American Gangster (18 page)

With this kind of scene it makes sense that many of the “legitimate” businesses that have stayed on East Fourteenth Street during the down-times fall into the seedy category. Up the stairs at the Gramercy Gym, where Cus D'Amato trained Patterson and Jose Torres, the fighters don't think too much about the sleazos below. Fighters figure they're on the fringe of the law themselves. They don't point fingers. But they keep
distance. They know that Placidyls make it tough to run six miles in the morning.

At Jullian's Billiards, one of the great film-noir light-over-the-faded-green-cloth-Luther-Lassiter-played-here pool halls in New York, hardly anyone makes mention of the scene either. The old men who sit on the wood benches, watching the nine-ball games, don't have time to think about creeps. Nine-ball's got a big element of luck, true. But it's the money game up there, and anytime money's on the table you've got to concentrate. So just shoot pool, Fast Eddie. Who cares who pisses in the hallway?

Down the street, Paula Klaw has her private thoughts. She's been on East Fourteenth Street for better than thirty years. She remembers when the cuchifrito stand was a Rikers Coffee Shoppe. And when there were two Hungarian restaurants on this block. She is not, however, complaining. “Who am I to complain?” says Paula Klaw. Paula Klaw runs Movie Star News, a film-still and “nostalgia” store stuffed into the second floor of the building next to the Jefferson Theatre. It's the best place in the city to buy photos of Clive Brook and Irene Dunn. As Paula says, the street has a “strong movie pedigree.” D. W. Griffith's original Biograph Studio, where Lilly and Dolly Gish made one-reelers, was on Fourteenth Street near Second Avenue. Buster Keaton became a star here.

Plenty of film was shot inside Movie Star News, too. As attested to by the half-soot-covered sign painted on the window, this used to be the studio of
IRVING KLAW, THE PINUP KING
. Irving, Paula's late brother, shot thousands of bondage pictures up here during the 1940s and '50s. Most of those pictures were of Bettie Page, the most famous bondage model of them all. Irving used his 8 x 10 camera to shoot Bettie for a variety of rags that had names like
Eyeful, Wink
, and
Black Nylons
. Most of the pics were distributed by mail order, which would lead to Irving running afoul of the blue-nose Kefauver Hearings on “juvenile delinquency.”

“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 in 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.