Melissa Leo: Academy Award Nominee, Teen Hooker of Times Square

As a congenital movie freak and budding homosexual in the 1970s (whose gayness-qua-gayness was undone by a relentless preoccupation with naked females and how to apply my naked self to them), the Academy Awards dwarfed Christmas and even Halloween in terms of an annual respite from an otherwise gruesome childhood.

Movies, in their power to transfix and transport, represented the only evidence of God to little Catholic me, and the Academy Awards were their Holy Feast Night.

Moms McBeardo launched that feast concept into another dimension when I was ten, baking a meat loaf in the shape of an Oscar trophy, covering it with cheese (for the gold plating) and placing a carrot in his hands (for the sword). The tradition has lived on, unbroken (even during that year I went vegetarian), and my recent knuckle tattoos of the letters MEAT and LOAF are as much a tribute to that affectionate delicacy as they are to “Hot Patootie”, Bat Out of Hell, and “His name was Robert Paulsen.”

Despite the juicy vittles, my interest in the Oscars has largely waned through the decades, due mostly to the all-encompassing conquest of Show Business over Life Business.

It’s one thing to talk about what a monumental undertaking it was to dig up photographs of nude boobs 25 years ago to today’s all-free-hardcore-porn, all-the-time youth.

But even many of my film-nut contemporaries forget that, prior to the preeminence of cable TV (let alone the Internet), seeing mere Hollywood movie clips was a major score (I even maintain that clips were the real reason Siskel and Ebert initially took off – but the class acts of those two giants kept us coming back).

On the Academy Awards telecast, you’d get five amazingly long clips from the Best Picture nominees, showcasing stuff way beyond what a local TV critic would (or could) share. It’s not like I had any other way of witnessing The Deer Hunter’s Russian Roulette scene at the time (although there it was uncut on channel 9 just a couple of years later, on Election Night 1980. Remember that?).

Now our every experience is nothing but movie clips and movie news and movie star gossip and show-biz insider crap. I swear, just before he died, my 98-year-old grandfather had opinions on the weekend’s per-screen averages every Monday morning.

Ironically, in this setting, today’s movies suck and blow and blow and suck. It’s like the opposite punchline of the joke at the beginning of 1977’s Best Picture winner Annie Hall (which beat out – yes! – Star Wars), wherein two old Jewish ladies are complaining about lunch. One says, “Oy! The food here is so awful!” and the other replies, “And such small portions!”

Now we get lousy chow dumped on us nonstop in a round-the-clock, all-you-can-stomach buffet from which there is no escape.

Still, 2008 was surprisingly rife with aboveground movies that I really liked, from the Hollywood horrors of The Ruins and Quarantine (and Rambo) to obvious critical-hosanna grist on the order of The Wrestler, Rachel Getting Married, Frost/Nixon, and Gran Torino. And Teeth.

Don’t worry. I’m getting to tits and sleaze soon, papi.

Thus the recent announcement of Academy Award nominations piqued my interest way more than usual, and I found the final tally a satisfyingly offbeat mix.

Mo(i)st stintriguing, naturally, was Melissa Leo scoring a nom for Frozen River, a movie I only know about because it contains Melissa Leo.

Melissa is this year’s “Who?” contender, and I can tell you that she’s been an esteemed “actor’s actor” for decades, she has a kid with the grittily great John Heard, and she co-starred on Homicide: Life on the Street. I also just found out that, like me, Melissa Leo dropped out of SUNY Purchase.

These are the surface details. Melissa Leo, first and foremost, is the star of the teen sex tragedy, Streetwalkin’ (1985).

Teen sex tragedies ran as a parallel movie universe throughout the era of beloved teen sex comedies, ranging from TV movies-of-the-week on the order of Diary of a Teenage Hitchhiker (1979), Off the Minnesota Strip (1980), and Fallen Angel (1981) to Brooke Shields’ pyromaniac romance Endless Love (1981) and the Daryl Hannah-Aidan Quinn motorcycle weepie Reckless (1984).

In the realm of exploitation that’s at least up front about it, the teen sex tragedy field flowered most profitably with high-school hooker movies. Roger Corman’s 1984 classic Angel (“High school honor student by day, Hollywood hooker by night”) and its sequels are the most famous, and I love each installment in its own way, but my favorite has always been Streetwalkin’, due in no small part (and, in particular, two delicious parts) of its leading lust-bomb, Melissa Leo.

“She dropped out of high school this morning,” glares Streetwalkin’s poster tagline. “Tonight she's a Times Square hooker!”

The inspiration is obvious, and the stated locale automatically intrigued me. Like Angel, Streetwalkin’ is also a Roger Corman production, and like Slumber Party Massacre (1982), it was directed by a woman (Joan Freeman) previously known for fare seemingly in diametric opposition to teen-babe T&A sleaze.

The tag is also somewhat misleading. Although Melissa, as our heroine Cookie, gets chickenhawked at the Port Authority Bus Terminal (like I always wanted to be), and the opening credits play over a dazzling montage of Times Square sex salons, her actual work territory is the corner of 3rd Avenue and 14th Street. At that point, that was the scummiest junction in Manhattan south of Forty-Deuce.

To see Julie Newmar (who gets a special “and also starring” credit) strolling that vicinity as Queen Bee, hustling in red lingerie outside the legendary Variety Photoplays theater and skid-row dive bar The Dugout, is just one of Streetwalkin’s myriad pleasures – and it’s a doozy.

It’s touches like the statuesque former Catwoman peddling her (incredible) body on a legitimately dangerous public thoroughfare that elevate Streetwalkin’ to one-of-a-kind status.

Certainly, it’s not the plot: Once our redheaded innocent Cookie has been transformed into a flame-maned sex-for-cash strumpet by Duke the Killer White Pimp (Dale Midkiff), rivalries over who’s going to make money off her ignite an interracial human turf war. Among the colorfully-monikered combatants is Antonio Fargas as Finesse and Kirk Taylor as Spade.

The presence of Cookie’s kid brother Tim (Randall Batinkoff) in the midst of the maelstrom is another typical trope of teen hooker movies, but this one especially detonated all manner of envious fantasies in me.

Tim lives with his hot hooker sister, hangs out with her hot hooker friends in hot hooker bars, and does hot hooker stuff all night on the streets of hot hooker New York with no school in the morning and no parents harshing his freshly pubescent hard-on.

Xavier High School, the institution I was attending at the time of Streetwalkin’s filming and release, is located on 16th Street and Sixth Avenue.

On countless afternoons, I walked a few blocks east of the Union Square subway station just to soak up what was festering on 14th and 3rd.

How I dreamed of someday residing in just such a milieu: all-night horror and porn at the Variety, cheap beers at The Dugout and, everywhere, all the time, hookers and strippers and peep-show girls who knew me and loved me and were proud enough to call me friend that they’d fuck me for free.

It was around 1985 that I occasionally popped into the Variety for a double feature (spaced out by desperately quick trips to the terrifying men’s room when I had to piss), but I felt too ugly and unwelcome to drink at The Dugout, where chicks with punk-rock hair had started to trickle in, and I was scared of all of humanity, let alone females, let alone prostitutes (do note that pecking order).

In Streetwalkin’, Tim is right up in it. He’s got access that I never did and never could have. He was a kid I hoped really existed somewhere, and I hoped he appreciated everything he had … everything I didn’t.

At the pulsating center of Streetwalkin’, of course, is Cookie. Melissa Leo. She of the mountainous crimson tendrils (and eyebrows) and freckles and and high-slung breasts with rose-pink nips and a round, white rump showcased in garters.

She radiates utter believability in her despair at the violence and humiliation of illegal street life mixed in headily with giddiness over the freedom of living outside adolescent constrictions while overpowering grown men with the sheer fact of her being.

Plus, she is very, very hot. And, a few times, very, very topless

Streetwalkin’ is actually one of three 1985 gems in which Melissa lets her naked Leos roar. The other two are director Henry Jaglom’s autobiographical divorce meditation Always, and the rape drama Silent Witness (where her character is called Patti Mullen, and odd harbinger of real-life Penthouse Pet and naked Frankenhooker star Patty Mullen). What a year at the movies.

My own first real-life hooker experience didn't go down (pun, as always, intended) until the following spring. A more experienced pay-to-come buddy piloted me out to a side street in Coney Island, and we haggled the $15 blowjob down fee to two for $25. You could do that then.

A couple of winters later, I patronized Coney's Island Girls once or twice more, and then the stretch around the Brooklyn Army Terminal maybe two or three times after that.

In 1990, I and a female friend picked up an Israeli streetwalker named Rachleen outside a topless pit called the Corkscrew Cafe. Rachleen blew me while my gal-pal eyeballed behind us. Shortly thereafter, I started seriously dating her -- the young lady in the backseat, not Rachleen.

Dating however,was always what I fantasized about with hookers, spending hours combing over the back pages of the Village Voice as a kid, and the Erotic Services section of Craigslist ever since.

Despite everything one might reasonably deduce, I've actually had very little traditional prostitute contact. It comes down to trying to force my condom-shielded softie into a hooker's mush at the Gore Gazette publisher's bachelor party in 1992, taking a bar whore to the fleabag motel opposite the Screw magazine HQ in 1995, and then visiting my first and only Asian massage parlor in San Francisco about five years ago, on somebody else's dime (where the service-woman squealed: "Oooh! You are king-size!").

Somehow, the countless single dollar bills and years of existence I spent groping and being groped by Live Nude Girls at open-window peep shows seem like a different experience.

My dream was always to be The Hooker's Boyfriend, anyway. And that most assuredly does not mean that I would be on any Travis Bickle-style rescue mission.

On the contrary, I always just wanted to take care of my workload while she was out attending to your load and everybody else's. Other than that, we'd be just an ordinary couple.

Maybe this is a component of my fantasy as The Great Corrupter, in which I capture the Prom Queen and convert her into a Porn Star. One weird manifestation of that dark ambition occurred in 2001, when I got an email stating essentially: "Look what you did to me, Selwyn Harris!" It came from an old zine-world friend that I'd lost track of. She'd been a teenage girl when she came across my publication HAPPYLAND and she had, once her boobs finished growing, taken to working as an escort. In due time, I employed her as naked talent in music videos for my noise-psych combo, Gays in the Military.

A more complicated episode occurred with me being involved for a spell with a lovely, warm-hearted Chicago secretary and part-time dress designer who evolved, during and after the fact, into Alix Lakehurst (pictured here mid-mammaries between Ginger Lynn Allen and Christy Canyon).

Eventually, I did officially achieve The Hooker's Boyfriend status, however briefly and ingloriously.

A while back, a stunningly attractive, appealingly tough and outlandishly sexy 40-ish New Jersey transplant operating under the moniker Jinx caught a Gays in the Military performance and succumbed to my sex-criminal insane-o appeal (I mean, who could resist?).

And so we became a couple. And while I tapped the keys at my nudie-lady-worshiping day job, Jinx turned top-dollar tricks in a luxury townhouse on Chicago's Gold Coast.

I liked the idea of this set-up: her out swallowing cocks and getting dicked all day by suckers lining up to pay for her body, followed by her then coming home to serve herself to me not just for free, but out of her sheer awe over my all-encompassing mightiness.

Alas, it turned out that Jinx really hated the reality of that set-up.

But we both became driven to somehow mutually seduce a local escort named Charlotte Sweetheart.

This was the koo-koo glue that held our toweringly healthy romance together: concocting scenarios as to how we'd meet this college-aged, arty, tattooed professional company-provider by artificial happenstance (like staking out her workspace and then hanging around the nearest Starbuck's).

Jinx would then, theoretically, strike up a chat with Miss Sweetheart, reveal what she did for a living and they'd bond, in loving sisterly fashion -- only, you know, they'd be sisters who'd fuck each other and, most importantly, me. At the same time. Forever. In loving tri-connubial bliss.

Between screaming fights and decidedly un-groovy hate-fucks, talk like this is how Jinx and I comforted one another.

It didn't last (and, needless to say, Charlotte Sweetheart never actually came into the picture).

At present, I date an age-appropriate woman who keeps her private areas covered in public and creates baby-clothing for a living.

This is a good life, and not just because it allows me to revisit a talisman as torridly tantalizing as Streetwalkin' from a mentally hygenic distance. But that, for sure, is one benefit.

Okay. Back to 1985.

Awash in players’ bars, anonymous nudes popping out of taxis, synthesizer soundtrack swarms, and bass-poppin’ disco theme song (performed by Sylvia St. James!), Streetwalkin’ provides a reminder that the true grindhouse era extended deeper into the ’80s than is popularly thought. And also that a singularly brilliant exploitation burst emanated from New York mid-decade. Consider also Vigilante, Tenement, Riot on 42nd Street, and the entire Chuck Vincent canon.

And do consider Streetwalkin’ when we salute Melissa Leo at the Kodak Theatre on February 22, 2009. Then go polish your own trophy.