The Bad Flasher

Photograph by Roswell Angier: Sonny, Washington Street., 1974

I sometimes wish I had been born ten or fifteen years earlier than I was. When I wish this, I attach a mental asterisk which directs me to a footnote:

*Everything else about my life would remain the same; only my date of birth would change.

This wish of mine allows me to fantasize about a years-long opportunity to explore and participate in the society that inhabited Boston’s red light district, The Combat Zone. But I was born in the sixties, and so only experienced The Combat Zone during its final years of meaningful existence. It was a semen, saliva and sweat stained social cesspool for those in need of, with a desire for, or a curiosity about, sexual expression more sick than sensual. When I discovered it, The Combat Zone was dying, so consider myself lucky, and privileged, that for a short time, I was able to live in one of America’s most infamous open-air public theaters of sex, drugs and crime. The hours I’d spend at night in Boston’s Combat Zone were some of the most exhilarating hours I’ve ever lived.

Photograph by John Goodman: Man Peep Show, Oct. 13,1978

Photograph by John Goodman: Movies,1978

Boston in the late 1970′s and early ’80’s was not the same city it is today, even though today I have no idea what Boston is like, because I haven’t been there in years. But based on my last visit there, it was ten fold more commercial, gentrified and shiny than when I lived there, so I imagine now, in 2010, it’s either at least in a holding pattern or has become even more of whatever it aspired to be when I was last there. But when I lived there, it wasn’t a very vital nocturnal place.

But to someone like me, willing to explore the city at night for hours at a time and in virtually any weather, there was a lot of interesting activity to be discovered. It just took patience, and a willingness to accept whatever was found as worth observing.  To find the “interesting” also required a willingness to accept than on many nights, I wouldn’t find anything of interest at all. But I came to accept this too as worthy of my study and contemplation, because even in nothing, there is something.

Photograph by Jerry Berndt: The Combat Zone, Washington St., Boston 1968

I didn’t walk then, as I do now. I rode a bike. I had a bike, so I rode it. I wasn’t stalking then, I was exploring. I didn’t know then what I’d become later, so didn’t know the difference then between walking and riding while stalking. Walking is better for stalking. But back then, riding my bike through Boston’s flat, empty streets at night was pure exhilaration through exploration. I rode everywhere. I especially enjoyed spotting minor crime scenes; watching cops detain and question transients, prostitutes and drug users.

The Combat Zone and Bay Village are on right margin; click to enlarge.

I lived on Beacon Street in Boston’s Back Bay neighborhood. Beacon Street was a long, one-way and sometimes two-way avenue that ran from the heart of Boston’s historic downtown all the way out of the city proper past Fenway Park and into Boston’s outlying boroughs of Brighton, Brookline and Newton. Beacon Street was also the northern most street on the Back Bay’s grid street pattern. I’d exit the rear service door of my apartment building with my bike onto Back Street. Back Street is a one way access road providing access to small, unpaved lots and parking slots behind Beacon Street’s apartment houses, and to public alleys which lead back across Beacon Street and into the grid of Back Bay streets. On the other side of Back Street was Storrow Drive, a two-lane, high-speed roadway similar to Manhattan’s FDR Drive on its East Side or its West Side Highway on its left coast. On the other side of Storrow Drive stretched the Esplanade park, and lapping at its banks, the Charles River, with Cambridge on its opposite bank.

Back Bay at Night. The Charles River in background, The Combat Zone to your right and out of frame.

I’d turn right on Back Street, mount my bike, and ride in the direction of downtown, towards Chinatown,  The Boston Garden, the Theater District and the Public Gardens park and The Combat Zone. Sometimes I’d smoke a joint while riding.

The densely populated downtown areas of Boston were always busy with cars, cabs, buses and pedestrians in the daytime, but these areas were less congested at night, and while they still pulsed with visible, tangible human activity, it was easier to ride a bike stoned than it would have been in the daytime. I rode without a helmet while smoking a cigarette after my joint, and always rode offensively, as a good Boston driver should. I just happened to be driving a bicycle. It was better than driving a car because I didn’t have to adhere to traffic laws. This allowed me to move where, when and how I wished. I could cover more ground, faster, on a bike than in a car. This is why I used The Combat Zone’s pilot fish neighborhood of filthy human behavior, Bay Village, as a partner in foreplay, before I’d venture into the Zone.

Bay Village is a jewel box neighborhood tucked snuggly above the Massachusetts Turnpike. It’s pinned against Boston’s South End neighborhood on one side, and Boston’s Theater District on the other. Its streets are narrow, as are its brick apartment buildings and houses. Prostitutes – street walking hookers – were always circulating in, and on the perimeter of Bay Village, lapping Tremont and Washington Streets on the outermost edges of The Combat Zone. The little neighborhood named as a village was sometimes referred to as “gay village,” in part because of its proximity to the South End neighborhood across the highway and its vital homosexual population, and also because of the transgender hookers who made Jacques, the Bay Village drag bar institution, their nightly headquarters.

Many of the girl-like humans who frequented Jacques and who worked as hookers would dot the Bay Village streets after midnight, cruising for sexually confused – or not – horny men. The girl-like humans would call out suggestively in awkward whispers to passing cars from the shadows with their ugly, half-female hormone warped voices. In their cheap shoes, synthetic wigs and poorly applied make-up, and taped and bound with Lycra and spandex from toes to torso, the Bay Village hookers were repulsively appealing to me sexually. I had never experienced transgenderism up close before, and to me, it was as though I had discovered a new species.

Photograph by John Goodman: Tremont Street #4, 1978

It was the same for me in The Combat Zone,whose fringe tickled me in Bay Village from just a few steps away across the street. The Combat Zone wasn’t Times Square, but it was to Bay Village. Bay Village excited me, but The Combat Zone got me so excited I actually did things while visiting.

Photograph by John Goodman: Shine, La Grange St., 1975

To be Continued…

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