Tales of Times Square: Expanded Edition (22 page)

And now, more thousands have shown for the march than was dreamed, after months of handbilling the city and countryside.

TWO-FOUR-SIX-EIGHT, PORNOGRAPHY IS WHAT WE HATE!
Banners proclaim the Sarah Lawrence Feminist Alliance, and another cute contingent from Vassar. A group of stubby, mustachioed dykes in green janitorial uniforms chant, “No more profits! Off our bodies!” Gloria Steinem is at the front line of the parade, smiling, waving her fist like a football cheerleader. Bella Abzug marches at the helm, making sure no one will exploit her bod. A couple of old cunt-licking professors march in step, plenty anxious to gain favor with the girls.

PORN IS RAPE ON PAPER

CUT SMUT

PORN IS THE THEORY, RAPE IS THE PRACTICE

The tension mounts with each block as the thousands approach 49th Street. Here is the first target of their aggression: the Pussycat Cinema and Showcase. They halt before the neon monolith.

“We say no! We say no!” They chant and wave fists. Thousands more converge. “No more bucks! Off our butts!”

OUR FEAR HAS TURNED TO ANGER—WATCH OUT!

The feminist march resumes toward 42nd Street. Here, emotions reach fever pitch. They stop before
House of Psychotic Women
, an R-rater at a Brandt theater. (“Their flesh is bloody, their lust will suck you in.”)

PORN IS THE MALE DEATH CULTURE!

DEATH TO PATRIARCHY!

Peepland locks one of its front doors. Cashiers watch from windows, laughing out of nervousness. The huge procession clogs the street, sidewalk to sidewalk, as if they could momentarily purge the smut by exorcism.

“We say no! We say no!”

A row of peep show girls emerges from the New Bryant livesex theater facing the protestors squarely: “We say yes! We say yes!” A quarter cashier stands in the doorway next to the peep dancers holding aloft a copy of
Screw
and a fistful of dollars, chanting, “Money says yes!”

An old black hound dog on 42nd stands outside a peep parlor and admonishes the crowd: “Know how many quarters I put in there every night to get my joint hard? They got all those fine young girls inside. How else my gonna get my joint hard, you just tell me that!” He points to the marchers. “These is some asshole women. Get outta here!”

PORN MOLESTS MINDS! PORN PROMOTES RACISM! PORNO HURTS KIDS!

CASTRATE THE BASTARDS!

The thousands march back and forth between Sixth and Eighth avenues, an area that harbors the thickest concentration of pornography in the world. Then they retreat into Bryant Park, behind the Public Library, for a rally. An old bag lady with an anti-abortion poster has it grabbed and ripped up by man-hating dykes. The rage of a dozen feminist speakers vents itself from the podium. The wackiest of these is Robin Morgan, whose voice screams to a tearful crescendo on the podium, attacking the very fabric of American manhood: “Ted Kennedy has left one of us dead, and a battered wife. Am I the only woman here who still mourns for Mary Jo Kopechne?”

PORN POISONS
!
PORN IS PAINFUL
!

CHILD PORN IS SCARY
!
MAKE LOVE, NOT PORN
!

Signs are leaned up against trash containers so the message can continue to ring out until the garbage men arrive.

A
LONER’S PARADISE

Save Our 42nd Street

Item from the
Forty-second St. Bugle
—if such a paper could indeed ever exist:

Forty Deuce, Jan. 1978...
“They gone fuck up everything,” said Williamson BoJeffries, a man in command of fifteen prostitutes whose strategic base is the corner of Eighth Ave. and 42nd St. Gazing out from his customized Eldorado, he could see the bulldozers and cranes transforming his beloved block. “Another year from now, this neighborhood be ruined.” A cop car crawled up alongside his Cadillac and Williamson sped off. He had been complaining, of course, about the 42nd Street Development Corporation, which has begun construction on the Theater Row project, west of Eighth Ave. Five perfectly suitable condemned buildings are undergoing a loathsome renovation intended to provide“off-off Broadway theater.” Will the plague spread eastward and eventually do in all of 42nd St.?

It started with the new Port Authority structure. Then came Manhattan Plaza, an eyesore that now houses hundreds of “performing arts” people. Theater Row is the latest architectural plan to undermine the fabric of the Times Square area. Although the directors of the Development Corp. insist their mission is a nonprofit one, they are backed by the likes of the Ford Foundation, every major greed-inspired bank and the infamous Port Authority itself. Imminent peril looms over this once thriving community.

“I’ve seen the directors of this committee,” said one massage parlor proprietor. “They don’t leer at our prostitutes, they refuse to purchase dil-dos or rubber cunts, and they won’t even come into our peep-show viewing booths and jerk off into the window.”

Who are these people and why are they invading the area?

“They call themselves theatergoers. They say they’re trying to make our street suitable for more of their kind. I tell you it’s sick.”

The Kinney parking lot chain, once a fast-fellatio service for late-night thrill seekers, has recently been ordered to restrict its clientele to car owners. Additional parking facilities are being cleared for the sole purpose of harboring automobiles
—
while the owners frequent Theater Row.

“I can’t understand it,” said an elderly parking lot attendant. “Used to make an extra fifty bucks a night lettin’ them gals suck off customers in the back. For a dollar, you could rent the back seat of any parked car in the lot. And they was fine young ladies, too. Left a trail of used condoms and douches all over the place. It was a pleasure coming to work.”

And who is responsible for turning this paradise into a grim cars-only desert?

“Thank yer former mayor for that. Gave out some hefty fines to my boss. If the new mayor would only come down and get sucked off in our parking lot, it might persuade him to bring back a great New York pastime.”

The unfortunate situation plaguing greater Times Square goes beyond building-renovation and prostitute crackdowns. It has even affected the children. Not long ago, a dozen bookstores in the area were raided in an attempt to rid them of all photographic material dealing with minors.

“Not the kids,” cried one bookstore owner during a recent raid. “When marshals came in and started emptying the shelves of our kiddie porn, I just broke down and cried. ‘You can’t do this to those kids,’ I said, blocking the aisle. ‘They’re just innocent young tots trying to earn a living.’ It was no use. Those bastards cleaned out some of our best-selling stock items. The one with the nine-year-old girl who sucks off the Bronx Zoo. That shot of the rhino giving it back to her was a lulu. They grabbed every copy of
Infant Ward Enema, Kindergarten Lezbos
Nos. 1–6. They even took our last edition of
Sally’s First Menstruation,
which was culled from serious medical journals.”

If they go after children, then there is no telling what they’ll go after next. Apparently nothing is held sacred in Times Square. This is of particular concern to Skids Grant, an urban ecologist and self-appointed chairman of the 42nd St. Wildlife Association. Lying half conscious in a puddle of urine, Skids was reached for comment at the IRT subway platform, his home and office.

“Dear God, I loves rats. Rats is the only natural wildlife we got around here. And they been trying to drive ‘em out for years.”

Just what, if any, new measures are being taken to exterminate them?

“It’s those fuckin’ train conductors. They likes to run over the rats. Many’s a rat I’ve scraped from the bottom of a subway wheel. Slow and bow-legged rats is, just like old Skids. But rats’ll be here longer than the IRT. They comes from deep down under the subways, up from hell. It’s just a cryin’ pity that rats gets such a raw deal. They’re cleanin’ up subway garbage now, and rats needs garbage to eat. They’s tryin’ to get rid of old Skids, too. Old Skids is the only friend rats has.“

Although the neon still shines brighter than the sun, some of that old sleazola that once glamorized Times Square has gone. Residents and tourists alike feel a sinking loss of spirit and pride as they stroll through the gutters of 42nd. The inflow of fresh young prostitutes has been interrupted by a ‘‘runaway squad” stationed in Port Authority. An NYPD “information center” stands where the statuesque World Porno Palace once stood, now just a memory of old New York. A ‘Lite Bite’ sandwich shop inhabits the building where “7 Live Nude Girls” once operated in sainted squalor. A Hardee’s burger chain store took over the site where a trio of Danish porn parlors once flourished. Ghosts of dead sperm cells haunt the crevices that ammonia rags can’t reach, but Hardee’s patrons seem untroubled as they chew their hamburgers in a location that once inspired a thousand gallons of jizz.

Though most of the three-card monte sharks, unemployed Harlemites and fleabag-hotel transients who dwell in the district seem apathetic, several are willing to stand up and fight for their neighborhood. One such patriot is filmmaker “Loupy Sales,” whose ten-minute spools are featured in many 42nd St. peeps. Harnessing his talents for another medium, he plans a TV campaign to engage the support of smut sympathizers everywhere. Breaking from a hectic schedule of anal-penetration close-ups, Loupy was anxious to talk.

“We all got to do what we can to stop those morons from ruining the whole area. You got fuckin’ priests and detectives out there stealing the best new blondes. I mean, it’s getting so that a man can’t publicly masturbate anymore. The least I could do was shoot these commercials to let people know what’s happening around here.“

Just what will the commercials show?

“Well, the first one goes like this: A six-foot-tall black hooker in a blond wig comes strutting down Eighth Ave. ‘Wanna go out?’ she asks to businessmen walking by. No response. ‘Looking for a date?’ No one acknowledges her presence. She stands more aggressively in the middle of the sidewalk, grabbing pedestrians. ‘Wanna date, honey? Lookin’ for some sex? Wanna good time? How ‘bout a suck and a fuck?’ Everyone just brushes her aside. She feels desperate and screams,
‘Don’t no one wanna pay for mah pussy?’

“Two big men in blue come over and clasp her hands in cuffs. There’s a loud snap, lots of echo. The cops walk her to the squad car, they pause, and we see a profile of the hooker’s face peering down the street. Then a slow pan of the avenue, showing the new Port Authority site, a Disney film on a marquee, mothers walking children to school. Not a peep show or urban blight in sight. A full head shot of the hooker turning toward the camera. There’s a tear running down her cheek. The frame freezes on this as a voice-over says:
Bring Times Square back into the gutter. Stop the renovation now.”

Twenty-Four Hours On the Square

Night was its natural hour. By day, many of the lights were turned on impatiently as if the proprietors could not wait for the sun to get out of the way. Nature was in large part eliminated..
..
Even on clear nights, the stars were outdazzled, as if a supernatural furnace door had been opened. If you hunted long enough over the building tops, sometimes you could see a pale moon moving through its lonely orbit in the sky. Like a discarded mistress, it kept its distance. It looked reproachful and humiliated.

—
Times
drama critic Brooks Atkinson, describing Broadway in the 1920s

Poor Brooks. Oh, how the elders of
The New York Times,
namesake of the Square, must have choked in the filth and smut and sleaze that steadily grew around the Paper of Record. The venerable old drama critic, for whom a Broadway theater was named, was appointed to the
Times
in 1925. He passed on in 1984. Ol’ Brooks perceived the gradual corrosion of 42nd Street from the Depression on, but saw his whole nabe shoot to hell during the late Sixties: “Go-go girls in striptease attire,” he wrote of the 1969 season, “danced as sensually as they could in the windows.... Crowds of dazed civilians in Duffy Square gawked at them all winter in a mood of sophomoric incredulity.”

The establishments sharing the back road of 43rd Street with the
Times,
at 229 West, make up a motley block association. The once-quaint Strand Hotel resembles a flophouse, but only its $35-a-single-room charge prevents this. Happy Place was the name of a bustling $12 fuck parlor, across the street from the
Times
during the Seventies. The Van Dyck, at 268 West 43rd, is a time-warped cafeteria whose menu still carries a Longacre telephone exchange. Blue’s, across from the Paper of Record, is the block’s exclusive black gay bar, the butt of
Times
reporters’ jokes and target of police billy clubs.

“Sorry, but we only admit orientals,” says the fellow barring entrance to the Rose Saigon, a small Asian nightclub. The Hotel Carter cashes in on city welfare contracts, while winos and junkies linger outside the Times Square Motor Hotel. Such is 43rd between Seventh and Eighth avenues.

Union and management reps of the
Times
met with police chiefs in 1969 to call for, as the paper stated, “a crackdown on drunks, homosexuals, loiterers and other undesirables” who’d been harassing them. Drunken panhandlers who slept in the area “preferred sidewalks with high-intensity lamps and a flow of relatively trustworthy pedestrians.” Like Brooks Atkinson.