Who Said That Youth Is Wasted on The Young
Or two young men in the prime of life and without girlfriends on the razzle in NYC when the town was still shit!
I came back to the US from England in early 1979 having spent the better part of seven years in Blighty. About six months after I got home, I had to reciprocate an American experience for my good mate from Uni, Charles and talked him into taking his vacation with us. In a typically British gesture, he brought duty-free cigarettes and booze as gifts for my parents. My parents said in their usual dour fashion: ‘We don’t smoke, we don’t drink.’ But as we all know, the Brits had kicked all of the Puritans out of their country long ago and stuffed them on us.
We went up to New York for a debauch with another classmate of ours, (a Welshman and as New York City doesn’t have sheep any more we had to bring one for him).
New York in 1979 was not the place it is today. It was grim and dirty and bust. On our night out on the town, and not the Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelley kind of romp the three of us ended up in a sleazy brothel off Times Square. We came into a sort of reception room with a bar covered in cheap red plush fabric and were given beers. There was a sad-looking white girl, a skinny black girl and a fat black woman wearing a bra, knickers, and stockings held up by garters (the British call them suspenders). She looked gross with a fat belly hanging over the top of her knickers.
We went into a little huddle and Charles and I said: ‘We’re not doing anything’. Our Welsh mate said he wanted to. Now, we had hardly any money between us, and I opened my wallet to see what I had. At this point, the oldest whore came over and grabbed my testicles (not too hard) and said: ‘Dis man, he da treasurer, he da treasurer.’
I gave our mate $30, which was all I could spare. He took the skinny black girl and disappeared. The others were disappointed and went off in a sulk. Charles and I were shown into a small theater to watch porn movies while we waited. We were there a long time, and I was getting really paranoid, assuming that our mate had been beaten, robbed and tossed out into the back alley.
As it transpired, he had been taken to a room with a bare mattress on the floor and a single bare light bulb. He was told to strip while they watched him through a panel in the door. This was to ensure that he didn’t have any weapons on him. The girl then came into the room and sat on the mattress and said: ‘Hundred dolla fo a fuck, sevnty fahv fo a suck, fifty dolla fo a hand job.’
All he had on him besides the $30 I had given him was ten pounds, so he offered this together with the $30. This would have come to about 45–46 bucks in total. The girl then had to go see the manager/pimp to get this cleared. In the end they accepted this amount, and he got his hand job. That’s what had taken so long. Charles, of course, delighted in recounting the whole tale to our mate’s girlfriend when he got back to London.
The next day Charles and I started drinking around noon in some fake British pub somewhere near Greenwich Village. We worked our way north, stopping in various bars until we hit Maxwell’s Plumb around 11pm. That was a very hip bar in New York at the time.
A little before 1 am we headed cross town and stopped some random black guy in the street and asked him if he could recommend a bar in the area. He said: ‘What kinda bar ‘choo want man?’ We said we didn’t know, and he pointed to one and said, ‘Try that one’.
It was a very nice, low-key, and quiet place with a woman bartender and a couple of guys sitting in a booth. We ordered drinks and then a couple of other guys wandered in. Then a couple more.
We were pretty dense — it took us a while to figure out exactly where we were. Around 2 am, the place filled up and was pretty damn lively. A guy in his early 50s, who said he was a bank manager, started chatting us up and plying us with drinks. I was pretending to be English and still had a pretty good accent. Charles and I were not keen on taking the subway back to Brooklyn Heights at that time of night. We decided to stay put, plus we were getting free drinks.
There was another fellow across the bar that was staring daggers at us. The bank manager said: ‘Oh that’s my boyfriend. Just ignore him.’
Sometime, around 5 am — and I still don’t know what possessed us to do this — Charles and I agreed to go back to this guy’s place with him. He walked out of that bar looking like the cat that had swallowed the canary. He clearly thought he was going to get an orgy with two young Englishmen.
We got back to his place, and he made us tea. We sat down on the sofa and he in a chair opposite us. He took out a cigarette, lit it, took a puff and put it in the ashtray. Then he passed out asleep. He was a pretty old guy after all and had been keeping pace with us drinking for about four hours. We were about 24. Charles and I just looked at each other, finished our tea and quietly left. We could have robbed him blind, but we’re decent chaps and just left him asleep in the chair. Doubtless, the next day he lied and boasted to his mates about what he had done with us, but them’s the breaks.
We started walking south down 2nd Avenue, laughing uncontrollably from the release of tension. We kept stopping off at convenience stores to buy beers as we went. It was dawn, and we had been drinking for about 18 hours. We then tried to walk across the Manhattan Bridge. That’s the one north of the Brooklyn Bridge. It doesn’t have a sidewalk and we climbed up on the girders and started walking on the girders. We got about 50 feet or so over the East River when we suddenly and very quickly sobered up. We made our way back, went to Chinatown for breakfast and a last beer, then took a taxi back to Brooklyn and fell into bed about 8am.
Who said youth is wasted on the young!?
