Don't Get Too Comfortable Read online

  Dawn is picking out and lightening the cornices of façades as we hurtle up through a deserted Wall Street. Settling into the backseat, I am reminded of that Wislawa Szymborska poem that used to be posted in subway cars. Something about how no one feels fine at 4:00 a.m. If the ants feel fine at 4:00 a.m., then hooray for the ants. Hooray for me, too. I am on my way home to bed, if not exactly sleep, the preferred nocturnal activity of most people in this great, big, dirty burg. This is my favorite moment of the night.

  PRIVATES ON PARADE

  The building at the corner of Forty-sixth Street and Broadway that houses the Howard Johnson's is also the home of the billboard for the revival of the musical Chicago. If you were to peel it back, you might discover a forgotten window, and hanging in it, a sign touting the long defunct Whirly Girly Revue. Who can say what the original colors were? By the time I became aware of it, around 1982, it had already been bleached by more than twenty years' worth of Times Square sunlight, its type faded to pale Crest-blue against a yellowing french-vanilla background. The Whirly Girly was probably a 1950s establishment, from the looks and lexicon of the sign. The lettering, block printing with vaguely exaggerated dimensions—the arms of the ys arcing like wishbones—tried to mimic some of the verve and curve of the good times promised inside. It's probably still there. There would have been little reason for its removal. Much easier to just leave it, covered over with the images of Bob Fosse's barely clad, hard-boiled Prohibition-era cutie-pies. It's like a geological record of peekaboo, the layers moving you back and forth through time with the ease of a trombone slide.

  Nostalgia has always been a bit of a bunko scam. Authentic charms of its signage notwithstanding, it's worth remembering that those must have been some pretty grim circumstances for the young ladies of the Whirly Girly. Unless it's your own heyday as a peepshow dancer you're fondly recalling, it's dangerous to drag a sepia-dipped brush over the sleaze of yesteryear. By early November of 2001, there is no need to look to the past for our daily dose of tawdry. While the rest of the country has wrapped itself in the flag and emerged newly patriotic and bellicose, New York scarcely two months after September 11 has tempered the jingoism by rising like a drunken, horny phoenix from its ashes. The city is electric with the renewed crackle of filth. Chalk it up to that old market-theory chestnut about the rising hemline in the plummeting economy, or that people simply don't want to spend their nights alone. The media have coined a term for the transitory love-in-wartime clutches they claim are happening everywhere: Terror Sex.

  While I have balanced the many weeks that I spent crying in front of the news with embracing the obliviating powers of alcohol, I've yet to dip my spoon into any of that Thanatos-scented carnality. So I have come up to Forty-second Street to witness the new Weimar firsthand. Secondhand, actually, as I will only be a passive audience member of Puppetry of the Penis.

  The proscenium of the John Houseman Theater has been decorated like a Greek temple with PENIS TEMPUS inscribed on the pediment. The audience is made up of mixed couples and groups of women. I spy one male duo. I am the only single man. I make very conspicious use of my notebook. No one cares anyway. They have been buying beer and wine in the lobby and have been encouraged to bring their drinks into the theater with them. One woman comes in carrying a pizza box and a stack of napkins and the ushers make no move to stop her. Her friends, a gaggle of girls out for a night on the town, wave her over. The pizza is for later, I suppose, because for now the ladies are sucking lewdly on heart-shaped lollipops. Even though the temple onstage has a Latin designation, it feels quite Greek in here. I mean Greek in that binge-drinky, Dalíesque-arcs-of-airborne-vomit, ripe-with-the-incipient-danger-of-date-rape, college-fraternity sense of the word, as opposed to the Aegean birthplace of democracy.

  The house fades to black and the man of the young couple beside me puts his arm protectively around his date. “Pray silence for the keeper of the art. Priapus!” says a recorded voice as a roly-poly young man in a short toga and paper laurel wreath takes the stage.

  “In Rome, they call me Dionysus. In India, Shiva. In Wales, Tom Jones.” I am too busy writing Rome was Bacchus, no? in my notebook to truly register the moment, but the evening's zenith of wit has just come and gone. Priapus introduces the two stars and creators of the show, Simon Morley and David Friend. The two Australians come out in velvet capes, their bare ankles disappearing into puffy white sneakers, not unlike Heather and Jennifer, my Hooters Girls. Doffing their garments, they stand naked before us, to the loud hoots and hollers and shocked chuckles of the audience. The young man beside me takes his arm from his girlfriend's shoulders and folds his hands in his lap.

  Neither Morley nor Friend has a particularly nice body. Maybe if it was more of a treat to see them naked, I might feel less embarrassed, able to get into the proceedings more. But then I remember the time I accompanied the writer Dan Savage to the Gaiety Male Burlesque on Forty-sixth Street, not far from the storied Whirly Girly.

  Dan was doing research on the seven deadly sins, and I went along to watch the strippers. Even there, the onstage antics of the naked men, some of them startlingly handsome, were curiously unerotic. That hypothetical question that I kept on asking myself while watching them shoot Sesión Privada—would I be more aroused if these were guys?—was answered in pretty short order at the Gaiety. The drill was the same with each dancer: he came out wearing very little, danced quite badly—the strippers were largely, easily identifiably straight—and then went offstage while the very well-behaved audience waited. In a perfect world, he was supposed to come back onstage starkers and erect. In an evening of twelve or so dancers, Dan and I only saw one instance of tumescence. The boner got some polite clapping, like the entrance applause that greets an ingenue who has received very good advance notices:

  (“Why, here comes Alice now.”

  “Hello, Pat . . .” she says, swanning onto the stage in tennis whites. She pauses before delivering the rest of her line. Facing the audience, she makes a slight bow of grateful recognition of her effect upon them. “It was so awfully swell of you to invite me.”)

  AT PUPPETRY, IT becomes immediately clear that the men's bodies are nothing more than the utilitarian walls of flesh from which their units depend. The show is strictly about their genital origami, as they call it. Their soft bellies and flat dimpled asses fade from view, not for the least reason because Priapus—O multitasking deity slash unpaid intern!—is filming all of it on video in tight, tight close-up, which is then projected in huge magnification against the upstage wall. This is the world's least appetizing cooking show. Today, chicken gizzards!

  They begin with the Wind-up, stretching and turning their dicks like auto cranks while calliope music plays. Priapus was the wrong muse to invoke. Plastic Man would have been more apt, because the evening requires some very un-priapic slackened flesh. These guys aren't unnaturally well endowed so much as pulled. There will be future hell to pay for both of them, urologically and aesthetically.

  “None of these hurt at all, so we don't want you to feel sorry for us,” says one of them. But I can't help it. I do feel sorry for them. Sorrier still for their mothers, and sorriest of all for myself.

  They call their tricks “installations,” and from the very first one, the Woman, where Morley tucks his leading man between his legs, the audience is beside itself with laughter. The banter would have to be smartened up tenfold to qualify as idiotic. It's all just a series of card tricks. “Here's another, the Wristwatch,” he announces as a penis is wrapped around a forearm. “Who wants a hamburger?” (I don't.)

  The installations are trotted out one after another with all the dramatic flair of a shopping list. I keep on waiting for some commentary, a story, anything resembling a point, so to speak. Friend does at least provide us with a bit of Puppetry lore. “Quite a lot of our installations were developed in a pub environment,” he says. Say, kids, why don't we take our drunken, latent homoerotic urges and turn them into a socko show?

  I sit through the Loch Ness Monster and the Roller Skate but leave just as they begin introducing props with the Squirrel, a glans poking through a knothole in a piece of bark. Perhaps my impression of the overall piece is woefully misinformed by my partial viewing, but failing a wholesale shift to Strindberg in the final thirty minutes, I don't think so.

  “You're not going, are you?” asks a member of the house staff in the lobby, her voice as astonished as if I had risen from the operating table mid-appendectomy. But I have to leave. Penis Tempus just didn't fugit fast enough.

  THERE IS MUCH in our culture to affront the eye of the fervent terrorist postulant, things out there that do us no favors, to be sure. If, for example, it came to light that the dangerously thin, affectless, value-deficient, higher aspiration–free, amateur-porn auteuse Paris Hilton was actually a covert agent from some secret Taliban madrassa whose mission was to portray the ultimate capitalist-whore puppet of a doomed society with nothing more on its mind than servitude to Mammon and celebrity at any cost, I wouldn't be a bit surprised. But unless Al Qaeda has some extra-special religious proscription against the idiotic and sophomoric, I'd be hard-pressed to count Puppetry of the Penis among those transgressive things that make us glorious and free. As a work of degenerate art, it is neither. It's harmless. The embarrassment I feel as I exit the John Houseman is not in having a penis of my own. It is in having retinas. And this might sound like a strange thing to say about a spectacle wherein two men spend more than an hour onstage stark naked but for shoes pulling the old dog-and-dice every which way for our delectation, but it lacked good old-fashioned showmanship. I've seen children's magic shows with more engaging narrative flow, let alone more convincing balloon animals. I thought rude sideshow entertainments like this vanished long ago
due to such civilizing influences as universal inoculation and the Tennessee Valley Authority.

  The rest of the audience adores it, though. After all, Joseph Pujol, the nineteenth-century star of the Moulin Rouge, has a street named after him in Paris. He delighted common folk and crowned heads alike with demonstrations of his pétomanie, or “fartistry,” doing birdcalls and even blowing out the footlights onstage from quite a distance, using nothing more than his remarkable flatulent powers, so what do I know?

  Maybe this is just what folks need right now, I think, trying to be charitable. The final tally of the dead changes every day and the subterranean fires at Ground Zero only recently stopped burning. There is still the ever-present question of further attack hanging over our heads. And talk about reports of the death of irony being premature, the tenure of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani—the martinet who improved the city for the few by abridging the rights of the many and criminalizing poverty—had the greatest final act in history, as he underwent his surreal transformation into a beloved hero, even, albeit briefly, to the liberal public-television totebag–oisie who roundly loathed him through two terms. It had been an aggressively rough two months in the city at that point.

  I WALK THROUGH the heart of Times Square to the subway. I hadn't been up there since the morning of September 12, when I stood on line outside the New York Times building on Forty-third Street to buy the newspaper; they couldn't be found for love or money elsewhere in the city. About 150 of us waited for the papers to be delivered from the printing plant.

  The trucks were taking longer than expected and I had promised friends that I would buy papers for them, too. I knew they would be worried about me if I was late so I turned to the woman behind me and asked if I could pay her a dollar to use her cell phone.

  She thought about it for a second. “Hmmmm . . . No. I don't want to use up my minutes.”

  Not her batteries, that she would need in good working order to call for help, god forbid, were she trapped underneath some fallen rubble, but her minutes. A purchasable commodity that I was in fact offering to purchase. Oddly enough, I found this display of cuntiness not twenty-four hours after tragedy bracingly restorative. We were still intact after all.

  I was also in Times Square on the first night of Desert Storm, oddly enough. Emerging from a movie late at night, I stood in the snow with half a dozen others watching the lights of the news zipper telling us that war had been declared. This is just like that photograph of the sailor kissing the nurse, I thought, with a too-healthy dose of self-mythologizing grandiosity, ignoring for the moment that that was a picture on the day the war ended, and in this instance the casualties were about to begin piling up.

  IN THE WEEKS following September 11, when people were questioning whether they should stay in town, my friend Jenny wondered aloud at supper one evening, “Do you think we're like those photographs of happy Berliners walking along the boulevards in 1938, completely blind to what's about to happen?” I'm not sure how happy or oblivious Berliners really were even in 1938, but I know what she means. It has been difficult to know how to behave, what to do. Another friend had to be seriously talked down from hightailing it to the Maine woods. There was a photo of a young woman in the Times a few days earlier. She said something to the effect that she did not, in point of fact, find it pleasant to be living in epic times. I quite agree.

  THE NOVEMBER AIR is cloudy with a frozen mist that makes halos around the lights of Forty-second Street, giving the place an old-timey sodium glow. I am reminded of something newspaperman and playwright Ben Hecht wrote in 1941 about Times Square. He wondered if, in half a century, the things he beheld then and there might seem “part of a scene so quaint and human as will bring tears to the eyes of some old print connoisseur in the year 1991. The electromania of Broadway, these neon and electric signs, the hemorrhage of lights, how full of a vanished individualism they will seem. What of the newspaper headlines? Will they also seem like valentines? Here is a more difficult metamorphosis to imagine. Hitler on a valentine!” Hecht is prescient. I've never seen an image of der Führer with the words “Be mine,” but The Producers, the Yiddish-inflected Mel Brooks musical, has a full-on Busby Berkeley Hitler number and is still running to packed houses.

  I ride back downtown, coming aboveground at Union Square. The city's biggest spontaneous memorial sprang up here mere hours after the attacks. By now, the place where crowds gathered to stand in silence has devolved over the weeks into a skeleton crew of die-hard youngsters engaged in drumming circles, Ultimate Frisbee games, and the free exchange of genital warts. I pass by a small group of them, playing guitar and still sitting on the grass even though it's promising to be a cold night. Littered around them are the wax plugs of candle ends, empty votive cups scattered here and there on the ground, and stray leaflets of the missing, sodden with rain, baked by the sun, now illegible and curling like dying leaves. Surrounded by all these multicolored bits and pieces, these kids could be the last stragglers at a fantastic party. Maybe there is some solace to be derived in that: bacchanal or funeral, after enough time, the detritus looks the same.

  BEACH BUMMER

  The scene is by now part of our collective unconscious: the earth being churned from underneath, a snaking runnel suddenly rupturing forth like a keloid scar. The burrowing stops abruptly and up from the ground pops Bugs Bunny, jubilant, his holiday props of pail and shovel at the ready. “Miami Beach!” he declaims. “Yippee! Hooray! Yahoo-y!” and off he runs, racing across the burning sand to the water. But Bugs has indeed taken that left turn at Albuquerque and is nowhere near Miami Beach. Hours later, we find him trudging half dead across a desert, searching in vain for an ocean.

  Some might interpret this as a parable about the miragelike futility of dreams. Still others might choose to see it as nothing more than the wascally wabbit's chance to indulge in his penchant for drag in order to outsmart that hot-tempered bedouin he will meet later on in the cartoon. Personally, the message I take away is that, in contrasting it favorably with the punishing emptiness of the vast, arid Sahara, what Bugs Bunny and his creators don't know about Miami Beach is a whole lot.

  It is not the fault of South Beach that I am a joy-obliterating erotophobe. That it comprises some of my deepest aversions (heat, direct sunlight, and a pervasive sense of fun) while lacking many of my most cherished requirements in a destination (occasional rain, the generally suppressive influence of the superego, and a melancholic populace prone to making monochrome woodcuts of hollow-eyed women sitting disconsolate in shabby rooms with their meager suppers on tin plates before them) is nobody's problem but my own. And it's a problem that I will have to keep to myself this weekend as I work the pool at one of Miami's hiply refurbished art deco hotels—the Hiawatha, let's call it.

  In the old days of Miami, when there was still a vital demographic that I might have charmed with my smattering of Yiddish, my pool duties would probably have involved setting up deck chairs and opening striped umbrellas, with perhaps the odd slather of cocoa butter across the occasional expanse of freckled dowager's back. But those are the klezmer strains of a largely disappeared world. The old widows have either died off or sit wheelchair-bound in nursing homes. The fever dream that is the new South Beach is all sleek, adamantine hedonism. I will be at the beck and call of a clientele glossy with privilege: glamorous people of low degree with tight clothing and loose morals.

  I can already see myself approaching a poolside cabana, a large cream-colored canvas tent providing a conspicuous privacy. Pushing aside the flap, I deliver drinks to a music impresario and his two friends. On a chaise nearby, the mogul's girlfriend lies, a living Helmut Newton photograph in nothing but Manolos and panties, her eyes rolled up into the back of her head, the glossed lips of her somnolent mouth parted. Beside her a small black-lacquered table frosted with a conical pile of cocaine, wispy traces of it wicking off in the slight breeze.