I spend the clammy days delivering invoices and sample ads to midtown bars, eateries, niteries and the new style of sexy nightclubs called discotheques. Picture this scene straight out of Mike Hammer–
Sunny day. I go into a cave-like club where the chairs are on the tables, the janitor is sweeping up, the bartender is taking stock and a chanteuse is auditioning for the owner. He is seated alone, tie undone, sleeves rolled up, working on a highball and worrying over the receipts.
I live this scene in the world-famousPeppermint Lounge, “the Home of the Twist” – plus the Copacabana, Latin Quarter, Roundtable, Roseland, Arthur, Upstairs at the Downstairs, the Rat Fink Room and, my favorite, the Santa Claus Bar.
In 1965, I land a messenger job with a penny-ante advertising agency in the Paramount Building in Times Square. It holds the theater where Sinatra had sung to screaming Bobby Soxers in the 1940s. In 1965, the Beatles movie Help! is playing there. To get into the elevator lobby, I have to fight my way through the screaming daughters of those Bobby Soxers.
Their granddaughters are screaming for Justin Bieber.
I was too young to watch the strip-show at The Barracuda Lounge but sometimes I happened to be standing just outside the entrance at show time. From there, I heard the saxophone blare of Night Train and caught glimpses of bleach-blonde bouffant hair and sequined gowns. And, I spied spike hi-heels at the end of long, sinewy legs. Boy, was my face red when I discovered that all of that belonged to the Jewel Box transvestite revue. Guys in Drag! Very popular at The Barracuda. And, my unbigoted Granny mended the G-strings of all the strippers – male and female. Also popular were the Italian boy-singers who beat “Volare” to death. Less popular were the earnest folk-singers hoping that protest songs would make a comeback.
Looks like Rodney was fooled, too.
Surprisingly some top-name comics used the Barracuda to polish material for The Ed Sullivan Show. One night, I managed to loiter in a back hallway and see an unknown comic named Rodney Dangerfield read his jokes off a stained napkin. He was hilarious. I then saw him mercilessly heckle a then-unknown but now-very-famous comic. They almost duked it out right there. It was a vivid introduction to the vicious world of stand-up.
I don’t think he was fooled!
By far the most popular act to play the Barracuda was a comedy-harmonica ensemble that featured a midget. They had starred on TV and in Vegas but like protest-singers, comedy-harmonica ensembles that featured midgets had become passé. Showbiz is cruel that way.
Tempest Storm in her prime. And, that’s a whole heckuva lotta prime.
“Angel” is another Southern Belle come to Times Square. The strip club MC tells us so when he announces – “Put your hands together and give a big New York welcome to this Sweet Peach from Georgia – Angel.” Enter a very bruised peach with a tubercular cough and emerald green teeth. She might just meet the age requirement for removing her garments in public for the delectation of paying male customers. When she places a small square of rug on the stage and lies down upon it to spread her legs and show us her vaginal cavity, her cough continues unabated. Cough. Anal and vaginal sphincters contract. Relax. Cough. Contract.
So, this is what it’s like to be a gynecologist,think I.
Before you condemn me, hear me out. I haven’t come to this den of debauchery to see Angel or her anal contractions or anyone else and their anal contractions. God as my witness, I am here as a student of theatrical history. To be precise, it is my especial interest in the performance technique of the ecdysiast that has drawn me to see an all-too-rare appearance by the legendary practitioner of that art – Miss Tiffany West. Tiffany is quite rightly the headliner. I am here to see her twirl tasseled pasties in opposite directions on her humongous jugs, do a “bump and grind” to the classic stripper tune Night Train and exit Stage Right. I am neither interested in nor prepared for the opening acts – especially Angel’s opening.
The show comprises the aforementioned “Angel of the Anal Contractions” and a Live Sexxx team – Missy and Major Motion. Missy is a light-skinned, high-buttocked Negress. Major Motion is a sullen, dark-skinned Mandingo who sports a penis the size of my Rocky Colavito model Louisville Slugger. I suspect that Major Motion is his stage name. Missy enters to an anonymous disco vamp. Then the Major enters and then the Major enters Missy. I mean, they proceed to make the “Beast with Two Backs” not five feet from my astonished eyes.
I’m walking across a sizzling 42nd street to a morning rehearsal when I see what I’m sure is a “Live Sexxx Team” sauntering to work. I’m also sure they are a married couple so, unlike me, they don’t have to rehearse their act. But, I hope for their sake that their Love Stage is air-conditioned. The distaff side of the Live Sexxx Team is beautiful – Crystal Gayle hair, Crystal Gayle face and Crystal Gayle legs that go all the way up to her Crystal Gayle ass. And, she has thigh-high boots on those Crystal Gayle legs. The boy half of the team isn’t much to look at, but who’s looking? So, he opts for an ensemble of flip-flops, gym-shorts and tank top. I know Crystal can do better than fucking this loser on a Love Stage even if it is air-conditioned. I hanker after Crystal and long to tell her so. I just know, know that we can find happiness as long as she always wears those boots. I am sure she is Southern.
Plaster casts taken from soldiers’ mutilated faces
It is 3 AM on a rainy night and I’m walking down the deserted, darker stretch of 42nd between 6th and 7th avenues. The wet pavement reflects the neon lights from the two porn stores still open. As I approach one of these, I see a man exiting while clutching to his chest a paper bag filled with photos of female flesh. I immediately detect something odd about his gate. It isn’t the usual overly-casual yet dartingly-furtive walk of men as they enter and exit dirty bookstores and movies. No. This man’s body seems permanently shaped into a posture of “shying away” as if he is flinching before a punch is thrown.
As I get closer to him, I see that he is wearing a plastic medical mask in a pitifully unsuccessful attempt to conceal that he has no face. The mask is the color of Pepto Bismol to suggest flesh tone with features crudely painted on. The lips are much too large and much too red. The eyebrows are even worse. I follow him at a distance and note the practiced, heartbreaking way he avoids the gaze of passing strangers and finds shadows and darkened doorways by which to pick his way down the street and home.
I hear a Black teenage couple arguing. He has been dragging her into movies on 42nd all day. She pleads, “Do we gotta see another kung-fu movie, Jerome?” They later pose for souvenir photos taken on the street corner in front of painted backdrops of the African jungle and ancient Egypt. A lop-sided rattan chair salvaged from a garbage heap serves as King Jerome’s throne in both locales. In one photo, he holds a rubber spear and in the other a cardboard sphinx. Yvonne stands beside her seated Lord. In the jungle, a leopard-skin print drapes her torso. In Egypt, a Cleopatra-crown rocks unsteadily on her Afro. Jerome pays extra to have the photos framed.
King and Queen fall asleep on the subway back to Bed-Stuy and miss their stop. Tomorrow, after Yvonne leaves for work, Jerome tapes the framed photos to the boom-box radio that is permanently attached to his shoulder. And, he returns to 42nd to see another kung-fu movie.
Midtown Manhattan isn’t a minefield only for out-of-work actors. Civilians are also under constant threat. I learn this as a teenager walking across 42nd street on a summer morning in 1965. Suddenly a long, thin, black object shoots silently down through my peripheral vision. An impression. A blur. Then I hear women scream and see that a crowd has gathered on the sidewalk directly in front of me. I work my way through to the center of the crowd and wish I hadn’t. A woman is dead on the sidewalk. She has been speared through by a window-pole; accidentally dropped by someone many floors above; dropped by someone who merely wanted to catch a bit of breeze.
The window pole has plummeted to earth, brass-hook first. A javelin. A lance. A guided missile. The dead woman had the worst luck in the world. One step in either direction – she lives. One missed elevator – she lives. But, someone held the elevator door for her. I look down on her obscenely splayed and skewered form, her face now covered by a man’s suit jacket. She was a valued employee. A wife. A mother. A New York woman who went to work this morning in a summer dress with a pattern of small flowers on it. Dead. The police and ambulance arrive. I walk away.
No matter how calamitous or inappropriate the circumstance, give an actor the chance to rattle off his resumé and he will not disappoint. Proctologists wait until they have me in the most compromising of positions before they ask, “So, you’re an actor. Have I seen you in anything?” And, even with the proctologist fisting me like Malcolm McDowell, I groan, “Unnhhh, damn, well, did you see… unnnhh… Trojan Women at Theater 54?” The same scenario plays out with urologists. I have a camera inserted through my urethra into my bladder for a cancer check. As the Doctor and I watch the live and exclusive footage of my bladder wall he asks, “Now, you’re an actor. My wife and I loved CATS. What did you make of it?” Actresses endure the same with their gynecologists.
“Sadism, gore and extreme violence…” and that was just in the men’s room!
I want to impress my classy new girlfriend with my “too cool for school” Brooklyn savoir-faire. So, I take her to a 42nd Street bughouse to see the movie Caligula produced by the skin magazine Penthouse. It’s a credible version of the story interspersed with scenes of incredible sex and it’s the only XXX movie to star John Gielgud and Helen Mirren. There is a Black gentleman sitting directly behind us. He is actively engaged with the film and adds a running critique to the on-screen action. When Malcolm McDowell coats his arm with lard and “fists” a kitchen slave, our critic leans forward and informs us that, “Dese Romans are some sick muthafuckas.” When a Centurion has his penis sliced off and thrown to the dogs, the Black gent jumps up whilst grabbing his crotch and informs the entire audience, “Damn, I could feel dat shit.”
Boy Outa Brooklyn 