Tales of Times Square: Expanded Edition Read Online Free PDF Page A

adulation. But then, every stripper worth her salt learns to control the tempo, to exercise a power over men that she never had as a kid. Yet Raven achieves this commanding aura without a trace of manipulation.
    She lists a jumble of occupations leading up to her reigning tit stardom: real estate agent, nursery school teach, L.A. roofing contractor, record promoter, nurse at Columbia-Presbyterian near The Bronx, where she grew up. She spent years in the Hell’s Angels, married one, then broke into a prison yard to fuck him, when he did time. She supervised something called “Narconon,” a drug rehab program in the California jail system—dressed conservatively, she says, she would mingle with addict prisoners and pit the biggest black guys against the fiercest rednecks in encounter-group staring exercises.
    Now in her thirties, Raven has landed dim-witted Hollywood cameos for big-boobed broads, in The Blues Brothers and other such rubbish. But she starred in Russ Meyer’s Up! , which carries a lifetime constituency; she’s since had to continually do men’s magazine spreads to keep the fans succored. She feels a kinship toward Little Annie Fannie, yet knows how to “walk into a lion’s den and survive.” With a teenage son, she’s come through like a Mack-truck Mary Tyler Moore. And now, clinging to the underside of show biz, bent on bigger movie roles, she commands $2,000 a week, plus accommodations, in what’s vaguely defined as the burlesque circuit, here and in Canada.
    Once upstairs in the Melody lobby, Raven is instantly surrounded by admirers and tit hounds. A gigantic, jolly black fellow named J.J. is introduced as the “president of her New York fan club.” He is nearly seven feet tall and four or five hundred pounds, and his hands are large enough to crush a basketball, which he absentmindedly seems to be trying to do as he shakes mine.
    Friends of J.J.’s nudge him in the ribs—”There she is!”—which causes him to burst into giggles. Raven’s “Uncle Lou” is here, a more reserved fan she met during her summer 1981 engagement, now elevated to dinner companion. The old cocker in the box office cackles his way out of the booth, complaining jealously because she hasn’t invited him to dinner. At every utterance from Raven, the enormous J.J. is reduced to giggles, unable to make conversation with his dream queen. Her pictures, I’m told, wallpaper his entire apartment.
    All of these fellers, who act reverent enough before the regular strippers, are downright awestruck in Raven’s presence. That such a woman stands before them, living, breathing, greeting them with a wink and a wisecrack, soon to strip off her clothes—which they will witness for a seven-dollar entrance fee—is too good to be true.
    “I’ve always had a really fortunate instinct for picking the safe ones from the Hillside Stranglers,” says Raven, both of us settled in the headliner’s dressing room, behind a locked door. “Like Lou, for instance. He’s like a distant uncle. He’s a nervous guy with a stutter; but he’s very honest and vulnerable, and I’m the kind of person, it seems, where all of a sudden, a guy feels he can be honest with me.”
    “Tell me more about Lou,” I say.
    “He’s just a regular guy. I brought him to meet my mother last summer. He’d never try to lay a kiss on me, other than just being sweet.... God, this room smells terrible.”
    The star’s room at the Melody is closet-sized, with exposed heating pipes and a high ceiling. A horizontal mirror hangs across the dressing table, where flowers from Al Kronish and fan cards are stationed. A new, blue paint job, covering old graffiti by strippers, leaves a lingering odor in the air.
    “Mind if I get dressed?” asks Raven, with under an hour before her 11:20 show. She opens the trunk, containing six costume changes, each with its own soundtrack cassette. Hers is a self-designed wardrobe of stripperwear, more prestigious than