We might as well has had targets on our clothes. Three suburban teenagers just off the Port Authority bus from Princeton.
As soon as we hit the street, the incantations started. "Smoke, ID, switchblade," they said as we passed by. Finally, a Ratso Rizzo type pulls us aside and said he could make the best fake ID's around.
We stopped in front of a porn theater on 8th Avenue. Ratso dissapears into the building. He comes back and says, "everything is cool. You just need to give me twenty each (The rough equilalent of fifty now)."
Even we weren't that stupid. We rejected his offer, then he asked us who we thought we were fucking with. We said we didn't know.
"You're fucking with the Mafia, man," he said. Even we knew that no one goes around talking about how he was in the Mafia.
We ditched Ratso and walked along the Deuce, 42nd between Seventh and Eighth ave. The guys approaching us became funny to us. Until one time a black man of a large build responded to our laughing.
He went up to Will, the most demonstrative, and said to him, "you a wise-ass motherfucker. I should get my boys on you."
At this point we gave up on quality fake ID's and went to Playland, an amusement parlor in the heart of the square. They simply asked how old we'd like to be, then gave us these absurd "college" ID's. I think mine was from North Central Southern Baptist College of the Holy Angels.
I tried that ID once, in DC, and the liquor store manager gave me a sincere "I'm sorry" look. Hey, I was a student in one of the most prestigious fake institutions in the country.
The best part of 42nd Street's clean-up was when they shut the porn theatres down, and replaced their street signs with odd bits of haiku and poetry on the marquees.
Scum couldn't figure out the street's new avant garde artistic direction, and largely went elsewhere.
I kind of wish they would have kept the poetry. Very New York. But commerce marches on.
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1 comment:
Hey, I had a license to do it.
Interesting, though, that parking lot has yet to be developed. Along 8th and 42-46, scum lives! It is a kind of dead zone. God help the tourists that come to Manhattan expecting elegance.
At the Hotel Carter, someone was killed last yet. Before this, there was a staffer who killed another employee. Even earlier, a woman had been pushed out a window, with her hands bound.
Read the reviews of this and the Milford Plaza before you go. As Rambler said (I'll need to pay him soon) "scum have to go somewhere."
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