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

closures of the Strand, the Capitol, the Roxy, and the Paramount, “where the great Frank Sinatra performed,” as the “beginning of the downfall of Broadway. It used to be a Great White Way, everybody was dressed up, tuxedos, gowns, no overalls, no short pants, no khakis, none of that mess. They had cops on the beat all night long, kept the peace, nobody mad at nobody. Walked anywhere I want anytime, never look back. Now? I can’t get home fast enough.” Though he lives around the corner from Hawaii-Kai, Pee Wee takes a cab home. “Thank God, I haven’t been mugged, because the man upstairs always takes care of me, so I don’t worry ‘bout nothin’.”
    After Birdland closed, Pee Wee “wanted to be with the people on the street.” Characters of questionable deeds continually wander in from the avenue to whisper in the midget’s ear, then dart back out. “Sometime I enjoy working here, sometime I don’t. These crazy nuts off the streets walks in and I straighten ‘em out, tell ‘em, ‘I’m sorry, you can’t come in, you in the wrong place.’” The four-foot-eight, sixty-eight-year-old midget carries a metal cane: “And know how to use it, too. First their legs; when they bend down, their stomach, then their head. That’s it.”
    Was The Pee ever married?
    “Never got hung up with nothin’ like that. They got a big mouth. All women got a big mouth, gettin’ in people’s b’niss. Not one of ‘em I know today I would trust goin’ ‘cross the street. Don’t get me wrong, I had my girls, crazy ‘bout beautiful women, sexy, decent, clean women.
    “Hey, baby, how you doin’?” booms the Broadway greeter into the street—where rumor has it he’s really a woman in drag. He remembers Police Commissioner Ben Ward walking a Harlem beat (“He was tougher then than he is now”), and scolds the governor for not putting criminals in the electric chair. It was the sixties assassinations that first messed everything up in the country. He then admits having been scared to death last night during an electrical storm, the likes of which he never before saw strike the Broadway pavement: “The signs of the time. All over Broadway, b’niss is terrible. In the next few years, all hell will break loose over the world. The battle of Armageddon is already started. People minds is boggled on pornography, all that ugly filth and stuff. They all dope addicts, their minds turn to ugliness. We in the last days.”
    Pee Wee looks far above his prison perch at the schlock Broadway waterfall and breaks into hymn:
    When your bod-y
    Suffer pain
    And your health you can’t regain
    Take your troubles to the Lord
    And leave it there .

LOWDOWN
    Inside the Peeps
    The scene is a crowded weekday lunch hour at a modern Times Square sex emporium in the late 1970s. Outside stands “Dudley Arnholt,” commodities broker, tough guy with a tax form, mid-forties, divorced, paranoid neurotic, Times Square Everyman at the moment. He’s so horny that the crack of dawn ain’t safe—he followed the direction of his erection all the way here, like a donkey following a carrot. But he freezes near the entrance—passersby are onto his game, he fears. Checking all directions to make sure the coast is clear of any clients, neighbors, or nieces, he sighs woefully and steps briskly through the door. Arnholt is home free in an evil candy store of gaping fuck holes, lassoed bazooms, twelve-inch cannons of shooting manhood, electrifying hardcore sound loops, and a blatant subculture of fetishes, all arranged in McDonald’s-style elegance. But the pang in his gut leads him past all this to an even greater spectacle—the fantastic, featured “Live Nude Girl” peep show.
    There are twenty occupied booths, each with a glowing red bulb that indicates a quarter has been inserted, giving the viewer his thirty seconds. Cocks of every age, race, and size are being drawn out in the booths. Some will spurt onto the walls, some into Kleenex, some will