These prices are registered and approved by the State of New York Department of Consumer Affairs.
“That’s some department,” Dovie-Jean observed. “Who they suppose to be protecting, anyhow? I’d like to see one of them get trapped thirty bucks for half a glass of Virginia Dare. Wouldn’t he purely howl?”
“He’d be making a big mistake if he did,” Red nodded toward a massive youth, wearing steel-studded leather wrist bands, sitting down the bar: Moonigan. Emil Moonigan. Moon Moonigan. Moon-the-Bear Moonigan. “The Bear’d eat him,” Red assured Dovie-Jean.
All Dovie-Jean had to do was to strip and jiggle about at the far end of the bar. She jiggled for twenty minutes, to juke-box recordings, then put on a leotard and invited the bar-mooks, one by one, to buy her a drink. With a 25 percent cut on drinks, she earned more at the Carousel than at Playmates of Paris.
She was working the Carousel on the week she was off at the Playmates of Paris. Red had gotten her the job, but she did not give him a nod of recognition when she came in.
Now, in the forenoon hush before the other girls had arrived for the day, Moonigan motioned Red toward him and began speaking low and confidentially. Dovie-Jean, sitting with her back turned to him, could still distinguish his words.
“They should throw every rotten slut-whore in this town into jail and throw away every key,” Moonigan assured Red. She wondered, Is he kidding?
Red, washing glassware, went on washing it; neither agreeing nor denying Moonigan’s Draconian measures.
“I say,” Moonigan insisted as though he felt he wasn’t being understood, “I say lock up all these filthy pigs and give the city back to the clean people. How are you going to protect virtuous women, like my wife, like my little girl, with a hundred and six of these sluts in every block? Throw them in the clink—throw them all in the clink. Don’t let them out until they’re willing to work for a living.”
“Live and let live, Moon,” Red ventured to suggest.
“Live and let live’—Is that what you’re saying?” Moonigan was fired by Red’s casual remark. “Live and let live? Let me ask you, would you let a person with a contagious disease walk around in contact with normal people? Of course not. Yet you let these alley animals hang on every corner and God knows how many diseases they got. What do they cate?. ‘I’m going to infect every man I can’ is what your alley animal is thinking.”
“What kind of disease is it you’ve caught, mister?” Dovie-Jean asked herself.
Every midtown tourist trap employs one Bear. He’s so big that barflies, trapped between paying an extortionate price and fighting him, almost invariably choose to pay.
Yet the Bear is not a fighting man. If he were he’d be working out in a gym instead of a bar. Because, when you’re six feet tall and weigh two hundred pounds before you’re thirteen, you don’t get into fights. Your size suffices. Lacking, thereafter, an ability to earn a living by other means, Bear’s size becomes his livelihood: his proportions become his trade. He can’t fight, he can’t wrestle, he can’t make the police force. He’s too big for the army yet not big enough to travel with a circus. He becomes the bar-room conquerer who has never fought a battle.
Moonigan had been engaged in only one battle and that had been because the Carousel had only one john.
The joint hired a big gooney broad who looked like she’d screw on the head of a pin to waggle her gooney-looking ass about atop the bar. That she was stone deaf appeared to be only a slight handicap. When one of the bar mooks propositioned her—“How much, honey?”—she’d answer, “Milford Junction, Ohio.” Later, when he asked where she came from she’d tell him, “Ten dollars for the room and twenty for me.” She had the right answers but put them in the wrong places.
This was not due entirely to deafness. She was usually so high, on this or on that, that she wouldn’t have understood even with good hearing. “I’m an Alanol Cat,” she explained when asked why she walked tilting forward. “I have to take care not to break all them eggs.” She’d forget she’d already taken one Alanol and would take two or three more still thinking it was the first of her Alanol Day.
Milltown. Thorazin, Serpasil. Atanax. It was all one to the Alanol Cat.
Two well-set-up customers walked in one evening and ordered a beer apiece. One was a young dude, the other one in middle age. She gave them no greeting and they gave her none. They merely sat at the bar and sipped beer.
It wasn’t until the Alanol Cat went to the john that it happened.
There was only one john and it had no lock.
The girls had to hold it from the inside. One of the mooks, a small, bespectacled man, having failed to notice the Alanol Cat go into the john, went to it. He pulled at the knob but the door didn’t open.
“Yank it!” Moonigan, out of some perverse sense of humor, instructed him. He yanked it and out flew the Alanol Cat with her pants down.
Everybody laughed except the Alanol Cat and the two sullen men at the bar. They merely continued drinking their beers.
A few minutes later the younger one approached Moonigan.
“Air you the fella who said, ‘Yank it’”
“I am,” Moonigan acknowledged.
The other customer came up and stood behind Moonigan.
“In that case,” the younger man assured Moonigan, “no hard feelings,” and clipped Moonigan right on the button with a solid right hand. Moonigan reeled and, as he turned away, caught another solid punch, this one a left, from the older fellow. Down went Moonigan.
“Get on your clothes, Mary Lou,” the younger one then told the Aland Cat. This time she understood immediately.
She left, walking between the pair of them, without stopping to ask for pay for her night’s work. Moonigan sat and watched them leave.
He looked pleased to see them go.
“Bisexuals!”
The Uriah Yipkind show was coming on at the far end of the bar. Uriah himself explained that he was about to present a TV show which, for simple daring, had never been surpassed.
The bar mooks looked dully at the screen.
“Children should not be permitted to view this program!” Uriah warned all parents.
Actually the children, say fourteen-year-old David and his sister—call her Judy—had their own TV on upstairs but weren’t sharply interested.
“I’ve seen it before,” David explained. “Do you want to see it?”
“What is it about?”
“About people who fuck both ways.”
“So what’s new? Let’s look at ‘The Gong Show.’”
Their parents, down in the front room, were caught by Uriah’s assurances.
“Tonight,” Uriah assured them, “we are going to present two young women who have had sex with both sexes, and a man who has also had sex with both sexes!”
Well what do you know.
The camera shifted to a serious-looking young woman in her twenties, who might be a student of anthropology or of dietetics.
“Who did you first get interested in, Jo-Anne,” Uriah asked her, “men or women?”
“I fell in love with my teacher in the sixth grade,” Jo-Anne recalled. “She was my music teacher. Then I fell in love with a cleaning girl. Then I fell in love with my roommate at college. When I was eighteen I had my first date with a man and I fell in love with him. Then I fell in love with his boyfriend. Then I fell in love with the boyfriend’s older brother and we got married and I have a lovely little girl now, only we aren’t married anymore, because he fell in love with the first man I was in love with, so it all worked out beautifully.”
“Time for a commercial,” Uriah announced, looking bewildered.
“Now,” he said cheerfully when he returned to the air, “we have Jack Woodburn of Santa Barbara, California. Tell us how you got started as a bisexual, Jack.”
“I started chasing men when I was twelve. I scared the bejesus out of them. I was sixteen before I met one who let me make a connection. After that it was men, men
, men. Then I met a bisexual woman and we hit it off so well we got married. Yes, we’re still married and have two sons. Yes, my wife has women lovers, and now and then I have a little affair on the side with a man. I believe my life has been greatly enriched by my ability to love someone of any sex. Don’t you?”
Moonigan switched the program off onto “The Gong Show.”
Nobody in the bar protested.
“I once had a broad,” Moonigan began reminiscing after the incident of the Alanol Cat, “who was so perfect I was hard put to find a reason to belt her. She kept herself so clean, and the apartment so spick-and-span, she cooked so good and kept bringing me a thousand a week between washing the dishes and feeding the cat. What did I have to belt her about?
“You can’t let things go on like that. Before you know it you will have lost your leadership and she’ll take off with some dude who needs no reason for belting her. Wham! He just knocks her on her can. If she asks him what was that for—wham! he cracks her for asking. Then, while she’s holding a knife blade to her swelling eye she realizes that what she got is a real solid stamped-on-every-link pimp, a jewel among pimps, and a swollen eye is a small thing to pay for a possession like that.”
“You’ll have to use more hot water if you want to get the feathers off that bird,” Red answered enigmatically.
Moonigan stared at him, trying to figure out Reds remark. Its meaning evaded him, yet revolved slowly in his head.
“Of course,” Moonigan answered at last, “I go with whores. Of course. Love is one thing and sex is another. Right? Does that mean I don’t love my wife? I just bought her a Corvette. If that isn’t love, you tell me what love is. She knows I love her because I refuse to act toward her like an animal. She’s as pure as my mother was. My mother was so pure she never permitted talk of sex in the house and our house is run just the same.”
“How’d you ever get born, for God’s sake?” Dovie-Jean asked Moonigan in her mind.
“Why should I act like an animal toward my wife when I don’t want her to act like an animal toward me?” Moonigan wanted to know. “Husband and wife aren’t suppose to be animals. It’s why I go with a whore once a week. Then I can return to my wife and treat her with respect and no unclean thoughts.”
Red had never seen Moonigan’s wife but he’d once answered the phone, when Moonigan was momentarily out of the bar, and talked a minute or two with Mrs. M. She’d put on a tone of such sultriness, the moment she realized she was talking to a man other than her husband, that Red had been as shocked as if a strange woman had thrust her tongue into his mouth.
“I was sixteen when I had my first girl,” Moonigan assured Red. “She was like an animal and that’s all she was—a damned animal, a damned goat, a sow in heat, a damned alley cat for God’s sake, a monkey in a tree. That filthy little slut let me do anything! Oh, she was a dirty little thing, the things she encouraged me to do! No shame, no shame at all. The moment we’re alone she zips open my fly and down come her pants! They should have pitched her into jail and let her rot.”
“How old was she?” Red inquired.
“Fourteen goin’ on fifteen! Old enough to know better!”
“Just young and foolish,” Red suggested.
“Just foolish you say? I suppose it’s just foolish, too, when they say, ‘I give a damn if I give this clown syphilis if I can get twenty bucks off him.’ Oh yeah, sure, just foolish. You think a whore considers the risk I’m taking? Does she stop for as long as one moment to think she may give me an infection I may take home to my wife? Don’t give me that ‘just young and foolish’ bit. She knows exactly what she’s doing and she don’t give a damn.”
“Everybody’s struggling to get by, Moon.”
“Look,” Moonigan ignored Red’s observation, “I’m not a doctor. I have no way of knowing, when I go with one of them, whether she’s sick or well. You call that fair? What am I supposed to do? Drag her to a clinic for God’s sake? Have her inspected? I say a whore who makes me a carrier of some dirty disease, and I infect my wife, ought to be kept off the streets. It’s a fact, and a fact is a fact. I’m only talking sense, Red.”
Dovie-Jean caught his face in the bar mirror: he wore his hair blond and long and carried a jade earring in his left ear. He had a big brown walrus mustache and a heavy jaw. When he caught her eye he gave her such a wide white smile she thought he must be showing off his dentures. He’s been kidding all along, she thought. He’s been putting us all on.
“Every whore in this town should be made to wear a red tag saying: Prostitute: Dangerous to your health.”
He’d withdrawn the wide white smile. Now he looked at her sternly and spoke enough for her to hear him clearly, “Black or white, they ought to be treated like animals, every one.”
Moonigan had no suspicion that the bartender and the black go-go girl were living together. Tourist traps, such as the Carousel, don’t hire couples knowingly, whether married or common law. Such couples inevitably conspire to defraud the house.
He had been taught two things: to loom and how to make ominous-sounding noises like: “You ordered the lady a drink, didn’t you? Okay, now pay.”
Dovie-Jean always felt uneasy when Moonigan was at hand. She always felt relieved when her week at the Carousel was done. The presence of Big Benjamin, at Playmates of Paris, gave her the feeling she was being protected. But this big blond’s conversation made her feel threatened.
“One thing you have to say for a cat,” she once heard Red telling him, “that you can’t say for a dog. You can’t poison a cat.”
“Try dissolving five cigarette papers in a saucer of milk,” Moonigan answered immediately.
“How about a dog?”
“Two yellow jackets in a hamburger.”
Big Benjamin was as illiterate in Yiddish as he was in English. This Delancey Street alley fighter, this ghetto lumberjack in the faded plaid shirt, this matzohfied Marciano with a broken nose, this pimpified kingfish who knew nothing of the Talmud and less than that about women, was nothing more, in fact, than a muscular schlemiel who went up and down stairs a dozen times a day fetching Cokes, coffee and hamburgers to the house’s whores.
He could gulp a superburger in a single gulp, then look up like a masterless mastiff for more. Yet he never bit a hand that fed him or even barked when kicked about by one of the women.
Janitor, runner, bouncer, between his chores he stayed out of sight in a shadowed and curtained corner, occasionally peering around the curtain’s corner to see that everything was all right.
He was also the local handyman. When one of the ceiling bulbs burned out, Dovie-Jean kept a trick waiting so she could watch Big Benjamin fix it. Up the ladder the women saw him mount step by heavy step. Everything the King did was step by heavy step. As though he had to think out every step beforehand. “I want to see this,” she explained to her trick.
There was nothing, really, to see except the man’s deliberativeness. He unscrewed the old bulb slowly, dismounted the ladder with it, placed it carefully on a table and remounted with a new bulb in his hand. When he’d gotten the new one screwed in, and the light came on, he beamed down upon the parlor with a look of such pride in his achievement that the women gave him a brief burst of applause.
“Can we go now, honey?” Dovie-Jean’s white trick pleaded.
“Just one minute, dear, he isn’t quite through.”
She wanted to see the King come down. Step by heavy step. Then saw him pause, at the ladder’s foot, take off his cap and make a low bow of acknowledgement.
“Do it again!” Spanish Nan asked, but the girl in the front office spoke into the audio system. “That’s enough fooling around, King. Back to work, girls.”
The voice was no more than that of one of the whores, but she was the receptionist for the day and felt herself to be a lady executive.
“What team is that cap from, King?” Tracy asked him.
The cap had been faded, by many Manhattan rains, to a pinkish white. Its
peak bore the letter C in red.
“Cincinnati Reds,” he decided, “I used to play for them.” Why embarrass the clown by asking what position he had played? If he knew first base from left field, that would come as a surprise.
Benjamin’s forebears had reached the Lower East Side in the 1880s and their descendants were still on Delancey Street. Of that whole sad clan, in a hundred years, Benjamin was the only one who’d made it as far uptown as Forty-eighth. He’d never made it to Fifty-ninth.
He slept on an army cot in the rear of the joint beside a broom closet where he kept the bucket and mop he used to clean the parlor, before the women began arriving at ten A.M. The girl at the front desk handed him seventy-five dollars every Saturday morning and he never asked who was paying him.
The girl at the desk could not have told him. The house was owned by two uptown lawyers who never came near the place and who discussed it, between themselves, as “our Forty-eighth Street property.”
Benjamin was not curious. Being provided with food and shelter satisfied him. He was being paid well, he felt, for his single skill.
For make no mistake: Benjamin really was skilled. No other bouncer in all Manhattan could rush a complaining trick onto the street faster than King Benjamin.
He seldom had need for violence. Most of the tricks came up the stairs half-intimidated by the time they pressed the buzzer. Some of them, once in a room with a naked girl, lost their nerve and left. Most were polite and respectful. All Benjamin had to do was to watch for the springblade and the .22.
“Does that big Jew really dig what goes on here?” Dovie-Jean won-dered aloud.
Yes, oh yes, Fortune filled her in. “I caught him staring at my tits once. I stared right back until he looked the other way. If it weren’t for having to pay, I think he’d like to come on.”
The women were skilled as nurses as well as whores. When a whore gave a trick a short-arm inspection (while he held the basin in awkward docility) she was less casual than a doctor or nurse might be, because her own health was at stake.
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