New York--A Town Without Foreplay

It looks more or less the same. Approaching, say, from the Queensboro Bridge at 59th Street, the buildings still appear majestic, confident, imperious, like players in some magnificent backfield or, for the more extravagant, like sentries at the gates of Olympus. The much-talked-about pollutive screen hangs above the city; but since there is no way actually to see it at work on the lungs, the effect is muted and cinematic, the work of an ambitious new film director, shaky on character, secure when it comes to giving his picture a "look." From a distance, it is all quite safe and manageable; but closer in, when the view becomes hot and stupendous and it's clear you're not dealing with a picture postcard, even the cool customer sucks in his breath a bit. Coming in on steerage, the immigrants felt it, of course, and the local who has been wandering in foreign lands experiences it more sharply than anyone. But even the commuter, struggling bumper to bumper from Hicksville, exhausted before the day has begun, has been known to revive somewhat, as though slapped by a Madison Avenue skin bracer, on catching that first exhilarative shock of the city. There is much of this in the approach to San Juan, the look of Rome from the Hills, the first sight of the Pacific and even dropping down over St. Louis--a sense of new and dangerous possibilities--but in the case of New York City, there seems to be a higher ante, more wild cards to the deck. Making first contact with this town, that elevator-dropping junkie's rush of excitement has to do with the fact that no matter how many times a visitor has been elbowed away from the table or come home tapioca city, there are more chances in New York that the dice will pass his way again; the list is long of those who've rolled their way back to a piece of the casino.

The man who has been away for a decade or two would still find New York City in 1971 recognizable. Great steel-and-glass towers, boxlike, geometric, have been thrown up at what often seems like the rate of one a day. Enormous hooker squadrons patrol the center of the city. At each midtown corner, men in undershirts sell dollar belts. (Who wears all those belts?) Cops confusingly wear beards and Wild West mustaches and very tough Irish barroom types, even more confusingly, have taken on the skinny, barearmed poignant hippie look. Women snippily prance along, managing in their hot shorts to show more ass or, more accurately, more toochis, than all the nudes in Calcutta!, all assuming the arrogant New York look, which says it's your problem, buddy, not theirs. Black dudes in tilted hats, floor-length coats and pants that seem painted to their legs bop along Third Avenue as though they alone know the ultimate secrets of the city, which they probably do. Pimpmobiles, priced at $18,000, lead the traffic parade, Henry Ford's dream as seen by Fellini. Yet it is still recognizably New York. Lindy's is gone and the Latin Quarter has been interred, but the park is untouched and the Plaza still holds court at 59th and Fifth like an elegant old lady. There is a sold-out show at the Winter Garden and you can still get a bag of hot chestnuts on any Broadway corner. (Three are good, 12 are lousy.) You can't meet someone at the Astor, but you can join forces at the Algonquin. To the man who has been away for a while, what slowly begins to seem unusual is not the look of the city so much as the balance sheet of it, a little weird, a little tilted. An elderly woman, sitting alone at an East Side restaurant, suddenly flings bottles and glasses at a wall mirror. To the one diner who takes exception to her behavior, the head-waiter explains, "She comes from a very well-to-do family." A well-dressed gentleman walks briskly into the emergency ward at Bellevue Hospital and tips his hat to the reception clerk. He has an ice pick in his head. To catch his new date by surprise, an actor, successful with women, sure of his moves, reaches beneath the table to fondle her toes and finds one missing. "My lover," she says with a bored drag of her cigarette. "I seem to attract the wrong kind of men."

In restaurants, people who get a choice sit with their backs to the wall, the way they once did in Laredo. An accidentally dropped plate has diners clutching their chairs, expecting the worst. In New York City, 1971, paranoia is the new reality. There really are 12 people waiting on a corner to get you. At a St. Mark's organic-foods shop, a man with dead eyes asks a young guitarist for one of his tempura shrimps, is rejected and does a series of Oriental attack gestures at the heavens, an obvious loony. But then he systematically chops the youth to the floor while the other patrons stare at their food, all of it muffled, soundless, TV entertainment in a glass booth. A man is staked out and trapped in a car lot by his girlfriend's husband, an adman, puffy, out of shape. "Go near my wife again and I'll kill you," says the husband, a respectable, time-honored warning. But instead of a clenched fist, he produces a yard-long blade, balances it on one finger, flings it up in the air, catches it on the tip of another finger, passing it along from finger to finger in that style. The accused gets the message and will not approach the woman again. But where did the adman learn such violent artistry? Two old friends meet, after many years. Each notices a bulge in the other's hip. Both admit to carrying weapons. They are not cops, they don't have dangerous jobs. They are not on their way to do something tricky. But they live in the city of New York. "Somebody starts in," says one of them, "and he's carrying his shit, I want to be carrying my shit." A tall yellow-haired model, perhaps Swedish, approaches a black man at a cabaret in the West Village as though she is going to embrace him. She does, with a glass water pitcher, cracking it across his head. The black man, his face an intricately stenciled map of blood, walks inside to the Chinese chef, who is being blown by a pretty neighborhood freak to commemorate his birthday. (Chefs get a lot of unsolicited action in New York. Girls are always saying let's go in and do something nice for Ming.) The chef extricates himself momentarily, treats the wound with towels and the black man returns to finish his dinner. An entire city, chopping, tearing, slashing, clawing itself to shreds, all of it muffled, soundless, the stuff of dreams, covered over by a thin, cocained veil. "You're afraid to goddamn fight in this city," says "Inspector" Pat Doyle, 26 years a suspenders-wearing Front Page-style crime reporter for the tabloid Daily News. "The day when two gentlemen could hang up their coats and go outside to settle their differences in a manly way is long gone. One will be a speed freak with a stiletto. One of the combatants' eyes will be gouged out. Your top mobsters don't condone this, incidentally. When I broke in, crime had some class to it. You'd have your occasional garroting or find a guy in a trunk or there'd be a shotgun killing. But today, a mother in Queens gets mad at her son and chops his head off. Now, what is that? The police have to have guys dressing up like women, with balloons for tits. They're shooting cops right in the detective squad room. You can't go to the zoo.

"Do you realize," says Doyle, and he's near tears on this one, "that in the city of New York, a man has to be buzzed into police headquarters?"

Late at night, apart from a few sparkled clusters of "singles" outside the East Side bars and some sightless junkies who slip through the streets like dazed moths, the city has an occupied look to it. Footsteps from behind sound like bombs dropping. Strangers pass one another, heads down, as though eye contact would mean electrocution. An elevator ride with someone unknown becomes a combat mission in the dark. A man goes to the South Bronx to visit his 70-year-old father, who is grateful that his apartment has been knocked over only twice. There are 35 tenants in the building and 27 keep German shepherds. These people are not pet lovers. Only near morning, when the newspaper delivery trucks hurl their wired paper bundles up onto the sidewalk and the garbage grinders begin to whine and grumble, is there some break in the tension. The sun smacks against the giant glass towers with ferocity, as though it would prefer to tear it all down.

• • •

When did this come about? Once, New York City meant being smart in school, waiting outside Yankee Stadium for Charley Keller, delicious giant malted milk shakes that the drugstore owner let you make yourself, terrific, towering stickball flies. Everybody had a nickname--Doodle, Doggie, Muff, Half-Ass, Pickles; each fellow, with a separate style, was a little traveling show unto himself, one famous for going into sewers for lost balls, another for a cute move he made at first base, another for allegedly being able to suck himself off, for being deaf, for outrageously being a Phillies fan with the Polo Grounds and the New York Giants only six blocks away. Irish kids were tough, Polish guys were strong, Italian kids were tough, colored guys had fast hands, some Jewish kids were tough, although most tended to wrestle and not punch in the face. Come to think of it, everyone was a little tough, but knives were something that occurred only in Mexican bandit movies. Every class had a refugee from Germany (usually called "Ref"), who had poor bladder control. The wildest event in the world was a girl getting her period, and even wilder was when a teenager, after a lot of arguments with her sick father, went downtown to become a whore (pronounced who-a). Only one girl per block "put out," usually the super's daughter, and a sex club had to do with a wild Jewish girl taking four guys up to her apartment and flashing her panties; if the crowd on hand was really fast, she would take a shower. Later, she would be sent to a special school. Fags had not been invented quite yet, and if there was one around, he wore enough make-up for the kabuki theater. Downtown was the magic word, the pearl of the New York oyster. Greenwich Village was very cute (bunch of "bohemians" lived down there); the black folks strutted their stuff up in Harlem, Brooklyn was more of what you had in the Bronx, people probably lived on Park Avenue, although you didn't know any, and your father's boss had a house out on Long Island--but downtown, that slab of grown-up fun and mystery that went from 42nd Street on the West Side to the edge of Central Park on 59th, was where the jewels were stashed. Above 59th, you might as well be in Siberia. Getting there was a big part of it--dressing up in a sports jacket, delicious one-cent subway gum, turning the wheel in the front car of the express train as though you were the one negotiating the lonely curves. Hot pretzels, shows with Jack Haley, Bobby Clark, Martha Raye and 20 hot-rumped rascals picked for tits and ass--since this (continued on page 336)New York(continued from page 130) was a time before producers went in for interesting types, skilled dancers and artistes. A fistful of coins for the penny arcade, the magic of a first whiskey sour, egg rolls, two entire strips, absolutely forbidden back in the Bronx, and, what the hell, it's late, shoot the works, a sleepy luxurious cab ride all the way back home.

There was a country out there; you knew it because Jimmy Stewart movies took place in it. Someone's uncle moved out to California for his health and there had to be a Detroit, unless the Tigers were kidding around, secretly holed up in Washington Heights when they weren't playing the Yankees. But for all practical purposes, America was New York City; and if there was life beyond its boundaries, you required some real proof before you'd buy it. It was an attitude that was to linger and at times become costly.

The country got discovered after high school when the Doodles and Doggies and Docs and DumDums scattered to study premed at Stanford and Purdue and Michigan State, battering their way into those places via their impressive New York City 90 averages. They ran into entire campuses full of polite guys who had been driving cars and dating girls since they were 14. You'd grabbed a little tit in an alley from the super's daughter. These people had terrific manners, spent a lot of time shining their shoes, but they could play basketball, too, going up very high and actually making the shots while you were concentrating on style. Heartbreakingly beautiful fair-haired girls from Anniston, Alabama, who really meant it when they asked, "What's it like being a gangster?" (The put-on had not been invented yet.) The first awareness of a certain resentment, however polite, toward New Yorkers. What did New York have, anyway? A bunch of sarcastic people. All right, so it had the theater. What about our Kiel Auditorium? Didn't The King and I play there for two weeks last year? On holidays, they would scatter, going off to houses with Mom, Dad, Sis and Bud, and great lawns, often leaving you behind, skinny, lonely, shaky, but an aristocrat of a kind, since you had always kept that towering thunderous place locked away in your mind and never before did it seem more rich and glittering. Later, you would feel that as a New Yorker, nobody left you behind. You left other people behind. It was that sort of attitude that made you suspect. Reading more, seeing all movies, arguing, doing things with flash. (There were no visible blacks out there; Jewish kids from the Bronx were the advance guard.)

Seeing more of the country, in Air Force blue this time--Denver, San Antonio, Minneapolis, lazy relaxed places like San Diego. Still a bit of an outlaw. Others looked better in the uniform. Always arousing a little suspicion, until a nervous Texas colonel, planning a trip East, asked, What's it like there? Is Jack Dempsey's the world's fanciest restaurant? Could you set up some theater tickets? Once in a while, you would meet someone who struck you as being a New Yorker, even though he had never been there. He had the style. (Later, Nixon would live in New York City for a few years but remain an out-of-towner, at least until the China trip.) A temptation to stay out there, marry one of the rangy, scrubbed, unneurotic Midwestern girls, let the country take care of you. In New York, you had to take care of yourself. Change your name, work for DuPont. Really duck things. Maybe even stay in the Service. Inevitably, though, you had to go back and sign in, face the man. To live in America and not be in New York would be like staying in Vegas for the swimming and the desert air.

Facing up to it, back you go, and--miracle of miracles--though you have the right address, somehow you're not a New Yorker. Bullshit job, credit cards, fag suits, deadlines, time clocks, cocktail parties, vicious exchanges with the wife of the assistant art director. Ninth-rate Dorothy Parker shit. Try the suburbs. Crab grass, town hall, the Long Island Rail Road. But where in the hell is New York? In some curious way, as a 12-year-old two-sewer king back in the Bronx, you owned a bigger piece of the city. Confirmation of an old truism about New York. Terrific when you're swinging. Not that bad when you're on your ass. Deadly place for the man in the middle.

Nightmares. Nervous-breakdown time. Premature ejaculations. Where did they come from? Welcome to psychoanalysis. Overswinging. Overthinking. Missing the ball. Then one day, catching one on the end of your bat and drilling it on a line, into the seats. Same swing, well, maybe you'd relaxed it a bit. Hey, watch out for this (aging) kid. He can hit. And then the city unlocks. Welcome aboard. Fashion models. George Plimpton, house seats, the columns come to life. The party had been going on all along--you just hadn't been invited. Better manners (the backbiting is there, but that comes later), prettier girls; terribly uncharitable to say so and there are powerful humanistic arguments to the contrary, but ten minutes with Bill Styron is more rewarding than an equivalent session with the wife of the assistant art director at McCann, Wells and Doyle.

So you're "back on Broadway," there is some razzle-dazzle by the Beatles, it's kill-the-Kennedys time and then there is this terrific jump cut to the Seventies and, hey, wait a minute, where did it all go? You came to see Fair Lady and someone threw in Last Exit to Brooklyn. You didn't even see them change the scenery. You've been taken by the world's fastest shell-game artist. Fun City? Make that Terminal City. Glassine wrappers, snorting cocaine right at the restaurant table. (The fuzz are too busy making the big busts.) Too much ass, if that's possible, pimpmobiles zipping closer, labia minora right in the goddamned store windows. Everybody carrying heat. Ever think you'd find a knife at your throat? No way. Happens to other people. You've got a press pass, you're an observer. At four in the morning, you've walked the dreariest backalley streets of Marseilles, almost drove the concierge crazy. What happened? Nothing. Then one night in Yorkville (at four in the morning--like Sky Masterson, that's your time of day), you get initiated; there he is, the most powerful man in the world, no eyes. "You can't protect that girl," he says, and there's choking, cutting, real blood, yours, cops, guns. "Just hold the sonofabitch till I get out of here." Now you're a real New Yorker, 1971 style, shipping out on a liner that hasn't been inspected in years. Warped, leaky, got to go down. It's the last-night party and, curiously enough, like 7,800,000 other passengers, in your merry paralysis, you haven't even checked to see if the ship carries lifeboats.

Yet no one jumps ship. A company pulls out, but they don't really count; bunch of Connecticut gibson drinkers who hated the city before they got there, just needed a little confirmation. Another company rolls in. A writer gets his ear lobe sliced off in a lobby, quickly moves his family to a small town Upstate. Question him and you find it isn't the ear lobe. He worked on a novel for five years and it sold 600 copies. Someone goes to London for nine months, raves about the girls, how civilized it is, the walks you can take. But he's doing his talking from P. J. Clarke's and he's back in his New York apartment. A fellow gets hired by the movies, limos, percentages of the gross, mornings on the telex, movieolas for checking the rushes, orange groves, hibiscus trees. But over at Malibu, his wife is crying. Back they come to West End Avenue. In summer, there is a rush to get away to Fire Island, the Hamptons (certain New York aficionados claim this is the only time to be in the city, no hassle on restaurants, theater tickets, terrific for the calm second stage of a love affair), but they carry New York with them in little traveling cells filled with the same talk, the same people, some wind, sand and local lobster thrown in for background. Then around Labor Day, the fall drumbeat begins, the city recalling its traveling legions, who rush back with new hopes, first drafts of plays, plans for completing the deal with a dimple-assed number who dominated the beach at Fair Harbor. Back they come to knee-high garbage, taxi strikes, cop strikes, bridge strikes, strikes of the heart.

Squashed, slashed, dollar pinched, polluted and harassed, how come they don't grab their hats and move toward the exit signs? Ask the question of Fun-Loving, a regular at Small's, Wilt the Stilt's Harlem hangout; he looks at you like you're crazy and says, simply, that he would rather be "dead-ass broke in New York than rich in Mississippi." To Charley P., Small's cool-daddy maître de, who's seen it all from Tangier to the Place de l'Opéra, the city is like the first time a junkie feels that needle. "He knows he got to get back there. You can't make it in those bright lights, baby, you ain't makin' it anywhere." Back from Nam, a black veteran weighs in with the thought that Asia's pretty terrific, but it's got to be second best. "Mainly because them Asiatic women got cold pussies." For the price, you get a bigger steak in Des Moines, with five extra courses thrown in, than you can at Frankie and Johnnie's, but the secret of the flavor is as unattainable as the key to the Inca code. To Mack, manager of F & J and a man consulted by Broadway producers on what types of shows to bring in, the New York mystique boils down to something simple. "I love the water here. Find me a decent drink of water outside of New York City. When I'm away, I turn on the TV and they got one channel. How could I live in a place like that?" Alto-sax man Paul Desmond produces a cool, pure New York sound he himself compares to a dry martini. Black jazz musicians begrudgingly award this white man points the way black hoop stars, when shoved, will admit that Jerry West probably deserves to play on the same court with "Big O" and Wilt. No reason for him to live in New York. In Stockholm, throngs of flaxen-haired students crowd into tiny cafés and pay cover charges to drink and listen to the records of this musician--warrior king. "I can live anywhere," he says. "It's inertia that keeps me here." But then a woman approaches the table and tells of a lovely long-haired wench who's staying at the beach, her husband away, jumping out of her skin to see him. He had never realized she knew he was alive. "I take it back," he says. "That's why I stay in New York." A dry cleaner in the mid-60s complains about the tightwad Europeans who fill the Third Avenue luxury buildings. "They don't know about cleaning. They rub the dirt off a shirt or they put it in a hot shower. Hand them a bill for four dollars and they call the police. My business is stiffs and phonies, maybe four live ones in a whole building. I'm like a donkey blindfolded on a treadmill. I haven't been laid in three years." So why does he stay there? It has to do with Haverstraw. "When I was in the Service, I heard of a place outside New York called Haverstraw. I said, 'That's for me, quiet, polite, just what I'm looking for. And what a name to it.'" Discharged from the Service, he took a train to Haverstraw. He looked around. He took a train back to New York and he's never left. A pretty, long-haired philosophy teacher from NYU, a dead ringer for one of her students, sees the city as a woman. It's a bullshit analogy, sophomoric, probably goes over big with her students, but it improves slightly when she works with it. Seattle, Chicago, Houston, they're all men, big and ballsy, but New York is a lady, not a tough women's lib chick, letting it all hang out, but some kind of mysterious, primal lady, open, voluptuous, revealing her secrets generously, but always keeping some in reserve. Actually, it doesn't improve that much. The veins pop out on people's heads when they try to pinpoint the New York mystique. "It's my husband's loft," says the blue-jeaned, teenaged wife of a medium-famous artist. "Five flights up, on Thompson Street, in the Village. We have a huge house in Atlanta that we never go to." But you can get the same loft in downtown St. Louis. "Oh, no," she says, frustrated, close to anger and tears. "You don't understand. This is different. This is a New York loft." A 22-year-old airline stew who's been raped once and on another occasion had a female detective shove two fingers up her rump in an illegal-drug search can't leave the city because every night, when she takes the dog for a walk, she sees a fag go out to get the papers in his pajamas. "And nobody even notices him." She feels there is no place else on earth where she could see something like that. Editor, philosophy teacher, Shakespeare authority Robert Brown is amused when it's suggested that he might live elsewhere. "Leave this city? Are you serious? The skaters at Rockefeller Plaza, the view from the Empire State Building, opening-night parties at Sardi's, walks through Central Park, the Rockettes?" But Bob, someone says, you never leave your table at Elaine's. Brown smiles, orders a Scotch on the rocks. Playwright-critic Jack Richardson would love to pack up and live in Cuernavaca. Clean air, lovely homes. Servants. Ten grand makes you an emperor. But it would take him 20 years to develop even a single New York-style friendship. Such weddings are like Bradley and Frazier on a fast break, each feeling the other's presence, sensing each other's moves, totally unimportant who actually stuffs it. Long as it goes in.

• • •

Struggling with their suitcases at the Port Authority Bus Terminal, the incoming little girls from Butte talk about excitement. Anonymity. It's so big, you can get all swallowed up in it. And nobody will ever know what you're doing. The unexpected. They get it fast, sometimes right at the terminal, from bus hustlers who'll carry their bags, take them anywhere, usually downhill. Out in the city, everything's a little unexpected. At the Police Academy library, a black detective with a giant Afro and two pearl-handled shoulder guns sits reading a copy of Commentary. An Arab with a monocle and an old-fashioned wooden leg prowls through the lingerie department at Bendel's. "I just keep looking at the door," says a hefty, dark-maned secretary-bar chick whose uneven roller-coaster teeth have made her a delightful sackmate for the dozen or so men who've made it back to her two-room high-rise efficiency on York Avenue. "Anybody's liable to come in. Antonioni. Warren Beatty. Someone with a marvelous zappy diet pill." One night. Antonioni and Warren Beatty both came into her favorite bar, 15 minutes apart. "And I didn't even remember what to do," she says. Sometimes it seems the entire city is on What's My Line? On a typical night, as if there were such a thing, at the same Antonioni-Warren Beatty bar, a pleasant, amiable, heavy-beaked man eats chicken cacciatore and sips a negroni. He's an international card manipulator, with contracts out on his head in half a dozen countries. Seated opposite him is a clean-smiling collegiate-looking man who smuggles jade and rare artifacts into the country from Guatemala. The actress who takes a seat between them, killing a few hours, is a cocaine runner who has also given head to many of the major figures in the record industry. They just call her at an idle hour and she runs over and gives them head. They give her free albums and some vague promise of an audition. She doesn't press them; she just likes doing this nice thing for them. Besides, she never actually balls anyone. The trio sit there, idly, talking about the Lindsay administration. A few tables over, two pretty girls chatter away with great animation, like ex-Radcliffe roommates who haven't seen each other since graduation. One is a heroin junkie, who spends each of her evenings as secretary to a Village clean-up-heroin committee. The other is a teacher at a private school specializing in the sons and daughters of czarist Russian émigrés, who take annual trips to the Holy Land and bring back giant cabbage-sized chunks of hash, easily passed through Customs, delicious apples for the teacher. There they are, typical little New York grouping. No one knows the other's scene. No one asks. "That man sittin' next to you," says Charley P. up at Small's. "You don't hassle him, even if he's got coal dust on him. You don't ever know who he's connected to."

Size, variety, bright lights, anonymity, showbiz, sometimes it seems you can strike them all, and what the city is really about is the girls. The Kathies, Cathys, Katherines, Carols and Susies, on the subway, at traffic lights, so many outside Bloomingdale's alone you don't know where to look first. Greed, the inability to zero in on one and stay with her for the evening, kills many an evening for the New Yorker. But how can you go to a smorgasbord and concentrate on the herring? Stand on a corner in Stockholm's old city and you can cast a movie about girls' dormitories 20 times over in your first half hour. Walk along Third Avenue on a summer evening and you can cast the same movie with equal speed, except that the Stockholm flick is Andy Hardy and the New York one is likely to be some kind of weird Fellini epic. If Los Angeles is health and tanned skins, London legs and profiles, Florence eyes and mystery, Rome tits, then in New York it's ass. Rare is the New York beauty who doesn't stop once, during her confident pilgrimage from Saks to Bendel's, to check her ass in a mirror. Little adjustment here, little alteration of the panty line and on we go. No matter how sculptured-perfect it is, the New York girl is terribly concerned about her ass, patting it down, smoothing it out, generally buoying up its confidence and hers. Either that or she is wildly sure in this department, really working with it in great, horsy, gliding, weaving, sashaying construction-stopping movements. In all cases, there is real involvement.

Who are the New York girls? Sometimes it seems they all come from convents, once wore those green-and-white uniforms and had dimpled knees. After years of having it drummed into them that there were devils under the bed, out to snatch at them, they've come to the city figuring they might as well jump in and meet the devils head on. After that first frenzied encounter or two, convent girls are amazingly open, civilized, with plenty of bottled-up energy on tap, and they will go back and ball an old boyfriend when he's lonely, which is a very classy New York thing to do. Whoever the girls are, another of their characteristics is that they are both full of surprises and unsurprisable. A sudden double somersault in bed. Mention coke, she just happens to have a little stash in her purse. Someone laid it on her. Downs? You got 'em. Ever slept with another woman? you ask in a professional tone. Who me, you kidding or something? Oh, well, there was this one chick at the Cape, I almost forgot, but I don't really count that, it was only a few months. She was so beautiful. How about, you say with your smartass New York charm, I tie you up to the bedposts and let you have a quick 20 with a carton of frozen scampi. Curious little smile that tells you, Jesus Christ, she's done that already. Bedposts, frozen scampi, inviting another chick in on the deal, that's not just for longtime girlfriends, either, it's for one-time street stuff, of which the woods are full in New York City. Share a cab with a stranger, a photographer's assistant, heading down to Sheridan Square, and all of a sudden you're right into it. No addition, subtraction, elementary algebra, you're expected to dive right into solid geometry. Mirrors, vibrators, speed, coke on the end of your joint, the works. This is not a foreplay town. There is a famed cameraman who is noted for buying m'lady one drink, then promptly getting down on his knees and heading for the goal line. Rarely does he hear so much as a "My, my, young man."

Convent chicks, models (everybody's a model, particularly the hookers), native New York girls (too tough, advance to the new arrival from Cincinnati), and nowhere on earth does there exist a wilder collection of ditzies. At a restaurant owned by a sports figure, a coat-check girl screws her boyfriend nightly on a pile of 300 coats while her girlfriend acts as a lookout. During the coat-less summer days, they don't see each other. A moneyed Vassar lovely gets married in the afternoon; that night she balls a bartender in the men's room of a midtown jazz joint. "The wedding was just something I had to get out of the way," she explains. A pretty UN translator balls her way through entire bars. When she finishes one, she moves on to another. But she's cool. Each guy at the bar thinks he's the only one who's made it with her. One girl makes it in hallways of high-rise buildings, another "straightens out" a fag at midnight under statues in Central Park. "Sure it's dangerous," she says. "But he forgets he's a fag."

• • •

Finally, it comes down to "more." More ugly, more pretty, more Korean restaurants. If it isn't more on your plate, very often it's more quality. There is a wilder selection of dishes on the Chinese menus in Frisco, but Mrs. Pearl stands over the pork while it's cooking and makes sure it's tender. More freaks, more games, more crazy. And if you get all that extraordinary food, all that sex, all that craziness thrown right in your face without trying, imagine what lies beyond, behind some of those doors you don't even know about. A pair of perfectly matched 12-year-old Eskimo chicks, trained from birth to satisfy weirdo cravings? You got it. Just a matter of knowing the right people.

More style? Goldwater didn't think so, but how they love it in this city. Not important that you actually score points. It's how you make that approach to the basket. Lindsay gets elected on it. Many of the hookers have it, a lot more than the judges and their listless periodic crackdowns. It's no accident that Alabama Joe Namath became Broadway Joe. "I hate the sonofabitch," says a midtown junk detective. "Hate his hair, hate everything he stands for. But if anybody ever hit him a cheap shot, I'd put two right between the guy's ears." On gimpy knees, Joe's got style. Reactionary, nigger-hating, the cop, in some curious way, has it, too. Nobody noticed the construction workers until they put on hard hats, picked up a little style. They appreciate Alcindor in this town, but with the understanding that he does it on physical equipment; if Earl the Pearl, with those mystical backcourt moves, ever settled in this city, they'd make him the mayor. Ali rode in with all the style, but at the end of 15 rounds, Frazier turned a courageous tanklike lack of style into a style of his own; he walked away with the fight and the town. There is a customer at Elaine's who is the king of style. The way he drinks, the way he dresses, the way he checks the action at the bar. Run an FBI search on him and you find out he doesn't do anything. No way the man can dress that way, make a living. He just keeps movin' and groovin', finessing his way to 25 grand a year. All on style.

Style--and an unspoken feeling of being number one--a feeling that the Yankees are still the number-one team in baseball, that they've just been goofing the past five years or so, giving the other teams a shot, that if at any point they really wanted to, they could begin to play in that old professional, aristocratic style and cop the series. The Knicks took it all one year, but wasn't it just boredom that made them back away last year? The city never wins any national beauty contests, but is there a New Yorker who doubts that the most extraordinary women in the world live in this city and not in Hot Gulch, Nevada, where all the winners come from? And, for that matter, couldn't New York, if it got its back up, break off from the rest of the country, start an army and put on one hell of a show if it came to war? What an army. Not since the French wore red knickers at the Marne. Might not win, but they'd look good goin' down.

The deeper truth is that if you're an interesting guy to hang around with, you can be with yourself anywhere. A stopover in Dallas can be pleasant, a weekend in Vegas a total delight (Cedar Rapids is stretching it). But rare is the man who doesn't crave a higher speed limit, a no-stakes poker game, more curves to the roller coaster--New York.