How to feel a freak down at the peep show

A SHORT time ago, I was on the phone to my editor at the New Yorker magazine, discussing story ideas. I suggested writing something about New York's sex industry. Mayor Giuliani has recently proposed new zoning regulations that would force the sex shops and peep shows in and around Times Square to move their business elsewhere (the idea being less that such emporia shouldn't exist than that they shouldn't exist in mid-town, where impressionable tourists get to see them). For a while my editor and I discussed various 'hooks' for a sex industry story, and then he suggested that we should visit Show World, one of the larger sex palaces on 42nd Street, to see if anything there provided inspiration.

Somewhere, in one of the remote and dimly lit antechambers of my mind, an alarum sounded. Might this not turn out to be a rather grim and mortifying outing? Wouldn't it be a little inhibiting to wander around the fleshpots of Times Square with my editor monitoring my reactions? When I rang off, the fuzzy intimation of future horror was still there, but I brushed it away and reassured myself that he would probably never get around to organising this trip anyway.

Only a couple of days later, however, I was sitting in my office when I received a phone call from my editor down the hall. 'What are you doing now?' he asked.

'Erm, nothing much,' I said nervously. 'I just got in.'

'Well why don't we go now, then?'

'What, to Show thingy? Ermmm . . . OK.' It was a bright autumn day and as we strolled down 43rd Street to 8th Avenue it was easy to imagine that we were on our way to do something wholesome, like visit the zoo or buy a toasted muffin. Outside the grim portals of Show World, we stopped to read a New York Times article lauding Show World as the hygienic, law-abiding paragon of porn purveyors. Show World, it said was 'the McDonald's of the sex industry'.

Emboldened by this stamp of bourgy approval, my editor and I ventured inside and purchased tokens at the reception counter. These little octagonal coins, worth 25 cents each, were imprinted on one side with the legend 'World's greatest show place' and, on the obverse, with a fairly primitive rendering of a naked woman in a transport of ecstasy. (Well, I assume it was ecstasy. It may just have been a woman in a jolly bad temper.)

Past the greetings area there was a row of video-porn booths and, dotted about the place, several posters of gaping female orifices. I wish I could provide a more exact account of Show World's interior geography, but the place seems to have been designed with the specific purpose of disorienting visitors. There was very, very loud rock music playing. Everything was very dark, and most available surfaces had been covered in mirror tiles, like a really horrible Hamburg disco, circa 1975. There were at least three floors. It seemed to me that we proceeded as you do at the Guggenheim, up and up and round and round, in a spiral. On each floor, there were women in various states of undress wandering drearily about, issuing invitations to come see the live show, or step into their fantasy booth. (When I asked the haggard man at the fantasy booth counter what this particular entertainment entailed, he blinked at me rheumily for a moment and then said, with some impatience: 'Whadda ya mean? Ya tell 'em your fannasy and they make it come true.')

My editor and I kept wandering, unwilling to admit that whatever reportorial curiosity was meant to be motivating this visit had all but vanished in a haze of excruciating embarrassment. Eventually he proposed that we investigate the live show on the top floor. Entering the 'theatre' we found six or seven men seated around a small stage watching an enormously fat and very pale woman with lots of black, punky eye make-up, jigging in a desultory way to some sort of synthesiser rock. She was proffering a bottle of baby oil to members of her audience, but all of them regarded her with snarling expressions of distaste and declined to participate. She then plonked herself down on the floor and proceeded to do something with the aid of a large black plastic phallus which the Independent on Sunday would not allow me to describe even if I wanted to.

By this point, I was in a state of extreme agitation. Inasmuch as I had speculated about what I would find at Show World, I guess I had assumed it would be along Soho lines - semi-naked women dancing non-exotic exotic dances and serving Japanese tourists dollars 100 glasses of pink water. As it had turned out, I was genuinely shocked by the place. Something about being with my editor and the slightly arch, 'sophisticated' posture that we were affecting for each other's benefit made everything doubly awful. It would have been one thing to go there alone and be honestly freaked out, but to go with a colleague and try to maintain this hip pose - as in 'Hey, we're all grown-ups here, no chance we're going to get silly and Andrea Dworkinish about this' - was properly disgusting.

Before we left Show World, my editor suggested we check out the peep show. Still reluctant to declare myself chicken, I entered into a tiny booth with him. When the slat was raised, we were afforded a view of four or five middle-aged women, slouching naked around a tiny, circular enclosure. One of them approached us and, looking at me - I was standing nearest the window - said: 'Hi sweetie, want to touch me?' I stuttered some ludicrous, Joyce Grenfell-like demurral: 'Erm, not just now, thank you very much,' and the woman looked at me with great weariness. 'Listen sweetie, we work on tips,' she said sharply. 'Come on, you want to have a feel of me?'

Strangely enough, since the Show World episode, neither I nor my editor has shown much enthusiasm for pursuing the sex industry story. We never did find the right hook.-