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By Root 843 0

his age cohort seem to belong. He took a window seat, scanning the busy view for something to shoot. Video technology having advanced and sub-compacted in the intervening decades, the camera he was lugging wasn’t the shoulder-strainer of his heyday. It drew no attention to its owner, and its owner drew no attention to himself, not like in the old days, when he was a clanking commotion. He aimed his camera lens through the window at any possible borderline-presentable woman in possession of youth who was passing by, even though she may have been passing by on the opposite side of Broadway; the bus was in motion, and he was shooting through the grimy glass of windows closed against the cold—no way could he have captured any savory images for his collection box, unless it was a motion-sickness documentary he was compiling. Ugly George had entered dirty-old-man stage in harness to a habitual mode he couldn’t shed and now had no application even on the lowest digital rungs of postmodern porn. It was almost sad, a parable of sorts. Mon semblable, mon frère, that could have been me! No, not really, and yet I felt a shudder of remote kinship with this survivor from the Jurassic Park of porn, and relief when he left the bus, taking the flaking past with him.

It would be sentimental to romanticize the antiromanticism of Times Square in the seventies, mourning a lost vibrancy and Brueghelesque teem more authentic than the toy mall we have today, where few tourists will ever know the thrilling fear of having defecation thrown at them or being caught in the middle of a difference of opinion between two hookers ready to cut each other into unequal chunks. The human wastage of Times Square weighs too heavily against slumming nostalgia. Entire blocks looked as if they had a case of cirrhosis. Nearly every doorway had someone standing in it up to no good. The contempt for women that often wore a sneer in porn films on its liver lips was an everyday dragon-snort in Times Square, where women on their way to work often walked a gauntlet of crotch-grabbing solicitations and insulting commentary only to undergo a round-trip replay at the end of the office day, and then who knew what the subway ride would be like? Teenage hookers irregularly lined the far west avenues of midtown in miniskirts and rabbit fur jackets, their bare legs stalky-looking in the passing car lights as they teetered from one rolled-down car window to another. Every X-rated movie marquee, movie poster, video store display, was a semiotic form of aggravated assault, the live sex shows likewise no altar to Venus. I saw only one and that was enough for me, sis. It was in an Eighth Avenue emporium still standing today, then a bustling hive of peep-show booths, sex-novelty counters, and a small theater that may have been in the basement, but even if it wasn’t, to enter it was to experience descent. The little playlet being performed was called “The Pimp and the Whore,” a lightly scripted episode that dispensed with backstory and character development to present a compact lesson in what happens to a whore who disobeys her pimp: a cursing lecture, threats of bodily harm punctuated with a couple of stage slaps (the hands clapping as the face snaps sideways), followed by kneeling submission, simulated intercourse, a cry of pleasure-pain, and a few parting comments from mack daddy before the dimming of lights to the sound of the performers shuffling offstage without taking a bow, a round of applause being perhaps too macabre under the circumstances. What I remember more than anything that happened onstage was the booming distorted intercom voice of the porn theater announcer telling us over and over again, overriding the dialogue, the title of the vignette, “The Pimppp and the Whorrrre … the Pimmmp and the Whorrre …,” selling what we were seeing like a lascivious strip-club DJ. It was a better Brechtian alienation effect than anything I’ve ever seen in Brecht, the sense of dehumanization compounded by the knowledge that the performers of this sketch were repeating it four, five times