“They harassed my brother,” Paula says now, adding that Irving always maintained “a tasteful relationship” with his famous model. When Howard Hughes once asked to meet Bettie Page after seeing some of the shots Irving took, Paula’s brother advised Bettie to see the billionaire, but “only if he promises to be a total gentleman.”
Paula was in charge of posing the pictures. She personally tied up Bettie Page “at least a hundred times,” bound her to various chairs, gagged her on beds, and manacled her with leather. Bettie was always sweet about it, Paula said, never complained, except when the ropes were too tight. Paula sometimes helped Irving title the pictures, items like “Bettie Comes to New York and Gets in a Bind.”
“It was wonderful those days,” Paula says now. “We had politicians, judges, prime ministers coming here to buy our photos. They would park their limos right outside on Fourteenth Street.” After a while, however, the court cases weighed everything down. Fighting back a tear, Paula says, “It was all that that killed Irving, I think. They said we sold porno. We did not sell porno.” Today Paula sells a book called The Irving Klaw Years, 1948–1963, containing “more than two hundred out-of-print bondage photos.” Paula calls it a “fitting remembrance to my brother.” Paula, who has white hair, blue makeup, and wears Capri pants, doesn’t have to come to Fourteenth Street every day. She lives in Sheepshead Bay and has “plenty of money.” But she “just likes it … you know, this used to be quite a glamorous street.” She says she hasn’t washed the IRVING KLAW, PINUP KING window in twenty years. She does not intend to.
If Paula, Jullian’s, and the Gramercy Gym fighters add aged seed to the surroundings, it’s the cynical “businessmen” who give Fourteenth Street and Third Avenue its shiny veneer of plastic sleaze. Who could have been surprised when Burger King opened in the old Automat where John Reed, currently buried near Lenin in the Kremlin, once ate club rolls? Burger King knows its customers when it sees them. The burger boys probably have whole demographic departments to psyche out every sleaze scene in the galaxy. No doubt they felt they had to keep pace after McDonald’s sewed up Ninety-sixth and Broadway.
Then there are the doughnuts. There are at least five doughnut joints in the immediate area of Fourteenth Street and Third Avenue. One even replaced Sam’s Pizza, a lowlife landmark for years. Doughnuts are definitely the carbo-junkie wave of the future. In fact, if some doctor would publish a weight-losing diet of Placidyls and doughnuts, airline stewardesses would make Fourteenth Street another Club Med.
But, of course, the real merchants of Fourteenth Street and Third Avenue are the sleazos. They control the economy. And why not? No one else wanted to sell stuff on East Fourteenth Street. You have to figure that more Placidyls and pussy gets sold at Fourteenth and Third than the pizza joint sells pizza or the cuchifrito place sells pork rinds.
No wonder the sleazos were pissed the other day. The Third Avenue Merchants Association was having a fair. They closed off the avenue. Ladies in print dresses sold pottery. Bug-eyed kids stood by tables of brownies. A nice day in the sun for the well adjusted. But the fair halted abruptly at Fourteenth Street, even though Third Avenue continues downtown for several streets before it turns into the Bowery. The implication was clear, and the sleazos weren’t missing it. A whole slew of the local losers stood on “their” side of Fourteenth Street, gaping at the fat-armed zeppoli men pulling dough and the little kids whizzing around in go-karts.
One Valium pusher looked up at the sign hung across the avenue and read it aloud. “T … A … M … A,” he said. “What the fuck is a T.A.M.A.?”
The Third Avenue Merchants Association, he was informed. “Shit,” he said, looking very put out. “Motherfucker, I’m a goddamned Third Avenue merchant.”
So what if Fourteenth Street is low? Does every block have to look like SoHo or one of those tree-lined numbers in Queens? The other night I was helping my friend move. He had been living on Fifteenth Street and Third Avenue in a high-rise, but the money got tight. So he took a place on Twelfth between Second and Third. As we were carrying an enormous filing cabinet into the lobby of his new building, he said, “Well, this place is dumpy, but at least I won’t have to pass the prostitutes every day on the way to work.” A couple of seconds later we heard a noise on the staircase. A ’toot was slapping a solid on a guy who we swore had a turned-around collar. A priest! We almost dropped the cabinet, laughing.
Besides, where else but on East Fourteenth Street can you hear a blasted Spanish downer freak abusing a little Polish guy, saying, “Que pasa? Que pasa? Que pasa?” To which the Polish guy says, questioning, “Kielbasa? Kielbasa?”
Of course, there are those who do not find all this so amusing. Like Carvel Moore. Explaining why sleaze is essential to the big-city experience to her is a fruitless task. She is the “project coordinator” of Sweet 14, an organization dedicated to making Fourteenth Street “the Livingest Street in Town.”
They are a cleanup group. The list of names who attended their kickoff meeting reads like a who’s who among New York powermongers. Con Edison head Charles (Black-out) Luce, David Yunich, Mayor Beame, Percy Sutton, representatives of Citibank, the phone company, and Helmsley-Spear. They issued a joint statement saying that Fourteenth Street wasn’t dead, it could “be turned around,” and it was up to the businessmen and government to do it. Luce, chairman of the group, offered $50,000 of Con Edison money each year for three years to this end.
Carvel Moore, a prim lady who once headed a local planning board, said it was “dead wrong” to assume that Sweet 14 was a front group for Charles Luce, the phone company, or anyone else. Sweet 14 was an independent organization looking out for everyone’s interests on East Fourteenth Street. She said that Luce’s $50,000 was “just a small portion of the money” the group had to work with. Then she brought out a bunch of art-student line drawings showing me how “incredibly inefficient” the cavernous Fourteenth Street–Union Square subway station is. It is one of Sweet 14’s major tasks to “help remodel the station,” said Ms. Moore, pointing out how the station’s “awkwardness” made it difficult for employees to get to work. The project will cost $800,000.
She also was very high on “Sweet Sounds in Union Square Park,” a concert series sponsored by Sweet 14. Ms. Moore detailed how these musical events brought “working people on their lunch hour back into the park … and made the drunks and junkies feel uncomfortable.” Drunks and junkies always feel uncomfortable when “normal” people are around, Ms. Moore said.
The most important task of Sweet 14, however, continued Ms. Moore, was “to break up the vicious drug trade and prostitution on Fourteenth Street near Third Avenue.” What kind of business, Ms. Moore wanted to know, would want to move to this area with things the way they are now? Sweet 14, said Ms. Moore, was now working closely with the cops to take “special action” in the area. One of the main problems with local law enforcement, Ms. Moore said, is that the yellow line down Fourteenth Street separates the jurisdictions of the Ninth and Thirteenth Precincts. Some of the more nimble-footed degenerates in the area know this and escape the cops, who are loath to chase bad guys into another precinct. Sweet 14, however, has been “instrumental” in getting Captain Precioso of the Ninth Precinct to set up a “Fourteenth Street Task Force” to deal with this situation. The organization has also “been active” in monitoring the OTB office at the corner of Second Avenue and Fourteenth Street. According to Ms. Moore, people have been known to loiter at the OTB, making it a “potential trouble spot.”
I wanted to tell Ms. Moore that I often make bets at the Fourteenth Street OTB and then hang out there (admittedly not inhaling deeply), waiting to see how my nag ran. I considered this being a sportsman, not loitering. But I held it in. Instead, I wanted to know what, after Sweet 14 succeeded in making East Fourteenth Street safe for businessmen, she suggested doing with the several thousand nether-creatures now populating the street? She indicated that this was a “social problem” and not part of her job. All i
n all it was a somewhat depressing conversation. And I walked out feeling I would rather buy electricity from Beat Shit Green than a cleanup from Charles Luce.
More troubling was a talk I had with George and Susan Leelike. They are the leaders of “East Thirteenth Street Concerned Citizens Committee.” The very name of the group brings up images of whistle-blowing at the sight of a black person and badgering tenants to get up money to plant a tree. But George and Susan Leelike are a little tough to high-hat. After all, they are from the block. They’ve lived on East Thirteenth Street for fifteen years. Raised a son there. And they came for cool reasons: Back in the late fifties and early sixties, the East Village was hip. Charlie Mingus and Slugs made it hip. The Leelikes related to that.
So, when these people tell you they don’t think a pross and a priest in a hallway is funny, you’ve got to take them seriously. They do have a compelling case. George explains it all: he says the Lower East Side gets reamed because the neighborhood’s major industry is “social service.” Anytime a neighborhood is poor, “social service” expands. The Lower East Side is both poor and liberal. So, says George Leelike, it has a higher percentage of social work agencies than any other neighborhood in the city. He questions the validity of some of these projects, pointing out that one place, Project Contact, started in the sixties as a teenage runaway home, then went to alcohol treatment, then to drug rehab, and now is back to runaways. This is “grant-chasing,” says Leelike. For the social workers to keep their jobs, the projects have to stay open. To stay open, they have to get grants. To get grants, they have to show they understand the “current” problems (read: whatever tabloid papers are screaming about this week) of the community and attract “clients.” George Leelike says there are more “clients” on the Lower East Side than any other place in the world.
“Clients,” the Leelikes say, are not the most stable neighbors. The worst are the methadone junkies. Beth Israel, says Leelike, has made “millions” from its methadone-maintenance programs that bring thousands of “clients” to the Lower East Side. So have the individual private doctors who run their own methadone clinics in the neighborhood. The Leelikes were a major force in a community drive that shut down one Dr. Triebel’s clinic on Second Avenue and Thirteenth Street. Triebel pulled in more than seven hundred thousand dollars in one year, much of it in Medicaid payments.
This kind of activity brought still more sleazos to the neighborhood, the Leelikes said. They pulled out Xeroxed arrest reports from the Ninth and Thirteenth precincts, showing that the majority of the pill-pushers pinched on Fourteenth Street said they were on some kind of methadone program. They said it was a vicious cycle, that many of the people on methadone had no desire or intention of kicking. Most of the local meth freaks were here on “force” programs. The city told them, Sign up with a methadone clinic or no welfare.
These were frightening charges, not just because they were indisputably well thought out and apparently true, but because they went to the very core of the two most important issues in the city—race and class. Talking to George Leelike, you had to admire his rational approach to subjects that usually inspire mad, inflammatory outbursts. You also got a closer look at why Ed Koch will be the next mayor of New York City. Koch is the coming wave of politician in New York. His major policy thrust is to appeal to the get-the-creeps-out-of-my-neighborhood constituency. He takes the side of the harried, postliberal middle class against the nether class. It is, after all, a tremendously winning point of view. Even in New York we have to admit that we’re so mad we’re not going to take it anymore. I even feel like that myself. I’d be crazy not to.
It is chilling and inescapable. Tolerance levels have gone down. The Leelikes said the thing they hated most about the sleazos was that they’re so snotty. In the old days, when Susan Leelike went to Cooper Union, junkies hung out in the Sagamore Cafeteria, near Astor Place. Dope fiends those days knew they were outcasts and acted accordingly. The Leelikes remembered these Burroughsian types with a touch of romanticism. Now, they said, methadone makes being a junkie legal. And the creeps have come out into the daylight, where it quickly becomes apparent that junkies aren’t the nicest people you’d ever want to meet.
This hit home. A few weeks ago I was walking by Cooper Square. A guy in his mid-twenties was stretched out on the ground, twitching. He didn’t look like a lowlife; he had French jeans on. A small crowd gathered around him. A cabbie stopped and put on his emergency blinker. The guy seemed to be having a seizure. Maybe he’s an epileptic, said the cabby, pull his tongue out of his mouth. Two people went for the cops, another to call an ambulance. Finally an older man rolled up the guy’s sleeve. The dude’s arm looked like a Penn Central yard. The older guy threw the arm back on the sidewalk in disgust. “He’s just a fucking junkie,” the cabby said. “A fucking junkie.” Half the people in crowd said, “Shit.” And everyone just split. Me, too. I split. When the guy’s an epileptic he’s human; when he’s a junkie, fuck him.
So I knew the Leelikes had the trend on their side. Also, it was clear—they are determined. They are willing to run the risk of being called redneck—Susan Leelike says, “I hate it when they call me the white lady”—to get rid of sleazos. And they don’t flinch when you ask them where they propose the sleazos go. “It’s just not our problem,” they say.
Patrolmen Bob Woerner and Dennis Harrington are in an empty office above Glancy’s Bar on East Fourteenth Street and Irving Place, hiding. Harrington and Woerner have been partners for six years. They used to work the smack detail on Avenues A, B, C, and D (called avenues X, Y, and Z in cop parlance). But pressure from Sweet 14 and local politicians on the department to “do something” about Fourteenth Street brought them here eleven months ago. Since then Woerner and Harrington, tough and smart cops, have been the most effective (in terms of arrests) of the twenty men on the Ninth Precinct’s “Fourteenth Street Task Force.”
Sometimes Woerner and Harrington walk down Fourteenth Street and ask buzz-brained cats, “Hey, man. What you doing?” It’s a torture technique; they know that the toughest question in the world for a sleazo is “What are you doing?” Creeps’ knees buckle under the weight of that one; they say, “I dunno, what am I doing?”
But what Woerner and Harrington really like to do is make busts. Which is why they are hiding in the empty room above Glancy’s Bar with their binoculars trained on the action beneath the Palladium marquee.
Making busts on Fourteenth Street isn’t tough. Sometimes guys will be so loaded they come right up and say, “Placidyl … Placidyl … oh, shee-it” before they realize they’re talking to a uniformed policeman. It is tricky, however. First of all, the captain doesn’t like cops to make too many arrests. He says busts take police off the street and put them in court. Primarily, though, when you’re making “observation” busts on Fourteenth Street, you’ve got to see them good. Most of the sellers get their stuff from scrip doctors, which means their own name is on the bottle. It is not a crime to carry “controlled substances”—if the (not-forged) scrip is made out to you. Selling the stuff, however, is illegal. So, instead of just grabbing a single party, like a smack bust, cops have to get both the buyer and the seller as well as recover the stuff. They also have to see the deal go down perfectly—that is, if they’re not into fudging evidence in court.
Woerner and Harrington say, Why fudge, on Fourteenth Street if you miss one sale, they’ll soon be another. But still, it hurts when you’ve been freezing behind the Con Edison fence at Fourteenth and Third, waiting for just the right view. And then, right at the big moment, a bus goes by.
Tonight, however, it ain’t gonna be no problem. Aerosmith is back in town at the Palladium and a dozen suburban kids are milling around in front of the theater, looking to get stupid. Woerner and Harrington are licking their lips. All they need is a seller. And from down the street, trudging slowly up from Third Avenue by the poolroom, here he comes. In unison the cops shout, “All right, Ernest James … come on, Ernest Jame
s.”
Ernest James, a gangly guy with a face and beard like Sonny Rollins, came on.
He walked into a crowd of leather-jacketed white kids. Got into a conversation with one. Took him off to the doorway of the fight gym. Then it couldn’t have been clearer if Otto Preminger were directing. Out came the bottle. There went the pill. Across came the three dollars. And down the stairs went Woerner and Harrington.
Like nothing, Harrington was reading Ernest James his rights. Woerner had the buyer, a blond boy from Pelham Bay, up against the wall. Ernest James, the perfect degenerate, pulled out a slew of false IDs, a pack of Kools, and looked impassively at the sky. Against the wall another kid was screaming to the spread-eagled buyer, “Jeff, Jeff … give me your ticket for the show.”
Ernest James was in big trouble. He had a goddamned drugstore on him. Ten bottles of pills in all: 26 big white tabs thought to be Quaaludes, 21 Tuinals, 15 Seconals, 40 unknown peach-colored pills, 34 unknown white pills, 23 ampicillins, 29 unknown yellow pills, and several dozen Placidyls. Most of the bottles were made out to Ernest James. Some to Ernest Jones. Others to A. Ramos. One was just to “Ernest,” which prompted Woerner to wonder if Ernest James was on a first-name basis with his pharmacist. Also found were two Garcia y Vega humidors full of 5- and 10-mg Valium. Almost all the scrips were supposedly written by one Doctor Jacob Handler of West 103rd Street. Doctor Handler is a Fourteenth-Street favorite. Harrington keeps a little scorecard of doctors’ names that appear on bottles. Doctor Handler is way up near the top of the list. But the cops say nothing will happen to him because “it’s tough to bust a doctor.”
Apparently to maximize his pill-gathering ability, Ernest James also had half a dozen different medical identification cards. Some were made out to the name William Summersall, others to A. Ramos and Ernest Jones. He also had a little notebook in which he has apparently been practicing different signatures. Most are Ernest Jones. But there is also a page on which Texas Slim is written a dozen times.
American Gangster Page 14
