Out again. Where George's old girlfriend has finally found some body willing to disco. Then into the john for a quick pee. A mistake not to lock the door behind me. Someone stumbles inside. "Later, asshole," I tell him. I pretty much have the hang of things now.
Outside Margot is smiling at me from across the floor. I work my way over. Just as I arrive she moves away. "I can't get too close to you," she says. She looks terrific in the white silk blouse.
"Why the hell not?"
"Listen," she says, "you're much too uptight. You really should loosen up." Her arms are around my shoulders and she's smiling. "I'd like to get you into a bra and panties. That would loosen you up, I bet."
"You always put your men in bra and panties?"
"Yeah." From the look in her eyes, I believe her. In her eyes, a 'gator swallowing salmon.
"Well, I personally look my best when I'm all naked and sweaty."
"Oh, no," she says. "I already did my naked and sweaty number for the year."
"Try it biannually."
"Ah, hell," she says, "your body's probably for shit and you're probably lousy in bed and a rotten writer."
"You like to try to cover all the bases, don't you?"
"Absolutely."
"Listen, Margot. I want to square off against you sometime. It would be fun. I have a real mean weekend in mind."
"But I'm not into that," she says. "This is what I'm into."
She takes my nipple between her polished manicured fingernails and twists and squeezes as hard as she can. It's okay. I can handle it. I go for her ass but the jeans are too tight to grab substantial purchase so I switch to her own breast and thumb the big erect nipple back into her chest until she winces and her eyes open wide. She quits and takes a breath. I put my mouth on hers and the kiss is good and hard.
"How often," I whisper, "do you get to fuck a fine writer with a terrific body who can break your ass in bed?"
She laughs. "Jesus, all right," she says. "So maybe I'd like to square off with you too. But it will cost you."
"You want money? From me?" Like we're old buddies from high school. But of course she does. I ask her how much.
"I know what I'd like to get. I'd like to get a hundred dollars."
"What will you settle for?"
"Fifty. Special writers' price."
I kiss her again. "I'll think about it," I tell her. This time it feels good to walk away. She's quite a woman. But I wouldn't give her the fifty if they flew her in from the Galapagos Islands.
Down on the floor, the place has finally arrived at the utterly bizarre.
There's a boxing match in progress.
A pretty little Spanish girl who can't be more than twenty is punching the hell out of a sandy-haired bearded guy in jogging trunks. He's wearing a mouth guard and he needs it, because for every punch to the body he takes three to the jaw. The gloves look huge and ridiculous on the girl's tiny arms but she makes up in gusto what she lacks in heft, she is slamming him with everything she's got and he makes no move to cover. Just a few short jabs to the shoulder to bring her on. He's got a good mean bitch here. No class, but a lot of native viciousness. And judging by the rocks in his shorts I'd say a good licking is his idea of a night to remember.
I decide I've got more to say to Margot so I look around for her but she's disappeared so I return to the boxer. The match is over now and he's standing by the ladder talking to a tall heavy blonde girl and a lovely black girl, his mistress. Beside the ladder is an overnight bag filled with boxing gloves in various weights and sizes. He's trying to explain the appeal this has for him but the blonde isn't listening. "It's the impact," he says, "the impact." The blonde calls him a stupid bitch and slaps him openhanded.
Something he's done has offended her. It doesn't worry him. He slips down his shorts and begins to masturbate while she glares at him. She backhands him a couple times and then rears back and lets him have a hard one to the jaw. "You better put in your mouthpiece, asshole," she says. "Give me a glove," she tells the black girl. It's for her knuckles obviously, not for him, because there's very little padding. Meantime he's obeyed her and stands there waiting for her to lace up, his lips forced open by the mouthpiece, cock in hand.
I'm not sure I want to watch this.
But I'm here and they're here and what the hell.
The outer reaches of consentuality.
"Love tap, love tap!" he squeals while she pummels him. Then he says nothing. There are no body blows at all now, just more and more punishment to the head. The blonde can hit hard and she won't hold back. She comes at him from either side, then head-on to the mouth and jaw, jabbing and punching, roundhousing. Then the black girl joins her—bare-fisted and just as mean as she is and they bash at him in tandem. His eyes get glassy. His cock wilts. His head begins to dangle. His lip splits and the black girl calls for a towel.
If anything, the blood incites them further. They pretend disgust with him for bleeding on them and wipe it away distastefully. Then they smash him again. The black girl's smiling. His balance starts to go. I see Denise moving through the crowd and I figure it's over.
Denise caresses the jaw tenderly. Then slaps it hard. What the fuck is this? She caresses him again. Then throws a perfect backhand. Christ! And now the other girls want him back again! Denise looks contemptuously at her bloody hand. "Go wash your mouth," she commands. He stumbles away. A strange rescue, I'm thinking, graceful in its way. And I guess it helps confirm my notion that at heart Denise is a softie.
But I've had it. I'm about to leave when Margot walks by.
"You know what I've decided?" I ask her.
"Don't want to know."
"You're not curious?"
I grab her arm and pull her over. "I've decided," I tell her, "that I want it free. Fifty dollars is a good price and I'm sure you're worth that and more. But if I give you money then I give you an edge and I don't want you with an edge on me."
She kisses me and smiles. "I'm busy," she says.
"That's okay. I can wait. You won't always be busy, right?"
"I might be."
"You won't be."
I'm betting I'm wrong.
And I think that life is full of these strange meetings and missed connections. As I walk out the door, there's George hurtling across the sidewalk in front of me. For a big guy, he can move. Up ahead of him two girls are screaming and chasing somebody they seem to want to slaughter. George catches them, hoists one under each arm and walks back to the Chateau. Whoever they're chasing has stopped and stares back at them and as I get closer I see that it's George's old girlfriend they are after. There are tears streaming down her cheeks and she's nearly too drunk to stand. I keep walking.
FLASHERS AND FREAKS
I'm thinking my informant is full of shit. There's nothing happening here.
I'm sitting in a mid-Manhattan movie theatre watching Marilyn Chambers suck off one guy and get fucked by another while a blonde girl tugs at her tits. The usual. It's obvious to me why I'd sworn off porn movies. Any minute now both guys will pull out and squirt her—and as far as I'm concerned the cum shot is the dumbest thing since, say, BLONDE VENUS. Maybe you remember that one. Marlene Dietrich sings "Hot Voodoo" in an ape suit.
But the crowd here is suddenly restless. People are leaning forward in their seats. Guys get up and scurry to new seats toward the center of the theatre. A frantic seething murmur begins to percolate over the soundtrack of Marilyn going glumph glumph and hangs gibbering in the air for a moment. The movie is forgotten. In front of me a guy stands up and moves away and I lean forward over his chair and peer into the crowd.
There it is.
Two rows down and a few seats over a blonde head is pumping up and down on some guy's lap—she's sprawled over an empty chair in order to reach him—while beside her a second guy, presumably her date, has her panties down over her thighs and his fingers are trawling her cunt. My informant is one hundred percent correct, bless his sleazy little heart. I catch only th
e end of it but it's worth it. The guy leans back gasping, his seat squeaking dangerously on its hinges. There is, of course, no cum shot.
Back to the day I first heard of all this.
We are standing in the projection booth of a 42nd Street live show and movie theatre where my friend is manager. Onstage a couple are finishing up their act, ploughing away at one another with what looks like real commitment. Beside us in the booth the projectionist and another guy are playing chess on top of a metal garbage can, an I Love Lucy rerun on the portable Sony. You get so blasé in this business.
"I've seen guys actually fuck girls out in the audience," my friend is telling me. "Some of the best action I ever saw—this girl starts out by giving her old man a handjob, then a blowjob, then pulls off her pants and sits on it. Starts bouncing up and down. Real good-looking woman. There were five guys behind 'er, and six in front of 'er, and guys lined up against the wall. Everybody watching. They really got off."
Yes folks there's a new game in town—or rather, a variation on a very old game. Flashers and Freaks as the players themselves call it. Even if you haven't been to a movie in years you've probably run into the Flashers. A venerable breed. I met my first Flasher in the balcony of the Branford Theatre in Newark, New Jersey in 1959. I was thirteen at the time. The movie was THE HORROR OF DRACULA but it was the Flasher who scared the shit out of me. "Can I suck ya off, kid?" Pud in hand. I mean, you want to see a young man move.
But that was before the new game began. These days flashers are younger—late twenties and early thirties for the most part—and scaring kids is kids' stuff. They are after the couples, the Freaks. "Ninety percent of the Freaks are into swinging," my informant is telling me. "But they're tired of that and this is something different. A fantasy trip, doing it in public, in a movie theatre." Remember drive-ins? Necking in the back rows? That fantasy. "Then you have a certain percentage who don't even know they're into it. But maybe they get a little high, they watch the film and they get horny, get loose. And they may never do it again in their lives. It's a one-shot deal.
"A woman walked in here one day, a beautiful redhead and she and her old man were playing around. He was finger-fucking her. So this flasher walks in, looks at 'em, sits down two seats away, takes out his dick and starts beatin' it. She looked at it. Looked at it again. And then fell face first into his lap. Bet you anything it was a one-shot. I never saw her again."
"Checkmate," says the projectionist.
They clear off the garbage can. I Love Lucy blares on. Onstage the live act is finished and a movie is running. My informant is telling me about business suits.
"You see a lot of business suits and attaché cases on these guys," he says. He knows one Flasher who is a TV actor, another who is a New York District Attorney, a third a hairdresser whose products are featured in boutiques all over town. Most of the couples, the Freaks, are young and attractive. Some come here to warm up before a session at Plato's Retreat. A lot are from out of town, here for a vacation or from New Jersey across the river. A lot from New Jersey. "The best time for Flashers," he says, "is after 10:00 p.m., because we get a lot of the after-theatre crowd."
They go see Peter Pan I guess, think happy thoughts and fly down here.
"Most of the women come in with guys. Though we'll get a single woman occasionally. I was doing a live show once and this woman came in and sat in the front row and after awhile I noticed that the crowd wasn't watching us. So I looked up. She had pulled her dress up and the crotch was cut out of her panties and she was playing with herself, watching the show."
The scene's pretty widespread, pardon the pun. Flashers like balconies when they can get them but almost any porn house will do, especially one where the aisles are open on all sides so the Freaks can't hide against a wall somewhere. I've even had reports of a Flash/Freak session during a show of ANIMAL HOUSE over on the East Side. "Some nights," says my friend," we have only one couple come in. But other nights we might have six couples, ten couples, and then the action is all over the place." A hot new porn movie in town will attract a lot of couples so serious Flashers watch the papers. Others will roam from theatre to theatre until they find one where the action's good.
"We've got regulars who come in every night. One couple will come in every Wednesday or Thursday, between 10:30 and 1:00. Like clockwork. The guys all know them by now. They don't ever bother to sit two or three seats away. They just sit right next to 'em and take it out. And the word spreads. One Flasher will say to another, 'hey, I had them last week.'"
Sometimes a Flasher will work for his own particular theatre. "Here we got only one floor-man, see, and he has to watch the entrance and the interior. On a busy night he can't do both. So we'll let a Flasher in for free and he'll keep an eye on the audience and the back door."
Often the action will spill over to the restrooms. If you see a lineup of maybe a dozen guys waiting outside the john you can be pretty sure what's going on inside. "There was a woman in here Sunday—she took on nine guys. I have one woman, comes from Rhode Island, she sucked off eighteen guys in an hour, including the projectionist."
If you're wondering where the security guard is during all this the answer is that they're usually in on it. "They won't stop you from playing with your meat because, hell, that's what the theatre is for. The only time they'll jump on you is if you bother somebody who don't want to be bothered. The guy who turned me on to Flashing was a security guard."
All the same there are rules, techniques, the unspoken refinements that make the difference between feast and famine here.
Normal Flasher procedure is to find a likely couple and sit down, not next to them, but one or two seats away. On the woman's side if possible. He waits a few minutes for the couple to get used to his presence, then catches their attention by lighting a cigarette. Then he quietly and inconspicuously pulls his pud from his pants. "He's gotten his dick hard, lights the smoke, catches her eye and she looks, and the flame from the match shows her what he's got." It's also possible to spread out and tie a shoelace brushing her leg on the downswing and again on the upswing.
Flashing can be graceful.
Occasionally it won't be possible for the Flasher to get to one side or the other of his target Freaks. No problem. In that case the next best thing is to sit in front of them, wave it in the air and glance back over his shoulder now and then. Meaningfully. If worse comes to worse it's possible to sit behind a couple and light a lot of cigarettes. Conversation won't work. A Flasher has to lead with his dick. Uncrossing arms and legs, lighting numerous cigarettes, occasional glances are all acceptable come-ons.
But you're not supposed to talk at the movies.
It's also unacceptable to slide past a couple on the way to your seat. Approaches must be made from the front, back, or either side. "It's an unwritten law," my friend tells me. "Why, I dunno."
But the big taboo is to interrupt another Flasher's action. This is often hard to resist. The urge to gawk is hard to shake. But gawking in and of itself is okay. What isn't okay is to move, to sit down beside, in front of, or behind the action. Some couples are there for a gang grope but others are not. They find someone up close in their face all of a sudden and they leave. Which makes for a very angry Flasher.
"We got one guy here who's a Hassidic Jew. He walks up and down the aisles and when he sees a couple with a Flasher he walks up behind 'ern, stands there and looks over their shoulders. And you know how it is, you get a feeling when someone's standing behind you. So this couple will turn around and see this guy with the hat and the curls and the black coat and they go, what the fuck? He blows a lot of action that way."
When a couple gets up to move the Flasher shouldn't follow unless invited. "Sometimes the Freaks will sit in the center of the theatre to attract Flashers and then when they've picked out the one they want they'll bring him to the back of the theatre because they don't want the entire crowd watching." If we think of Flashers as sharks in the water this is a kind of selective f
eeding.
Breaking this rule is apt to get a security guard involved. Or worse.
"Not every Flasher gets over. We had one guy flash and the woman—I don't know if he touched her or what—but she stood up and hit him over the head with a beer bottle. Then pulled out some mace and sprayed his face. Then proceeded to do a Muhammad Ali on him. Beat the shit out of him in here."
If this sounds like the kind of action you crave you can probably get over. Remember that theatres are dark. You could look like Larry Talbot on a full moon and get over now and then. Because of the darkness, the important thing is to notice the action when it's there. My informant for instance tells me that he worked as half of a live-sex team for over a year before he caught on. His buddy the security guard came up to him one day and said, "how come you don't get any of the action in here." What action? "There's pussy in here!" the guard said. And four seats away a woman was giving some guy a blowjob.
"You'd be amazed at what people don't notice. One night I was walking up the aisle and I looked over to my left and said to myself, hmmmmm, that woman's naked. And she was. And would you believe that it took her forty-five minutes to get any action? Nobody noticed. Her old man was sucking her tits and nobody noticed."
When the audience does notice, it is apt to notice hard. Maybe it's the lure of the forbidden that accounts for that—if the same thing is happening onstage or onscreen and in the audience the audience will always win hands down. In the live shows the performers find this a flying pain in the ass. I talked to one of them. "Of course the team gets pissed," she said. "Here you are doing the whole number—dancing, doing a nice showy strip and then the guy comes in and you do your theatrical seduction scene and then you got ten or fifteen minutes of boner under those fuckin' lights and you turn around and everybody's watching some little shit from Scarsdale get her ass fingered in row three. You say to yourself, why bother? One night one of the big porn stars came in with a guy and another girl and they proceed to fuck and suck right in the front row. How can you compete with Annie Sprinkle bouncing up and down right within groping distance? You can't. Man, that night we just lay there looking at each other."