Lucking Out - James Wolcott [97]
Watching Midnight Blue often made you feel dirty inside, dirty outside too. Not the good kind of dirty that tingled of emblazoned afternoons under the high-school bleachers, but the kind that put you off your feed, like gazing upon buffet food that had been under the heat lamp too long. But that the show was on TV at all and popular among New York’s sophisticated lowlifes was proof that Lenny Bruce hadn’t died in vain, though he might have wished his disciples had been more deserving primates. Seventies cable access would also be where reality porn made its first trudge out of the primordial bog in the semi-upright figure of “Ugly George” (real name: George Urban, so apropos), who trolled the streets of Manhattan in a bare-chested silver spacesuit outfit, bearing the bulk of a heavy backpack with a satellite dish attached that looked as if it belonged to a lunar land rover and a shoulder-mounted camera always ready for action. Ugly George, unlicensed provocateur, would approach attractive women on the street and try to coax them into taking off their clothes on camera with all of the sweet-talking charm he could muster, which wasn’t much even by the meager standards of the day. Those who agreed to remove their tops for whatever occult reason he would usher into the nearest secluded alley or building hallway, where they’d peel off for the lens, as if it were a department-store changing room. Some would even accompany him to his basement apartment, which looked like a future crime scene in its seamy seclusion, a forensics field trip to collect a Jackson Pollock galaxy of DNA samples. Those who rebuffed Ugly George’s come-ons had insults hurled at them for blowing their chance at stardom, a choice they evidently found more palatable than the prospect of blowing him. The situational suspense of each will-she-or-won’t-she-show-the-goodies? episode is what gave the repulsive compulsion of The Ugly George Hour of Truth, Sex, and Violence (the violence was strictly verbal) its jagged teeth as a bottom-feeding enterprise.
Like Midnight Blue, The Ugly George Hour was a New York seventies phenomenon (the seventies: the mattress that exploded), must-see viewing for stay-at-home sickos and amateur sociologists; but like Al Goldstein, Ugly George himself was only capable of lateral movement in the slime field, limited by his lack of luster and immediate-gratification gluttony. Had he been a smoother operator and discovered Florida spring break instead of hulking and skulking the same old chewing-gummed sidewalks, he might have tumbled into the fountain of youth and beaten Joe Francis to the Girls Gone Wild franchise. Had he been able to talk a good art game and owned a more low-slung Dadaist imagination, he might have become the Harmony Korine of his time, Korine’s 2009 movie, Trash Humpers (masked grotesques literally humping Dumpsters), availing itself of a VHS vomit-bag aesthetic that has Ugly George stamped all over it. But he went only where the snout of his camera lens led him, which wasn’t high or far.
Not long ago I was on the M104 bus taking in the majestic sweep of upper Broadway—Gray’s Papaya, Zabar’s, the nail salons—when a man got on who reminded me of Shrek, if Shrek were the color of disgruntled instead of clay-green. It was, yes, Ugly George himself, still among us. Had his former notoriety not placed him for me, I would have taken him for just another Upper West Side scruffian, a category of unkempt malcontent in which many unmarried men in