Dark Maze

neon signs bigger and more robust. The Camel smoker blew perfect rings high above the unruly intersection of Broadway and Seventh, one ring a minute thanks to the trusty Con Ed steam pipes.
    Maxwell House coffee dripped long past its last drop, on into a seeming infinity. A ten-thousand-gallon Pepsi-Cola waterfall stretched a full block over the roofs of the Bond menswear store and the old Criterion, the real one. Little Lulu skipped eight stories up the side of a building to pluck Kleenex from a box.
    Everybody dressed up in evening jackets and gowns to go to the Strand or the Capitol or the Roxy or the Paramount, where the great Frank Sinatra would sing. Broadway actors ate spaghetti suppers at Romeo’s after their shows. The cops were on foot post all night long, and you walked where you pleased.
    That was the Great White Way.
    Those were the days before people had surrendered their sense of wonder to television, when popular music still soothed the savage breast and musicians had not yet lost their jobs to soulless synthesizer machines. It was a time when everybody wore hats and pressed their clothes, the time before all the neon read Japanese, when the idea of commercial sex was to allure, not to assault. That was the way it was.
    In my seven-block hike over to the Horny Poodle, I witnessed the following: a buxom pre-op transsexual hooker voguing on a well-lit corner in red-sequined halter top and matching hot-pants, his johnson lolling out of her fly; two swishes debating the relative orgasm-enhancing merits of Rush and Quicksilver outside a grubby candy shop ran by a dour giant in a turban; a loud-faced skell spitting and howling like a rabid dog, dodging cars in the middle of Eighth Avenue; a bag lady hunkered down under a tent of rags and papers, sharing a can of something with a half-bald cat; four teenage chicken fags huddled in a doorway with a crack pipe; a brain-damaged evangelist screeching about Jesus through an electric bullhorn; and a short, muscular drunk with two tall cans of Ballantine in his paws loping after a married couple from Nebraska or someplace like that and snarling, “What’s-a-maddah, you doan like Spanish people?”
    I did what I could.
    I dialed 911 from a pay phone and reported the cursing dog-man, I tossed a dollar into the bag lady’s tent, and I was glad to see the tourists duck into a hotel lobby. If anybody wanted to take up with the tranny or the chickens or the Jesus jumper, that was between them and their demons.
    As for me, I had to get to the corner of Fiftieth and Seventh Avenue and the Horny Poodle. I crossed by the TKTS booth on Forty-ninth, where half-price leftovers to the Broadway shows are peddled. There used to be a statue there called “Virtue.” This was a forty-foot replica of Miss Liberty down in the harbor, erected by a committee of do-gooders from yesteryear to challenge the great American pastime of disparaging New York City. Miss Virtue’s bronze shield read our city and the poor thing was covered from crown to sandals with big dark stains, symbolizing the out-of-towner mudslinging she suffered; her plaque urged all good New Yorkers to defeat slander.
    A block up the avenue from Virtue’s last stand was the Horny Poodle, the last mastodon of the area’s once-ubiquitous topless bars. Its wide double glass doors were frosted with the images of leering white French poodles dressed in cutaway coats and top hats; these portals were illuminated from above by a pair of stupendous pink neon breasts with blinkering puce nipples. The joint sparkled in an otherwise drab strip of changing Times Square real estate, nestled between a gay cinema that night showing “Foaming Fannies” and an all-American newsstand where the reader can buy everything from USA Today to the latest number of Nuns & Nazis magazine.
    Strolling through all of this today makes me a little tired, and more than a little sad in my middle-aged heart. But I suddenly realized that since I was officially back on the clock, I could put my Johnnie Walker reds and Molson chasers on my investigative expense account somehow or other and this gave me a small lift.
    Then I entered through the double glass doors. Inside the Horny Poodle, the atmosphere was something less than the tit-man’s paradise it was cracked up to be.
    A couple of million palm cards passed out in the streets over the last few decades by the likes of Picasso promised a lonesome guy in an adolescent mood the prospect of being