1950s strippers in my home! My tv is my time machine

Late night viewing a couple of months ago…

I love books and I love strippers! 😉

I always prefer seeing strippers live but haven’t been to the clubs in years after being a decades-long aficionado. Changes in my financial situation made dishing out $10 for a beer and $20 each for lapdances impossible and then of course there was the pandemic to close things down for awhile. A friend of mine went to a club recently but he didn’t make it sound too lively.

Anyway, it’s hard to see strippers from the 1950s anywhere but on video these days, right?

So that’s a peek at the view from my couch as I watched Naughty New Orleans, which I got from Sinister Cinema here, a great source for vintage films.

A fun movie with some sexy “peelers” and amusing “baggy pants” burlesk comics.

 

Haunted by the memory of a showgirl…

Happy Halloween! In the spirit of it in this year 2022, I read Bram Stoker’s Dracula for the first time, after a friend on Twitter, the amazing Irish dominatrix SpoiltprincessG, mentioned that it was one of her favorite books. She is quite the reader and in fact that’s how we became acquainted online, when she told me she’d read some of my stories and we got to discussing other authors. In this 2019 post I recall what she thought of my book Fate of a Stripper.

I found Dracula truly an epic novel that illuminated many additional themes of a story so familiar from the innumerable Dracula or vampire films I’ve seen. One aspect of the original novel that never seems to show up in the movies is the deep comradeship between the young people, in late nineteenth century England, who are confronted with the monstrosity that is the blood-drinking count. The elderly, scholarly Dutch vampire fighter Dr. Van Helsing is their guide in the battle, but Stoker gives us a fuller sense of the circle of young men and women on whom Dracula preys, fuller than I can recall from any of the films I’ve seen–although Hammer’s initial 1958 Christopher Lee outing, Horror of Dracula, while heavily compressing the story, does capture some of the confusion and desperation of those under the siege of the fiend. Perhaps Francis Ford Coppola’s version captures some more of this; maybe I’ll re-watch it. Unfortunately, when I saw it thirty years ago in its original release, the movie made almost no impression on me. I don’t recall why.

In any case, being in this supernatural frame of mind, also having enjoyed the ghost stories of British writer Algernon Blackwood during the summer too, as well as revisiting Edgar Allan Poe’s essay “The Philosophy of Composition,” I thought I’d go for a change of pace in my own fiction writing, as I do now and then, with the result that I just published this short tale, “DO YOU REMEMBER ME, LILY?” 

It was initially inspired by the true story of a famous showgirl and burlesque dancer named Faith Bacon who committed suicide back in the 1950s. You can read about her on Wikipedia here. I’ve long thought about her tragic life and imagined what effect her death might have had on her fans, so using this as a plot springboard, I created a character named Lily Dyrell who is driven to a similar fate and whose self-destruction haunts one of her longtime admirers.

Walking around Times Square’s side streets nowadays, one sees amid all the boring new glassy construction the old buildings still standing here and there, so evocative of the noirish past. I decided to take a photo for my cover to get a flavor of world “Lily Dyrell” and her fan “Arthur J. Merkellin” would have moved through.

Obviously my story is not an epic like Dracula but a short, modest tale in the Poesque mode of composition, aiming to create the effects of both fear and sadness as Arthur, confronted with Lily’s spirit, comes to a heartbreaking realization about what was going through the head of his now-deceased dancing goddess.

“DO YOU REMEMBER ME, LILY?” is available at Amazon worldwide as an ebook that can be read on tablets, computers, phones, and Kindles.

By the way, here is the edition of Dracula that I read. The striking face on the cover, which to me looked like a combination of both Bela Lugosi and George Zucco, horror movie kings of the 1940s, was actually a portrait of the Victorian-era British superstar Henry Irving in the role of Mephistopheles. Bram Stoker worked for Irving for many years and the character of Dracula was indeed partly inspired by the actor’s commanding personality.

Finally, if you read and enjoy my new ebook, you might also savor the twists and turns of my supernatural femdom erotica tale, The Dominatrix Who Couldn’t Die, also available as an ebook at Amazon. 

 

Elegy for a post office box…

On April 27, 2022 I ended a relationship of about forty years.

I closed a post office box I’d first opened circa 1982.

At the time I’d gotten it, I lived in a walk-up apartment right in Times Square, on the same block where the old offices of the show biz newspaper Variety had been located; where one of the top burlesque agents of the 1950s once had his headquarters; on the same block where the fictional public relations flack “Sidney Falco,” played by Tony Curtis, had his home/office in the 1957 film noir masterpiece Sweet Smell of Success; and a block away from where the great model Bettie Page had lived in the ’50s in an apartment I once read described as “turbulent.” In the building where I lived, I had a tiny mail box in a vestibule that had no security or locked front door (since there were businesses like a rehearsal studio and a musical instrument repair shop upstairs too), so to get packages of any size I needed a secure p.o. box, which I got nearby at Rockefeller Center.

The great Gil Elvgren seems to have done pinups that can match almost any theme!

In the ’80s I ordered things such as my first videocassettes of obscure horror and noir films from companies like the great Sinister Cinema and had them sent to the box. And, in those days when mail order was still a big part of the erotica business, I collected leg art photos and magazines from the likes of Elmer Batters and other creators and vendors of fetish or femdom themes.

When I moved away from Times Square in the ’90s, I held onto the box as it still was convenient to get mail, although I used it less and less. I mostly got announcements and catalogs connected to the movie memorabilia shows I liked to attend before the pandemic, and hope to get back to attending sometime soon.

In recent years I held onto the box because I told myself it would come in handy if I ever decided to conduct a mail order writing workshop to make some extra money, but I never went ahead with that.

I also simply liked to walk over to Rockefeller Center and check it now and then. The post office was near the yearly Christmas tree so I always took a look at that. Its location also gave me motivation for a decent walk (I still live in Midtown) and was also nostalgic because my first job in New York City, in summer 1971, was as an NBC page at the studios at 30 Rock, so I just liked to go over there. In a lot of ways the interior of the complex has changed, but in others it remains the same–for example, the fantastic mid-20th century murals in the main lobby are still there–and also I’d walk by the place where the tourist information desk used to be, where fifty-one years ago I’d sat and sometimes see celebrities such as Claudia Cardinale come out of the elevator after doing Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show. I even met a girl once when I was working that desk, and we had a nice evening together wandering around the area. I remember she was a vivid redhead like Ann-Margret, but with a much bigger butt. She wore a summery dress and we sat for awhile at the fountain in Bryant Park as the sun went down…

Anyway, when I went over to the usual p.o. box location near 49th Street earlier this week, it was gone!  Renovation work had started in the last couple of weeks in that underground concourse near the famed ice skating rink, and the entire post office had been relocated over to 51st Street in the building upstairs. When I went to check my box at the new p.o., my key didn’t work, because all the boxes had new locks. I was going to renew it again (I always renewed at the end of April) and get the new keys, but the price had been raised quite a bit so I decided it was time to give up the box, which I really didn’t use very much at all anymore.

Ah, but it used to be fun to get videos of obscure Mario Bava movies like The Devil’s Commandment from Sinister Cinema (in business online here) and copies of the late Elmer Batters’ leg art zine showing up in my box!

Obviously this is not a picture of me at my p.o. box–it would be far less photogenic!–but rather a pinup by the wonderful Gil Elvgren (I did a Google search on “pinup art with postal theme”). You can get this art for yourself at Zazzle here in various forms like posters or refrigerator magnets or postcards. (I’m not connected to this site, just giving credit for my source of the image!)

As a side note, it’s great to see the proliferation of pinups in recent years. Back in the ’70s and even the ’80s, the stuff was still rare and hard to find in any forms!

 

Silk stocking magazines set me off on the quest…

Silk stocking magazines…just the name is so evocative!

I’ve written here before how I’m always fascinated walking around Manhattan and remembering what occupied a particular space long ago. For example, this decrepit building at the northwest corner of 46th Street and Eighth Avenue housed a fantastic video store, DVD BLOWOUT, that sold obscure cult movies like stuff from Something Weird Video in addition to its hardcore porn; and next to it was the Full Moon Saloon, a place where I did a good amount of drinking back in the day…

This is what has replaced it: shiny, tall, and a hub for tourists.

I also remember, when I pass by an Asian noodle shop near the southwest corner of 49th St. and Eighth Avenue, that long ago in the 70s its space was occupied by a used magazine store, where I first came upon these magazines (scans taken from my own copies, some of which I’ve sold at memorabilia shows):

I recall asking the slender gray-haired middle-aged guy behind the counter near the door what these magazines were. I had never seen these publications before, packed with the nylon-sheathed ladies of the late 40s and 50s. “They’re called ‘silk stocking magazines,’ ” he said. Amazingly, they were only $2.50 or $3.00 a piece, so I bought three or four. Now they go for about $25 a piece, even in just good, not necessarily, great condition. They’re hard to find. BEAUTY PARADE, TITTER, FLIRT…these are the titles of the mags in which Bettie Page and other popular models frequently appeared. They were published by Robert Harrison, who later in the 50s went on to great notoriety with the scandal-mongering CONFIDENTIAL magazine.

Little did I know that my lifelong quest to collect vintage girlie mags and endless pinups had begun! I still have the copy of FLIRT, which I bought in 1977 from the late Art Amsie, the dealer and collector who was a cornerstone of the pinup revival, and who even photographed Bettie Page himself. It’s a mint copy which I’ve only looked at a few times, wanting to keep it in as perfect condition as possible—not because it’s worth so much, I probably couldn’t get more than $100 for it; it’s just nice to have an issue so well-preserved from so long ago, when most of them are so fragile they fall apart as you turn the pages. You can read my profile of Art Amsie here.

You can see how un-seriously these mags were treated by some folks before the interest in pinups was renewed in the early 80s. The price $3.00 was casually scrawled on the gorgeous Peter Driben-painted cover of TITTER, along with the date!

If you’re interested in seeing more of these covers and the insides of the mags, look on Amazon here for a Taschen book called 1000 PIN-UP GIRLS, and your orbs will get their fill of the fillies! Note their variant spelling of “pin-up.” Me, I always spell it “pinup.” 😉

 

The “sex workers at work” genre in films and fiction…

One of my favorite sub-genres of film and fiction is the “sex workers at work” story–examining the mundane details of the jobs people do in erotic businesses. (By “sex work” I mean the most general use of the term, including all kinds of adult endeavors including stripping.) I thought about this when I saw an interesting film the other night from the 1940s: Glamour For Sale, about the women working for escort agencies and clubs.

This film was shown on Turner Classic Movies during its Anita Louise day as part of TCM’s August 2018 “Summer Under the Stars” programming.

It wasn’t a great movie, but I loved one detail of how the B-girls operated the drink hustle, as explained by Anita Louise’s character: they would get brandy in a glass, and soda in a second glass. They’d sip the brandy with a straw, and then move the straw to the soda glass and let out the brandy. That way they didn’t get drunk. When the waiter came by, he would take both glasses away and, if the customer agreed, bring a fresh pair of brandy and soda glasses to the hostess. It was hoped that the customer would never be wise to the fact that the hostess was not actually imbibing the expensive drink.

This practice degenerated in the 1970s and early 80s, when I was going to strip clubs that heavily featured the drink hustle: the dancer (who would hustle drinks when she wasn’t onstage) would sip her champagne but then spit it, literally and obviously, into a second, and empty, tall glass. (For some reason or other, I remember how those tumblers were made of frosted glass.) In this way it was clear that the thing the customer was actually paying for was her time, and not the “champagne.” Unless the girl chose to actually drink it, which occasionally happened too.

Two of the X-rated films I wrote in the 1990s were of the “sex workers at work” genre: Masseuse 2 and Masseuse 3.

This was one of my most personal screenplays, inspired by Japanese movies about brothels such as Mizoguchi’s Street of Shame. The masseuse’s story enabled me to explore my own feelings about working in the erotic business.

 

This won Best Film in 1998 from the X-Rated Critics Organization. It has some intense scenes exploring femdom themes.

 

In both of these original stories (not related in any way to the original hit The Masseuse or to each other except in title) I tried to weave as many little details about the actual work of masseuses as I knew into the dramas. I guess I succeeded as the films were very successful and continue to be watched more than twenty years after they were made. I even had a small and funny little role in Masseuse 3 as a lapdance customer. You can find it at this adults-only link here under the scene title of “Sexy Chicks Eat Pussy and Finger Each Other.”

Also, my scripts for Sweetie Baby and Boom Boom Valdez depicted both the jobs and personal lives of topless dancers and, in the case of former, a waitress at a strip club:

And of course my psychological suspense novel Fate of a Stripper (see sample here)  includes all sorts of details about the stripping profession which I gathered from the dancers themselves through the many years I hung out in those clubs, and through the hundreds of hours of interviews I did with strippers for various adult magazines.

I wouldn’t be surprised if, one of these days, I wrote yet another story examining some aspect of the erotic trade…

 

 

I miss my floozies…

I have a friend, George, with whom I’ve sometimes watched films noir. He has an endearing habit of saying, “Here’s the floozy music,” whenever the music on the soundtrack obviously indicates the entrance of a so-called tramp or femme fatale.

Well, I don’t need music to know when I’m in the presence of a floozy. I use the term affectionately, meaning to me “a woman of the demimonde.” Strippers are my chief floozies, although in my time I’ve known some nice hookers too. But with the decline of the adult magazine business in which I worked for more than 40 years, and the greater difficulty of making a buck as a porn writer online, I just don’t have the disposable ca$h to spend time with “floozies” much anymore.

That’s one reason why I enjoy noir films and noir novels…I get to spend time with floozies without going over my budget. 😉 (Can you tell I drank a 24 ounce can of ready-made margaritas before writing this post?)

While I drank the margaritas I watched Joan Bennett in 1948’s Hollow Triumph on TCM’s Noir Alley series, although in this film Joan is not particularly floozy-ish. I love Joan Bennett, her tart affectionate dames are just my cup of tea, and I’ve known a few in my time, especially barmaids at the old Times Square strip clubs like the late lamented Club 44 on Eighth Avenue near 44th Street. I sometimes have a gloomy disposition, after all I am a kind of noir guy myself; and one of the Club 44 barmaids, a older Brazilian lady named Elizabeth, used to try to cheer me up by giving me clippings to read, in a plastic baggie, of humorist and toastmaster Joey Adams’s joke columns from the New York Post.

Anyway, I digress. Here are a couple of recent novels I’ve read that had their happy share of floozies…

This cover scene is actually in the 1952 book, as a streetwalker tries to pick up the detective hero at 51st and 6th Avenue, a location I know quite well. But although a nice interlude, the sequence feels inserted into the story simply to justify the cover; it’s not pertinent to the plot, which is a pretty good one about political corruption in NYC.

 

This is a really tense 1954 novel about two gay drifters who kidnap a narcotics agent as he drives out to Los Angeles after a undercover job on the New Orleans docks. It has two well-drawn floozy portrayals, one of an affectionate stripper involved with the agent in the Big Easy, and the other of a not-too-bright but good-hearted female drifter from Tennessee who gets swept up by one of the male drifters, who is bisexual.

 

When I wolfed down these fun books, I got to enjoy the company of classic-style noir floozies. You can easily meet the two dames in Death Hitches a Ride by checking out the double-novel reprint at Sinister Cinema’s Armchair Fiction line here. It’s a really well-done story, and in fact I read it twice for the way it builds character and tension; the only flaw is that the ending is a bit too abrupt. But the characterizations are terrific. I wonder whatever happened to author Martin L. Weiss—a very talented fictioneer indeed.

 

The world of HBO’s “The Deuce,” as a NYC porn writer knew it…

I’m absorbed by this new HBO show, as it’s interesting to see the 1970s New York City sex business depicted in a continuing tv drama. The production is well-done with some good acting, writing, and clever production design, and for me it’s an entertaining supplement to the movie of personal memories that I carry in my head from my own experiences in Times Square over the years both as a fan and as a writer/editor for porn magazines and films.

Maggie Gyllenhaal as the hooker Candy on the stroll

 

The recreation of 42nd Street marquees is well-done, but…

 

…as far as I remember, the streetwalkers looked for customers on Eighth and Ninth Avenues, not on the Deuce. But the marquees definitely make for more vivid cinema.

 

Every inch of the neighborhood has some resonance for me. For example, the doorway shown below, on Broadway near 50th Street (I took this pic a couple of weeks ago) was in the 70s the entrance of one of the few “dime-a-dance halls” remaining in Times Square, where you bought strips of tickets to dance (and grind) with ladies…the tickets were no longer a dime then (that was the 1930s price), but if I recall correctly, around 1974 they were $29 a strip. Why $29, I never found out. I used the experience of going to that place in one of my porn novels which wasn’t very good except for the section set in the dance hall.

I can’t remember what the ballroom was called, though…the Diamond, perhaps? The Tango Palace and Satin Ballrooms were a couple of blocks down.

 

The Deuce helps me clarify my relationship with my own past. Unlike the characters in the show, I did not socialize in a bar with pimps, prostitutes, gangsters, or 8mm hardcore movie makers. I did patronize hookers, yes, on the street or in apartment brothels, but didn’t hang out with them otherwise; I would have, however, as I occasionally asked them to go have a bite or a drink–but they were only interested in making money from me as a john, alas. So my relationship to Times Square was largely as a customer and spectator; like a theatergoer who may see lots of plays on Broadway, but doesn’t hang out with the actors, playwrights and producers afterward.

Scenes on The Deuce where girls get in cars with strangers make my skin crawl. I feel frightened for them. In fact, when I went with a few prostitutes to cheap hotels back in the 70s, I was afraid that I would get hurt, or robbed, or beaten up. Loneliness as much as horniness drove me into their arms in those seedy rooms…and I always felt guilty about it. Oh how many unnecessary VD tests did I take to allay my neurotic fear that I would “punished” for my dalliances!! I always turned out to be okay.

The dirt, the garbage of the streets, the violence depicted on the show, and The Deuce‘s constant flow of “the-fuck-you-say” New York tough guy dialogue: these were not especially part of my experience there. Although while by now after 43 years as a Gotham denizen I have my own New Yorkese patter down pretty well, in the 1970s I was still mostly just a too-nice-for-my-own-good Jewish boy from Chicago and had only mastered one East Coast phrase: “Fuckin-A”. 😉 Does anybody still use that one? Haven’t heard it in ages.

My Deuce (or 42nd Street as I always called it then) was instead a kind of Smithsonian Institute of erotica, where I found mint-condition issues of John Willie’s original late-1940s Bizarre magazines for $3 each…

The clerk who sold it to me for THREE DOLLARS (very cheap even in the 70s) clearly had no idea what it was, and until I got it home & opened it, neither did I. The gorgeous cover got me buying it. And once I looked inside and perused its stylishly fabulous fetish contents, I became a lifelong John Willie admirer.

I also found copies of the fetish digest Exotique, and black and white photo pamphlets of models like Bettie Page or Tee Tee Red or Lynne Carter…and a lurid $1 novel called Growing Up in Pain which I studied assiduously to learn the structure of the cheap bottom-of-the-barrel porn fiction put out by Star Distributors so I could get a job writing the stuff myself.

42nd Street was my grade-Z movie source long before I got a VCR, a place where I could see triple bills of crazy schlock movies and enjoy wild audience commentary unlike anything I’d ever heard or probably will ever hear again.

For example, seeing The Thing With Two Heads at the Anco Theater, the venue furthest west on the south side of 42nd near Eighth Avenue, was the most hilarious ninety minutes ever…the audience was hysterically funny, talking back to the screen as the head of a racist doctor played by Ray Milland is grafted onto the body of a black death row convict played by Rosey Grier. Unfortunately, I also remember how smelly that decrepit old theater could be, too…

I picked up streetwalkers—and some of them were beautiful, knockouts, stunners. They peddled their wares on Eighth Avenue’s “Minnesota Strip” (so-called because of all the Midwestern-bred hookers who strolled there). As I worked up courage to select a pro, I ate souvlaki in the Greek joints and cheap chow mein in the Chinese joints and low-cost spaghetti in an Italian place on 42nd. I also went to massage parlors along Eighth Avenue and even as far east as 47th St. and 6th Avenue, on the edge of the Diamond District.

I found copies of my own porn novels on the racks for the first time in the bookstore next to the National Hotel at 42nd and Seventh, just a stone’s throw from the Golden Dollar topless bar, one of the bleakest clubs in the area. The titles of my books were The Screaming Virgins, The Punk Stud and His Women, Young Michael’s Seductress (wherein I wrote about the dime-a-dance halls), and Teasing Teenage Daughter.

I went to Show World Center at 42nd and Eighth, and Show Center at 47th and Seventh, and Show Plaza at 42nd between Broadway and Sixth, and indulged in fantasies with the one-on-one “booth babies,” the peep show girls who gave private shows in two-person booths separated by a glass panel and connected by a telephone for the exchange of all essential dialogue… 😉 . I still remember some of those ladies’ stage names: Blondie, Annie, Brandi, Olivia, and China. Upstairs at Show World, when I was in my “porn scribe” mode (as opposed to my looking-for-cheap-thrills mode), I interviewed X-rated movie stars backstage at the Triple Treat Theater and sometimes also photographed them there to illustrate my articles.

I went to the barmaids-in-leotard bars recreated in The Deuce which were on 48th between Seventh and Eighth Avenues: a joint like Club International (which ironically later was the title of a magazine I prolifically wrote for) and another one called Al Lang’s where, if I recall correctly, the suave-looking manager was always nicely dressed in a double-breasted suit. Up on 49th between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, I went to Tin Pan Alley (which I’ve read is the model for the Hi-Hat on The Deuce), and chatted with the barmaids there but I didn’t become friends with any of them although I tried to date one or two. I remember Nan Goldin, the famous photographer, briefly worked behind the bar at Tin Pan Alley in the early 80s. Somewhere around that time I was dating a girl who looked a lot like the character of Lori on The Deuce, I mean a REAL lot, as played by Emily Meade. In fact when Lori comes on-screen I feel kinda weird, because even her boobs (seen extensively in the second episode) look the same as I remember my girlfriend’s did…

Lori (Emily Meade) not only resembles my old girlfriend but her character even comes from the same Midwestern state, Minnesota…

On 42nd Street I went to the Roxy Burlesk to see strippers and watch hardcore Rene Bond movies like Diary of a Schizo wherein she played the titular role and made up her face to look like Raggedy Ann when she flipped out after too much sex. She was and is one of my favorite porn stars ever…check out this link, where I found her photo,  to learn more about her (NSFW, though, there are explicit pix there).

Her performance in the film Teenage Fantasies is legendary, as she cheerfully gives head & talks to the audience about oral sex.

 

I went to the Harem Theater on the north side of the Deuce toward Eighth Avenue for porn movies (as opposed to the bigger theaters where I went for kung fu, blaxploitation, horror, Harryhausen, and westerns) but stopped patronizing the Harem after some dude with a Derringer shot another guy in the audience. In the old big theaters I learned from experience to sit far enough under the mezzanine and balcony so that I wouldn’t get hit by flying cigarettes tossed down from above. Nobody ever put their hand on my knee or trying to blow me in a theater, but I also knew enough never to go to the men’s rooms in those places. I had a stronger bladder then.

I went to see burlesque both at the Follies at 46th and Seventh and the Melody (later the Harmony) Theater, watching dancers like Joey Karson and Therasita San Juan and Sonia Tokyo and Crystal Blue and Maria Krupa and Susie Nero and even the legendary striptease superstar Blaze Starr once. The Melody/Harmony was a whole world unto itself, too much to go into here…worthy of its own book or tv show. Check out this link to the adult industry history site The Rialto Report to learn lots more about it.

Through all those years, most of my friends were my fellow editors and writers, with some actors and artists too, often cynical about porn even as it fascinated us. We were all talented in our respective fields and many hoped for the main chance of opportunities outside of smut with more mainstream accomplishments. Some did, indeed, move on.

So, to sum up, in many ways, although I did mountains of magazine stuff related to the area and its workers, I was also always a fanboy and customer down on “The Deuce.”

The reality is my life is still basically on “The Deuce”, though…but rather the Deuce that exists in a different form, the Internet, instead of on a street. It’s the “The Deuce” as a way of thinking, you might say. With my writing about femdom and kink and webcam sites, for example, I’m still on the beat of the sleaze and the twists and turns of la vie psychosexualis.

What a tour I could give of Times Square! In fact, in one of the better porn films I wrote for Vivid Entertainment, 1997’s Masseuse 3, I created a character named Burt Lazarus who stands in front of the Show World Center as a kind of barker, talking about the area’s former tawdry glory. Unfortunately, in the way things sometimes don’t work out in the translation of screenplays to film, Burt’s scenes weren’t done the way I’d hoped, and the effect of his elegiac oratory didn’t have a chance to come across properly.

I could’ve done it better. So if some night you see me holding forth at 42nd Street and Eighth Avenue about the vanished and vanquished splendors of smut, don’t be surprised! 😉

 

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I made the screencaps above from the first episode of The Deuce.

 

 

Erotic phantoms of NYC’s Eighth Avenue…

One thing that fascinates me is what existed in certain spaces before what is there now. I always remember the previous tenants, especially if they have some erotic or sleazy context… 😉

For example, the northeast stretch of Eighth Avenue between 45th and 46th Streets:

This used to have three notorious porn theaters: the Capri (where the parking lot is now on the left); and the gay-themed Eros and the hetero-themed Venus. I can’t help but see in my mind the facades of those vanished edifices superimposed over the hordes of tourists who now stroll by and patronize the restaurants and bar and open-air market that now inhabit those urban footprints.

A block up to 47th and Eighth, across the street on the northwest side, is a marquee for what is now a sightseeing business:

Previously in the 1980s this space housed the Hollywood Twin Cinemas, but even before that in the 1970s the mezzanine was utilized for part of a massage parlor. Back in the 70s (not now!!) the entrance way on the left (painted red now) led to an elevator that took you up to the mezzanine and the girls who were sitting there. But BEFORE that mezzanine was used, and even before the theater showed porn films, not the mainstream Hollywood fare that came in the 80s, the massage parlor was just a street-level storefront on the left where the glass windows of the Duane Reade drugstore now are in 2017.

The very space where those donuts now lay placidly in their display case was, around 1975, the entrance alcove of the massage parlor, where I met one blonde girl named Lydia with whom I first acted out femdom roleplay fantasies (foot and butt worship) and visited several times; and another blonde named Goldie who, on one particularly cold winter night, gave my lonely bones a friendly hug and rubdown, and warm interesting conversation in which she told me she was a descendant of an early American president! I re-created some of that dialogue in the first porn film I wrote, 1987’s Adultery.

This stretch of street was immortalized in the poster for the 1976 film Taxi Driver. Recognize that marquee?

Finally, across the street, where there now stands a Starbucks, a Staples, a medical clinic, a preschool, and apartments, there used to be low-rise buildings that had a fantastically sleazy porn shop, a used comic book shop, an infamous gay bar called the Haymarket, and perhaps most important for the history of pornography, in the center of the block at 776 Eighth Avenue there were located offices of fetish digest publishers back in the 1950s, which showcased the work of such legendary artists such as Gene Bilbrew. I don’t remember the titles offhand right now, but I remember seeing the address on the copyright pages of some vintage issues. If and when I stumble on them again, I’ll amend this post and add the titles. This is the block now…

Look closely, though, and perhaps you’ll be able to imagine, as I do, infamous 50s femdom fetish models like Tana Louise walking down the street in sexy 50s couture and maybe going up the long-vanished steps to editorial offices at 776 Eighth Avenue!

By the way, Tana Louise (as opposed to the actress Tina Louise, an entirely different performer) was one of the very first fetish models I personally ever saw in a magazine. In today’s over-saturated kink environment, it may seem incredible that she really blew me away with her witchy dominant aura, but back in the early 70s I don’t think I’d ever come across anybody quite like her, and I think I noticed her before I even saw Bettie Page, who never looked quite as ferocious to me in any case. I got this image from the cool site Java’s Bachelor Pad, so go here to see and read more about Mistress Tana too.

 

 

 

Boom Boom Valdez and other catchy names…

Someone on Twitter last night said that they liked a phrase in one of my tweets and wanted to use it as the name of their band. The phrase was “futile lechery,” which I used to describe the hilarious attempts of horny John Astin to score a date with lovely Doris Day in the 60s comedy A Touch of Mink. I gotta admit, I’m proud of that little combo of words.

Actually, however, it’s not the first time my words have inspired (or will inspire) a band’s name. In 1988 I wrote (and titled) a porn movie called BOOM BOOM VALDEZ.

I wrote several movies directed by Henri Pachard.

I had briefly met the sexy young star Keisha at the XRCO Awards in L.A., and I was knocked out by her beauty and friendly personality. Then another time (I can’t recall if it was on the same trip) I ran into her at a party at the home of a magazine photographer, and I told Keisha I’d love to write a movie for her sometime. I mentioned this to director Ron Sullivan aka Henri Pachard, who was also there. He told me to come up with a storyline (he had just directed my first two screenplays, ADULTERY and ON THE LOOSE) and I promptly did when I got back to New York. BOOM BOOM VALDEZ is the story of topless dancer Boom Boom (Keisha) and her relationships with her sister, mother, co-workers at the club, and a writer who has a bit of a crush on her. (Nothing autobiographical about it!) 😉

The picture got made and is still out there on disc, old VHS cassettes, online, and even got a very nice IMDb review last year which you can read here. But as luck and occasional porn production ineptitude would have it (and at the time I was extremely annoyed), the producers forgot to include my name in the credits…!

My reaction to this was, and I quote exactly:  $%!!#??#&**##%!!!

I wrote all my movies under my real name Neil Wexler, rather than Irv O. Neil. Many of the scripts had a lot of personal elements, even more in the case of BOOM BOOM VALDEZ which is why the missing credit so irked me. But to whom was I going to protest, the non-existent Porn Screenwriters Guild?

Notice how the disc box has a much more peppy photo of Keisha? She looks so serious on the VHS cover above!

Nonetheless, in sneaky fashion, always anticipating this kind of snafu, I’d left certain clues within the script itself as to its writerly parentage. For one, there is a character named “Victor Bloom”—Bloom being a name that has popped up in my work since 1975, either as characters or pseudonyms (I wrote as “Lester Bloom” for many years). Secondly, the characters of the writer played by Joey Silvera and the burlesque fan played by Richard Pacheco are very recognizably drawn on my own personality and interests. The writer, in fact, is a precursor to the character of Vic Vanner in my suspense novel FATE OF A STRIPPER, about a middle-aged writer/editor in love with a dancer.

You might say that in my imagination, Boom-Boom Valdez dances on the same club stage as Valerie Vickers of this novel.

Anyway, it was a kick when I heard, years later, that there was a European band called Boom Boom Valdez—so I look forward to hearing more about Futile Lechery!

 

 

The dark nights of a stripper’s heart…

FATE OF A STRIPPER is a novel that takes you into the girlie joints of New York’s contemporary Times Square (yes, such clubs are happily still there despite the much-publicized gentrification); the hipster scene of the New Burlesque (a little further downtown in the East Village); and into some very dark recesses of the human heart…

A story in the femme fatale tradition of 1950s noir paperbacks and films.

It’s available on Kindle and many other mobile devices at Amazon USA, UK, Canada, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Japan, Mexico, Brazil, Australia, India and The Netherlands.

So please click ahead to Amazon and explore the free sample chapters, and then experience…

FATE OF A STRIPPER.