Times Square Babylon Then

Rent boys.

Hookers on the Strip.

Flesh peddlers.

Martinis at Hojos.

And let's not forget the pimps.

Now Babylon is no more.

But Times Square was something else in the 1970s.

And anyone who wandered that chasm of sin knew that all too well.

HANDS OF BRICK by Peter Nolan Smith

HURRAH Video link

Hurrah's nightclub existed from 1977 to 1981. Once its disco era was ended by the opening of Studio 54, the owners refashioned the second-floor club into a showcase for punk and new wave bands. I worked at the door with Howie Montauk and Jack Flood. The DJ was Shaun Cassette. The bands were the Dead Boys, the Damned, the Ramones, ESG, Klaus Nomi, the Police and too many others to mention without hurting my brain cells, however a new website has been dedicated to bringing those shows back to life thanks to the VDO DJ Merrill Alighieri.

I hadn't thought I would ever seen Polyrock again or Gang of Four or the Cure again.

This is a must see for all fans of that epoch and here's the link;

ps We had a good times there; free love and good cocaine.

Before the age of 'just say no'.

The roof had a view of the Statue of Liberty. I made love to many patriotic girls there. I think I even fell in love with several of them; Lisa Johnson, Emily Johnson, the sisters from New Jersey. I thought that I was a star and I was for several years.

This link helps me remember which ones.

Dad's Moustache 1972

In the early 1970s my father complained about my sister's boyfriend's facial hair and she told my father that he would look younger with a mustache. He grew one and then sideburns too. Youth always wins over an older man.

Mom, my youngest brother Michael and my father Frank A Smith II.

Love them all forever.

HillBilly Ranch Bar Boston - 1999

As you get old you forget. as you get older, you are forgotten - anon

I know that I didn't come up with that quote, because I haven't really forget everything yet and several years ago I reminisced about Lost Boston with a few old-timers during an afternoon Jacob Wirth's bar, while killing time waiting for the Chinese bus back to New York.

The girthy fifty-year olds were both members of the court, a judge and a DA, and I introduced myself, asking if they knew my brother, who had worked as a lawyer in Boston for almost thirty years.

"You mean 'No Show' Smith. I can't count the number of times we've requested his presence here and he never shows."

"He's a hard worker."

The sharp winter sun filtered through the thick front window. No music played on the stereo and the TV showed the rerun of last night's Celtics game. At that moment there was nowhere else in the world closer to heaven.

"And this isn't hard work." The DA slugged down a Jameson and signaled for three more.

"It can put a sweat on you, but not like digging a ditch." I had been working as a general contractor on a rich man's house in Greenwich, Connecticut. My hands were calloused from the toils of construction. The three of us were of Irish descent. Our grandfathers had suffered hard labor to make our lives less of a struggle. "Holding a shovel is more honorable work."

"To the Big Dig." The judge raised his glass. The tunnel under downtown Boston had replaced an elevated highway spanning downtown for decades.

"Sorry, if I don't join you, but they dumped the rubble into the Quincy Quarries." The project planners had dumped more than 5.4 million cubic yards into the granite pits.

"Now the Quarries was something. Most every teenage boy south of the Charles River had jumped off Rooftop."

"Here's to Brewster's Quarry" The bartender appeared from nowhere and placed four glasses on the scarred wooden plank, joining us to toast the longgone teen Eden.

"Remember when they didn't let women drink at the bar here?"

"Yes, back in the early Sseventies I used to bring my feminist friends here as a joke. They hated that the bartender wouldn't serve them at the bar. He loved telling those hairy girls to take a seat in the dining room." I couldn't remember his name, but we agreed that back then a woman's place wasn't at the bar in Jacob Wirth's. I was of a different mind now, but said, "I thought it was a good laugh."

"Maybe the bartender didn't think it was that funny. You were probably a dirty hippie and I mean that in the best of all possible terms. I was a Marine."

From South Boston?"

"Yes."

I had taught at South Boston High School during the Bussing Era and decided not to mention that.

"Not many choices for young men from Southie back then."

"Prison, OD, or the Marines. None of us had the money for college."

"A wise choice. I protested against the Vietnam War." At sixteen I wanted to join the Marines to get out of my hometown. My mother, a staunch anti-communist, refused to sign the papers.

"You dirty hippie."

"I'll drink to that."

My brother showed up later and our collective memories toured the city of our past. We extolled the prune rolls at Warmuth's, the grilled hot dogs at WT Grants, the strippers at the Two O'Clock Lounge, and relived my brother's bachelor party in the Combat Zone. That was a blank in my mind.

"I vaguely recollect stumbling out of the Naked I into the Hillbilly Ranch. I think I wanted to hear a version of Meryl Haggard's MAMA TRIED."

"We lost you for about an hour."

"Probably ended up with the drag queens at the Other Side." William laughed with his beer belly juggling like defrosted jello. The beer at Jacob Wirth's was better than good.

"No, I'd remember that. At least I think I would, but something sticks in my mind about getting up on the stage of the Hillbilly Ranch and singing a song." Later I had seen Sleepy La Beef, John Lincoln Wright, the Bayou Boys, and other southern bands of the 70s at the dive next to the Greyhound bus station.

"That was a tough bar owned by Frankie Segalini. You were lucky that you weren't rolled in that place. it was filled with Navy peckerwoods and crackers. They didn't like us Irish."

"You returned to the Naked I intact." My older brother had a head for long ago. He was a lawyer.

"And we made it to the church in time."

The four of us clinked glasses to those times gone by. It was good to be with my older brother and two members of the court. We spoke of our lies

The 1978 Blizzard, the Chelsea Fire, BC beating Notre Dame, Checker Cabs, friends, family, the Surf Nantasket, Brother's Bar in Kenmore Square, and the taste of fried clams from Tony's on Wollaston Beach.

Afterwards I walked my brother to his office on Beacon Hill. The bus station and the Hillbilly Ranch were gone. Neither of us said anything about them. We were happy to have seen each other and spend time together. We were in the now in a city we knew so well. As youth we had thought that the good times would never end and they never do in your heads, especially after spending an afternoon at Jacob Wirth's.>

LOLITAS ON THE SUBWAY 1977

School breaks open at 2.
Young girls lounge on the subway
Tramping uptown.
Seemingly ready for action.
And it's not all a bluff.
Teenage girls not scared of the Lower East Side slums
Tenement buildings eternally burning
Their youth eternal
Decadent
Daring
Dangerous
Bored to death of the touch of their fathers' friends

Lolitas on the subway
Taunting all men's desires
A finger pulls apart the school uniform
Fourteen and ripe with power
Ingenue eyes asking, "You want to watch?"
And what man can refuse Lolitas' lost lips
Mocking at all men.

Their peals of teenage lust echoing of tiled walls

Going home
Thumpbam
Thump bam
Thump thump bam bam
The lolitas degang on East 86th Street
They rich girls
Inside their doorman apartments they lock the bedroom doors
Thumpbam
Thump bam
Now more a lolitas just a girl in pajamas which she was lolita Thumpbam
Thump bam
A young girl waiting for her master.
Knowing her secret name
Knowing where she wants to be touched
Lolita

Schoolgirls on the A Train to Far Rockaway 1978 - Willy Spiller

Drunken Bully - C'est Moi

Almost ten years ago my faux-sister Pip was defending 1970s porn star Marc Stevens on Facebook. I caught the thread in mid-stream and joined the fray. Marc and I had and I had almost been lovers.

Here's the exchange; PIP - Marc Stevens was a next-door neighbor and pal...here he is on David Susskind...We partied all the time...but our scenes were different...viva la difference, he was oddly fatherly to me...and if though I knew he was a porn 'star', I never saw his movies...but he did give offer me advice about boys..which I was happy to hear. Sad to see him had such a tragic end...like so many of that time...famously photographed by Mapplethorpe. ah me!

WOMAN FROM BERLIN I wondered why he was coming to Club 57 - it was you who told him. Wednesday at 3:07pm.

PIP - yup...hung with Peter Nolan Smith, my sister Kyle Davis Cadley and a whole motley crew....ah woe!

ME - Marc was good fun.

WOMAN FROM BERLIN - He was very polite and nice as I recall.

PIP - A good fb friend, gay english teacher is Fla., was bemoaning a Porno star making a PSA...it rankled and brought Marc to mind! What a great role model he was for gay kids! Did we live in a particular place in time that enabled us to be open and happily accepting of each other? The more I know about what people 'out there' think, the less I feel I belong.

ME - it was a special time. we accepted each other for what we were and our opinion evolved from relationships after overcoming prejudice. The era of errors.

WOMAN FROM BERLIN One is brought up to be accepting and loving of others or not. I think it's that simple.

ME - Most people are raised with the bias of their community. It is up to the individual to change the thinking of the majority through our thought deeds and words.

PIP - So we made our own community...and now we're in a right wing hell hole.

WOMAN FROM BERLIN So what's new? We were always in one. Remember Anita Bryant? The Moral Majority? America, Love it or Leave it? Yuppies? Nancy Reagan's red cloth coats? Ring any bells?

PIP - Vaguely...Anita was mean to Harvey Milk...orange juice...we in the thick of it could dismiss the wacko's..harder now, somehow, perhaps my view is too narrow and shaped by our unique perspective...I get pissing mad when I think of people in closets and suicidal teens...Surely we have gotten somewhere!!!!Do You remember that party you had in Chinatown...someone fell off the roof ( is okay, I believe) and I made out with a beautiful girl all night!!!! Cyrena. Ah YES, I'm an old goat now lol

WOMAN FROM BERLIN - Steven Kramer who was married to Patti Astor at the time pulled that tap dancing trick on the ledge, which is something he often did, but alas fell off that time. Brilliant artist of many talents. You kissing Cyndria Fox maybe? I know that night Robert Gordon propositioned me with my pal and his girlfriend Snooky nearby. What a creep. That was the opening party for NWV. Andy Horn was there, he says, but I haven't the slightest recollection of having met him then. PIP - My only GF Cyrena...wow...flashback.

WOMAN FROM BERLIN - Everyone had them in Boarding School, but unfortunately I was expelled before I got one and the irony was that I was accused of sneaking out to meet boys - at the tender age of 11? and kicked out. I actually think the "Ban The Bible" pin that I wore on my uniform and my disregard for the rules made them have it in for me. You had a girlfriend?

PIP - She was everyone's girlfriend! LOL..not girlfriend...What do the kids call it??? Friend and hook-up?

PIP - Ban the bible...good one LOL Marc Stevens www.ovguide.com Watch Marc Stevens Videos. Free Streaming Marc Stevens Video Clips. I Added this after a long day research Trappist Beer in Belgium. Always trying to make a story about me.

ME - I remember Steven dancing on the edge. Anthony Scibelli and I pulled him down and two minutes later he was back up there. We went to grab him and he fell the wrong way. Crunch. We looked down at him. He was lying facedown in a pool of blood.

ME - David McDermott and I leaped to the billboard on the other roof and climbed down to him. Patti was screaming at the top of her lungs. David was a little horrified by the sight of so much blood, but was brave enough to say, "If we don't move him, he's going to drown in his own blood., but I asked Steven if he could move his feet.

ME - "You're right. Can you move your feet. He moaned 'yes' and I turned him on his back. Someone yelled from your roof. "What do you need?" -

"I yelled back a beer."

WOMAN FROM BERLIN - Another stunt that he used to pull at Kristian's loft would be he would be hanging on the ledge outside of the window and when you noticed him he would wave at you while holding onto the ledge with the other arm. It would scare the you know what out of you.

ME - I ran into him months after his fall. He asked if I knew him. I said no, thinking he might be embarrassed. finally I succumbed to his insistence and said, "I was the guy who turned you over on that roof.' He walked away without another word.

SQUARE GAY - I stand by my post of yesterday. We are supposed to be reminding gay youth that they can be gay and healthy and happy throughout their lives. I don't think we need more reminders that the gay world is hyper-sexualized and that many, wrong...

WOMAN FROM BERLIN - You know, I think I remember you shouting for that beer. I was so sensitive years ago

ME - I must say that many teens of whatever sexuality are self-loathing. I was wheeling in my bed at this moment.

ME - Noel, the Aids epidemic was manufactured. Me - straights shared the same lifestyles. We had a good time. Don't demonize the past. L 7

WOMAN FROM BERLIN - Oops, this is my stop, gotta get off. Bye Y'all.

PIP- Noel is dismissing us as drug addled losers from the 70's!????

CARO!!! Ha ha. not quite.

ME - Noel, this world is too filled with squares telling us we were wrong. You want to shout that out. Sing to a different choir. We are altos and falsettos in this crew. Buzzkill someone else

PIP - Noel, could I be wrong in thinking that this is a case of the oppressed becoming the oppressor? It seems you want a place at the dinner table of Middle America! You'll never feel better until you (collectively) accept yourself...oh dear.

ME - believe me, i can still throw the buzzkills off the bus. Noel, stop looking in the mirror and admire the shadows

WOMAN FROM BERLIN - Lucia, not all are enlightened or have drank from the same fountain. Au 'Reservoir'.

ME - Marc 10 1/2 Stevens. he had some crank on him, drool factor 12

PIP - I never sorted all my pals out...gay..straight..we were individuals baby...As Ann Magnuson said in "The Nomi Story" which I saw for the first time...we were all outcasts who came to NYC to find a place to feel free and express ourselves...the miracle is we found each other. Peter...I saw the Mapplethorpe 'penis' today ! Hello!

ME - the uncut version. what a schlong. Off to sleep after drinking Trappist beer on the Belgium border Aulne 8, was anyone really straight

PIP - not then...well...some 'girls' LOL, well, my brain is a fried kitten from all the drugs and sex I've had.

WOMAN FROM BERLIN - Poor Noel, shame on us, or you, for allowing a drunken bully like Peter to run wild (again). Non-Quitter or Non Sequitur? Hard to say and honestly if we were all drooling over penis sizes the human race wouldn't have an over- population problem.

SQUARE GAY - Squares? really? Are you twelve? Look who's doing the judging now. and I am obviously waaaaay to L7 to get the mirror/shadow metaphor. and, Kimmy, I am opressing no one. Drag queens and leather daddy's have long had too high a profile in the gay community. I can be out and proud--even to my teenage students--without becoming a parody of myself. i think that's what a gay student of mine was referring to recently when he told me that i was the reason he stopped seeing it as a curse. to each his own, but I'm not going to support yet another gay cause that thinks its de rigeur to bring out the porn stars or present caged masters and slaves at their galas or whatever else just because it's part of the "wonderful patchwork of who we are."

PIP - recently 'out', not too proud, a gym rat is just another way to say gay...I don't think I mentioned 'leather queens' once...but my cousin would describe himself as such, as well as a member of Boston's symphony...stereotypes indeed Noel. Drunken bully.

WOMAN FROM BERLIN knows him from way back when.

THe WOMAN FROM BERLIN knew knew me. She is more wrong than right, but then a woman is never wrong, but she and Pip defended Marc Stevens. He was a good guy and a lot of fun!

ps He wasn't into squares either and I wouldn't have trust the woman from Berlin with a bag of mud.

Then and now and I wouldn't have beem intimate with her even on 'Ludes.

photo of marc stevens from robert mapplethrope. Redacted by the uncool censors of Facebook

PTSD Too

Several years ago I was at Grand Central Terimnal with my sister's younger in-laws. All military back from the Endless War. A twentyish Ranger said with young envy for a lost time that New York must have been crazy back in the 1970s. I replied yes and then flashed on the ghosts. Too many to count or remember.

AIDS, ODs, Craziness.

They took their toll.

I broke into tears.

The soldiers gathered around and hugged me saying they knew how I felt.

Tyey had lost frineds too.

Too many firnds.

Same as me.

Suddenly I realized I had been repressing PTSD for decades.

And it was okay because these soldiers had it too.

All together without knowing it.

We are us.

JOURNAL ENTRY DECEMBER 27, 1978 - EAST VILLAGE

This morning I had driven Ande's father's car from Brookline to Route 3 onto 128 past the snowfields of the Blue Hills and then headed south to the great metropolis of New York City. Big Blue has a radio station atop its granite bald summit. The view from the tower encompassed Boston from Cape Ann to Nantasket. As a teen I had skied the short trails, but always revel in the dark blue of the Atlantic stretching east into the Atlantic. Boston had once been my hometown. My mother had called this morning and told me to take care of myself. My one goal was to make enough money to pay off their mortgage and then send them to Hawaii. Getting a regular job was the only way to achieve that wish, but 9 to 5s bored me shitless and I stepped on the Cutlass' gas.

Visiting my parents had been comforting as had seeing my brothers, sisters, and aunts and uncles and our next door neighbors, the Menconis for Christmas dinner. I loved my parents. My older brother was with Pattie, who was working for the CIA My sisters Pam and regina seemed happy, and Regina's beau was a good man from Hartford, if there is such a thing. My younger brother Patrick played guitar in the basement, while Michael, obviously wanted to tell everyone his secret. I had warned him that confessing you're gay was one sure way to ruin Christmas and he said, "Maybe this summer."

I felt bad about not having any gifts and even worse getting some. Andy was my only friend at the gathering. Every other friend from grammar and high school and college have vanished into the amnesia of the past. My old girlfriends are ghosts; Linda Imhoff, Hilde Hartnett, Janet Stetson, and Jackie Collins. I'm not sure if I abandoned them or they deserted me.

The Cutlass sped on I-95 through the marshlands of the Neponset River. The highway rose at Sharon onto a plateau all the way to Providence. The Interstate had destroyed miles of neighborhoods, but at least the engineers had banked the pavement and I hit 80 past the empty harbor.

Farther along the State Prison rises atop a high berm. Hundreds of convicts locked to serve sentence for their crimes or someone else's wrong. Snow topped the field of the pine barrens, until I reached New London and the nuclear sub bases of Groton. Within a half hour I crossed the Connecticut River, which I considered the southern boundary of New England.

At Christmas dinner my family asked, "Will you ever return to Boston?"

"I don't think so."

I love New England; Maine and the White Mountains, but I had taught English at South Boston High during the bussing riots. The city of my birth was filled with racists. My old friends called me a 'race traitor. I could fight them all. The day before Christmas I rode the trolley into Park Street. None of the women appealed to me.

I left the city in 1976. I adopted the sums of the East Village as home, even though my first friends had yet to come to New York. My good friend, Andy, was remained in Boston playing funk in an all-black band. Neil had left Staten Island to study Medicine in Dagupan City in the Philippines, Libby had flown to Paris to seek fame and fortune as a fashion model. I had new friends now, but I felt I would desert them at one point.

LATER

I'm trapped in Brooklyn. Covid has surged out of control, yet plenty of unmasked people wander the streets of Clinton Hill, as if they are immune to the virus, but many of my friends have been struck up by this variant despite having been vacced twice.

A road trip would be perfect except there's nowhere I can go, as I will have a series of tests at NYU Hospital to assess the health of my liver.

I've been invited to ski in Tahoe, sun in florida, and fly over to London to reside at Goodenough University. Mostly I want to see my families in Thailand, however Nu says that everything in Shut down in Pattaya and Mem is concerned about leaving the house.

Oh, for the world to be free again.

1970s Versus Now

Where be my Time machine, Mister Wizard.

Fuck now.

1970s always.

Times Square Babylon Then

Rent boys.

Hookers on the Strip.

Flesh peddlers.

Martinis at Hojos.

And let's not forget the pimps.

And now.

No more Babylon.

But it was something.

And we all knew that.

Dreams of Fast Cars

I am planning a trip to Thailand. My English friends have called with a request to break the JFK-Bangkok flight with a JFK-Heathrow landing. I love them all, but unfortunately for the Limeys I missed my children too much to deviate from my flight plans, although last night a dream transported my unconsciousness wish to visit my London friends.

We meet in a pub on Westbourne Grove. Drinks were on me. The crowd was enormous. Every one of my English friends was at the bar and several ex-girlfriends vied for my attention. No one had aged a day from the last century. The room overreached capacity and I escaped before the bartender could present the bill. The total had to be in the thousands, for the British can really drink when it's on someone else's cuff, then again so can most drinkers.

I wandered through a nearby park to a car dealer selling souped-up 70s Toyota for a half-million pounds each. The dealer said no car was faster and a single lap around the racing track cost over $500. I thanked him from the offer and stepped into the ether of my alter-ego.

England was certainly expensive these days.

Even in my dreams

Elegant Hands

This blonde on the Vespa in front of the Dakota says it all about the 1970s New York. A blue dress in front of a blue car. The blonde elegantly studying her nails and not a mobile phone. Big feet and you know what they say about girls with big feet? Big hands.

The Romance Of Blow

The 1970s were a beautiful time. And so were the 80s. And I liked it.