A case study from before the invention of the two-thousand-dollar studio apartment. Back in 1977, the so-called Summer of Sam, soon after the near bankruptcy of the city, there were many contenders for the title of "sleaziest street corner in New York." Fourteenth Street and Third Avenue was closest to my home, and I like to walk to work. Now East Fourteenth Street is "redeveloped." Jullian's, once the most picturesque pool hall in the city, is now an NYU dorm. Ditto the Academy of Music. The Gramercy Gym, where fighters good and bad trained, is long gone. So is the studio where Bettie Page took her famous bondage pics. This is called progress. Even if it is a perverted nostalgia to long for the bad old days when the city's major thoroughfares were lined with nodding junkies, it is hard to dismiss the lingering (loitering?) feeling that something has been lost. From the Village Voice, 1977.
All the popcorn pimps, penny-ante pross, nickel-and-dime pill-pushers, methadone junkies, and doorway-living winos felt the hawk wind as it blew down East Fourteenth Street. It's late October, the time of the year when one night, all of a sudden, you know you better break out the warmer coat. Except that on East Fourteenth Street, who has a warmer coat? One creep—a downer-selling vermin—knows the raw of it all. He stands in front of the pizza joint on Fourteenth and Third Avenue, begging for eye contact. "Robitussin, man, Robitussin." Robitussin? "Robitussin," he croaks. He's selling cough syrup. Over-the-counter cough syrup.
It is enough to stop you in your tracks. "Robitussin, man? Don't you got no Luden's or Vicks VapoRub?" I mean: Two-dollar Placidyl is low enough. But Robitussin? "You have got to be kidding."
The creep's voice squeaks up a couple of octaves, his scarred-up head sags. He says, "Just trying to get over. This gonna be a rough winter."
It's always a rough winter at Fourteenth Street and Third Avenue. Rough for the blond junkie and his girlfriend. They told the people at the methadone center on Second Avenue and Twelfth Street that they were going out of town. Back to Ohio to visit the chick's parents. The methadone people gave them a week's supply of bottles. It sounded like a good plan since the blond guy and his girlfriend weren't going nowhere except to Fourteenth Street to sell the extra shit. But they got into a pushing match with some of the Spanish guys drinking Night Train Express at the L train entrance. The methadone bottles fell down the stairs. A scuffle broke out, then the cops were there. One thing led to another, and soon the blond junkie and his girlfriend were back at the drug center trying to explain why they weren't in Ohio. Now they're on "permanent release," which means no more state-issue methadone. You can see the two of them out on the street, scratching and begging, looking for a taste, any taste.
A rough, cold winter. Some of the usual skells have taken off. Nobody in the Durkin, the creep joint with the tilted bar, has seen Joey the Eye for weeks. Joey the Eye was a mess—too fucked up to cop pills, never had a girl out on the street. But he could—and would—take his bloodshot eyeball out of his head and hold it in the palm of his hand. He said if you didn't give him a cigarette, he'd tighten the grip, crushing his own eyeball, which would make it all your fault: him having nothing but a dark pit where his eye should be. The Hung Man is also missing. He spent some of the summer leaning on a parking meter, stark naked. Valium pushers came over, slapped five, and said. "Man, you hung."
Beat Shit Green is gone, too. But no one in the pill-pusher ginmills on Second Avenue figures Beat Shit is soaking up rays in Miami Beach. Beat Shit is one of the worst scumbags ever to stand at Fourteenth Street and Third Avenue hustling "Ts and Vs" (Tuinals and Valium). He used to claim that he was the one who sold the white boy that fatal bunch of beat shit in Washington Square Park last year. Bragged about it. What did he care, he made his $2.50. Beat Shit has been known to sell methadone that was really Kool-Aid and aspirin. He'd suck the juice out of a Placidyl and sell the shell. But, they say, that kind of beat shit comes back on you. They say Beat Shit's not going to make the winter because he got thrown off a roof on East Thirteenth Street.
Rough. Cold. In one of the bars next to the cuchifrito stand, Willie ("call me Big W") is wondering if he'll see April. For a downer salesman, Willie is a pretty sweet dude. Sometimes if one of the barmaids in the Durkin is smooching it up with an off-duty cop, Willie will take a bar stool next to the chick and wait. Soon she'll curl her hand around her back and make a little cup. Willie will slip her a couple of Valiums. The barmaid will put her other hand in the cop's crotch and pull her face away—pretending to cough or something. While the cop is dealing with the barmaid's squeeze, she'll swallow the pills and go back to tonguing before the guy knows anything. Willie digs that kind of move. He says, "She's slick, huh?"
Recently, though, things haven't been going too good for Big W. Mostly he gets over selling pills to kids from Jersey. But, like they say, Willie is his own best customer. Talking to him gets you seasick; he's always listing from side to side. Tonight Big W is wearing his skullcap funny. It's not pulled down over his head; he's got it done up in a little crown. Willie says he don't want it skintight, it puts too much pressure on his stitches. Seems as Willie was in the Durkin a couple of weeks ago and got into an argument with a pimp. Willie thought the guy was just bullshitting until the iron rod came out. He forgets what happened next. Except that he woke up in Bellevue with a head that looks like a road map.
The stitches have made Willie mad. Mad enough to "get violent." The other night he decided he was "just gonna go mug myself somebody." He went around to the stage door of the Academy of Music. Aerosmith was playing. Willie picked out a kid who was completely destroyed on Tuinals. The kid was waiting for an autograph, but Willie figured anyone jive enough a wait for a fucking autograph has to be an asshole. It got better when the rock star came out the door, "got into his fucking limo, and didn't even give the sucker an autograph." So Willie made his move. The Jersey kid beat Willie into the sidewalk and "stole my Placidyls." At this rate, Willie figures he'll be lucky to live till spring.
I have always wanted to write a story called "The 10 Sleaziest Street Corners in New York." I mean, why did certain street corners—excluding obvious "ghetto"-area ones—become hangouts for pill-pushers, prostitutes, winos, bums, creeps, cripples, mental patients, mumblers, flimflam men, plastic-flower sellers, peepshow operators, head cases, panhandlers, and other socially unacceptable netherworld types. How did these corners get this way? How long had they been this way? What was their future? Which ones have McDonald's? Which ones have Burger King? Did this matter?
I compiled a fairly comprehensive list off the top of my head: Ninety-sixth Street and Broadway—the first subway stop down from Harlem; Seventy-second Street and Broadway—good old needle park; Fifty-third and Third—the Ramones sang about chicken hawking there; Twenty-eighth and Park Avenue South—the Bellmore Cafeteria cabdrivers bring the pross; Second Avenue and St. Mark's—the dregs of the burned-out hippies; Bowery and Houston—the cabbies will run over a bum before they let him wash their windshield; Sixth Avenue and Eighth Street—the aggressively plastic up-and-comer; Ninetieth Street and Roosevelt in Queens—home of the low-level Colombian coke dealer; and, of course, the granddaddy of them all: Forty-second Street and Eighth Avenue, the whole of Forty-Deuce Street actually.
Soon, however, it became apparent that it was crazy to "do" all the corners of crud in New York. How many burgers can one slip down his gullet? It would be better to home in on one singular slice of sleaze.
Fourteenth Street and Third Avenue was the natural choice. I live around there; it's my neighborhood sleazy street corner. The pross have seen me enough to know I don't wanna go out. But, also, Fourteenth Street and Third Avenue is a classic, time-honored choice. Fourteenth Street—the longest crosstown Street in Manhattan—has been on the skids, for the past 120 years.
Once, long ago, blue blood coursed through this stem. An 1853 edition of the New York Herald said of East Fourteenth Street, "Here, there are no stores—nothing but dwelling houses, which are substantial, highly finished, and first class." When stores did come, they were Tiffany's and FAO Schwarz. When the Academy of Music was built, in 1854, it was hailed as the city's center of classical music and opera. Europeans sang there. The Metropolitan Opera House was built uptown by smarmy nouveaux riches, like the Vanderbilts, who couldn't get boxes at the Academy.
It didn't last long. East Fourteenth Street did one of the quickest and earliest "there goes the neighborhoods" in New York history. By 1865, the New York Times was reporting that "all of the once-splendid row houses of the 14th Street-Union Square sector are now boarding houses." In 1868, Charles Dickens saw Fourteenth Street as a precursor of Levittown. He said: "There are 300 boarding houses exactly alike, with 300 young men exactly alike, sleeping in 300 hall bedrooms exactly alike, with 300 dress suits exactly alike…."
Prostitution was firmly rooted on East Fourteenth Street by the turn of the century (a Gentleman's Companion of the time lists fifteen whorehouses in the area), and it aided some unlikely causes. Emma Goldman writes of doing a little flat-backing on Fourteenth Street to pick up revolutionary pocket money. Those days, there were plenty of Reds around. Socialists stood on soapboxes in Union Square Park. During the Sacco-Vanzetti trials, the cops mounted machine guns on top of the Guardian Life building. John Reed and Trotsky discussed eventualities in the Fourteenth Street cafeteria, which had a sign on the wall: A TRAYFUL FOR A TRIFLE.
Today the only vestige of leftist activity on Fourteenth Street is the sign from the sixties underground newspaper Rat, which had its offices next to the Metropolitan porno theater. It reads, HOT RATS WHILWE YOU WAIT. Once-flourishing capitalists have also fallen on hard times. Macy's, Hearn's, Ohrbach's, and Klein's all were here. Now only Klein's on the Square remains as a massive, empty three-hundred-thousand-square-foot hulk. The square-rule logo makes the place look like a decrepit Masonic temple; except there's no "all-seeing eye."
The East Village Other, in one of its last issues, published a secret report predicting a deadly and monumental earthquake about to flatten half the city. The scientists (all Hitlerians, said EVO) were keeping the news from the public. The report said all the major fault lines ran right underneath Fourteenth Street. It was a totally believable story.
East Fourteenth Street should have settled into a typical cycle of urban decline and upshift. But the street has resisted, plotting instead a flatline course. Down and down. Most around here say it hasn't bottomed out yet.
Fourteenth Street at Third Avenue is more than a sleazy street corner, it's the epicenter of a mini-sleazopolis. In the blocks around the hub, several different creep scenes operate side by side, and almost independently. Occasionally a pimp hanging out in the Rio Piedras bodega, on Third Avenue near Eleventh Street, will go up to Fourteenth Street to sell some pills, but not often. The girls stay fucked up most of the time but don't sell. Pill-pushers don't even go to the same bars as the pross. It's a real division of labor. The thing that holds it all together is that it's all so low. Low! Ask anyone stumbling past the old Jefferson Theatre—they'll tell you: After Fourteenth Street, there ain't no more down.
Sure the pimps sit in the chairs of the barber college at Twelfth and Third pretending to get a swell $1.50 haircut like they're New Orleans patroons. But it is all front. Fakery and lies. These pimps have never gotten to check out the scene with a gangster lean from the front seat of an El D and they never will. They don't even have a fur hat to slouch about in. They're lucky to have one girl working, and you know she's going to be desperate. A working girl freezing skinny legs waiting for cars with Jersey plates turns two hundred dollars a week down here, when it's good. No chance of them taking their act to Lexington or even Eighth Avenue, either. They're on Fourteenth Street because the big pimps think the place is so funky they don't even care to organize it. The heartless say that Fourteenth Street is one step from the glue factory. A few weeks ago the cops picked up a fifty-seven-year-old pross outside the Contempora Apartments. It was believed to be some kind of record, age-wise.
Pill-pushers are no better. Most of them started turning up on Fourteenth Street back in the late sixties after two doctors, Vincent Dole and Marie Nyswarder—the father and mother of methadone maintenance—shook up the dope-fiend world by setting up a clinic at the Morris J. Bernstein Institute of Beth Israel Hospital. Methadone was touted as a wonder drug. Everyone said it would be the end of the heroin problem in the city. Junkies from all over the city were sent over to Bernstein (on Second Avenue and Seventeenth Street) and other nearby "model" clinics to drink little clear bottles and kick.
Some kicked. But most just got a short course in how to manipulate the Medicaid programs politicians loved to pour money into. Drugs led to drugs. It was easy to take your little methadone card and Medicaid slip over to a "scrip" doctor who would be willing to write you an Rx for a hundred Valiums if you told him you were "anxious, very anxious." This led to the famous junkie refrain: "I'd go to Doctor Zhivago if he'd write." Otherwise, you could write your own. The forms were usually lying around the program offices. A scribbled "X" might be good enough to get a pharmacist to fill the scrips. What you didn't use to get fucked up on, you could sell. Same thing with extra methadone.
Fourteenth Street and Third became the flea market. It was an Eco-101 example of supply and demand. The drug of choice among the dumbo suburban kids these days is downers: the Fourteenth Street stock and trade. Throughout Long Island and Jersey, blond-haired types driving their papas' Le Sabres know that Fourteenth Street is the place to go. Any night a useless boogie band is playing the Palladium (what they call the Academy of Music now), you can see the most mediocre minds of the next generation drag themselves through negro streets into the most desultory madness.
It is a game anyone can play. Go over to the emergency room at one of the hospitals in the area, tell them you're dying from a headache and want some Percodan. The intern there will be surprised and ask you, "Sure you don't want Valium?" Insist on Percodan and the intern will tell you, "Take the Valium. If you don't use them, sell them on Fourteenth Street. None of them have heard of Percodan."
There's no night (except for Sunday, when the Street is eerie and dead) when you can't walk from Fourth Avenue to Second Avenue on Fourteenth Street without at least half a dozen ballcap-wearing, pinpoint-eyed junkies asking you if you want downers. The price list fluctuates with supply: Placidyl usually go for $2.50; Valium, 75 cents; Tuinal, $3; Elavil, $2 on Fourteenth Street, with a 25 percent markup for rock show nights.
You'd figure that would add up. Especially with no overhead and Medicaid usually picking up the initial tab. But these guys ain't got no money. They're too spaced out. That's why they're on Fourteenth Street to begin with. They couldn't get over selling smack on 123rd Street. They couldn't even get over selling smack on Avenue B and Sixth Street. They don't got the concentration. Pusher wars don't happen. No one can remember where their turf is, or was. They are in trouble if you ask them for more than three Valiums. They pour the pills out into their hands and start counting. Then they recount. Order more than eight or nine and it can take an hour.
If you want to draw a map of the Fourteenth-and-Third sleazopolis, give the pill-pushers Fourteenth Street between Second and Fourth. That's the south side of the street; for some reason they're never on the north side. No one knows why, they sure aren't working on their tans. Scoring spots include the doorway of the Larry Richardson Dance Company at the corner of Fourth Avenue. Most of the guys up there are in business for themselves but there are also "steerers," creeps who will tell Jersey kids to come around the corner to Thirteenth Street. This is usually for "quantity" and sometimes for rip-off.
The rest of the scene, working from the west and down, goes like this: Union Square Park is bonkers these days, the sight of curving benches packed with leathery, saliva-streaked faces is truly impressive. The park isn't a major retail center for the pill-pusher, but many will come over for a little rural R and R. After a tough day of Placidyl pushing, you can lose your profits back playing craps or three-card monte. On the other side of the George Washington statue there are also several "loose joints" guys who got off the wrong subway stop on the way down to Washington Square.
The pross take Third Avenue. Their spiritual home is near Thirteenth Street, where there are two miserable excuses for peepshow joints as well as three porno theaters (that includes the Variety Fotoplays when it's not showing devil movies). The 'toots will also graze down to Fifth Street. The Regina Hotel on Third and Thirteenth (a featured backdrop in Scorsese's Taxi Driver) is no longer a big pross hole. The cops broke the manager's balls so now he's on the up-and-up, although you wonder why anyone would stay there if they weren't getting laid. The Bowery flops are the Ritz-Carlton compared to the Regina. Now most of the hotel tricking goes on at the Sahara, a little oasis on Fourteenth. The Sahara has a sign saying LOW WEEKLY RATES even though most guests spend less than a half hour at the Sahara. Seven dollars is the room tariff. A lot of the action, though, goes on in the parking lots along Third. The West Indian guy who used to work there charged two dollar a pop to get in the backseat of a parked car. Hope they didn't use yours.
The "he-shes" (also called "shims" or "he-haws") hang near Second Avenue and Twelfth Street and also congregate at Little Peters, a swish bar by St. Mark's Place. This is one of the biggest t.v. scenes in the city. Of the fourteen hundred pross arrests the cops made in the area during the past year or so, nearly half were men dressed up as women. Ask why he-shes are usually Puerto Rican, a working "girl" says, "Our people are so mean to us … besides, haven't you ever heard that Latins were made to love?" The he-shes are much classier looking than the straight pross. Johns claim you can't even tell until you get real close. And, even then … you can't. But, then again, most of the johns who cruise Fourteenth Street just don't care.
With this kind of scene it makes sense that many of the "legitimate" businesses that have stayed on East Fourteenth Street during the downtimes 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.
It is chilling and inescapable. Tolerance levels have gone down. The Leelikes said the thing they hated most about the sleazos was that they're so snotty. In the old days, when Susan Leelike went to Cooper Union, junkies hung out in the Sagamore Cafeteria, near Astor Place. Dope fiends those days knew they were outcasts and acted accordingly. The Leelikes remembered these Burroughsian types with a touch of romanticism. Now, they said, methadone makes being a junkie legal. And the creeps have come out into the daylight, where it quickly becomes apparent that junkies aren't the nicest people you'd ever want to meet.
This hit home. A few weeks ago I was walking by Cooper Square. A guy in his mid-twenties was stretched out on the ground, twitching. He didn't look like a lowlife; he had French jeans on. A small crowd gathered around him. A cabbie stopped and put on his emergency blinker. The guy seemed to be having a seizure. Maybe he's an epileptic, said the cabby, pull his tongue out of his mouth. Two people went for the cops, another to call an ambulance. Finally an older man rolled up the guy's sleeve. The dude's arm looked like a Penn Central yard. The older guy threw the arm back on the sidewalk in disgust. "He's just a fucking junkie," the cabby said. "A fucking junkie." Half the people in crowd said, "Shit." And everyone just split. Me, too. I split. When the guy's an epileptic he's human; when he's a junkie, fuck him.
So I knew the Leelikes had the trend on their side. Also, it was clear—they are determined. They are willing to run the risk of being called redneck—Susan Leelike says, "I hate it when they call me the white lady"—to get rid of sleazos. And they don't flinch when you ask them where they propose the sleazos go. "It's just not our problem," they say.
Patrolmen Bob Woerner and Dennis Harrington are in an empty office above Glancy's Bar on East Fourteenth Street and Irving Place, hiding. Harrington and Woerner have been partners for six years. They used to work the smack detail on Avenues A, B, C, and D (called avenues X, Y, and Z in cop parlance). But pressure from Sweet 14 and local politicians on the department to "do something" about Fourteenth Street brought them here eleven months ago. Since then Woerner and Harrington, tough and smart cops, have been the most effective (in terms of arrests) of the twenty men on the Ninth Precinct's "Fourteenth Street Task Force."
Sometimes Woerner and Harrington walk down Fourteenth Street and ask buzz-brained cats, "Hey, man. What you doing?" It's a torture technique; they know that the toughest question in the world for a sleazo is "What are you doing?" Creeps' knees buckle under the weight of that one; they say, "I dunno, what am I doing?"
But what Woerner and Harrington really like to do is make busts. Which is why they are hiding in the empty room above Glancy's Bar with their binoculars trained on the action beneath the Palladium marquee.
Making busts on Fourteenth Street isn't tough. Sometimes guys will be so loaded they come right up and say, "Placidyl … Placidyl … oh, shee-it" before they realize they're talking to a uniformed policeman. It is tricky, however. First of all, the captain doesn't like cops to make too many arrests. He says busts take police off the street and put them in court. Primarily, though, when you're making "observation" busts on Fourteenth Street, you've got to see them good. Most of the sellers get their stuff from scrip doctors, which means their own name is on the bottle. It is not a crime to carry "controlled substances"—if the (not-forged) scrip is made out to you. Selling the stuff, however, is illegal. So, instead of just grabbing a single party, like a smack bust, cops have to get both the buyer and the seller as well as recover the stuff. They also have to see the deal go down perfectly—that is, if they're not into fudging evidence in court.
Woerner and Harrington say, Why fudge, on Fourteenth Street if you miss one sale, they'll soon be another. But still, it hurts when you've been freezing behind the Con Edison fence at Fourteenth and Third, waiting for just the right view. And then, right at the big moment, a bus goes by.
Tonight, however, it ain't gonna be no problem. Aerosmith is back in town at the Palladium and a dozen suburban kids are milling around in front of the theater, looking to get stupid. Woerner and Harrington are licking their lips. All they need is a seller. And from down the street, trudging slowly up from Third Avenue by the poolroom, here he comes. In unison the cops shout, "All right, Ernest James … come on, Ernest James."
Ernest James, a gangly guy with a face and beard like Sonny Rollins, came on.
He walked into a crowd of leather-jacketed white kids. Got into a conversation with one. Took him off to the doorway of the fight gym. Then it couldn't have been clearer if Otto Preminger were directing. Out came the bottle. There went the pill. Across came the three dollars. And down the stairs went Woerner and Harrington.
Like nothing, Harrington was reading Ernest James his rights. Woerner had the buyer, a blond boy from Pelham Bay, up against the wall. Ernest James, the perfect degenerate, pulled out a slew of false IDs, a pack of Kools, and looked impassively at the sky. Against the wall another kid was screaming to the spread-eagled buyer, "Jeff, Jeff … give me your ticket for the show."
Ernest James was in big trouble. He had a goddamned drugstore on him. Ten bottles of pills in all: 26 big white tabs thought to be Quaaludes, 21 Tuinals, 15 Seconals, 40 unknown peach-colored pills, 34 unknown white pills, 23 ampicillins, 29 unknown yellow pills, and several dozen Placidyls. Most of the bottles were made out to Ernest James. Some to Ernest Jones. Others to A. Ramos. One was just to "Ernest," which prompted Woerner to wonder if Ernest James was on a first-name basis with his pharmacist. Also found were two Garcia y Vega humidors full of 5- and 10-mg Valium. Almost all the scrips were supposedly written by one Doctor Jacob Handler of West 103rd Street. Doctor Handler is a Fourteenth-Street favorite. Harrington keeps a little scorecard of doctors' names that appear on bottles. Doctor Handler is way up near the top of the list. But the cops say nothing will happen to him because "it's tough to bust a doctor."
Apparently to maximize his pill-gathering ability, Ernest James also had half a dozen different medical identification cards. Some were made out to the name William Summersall, others to A. Ramos and Ernest Jones. He also had a little notebook in which he has apparently been practicing different signatures. Most are Ernest Jones. But there is also a page on which Texas Slim is written a dozen times.
Under the fifteen-watt glare in the Ninth's arrest room, Harrington books Ernest James. This is nothing new—Harrington has arrested Ernest James before. In fact, Ernest has six busts for pills this year already. Too bad, figures Dennis Harrington: Ernest James is not a bad guy. In fact, Dennis thinks, most of the guys he busts aren't real bad. Just a bunch of losers. Ernest James had $84 on him, but that had to be his life savings. Most guys have about $30. "Sometimes it is that ‘there but for fortune thing,' " says Dennis, who is haunted by the memory of his brother, who was "into junk." He also thinks about that same picture they always show of Karen Quinlan. Dennis wonders if she got her downs on Fourteenth Street.
Asked where he got all the pills, Ernest James is cool. "I'm qualified to have as many pills as I want," he says. Asked about all the different IDs, Ernest says, "I'm qualified to have as many names as I want."
While the cops count up the rest of Ernest's stash, I ask him if he thinks the businessmen and cops can clean up Fourteenth Street. He says, "I dunno 'bout no cleanup. All I know is I wanna get to St. Louis. I can do security over there. I can't sell these pills no more. But if I don't, I got bread and water. My philosophy is that if the city put the clean in the street, they put the dirt in the street, too. Goes both ways. There is one thing that's sure. Ain't no way to clean up this. Cops come fuck up with Fourteenth Street, people just gonna go somewheres else. If they want to get rid of the dirt, they gonna have to shoot those motherfuckers. Line up those mother-fuckers and kill them. All of them. Dead."
Woe is Ernest James. He got caught in the cleanup. Usually Ernest winds up with one of those mumbo-jumbo raps like time served or adjournment contemplating dismissal. In other words, he gets off. Not bad, considering pill-pushing is a class-D felony worth up to seven years. This time, however, Ernest James is taking the fall. The D.A. is making an example of him. A special grand jury on soft drugs is indicting him. Instead of the usual weekend at Rikers, they're offering Ernest a year. And that's if he pleads.
Tough shit, Ernest James. Add insult to injury: When Ernest got picked up on September 30, he claimed it was his birthday. No one believed him. But it was true. Happy birthday, Ernest James.
Another thing Ernest James was right about: If you move a sleazo, he'll just go somewhere else. You got to kill the motherfuckers … dead. Down in Chinatown, they say that's what Mao did with the opium addicts. Hopheads can't drive tractors, so Mao's guys just put them up against the wall and blew their brains out. Bet there ain't no sleazy corners in Peking.
For a society stuck with half a million sleazoids (conservative metropolitan-area estimate), this could be an eminently modest proposal. Discussing this alternative with liberal city councilman Henry Stern, he says, "Of course, I'm not in favor of killing these people."
But Stern admits that he can't figure out what to do with them. "It's a dilemma," he says, "maybe it's one of the biggest dilemmas in the city today." Miriam Friedlander, another liberal councilperson who has been working closely with Sweet 14, also does not favor wholesale annihilation. She takes a more conventional tack, saying, "It's my primary function to break up that situation and get them out of the neighborhood."
In place of execution, the politicians offer "redevelopment." "Redevelopment" is a coming concept in the city-planning business. A modification of the pave-it-all-over-and-start-from-scratch school of urban studies, "redevelopment" essentially means taking over "depressed" areas and transforming them into middle-class shopping and residential areas. The best-known example of "redevelopment" is on Forty-second Street between Ninth and Tenth Avenues. A civic group came into possession of several "tax-arrears" buildings and redid them into boutiques. Henry Stern, Miriam Friedlander, Koch, and the rest feel that "redevelopment" is at least worth trying on Fourteenth Street and Third Avenue. And with economic biggies like Charlie Luce, Helmsley-Spear, Citibank, and Restaurant Associates around, you know the job will get done right. Oh, boy, will it.
Of course, "redevelopment" stops short of final solutions. So Ernest James's philosophy holds up. Due to the hard-nose police work by the "Fourteenth Street Task Force," the sleazos have begun a minor migration. Routed from parts of Fourteenth Street, they camped in Stuyvesant Park on Second Avenue and Fifteenth Street. According to the locals, who say they pay extra rent to live near the park, the situation is becoming disgusting. Methadone addicts are leaving their bottles all over the place. Pill-pushers are dealing. The other day two of the he-shes got into a little mutual around-the-world.
The neighborhood forces rallied, led by one Jeanne Pryor, a right-minded lady who loves a firm grip on the bullhorn (who last week opened a cleanup storefront at Fourteenth and Third). They decided that the Thirteenth Precinct was not providing adequate protection from the sleazos. They demanded police guards in the park.
One night last month a protest march was organized. About 150 people showed up to carry signs saying things like OUR CHILDREN ONCE PLAYED FRISBEE IN THIS PARK. Others carried shopping bags full of empty scrip bottles they said were collected in the park. These were a present for Captain Joseph Neylan of the Thirteenth, who, Ms. Pryor kept shouting, "has been out to lunch for the past six months."
The march, accompanied by a man in a kilt playing a bagpipe, began at Fifteenth Street and headed up Third Avenue toward the precinct house on Twenty-first Street. Ms. Pryor had planted stories in the Daily News, so the local television stations sent out crews to cover. Arc lights flooded the streets as Ms. Pryor led the chant of "junkies out of the park."
As the march reached Seventeenth Street, it started to get interesting. A messed-up black guy bounded in front of the marchers and held up his hands like he was stopping a runaway team of horses.
"Stop!" he said, the TV lights glaring in his buzzed eyes. Stunned, Ms. Pryor halted in her tracks. The whole march bumped to a stop. There was a silence. Then the guy started chanting, "Junkies out of the park. Junkies out of the park." The marchers stepped back. The guy kept screaming, "Junkies out of the park. Junkies out of the park." Then he stopped and looked the bagpipe player right in the eye and said, "I'm a fucking junkie. I'm a fucking junkie. I'm a fucking junkie. Get me out of the park. Get me out of the park. Get me out of the park."
The mock turned to a plea.
It was then that Jeanne Pryor should have acted. She should have taken out a 12-gauge shotgun and blown the creep's head off.