Free Tales of Times Square: Expanded Edition by Josh Alan Friedman

through them, then falls to the sidewalk, ending in a hand pirouette. One of the little urchins dares to try a back Spin, but is shoved off by the big boys. “Get the fuck back!”
    The next cat from Float has his routine interrupted by a Four who wears a tanktop T-shirt and toothpick far back in his mouth. “This be you,” says Tanktop, mocking his opponent, a sluggish, bulky dancer in a windbreaker. Tanktop executes some cliched robot moves, à la James Brown ten years ago, to demonstrate his point. Then he starts to do his own moves, his nostrils flaring angrily. Spastic, jerky muscle twitches, quick-changing face contortions. He measures his challenger’s head between his hands, then prances about, as though still holding the head. This is Tanktop’s take on Japanese electronics, robots, computers, and video games, all coming back at you on the street corner.
    “Okay, we through,” announces the collector, flatly and suddenly, without any flourish. The partying stops on a dime, the crowd disperses, and they’re finished on this block.
    Pee Wee Is Not a Happy Man
    The short-tempered black midget, a Times Square novelty since 1943, paces at the doorway of Hawaii-Kai like Napoleon. He’s been serving time here since 1960, greeting folks with his cane, pointing the way upstairs at the schlock tourist restaurant next to the Winter Garden. His domain resembles a tropical Hawaiian Disneyland exhibit with a coat check and rest rooms. Business is terrible. If you grease his palm, he’ll sit you down by the mock waterfall and tell you his life story:
    “I’m Pee Wee, been on Broadway almost fifty years. I come up from Nashville in August 1943. I was singing and dancing with the late Frances Craig, owned a white band down South who had a black man performin’. After he gave his band up during the war days, he give me a hundred dollars, ticket, and letter of introduction.
    “I had met the great Billy Eckstein down in Nashville, gave me his Harlem address, told me whenever I come to New York City I could stay with him till I got something to do—” A personage interrupts him at the door. “Don’t come over here ‘n’ bother me now, this my b’niss!” Pee Wee shouts, lording over the Hawaiian forest like a Cornish hen. Upstairs, the Hawaiian revue of hula girls and singers are starting their chant on the dining stage, which Pee Wee has no part in. Pee Wee performed at the Three Deuces Club on 52nd Street during his first few years in the city. “Ballads, jazz, rhythm, that was my act. But I stopped singing in the nightclub b’niss after ‘44. They made me greeter and host. I preferred that to singing, because so much red tape getting started. I had more fun as emcee. Did that for ‘bout twenty-five, thirty years.”
    Pee Wee worked Times Square joints like the Royal Roost, and Zanzibar’s at 49th and Broadway, his favorite because of its old-time mobsters and decor. But it was at Birdland that he became a fixture: “I introduced onstage Miles Davis, Teddy Wilson, the late Charlie “Yardbird” Parker, late Fats Navarro, late Bud Powell.... Never went to their funerals, always wanted to remember them as I saw them.”
    Pee Wee dresses in an old-fashioned blue-and-gray doorman’s uniform that he “messes up” with a rose in his lapel, a police button, an American flag, two religious emblems, a diamond stickpin under his bowtie, and gold jewelry, making him look like a tiny, decorated general.
    “I lived in Harlem, the Hotel Theresa. That’s when Harlem was Harlem. It was clean, weren’t no muggin’, nobody think about stickin’ ya up, everybody was beautiful. Times Square was so clean in those days, you could eat off the sidewalk. When you get offa your job, you’d go to the all-night movies in Times Square. I don’t mean no bad, ugly movies. Legit movies, reg’lar, clean. Then I’d go down to Romeo Restaurant with a friend for spaghetti and meatball, prices were right.”
    Pee Wee cites the