductory peek the curtain crawls back down. Arnholt has spotted the object of his desire. He pops in another quarter and fixes his stare on Foxy Bertha. She twists and grinds, her enormous buttocks protruding upward like a gigantic brown hen freaked out on disco. Dudley Arnholt, midlevel juggler of soybean certificates, is entering the point of no return. He knows nothing of silver futures now, he can’t quote you today’s copper closings or tomorrow’s can’t-miss capital ventures. His life, business, and hemorrhoids are far away from the world of Foxy Bertha and her fat, jiving, juicy black ass in the sky.

“Calling all men, calling all pussy inspectors. We got chocolate clitty onstage for ya now. Come warm your bones, warm your main bone, gonna race into space, yeah, big daddy!”

The intermittent drone of the emcee is inaudible as our hero’s eyes roll up in passion. It’s time to whip it out. With trembling fingers, he fumbles his pecker through the slit of his boxer shorts. His adrenaline is coursing as he strokes up a storm, but he pauses to keep feeding that slot or the Bertha of his dreams will disappear. Mirrors line the walls, so she’s never out of view. But now she’s coming closer, pumping her snatch right into Arnholt’s window, her crooked smile revealing two missing choppers. Juicy Jane and her jagged cesarean scar is revolving on a platform behind in a spread-eagled Quaalude stupor. Arnholt’s building a furious pud callus, all the more unbearable as Bertha’s eyes meet his in a conspiratorial wink. She presses her labes into his window and the commodities broker flicks out his tongue, lathering the funky glass with spittle. He has reached his own Times Square heaven, lost in a nirvana of sleaze. . . .

Oxuzana Brown, four-year veteran of Show World, always claims she’s going to leave her post at Times Square’s biggest sex circus and head for Europe. She plans to live there a long while, but can’t seem to get going. This big-bosomed Harlem child, of “French and Nigerian background,” who still possesses a soft glow in her face, is ready to retire.

“I’ve had my fill,” asserts Oxuzana, but with a lack of bitterness. “I’ve learned to do sex shows, to simulate lesbian and S&M acts, developed basic booth skills—like getting guys to spend money. I’ve seen enough come to last a lifetime. I’m tired of guys who look like dogs tellin’ me what they wanna do over the booth phone. You know you may not be a beauty queen, but you know you doin’ better than them. I’ve seen the strangest cocks in the world. Saw a tiny Chinese with a huge monster cock. Then I saw this giant, muscular black guy whip out the tiniest dick I ever saw. Wanted to introduce the both of them so they could get an operation and switch.”

After a hard double shift, Oxuzana stabilizes at the Blarney Stone across the street with a white wine, though last night she was robbed coming out of this bar by two dykes. And last week, she finally switched from the downstairs booths to the upstairs concession: “A lot of pressure’s been building up downstairs. My manager accused me of taking time off from my booth to talk with someone because he was white. There was a meeting to reduce the queens [pre-op transsexuals] to no more than three per shift. And a customer had a gun two weeks ago, threatened to shoot the manager.”

Oxuzana began in 1979 at “Lee’s Baby Doll Revue,” a live peep downstairs at the complex. Times Square had just been forced to put glass back in the partitions after a year of frivolous open-window encounters between patrons and dancers. “I would not have taken the job if the windows were open,” she claims. “But back then you really had to dance and sweat, and hit each of the fifteen windows, even though there were no tips.” Starting salary for peep show girls in 1979 was three dollars per shift in the “Peep-Alive,” plus a forty percent cut of the newly installed silver dollar one-on-one booths. The split increased to fifty-fifty with management, then returned to forty-sixty. Though Oxuzana only averaged $175 after a week of dancing back then, she has a higher regard for days past. “The tightness is gone. A few years ago, if there was a fight, everyone jumped in, we were more reliable. Today, you can pull $200 in the booths in a night, but the change man can screw you up. If he’s not right there with silver dollars, customers’ll leave.”

As a matter of course, Oxuzana learned how to avoid the pimps, who generally zero in on the dumber girls. “But they
never
spend any money. They might have an old lady who works here, and they’ll get their girl to pull another. If one comes in my booth, I’ll just leave, say I gotta dance. Look at the way they dress and act. You get one of them by themselves, unprotected, and they are chicken shit.”

Oxuzana’s customers at Show World divide up into three general categories. Some guys practically live there, masturbatory junkies, in for a daily fix. Then there are curiosity seekers, occasional visitors to Times Square who might even bring their wives. And “juniors”—young men or teens in for a worldly thrill with a Live Nude Girl. “But I have seen, in my four years, a lot of straight guys fall from simple fantasies into mental illness. A lot of customers have gotten sicker. One guy can’t orgasm unless I pretend I’m drowning in quicksand over the phone. Every night, there are guys who creep in and lick come off the windows. And one customer was a slasher. I saw him arrested on TV. I have no respect for these men. But I also met a famous conductor in my booth, real nice guy, and a soap opera star from
Days of Our Lives
.”

The girls can’t show too much that’s legal these days in the peeps. They can technically get busted for touching their tits or opening their legs. “As long as you don’t show too much coochie,” Oxuzana says. “One way you can spot undercover cops is, they don’t look like they want to be here. They don’t even look horny. But new girls don’t know any better, they’re the first to get busted. With a clean record, you’re out in hours. Slap on the hand, makes the city look good, cops look efficient.

“My biggest fear about Show World,” reveals Oxuzana, “are the mops. You got AIDS, herpes, gonorrhea, and syph out there—and guys come and come and come. There’s not enough detergent in the world for me. I’m terrified to get touched by a floor mop. They skeeve me out. You can’t rinse them enough.”

What have the battlefields of Times Square done to her own libido, seeing man at his worst?

“I’m more into women now than men,” says Oxuzana. “Although I do still prefer tall men, hairy men, European men. I won’t let Show World disturb my sex life.”

The Peep Machine

In his fourth-floor technical lab at 42nd and Eighth, Roger Kirschner is mulling over the conversion of all peep-machine coin slots to a more sophisticated system. Show World boss Richard Basciano’s twenty-eight-year-old mechanical wiz has nearly made his decision: to remove the conventional $4 “Coin Mech” and go with the advanced $40 “Coin Comparator Mech.” As he is chief of operations, Roger’s decision will convert many hundreds of peep machines throughout Show World’s reigning empire of Times Square emporiums by 1985. A lot of research went into acquiring the new gizmo, including two trips to Chicago. “We deal with companies all over the country that supply coin mechanisms to all types of vending machines, from candy and cigarette to slot machines for Bally, in Atlantic City, Vegas, and video arcades.”

Roger’s work deals with computerized electronics, his office filled with logic circuits, microprocessors, “mother” PC boards for the video peeps. He also cuts and edits loops and videotapes here, for all the main locations: Show World, Show Follies, Show Place de Paris, Les Gals, Joy, and the Pussycat Showcase. Boxes labeled
COIN MECHANISMS
and
COIN ACCEPTORS
—two of the biggest such firms—lie around the lab. Roger has an affable manner, very much absorbed in the electro-mechanical aspects of peeps.

Roger picks up a $4 Coin Mech, now used in all peeps. Each is manufactured to take one coin forever; in this instance, a Susan B. Anthony silver dollar. The paperback-size gizmo says “SBA” on its gut. In an ironic feminist slight, all locations had to change their one-on-one booth mechs when the smaller Susan B. Anthony dollars replaced Ike. The old coin mechs are 80 percent foolproof against slugs. But the new $40 Coin Comparator is 100 percent foolproof—their slots won’t take slugs, small change, or washers—“Sometimes guys even tie a quarter onto a string and try to drop it through.” Measuring conductivity like a metal detector, the Comparator will gauge weight, thickness, and metallic composition of a coin. Any coin that doesn’t match perfectly will be caught on a magnet and rejected. It can be instantly readjusted to any price or token change. “Although it’s $40, it’ll save money in the long run, and you’ll have ‘em forever. If we went back to quarters from tokens, all’s you do is stick a quarter in, from then on that’s all she’ll accept.”

Show World, the U.S. Steel of porn palaces, switched to its own monetary system of tokens by 1980, now in all locations. Bags of them lie on the main-floor manager’s desk, like sacks of Wells Fargo gold, spilling over at the brim. “Give them tokens,” the floor manager might instruct one of his boys, when visiting pornographers enter his office. And then, amazingly, they’ll fill the guests’ hands with jingling, octagonal twenty-five-cent tokens, both silver-and copper-colored. Each has the inscription
Worlds Greatest Show Place
.

Show World switched to tokens for security reasons. “Before,” says Roger, “Show World booths had cash in the boxes. People tried everything to break into machines. Nine times out often, they did more damage trying to get at the money, even when never getting it. People won’t break in for tokens, they can’t refund them. Unless they have someone on the inside to cash ‘em in.” Show World tokens can be found in taxi ashtrays, scattered across Times Square parking lots and train tracks—incriminating evidence fellows don’t want their wives in suburbia to see. At one time Les Gals used to refund them—a detail of black boys went to the train tracks nightly to round up littered tokens and cash them in. “The tokens are also a gimmick. They don’t cost twenty-five cents to make—maybe four or five cents. If those tokens walk, you’ve profited.”

There are thirty people in management at all of Show World’s locations, not including endless girls, quarter cashiers, mop-ups. They handle everyday shit. “We have guys that come in and just go around all day taking pieces of paper and stuffing up the coin chutes. They get their kicks on that. We figure it’s an older gentleman who doesn’t have anything to do, who gets off on seeing us go crazy after they stuff up all the chutes.” Roger has nine mechanics working three shifts, between the stores. “They handle breakdowns. Bent coins people put in that jam up. If they know a little about physics, people take wax impressions, then make a lead impression for a slug.”

Show World alone gets about $100 a week in slugs, or four hundred. “But if they get slugs past the dollar one-on-ones, you’re not talking about twenty-five cents anymore. If someone hits on the right size, shape, and weight, this guy can save a lot. When the machines are dumped every week, there’s a meter reading taken to help us see what’s popular and change the loops. If we have pennies in that booth, they’re recorded also. That tells me the mech’s not adjusted right, or the guy who’s making the slug is getting over on us. We’ve caught people plugging up or breaking into machines. All’s it winds up to be is a lawsuit if somebody gets hurt; you don’t want the confrontation.”

Roger flips over his newest design—a huge two-dollar Show World token with silver finish. It will buy extended time in the one-on-ones, currently standardized throughout Times Square at forty seconds per dollar. “Some customers will take their pants off in the booth before they even drop their money. They get ready so they’ll save that dollar, they know it’s only forty seconds.”

Touring the live peep, Roger unscrews the electronics of a booth. The Peep-Alive mechanism—now commonplace throughout Times Square and perhaps the world—was developed by Roger, who worked nights with a New Jersey electronics company. Yesterday’s more rickety system, by a company called Textoil, used compressed ball bearings. Roger’s sleek innovation is “a very simple circuit,” utilizing a “worm gear” to raise the shade: A quarter activates a timer and sends voltage up to a motor that turns a threaded “worm gear.” The shade climbs up on a nut, like a screwgun. A microswitch stops it at the top. When the timer’s off, it unlatches a relay and the partition comes back down. And thus, in the interim, are the thrills and chills of “Live Nude Girls,” the neon-community catchphrase.

Show World gradually incorporated safety precautions for dancers. “Girls used to get their hair caught in the worm gear. We put a cover over it. They used to hang on the pipes and pull out the electrical wires. We put handles on, so they can pose before windows. We don’t rotate the tables anymore. A girl would lay there, she wouldn’t get up and dance.” The company recently installed full-circle Peep-Alives instead of semicircles, where all the money would come into the center booths. New peeps, nine feet in diameter, take up less space and give each window an equal view, though the peep queens appear to be trapped in a cage. These eighteen-booth circles operate at Show Follies, while Show World’s remain with fourteen booths but a panoramic runway.

“In New York, space is money, every square foot is worth something,” says Roger, surveying the film peeps. “If I can fit fifteen machines in this aisle, compared to ten, that’s good business.” The film-peep booths are seventy-nine inches deep, but the video booths, honed by Roger, are only fifty-nine inches deep. “Video now does four-to-one over film peeps.”

Show World introduced video peeps in January 1981. “We started with ten multiple-choice selections. It was very complicated, people weren’t yet geared to computer-type operations, we were ahead of our time. They just wanna drop the money, not get involved.” Roger videotaped clothed porn stars Lisa DeLeeuw and Desiree Cousteau reciting instructions, which each booth ran on a promo channel when you entered—how to drop in a token and key a program from 01 through 10 on the computerized touch-tone pad. “But guys would come in and jerk off to the instructions.” Furthermore, the wear and tear on ten machines, which funneled porn to each booth’s TV monitor continuously, broke the machines in a month. Twenty-minute loops would unload and rewind three times an hour, on customer’s token time (unlike the film loop, which
loops
around nonstop).