18
The Boy Buys the Wrong Hat
When it comes to baseball, hate is a wholly acceptable family value. Written on the occasion of the “Subway Series.” New York magazine, 2000.
The Yankee hater in me, sometimes dormant but never dead, stirred last summer at Modell’s out by Caesar’s Bay in Bensonhurst. I’d promised my ten-year-old son a new hat, and there on the wall was a veritable riot of sports merchandising. Logos as odd and alien as crop circles embellished snapbacks representing Devil Rays, Sharks, and Hokies. Through the glut, my son’s eyes settled on a far more familiar emblem. There, a beacon among the ESPN trash jungle, stood the most famous trademark in all sports, maybe in all the world.
The N and the Y, like lovers so entwined, haughty, perfect. It was a fearsome icon, one that had been branded in my soul, stamped like a hot iron on my forehead, seared like a forever damning pair of letters on my back. My son, blood of my blood, DNA of my DNA, was about to purchase a Yankee hat.
This was a problem. For sometimes fashion is not just fashion and symbols are too evocative to be worn casually, by punk-rockers or little boys. Still, I’d promised. I’d get him a hat, any hat he wanted. As I drove home, the sight of this Yankee thing on my son’s lovely, unsullied head struck me as a possibly ominous first salvo in a long-running Oedipal struggle. My son, the Yankee fan. It struck dread into the heart.
“I don’t see what the big deal is,” my son said, feeling the tension as we rolled up the Gowanus Expressway. “It’s just a hat.”
Just a hat. How to explain? How to make it clear that in our family tradition, it was not considered proper to cry when Gary Cooper gives that claptrap “luckiest man” speech in The Pride of the Yankees? That one need not feel awe while walking past Mickey Mantle’s restaurant on Central Park South because, even with all that corny violin music about his knees and being the son of a coal miner, Mantle, soul of stolen youth or not, was still a Yankee? Like Serbia, like Hatfields and McCoys, there are ancient hatreds that transcend conventional irrationality. Wherever I am, whatever I’m doing, news of a Yankee loss makes my day.
But what choice is there? It is bred in the bone. Shot through the helixes. We do, after all, live in Brooklyn. Not counting Romania, Brooklyn is our ancestral home. A tug on the wheel of the ole Camry, a dodge of a few trolley tracks seeping up from beneath the tattered asphalt, and we’d be on Empire Boulevard and Bedford Avenue. Even now, the place remains a power vector, drawing you closer, even though all that remains are projects and the Ebbets Field Donut Shop, corn muffins $1.25. Holy Happy Felton!—even now it is like yesterday: how on May 12, 1956, date of my eighth birthday and year of the last Subway Series, I strolled with my grandfather down Franklin Avenue, to the legendary ballpark where Carl Erskine pitched a no-hitter against the Giants. “Some game, no hits,” my father would later say.
It was an experience no eight-year-old forgets, especially as seen with Grandpa, the first generation of Jacobson Yankee haters, who spent his youth hauling overcoats through the Lower East Side and told me, in no uncertain terms, that the Yankees were the team of the bankers, every last one of them against meaningful social change and the workingman, from Jacob Ruppert on through DiMaggio, that flattop-headed Marine Hank Bauer, and the batboys, too.
Since Walter O’Malley really might be the third-worst person of the twentieth century behind Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, it seems unfair to hate the Yanks all the more because the Dodgers left town in 1957. But that’s when it clicked in for me. There they were: the all-powerful inevitable, like the phone company, the only game in town.
The Yankees: Take it or leave it. I just couldn’t do it, couldn’t root for a team that won the pennant fourteen out of my first seventeen years of life. Rooting for the Yankees was like declaring yourself to be a front-running prick, a defender of the status quo. Beyond this there was the fact that they played in the American League, always so Gentile in comparison with the funky National. There was the phrase Yankee co-owners (meaning Dan Topping and Del Webb, forerunners of indicted Nixon/Watergate contributor Steinbrenner). There was the much rumored passing-over of first baseman Vic Power because he caught the ball with one hand, which was so (jive) un-Yankee, not to mention the tacit reluctance to hire black players in general outside of Elston Howard, who, as Casey Stengel pointed out, couldn’t even run. Beyond this were the pinstripes themselves, which, like Grandpa said, were so much more Wall Street than River Avenue.
Then came the Mets, the anti-Yankees, a team for their times. Instead of lockstep victory, the Mets offered Marvelous Marv Throneberry failing to touch first and second while hitting a triple, and Everyman Roger Craig throwing down his mitt after picking off a runner on consecutive throw-overs only to have the first baseman, Ed Bouchee, drop the ball each time. The Mets were cosmic. What Yankee fan could possibly have found himself smashed on LSD in Berkeley, California, in 1969 as Ed Kranepool hit a homer to help beat the Orioles in the World Series, so giddy in the belief that it was all just one more fabulous hallucination?
This isn’t to say that Yankee-hating has been a walk in the park. There have been moments of weakness, instances of doubt, dramas that cannot be denied. The Billy Martin story, from the Copa riot, to beating the crap out of the marshmallow salesman, to his lonely death on the highway, is epic. And who can discount Mike Kekich and Fritz Peterson swapping wives in the middle of the season? Mostly, though, you’ve got to hate them. Hate them even if Yogi and Phil ran a bowling alley off Route 3. Hate them even when they sucked and Horace Clarke led them in hitting with a .272 average.
Luckily, now there’s Giuliani. In an era in which most Yanks (outside of Clemens—dig in, Rog, dig in) seem okay, the Yankee hater is thankful for Giuliani in his little shiny jacket, holding inane placards given him by the only adviser he actually trusts, Freddy the Fan. Even in his kinder, gentler mode, he’s just so junior high. Still the prick hanging by the cyclone fence waiting to prey upon the weaknesses of the more sensitive, the less aggressive, the potential loser: hell’s own perfect Yankee fan.
So that settles it. The Subway Series has finally returned to us after forty-four years, and the moral lines are firmly drawn—the Mets: good; the Yankees: bad.
Along with everyone else, my son Billy is psyched. Too bad B can’t get his own Carl Erskine no-hit birthday party instead of the three-to-five slot at Funtime USA. But that’s what happens when you’re born on February 4 and mucky old baseball eats Latrell Sprewell’s dust. Still, even if it will never be 1956 again, the current brace of games, waged by millionaires, dispassionate and not, offers a taste. Fodder for tales told too often twenty and thirty years hence. Also, it is an opportunity to do some yeoman Yankee-hating.
For Billy, the breakthrough came early this season. Someone gave us tickets, so I dutifully took him up to the so-called Big Ballpark. Bill couldn’t figure why so many people were rooting for the Red Sox. At the Garden and Shea, no one cheered for the visitors. “They’re not for the Red Sox; they’re against the Yankees. It happens all the time,” I told him, in all accuracy. He found something liberating in that, the idea that you didn’t have to root, root, root for the home team, the subversive notion that you could be against the likely winner. Besides, the Yankees didn’t need Billy to be their fan. They always won anyhow. They were the champs, just like back in 1956.
“If you’re going to hate a team, it might as well be the Yankees,” my son sagely told me this morning on the way to school. Just last night we found ourselves, two generations of Yankee haters, forced into hoping the Bombers beat the Oaklands, since their victory would assure the grail-like Subway Series. When the Yanks pushed across the winner, my son frowned as if he’d swallowed some bad but necessary medicine and went to bed without a word. A hard-core but wholly appropriate reaction.
Now, Mets hat firmly on his head, he was ready to enter the schoolyard. It wasn’t going to be easy the next week or so. There were a lot of fifth-grade Yankee fans in there, annoying, smug,
and loud, leaning against the cyclone fence, ready to pounce when their inevitable juggernaut began to roll. The Yanks will win, they always do. But Billy can handle it, secure in his love, secure in his hate.
19
The $2,000-an-Hour Woman: A Love Story
Needless to say I had to stay up past my bedtime to do this story. A report from after midnight in the Big City. From New York magazine, 2005.
Jason Itzler, the self-anointed world’s greatest escort-agency owner, prepared to get down on his knees. When a man was about to ask for the hand of a woman in holy matrimony, especially the hand of the fabulous Natalia, America’s No. 1 escort, he should get down on his knees.
This was how Jason, who has always considered himself nothing if not “ultraromantic,” saw it. However, as he slid from his grade-school-style red plastic seat in preparation to kneel, the harsh voice of a female Corrections officer broke the mood, ringing throughout the dank visitor’s room.
“Sit back down,” said the large uniformed woman. “You know the rules.”
Such are the obstacles to true love when one is incarcerated at Rikers Island, where Jason Itzler, thirty-eight and still boyishly handsome in his gray Department of Corrections jumpsuit, has resided since the cops shut down his megaposh NY Confidential agency in January.
There was also the matter of the ring. During the glorious summer and fall of 2004, when NY Confidential was grossing an average of $25,000 a night at its five-thousand-square-foot loft at 79 Worth Street, spitting distance from the municipal courts and Bloomberg’s priggish City Hall, Jason would have purchased a diamond with enough carats to blow the eye loupe off a Forty-seventh Street Hasid.
That was when Itzler filled his days with errands like stopping by Soho Gem on West Broadway to drop $6,500 on little trinkets for Natalia and his other top escorts. This might be followed by a visit to Manolo Blahnik to buy a dozen pairs of $500 footwear. By evening, Itzler could be found at Cipriani, washing down plates of crushed lobster with yet another bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue label and making sure everyone got one of his signature titanium business cards engraved with NY Confidential’s singular motto: ROCKET FUEL FOR WINNERS.
But now Jason was charged with various counts of criminal possession of a controlled substance, money laundering, and promoting prostitution. His arrest was part of a large effort by the NYPD and the D.A.’s office against New York’s burgeoning Internet-based escort agencies. In three months, police had shut down American Beauties, Julie’s, and the far-flung New York Elites, a concern the cops said was flying porn stars all over the country for dates. Reeling, pros were declaring the business “holocausted” as girls took down their Web sites and worried johns stayed home.
Many blamed Itzler for the heat. In a business where discretion is supposed to be key, Jason was more than a loose cannon. Loose A-bomb was more like it. He took out giant NY Confidential ads in mainstream magazines (the one you’re holding included). In restaurants, he’d get loud and identify himself, Howard Stern style, as “the King of All Pimps.”
Only days before, Itzler, attired in a $5,700 full-length fox coat from Jeffrey, bought himself a Mercedes S600. Now the car, along with much of the furniture at Jason’s lair, including the $50,000 sound system on which he blared, 24/7, the music of his Rat Pack idol, Frank Sinatra, had been confiscated by the cops. His assets frozen, unable to make his $250,000 bail, Jason couldn’t even buy a phone card, much less get Natalia a ring.
“Where am I going to get a ring in here?” Jason said to Natalia on the phone the other night. He suggested perhaps Natalia might get the ring herself and then slip it to him when she came to visit.
“That’s good, Jason,” returned Natalia. “I buy the ring, give it to you, you kiss it, give it back to me, and I pretend to be surprised.”
“Something like that,” Jason replied, sheepishly. “You know I love you.”
That much seemed true. As Jason doesn’t mind telling you, he has known many women since he lost his virginity not too long after his bar mitzvah at the Jewish Community Center of Fort Lee, doing the deed with the captain of the Tenafly High School cheerleader squad. Since then, Jason, slight and five foot nine, says he’s slept with “over seven hundred women,” a figure he admits pales before the twenty thousand women basketball star Wilt “the Stilt” Chamberlain claimed to have bedded. But, as Jason says, “you could say I am a little pickier than him.”
Of these seven hundred women, Jason has been engaged to nine, two of whom he married. “It was really only one and a half,” Itzler reports, saying that while living in Miami’s South Beach he married “this hot Greek girl. She was gorgeous. The first thing I did was buy her this great boob job, which immediately transformed her from a tremendous A/B cup look to an out-of-sight C/D cup look. But her parents totally freaked out. So I got the marriage annulled.”
This aside, not counting his sainted late mother, Jason says Natalia, twenty-five, about five foot three, and perhaps one hundred pounds soaking wet, reigns as the love of his life.
Without Natalia, she of the smoldering brown eyes that have excited who knows how many investment bankers, billionaire trust-fund babies, and NFL quarterbacks, Jason would never have been able to build NY Confidential into the icon of sub rosa superhotness it became. It was Natalia who got top dollar, as much as $2,000 an hour, with a two-hour minimum. In the history of Internet escorting, no one ever matched Natalia’s ratings on TheEroticReview.com, the Zagat’s of the escort-for-hire industry. On TER, “hobbyists,” as those with the “hobby” of frequenting escorts are called—men with screen names like Clint Dickwood, Smelly Smegma, and William Jefferson Clinton—can write reviews of the “providers” they see, rating them on a scale of 1 to 10 for both “appearance” and “performance.”
In 2004, Natalia recorded an unprecedented seventeen straight 10/10s. On the TER ratings scale, a 10 was defined as “one in a lifetime.” Natalia was the Perfect 10, the queen of the escort world.
“Yo! Pimp Juice! … that her?”
It was Psycho, a large tattooed Dominican (Psycho was stenciled on his neck in Gothic lettering) who was referring to Jason by his jailhouse nickname. Itzler nodded. There was no need to gloat. Moments before, Jason scanned the grim visiting room. “Just making sure I’ve got the hottest chick in the room.” Like it was any contest, Natalia sitting there, in her little calfskin jacket and leather miniskirt, thick auburn hair flowing over her narrow shoulders.
Besides, half of Rikers already knew about Jason and NY Confidential. They’d read, or heard about, the articles Itzler had piped to his pulp enablers at “Page Six,” including how he could get “$250,000 an hour for Paris Hilton with a four-hour minimum.”
But you couldn’t believe everything you read in the New York Post, even at Rikers. Natalia’s presence was proof. Proof that Jason, a little Jewish guy who still sported a nasty black eye from being beaten silly in his sleep by some skell inmate, wasn’t full of shit when he told the homeys that he was the biggest pimp in the city, that he got all the best girls. How many other Rikers fools could get the Perfect 10 to visit them, at nine o’clock in the morning, too?
“Psycho … Natalia,” Jason said. “Natalia … Psycho.”
“Hey,” Natalia said with an easy smile. She was, after all, a girl you could take anywhere. One minute she could be the slinkiest cat on the hot tin roof, wrapping her dancer’s body (she was the teenage tap-dance champion of Canada in 1996) around a client’s body in a hotel elevator. Then, when the door slid open, she’d look classic, like a wife even, on the arm of a Wall Street CEO or Asian electronics magnate. She was an actress, had played Shakespeare and Off Broadway both. Ever the ingénue, she’d been Juliet half a dozen times. Playing opposite Jason’s however-out-of-luck Romeo was no sweat, even here, in jail.
Not that Natalia had exactly been looking forward to coming to Rikers this raw late-spring morning. Riding in the bus over the bridge from East Elmhurst, freezing in her lace stockings as she sat beside a
stocky black man in a Jerome Bettis jersey, she looked out the window at the looming prison and said, “Wal-Mart must have had a two-for-one on barbed wire.”
It wasn’t that she didn’t miss Jason, or the heyday of when they lived together at 79 Worth Street, the harem stylings of which came to Itzler while getting his hair cut at the Casbah-themed Warren Tricomi Salon on Fifty-seventh Street. It was just that this marriage thing was flipping her out, especially after Jason called the tabloids to announce the ceremony would be held inside Rikers.
“Every little girl’s dream, to get married at Rikers Island,” Natalia said to Jason. “What are they going to get us, adjoining cells?”
But now, holding hands in the visiting room, surrounded by low-level convicts, just the sort of people who rarely appeared in either of their well-to-do childhoods or in the fantasy life of 79 Worth Street—neither of them, pimp or escort, could keep from crying.
“Are those happy tears or sad tears?” Jason asked.
“Just tears,” answered Natalia.
“Crying because your boy is in jail?”
“That and … everything else.”
It was a tender moment. Except then, as he always does, Jason began talking.
“Don’t worry about this Rikers marriage,” he said, back in schemer-boy genius mode. “This isn’t the real marriage…. When I’m out we’ll have the princess marriage … the white dress, everything. Your mom will be there. My dad … This is just the publicity marriage. You know: getting married at Rikers—it’s so … rock star!”
Natalia looked up at Jason, makeup streaming from her face.
“It’s great, isn’t it?” Jason enthused. “A brilliant idea.”
“Yeah,” Natalia said wearily. “Great, in theory.” Almost everything Jason Itzler said was great, in theory.
They call it the oldest profession, and maybe it is. The prostitute has always been part of the New York underworld. According to Timothy J. Gilfoyle’s City of Eros, in 1776, Lieutenant Isaac Bangs of the Continental army complained that half his troops were spending more time in lower-Manhattan houses of ill repute than fighting the British. In the nineteenth century, lower Broadway had become, in the words of Walt Whitman, a “noctivagous strumpetocracy,” filled with “tawdry, foul-tongued and harsh-voiced harlots.”
American Gangster Page 28