American Gangster

by Mark Jacobson

  A rough, cold winter. Some of the usual skells have taken off. Nobody in the Durkin, the creep joint with the tilted bar, has seen Joey the Eye for weeks. Joey the Eye was a mess—too fucked up to cop pills, never had a girl out on the street. But he could—and would—take his bloodshot eyeball out of his head and hold it in the palm of his hand. He said if you didn’t give him a cigarette, he’d tighten the grip, crushing his own eyeball, which would make it all your fault: him having nothing but a dark pit where his eye should be. The Hung Man is also missing. He spent some of the summer leaning on a parking meter, stark naked. Valium pushers came over, slapped five, and said. “Man, you hung.”

  Beat Shit Green is gone, too. But no one in the pill-pusher ginmills on Second Avenue figures Beat Shit is soaking up rays in Miami Beach. Beat Shit is one of the worst scumbags ever to stand at Fourteenth Street and Third Avenue hustling “Ts and Vs” (Tuinals and Valium). He used to claim that he was the one who sold the white boy that fatal bunch of beat shit in Washington Square Park last year. Bragged about it. What did he care, he made his $2.50. Beat Shit has been known to sell methadone that was really Kool-Aid and aspirin. He’d suck the juice out of a Placidyl and sell the shell. But, they say, that kind of beat shit comes back on you. They say Beat Shit’s not going to make the winter because he got thrown off a roof on East Thirteenth Street.

  Rough. Cold. In one of the bars next to the cuchifrito stand, Willie (“call me Big W”) is wondering if he’ll see April. For a downer salesman, Willie is a pretty sweet dude. Sometimes if one of the barmaids in the Durkin is smooching it up with an off-duty cop, Willie will take a bar stool next to the chick and wait. Soon she’ll curl her hand around her back and make a little cup. Willie will slip her a couple of Valiums. The barmaid will put her other hand in the cop’s crotch and pull her face away—pretending to cough or something. While the cop is dealing with the barmaid’s squeeze, she’ll swallow the pills and go back to tonguing before the guy knows anything. Willie digs that kind of move. He says, “She’s slick, huh?”

  Recently, though, things haven’t been going too good for Big W. Mostly he gets over selling pills to kids from Jersey. But, like they say, Willie is his own best customer. Talking to him gets you seasick; he’s always listing from side to side. Tonight Big W is wearing his skullcap funny. It’s not pulled down over his head; he’s got it done up in a little crown. Willie says he don’t want it skintight, it puts too much pressure on his stitches. Seems as Willie was in the Durkin a couple of weeks ago and got into an argument with a pimp. Willie thought the guy was just bullshitting until the iron rod came out. He forgets what happened next. Except that he woke up in Bellevue with a head that looks like a road map.

  The stitches have made Willie mad. Mad enough to “get violent.” The other night he decided he was “just gonna go mug myself somebody.” He went around to the stage door of the Academy of Music. Aerosmith was playing. Willie picked out a kid who was completely destroyed on Tuinals. The kid was waiting for an autograph, but Willie figured anyone jive enough a wait for a fucking autograph has to be an asshole. It got better when the rock star came out the door, “got into his fucking limo, and didn’t even give the sucker an autograph.” So Willie made his move. The Jersey kid beat Willie into the sidewalk and “stole my Placidyls.” At this rate, Willie figures he’ll be lucky to live till spring.

  I have always wanted to write a story called “The 10 Sleaziest Street Corners in New York.” I mean, why did certain street corners—excluding obvious “ghetto”-area ones—become hangouts for pill-pushers, prostitutes, winos, bums, creeps, cripples, mental patients, mumblers, flimflam men, plastic-flower sellers, peepshow operators, head cases, panhandlers, and other socially unacceptable netherworld types. How did these corners get this way? How long had they been this way? What was their future? Which ones have McDonald’s? Which ones have Burger King? Did this matter?

  I compiled a fairly comprehensive list off the top of my head: Ninety-sixth Street and Broadway—the first subway stop down from Harlem; Seventy-second Street and Broadway—good old needle park; Fifty-third and Third—the Ramones sang about chicken hawking there; Twenty-eighth and Park Avenue South—the Bellmore Cafeteria cabdrivers bring the pross; Second Avenue and St. Mark’s—the dregs of the burned-out hippies; Bowery and Houston—the cabbies will run over a bum before they let him wash their windshield; Sixth Avenue and Eighth Street—the aggressively plastic up-and-comer; Ninetieth Street and Roosevelt in Queens—home of the low-level Colombian coke dealer; and, of course, the granddaddy of them all: Forty-second Street and Eighth Avenue, the whole of Forty-Deuce Street actually.

  Soon, however, it became apparent that it was crazy to “do” all the corners of crud in New York. How many burgers can one slip down his gullet? It would be better to home in on one singular slice of sleaze.

  Fourteenth Street and Third Avenue was the natural choice. I live around there; it’s my neighborhood sleazy street corner. The pross have seen me enough to know I don’t wanna go out. But, also, Fourteenth Street and Third Avenue is a classic, time-honored choice. Fourteenth Street—the longest crosstown Street in Manhattan—has been on the skids, for the past 120 years.

  Once, long ago, blue blood coursed through this stem. An 1853 edition of the New York Herald said of East Fourteenth Street, “Here, there are no stores—nothing but dwelling houses, which are substantial, highly finished, and first class.” When stores did come, they were Tiffany’s and FAO Schwarz. When the Academy of Music was built, in 1854, it was hailed as the city’s center of classical music and opera. Europeans sang there. The Metropolitan Opera House was built uptown by smarmy nouveaux riches, like the Vanderbilts, who couldn’t get boxes at the Academy.

  It didn’t last long. East Fourteenth Street did one of the quickest and earliest “there goes the neighborhoods” in New York history. By 1865, the New York Times was reporting that “all of the once-splendid row houses of the 14th Street-Union Square sector are now boarding houses.” In 1868, Charles Dickens saw Fourteenth Street as a precursor of Levittown. He said: “There are 300 boarding houses exactly alike, with 300 young men exactly alike, sleeping in 300 hall bedrooms exactly alike, with 300 dress suits exactly alike….”

  Prostitution was firmly rooted on East Fourteenth Street by the turn of the century (a Gentleman’s Companion of the time lists fifteen whore-houses in the area), and it aided some unlikely causes. Emma Goldman writes of doing a little flat-backing on Fourteenth Street to pick up revolutionary pocket money. Those days, there were plenty of Reds around. Socialists stood on soapboxes in Union Square Park. During the Sacco-Vanzetti trials, the cops mounted machine guns on top of the Guardian Life building. John Reed and Trotsky discussed eventualities in the Fourteenth Street cafeteria, which had a sign on the wall: A TRAYFUL FOR A TRIFLE.

  Today the only vestige of leftist activity on Fourteenth Street is the sign from the sixties underground newspaper Rat, which had its offices next to the Metropolitan porno theater. It reads, hot rats while you wait. Once-flourishing capitalists have also fallen on hard times. Macy’s, Hearn’s, Ohrbach’s, and Klein’s all were here. Now only Klein’s on the Square remains as a massive, empty three-hundred-thousand-square-foot hulk. The square-rule logo makes the place look like a decrepit Masonic temple; except there’s no “all-seeing eye.”

  The East Village Other, in one of its last issues, published a secret report predicting a deadly and monumental earthquake about to flatten half the city. The scientists (all Hitlerians, said EVO) were keeping the news from the public. The report said all the major fault lines ran right underneath Fourteenth Street. It was a totally believable story.

  East Fourteenth Street should have settled into a typical cycle of urban decline and upshift. But the street has resisted, plotting instead a flatline course. Down and down. Most around here say it hasn’t bottomed out yet.

  Fourteenth Street at Third Avenue is more than a sleazy street corner, it’s the epicenter of a mini-sleazopolis. In t
he blocks around the hub, several different creep scenes operate side by side, and almost independently. Occasionally a pimp hanging out in the Rio Piedras bodega, on Third Avenue near Eleventh Street, will go up to Fourteenth Street to sell some pills, but not often. The girls stay fucked up most of the time but don’t sell. Pill-pushers don’t even go to the same bars as the pross. It’s a real division of labor. The thing that holds it all together is that it’s all so low. Low! Ask anyone stumbling past the old Jefferson Theatre—they’ll tell you: After Fourteenth Street, there ain’t no more down.

  Sure the pimps sit in the chairs of the barber college at Twelfth and Third pretending to get a swell $1.50 haircut like they’re New Orleans patroons. But it is all front. Fakery and lies. These pimps have never gotten to check out the scene with a gangster lean from the front seat of an El D and they never will. They don’t even have a fur hat to slouch about in. They’re lucky to have one girl working, and you know she’s going to be desperate. A working girl freezing skinny legs waiting for cars with Jersey plates turns two hundred dollars a week down here, when it’s good. No chance of them taking their act to Lexington or even Eighth Avenue, either. They’re on Fourteenth Street because the big pimps think the place is so funky they don’t even care to organize it. The heartless say that Fourteenth Street is one step from the glue factory. A few weeks ago the cops picked up a fifty-seven-year-old pross outside the Contempora Apartments. It was believed to be some kind of record, age-wise.

  Pill-pushers are no better. Most of them started turning up on Fourteenth Street back in the late sixties after two doctors, Vincent Dole and Marie Nyswarder—the father and mother of methadone maintenance—shook up the dope-fiend world by setting up a clinic at the Morris J. Bernstein Institute of Beth Israel Hospital. Methadone was touted as a wonder drug. Everyone said it would be the end of the heroin problem in the city. Junkies from all over the city were sent over to Bernstein (on Second Avenue and Seventeenth Street) and other nearby “model” clinics to drink little clear bottles and kick.

  Some kicked. But most just got a short course in how to manipulate the Medicaid programs politicians loved to pour money into. Drugs led to drugs. It was easy to take your little methadone card and Medicaid slip over to a “scrip” doctor who would be willing to write you an Rx for a hundred Valiums if you told him you were “anxious, very anxious.” This led to the famous junkie refrain: “I’d go to Doctor Zhivago if he’d write.” Otherwise, you could write your own. The forms were usually lying around the program offices. A scribbled “X” might be good enough to get a pharmacist to fill the scrips. What you didn’t use to get fucked up on, you could sell. Same thing with extra methadone.

  Fourteenth Street and Third became the flea market. It was an Eco-101 example of supply and demand. The drug of choice among the dumbo suburban kids these days is downers: the Fourteenth Street stock and trade. Throughout Long Island and Jersey, blond-haired types driving their papas’ Le Sabres know that Fourteenth Street is the place to go. Any night a useless boogie band is playing the Palladium (what they call the Academy of Music now), you can see the most mediocre minds of the next generation drag themselves through negro streets into the most desultory madness.

  It is a game anyone can play. Go over to the emergency room at one of the hospitals in the area, tell them you’re dying from a headache and want some Percodan. The intern there will be surprised and ask you, “Sure you don’t want Valium?” Insist on Percodan and the intern will tell you, “Take the Valium. If you don’t use them, sell them on Fourteenth Street. None of them have heard of Percodan.”

  There’s no night (except for Sunday, when the Street is eerie and dead) when you can’t walk from Fourth Avenue to Second Avenue on Fourteenth Street without at least half a dozen ballcap-wearing, pinpoint-eyed junkies asking you if you want downers. The price list fluctuates with supply: Placidyl usually go for $2.50; Valium, 75 cents; Tuinal, $3; Elavil, $2 on Fourteenth Street, with a 25 percent markup for rock show nights.

  You’d figure that would add up. Especially with no overhead and Medicaid usually picking up the initial tab. But these guys ain’t got no money. They’re too spaced out. That’s why they’re on Fourteenth Street to begin with. They couldn’t get over selling smack on 123rd Street. They couldn’t even get over selling smack on Avenue B and Sixth Street. They don’t got the concentration. Pusher wars don’t happen. No one can remember where their turf is, or was. They are in trouble if you ask them for more than three Valiums. They pour the pills out into their hands and start counting. Then they recount. Order more than eight or nine and it can take an hour.

  If you want to draw a map of the Fourteenth-and-Third sleazopolis, give the pill-pushers Fourteenth Street between Second and Fourth. That’s the south side of the street; for some reason they’re never on the north side. No one knows why, they sure aren’t working on their tans. Scoring spots include the doorway of the Larry Richardson Dance Company at the corner of Fourth Avenue. Most of the guys up there are in business for themselves but there are also “steerers,” creeps who will tell Jersey kids to come around the corner to Thirteenth Street. This is usually for “quantity” and sometimes for rip-off.

  The rest of the scene, working from the west and down, goes like this: Union Square Park is bonkers these days, the sight of curving benches packed with leathery, saliva-streaked faces is truly impressive. The park isn’t a major retail center for the pill-pusher, but many will come over for a little rural R and R. After a tough day of Placidyl pushing, you can lose your profits back playing craps or three-card monte. On the other side of the George Washington statue there are also several “loose joints” guys who got off the wrong subway stop on the way down to Washington Square.

  The pross take Third Avenue. Their spiritual home is near Thirteenth Street, where there are two miserable excuses for peepshow joints as well as three porno theaters (that includes the Variety Fotoplays when it’s not showing devil movies). The ’toots will also graze down to Fifth Street. The Regina Hotel on Third and Thirteenth (a featured backdrop in Scorsese’s Taxi Driver) is no longer a big pross hole. The cops broke the manager’s balls so now he’s on the up-and-up, although you wonder why anyone would stay there if they weren’t getting laid. The Bowery flops are the Ritz-Carlton compared to the Regina. Now most of the hotel tricking goes on at the Sahara, a little oasis on Fourteenth. The Sahara has a sign saying low weekly rates even though most guests spend less than a half hour at the Sahara. Seven dollars is the room tariff. A lot of the action, though, goes on in the parking lots along Third. The West Indian guy who used to work there charged two dollar a pop to get in the backseat of a parked car. Hope they didn’t use yours.

  The “he-shes” (also called “shims” or “he-haws”) hang near Second Avenue and Twelfth Street and also congregate at Little Peters, a swish bar by St. Mark’s Place. This is one of the biggest t.v. scenes in the city. Of the fourteen hundred pross arrests the cops made in the area during the past year or so, nearly half were men dressed up as women. Ask why he-shes are usually Puerto Rican, a working “girl” says, “Our people are so mean to us … besides, haven’t you ever heard that Latins were made to love?” The he-shes are much classier looking than the straight pross. Johns claim you can’t even tell until you get real close. And, even then … you can’t. But, then again, most of the johns who cruise Fourteenth Street just don’t care.

  With this kind of scene it makes sense that many of the “legitimate” businesses that have stayed on East Fourteenth Street during the down-times fall into the seedy category. Up the stairs at the Gramercy Gym, where Cus D’Amato trained Patterson and Jose Torres, the fighters don’t think too much about the sleazos below. Fighters figure they’re on the fringe of the law themselves. They don’t point fingers. But they keep distance. They know that Placidyls make it tough to run six miles in the morning.

  At Jullian’s Billiards, one of the great film-noir light-over-the-faded-green-cloth-Luther-Lassiter-played-here pool halls
in New York, hardly anyone makes mention of the scene either. The old men who sit on the wood benches, watching the nine-ball games, don’t have time to think about creeps. Nine-ball’s got a big element of luck, true. But it’s the money game up there, and anytime money’s on the table you’ve got to concentrate. So just shoot pool, Fast Eddie. Who cares who pisses in the hallway?

  Down the street, Paula Klaw has her private thoughts. She’s been on East Fourteenth Street for better than thirty years. She remembers when the cuchifrito stand was a Rikers Coffee Shoppe. And when there were two Hungarian restaurants on this block. She is not, however, complaining. “Who am I to complain?” says Paula Klaw. Paula Klaw runs Movie Star News, a film-still and “nostalgia” store stuffed into the second floor of the building next to the Jefferson Theatre. It’s the best place in the city to buy photos of Clive Brook and Irene Dunn. As Paula says, the street has a “strong movie pedigree.” D. W. Griffith’s original Biograph Studio, where Lilly and Dolly Gish made one-reelers, was on Fourteenth Street near Second Avenue. Buster Keaton became a star here.

  Plenty of film was shot inside Movie Star News, too. As attested to by the half-soot-covered sign painted on the window, this used to be the studio of IRVING KLAW, THE PINUP KING. Irving, Paula’s late brother, shot thousands of bondage pictures up here during the 1940s and ’50s. Most of those pictures were of Bettie Page, the most famous bondage model of them all. Irving used his 8 x 10 camera to shoot Bettie for a variety of rags that had names like Eyeful, Wink, and Black Nylons. Most of the pics were distributed by mail order, which would lead to Irving running afoul of the blue-nose Kefauver Hearings on “juvenile delinquency.”