Bruce Benderson admired Rogers’s book; his User, published eleven years later, also has
a bitter contrast between those with the entrepreneurial savvy to attain the American Dream, and
those in the Black and Hispanic underclass who scrounge for tricks, drugs, and part time jobs as
bouncers and janitors in Times Square.  These, trapped in their “Land of the Doomed,” share the
need for “respect”–which means “being judged with contempt or fear.” This respect is based on
beauty, muscle hardness, the power of the fist or the size of the penis. Insolence and contempt
are great ego-boosts for the disaffected “hard man” but they are just what the boss ordered to
keep him from caring if the have-nots eat garbage and die.

                                              

Apollo is a gay hustler who has a white, New Age mom, a good education, but no training in
handling money, real estate, or the art of the deal. In fit of rage he sucker-punches Casio, a
bouncer at the porn theater where he and other hustlers take customers from auditorium to soiled
cubicle. In similar fit of temper, he has beaten up a white HIV-positive friend, temporarily
ruining what was a love match. Benderson takes us deeply into the psyche of these men.

Apollo is no longer capable of associating sex with love, so when he gets back together with his
friend, now very ill, the relationship has no physical contact (the lingo is “dead on each other”).
But Apollo becomes drug free, positive in outlook, and devoted to making life as easy as
possible for his lover. Now a clear-thinking and ambitious person, he gets a job as a bouncer at
the 42nd Street after hours cabaret run by the street-wise transvestite Tina. Apollo knows the
body language, threats, and scams on the customers from experience, for their culture is his. He
successfully transcends his roots to keep order, hoping to work his way up in the lucrative Times
Square sex-entertainment business. His role model is the chief entrepreneurial power on The
Deuce, Mrs. Huxtable, the long-time owner of the theater in which he and Casio both worked,
the former as hustler and the latter as bouncer. More of this later. Apollo does not realize his
goal. He needs the support of his AIDs stricken lover, who cannot sustain it, partly because of
self-involvement with his decaying body, partly because of jealousy, and possibly also because
of his psychic weakness: an inability to fully trust a man of mixed race who tries so hard to reject
his own cultural roots. In the end, Apollo and his lover have isolated themselves from each
other. The street life is so hard that Apollo chooses institutionalization in prison.

Casio fares a little better. His wife drops out of beautician’s school and becomes another user.
He was not to blame for her habit, but he was not capable of breaking her out of the spiral in
which he himself was imprisoned. She meets another man, who gives her self-worth and
confidence. While in prison for dealing, Casio gets a Dear John letter; his wife has had two
children by her new lover and is moving to Florida to practice her profession, having finished
school. Her last favor to him is to get him the lock of his dead mother’s hair he wanted. But she
will not take his son, Baby Pop, with her to Florida. Casio and Apollo live parallel ill-fated lives
as the most dispensable of  Times Square’s hustlers, except that Apollo can love and support his
partner, had he been allowed to.  Baby Pop, a prodigy in mathematics, sets out to revenge his
dad, but allows Apollo to compromise with him in a manner that lets him keep his honor. The
boy is too intelligent not to question how he really feels. He has no father to talk to. Casio is in
prison and his mother has moved to Florida. Baby Pop cares for himself by living in the
underground caverns of Penn Station until his hustling leads to HIV. At this point he is taken in
by Tina and the sympathetic transvestite community which she leads. Then he moves in with his
father to a SRO hotel.  Wheelchair-bound Casio thinks, “what more could a man ask for when he
had a roof and some food, no trouble from bitches, enough dope, and a son by his side?” He has
some vague notion of sending his son to college. Meanwhile, Baby Pop struggles to avoid
becoming another sad statistic in the mayor’s next bullshit campaign speech.

Mrs. Huxtable’s position as the controlling force of the sex business pyramid in which Casio and
Apollo are base peons had a real life model. Mrs. Chellie Wilson owned several theaters,
including the Cameo, on 8th Avenue between 44th and 46th Streets, known as the “Minnesota
Strip” because young men and women from out of town hustled there. The Cameo featured hard
core films in the early 70s, “that golden age of Times Square’s sleaze empire,” as Benderson
puts it. Prostitutes, some of them gay and transsexual, congregated in a bar next door, picked up
tricks in the audiences, and “did” them  in the theater’s restrooms. Wilson lived above her Eros
Theater, across the street from the Cameo. She had been in the film distribution business since
the 1920s, and was well known for her habit of lending money, finding jobs, bailing people out
of jail, and otherwise creating a smoothly running business and a set of allies and dependents.


Benderson understands the underworld (porn, call girl, gambling and drug entrepreneurs) and
upperworld (police, politicians, investment bankers) symbiosis. Mrs. Huxtable’s allies include
Detective Parego, whose parents ran an Irish bar and taught her how to understand the needs and
dreams of customers for drink, sex, easy money, protection from con men and cops, and self
respect. If Lady Luck and his sick lover had been kinder to him, Apollo might hav e fulfilled his
dream, which was to be of enough use to Mrs. Huxtable for her to teach him the business skills
of the Man. Neither he nor Casio blame the boss lady who lives upstairs for the squalor they are
stuck with. They can’t see far enough to notice that her uncanny awareness of when a worker has
used up his energy and sexiness has everything to do with why they are either in jail or
unemployed. Nor could they fathom the millions she will make when she finally allows the City
to purchase her properties, or when she opens an upscale gentleman’s club on the new, Disney-
fied Times Square.