The Forty-Two

by Ed Kurtz

  “The Anco’s not so bad…”

  “It’s disgusting.”

  “It’s better than the Cameo.”

  “That’s just porn. I don’t do porn.”

  “Maybe you should start,” Charley said with a smile.

  Andy smiled back, his gargantuan moustache spreading across his face like a giant caterpillar. He wrapped his arm around Charley and pulled him in for a hug. Charley did not resist.

  “Poor thing,” Andy said. “After your rough night you had to come put up with me.”

  “You’re not so hard to handle, Andy.”

  “What happened, darling? Did you get rolled by a hooker?”

  “I wish I had. There was a girl murdered at the Harris last night.”

  Andy shot up, alarmed.

  “My God, you were there?”

  “I was sitting right next to her.”

  “Fuck, Charley! I saw it in the Post this morning, but… Jesus, Forty-Two is getting bad.”

  “It’s been bad,” Charley said. “It’s just getting worse.”

  “But God, we love it, don’t we?”

  “Not last night I didn’t.”

  “Who was she, anyway?”

  “I have no idea. She sat right by me between features, and by the end of the second flick she was dead. Stabbed through the back of the seat, I guess. I thought I got lucky.”

  Andy let loose a nervous laugh. “You did, baby. You didn’t get stabbed, too.”

  “I guess that’s the thing that’s really been bothering me about it.”

  “What, you want to be stabbed?”

  “No, it’s not that. It’s just that it all seems pretty damn personal. Like whoever killed that poor kid was after her and her in particular. Like they watched her go into the theater and seized the opportunity for a quiet, anonymous murder. I’m really starting to think that it was a real grudge killing, you dig?”

  “Jesus wept, you’re Honey fucking West.”

  “I’m just working it out in my mind. It’s a hell of a thing to experience, you know.”

  “Sure,” Andy said. “But it’s not your problem. Try not to get obsessed with it, Charley. Don’t let it eat you up. I still need you to hold the boom, for Christ’s sakes.”

  “I thought you were done with all that.”

  Andy hid a sad smile under his brushy upper lip, but his rosy cheeks gave it away.

  “I can’t ever be done. You know that.”

  “Then Bloody Birthright will still get its premiere at the Anco?”

  “To hell with the Anco,” Andy said. “It’ll run a month at the Cinerama.”

  Charley imagined the grainy, ill-focused 16mm look of Andy’s work projected across a 146-degree arc on the Cinerama’s massive screen. He laughed, and so did Andy.

  “But I guess I’d settle for the Harris,” Andy went on with an exaggerated whine. “So long as no one gets murdered before the end of the movie.”

  Andy was jamming his key into the door when it hit him that he’d forgotten Franz’s crullers. He whispered, “Shit!” and went in where Franz was already laid out on the couch in front of the TV in his boxers and an Eagles T-shirt. He lifted his head with what looked to Charley like a considerable effort.

  “You forgot, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah. Sorry.”

  “S’okay. Maybe next time.”

  Andy pushed Franz’s legs off the couch and sat down. On the television a ridiculous futuristic train rocketed across the screen.

  “What’re you watching?”

  “Supertrain.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “What the hell d’ya think? A super train.”

  Charley shook his head, thinking that maybe Bloody Birthright had a shot at the Cinerama after all. Then he got back up and headed for the door.

  “Where are you going now? It’s a bit late to get those crullers now.”

  “I’m going out for a while,” Charley answered as he stepped out into the hall. “I’ll be late.”

  “Out where?”

  Charley said, “Back to the Deuce.”

  Chapter 4

  The one-sheet reproduced in the Post screamed, It was buried for a hundred years…but never laid to rest! That was for the first half of the New Amsterdam’s double bill, which was ambiguously titled Terror, and it made no effort whatsoever to tell anything about the film. The second feature was called Dracula’s Dog, but that seemed pretty self-explanatory to Charley. He had just polished off a two-dollar steak up the block at Tad’s and, as much as it alarmed him, he was in the mood to see some carnage. Thus he checked out the Post’s “Movie Clock,” the same paper he had been carrying around with him all day. On the front page Elizabeth Anne Hewlett still smiled alluringly in black and white. Deeper inside were the listings and all the ads for legitimate cinema mixed in with the trash. Young, Wild, and Wonderful (XX) right in between Star Trek: The Motion Picture and All That Jazz. He pored over the Movie Clock and tried to forget the front page.

  After he finished his steak and fries, he ambled the few steps down the street to the New Amsterdam on the southeast corner of Forty-Second and Broadway, next to the subway stop. Looming above the A, the familiar square clock read eight-thirty. He bought a ticket and wandered up the steps to the balcony. Charley really liked sitting in the balcony.

  The first show turned out to be a British production that was slight on plot but heavy on the wild visuals. There was enough crazy green and red lighting to give Suspiria a run for its money, and he really dug the beheading at the start of the film, though there really wasn’t very much to go on after that. The crowd got kind of rowdy toward the end during a striptease scene with this terrifying-looking blonde with a buzzcut and the face of a stevedore. She had nothing on but a studded leather choker, a chain around her waist and knee-high boots with four-inch heels, and she was doing a weird interpretive dance that seemed to suggest suicide by hanging if the bullwhip around her neck had anything to do with it.

  At the end of the picture, some girl got red paint on her and nearly had a conniption fit because she thought it was blood. Charley found this utterly preposterous; no one could make such a ridiculous mistake. For one thing there was the color—it was too bright, too red. Even more than that, Charley considered the smell. Paint always had that distinctly chemical odor, no matter what kind it was, whereas blood smelled strongly metallic with a strangely citric sourness to it…

  He stopped himself right there. Before last night he probably wouldn’t have remembered what blood smelled like if he’d ever really known at all. Now he couldn’t seem to get it out of his nose.

  The credits rolled and there was a brief intermission, and then the second half of the bill got underway. It had José Ferrer in it as a police inspector from some Soviet country, and he was tracking Count Dracula and his vampire dog to the States. Poor José was a long way from Cyrano de Bergerac. It was a silly picture; stupid, really. But after Charley watched the blood flowing out of the hound’s second victim he started to feel ill. He was almost ashamed of it, but the shame did nothing to assuage his upset stomach. He walked out before the third reel.

  The movies were okay, he just didn’t think he could take much more of the bloodshed he’d thought he wanted to see. At least no one in the theater got killed, a first for him that week.

  Normally he would have trekked back up to Broadway after a venture to Forty-Second to catch the subway back to Alphabet City, but tonight he absently wandered west instead, further up the Forty-Two past Eighth Avenue. Here were the seedier theaters, seedier even than the hardcore triple bills at the Anco or the Globe back on Broadway. Here was the Roxy Twin that boasted four new triple X shows every Wednesday and Sunday on its wildly angled and brightly lit marquee. The red door to the mysterious Love Connection and the Live Burlesk that promised “Bizarre Action” on its stage and the sundry twenty-five cent peep shows that popped up everywhere in between. Porno floorshow, live nude girls. Aggressive dudes with junky twitc
hes leaned out of the shadowed doorways or paced back and forth under the mostly spent bulbs that dotted the jutting marquees, all of them singing the same tune.

  Hey man, come on in, come on in here.

  Girls, nude girls, get you a piece of this action.

  Girls, girls, girls.

  Charley paused in front of the bright red door under the unlit sign that spelled out Love Connection in red capital letters against a sickly yellow background. A Hispanic guy in a fur coat with his hair slicked back was dozing against the door until he sensed Charley’s lingering presence. Then he shot straight up and twisted his mouth into a gummy, mostly toothless grin.

  “Yeah, man, that’s right,” he wheezed. “This is the place, man. Check it out. Check it out.”

  Charley squinted one eye and looked hard at the guy.

  “What’ve you got in there?”

  “Man, what don’t we got. You want girls, this is the place. For real, this is the place. Floorshows goin’ all night, peep booths, videos in the lobby. You don’t even need no machine at home to play em, you can watch em right here. Anything you need, this is the place. Check it out.”

  “What’s it cost?”

  “Nothin’ going in, even.” The guy turned the handle and opened the door, revealing only a stairwell leading up. It was too dark at the top of the stairs to see where they went. “Jus’ go on up. Pay as you go, know what I mean?”

  “Yeah,” Charley said. “All right.”

  He carefully slinked up the steps, having to squeeze past a guy in a bucket hat who was smoking a reefer and not about to move for anybody. At the top of the steps there was another door, and Charley opened it to reveal a narrow hallway with a few bare, flickering light bulbs gently swaying from the chipped ceiling. A door—red, of course—was directly at Charley’s right, and there was also one at the end of the hall. In between them was yet another door, but this one was clearly marked NO ENTRANCE. He stood in the doorway and began to feel like Alice in Wonderland, unable to determine which door led to which wonders and marvels.

  In a minute, the door closest to the steps creaked open, and a tired-looking old guy with a scruffy brown beard and a lipstick kiss on his forehead came out, smiling like he didn’t know he was smiling at all. Charley’s presence startled him a little, but then the smile spread wider.

  “I know,” the old guy rasped. “I had the same problem first time I come here. I’ll fill you in, though. This door here goes into the floorshow.” He pointed to the door from which he just came. “And that one down there, that’s the way into the peep shows. You gotta stand, though. Just little slits in the wall, and you look through em, see? I don’t know what a short little guy would do. Stand on a phonebook, I guess.”

  He released a crackling, phlegmy laugh. Charley tried to fake a smile, but his face wasn’t having any of it.

  “There’s movies and magazines and shit like that back there, too. But you want my advice, go have a look at the floorshow. It’s a crackerjack.”

  The old guy patted Charley on the shoulder and slid his hand down like he was wiping something off. Charley edged away from him, and the old guy vanished down the dark steps, hacking and wheezing all the way down to the street. Still, his advice seemed sound enough. Charley went into the floorshow.

  It was an old auditorium that probably hosted some form of legitimate theater at one time in the distant past, way before the sex industry subsumed Times Square and its immediate environs. There couldn’t have been more than fifty or sixty seats in the place, and the rows weren’t on an incline like in most theaters, just flat from the back of the place all the way to the foot of the stage. Charley took a seat in the second to last row and hunkered down as though he was afraid to be seen. In front of him were ten or twelve men who were dispersed more or less evenly throughout the room, some of them nodding off and one of them fast asleep. One guy’s shoulders were trembling and Charley figured he was likely jerking off. Some people had no shame at all. And the girl on stage wasn’t really anything to make a man want to debase himself so terribly, either.

  She was a little on the fat side, her stomach folded over into two dark creases except when she arched her back to make her breasts sag less. She probably wasn’t at all pretty, but with that much makeup on she looked like a sad hobo clown, and her real face was completely concealed as if it were a disguise. Charley thought maybe it was. Not many women would want the world to know they took their clothes off for a living in a crummy joint like that.

  Her bottoms never came off, but she played with the strings a lot, teasing that just maybe she would give the fellas a peek even though no one believed for a second that she would. The song changed from whatever disco travesty was playing before to Peaches and Herb’s “Shake Your Groove Thing” and she started to convulse so badly that for a second Charley thought she was in serious medical trouble. It just turned out that she was a miserable dancer. When a guy who smelled like gin tapped Charley on the shoulder and demanded a dollar for the entrance fee, Charley nearly told him it wasn’t worth it. But he was not particularly interested in having his teeth knocked out, so he dug into his pocket and paid the guy. He was just glad to be rid of him and his odor.

  By the time he returned his cautious gaze to the stage, the girl was collecting her slinky costume from the floor and exiting stage right. Another girl would be along in a minute, but Charley had had enough of this part of the exhibit. He stole out of the room and went back into the hall. There was still another door concealing unpleasant mysteries from his unwanting eyes.

  The old man in the hallway was not exaggerating. The booths were constructed of pasteboard that jutted out of a half-octagon. Dingy crimson curtains hung over the entrance to each of the four makeshift booths, two of which were pulled aside to reveal no one inside. There were presumably occupants in the other two, men doing things Charley preferred not thinking about. The other half of the room was taken up with a rickety counter that stretched from one wall to the other; on it a collection of mismatched televisions were set up. Each screen displayed a different pornographic scene, none of them too terribly wild. A stack of glossy cardboard boxes with naked girls on them rested at the end of the counter, big black videocassettes concealed within. The wall behind the counter was covered by racks from floor to ceiling, and the racks were covered with videocassettes, magazines, dirty books, rubber sex aids and cheap prophylactics. An attendant sat close by, absorbed in the paperback he was reading. Charley smirked. He had never thought about it before, but he now guessed that people who worked in the sex business didn’t get any jollies out of it. It was a job.

  As Charley advanced towards one of the open booths, the attendant took notice and hurried over to him. He was a squat guy with a squarish face that was clean shaven except for the narrow strip of hair that ran from his bottom lip to about two inches below his chin.

  “Hey man, this shit ain’t free,” he said irritably.

  Charley gave the guy a dollar without saying anything. The attendant pocketed the bill and went back to his paperback. Charley wondered if it was any good.

  He chose the booth closest to the door and yanked the curtain closed. Now the cramped little area was bathed in darkness except for what little light seeped out of the rectangular slit in the wall in front of him at eye level. Charley could smell sweat and cheap perfume and it made him gag. He tried concentrating on the pulsing beat of “He’s the Greatest Dancer” and it helped him get used to the smell. He then advanced to the slit in the wall. It looked like a mail slot.

  On the other side of the wall was a small space that was brightly lit from above. Charley could see the two slits on the other end and the two pairs of eyes that peered through them. They weren’t looking back at him. The nude girl undulating before them had their full attention.

  Charley was surprised to find out that this dancer was actually quite pretty. Beautiful, even. She had shoulder length sandy blonde hair that was cut in a sharp straight line all the way around, perf
ectly framing the shape of her face. Her shoulders were small and round, her arms muscular but still entirely feminine. While she danced, her large, pert breasts bounced to the beat of the song, both of them moving in tandem, all but hypnotizing Charley. She made him feel hungry for her, a counterfeit response he welcomed.

  One of the other gawkers slipped a bill through his slit and the girl moved seductively toward it, shifting her shoulders forward and back again like a stalking cat. She bit the bill and tore it away from him as she wobbled her torso and made her breasts shake violently. The guy in there moaned. Charley dug in his wallet and found a five-dollar bill. It was all he had left.

  When the girl came around to accept his tip, she smiled at Charley and gave him a wink. It was a weird smile, but only because of the juxtaposition between it and the environment. There was nothing sexual about the smile, nothing naughty or sexy or sleazy at all. It was just a sweet little curl at the corners of her mouth, a nice girl grin just like the one in Elizabeth Ann Hewlett’s photograph in the Post.

  Charley gawped. His throat pulsed and a choking squeak escaped his mouth. The stripper canted her head back, maintaining the smile, and apart from the haircut he found himself staring at the grainy newspaper image made flesh.

  The girl took his fin and moved back to the center of the cramped, hot space. Her skin glimmered with sweat. Charley ducked backward out of the booth, tripped over his own feet, and landed hard on his tailbone.

  The guy at the porno counter chuckled.

  Charley waited under the sparkling awning of a dirty bookstore, pretending to peruse some of the bargain offerings on the sidewalk racks. It was mostly sadist stuff, whips and chains and disturbing rape fantasies. He thumbed through a dozen of them, hoping the greasy clerk inside the store wouldn’t chase him off before the girl came out. Then a stroke of luck came his way when the girl appeared in the red doorway to Love Connection. The doorman said something to her and she raised her hand in a dismissive gesture.