Thirty-Five Beans Well Spent

Thirty-five beans well spent

Reaching for the crotch to illustrate.

I've always found complaints about the Disney-fication of 42nd Street lame, not because I like what's been done to the Deuce, but because they ignore its realities. Any place where a girl will take off her clothes and call you "Papi" while shaking her rump for the price of a new hardcover cannot be fairly described as too family-friendly.

Recently, in the service of journalism, I paid a girl to do all of this and more at a shop on 43rd and 8th Avenue, where the customer who gets past the first two racks of she-male DVDs and lubricants is presented with about a dozen haggard women in their underwear, wriggling uneasily in heels. One of them, a vaguely Asian woman who spoke with a fake snob accent, straightforwardly described the process for me: a $25 "tip" for the girl and $10 for a booth would buy me a five-minute show of female self-gratification (here she reached for her crotch, as if to illustrate), during which I would be free to pleasure myself. How exactly this is squared with Mayor Bloomberg's edicts against such shows I'm not sure, but it presumably involves protection money.

Choosing from among a dozen unattractive women who want you to satisfy yourself in front of them is an unpleasant task; the only decent thing to do is to go with the first one who makes eye contact with you. In this case, it was a plump Puerto Rican no younger than 40, implausibly named Candy; she foisted me off into booth No. 2 and instructed me to slip my $35 through a letter-slot in the booth. Once I did, a partition window went up, and I got my show, which was made rather awkward by the fact that I was taking notes. Candy took this as an affront and, despite my protests, resorted to increasingly vigorous measures, such as licking her own nipples and spanking herself, to convince me to drop my trousers. The failure of these measures led to scowling and attempts at eye contact, not all of which I successfully avoided.

In all, it was a $35 well spent. It's good that such a place exists; while it's not to my tastes, those who spend their time yearning for the good old days would do well to take advantage of the opportunities if offers for the relief of stress.

-Grant Causwell