Lucking Out (26 page)

It would be sentimental to romanticize the antiromanticism of Times Square in the seventies, mourning a lost vibrancy and Brueghelesque teem more authentic than the toy mall we have today, where few tourists will ever know the thrilling fear of having defecation thrown at them or being caught in the middle of a difference of opinion between two hookers ready to cut each other into unequal chunks. The human wastage of Times Square weighs too heavily against slumming nostalgia. Entire blocks looked as if they had a case of cirrhosis. Nearly every doorway had someone standing in it up to no good. The contempt for women that often wore a sneer in porn films on its liver lips was an everyday dragon-snort in Times Square, where women on their way to work often walked a gauntlet of crotch-grabbing solicitations and insulting commentary only to undergo a round-trip replay at the end of the office day, and then who knew what the subway ride would be like? Teenage hookers irregularly lined the far west avenues of midtown in miniskirts and rabbit fur jackets, their bare legs stalky-looking in the passing car lights as they teetered from one rolled-down car window to another. Every X-rated movie marquee, movie poster, video store display, was a semiotic form of aggravated assault, the live sex shows likewise no altar to Venus. I saw only one and that was enough for me, sis. It was in an Eighth Avenue emporium still standing today, then a bustling hive of peep-show booths, sex-novelty counters, and a small theater that may have been in the basement, but even if it wasn’t, to enter it was to experience descent. The little playlet being performed was called “The Pimp and the Whore,” a lightly scripted episode that dispensed with backstory and character development to present a compact lesson in what happens to a whore who disobeys her pimp: a cursing lecture, threats of bodily harm punctuated with a couple of stage slaps (the hands clapping as the face snaps sideways), followed by kneeling submission, simulated intercourse, a cry of pleasure-pain, and a few parting comments from mack daddy before the dimming of lights to the sound of the performers shuffling offstage without taking a bow, a round of applause being perhaps too macabre under the circumstances. What I remember more than anything that happened onstage was the booming distorted intercom voice of the porn theater announcer telling us over and over again, overriding the dialogue, the title of the vignette, “The
Pimppp
and the
Whorrrre
 … the
Pimmmp
and the
Whorrre
 …,” selling what we were seeing like a lascivious strip-club DJ. It was a better Brechtian alienation effect than anything I’ve ever seen in Brecht, the sense of dehumanization compounded by the knowledge that the performers of this sketch were repeating it four, five times a day, like the last damned dregs of vaudeville. Forget Sartre and
No Exit
, this is what hell must really be like: an endless reenactment performed by dummies for dummies, and you’re one of the dummies.

After a disgruntled jazz musician and his girlfriend, about to be evicted, turned on the oven and stove burners and all the water taps before stealing out into the night, flooding my apartment and nearly turning the entire building into a minor replica of
The Towering Inferno
, I moved from my digs on the Upper West Side to a studio apartment on the farthest end of the West Village on Horatio Street. It was there that I was audience to a different sex show each weekend, with a quite distinct and varying cast. Moving into Horatio, I felt I had arrived: my first real New York apartment, the first empty space to call mine that didn’t have someone else’s history hanging around, the perfect snug fit for man and cat. Western light bathed the room with a warmer benediction than I had ever gotten in my old hideout (where the morning light seemed bloodshot), and my new place’s one redbrick wall was a sign that I had finally landed my own parcel of the bohemian experience. It even had a fireplace, what could be better. I slept on a captain’s bed, its three bottom drawers holding all sorts of bachelor necessities, and worked at a desk on a typewriter whose electric purr I would later associate with the sustaining hum of Transcendental Meditation.

It was a quite modern building, which meant that sound muffling seemed to have ranked low on the list of the Mafia’s construction priorities. I could hear every sneeze and cough in the next studio as if the wall were a tent flap, and was able to follow the psychodrama of every loud telephone conversation as if it were an ongoing improvisation based on Jean Cocteau’s
Human Voice
, a monologue once found in nearly every college drama department repertory. The young man in the adjacent apartment to me was having chronic boyfriend problems with Billy, whose name received extra
l
’s whenever my neighbor was distraught. “Billllllllly, why do you keep doing this to me?” Whatever it was that Billy was doing, he kept doing it, because the same desperate plea bargaining was played out over the phone again and again, as if the plaintiff were stuck to a script written on flypaper. Sometimes Billy would come over, and they would fight for a bit and then go out, or go out and then fight when they got back. I would pound on the wall, they would pound back, and really that’s what being a New Yorker was about then. One of the regulars I would come to recognize in the hallway at 92 Horatio was a porn star named Marc “10½” Stevens, whom I had seen on-screen without considering myself “a fan of his work” and who sometimes appeared at parties painted silver, like a spaceship dashboard ornament. While in the army, stationed in Germany, Stevens found himself in the same bank of urinals as fellow soldier Elvis Presley. Legend was that the less endowed Elvis made a quick appraisal of the hose Stevens was holding and drawled, “Ya’ll better take care of that thang.” Words to live by, and Stevens’s thang was later photographed by Robert Mapplethorpe, no mean judge of hangage himself. I would often see Stevens in the company of drag queens who partied down as if they had LaBelle’s “Lady Marmalade” playing nonstop under their wigs. They sometimes popped poppers in the elevator on the way down to the first floor, wanting to hit the streets with an extra goosy bump.

Sunset aside, my studio hadn’t much of a view. The windows overlooked a stretch of the underpass of the original High Line informally known as “The Trucks,” named for the fleet of trucks parked there at night. My first summer on Horatio, I was standing at the window, wondering who the hell was honking the idiot car horn below (a perennial New York question), and noticed a man entering a gap between the trucks while another man exited from a different gap. Then another man emerged from that same gap, as if whatever business were being conducted with the first exiter had been completed. I wondered if drug dealing was being done, since it was being done most everywhere else. Perhaps it was, but that wasn’t the main draw. It took a few surveillance moments to realize that my windows afforded the scenic view to a major cruising spot, this overpass shielding a Pac-Man shadow maze of pickup action. (Pac-Man hadn’t been invented yet, but no other analogy quite dings the bell.) From the detached perspective of my overhead view, the intrigue had the abstract quality of a Jacques Tati comedy, a man on the hunt vanishing down one aisle and reappearing from another one soon afterward, as if he hadn’t found what he was shopping for and was retreating into the shadows again while another man discharged himself from the lane between a different pair of trucks, he too having come up empty. One night I saw a man materialize between trucks in a pair of leather chaps over a pair of jeans that had been cut in the back to bare a heart-shaped bottom, his butt cheeks hosting a cucumber or a dildo shaped like a cucumber—in any case, something dark green was poking out. Had he inserted it himself, or did someone insert it for him and was he searching for the original owner? He paused on the sidewalk in a moment of Hamlet indecision, his “jewel pouch” carrying the seed of doubt, then turned back into the shadowed aisle between the trucks, his night not quite done and for all I knew may have been just getting started.

For those were marathon weekends many of the men in the West Village seemed to be putting in, stamina-testing contests, judging by their grizzled, battle-weary condition on Sunday mornings, some of them still bearing the darkness in their eyes like coal miners who had just come off a brutal shift. I, on my way to pick up the Sunday
Times
, would sometimes find myself downwind from a couple of sexual platooners who had pulled an all-nighter, a cloud of sweat, leather, alcohol, urine, semen, cologne, lubricant, and industrial might invisibly tentacling from them like a collection of short stories waiting to be written by Edmund White. The look of so many men on those mornings after the night before was the ink-drawn definition of “fucked out.” Evidently, a lot more martial effort went into what they were doing than what their straight counterparts got up to on weekends, more ritual and regalia. Because gay life had been criminalized and stigmatized for so long, forced underground or into pocket enclaves, it had developed its own cryptology, but now the codes were more open, flashing in daylight. A yellow handkerchief in the back pocket signaled one thing, a black handkerchief signaled another, and left or right pocket designated whether one was a top or a bottom, although rueful word had it that there were a large proportion of men who claimed to be tops who were only fooling themselves and disappointing others. (Just as the ratio of masochists to sadists is so lopsided, putting a premium on the latter.) Post-Stonewall, the West Village was one of the prime vector sectors of seventies sex with the safety catch off. Monday mornings it was not uncommon to spot a businessman leaning back in the driver’s seat of his parked car, receiving head from a drag queen before driving off to the office, one way to kick off the workweek. Horatio Street was a short throw from the meatpacking district, when it really was the meatpacking district and not a Marc Jacobs mini-mall, its brick streets, angled shadows, and abandoned atmosphere at night drenching the area with a Brassaï-photograph mystique or Jack the Ripper air, depending on the threat level in your head. The Anvil, which opened in 1974 and soon earned a niche as “a gay bar with a rough-trade rep” (in the words of the
Village Voice
), was on Tenth Avenue, its main action taking place downstairs. That’s what a large part of the seventies was about,
venturing downstairs
, into the orphic melee, the gladiator pit of the members-only Mineshaft on Washington Street reputed to be even more of a docking station of battering-ram abandon.

A bystander in my own neighborhood, I only had the scratchiest outline of what was happening around me. It wasn’t until Richard Goldstein’s groundbreaking article in the
Village Voice
, headlined on the cover as S&M: FLIRTING WITH TERMINAL SEX and illustrated with a photo of a mannequin head encased in zippered leather mask (ideal for asphyxiation-training purposes), that the uninitiated got a field report on the complete panoply of specific practices grappling away in the groaning penumbra—the glory holes, the golden showers, the fisting. “People brag about how many fists they can contain, and there is even an organization, Fist Fuckers of America, whose insignia, a clenched fist, adorns the Anvil,” Goldstein reported. Today, Fist Fuckers of America sounds like an apt name for whatever organization Newt Gingrich is fronting at the moment, but at the time it gave proof that pierced-cheek punks were clearly pikers compared with these pro leaguers at the punishing extremes of pain exploration—this leather guild of edgeplay. Although the S&M subcult that Goldstein depicted may have been padlocked off from everyday experience—its energy forces trapped and released behind its own containment walls, its violence consensual and ceremonialized—rough trade freelanced the night, and depending upon the kindness of strangers in the pickup scene could get you pulped. One heard unconfirmed stories of tricks roughed up by their johns, johns being stabbed and robbed by their tricks, bodies being found disposed along the piers. Sharpening the shadows were gay-bashing attacks carried out by gangs of youths, attacks not limited to the immediate radius of Christopher Street. (One horrific summer night, the gay cruising area in Central Park known as the Ramble was the site of a homosexual-hunting cull in which the serial victims were clubbed with bats. “Dialogue was sparse throughout the rampage,” Arthur Bell reported in the
Voice.
“Each attack was guerrilla-like—swift, and without warning. Quick clubbings, then onward to the next target.”) When the director William Friedkin started shooting
Cruising
in New York, a
noir policier
that took the first reverse-periscope look at the Crisco disco inferno, the
Voice
raised a ruckus and location sites were picketed, the extras who were trooping out of the bar scenes catcalled as “traitors” by waiting protesters. But for all of the finished film’s howlers (including the spectacle of Al Pacino in Tom of Finland leather drag), it nevertheless captured the dark riptides of mortal danger and paranoia in the ambiguous prey-game. In 1978, a year before filming began, a twenty-three-year-old man—a disco dancer—was found dead one morning outside the Anvil, where he had been seen earlier that evening arguing inside with another man. He had been stabbed with a chef’s knife.

The straight dating scene had its own homicidal overhang of “stranger danger.” Pop historians recall the seventies as the decade of Erica Jong’s 1973 novel,
Fear of Flying
, and the “zipless fuck,” impromptu, liberated, guilt-free penis-hopping a bouncy pogo ride away. It was also the year that a teacher at a school for deaf children, a twenty-eight-year-old named Roseann Quinn, was found naked in her bed, fatally stabbed multiple times in the stomach and bludgeoned about the skull with a statue of her own likeness. The assailant was a stranger she had met on New Year’s Eve in a bar across the street from her West Side apartment and taken back to her place for a one-night stand. The day after her brutalized body was discovered, the
Daily News
ran the headline story ONCE MORE, BACHELOR GIRLS ASK: WHO’S NEXT? Unlike so many tabloid horror stories, this one’s shock waves didn’t thin and recede with the next news cycle. They cut a neural pathway, put down tracks. Two years later, Quinn’s “sex slay” was novelized by Judith Rossner into the sensational best-selling cautionary tale for girls about town called
Looking for Mr. Goodbar
, a catchphrase title that captured the prowling sweet-toothed hunger that vampired inside even nice girls. And two years after the novel arrived the movie version, starring Diane Keaton, taking Annie Hall out for a walk on the wild side, a creepy, defrosted William Atherton, and a jacked-up rabbit of Method-actor jism jive relatively new to the screen named Richard Gere (whose performance turned out to be the tryout run for the studly calisthenics of
American Gigolo
), and directed by Richard Brooks as if he were carrying a wooden cross and crying,
“Repent!”
A date movie for the damned,
Looking for Mr. Goodbar
looked as if it had been coated from floor to ceiling with contraceptive jelly, with a perv reading
Hustler
in the subway train in the very first scene, one slick barfly after another vying to worm into Theresa’s panties, with Keaton’s father, Richard Kiley, bellowing like a prototype Bill O’Reilly about kids today and their do-your-own-thing attitude: “I don’t understand your crazy world—free to go to hell! Freedom! Tell me, girl, how do you get free of the terrible truth?” How do you get free from such terrible Arthur Miller–sounding dialogue? might have been the better question.