Head east on 10th street and stride towards 268.
Before you see the sign, you’ll feel the heat rising off the bathhouse like humidity off of black August tarmac.
Last week I climb the steps, lean against the counter and hand over my watch, earrings, and wallet to the open security box offered by reliably grumpy Russian proprietor Boris.
My Old Friend, how long you been coming here?
Boris, I been coming here since you and your business partner David were friends and stood behind that desk laughing and glad-handing customers.
Since Madame Agnes reigned downstairs where she laid me out on that marble butcher’s slab and rested my arm on her enormous bosom to massage my neck and shoulders.
Boris, I been coming here since the Turkish guy.
Oh, the Turk.
When he said it, it was a grunt.
Time was the East Tenth Street Russian and Turkish Baths was a Turkish bath.
At least Turkish owned.
The fit young Turk was a chiropractor.
Or so he claimed.
A stealthy commando-styled chiropractor.
Upon entering the establishment, the unsuspecting patron could suddenly find her throat caught in his sure grip.
Without a whisper, he’d stepped from behind and then twisted and turned a neck so quickly you’d think he was a carnival geek cradling a chicken.
A series of snap crackle and pop would ricochet down my spine and deafen like skeet shooting through my cerebrum.
Stunned, I survived where the chicken wouldn’t.
My head still on.
Straighter, yes.
But a hell of a lot tenser.
Thanks to the Turk then for the baths down below.
Some people are schvitz people.
To schvitz is to be alive.
And schvitzless is a slow rigor mortis particularly when your nearby domicile is an authentic tenement.
Where wind whistles, “Brother Can You Spare a Dime” through the gaps in the window’s wooden frames.
Where the heat hisses, “Steam Heat” and slips out into the cold night headed towards an encore of “Take the A Train.”
The Tenth Street Baths, upstairs and down, are a convocation of geeks, freaks, outlaws, thugs, and mobsters.
Ayy, how ya doin? When d’you get out?
One ape-chested patron greets another,
as a third starts to bark,
Who let the dog out?
Mix in a handful of sour stoop-shouldered hipsters and a few radiant, tiny-pored, beautiful people.
Welcome to Schvitz Culture.
Schvitzers don’t talk about schvitzing.
They schvitz.
It’s the non-Schvitzers who ask,
What do you DO there?
Schvitzing can’t be explained.
It’s like telling someone you’re into bare-fisted cage fighting.
What do I do there?
I sit in a room so hot, if my bare leg touches the wall, it’ll scald.
The heat assaults with a ferocity that causes my mind to blackout in a proto-Ayahuascan vision quest.
For respite I step into a pool so frigid my numbed feet barely climb back out.
Once a month I actually pay a bear of a Russian to pulverize me with frothing oak branches and manhandle me through a sequence of three-quarter and full nelsons in a climate that simulates the inner sanctum of a pizzeria’s brick oven.
When I leave, my arms are too weak to hook my bra.
My skin is blushing like a bride’s.
My waist is taut, my face aglow, each breath like a baby’s first.
I’m alive.
Exeunt the Turk.
Enter two Russians: Boris and David.
They add barely a sun roof, flavored vodka, more massage rooms, expand the men’s changing room by squeezing down the women’s.
Once friends they are now mortal enemies and swap out ownership every other week.
It’s like divorce where the business is in a custody standoff.
Dad moves in one week and then packs up and leaves with out a trace.
Mom moves in the next.
And ditto.
For decades.
Mom and Dad each have their spies.
They’re called employees.
Do they double or triple cross?
Who knows?
At the Tenth Street Baths, you’re back in the USSR.
Buy a seven or ten-pack pass.
The economy’s in your favor and cash’ll get you a special price.
It did me.
But my pass is only good for Dad’s weeks.
I have to go next week and sort something out with Mom.
Nasty attitude, crowd, noise, dirt, cracked rubber slippers, over-laundered robes, rough and ready towels, broken hooks in splintered lockers.
The list is unbearable.
For ordinary people.
But for Schvitzers what’s unbearable, is not to schvitz.
But to collapse on a wooden bench in a small tile-walled room, where cast iron radiators stack floor to ceiling and output enough steam to propel a Mississippi River boat, blasting with a force and a din that convulses then slackens muscles immobilizing them like strychnine?
For a Schvitzer, that is to lay down with the Gods.
It’s not for everyone and it doesn’t last forever but
there’s a time and a joy in eating candy that’s so sweet it feels to melt away
your teeth. For coconut fans, the British Bounty bar is far more
cavity-enhancing than its Yankee cousin the Mounds.
Once upon a time, New York City hosted two subway vendors
that sold a shredded-coconut treat sweeter than a Bounty bar.
The pastel-colored patty was 3 inches square, non-chocolate
and slipped into a sticky cellophane envelope. This free-standing bonbon
filling was a creamy grout joining long rough coconut strands in a
melt-over-your-tongue and eat-at-your-teeth delight.
Grand Central sold ‘em down at the bottom of the subway
entrance just to the left of the turnstile.
And Coney sold ‘em.
During an August heat wave I’d fold myself into the already
packed can of F train and press sweat with the world’s population and out we’d
ride to the people’s beach: Coney Island. The train’d roll into Stillwell
Avenue where we’d solidly exit as one and pour through the open doors, thinning out
toward the thickening summer heat.
Now new and nearly European Stillwell Station.
Stillwell Station’d greet with the smell of urine, grease,
salt, and sweet. The salty sweet wafted up from the vendor at the bottom of the
wide long ramp that pitched towards Stillwell Avenue, to the thick splintered
boardwalk, a pocked and pitted littered stretch of sand, and the vast flat
Atlantic beyond.
The station’s food counter displayed bagged cotton candy,
hallucinogenic lollipop spirals and a pirate’s booty of pastel coconut gems
alongside sun-colored corn popping in a smudged glass vitrine. The first bite
of creamed coconut filled my mouth with a carnival delight and fortified till
lunch hour when I’d step off the counter at Nathan’s carrying my over-the-brim
cup of famous fries. Nathans still offers the customers of people’s beach
a self-operated ketchup pump; a faucet of satisfaction to drench the world’s
best fries till the heart and tongue’s content.
Fries are now served by the bag, and still with a tiny devilish fork.
August in Coney Island, the beachcomber rolls up from hot
tenement hell into the purgatory of nuclear sun where Coney seizes the senses till the eyes leap out on
springs and the tongue hits the boardwalk with a thud.
Behold here in Coney Island, a roiling abundance of human
flesh.
Man and dog.
Banners herald The World’s Tiniest Woman alongside The
World’s Biggest Rat.
Twenty-nine tiny inches.
This way to a world of fun.
Fly your flag.
How Sweet It Is.
August won’t last forever.
Kiki and Sophie in Wayfarers, Coney Island, August 1983.
Confession One
I’ve never seen Valley of the Dolls.
Until last night.
Confession Two
I wept.
Now I don’t usually weep in the dark before a screen unless Ralph Fiennes is projected on it.
On a recent long haul flight I watched The English Patient.
Twice.
Back to back.
Weeping, I actually lost water weight.
Ralph brooding in khakis. The perfect diuretic.
So, why did I sob an entire Valley of the Dolls?
It is the perfect kitsch masterpiece.
But that can’t be the only reason.
When I was a girl my mom had a friend as gorgeous as Sharon Tate. J’s hair teased up in a high smooth lift over her crown then fell waistward in a California dreamin’ cascade. J. wore belted safari suits in crème and bone. She was long and leggy and used to chat on the phone sitting on the kitchen counter, her pretty feet in the sink, her knees tucked up under her chin.
When Sharon Tate lies alone in her twin bed, a bandage peeking out of her mocha negligee, afraid of losing her breast, her husband locked up in a loony bin, her sister-in law, the elegant and practical Lee Grant, pimping her out, like her mother before her, I thought of J. with her leg in a cast and years later I’d heard her husband put it there. I thought of Sharon Tate, murdered in her home by the Manson clan, and I wept.
I wept thinking of all those gorgeous women, on screen and off, with
all their goddamn gorgeousness and yet all so forlorn. They gave it all
away. And in their poverty, they turned to dolls.
Pills, baby.
And what about those hairpieces?
I wept for the end of the era of Hollywood la-dee-da speech, of women in hats, hairpieces, and gloves.
And when Susan Hayward says,
One day you'll wind up alone.
Like me.
And wonder what happened.
Yeah, you guessed it. For that I wept.
Child star Patty Duke, all grown up here, flicks her beatnik hips to stardom only to stumble doll-addicted back to Nowheresville in a glitter mini-dress and mussed wig.
Shall I call you a cab? A kindly bartender queries.
I don’t need it.
I don’t need anybody.
Cause I got talent.
Big talent.
Pause.
Turn.
Close up.
They love me.
The hell with ‘em, who needs ‘em?
The whole world loves me.
More tears.
This morning I had trouble dressing. Nothing would do. I stood on a pile that was my whole damn wardrobe. Everything was just a little too tight. The mirror just a tad too wide.
Now it all becomes clear.
Confession Three
PMS.
That time of month when a girl could really use a doll.
Seemed when a man shot junk into his arm, thousands of tiny gyroscopes chugged through his veins like Pac Men.
Gangly H users, their eyes dialled so far past white to be as good as shut, stepped into moving traffic.
Not from the green but from well in between.
They surfed a swath of tarmac across Houston, Broadway, or Avenue B. Torsos torqued, and fingers licked the road as a squall of speeding cars pitched them into death’s screeching jaws.
I’d seen hundreds of heroin-happy Daze and Nightz of the Living Dead marching straight to Hades but I never saw one stumble or fall.
Never witnessed a traffic-trapped pie-eyed pedestrian bludgeoned by the grill.
High as kites, but well below ground, their feet riveted to subway flooring as their bony frames performed the awkward dance of a wooden child’s toy, collapsing and re-straightening on its tiny platform from the press of a button beneath it.
The train heaved and halted to a poor man’s orchestra of metal greased against summer soot. The soloist bobbed unceasingly.
He gonna bend but he ain’t gonna fall,
a fellow passenger announced.
We didn’t have to wait and watch to find out.
We knew he’d triumph.
We knew about the tiny gyroscopes.
It’s an old story.
Smack gave way to crack, slums became habitable, and slumlords sold to developers.
As the cabbie said, on a late-night ride low and east, “all them shooting galleries closed down”.
I am not saying I miss the addicts, any of them, smack, crack or PCP.
Nuh.
I don’t miss the hooked-on-shit users who broke car windows to swipe grimy Phil Collins cassette tapes.
Who cut cable to abscond with other peoples’ bicycles.
Don’t long for the return of the economic underclass that thrived trading pinched swag for crack vials.
Do not pine an era when personal property was tenuous and insubstantial as purple haze.
Will not champion a decade when one man’s stuff was ready-ripe for swiping, hawking, and reselling in the teeming contraband market on Saint Marks Place.
I don’t dwell on these memories as part of the good of the good old days. They are the bad and the ugly.
I mention it now because yesterday I glimpsed a zombie at 42nd and Sixth. First sighting in decades.
He straddled a bicycle. One hand held a slippery cigarette that moved beyond the reach of his pursuant lips and guided his torso to the horizontal.
For a more sober man, lips and cigarette meet.
Like two lovers in a kiss.
This fellow’s cigarette was followed by a palpable passage of ether, and following this glimpse of nothingness were the pursed lips, and these lips led a sleepy-eyed head, that craned a neck, and tugged a lean torso akimbo over a pair of legs cross-purposed with a bicycle.
Could he inhale that first satisfying drag before his hand stubbed the burning tip to ash against the pavement? Before the button under Bryant Park released and he snapped back to straight?
That was yesterday.
Today on the 2/3 downtown I spy the following:
Is Heroin a Problem for You? Tired of Getting Sick and Wasting Your Money?
Ah, the users ARE here. They sit among us reading advertisements that offer free and confidential services to the exhausted, nauseated spendthrift.
Perhaps it is the new technology, an internal gyroscope GPS guiding upright profligates to bright crosswalks and through smart neighborhoods where community gardens grow from the compost of torched abandoned buildings.
Or maybe it just looks that way and really everything new is old again.
