by Ed Kurtz
THE FORTY-TWO
A NEW PULP PRESS BOOK
First New Pulp Press Printing, June 2014
Copyright © 2014 by Ed Kurtz
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book would not have been possible had New Pulp Press honcho Jon Bassoff not taken a chance on it—I am indebted to him for bringing The Forty-Two to print. Gracias, amigo. And gracias also to Matthew McBride and Anonymous-9, my NPP comrades, for their support and guidance.
I was born in the wrong time and place to experience the Forty-Two in person (to my eternal regret and chagrin), but I have been obsessed with its heyday since I first caught the exploitation bug in my youth. Many writers, filmmakers, producers, archivists, and historians have been invaluable to me in my passion for trash cinema and research for this novel, though perhaps none more than Bill Landis and Mike Vraney. Landis was there, right in the thick of it, documenting the scene and its countless feature presentations through his infamous and legendary zine, Sleazoid Express. Vraney was on the other side of the country, in Seattle, where his love for cinema’s underbelly led to Something Weird Video, which continues to rescue the wildest and weirdest films in history from oblivion. Landis died of a heart attack in 2008 at the age of 49; Vraney passed away at the beginning of 2014 from cancer at 56. Both gone much too soon, though their legacies, efforts, and infectious enthusiasm for exploitation movies will continue to inspire folks like me for years to come.
I dedicate The Forty-Two to Bill Landis and Mike Vraney, with thanks.
THE FORTY-TWO
ED KURTZ
Murder has its sexual side.
—Marquee of the closed Times Square Theater,
217 W. 42nd, 1993
Prologue
She closes her eyes halfway, averts her gaze and concentrates on withholding the tears. If she cries, she knows, they will only make it worse.
And they can. Whenever they kick it up, whenever they step up the production, she thinks it could never get any worse. But it does. Always, it does.
Tonight the wiry man leans hunched against the wall, shirtless, the colors on his tattooed trunk dulled with time. He smokes a cigarette and eyeballs the girls, both of them, one of whom gives him the finger. Not her. She is tied to the bedposts. They are both naked. The room is cold. The mattress rough on her skin.
The camera stares blindly, its lens glaring from the scant light of the overhead bulb. The wiry man is growing impatient. He lets the cigarette fall to the dusty floor, grounds it out under the heel of his bare foot.
He grins.
The other girl finds her pliers. Her trusty tool.
Don’t let them see you cry.
It is all you can do.
It’s showtime.
Chapter 1
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 afte
r 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 s
omeone 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.