photo by Robert Mapplethorpe. The playwright died of AIDS in 1989.
                                                                                                                                                                                                          

      Forty Deuce opened on Broadway in October 1981, and won Villager Best Play award that year. Kevin Bacon, playing Ricky, won the Obie as best actor. Orson Bean played Roper,  Harris Lasawsky was Augie, Ahvi Spindell was Mitchell, Tommy Citera was Crank, and Mark Keyloun was Blow (played by John Pankow in the earlier Perry St. Theater workshop production). John Anthony was played by John Noonan.

The play takes place in an 8th Avenue apartment on a humid pale smogish August Sunday afternoon/evening. John Anthony is a 13-year old runaway (possibly thrown out of his upstate home by his brother because he was queer) taken in by chickenhawk Ricky ("snatched her off a Greyhound"). He spends the play sprawled naked on a bed. The apartment is owned, or managed, by Augie, in his late teens, as are his pals Mitchell, Crank, Blow, and Ricky. These four, and Augie, are New York natives of various ethnic backgrounds. The other character is a prize John whose vice is underage boys. He is a fortyish management consultant who works on 6th Avenue (centerpiece of corporate America, according to the stage directions) named Roper. His ethnic identity, the list of characters tells us, is WASP, as is John Anthony's.

Ricky has created a problem by bringing John Anthony into the apartment. An 8th Avenue pad is not the place to arrange "dates" for affluent pedophiles. There are other hustlers who are in charge of such activities, and Augie needs to report to his boss, Mike, the purposes to which he has put the space Mike has given him--and the profits, of course. If Mike is displeased, Augie, Ricky, and the others "gonna have broken glass rubbed in our eyes." The rules of hard core pariah capitalism can get a businessman killed when the people in control are organized crime.

Organized crime means not only Mike and his enforcer-hit men but the high-end, Sixth Avenue customers like Roper: "consultant she calls herself. Oil Companies, plastics."  Roper needs the thrill of forcing his partners, and they have to be  young. "Passion, the real stinking hots," and yet something "fierce and dominant, too. something I can provoke, and then break." Augie and Roper have played this game before--all under Mike's protection, because Roper pays the kind of money some of mike's uptown operations do. Now, Augie, and Ricky and the others--thanks to Rickey's hubris--have to sell John Anthony to Roper.

The catch, which forces the drama forward, is that John Anthony has died of  the mainlining Ricky has inflicted on him. The slang for death is "cacked," explained in the Glossary as "giving up the ghost, 'cacking' or vomiting up the spirit." The reduction of  the mysterious and spiritual to the stinking bodily rejection of poison is a kind of  epitome of the buying and selling of sex, by 42nd Street boy pimps and their upscale customers (how different is the business of the film and clothing industries, the auto, whiskey and travel corporations, the upscale housing moguls and all their consumers?). 

  street hustler                       God's belly  


The key to the success of Forty-Deuce is its portrayal both of 42nd Street's underground economy and of all-American moral and emotional confusion (Bushworld has deep roots) grounded in Texas-sized acceptance of  exploitation, hypocrisy, and control so all-embracing that it is, to the born-to-rule "decider," a kick. As Bowne puts it, stepping out from the character of Roper as if he were delivering a Shakespearean soliloquy in Richard III:
You learn to see past the the throngs of little hustlers with their warts and
styles and meanness, their tiny blinkered deals. There's simply the what-do-
you-call-ems? The ratchets and sprockets of an immense process that knows
what it wants, that dices and selects and arranges according to its own lights.
People keep living for gods to worship. But they're already living in God's belly!

Mitchell, from experience with the Bryant Park sex and drug scene at the time, puts it more bluntly: "Two pounds a scag you can diddle a cop you can fuckin diddle the schmuky mayor. But one loose J they drag you in [the Black Maria] and rip out your pussy."

The actor playing John Anthony, despite being motionless and speechless, has to embody the dirt done to sex and beauty as he lies "curved and twisted" on the filthy sheets.
So what am I bid for this chicken? Here's a foot fulla five stiff toes. Here's a vein got
a track so big you could run your cock halfway up her arm. . . . Ever see a mouth like
that give you a blow job for days. Asshole tight as a drum butt like a rubber pad stick
 clamps on it. . . ."

It's necessary to make Roper think he has killed the boy while high on whatever he has smoked  when he first shows up  for the date.  Then, they will blackmail him for  $5000, which will please Mike.  The teenage pimps do reel Roper in. The scheme may be simple, but to them it is life and death, street-level capitalism; no frills, and no bullshit altruism equating the product and its entrepreneurs with patriotism, democracy, and the future of the city. But events have moved beyond their control.

Blow has committed a different kind of hubris than Ricky in trying to get big bucks without being part of Mike's system. Blow, who is not a part of Augie's operation but a useful freelance--has fallen in love with the "fetus"--street slang for under aged prostitute, perhaps (no help from glossary on this one) but also reflecting something that is a natural part of the life style John Anthony has been cheated out of). And pity is not quite excluded from the Eighth Ave. apartment. Blow has fallen in love with him, or at least has empathy for this victim. He reflects on how John Anthony got to the Port Authority to be grabbed and OD'ed by Ricky. His brother's lack of courage to face what sexual desire is got him on the bus to Times Square in the first place. So Blow tells Mike what has been going on.

The upshot is the perfect set-up. The vice squad will arrive ten minutes before Mike sends his enforcers to collect from Augie. These button men are Black, so the resulting story will result in tabloid headlines--"White Kid Cacked by Dope and Niggers"--that will sell a lot of papers, made the police look like prime vice-busters and decency protectors, and get Mike even more muscle with the political heart of the city.

"Fucking Christ, Mike's got control. . . . Mike has got his finger up product," says the admiring Augie.

Roper is driven to his East Side apartment, with Mike's compliments. The police will keep some of the dope, Augie and his regulars get some of it, and they hide out in the Village for a while. Blow is so ordered also, for he is no longer an independent, unless he wants to try hiring himself out for blow jobs with his lips cut off. Ricky, who Mike wants to come "talk" to him anyway, is asleep on the toilet just like at the beginning of the play. So he will be picked up by the cops, and either included in the prosecution or turned over to Mike. Either way, no more Ricky. Some justice. Some business.