ROBBIE

by H. KARP

"You want to know what I feel when one of those old men has my cock in his mouth? It's simple, man. I feel power. I own them, man. I own those old dudes. When they've got their hands all over me, they're mine. I'm in charge. It feels wonderful."

New York City is strange.

Other cities have pimples on them. Little ones.

San Francisco, outside the Haven after the bars close, is grotesque.

And London, in Piccadilly Circus, is peculiar. But both these cities, like most cities, are for the most part placid. Grimy, depressing, maybe; but they are not covered with the pervasive, palpable sense of strangeness that covers New York. All of New York. No corner is safe, no tiny enclave is straight, in this town. Everywhere, everywhere you look, dreamlike New York stares back.

Christopher Street at 11pm on Friday in the spring. Gorgeous. Like panthers the people move, touching, not touching, barely touching. The street is high; the music so thick it hangs in the air like a canopy.

Eighth Avenue in the Twenties at about 4 o'clock in the morning. The leather bars have closed, and strange gangs of Puerto Ricans rush up and down, shouting at each other in Spanglish, marching past the studs who stand on the corners, keys wrapped around their hands, menac ing the moon.

The Port Authority Bus Terminal, where it is never night or day, but always some harshly fluorescent time in between, and the people move like entomological specimens about to be trapped in a preserving fluid.

And the little streets under the Brooklyn Bridge where the people walk slowly up and down and do each other in crumbling doorways until the whole little neighborhood smells like sex.

Fantastic place, New York, filled with fantastic people.

Once I came out of my apartment early in the morning, the sky still gray with edges of pink just starting to glow, and saw, silhouetted against Central Park,

three elegant hookers and a one-legged man doing a slow and stately dance. In the middle of all this a street would have to be something, wouldn't it, to be thought of as the strangest place of all.

Fourteenth Street is.

An unusually wide street for New York, it cuts, fat and bleached-looking, straight through the Island from the decay of the docks on the West Side to the slums and housing developments on the East Side.

It is jammed with stores. Stores filled with so much merchandise, it spills into the sidewalks. On both sides there is a panorama of sleazy materials, trashy panty hose, ghastly pink plates, Christmas decorations, misshapen pots and pans, truly ugly works of art.

To make the merchandise even more attractive, there are barkers in front of the stores; screaming, mostly in Spanish, about the joys of the shit they're selling, the wonders of the paintings of the Sacred Heart of Jesus on black velvet and how no hacienda can afford to be without one. And music, too, each store blaring it$ own, the golden blackness of Marvin Gaye blending with Salsa. So much music, in fact, that often it just gets to be too much for the customers and they dance, whirling, stomping, shouting, in and out of the plastic shower curtains and the velveteen hot pants.

There are bars, too.

And restaurants blowing hot chili smells into the air.

And Sabrett carts.

And junkies, either dealing or nodding out.

And fantastic bums asleep in the middle of the sidewalks, oozing juices that trickle down to the curb: Blood? Piss?

No one on Fourteenth Street knows. No one on Fourteenth Street cares.

Right in the middle of all this is a purple orchid of a place, a place that's peculiarly New York. And peculiarly Fourteenth Street.

It has an elegant name for what it is, reduced to its barest essentials, a whorehouse. It's worked like a club, but, as in many enterprises of this sort, the whole thing is sort of confused.

You are, I think, supposed to pay $10 for membership to begin with and then $4 every time you go in, but when I got there the woman selling tickets said I didn't have to join if I didn't want to.

I didn't want to.

"Just give me four bucks, honey," she said. "Well, wait. Are you going to take off your clothes?"

"I don't know," I said. "Do you have to take off your clothes?"

"Oh," she said, "you haven't been here before, honey? Well, you'll see." I paid the four bucks.

You walk into a small room with a round bed in the middle. Off to one side is a bar. The bartender, a reasonably muscled, fairly good-looking guy, is pouring little glasses of awful red wine. "It's free, man," he says to me. "Take one. Take two."

He is wearing only a G-string, and I stare at his ass as he turns around. He catches me looking. "That's not free," he says. "See you later," he says, smiling brilliantly.

It is pretty crowded.

Average age of the crowd is forty, I estimate, but there are wild swings at both ends. There are two men there, grotesquely fat, who are, minimally, sixty-five. There is a delicate boy who can't be more than eighteen.

I go up to him.

"Hi," I say.

"Hi," he replies. He looks uncomfor-

VECTOR 55