Tales of Times Square: Expanded Edition by Josh Alan Friedman Page B

mechanism we were using, it had to go all the way down before it went up.”
    A peep show patron could summon a naked, willing stranger to his window with the wave of a dirty dollar bill. He could request tit, twat, hind end, have a leg hoisted into his booth, a boot in his face. Starving octopus hands grabbed over girls’ bodies, trying to wangle a finger into paydirt. In this peculiar mating dance, ghetto girls paraded booth to booth, fondling their wares and twitching their fingers in a pay up gesture. Dollars were stuffed into shoulder purses and stockings. Some couldn’t quite decide whether they belonged in this racket, standing back haughtily while a customer craned his horny neck out the window, lips grasping for a nip. More enthusiastic girls, often black and Hispanic, propped a wide-spread ass over the window ledge to be sucked heartily. A grizzled old Festus might pay ten dollars for a soul kiss, while a younger guy might have his hair petted romantically as he sucked a boob.
    In their workaday world the girls faced a wall of windows which opened and closed on a humorless gallery of zombie faces. “All you see is a hand, you don’t see a face,” remembers Candy Staton, an Amazonian Peep Queen whose bod made her $150 a night during the open-window days. “I started as one of the girls who’d rather wear panties and keep the guys above my waist. I didn’t want just anyone to touch me down there. But after I saw how much money you could make, I did it. It drove me crazy, I couldn’t handle it. But I did it.”
    Candy “graduated from Syracuse with a major in physical therapy.” She had an ugly-duckling childhood, then turned stunning at eighteen. She felt a calling to parade herself in Times Square by night, but worked as a children’s therapist by day. For one year at Blackjack, the most squalid of peeps, where junkies grapple desperately for tips, she ground her pussy into the middle fingers of anonymous menfolk with more passion than any other Live Nude Girl on 42nd Street. “Everybody was in one untidy dressing room, all the girls, the janitors, constant traffic streaming through, pimps hitting on you—you didn’t know who was who. I knew two junkies who died, both young women with children. The management was nasty to the customers. But the money was there, and I met some good people who I stay in touch with.”
    The live peeps were the straight man’s closest equivalent to the underside of gay nightlife—wandering into a dark booth to mouth the slimy genitals of strange women, whose breasts were coated with the slobber of fifty previous tit-biters and whose sucked-out cunts glistened at premium rates. Underage black youths snuck in, having a high old time making the girls cringe with embarrassment (“I see yo’ titty, ha, ha!”). Eugene, a twenty-two-year-old employee at Barking Fish, the Cajun fast-food joint across from Show World, recalls his bemusement when he began waiting on peep girls: “I recognized about six of them from high school in Queens, I even went to junior high with some—Jamaica High, Andrew Jackson. They try to stay away from me, they don’t want people to know what they doin’. Girls from Queens, they all act the same. Real quiet, but when they come into the city, they become nymphs. Girls from The Bronx or Manhattan would think twice about working a peep show, but a girl from Queens thinks nobody from out there will see her. A lot are also from the South, you can tell by their accents.”
    In January 1980, Show World chief Richard Basciano ordered windows reinstalled in all locations. “We closed windows in the Peep-Alive ‘cause we felt it was getting carried away,” says Roger. “Girls were makin’ all kinds of deals with the customers—in fact, we were threatened that we’d be shut down for prostitution. We made a lot of money, but he chose to shut the windows. Now, we got hurt, we really took a beating in profits, our business almost went down the tubes, we