No sooner had I survived the Yawn Patrol than I had to start on my first Penthouse piece, “The Passing of Baltimore’s Block.” Having been raised in a very moral and church-going family, I felt weird about writing for Penthouse. On top of that I was a recently converted good Lefty pro-feminist dude, though I scarcely acted like one. I talked to my agent, Georges Borchardt, about my reservations. How could I, a bona fide Left Wing Clown, write about strippers for a sleazy magazine like Penthouse? His attitude was interesting. He told me that if I wrote well I would be filling up the pages with intelligent commentary instead of another display of skin, so it was my duty to write for anyone who would pay me. He also said it would help me pay the rent when I left teaching and moved to New York, which I was planning to do at the end of the school year.
I found both these arguments persuasive.
Besides I did have a love/hate relationship with the sleaze of Baltimore’s block. Though it was filled with clip joints, hookers, and bad men, it was also my last connection with the Old Baltimore of my youth. My grandfather, Robert Roland Ward, was a ship’s captain out of old Pier I in Baltimore. Squat, built like a tank, Cap, as he was called by everyone, was as tough as the ships he guided down the Chesapeake. His last ship, the old Port Welcome, took people on pleasure cruises down the Chesapeake Bay to Betterton and Tolchester, fading beachfront destinations (broken down Ferris wheels, half-speed carousels, balloon shooting stalls, and throw-the-ring-over-the-bottle scams) on the Eastern Shore. I went with him as an ordinary seaman and wiper, perhaps the worst job aboard a ship. The wiper wiped oil on the engine so it didn’t overheat and blow up. The engine room was about ten thousand degrees, or so it seemed, when you were down there for five or six hours.
In spite of the tedium of the job I loved “shipping out” with my granddad, even if it was only a day run down the bay. Sometimes I would sleep over on the ship and Cap would come down and pat me on the head, and say, “What a good boy!” I was very close to his wife, my grandmother, Grace, one of the finest people I’ve ever met. But I barely knew Cap at all. So these trips gave me a chance to get close to him, and to find out that he loved me, dearly, something the rough-hewn guy would never admit out loud. To tell the truth, I often wondered if Cap really even loved Grace. She was a teetotaler; he was a heavy drinker. She was a civil rights leader; Cap couldn’t have cared less about any of that. He was away for months at a time when he was younger, running tankers all the way down the Eastern Seaboard and around the Gulf of Mexico. She was home with the kids: Robert, my dad, and her daughter, Ida Louise, who grew up to become a powerful woman in the department of Health, Education, and Welfare. Finally, she was a serious church woman, and I doubted if Cap believed in God at all.
My question concerning my grandparents’ love for one another was answered one day when I was at a bar with my grandfather. We had just come off the ship after a week’s work and received our pay in a white envelope from the paymaster, who sat in a battered white shack on the old, swaying dock. The crew of the Port Welcome then went across Pratt Street to blow their money at the Wishing Well, a tavern built there for just that purpose.
I had just turned eighteen, and my grandfather invited me to come along. I was shy, and not much of a drinker. But the idea of drinking with “real seamen,” especially Cap, was too exciting to turn down.
The Wishing Well could only be described as a serious waterside dump. There was a bar, some crude tables, and battered chairs. But on a Saturday afternoon it was filled with seamen. Now every Tom, Dick, and Lawyer has a tattoo, but back then sailors got them on their adventures in foreign ports. The place was filled with guys who looked like they had come out of Treasure Island. Old salts with grizzled faces, missing half their teeth, guys with broken noses, and scarred throats from knife fights.
I bellied up to the bar (which had no stools) alongside Cap and we ordered boilermakers. Beer and a shot of whiskey. I watched as my granddad downed his in one toss and did the same. The whiskey burned and I had to turn away, and hit my chest to keep from coughing. Seconds later, another shot appeared in front of me. Cap put his big arm around me and said, “Well, ain’t this a day!” I was exhausted from all the sun on the bay, and the engine work, and now the booze took its toll on me, pronto. I smiled and hugged him back. Then I noticed a new guy who had slipped in on Cap’s other side.
“Hey, Rob,” he said.
“Hey, Masters,” Cap said. “Want you to meet my grandson, Bobby.”
“Hey there, kid,” Masters said. He was a big guy with a face like a lopsided football.
I nodded hello.
“How you doing, Cap?” Masters said.
“Good. Just got our pay. First time I been here for a while.”
Masters laughed in a knowing way and looked at me.
“That’s ’cause of your grandmother, kid,” he said. “She tells Captain Rob to stop drinking, he stops.”
I nodded and smiled but said nothing back. I felt disloyal saying anything negative about Grace, whom I loved more than anyone in the world.
My grandfather seemed to pick up on my discomfort. He turned to Masters and said:
“Now don’t start badmouthing Grace, Masters. I won’t have it.”
Masters belted back another shot and looked a little dazed.
“Ah, Rob,” he said. “Why do you defend that old bag?”
I literally froze at the bar. “Old bag”? This was Grace Ward he was talking about. I felt such a fury at his words that I could barely speak. Which was fine, because Cap spoke for me.
He turned to Masters and said: “Don’t ever talk about my wife like that. You hear me? Never!”
But Masters was already belting back another whiskey and laughing. “C’mon, Rob. You gotta admit. That old broad has got your number.”
“Hey,” I said. “That’s enough of that kind of talk.”
“Hey, listen to the tough guy,” Masters said. “Your grandmother is a mean old bag, boy. High time you knew it.”
He looked as though he might want to continue his speech but he never got the chance. My grandfather punched him in the nose so hard that it looked like a squashed tomato. Blood flew all over Masters’s shirt and he fell like an anchor to the barroom floor.
The whole bar became deathly still and people moved away, as though the two men were having an Old West gunfight.
“Don’t tell Grace, Bobby,” he said, as he reached down to help Masters up. “She hates it when I get into a brawl.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “You think he’s all right?”
“Oh, yeah. He’s always getting into fights. Tough guy too. That’s why I hit him first. Anybody tries to bully you, always get the first blow in.”
He half carried Masters to a table and sat him down in a chair. An old grizzled guy looked at him and laughed.
“That was quite a shot, Rob,” he said.
My grandfather laughed and patted Masters gently on the head, like he was petting a dog.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said. “I know a better place.”
We walked out onto Pratt Street. Across the cobblestones was our ship, the Port Welcome. Gulls dove to the rotten old pier, picking up some popcorn an old rummy had left for them. There was a bum panhandling just outside the Wishing Well door.
“Hey,” he said. “I was once an officer and a gentleman, Cap.”
“I know that,” Cap said, and peeled off a twenty, and handed it to him.
“Gee that was a lot of money, Cap,” I said.
“He was a good man before he got onto the booze. We went through a lot of scraps together.”
We headed up to Baltimore Street, and all the strip joints. I was in shock. I had no idea my grandfather knew about any of this. But then it made perfect sense to me. He was a seaman, a drunk, and a man’s man. I was really so incredibly innocent. My friends and I had gotten into a few scrapes but basically we were good kids.
My grandfather was another type of cat. Another kind of man. The kind you don’t meet in polite middle-class society.
We walked down tawdry Baltimore Street, past neon lights. The Club Troc. Girls, Girls, Girls. Each club had a doorman who laid out his rap to get you inside. “See things here that you can see nowhere outside the Orient. C’mon in. Two for one on well drinks.”
We finally came to the Gayety Theatre, Baltimore’s oldest and finest burlesque house. The strippers there were once world famous. Now burlesque, like the Port Welcome, was a fading business. People watched television, went to the movies. Live strip shows, in a theatre, with comics and an orchestra was something out of the ’20s. Only a few of the old places were even operating anymore. There was constant talk in the papers of a moral crusade to tear the Gayety down.
There was a small bar in front of the theatre, the Gayety Bar, and my grandfather sat me down on a stool. Within seconds an older woman bartender named Ruby came up to us.
“Hi, Cap,” she said. “Who’s this youngster?”
“My grandson, Bobby,” he said. “He’s my mate now.”
God, I was so thrilled to hear those words. My mate. Even writing them down now I feel a thrill inside, though all of this happened over forty years ago.
Soon we were drinking and laughing with all the local characters at the bar. There was a skinny guy who sold watches, and another big, hairy guy who sold ties. He had them inside his overcoat, which seemed about two sizes too large for him. They all obviously loved my grandfather, who became even more popular because he bought everyone there drinks.
I had another boilermaker, and looked hazily at the pictures of the girls inside.
I wondered if he knew any of the girls. It seemed likely, of course, but I still couldn’t quite believe it. My grandfather had this whole other life away from the family. And now, for the first time, I got it. It was tawdry, cheap, and exciting as hell down here. We had a couple more drinks and then another shipmate named Sparky John wandered in. Sparky was a nomad. He worked on ships in the summer and in the winter went to Florida where he was a clown and a roustabout in rodeo shows. He was a big guy, with a bulbous nose with a scar running across it. He told how he’d gotten it saving a couple Dobermans that had were fighting in the water. When he tried to pull them back to safety, the dogs had panicked and clawed him across the nose. But he had saved the dogs. On board ship he was a mate, but his actual job was to dress like a clown and entertain the young passengers with his magic tricks. I loved him, like I loved everything in those days.
My grandfather bought us all more drinks. I could barely stand up.
Sparky started to tell us all a story about meeting Elvis Presley on the movie Roustabout. I was stunned. I didn’t know mere mortals could even meet Elvis. I loved his records so much that he seemed like someone from another planet. I tried to be cool, but finally blurted out: “You actually know Elvis?”
“Sure,” Sparky said. “He’s a great kid too.”
Elvis, a kid? That threw me too. I guess to Sparky, who was in his fifties, he was. To me though, Elvis was God.
We had a few more drinks, then my granddad smiled and said, “Well, Bobby, I gotta get home to Grace. You coming?”
“Why don’t you stay around a while?” Sparky said. “If it’s all right with you, Cap?”
My grandfather looked at him and shook his head. “Well, yeah. I guess so. But you take care of him. I don’t want him getting sick.”
Sparky looked at me and smiled. “Don’t you worry. I got this covered.”
My granddad looked at me and shook his head. “My big grandson. You take care now. And never say nothing about this to Grace.”
“Don’t worry, Cap,” I said. We hugged one another then, and I could smell his chewing tobacco.
He walked out of the bar and down the street. His legs were bowed, seaman’s legs, my dad called them. He looked a little like a silent movie clown. Chaplin… but with the build of Jimmy Cagney.
“Your granddad’s a great man,” Sparky said. “He gives an old mate a chance.”
“Yeah,” I said. “He is.”
We had another drink and traded our histories, though my own was so skimpy that I barely knew what to say. Sparky had been an orphan, hitchhiked around the world by the time he was twenty, and become a circus clown, after being a dishwasher, a security guard, a farmer, a logger… the list went on forever.
He was like someone out of a Woody Guthrie song. He had been all over the world, didn’t have a dime, and seemed a happy man.
After one more beer, he said: “You want to meet some of the girls?”
“Girls?” I said. I wasn’t being coy. I didn’t understand what he meant.
“Inside. The peelers?”
“Oh, the peelers?” I said. “Sure.”
I knew peelers must mean strippers, but like him knowing Elvis, it just didn’t seem possible. I had come to the Gayety with a fake ID and seen the women taking off their clothes before but there was a magical barrier between the stage and the audience. No one like me could know them.
I mean in a way they were unreal, like… like movie actresses.
It seemed impossible and yet, here we were, talking to someone at a side entrance and going backstage… and there they were, vaudeville clowns, and this fantastic stripper named Tempest Storm. She was cheap and overpainted and her red hair was too shellacked but she was also the most beautiful woman I had ever seen in my life. She smiled at me and said: “Hello, Bobby. Any friend of Sparky’s is a friend of mine. Are you in college?”
“Uh-huh,” I said, like a dead man. “Yeah… I go to Towson.”
“That’s great,” she said. “Have you ever seen the show?”
“Uh, no,” I said. I couldn’t tell her the truth. I was ashamed that I had looked at her naked before. Even though that’s what she did for a living. I felt a complete fool.
“Well, this should be fun for you. You boys can watch from the wings.”
She batted her eyes at me, pressed my hands with hers, and went off to her dressing room.
Sparky and I walked to the wings, and peered out. The place was half empty.
A comedian was on the stage, doing a doctor and nurse bit with a blonde with huge boobs and the world’s shortest nurse uniform. The jokes were terrible, but when they came off both of them seemed happy.
“Went over good,” the comedian said.
He looked at me, and I nodded and smiled enthusiastically.
“Great,” I said.
He pinched my cheek and waddled in his big shoes toward the back.
We stayed for a while more. Waiting for Tempest. The way it worked was that the older strippers came on first. Up close to them I could see their wrinkles and how much makeup they needed to appear young. On stage, they took a beating as they peeled away their clothes.
“Put it back on, baby!”
“Ugh. Don’t make me look!”
But as each of them came off, they all smiled and kept a perky attitude. One of them said, “I killed them.” She was lucky. Only one or two people had thrown candy boxes at her.
Another old stripper came on a few minutes later. She had her clothes half off, when she winced. Something had hit her, but I couldn’t see what it was.
“What the fuck?” she said, as something else hit her.
Sparky pointed to the stage.
“Guys are shooting paper clips at her,” Sparky said. “With rubber bands. Old trick.”
“Man, that must hurt.”
The girl winced again.
“Be right back,” Sparky said. “You wait here.”
“Uh-uh,” I said. “You go, I go.”
He shrugged and we took off around the outside of the curtain and soon found ourselves out in the audience.
There, in the middle of the theatre, were three tough-looking teenagers with Duck’s Ass pompadours, long hair piled high, like black pasta. In New York they were known as gang members, or JDs for juvenile delinquents, but in Baltimore we called them “drapes.” They wore slick, cheap-looking suits, and black shoes with three-inch Cuban heels. They were tough guys.
We watched as the oldest of the three lined up his rubber band, and shot a paper clip at the elderly stripper.
He hit her on the leg and she screamed and looked furiously out at the audience.
Sparky John moved with the quickness of a pulling guard. I followed behind him. I was scared but told myself I’d rather die than chicken out.
We came upon the three of them as they were getting out a new box of paper clips.
“Get out of here,” Sparky said. “Now.”
The tough boy stood up, and stared at him.
“Fuck you, scar nose,” he said.
Sparky pushed him back down in his seat. Another boy stood up, and I pushed him back down. I could not believe I had done this.
The three boys looked at each other. They weren’t afraid, and they weren’t backing down.
“You shoot that woman again, and you are going to disappear, kid. I mean forever.” Sparky said. He reached into his old, filthy overcoat, and showed the handle of a gun to the young hoodlums.
I felt my pulse racing but it was all over. The three seemed to lose all their confidence.
“We already paid for our tickets,” one of them said.
“Leave now and I won’t shoot you in the face,” Sparky said.
The three of them got up and left in record time. They practically ran over one another trying to get out of the place.
Sparky and I sat down in their seats.
“Don’t tell Cap about this, Bobby,” he said. “He’d fire me for sure.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m not going to say a thing. That gun? Is it loaded?”
“Hell yes,” Sparky said. He pulled it out and aimed it at me. Then shot me in the head with a stream of water.
“Jesus,” I said.
“Every clown needs a water pistol,” he said.
Then we both cracked up and watched Tempest Storm take off her clothes.
“Hey, Ward-o, this is Mike. Let’s go down the Block tonight, whatya say? They got Chili Peppers, yah know, didju see her last time? She gets up onna stage, cups her hands over her breasts and says, in this incredibly sexy voice, ‘Heeeeey Beeeeeg Boyyyyys, cooooome up here, with Chiliiiiii, nooooo?’ She drives you outta’ your mind. Look, my folks are comin’, I’ll meet you and Spencer down at Arundel at nine.”
And then comes the lying, and the cajoling, and the champion riffing. “Ah, Mom, I gotta go to the library for a while. Yeah, I gotta go study up on the… ah… Crimean War. It’s real interesting. Lotta people got massacred. See you later.” Then I’m off to meet Mike and Spence who will take us in his ’56 two-tone Willy’s down to the Northwood Liquors, where we will pay off Jim, the shopping-cart collector, two dollars to buy us a pint of Sloe Gin. Ah, so silky smooth, gives you quite a buzz, friends. Just right for the occasion, for tonight. Soon we were tooling down Loch Raven Boulevard past the veterans’ hospital, and I thought of them in there all coughing and hacking away with the bad TB, and I felt sorry that they couldn’t be with us. Couldn’t drive with us down to Baltimore Street, our city’s two-block strip of sin. Ah, the Block, with its Club Oasis, and Club Troc ($1.75 a beer), and that unspeakable armpit, the Miami Club (“Live Rats on Stage”). And then there’s our true Shangri-la, the ancient Gayety Burlesque House, with its golden pillars and rococo stage with the plaster nymphs peering out of the eaves. And on that stage, in that green-blue-indigo spotlight, were our saints of the Block: Ms. Chili Peppers, Ms. Candy Barr (“A Little Piece of Southern Hospitality”), and Ms. Virginia Bell (“and her Fab 44s”). Oh, we came as a gang, but we went away like a congregation who had seen the light. And you might say it was chauvinism, and you might yell it was one-dimensional, but what a dimension. For this was the real ’50s, that era we worship as secure and safe and fun. But for those of us approaching or waving good-bye to thirty, the ’50s was, above all, the Age of Horniness. Legs you could not see, but only imagine. Breasts that pushed out from V-necks, huge breasts of Pam Hooper and Diane Conway, eighth-grade Wonderwomen. And necks and backs and piles of stiff starched hair piled on the head in beehives. And what did they keep in those hollow cones, what instruments of delicious torture?
And the questions, the endless questions:
“Didja hear about Mole? He got tit offa Sandy Franklin.”
“No, I don’t believe it.”
“No, he did. He’s straight about it. He coulda maybe scored a home run, but her old man came in.”
And, Dear Readers, we were not, let me emphasize, we were not those ’50s Innocents, with the pathetic bebop lingo. Oh, we spoke that scan every once in a while, but there was always the parody. The self-parody, which itself was full of hope, and full of worship for the female form. Tit, for God’s sake, impossible, unreachable, invisible. And Ass, and the Other, which you didn’t even think about. Oh, sure, you were a tough dude, with your pink jacket with “Four Aces” stitched on the back, and you were ready to support the Greeks against the Remington Avenue Drapes—but THEY were still out there, those perfect girls, like “Diana” by Paul Anka, and the “Queen of the Hop,” who turned away when you came near, as if you smelled strange. And we scowling mean-assed kids who rode around Loch Raven Reservoir mooning the necking couples… we could not be released.
And so we went instead to the Block, to see our fallen angels. These women, these strippers, these exotic dancers, were, to us pimply, mumbling, and pathetic youths, the real girlfriends, saints, and artists of our world. And it was a fine art, friends. Ask the man who came to the blue light of the Gayety, a Baltimore News Post (“IKE SAYS NO TO KOREAN DEMANDS”) rising, rising mysteriously off of his lap. And ask Jack D., the toughest of the Greeks, whose chiseled features melted, widened, and spread with joy at the sight of Candy Barr’s long cowboy-booted legs. And ask Michael Spencer, who cursed and hooted when we had to wait for the dead-eyed rummy comics to finish their bits:
“Don’t yell at me, boys. Are you wif or agin me?”
“You’re as funny as a fart inna space suit.”
Which is no way to act around Billy “Cheese ’n Crackers” Williams, who is doing his damnedest to make us howl.
But we were not amused. We were waiting for the royal entertainment, Blaze Starr bustling out on stage, with that apple-red hair and those huge, buoyant breasts. We wanted Chili Peppers who came on, and lay on her red bench, and lifted her one black-meshed leg to the spotlight, and began to tickle that same leg with a peacock feather, and then let that feather work its way ever so slowly to the dark V in between those perfect thighs, and then slowly took off those hose, and worked that feather around and around in there, and let out with those little ecstatic apostrophes to nature, love, and sex, well, let me tell you, folks, we believed in the Act.…. This wasn’t any cheapo strip routine… this wasn’t any top-heavy Irma the Body bouncing her jugs at the boys in the front row, this here was class… and the moment of revelation, the revelation of the mystery of sex and the essence and the torture of major teenage lust!
The idea, friends, was Adventure and Romance. The reality was my grandfather, Captain Robert Ward, at seventy-four the oldest sea captain in the Baltimore harbor. He managed to get Michael and me jobs as ordinary wipers and deckhands on a broken-down old tourist boat named the Port Welcome. This was not Trader Horn, friends, nor the Queen Mary. This tub’s route consisted of a leisurely, not to say dull, cruise down the Chesapeake Bay, with stops at Tolchester, Maryland, a seaport distinguished mainly by its stinging sea nettles, and Betterton Beach, which featured a clapboard fortress called the Hotel Betterton—a construction that leaned at a sixty-degree angle over the lapping waves.
So it was not the Arabian Nights, but it was romantic all the same. Sparky, the ship’s clown and alcoholic extraordinaire, kept us alive and excited with his tales of loose women and card games in the Virgin Islands. A huge, powerful man with kinky black hair and a bulbous Karl Malden nose distinguished by a long scar that crossed the veiny bridge and ended at his short mustache, Sparky became our Long John Silver, our Wallace Beery, our newest Brother in the ongoing struggle against our own middle-class roots. We loved him with the desperation of the young.
He loved us in return, and took us to every club on the Block, where we were now accepted as regulars. He introduced us to Tempest Storm, a red-haired beauty who, we were told, was involved with the Long family of Louisiana. He shared his wine with the paraplegic Arky the Bagman, who rolled up and down the Block on a platform screaming Ahhhhhh Ahhhhhh, his blue eyes rolling around helplessly in his head. He took us down by the docks, where we sat and drank Jim Beam, and he told us of how he had been in Florida on location with Elvis Presley, shooting one of the Great E’s horrible movies. On those mornings when he wasn’t totally sick (and they became fewer and fewer), he woke us up and dragged us on deck to see the sun. We were embarrassed by his romanticism and his sentimentality, but his courage and generosity won us over. I remember the night we sat in the Gayety watching Candy Barr, and Sparky turned us on to some hash and told us about his nose scar. Two Dobermans had been fighting on the beach at Bermuda, and their scrap had sent them out into the water. Soon they were out too deep, in danger of drowning. Sparky dived in, fully clothed, and tried to separate them. For his efforts, the panic-stricken dogs had both turned on him and nearly bitten and clawed him to death.
“But I saved those bastards,” he said.
And we believed him. Like Blaze and like Chili, we believed in his Act, and we were happy to have been able to bring some species of love into his rough and troubled life. One of the last nights Michael and I ever saw him (the summer was ending and he was going off to Florida to make the carny circuit) he took us to the Two O’Clock Club, which was now owned by Blaze Starr. Before we realized what was happening, we were sitting at the back bar with Blaze herself. Sparky was telling her about two sailors who had robbed and beaten another member of the Port Welcome’s crew, an old sailor named Gene, who was famous on board ship for being able to hand-roll his cigarettes faster than anyone else.
“They try to rob me all the time, honey,” Blaze said in a hoarse voice that sent shivers up my back, “but I do just like you, Roy, I kick their asses.” Then she gave a deep rich laugh, and Michael began to shake his head.
“She’s wonderful,” he said. “She’s like a cross between Lucille Ball and Mae West.”
“And better than either of them,” I said, patting my friend on the back.
“Hey, you two,” Sparky said, “I’m outta cash. How about buying a round of drinks?”
“They’re on me,” said Blaze. She smiled at us and nodded her head.
“Thank you,” we said, feeling small and intimidated, but very good.
“It’s nothing,” she said. “I treat my friends good, honey.”
In June 1973, a young man, fresh out of his second marriage and deep within the dream world of his own miseries, his new novel, and his newly freed angst-terror plans, made the trek from upper New York State, down superhighway 81, past the mountains and steel towns in Pennsylvania, finally stopping at the old shingled house on Woodbourne Avenue in Baltimore, Maryland.
On my second day back in my old city, I spoke with the current mayor, Donald J. Schaeffer, and the commissioner of Housing and Community Development, Robert Embry. Both of them were justly proud of the plans for Baltimore, and both of them sounded a bit amused, and at the same time concerned, about what would happen to the Block, which would, if it stayed where it is, be right in the middle of the new progressive downtown.
“We don’t want to tear it down,” said the mayor, “if it were only located someplace else. You know, if the Block owners could get together, and maybe agree on where they would like to go.”
Embry, a short, stocky man, said the same thing:
“We don’t want to get rid of the Block. Hell, it’s an attraction. But it’s going to seem a little odd sitting there next to the new district police station.”
Yes, I thought, that would be more than a little odd. But I kind of liked the idea that in the middle of all that beauty (stainless-steel variety; the new central police station has golden one-way windows, architect: Franz Kafka) and progress and security would be the little old ugly rundown funky con artist, whore-loving, exotic-dancing Block. A constant reminder of what we were all about. Like the newspaper article I had seen in the Baltimore Sun just the day before, “Father Stabs Son to Death over Crab Cake.” When asked how he could do such a thing the man had replied, “Well, there was only one left, and I was damned hungry.” Oh, yeah… the Block in the midst of Eden. It was an idea worth considering.…
And so… so… they are going to demolish the Block. In another year or two there will be no tawdry strip houses, no strippers. And what’s more, when I am in my right mind (and we must be in our right minds sometimes, friends), I suppose it’s inevitable. Who needs it anymore? Who is willing to… ah… suspend the disbelief? I mean you can go to Fells Point and get that college nooky baby, and there ain’t no teasing going down. But I still have this thing, see. I still believe in the Block. Or do I just believe in my own past, or want to believe in my own past? These things become difficult, they sorely do. And so, the next night, I found myself sitting once again with Ms. Blaze Starr in her Two O’Clock Club, across the street from the old Gayety, which burned down in ’71.
“For the insurance,” says Ms. Starr. “They got a lot of insurance out of that, honey.”
I smile and drink my Scotch and look around the Two O’Clock. It is a class place, black leather everywhere, and a huge horseshoe bar with the stage and the runway in the center. Right now the girls are starting to come in, and Blaze tells me to talk to them while she takes care of her finances.
“You know,” she says, “I’m one tough businesswoman, honey. I’ll be the last to go on the Block. And when they start closing the other places, I’ll triple my profits. Not that I wish the other owners any trouble, you understand. They’re my friends, but, honey… well.…”
She gives that smile. Oh, Mae West, forget it. In fact, oh, Virgin Mary, and Saint Teresa of the Roses, you can bag it, too. Blaze, Sister Blaze, is the main woman.
Next I talked to Miss Exotica 1973, whose Christian name is Ms. Terri Lawrence, and she comes from Highlandtown.
“Yeah,” she says, nervously working her hands over her curlers and chewing some gum, “I was working on the day shift at Procter and Gamble, you know, all that assembly-line work. The most boring job in the world, honey. And my friend Viki, she’s a dancer. Well, she says, come down here and try to be an exotic dancer. And I said I couldn’t. I meanstrip in front of a bunch of men? But I saw what kind of money they were making, and I tried it… the first night, I almost died. Some guys were drunk and yelling, and I had heard about what happened to Candy Sweet the day before. Some guy came out of the crowd and started to strangle her. But it was all right… it went over, in fact, a lot of guys really liked me… they cheered me… you know.….”
I knew. At least I think I knew. I knew what it was like in old row house Highlandtown, in those drab, endlessly dull summer nights. The only diversion was the Walt Disney flick or the bingo game. And I felt something new about these women, something beyond the romance of my youth, or my later super-political Brothers-and-Sisters-All consciousness. I now felt that what they were doing was, in its small way, heroic. They had opted for self-expression, for recognition, which most of us only dream about. They were willing to risk being laughed at, hooted at, even strangled rather than to go back on the assembly line.
A moment later, I was talking to Candy Sweet herself, a thin dark-haired girl of about twenty-six, with a rather pronounced overbite. She was shy and nervous, and like Terri Lawrence, played with her split ends while we chatted.
“I’m from Remington Avenue,” she said.
I was shocked and delighted. Our old enemies the Remington Avenue gang was without doubt the most feared of any gang in Northeast Baltimore. Behind the Marine Hospital and plush Johns Hopkins University were the old frame houses. The families came from West Virginia, and the deep South. They arrived in Baltimore with few skills, and tried to dig out a living. Everyone I had known from that area, except one boy who got a scholarship to the University of Maryland, had ended up on junk, on booze, or in jail. Or they were dead.
“I love Blaze,” said Candy Sweet. “She keeps the bums and the hustlers out of here. She don’t make us do nothing we don’t want to do.”
“Like what?”
“Oh… like the other bars… they aren’t as nice. They don’t have any class, you know… like a girl will have to give a guy head in a back room if he buys her champagne… or jerk him off under a table. We don’t have to do that here.”
Now, in spite of all my worldly experience, I felt a bit shocked. Saint Chili giving head in the back room. Oh, no, sir. Her appeal, after all, was that she was red-hot sensual, but also ice-cold unreachable. Myth. Perfection. Platonic sex. Head jobs in the back room? Ugh.
Candy left to get dressed, and Blaze returned.
“They treating you good, honey?” she said, patting me on the leg.
“Yes,” I said, “everyone’s been very helpful.”
“Well, I want them to be that way. Mr. Goodman—that’s Sol, honey, he was my agent when I was touring—he taught me how to get along, how to save my money. Next year, if they start tearing down the Block, and I know they will, honey, seven clubs are going to get their eviction notices this year.…. Well, I plan on moving to Glen Burnie and opening Blaze Starr’s Country Cooking. I wanted to move this year, but they were afraid down there. I told them I didn’t plan on moving the club there, but they were nervous. I think they thought I was going to have topless chickens or something, so they kept me out. But I told them, honey, Blaze’ll be back… you hear me? I come a long way from Pole Creek, West Virginia, and I got a long way more to go.”
“How did you start dancing?”
“I started when a date took me to Washington. I was a waitress at the Mayflower Doughnut Shop for thirty dollars a week. Then I met Mr. Goodman, and soon I was making… well, a whole lot more than that. I was free.”
There it was. Freedom. None of us had thought much about that before. They danced and stripped because it gave them a kind of freedom they couldn’t find in their straight lives. I took a look around. Women behind the bar (Blaze’s sisters, I found out), women as dancers, a woman emcee. The Two O’Clock Club was liberated in the classic Marxist sense of the term. Women owned and ran the works.
“You know, honey,” Blaze said, “I love what I do. I think all the girls who work here really love it. This isn’t a porno movie… this is burlesque… I mean, it’s a very personal thing, dancing. Take my act. I don’t do a regular strip, nothing dirty in it… I do a comic strip. I’ve got a whole act.”
“I see,” I said.
And I did see, for I had caught her act a couple of times. It was very funky, very funny burlesque. She came on wearing a gown, and then lay down on a red chaise longue and sprinkled powder all over herself. I remembered her promenading up the runway, dropping her feathered boa with the insouciance of a queen, parting some sailor’s hair with her breasts. It was all done with consummate style and good humor: It was entertaining, and it told us something about Ms. Blaze Starr. About her courage, her ability to survive, and her comic vision of sex. Porno movies had nothing to say to any of us except that sex could be exhausting, and as dull as accounting.
“Now here’s someone I really want you to meet,” she said. “My co-feature, and don’t you think she’d really be nice for the center spread in Penthouse? Miss Sandy Shores, the baby doll of burlesque.”
I turned, and I’m sure my mouth dropped open a bit. In front of me was the most sensational-looking woman in the club. Black hair, red hot pants, and long, perfect legs. Oh Chili, oh Virginia Bell, I’m sorry to forsake you, but.…
“Hellllo there,” she said, in perfect stripper’s hoarse-throated wonder. “Do you have any questions you’d like to ask me?”
Oh, many, many, I thought, gnashing my teeth. Michael, you should not have died.
I asked Sandy and Blaze what they thought of women’s liberation.
Sandy Shores said, “Sure, I want equal opportunity in jobs. I tried to get an apartment in a high-rise downtown because it was closer to work, but they wouldn’t give me one. Not because I was a woman, but because I was a dancer. But, as for acting and dressing like men, well, what can I tell you, I’m a lady.”
Blaze handed me a copy of a booklet called Blaze’s Booby Book, which features photos of her and two original country and western songs, and said, “Well, honey, if they really knew it, women have always been free. Nobody ever stopped me. I just used what I had and went out and did all right.”
“Yes,” I said, “but what about the charges that what you and Sandy are doing is somehow demeaning to women, makes them look like sex objects?”
“Look, honey,” Blaze said, “These are mine.”
She put both her hands over her breasts.
“I do what I want with these,” she said. “And I used them to free myself.”
I considered the subject closed.
Blaze went off to take care of her business again, and I chatted with Sandy Shores (that is, when I was able to speak properly—I still get very nervous in the presence of beauty, sex, and passion). She wanted to be an actress, she wanted to appear in Penthouse, she wondered if I could take her home.
“What?” I said.
(“Heeeeey Beeeeeg Boooooy, you wan come up weeeeeth Chili?”)
“Would you like to take me home tonight?”
“Yes,” I said, “that would be nice.”
“I hope you like my act,” she said, lifting her perfect leg and crossing it, rubbing the stockings together.
“I’m sure I will,” I said.
“I’ve got to go backstage.”
“Yes,” I said.
And so I had another drink, and another, and watched Miss Exotica 1973, Terri Lawrence, go through her act. And as I watched, what Blaze had told me began to make more sense. I thought of Terri in Highlandtown, thought of that slow, repressive life-on-the-line at Procter and Gamble, and I saw all her hurt and anger come out when she moved slowly, sullenly through the dance. Her mouth was curled down, partially in submission and partially in real defiance. And when she went to the floor and spread her legs, it was slow, powerful, and commanding, and yet painfully self-conscious. She was wounded, this big strong woman, but she was also in the process of healing herself. I watched her with a new fascination, with the fascination one has when one finally learns about jazz or painting.
I began to understand that there was real intelligence of the most personal kind behind what these women were doing. The strip, like the blues, tells us something about the dangers and fears of life.
Knowing that, I understood more when Sandy came on. She came whirling out of the blue lights, twirling her feathered boa, and wearing a long see-through blue negligee. I thought of what she had mentioned to me about her life, her wealthy Jewish parents in Pikesville, her dropping out of college. She was dancing and twirling about, doing splits and leaps: She was the Jewish Princess gone to the outlaw world, she was an actress who had chosen to live on the edge. Her dancing celebrated the facts of her existence, her youth, her beauty, and her attempts to be free of the suburban dredges. She whirled, teased, laughed, and grew sullen. She was young and turned on to her own body, turned on to her body in the midst of her own drama; a drama that redefined the body and the self, made her transcend her personality and her past, and that finally transcended even sex itself—for sex is always defined in relation to your partner, but the body in a strip is defined only by the extent and the ability of the dancer’s fantasy life. Of course, that fantasy life has itself been shaped by events, people, money, and family. But the dancer has the ability and the freedom to determine how these obsessions will be patterned and so the exotic dance, the striptease, if you will, is, in the hands of the ladies of Baltimore Street, the most personal of mediums.
Or maybe the fuck not. Did I mention I am a philosophical drunk?
I watched, very happy for her happiness, as she whirled once again in front of me.
Then she leaned over the bar, did a split, caught my eye, and stuck out her tongue in a lewd, ancient, sexuality that stirred me, turned me on.
I laughed and held up my drink to her, to Terri Lawrence, to Blaze Starr, and to the whole grand dying Block itself—the home of the saints I had worshipped as a child, revered romantically as an adolescent, and now loved again, as any man loves sex, art, the body, and the courage to try to extend the tightly bound limits of our short, blunt lives.
Rereading this piece I’m struck with how romantic it is. How sentimental. As you can see, I was still influenced (and rebelling against) my recent trip down Revolutionary Road, and wanted to see something more in stripteases and barroom girls than mere sleaze. I debated whether to include this piece. It’s so full of Left-Wing academic jive, but what the hell… I kept it in because it catches some of the real spirit of my old hometown before it was taken over by the slick-assed publicity boys. The Gayety is still around but is no longer a burlesque house. Just another Hustler Club, which is ironic, for later on in this book you’ll meet none other than Larry Flynt.
In any case, it was an early piece and I was anxious to prove that I wasn’t wasting my time writing about strippers. There was something of the Good Boy in me that I didn’t want to violate. What would my church-loving grandmother think of what I was doing? (Even though she was deceased.)
I felt funny about writing about these people, slightly guilty, and I was anxious to make them seem better than they were.
On the other hand, I still believe what I wrote may be true. For a person working in a soap factory, stripping is a way of gaining freedom. Even if feminist middle-class women might find it just another form of female slavery.
An energetic piece anyway, and I did get to go out with Miss Sandy Shores. We had a nice couple of days and nights together and then one night, while we were sleeping together she said I’d have to leave early that night.
“Why is that?” I said.
“Because my girlfriend is coming home, baby. And the last guy she caught me with got a stab wound in his back.”
I kissed her on the head and got out of there half dressed. I drove away from her and the Block and haven’t been back since.