"Bullets, Booze and Bastards"

Sample from The Forty-Two by Ed Kurtz

Thursday night and the Square was on fire.

Cold as hell, but hopping. People everywhere, crowding, squeezing past one another, sweating like pigs despite the frigid air above, around them. It was bright, a neon night bright, an entirely separate dimension apart from the stark, too honest light of day.

Cabs jousted for space, buses belched black exhaust. The Square in gridlock even at this hour. The densely packed human throng undulated in waves, up and down the steps to the IRT, shuffling underneath dingy awnings, shambling in and out of Howard Johnson’s where bleary eyed patrons slumped in tattered orange booths and gazed out at the nighttime action.

Usually Charley took the subway down to the Deuce to catch a double bill, but he’d just gotten paid and he was feeling flush so he splurged for a taxi instead. The driver was a West African guy with an impenetrable accent who kept asking questions Charley couldn’t decipher. He only knew they were questions because of the lilt at the end of each round of thick, garbled intrusions. He nodded or let out a feigned, nervous laugh whenever the driver stopped for air. By the time they reached Times Square the jig was up—Charley must have answered wrong and now the driver was insulted by his fare’s patronizing attitude. He grunted a quick series of numbers that Charley took to be the cost of the fare, which he paid without another word exchanged between them.

A stumbling drunk tourist and the grinning hooker who’d just fleeced him climbed into the taxi after him; he supposed they weren’t going to pay much attention to the African’s third degree. He just laughed under his breath, shook his head. These dudes who came in from South Dakota, Iowa, Waxahachie, Texas or wherever, business or family trips to see the Empire State building and the Statue of Liberty, they always managed to sneak off to the Square to see if it really was where all the action was. Hell yes, it was. But Charley didn’t much care about most of it; he was just there to catch a double feature on 42nd.

Forty-Second, Forty-Two, Forty-Deuce, the Deuce. It went out of Times Square like a shot, probably the thickest and gummiest strand in the web that was the Crossroads of the World.

The Deuce had always been the same, more or less; theaters and sex, a show and a blow, except you were more likely to get stabbed now that it was lined with grindhouse movie theaters than back in the days when it was all so-called legit theater. Even then it was a haven for prostitutes and gangsters and petty crime—the city had just contributed switchblade wielding transvestites, male rough trade and out-and-out triple X pornography to the mix, that was all.

By the time Charley first set foot on its sticky macadam, the Deuce had long since developed into a predominantly male venture, a playground for men seeking something from other men, be that drugs or sex, or the illusion of sex. He didn’t go in for that. He came for the best of the wildest movies shown anywhere in the world, as any sleaze-hound knew.

From the Forty-Second and Broadway IRT stop, one went around the Globe Theatre (all porno) and Nathan’s Famous Hot Dogs (the same as the one on Coney Island), then through a claustrophobic arcade that tested the mettle of any visitor; it was hot even in the dead of winter, and a newcomer might find himself gagging on the stink of body odor and cheap aftershave if he wasn’t already used to it.

Charley was used to it.

The arcade drove out onto the Deuce proper, the block between Seventh and Eighth avenues. If you walked the north side of the block you passed by the Rialto, the Victory, the Lyric, the Times Square, the Apollo, and finally the Selwyn before you hit Eighth and the sex shops and quarter peep shows beyond. On the south side were the New Amsterdam, Cine Forty-Two, the Harris, the Liberty, the Empire and the perennially squalid Anco Theater. In between and on the floors above were late night burger joints and red light rooms, La Primadora and Westernburger and Tad’s $2 Steaks. There were other theaters around the Square, mostly hardcore but not all of it, the Bryant and the Harem and the Cameo further up Eighth, but Charley knew the Deuce was where it was at. It was a kind of sickness, maybe not all that different from the pale, jittering junkies he observed trembling under the brightly lit porticos or shooting up inside the scummier theaters. Except his fix didn’t leave a mark or twist up his insides, and Charley would never find himself on his knees in a puddle of urine in Tad’s men’s room for a fix of cinematic sleaze. For Charley, it was entirely about the experience, sort of like Dickens slumming in the nastiest parts of London, only Charley went home to Alphabet City when it was done, which was no better at all.

It was two days after Christmas, but there was nothing in sight to indicate that anyone had been celebrating here. No one hung mistletoe or those gaudy, multicolored bulbs across the marquees on Forty-Second, nor did any of the happy-ending massage parlors or quarter peep shows on the floors above them replace the red lights in their windows with somber white candles. It was as though Christmas never really came to the Deuce, not like New Year’s it didn’t, because nobody ever came down there to spread their goddamn holiday cheer. They came with the same objectives they had every other day of the year: sex, drugs, and maybe a sixty-cent cheeseburger at the Grand Luncheonette. Charley went there now, eager for some black coffee and maybe a couple of doughnuts to keep him awake and alert while he pored over the listings in the Village Voice.

Charley passed the shambling night owls: pimps and bums and pink-faced alcoholics, furious doomsayers and jumpy hopheads. There was plenty of flesh for sale—mostly male but some female and various degrees in between. A pair of chickens leaned at forty-five degree angles against a shuttered storefront, propped up by their elbows. One Puerto Rican, one vanilla white, both of them oily and doe-eyed and underdressed for the bitter cold.

“Speed, coke, cock,” the Puerto Rican boy droned.

He was gently thrusting his hips with the third syllable every time. It was an unenthusiastic carnival bark; the circus of the Deuce was full of them, eight to a block at least. The white boy nodded off. He was letting his partner carry the marketing load. Just before the boys escaped his peripheral vision, Charley caught a glimpse of a paying customer. The Puerto Rican kid did not bother to wake up his buddy when he took off with the guy. Probably he was too far gone to shake out of it.

The stool closest to the Grand Luncheonette’s open door was miraculously free; it was Charley’s favorite spot and he took it. He could watch the extravaganza out there from this vantage point; all the madness of the Deuce from the safety of a plate glass window in between.

Pops sauntered over to him on the other side of the counter and raised his eyebrows. Charley was pretty sure Pops recognized him, but he couldn’t be expected to know everybody’s name. Everybody sure enough knew Pops, though. He was one the Times Square superstars, and he hadn’t even had to do anything illegal or sordid to make the shortlist. Pops just grilled up some damn good burgers, and anyone who’d had them knew it was enough. Charley asked politely for a cup of coffee and two doughnuts. Pops frowned. It really was asking a lot to park your ass on the best stool in the joint and then not even order a burger. Charley sighed and ordered one.

“I still want the doughnuts, though.”

Pops waved his hand irritably as he wandered back over to the grill. Charley grinned and unfolded the section of the Village Voice that had been crumpled up in his back pocket all day.

He checked the Selwyn first, because the Grand Luncheonette was conveniently located just under its marquee with all those glaring white and yellow bulbs. The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh was the first feature—the ad showed cartoons of all these famous basketball players like Julius Irving and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and there was an anthropomorphized basketball with an unhappy looking fish in its mouth. The double bill wrapped up with a flick called Blue Collar, and that half of the ad displayed only a photo of Richard Pryor smiling like maybe he just heard a mildly funny joke. Charley skipped that.

There was plenty of stuff with girls in it, porno flicks and some roughies and other sundry sexploitation junk. The Victory was showing a triple of steamy sounding stuff like 9 Lives of a Wet Pussycat and Visions of Claire, and the Times Square Theater was catering to a sort of nasty crowd that week with something called Cry Rape on the second half of their bill.

(Two men and a girl—what happened when their strange, bizarre sex games went too far?)

What Charley really wanted to see, however, was blood.

Some good old-fashioned gore-soaked horror exploitation, like a Herschel Gordon Lewis revival or maybe a couple of those walking dead movies. But barring that, and excluding the kung fu triple bill going on across the street at the Empire, the evening’s entertainment was going to have take place within the hallowed walls of the Harris Theater. Charley had already circled that one, and in red no less, but sometimes he changed his mind at the last minute. Not tonight—he was sticking with his gut.

Last House on the Left Part II and Slaughter Hotel.

Charley practically drooled on the smeared newsprint image of a mostly nude woman recoiling in terror from the huge knife plunging at her, a black gloved hand tightly curled around the handle. The ad did not make it clear which of the two films this was meant to illustrate, or if perhaps it summed up both of them, but he didn’t really care. Going to see these movies was always a roll of the dice; sometimes you came out pleasantly surprised, but most of the time it was just pathetic, strictly the bottom of the celluloid barrel.

Pops plopped a plate down on top of Charley’s paper, spilling opaque dollops of grease all over a pair of amorous disco teens from Cine 42’s showing of Skatetown, U.S.A. Both doughnuts were floating in the stuff, but that seemed all right to Charley. It was all going to the same place, anyway.

“Thanks, Pops.”

The cantankerous grillmaster mumbled something too indistinct to make out and went over to the far end of the counter to take somebody else’s order. Just outside the glass door, a dark-skinned guy in a pink sleeveless shirt shuffled up the sidewalk, calling out his stock in trade.

“Girls, man! Live nude girls. Only a dollar, only a dollar. Live nude girls!”

He had a stack of cards in his hands, probably full color pictures of the sort of wares his employer claimed to offer. Of course none of the chicks ever looked that good. Everybody ought to know that by know, Charley thought, but still they came in droves. Even now a ratty-looking man in a gray trench coat and with long, stringy hair was greedily accepting one of the guy’s cards.

“Only a dollar!” he was reminded.

Charley thought they were overcharging. Any number of Times Square peep shows charged only a quarter at a time. Of course, those quarters could add up as the shutter came down again and again, but who was counting? That was one of the nice things about the movies: you only spent exactly as much as you expected to. There were three dollars in Charley’s wallet designated for the Harris box office, and nobody was going to come up and ask for more like they did with just about everything else on the Deuce. Nothing was free, but at least a double bill was always pretty cheap.

Charley finished off the burger, but one bite of doughnut was all he needed to second-guess his initial estimation of them. They weren’t bad doughnuts, but all that grease wasn’t doing them any favors. He nodded to Pops and rolled up the Voice and turned back out onto the sidewalk.

Everybody was pushing tonight—girls for sale, boys for sale, weed, H, blow. Just up ahead, a trio of pimps in fur coats conferred under the lights of the Lyric marquee, exchanging loud machismo boasts beneath tall red squares that spelled out End of the World. Charley crossed over to the south side of the street and continued up to the Harris.

Here he had to step over some guy who lay crumpled up on the sidewalk between bright vestibules, just outside of the New Barracks bathhouse, but in a second he was floating up to the box. He dug out his three dollars and the sallow-faced usher silently pushed a ticket stub at him.

Like most of the grindhouses down here, the Harris’s gallery lobby was a narrow, shotgun affair that went straight back to Forty-First. Much of the vestiges of its golden age heyday were still visible: the marble and the gilding and the badly chipped wall panels that looked like something out the seventeenth century. There were probably tapestries hanging there half a century ago, but now the walls were scratched to hell and covered in grime. It was impossible to ignore the faint scent of piss in the air. Someone had drawn a crude but recognizable caricature of Ed Koch on the wall beside the staircase, a little cartoon bubble emanating from his mouth that said, “How’m I doin’?”

Beneath it someone else wrote, “Vote for Cuomo, not the homo.”

Forgoing the stale popcorn for sale at the end of the lobby, he climbed the stairs up to the auditorium. He always saw plenty of people inside with bags of the greasy yellow stuff in their laps, but he also observed ushers collecting discarded popcorn from the garbage bins after the shows were done on more than one occasion.

The odor of piss and sweat wafted into the auditorium as well, some of it probably originating in there, but in Charley’s eyes the grand beauty of the place trumped what everybody did to it. The Art-Nouveau chandeliers might have been long gone before he ever set foot in the city (and probably before he was born), but the impressive elliptical dome remained with its ornate floral designs. He found an empty row on the balcony and situated himself close to the aisle, just across from one of the two closed off opera boxes that flanked the proscenium arch. The golden gild that once dominated the plasterwork of all the moldings and fixtures up there was almost entirely chipped and scratched away, but he could still see its former glory if he squinted and filled in the blanks with his imagination. Not that he felt he had to. It was still gorgeous.

Below the balcony in the main part of the auditorium a small crowd was filing in, hooting and hollering and carrying on like they always did. Some dudes brought in hookers in black fishnets and gigantic, unwashed wigs. As soon as the lights went down they’d get down to business and be gone before the intermission. A couple of nervous junkies huddled together against the west wall, waiting on the darkness for their own disreputable purposes. Someone shouted a string of obscenities and a few people laughed at him. After another minute, the speakers popped like gunshots and the screen exploded in a rippling network of multicolored circles upon which bled the familiar legend: Prevues of Coming Attractions.

Now the lights shut off and the crowd settled in for their respective moments of bliss; be that shooting up, lifting up some whore’s black vinyl skirt or, like Charley, actually paying attention to the mayhem on the screen.

The trailers kicked off with Ginger, that well-worn Cheri Caffaro picture, and even the preview was loaded with leering shots of her completely nude two-toned body. A tired and surprised voice cried out “Tits!” every time they showed up on the screen. Charley hoped the guy was getting his fill or else it was going to be a long night.

When that one crackled off, something new from Al Adamson snapped up in its place—Sunset Cove—which amounted to three minutes of cute teenagers prancing around in string bikinis on the beach. Charley liked the girls well enough, but he didn’t think he’d bother to catch that flick. For Charley, it was all about the horror pictures, good, bad or downright horrible.

The first feature finally got underway and Charley took note of all the Italian names in the credits, which to the savvy theatergoer indicated that this was not Last House on the Left Part II at all, but some recycled old Eurotrash with a new title slapped down on top of it. In fact, it turned out to be Bava’s decade old body count saga Bay of Blood. They hadn’t even bothered to change the title card. Charley had seen this one before, but that was well enough since he remembered liking it. But by halfway through the picture no one had gotten killed for quite a while and his eyelids were drooping. There were possibly worse places in the world to fall asleep in than the Harris, but he couldn’t think of any. He’d dropped off for a little while the very first time he had ever come there to catch a kung fu double bill—Fists of Bruce Lee and Hong Kong Strong Man—and when he woke up a little Hispanic guy with wild coked-out eyes was working at his zipper. Charley kicked him in the chin and promised himself that would never happen again.

At intermission about half the crowd was either leaving or had already gone, but there were some new stragglers coming in, most of them obvious hustlers from the bathhouse next door. Just before the lights went back off again someone slid into the seat directly to his immediate right. Charley ground his teeth, worked his brain for the best way to get rid of the guy, but it wasn’t a guy at all. It was a girl.

It was unusual enough to see women in these places at all, much less a nice looking girl like this one. Charley didn’t think she looked like she was on the make; she didn’t seem to fit the profile. She was dressed fairly conservatively, relative to Forty-Second Street, with a low-cut wool blouse and a new pair of bellbottoms that clung tightly to her body until they spread out at the shins. Her hair was long and sandy blonde and perfectly straight, as though no two strands dared intersect with one another. She had that Middle America look about her, an innocent small town kind of girl, which made Charley fiercely question what the hell she was doing in the Harris by herself late at night. More than that, why had she chosen to sit right next to him?

Charley looked her over and tried to smile, but it got all fouled up in the process and turned into a sneer.

He said, “Hi.”

The girl made a face, the kind of face a girl makes when she really doesn’t want a dude creeping on her.

“Hi,” she said back.

Now he was desperately trying to come up with something to say, something to get a conversation started, something he had never been any good at.

Come here often?

Don’t be an asshole, Charley.

She clearly didn’t want to make nice with him. She was just looking for a place to cool out.

Right next to him.

The lights went down and the second feature flickered on. Another Italian production, another title card that didn’t match the marquee outside: Cold Blooded Beast. Somebody shouted at the screen.

“The hell?”

This one had even less suspense than the first film, but at least all the slow stretches were taken up with a lot of gorgeous nude girls whenever Klaus Kinski wasn’t sulking larger than life on the massive screen. Charley dug the black chick in particular—man, but was she a knockout—but after a while he started to feel a little uncomfortable ogling all the women on screen with this strange girl seated beside him. He glanced over at her and saw that her eyes were fixed firmly on the film. Maybe she’d really just come to check it out, after all. Stranger things had happened.

About half an hour into Slaughter Hotel or Cold Blooded Beast or whatever it was called, a nurse in the film was wandering the grounds of the asylum when the killer popped up out of nowhere and took her head clean off with one of the medieval weapons that were conveniently displayed inside. The girl next to Charley let out a frightened gasp and smashed her hand down on Charley’s knee, squeezing tightly. A vague thrill buzzed in him—he was not altogether sure he liked being touched by a complete stranger, but at least she was finally coming out of her ice shell. He took a plunge and gently patted the hand on his knee, a reassuring gesture that was meant to say, It’s cool, baby. I won’t let anything happen to you. It was kind of an asshole move but he had nothing better in his repertoire.

The girl instantly released her grip and her hand went slack, but she didn’t move it away. Charley liked that, and when he kept his hand on top of hers, she kept hers there too. He watched the rest of the movie like that, sort of holding hands with some chick he didn’t know and to whom the most he’d ever said was Hi.

Still, stranger things.

Occasionally he ran his free hand through his thick, pomaded black hair. Then he would wipe his fingers on his trousers, having temporarily forgotten about the goop he combed into his mop almost every morning. It was all part of his look, the whole Fifties thing, along with the Staceys and the rumbled khakis and his omnipresent brown rayon jacket. Jackie always hated it, told him he was putting on a show that had nothing at all to do with who he was on the inside.

Charley wondered how the girl beside him would react to that.

Things really got heated in the last reel of Slaughter Hotel. There were some pretty wild hardcore inserts, the sort that usually only played the straight up porno circuits like the Cameo over on Eighth, complete with medicinally close shots of female genitalia. Then there were some of the routine lesbian shenanigans common to the European sex-horror trash of this sort, awkward fumbling with fingers and tongues and a little rumba music, when suddenly the black girl Charley liked got an arrow through the neck and her lover started screaming her head off. Charley braced himself for his new friend to get scared again, put the squeeze on his knee. But she remained silent and still. Not even a peep.

Weird, Charley thought.

When the Inspector showed up and the killer was unmasked, Charley knew the film was just about over and he began feeling nervous about what he was going to say when the lights came up. Did he offer to buy her a cup of coffee and a slice of pie? Take her out for a drink? Or did he dare ask her to come back with him to his place? He had been holding her hand for the better part of an hour, but it hadn’t occurred to him what was supposed to happen next until that very moment. Now a sweaty film formed over his face and the opening salvo of panic started to flutter in his chest. There was a perfectly good reason Charley McCormick spent most of his time alone.

Finally the screen shouted The End and the projector died and the lights came back up. The hollering masses down in the seats below shuffled out with tired murmurs. No one bothered to wake up the four or five guys who slept in their seats throughout the auditorium. Charley wagered they’d find their pockets a whole lot emptier once they came to.

With a deep breath he took his hand away from the girl’s. He waited about half a minute to see if maybe she’d start so he wouldn’t have to, which she didn’t. He sighed heavily.

“So, look,” he began, “maybe we should go get some pie or something. You can tell me your name and I’ll tell you mine. It’s Charley, by the way.”

Charley smiled at his goofy little joke and turned to flash it her way. She did not return the smile. Instead, her mouth hung open like the hinge was busted and her eyes sagged drowsily down to the floor.

Charley just wrinkled his nose, which filled with a pungent, coppery smell. Then he leaped out of his seat and a scream got stuck in his throat.

The girl’s blouse was soaked through, red, clinging to her breasts. The red seeped out from the back of the seat, too. A small, sticky red puddle had formed on the floor under her.

“Shit!” Charley screeched.

He gazed in cold horror at the girl’s dead face, her bluish lips slightly parted with a few flecks of pink foam collected at the corners. His mind reeled at the realization that he had just spent the last hour at the movies holding hands with a corpse.

He bent over the balcony and vomited.