The Lost Continent - Bill Bryson [71]
In the evening, as I strolled back along Times Square, my eye was caught by a strip-tease club with a photograph of the strippers in the window. They were nice-looking girls. One of the photos was of Samantha Fox. Since Ms Fox was at this time being paid something like £250,000 a year to show off her comely udders to readers of British newspapers such as the Sun, it seemed to me improbable, to say the least, that she would be peeling off for strangers in a smoky basement room on Times Square. In fact, I would go so far as to suggest that there was a little fraud at work here. It’s a mean trick to play on a horny person.
They always used to do this to you at the Iowa State Fair. The strippers’ tents behind the rides would be covered with wildly erotic paintings of the most beautiful, silky-haired, full-breasted, lithe-bodied women you ever saw – women whose moist and pouty lips seemed to be saying, ‘I want you – yes, you there, with the zits and glasses. Come and fulfil me, little man.’ Aged fourteen and delirious with lust, you would believe these pictures with all your heart and many of the neighbouring organs. You would hand over a crumpled dollar and go inside, into a dusty tent that smelt of horse manure and rubbing alcohol and find on stage a weary stripper looking not unlike your own mother. It was the sort of disappointment from which you never really recover, and my heart went out now to the lonely sailors and Japanese photocopier salesmen who were down there drinking sweet, warm cocktails and having a night of overpriced disappointment. ‘We learn from our mistakes,’ I remarked sagely to myself with a rueful smile and told a panhandler to piss off.
I went back to my room, pleased not to have been mugged, more pleased not to have been murdered. On top of my television was a card saying that for $6.50 I could have an in-room movie. There was, as I recall, a choice of four – Friday the Thirteenth Part 19, in which a man with a personality disorder uses knives, hatchets, Magimixes and a snow blower to kill a succession of young women just as they are about to climb in the shower; Death Wish II, in which Charles Bronson tracks down and kills Michael Winner; Bimbo, in which Sylvester Stallone as Rambo has a sex-change operation and then blows up a lot of Oriental people; and, on the adult channel, My Panties Are Dripping, a sensitive study of interpersonal relationships and social conflict in post-modern Denmark, with a lot of vigorous bonking thrown in for good measure. I toyed for a moment with the idea of watching a bit of the last one – just to help me relax, as they say in evangelical circles – but I was too cheap to spend $6.50 and anyway I’ve always suspected that if I did punch the requisite button (which was worn to a nubbin, I can tell you), the next day a bellboy would confront me with a computer print-out and tell me that if I didn’t give him $50 he would send a copy of the room receipt to my mother with ‘Miscellaneous charges: Deviant Porno Movie, $6.50’ circled in red. So instead I lay on the bed and watched a rerun on normal television of a 1960s comedy programme called Mr Ed, which was about a talking horse. Judging by the quality of the jokes, I would guess that Mr Ed wrote his own material. But at least there was nothing in it that would get me blackmailed.
And thus ended my day in New York, the most exciting and stimulating city in the world. I couldn’t help but reflect that I had no reason to feel superior to my fellow lonely hearts in the strip-tease club twenty floors below. I was just as lonesome as they were. Indeed, all over this big, heartless city there were no doubt tens of thousands of people just as solitary and friendless as me. What a melancholy thought.
‘But I wonder how many of them can do this?’ I remarked to myself and with both hands and both feet reached out and touched all four walls at once.
Chapter fifteen
IT WAS THE Columbus Day weekend and the roads were busy. Columbus has always