Them Hustlers

by Jeffrey Manber

  Liars. Two-faced hypocrites.

  Flynt hated them all.

  While in New York to meet with his European distributors, the publisher had dropped in to see his friend Al Goldstein; publisher of Screw Magazine, the rag newspaper that published page after page of classified ads for call girls. These two men were the publishers of the most graphic material allowed under the First Amendment.

  The get together took place in Goldstein’s office on 14th Street, just off 6th Avenue in Manhattan. To the casual observer this area of New York would seem unconnected to the neighborhood surrounding the University Club on 16th Street and L. The Washington turf included the White House, the stately Jefferson Hotel and was packed with well-known lobbying and trade association offices. It was one of the pinnacles of success for many who came to Washington.

  14th Street and 6th Avenue, on the other hand, lay at the very bottom of the pyramid of American power and money. The street was raw, bursting at the seams with the cheapest of products. Both sides of 14th Street were jammed with shrill loudspeakers mounted along the fronts of each store that blasted down on the sidewalks with come-on promotions delivered in bursts of Spanish and English. The smaller the store, the more crowded the aisles and the number of cheap bargains which spilled out onto the sidewalk, as if each store, regardless of size, held the identical inventory. Thrown out onto the cracked and dirty sidewalk were the windup barking dogs, crying dolls, Teflon pots, plastic fruit displays, blankets, whistling trains and nylon wigs in blond and blue and some in rainbow colors.

  This New York was the latest stretch of ghetto capitalism, the most recent incarnation of what came before, whether Orchard Street on the Lower East Side for European Jews, Jerome Avenue in the Bronx for the Blacks or the Upper East Side by 1st and 2nd Avenues for the Irish or more recently the Korean and Dominican neighborhoods in Queens. It was the first rung in the idealized American ladder to success. Shoppers and storeowners shared a common desire to push higher, much like the power hungry young lawyers and publishers and community organizers from small towns across America who climbed up the political ladder and landed in the nation’s capital.

  So connect the dots and the link was clear. Different mountains to climb, but the same rules for reaching the pinnacle of success.

  Climbing high was something that Goldstein had clearly achieved. Four stories above the commercial chaos of the street was located the offices of Screw Magazine. Each morning, Al Goldstein arrived in his stretched white limo, certainly the only limousine between 6th and 7th Avenues. His presence was a daily reminder of how we reward those who sell well, regardless of the merchandise. The fact that Goldstein traveled in a chauffeured-driven car equipped with a video recorder, color television and well stocked bar, despite earning his money from two inch by four inch ads advertising so-called lonely housewives and bored co-eds hustling for sex, was an important lesson for those who sold meat shish kebabs for three dollars or pushed out the door cheaply made household crap.

  That Goldstein socialized with famous entertainers and publishers; that he was invited to the hot parties and got laid with seeming abandonment, thrilled the shop owners and salesman and shoppers who saw Goldstein as an accessible embodiment of the American Dream.

  “The whole American Dream is being flushed down the toilet by this group of horny, corrupt, southern hick politicians.” The speaker’s words were slow, like that of a drinker. But his speech patterns were not from the effects of alcohol. When the bullet smashed into his spine outside of the courthouse in Lawrenceville, Georgia more than twenty years ago, it affected his speech. His face still looked farm-fed; the strong look of a young man, though the body was now wasting. Flynt spoke slowly, maybe from the mountains of pills swallowed each day, but the razor sharp mind that figured out how to make a fortune from sex was intact. And with his competitor and friend, he could show his anger.

  “We should hire a dozen prostitutes and film ‘em having sex. That will take care of the whole bunch. Or maybe they don‘t have sex, except with their mothers.” Al Goldstein spoke in rapid fire bursts, his nasal high voice filled with the intense energy of a Jewish kid from Queens who had far outshone his school bus driver father. Goldstein suffered his own physical problems, but his were self-imposed. In recent years his weight had mushroomed to ridiculous and dangerous levels, necessitating frequent visits to a fat farm in North Carolina.

  “Nahhh, that won't work.” Drawled Flynt, waving his hand in an agitated manner. "Everybody's too careful right now....and you got entrapment issues...I’m thinking we should run some advertising campaign against the Republicans to smoke them out.” Flynt was pissed Goldstein was not taking the conversation seriously. He wasn’t sure why he had bothered to visit. There had been a time when Goldstein had truly cared about constitutional issues and politics, but less so lately. Easy money and sex had dulled Goldstein's political fever.

  Flynt looked around Goldstein’s office. Scattered about were new cheap toys, sophisticated video gadgets, telescopes, lava lamps, nude pictures and the latest consumer releases from Japan. It was the upscale version of the bewildering choice offered by the peddlers from the street. Flynt inwardly shuddered. His Beverly Hills office was sleek and refined, everything kept in perfect order.

  “You play with all these toys?” He finally asked his host.

  Goldstein looked sheepish. “Tax write-off.” He then shrugged. “When I’m not having sex I’m bored.” Then the usual Goldstein jab. “You still can do sex, can’t you?”

  Flynt thought again about the bullet that had made him the unwanted member of an exclusive club that included Martin Luther King, the Kennedy Brothers, Ronald Reagan, George Wallace and John Lennon. His own brush with death was sealed by publishing an interracial picture of a couple having sex. A white supremacist was believed the attempted assassin. Flynt saw himself now as the voice for the working class stiff, trapped in a shitty job, getting by on paycheck to paycheck who didn't need no politician telling him that getting off on lewd pictures was the government's damn business.

  Flynt didn't know the president. But the smut publisher was determined to come to his aid. Those Republicans screaming with indignation of a married man having sex with a young girl, as if none had ever cheated on their cow-looking wives.

  Flynt fumed thinking of what Congress had ignored during the impeachment battle. Wrestling with the collapsing Soviet empire, the break-up of Yugoslavia, that wacko in Iraq, the religious nuts in Iran. Instead, the public’s money was spent on a never-ending investigation by the Republican hired gun Kenneth Starr. All this when opinion polls showed the American public overwhelmingly supported the president and wanted to move on from the whole embarrassing affair.

  Something had to be done. Someone had to do something. The question whirling through his head for the past week was what how to throw a cog in the Republican moral crusade and witch-hunt.

  Flynt watched Goldstein signing invoices and instinctively adjusted his half-functioning body as if it had only fallen asleep from sitting too long in the wheelchair. He had an idea....a way to help turn the battle back onto the attackers.

  “Ya let me run an ad in your trashy paper?”

  Goldstein enjoyed shocking even friends. “I’ll give you 50% off if you have sex with a midget.”

  Flynn held his own. “Not into midgets. Seventy five per cent off and you can suck me.”

  “Deal.”

  * * *

  Flynts' bodyguard and nurse helped him out through the run-down office. It’s a shame, he thought while being pushed to the elevators. A man like Goldstein, who as a brash young reporter had once interviewed Fidel Castro, had lost interest in using his magazine as an instrument for change.

  Out in the street Flynt stopped for a café con leche, the strong espresso cup of Cuban coffee. The hurrying shoppers, the screaming salesmen, the cheap products, all were a far cry from his Los Angeles office. But he felt at home. Like in the eastern Kentucky of his upbringing what you saw he
re on 14th Street was what you got. A toilet plunger for a buck just ain’t gonna last for long. But when you have little money and the toilet is stopped up and the wife is screaming, you buy the cheap plunger grateful someone was thinking of you. The coffee gave his tired body an instant lift. Politicians like Henry Hyde and Bob Barr and Newt Gingrich made him furious. That they were all Republicans mattered none. It was the hypocrisy of their dictating a way of life they couldn't even bother to uphold. Like all them preachers attacking him and soon enough caught with prostitutes.

  A caffeine and sugar rush was helping form a plan in his mind. Maybe the time with Goldstein had been worthwhile after all.

  Once he had been hosted into the van, he picked up the car phone to call his office. His assistant answered immediately. “Here’s what I need,” he instructed. Small talk was a luxury he no longer enjoyed. He gulped to take a satisfying breadth. “Find out the cost for full page ads in the New York Times and Washington Post.” To hell with Goldstein and his magazine. To battle with the big boys you had to do it right.

  A small squat Hispanic woman rushed up to the van. She had seen the wheelchair and knew only that the occupant was wealthy and handicapped. “A special prayer for Jesus,” she shouted through the window, “will make you walk again.”

  Flynt cursed under his breath. Religion held people like this woman down. But it comforted them when their husbands ran off with the money, when the men cheated, when the men disappeared, there was always religion to soothe the hurt. As if those preaching were any better than those sinning.

  Yeah, Flynt knew what to do. If he had taken anything away from his years of battling the Moral Majority, it was how any sort of polite discussion of constitutional rights and common-sense laws accomplished nothing. Entrenched power responded only to brute force action.

  “Let’s go. Time to go home,” he said to the driver. Soon the jungle of 14th Street was a forgotten memory.

  ~ ~ ~

  Chapter 9

  From the bag of Gigi Bienvenue came seven candles, four of which were predominately white and three predominately red. The white stood for purity and healing. The red was for love. But each candle also had some black wax, to signify the change in feeling that was taking place tonight. The wax was carefully chosen; only beehives from Slidell, Louisiana were deemed pure enough.

  Gigi was employing a cunning strategy on the unwitting Florida congressman, seeking to instill warm feelings between him and Livingston rather than trying to break the congressman's will. In a voodoo ceremony the strategy of the practitioner is key. Every ingredient used, every word uttered, the order of the events, all must be exactly right for the black magic to take effect.

  While Gigi emptied her bag, Corwin jumped up and obligingly switched off the room light, but left the television with the sound turned up high.

  Now Gigi took out a three-inch knife with a gold handle and etched into the white and red wax the name of the Cuban-American congressman. Then she cut off each of the top wicks, and scrapped the wax off of each of the bottom ends - the black wax. When she had a new wick from the black wax side, the candles were lit. As the black wax, or unwanted emotion, melted away, the ceremony would commence.

  Next came the cakes, the ritual flag sparkling with sequins and a bottle with a clear liquid. Gigi dropped to her knees, beginning to draw on the floor the vever. This was the design made of a white dust, usually cornmeal or flour, which would signify to the Loa-- the waiting angels or spirits that serve as gatekeepers to the Bon Dieu or good god---that a new voodoo campaign had begun. It was meant as a sign of respect.

  Tucker was down eight points in the polls when he had bumped into the young woman. The election had a month to go; it was his first election since taking over from his scandalized predecessor. The primary had left him exposed, primarily because of the many mistakes of a novice. Why not give black magic a try? He forgot about his dinner that night and took the girl back to his campaign headquarters. Most of his backers thought the idea nuts. But not Carlton Jones, who agreed to put Gigi on salary. That was six congressional campaigns ago. And several campaigns for the other two men in the room.

  Gigi had helped each of them overcome political adversaries, realize satisfaction in their love lives, fight through the despair from the death of a loved one and when necessary, march with them into battle to extract vengeance when wronged. The voodoo priestess was the weapon they agreed never to talk about, not to friends, colleagues, staffers, lovers or campaign supporters.

  There were rumors, sure, but it was a blood oath none had violated.

  Gigi believed in each of these men and they, in turn, believed in her not only as a political weapon but also as the most recent link in a chain that stretched back into the darkest chapters in their own histories. Each of these politicians had Creole blood. Accepted as fact since their childhood was the reality of the hidden world Gigi could summon on their behalf.

  * * *

  While Gigi drew the vever the others began clapping the beat that was the batterie. Yet again the University Club, just a few blocks from the White House, was transformed into an ancient black magic ceremony. All joined in, the politicians and Tanya, clapping while Gigi sprinkled on the floor the cornmeal, next the oils, then the bones and lastly the feathers. The bongo-like beat of the clapping provided the rhythm to the priestess's movements. Her left arm seemed to float and hover until horizontal, while the right bid the work of the ancient ceremony. Gigi’s body dipped and rose, dipped and rose again before murmuring softly in her 19th century English-African-French dialect the invocations inviting the spirits to bear witness to this moment.

  For Tucker this was a moment of joy.

  Tommy Tucker loved having Gigi in his political arsenal. He believed it a crucial element to the mystique of being Congressman Tucker. Rumors of secret campaign weapons scared off would be challengers and gave hometown reporters second thoughts about writing exposes on his business dealings. And even though Gigi turned down each and every advance he had made towards her over the years, he still was mesmerized.

  The initial rebuff was that very first evening. Gigi had a body that was all muscle and radiated energy from within. More and more he tapped into her vitality; using her energy to rejuvenate his worn down feelings. Turning sixty-five had left Tucker more depressed than usual. Ten months ago the doctors had found a cancerous tumor in his colon. It was small and probably caught in time but the whole episode had taken its toll.

  At first Tucker gave serious consideration to making a public announcement, with his wife standing by his side and maybe one of the doctors. That would be good for some sympathy and he sure felt like he needed some lovin'. Even public lovin'. In the end he had decided to tell no one other than his wife. Not Tanya or Gigi or his so-called mistress who at the first sign of his mystery weariness left town, she said, to spend time with her mother.

  When in doubt he would hold the cards close to his vest. It was just the way he had learned to do the people’s business and it had served him well. No public sympathy had been needed for the two decades in public life and now was not the time to change.

  He needed a new lover, that’s what he was needing. He would speak to Tanya about how to get rid of Ashley. Find her a place of work back home or something like that. You always take care of those that take care of you, that was the Tucker motto.

  But he needed a new girl who would make him do silly things and feel foolish and well, just be spontaneous. That’s what a mistress was good for. Silly nicknames and shared secrets like two school kids in the back of the lunchroom. Over a few bourbons he had shared with his closest buddies how sex with a high-spirited young girl was just the tonic for the endless workdays and constant demands of being a politician. Most men his age were winding down the hours spent in the office, playing more golf, watching television or taking the long promised European trip with the wife. But there was no winding down as a congressman. Running for re-election every two years, raising funds nonstop. I
t was brutal for a man his age. Washington was hell on the health, that’s for sure. In that regard, he empathized with the president for being caught with his pants down. But he sure wasn’t gonna pass up the God-given opportunity, no sir.

  * * *

  *

  Gigi was whirling round and round over the circle she had created. For what must have been the hundredth time Tucker wondered if Gigi preferred the company of women. Had she slept with Tanya? There was a certain ease between the two. He looked over at Tanya, whose eyes were closed as her athletic body swayed to the beat. Tanya seemed far more relaxed with Gigi than with anyone, even with her new beau. In the University Club room, right at that moment, Tucker felt again the pangs of raw jealousy. Gigi would be the ultimate catch for any man - exotic power and Creole sexuality rolled together.

  In her bare feet the priestess danced in a tight circle, her long white dress billowing like the sails of a three-mast schooner. Twirling ten times in rapid succession, Gigi drew the first part of the event to a close, satisfied all was in order. The group stopped clapping. Now would be the heart of the ceremony, the use of the voodoo doll to summon the angels to aid their request. While Senator Byrd of West Virginia droned on from the television, Gigi pulled out the voodoo doll created for tonight.

  The doll's cross-shaped sticks formed the outline of the body. The sticks were held together with string made from hemp. Everyone knew that wrapped around the sticks was Spanish moss taken from the Bienvenue farm. The frazzled ends of the moss also became the hands and the hair. Gigi liked to use cotton from the Mississippi Delta for the doll’s head. This doll had buttons for eyes. Gigi was given the handkerchief, which she glued onto the doll’s chest. She then took the congressman’s hair and glued that to the cotton head. With the fluffy cotton and silly eyes and primitive look it could be a homemade doll for the enjoyment of any child. But this was a voodoo doll. It worked in ways no rational mind could conceive.