Lee Conjures a Ghost

Episode Transcript

note: this is not a final transcript. This is the editing script as we work on the official episode transcription.

Preface

[environmental street noise from the Kraine’s stoop, continues beneath VO]

LEE, VO: For most of our history, the home of the New York Neo-Futurists has been 85 East 4th Street, which is just west of 2nd Avenue, in Manhattan’s East Village.

From the stoop of 85 East 4th Street, you can see a maze of fire escapes, yellow cabs zooming down 2nd Ave, the neon sign that reads “KGB BAR,” the Ukrainian flag, there’s the folks swarming the comedy club downstairs or dragging instruments to the jazz club upstairs. There’s also the husk of a beloved dive bar, shuttered and reopened as a French bistro that will sell you $35 roti.

And wedged between that glossy new bistro and a rat-infested dumpster is a door. That’s where we’re headed.

My queer ancestors made history behind that door, and I wanna talk to ‘em.

History: The Bijou

If you were to step through the unmarked door at 82 East 4th Street (which… you can’t—more on that later), you’d see a long flight of stairs taking you below the East Village to a subterranean storefront.

Now why would anyone open a business in a place that hard to find? Well… if what you’re selling requires secrecy.

[90s “porny” music plays, as heard through a wall]

In fact, it was the perfect home for the Bijou, the last tenant of 82 East 4th.

The Bijou Cinema, which operated from the early 1990s until 2019, had no signage. It never advertised. It thrived on word-of-mouth alone. And the key to the Bijou’s success wasn’t its popcorn. It was the blowjobs.

“You go down a carpeted staircase to a ticket booth — there are posters for classic movies on the wall — I was fairly drunk so specifics are hazy — The clerk was pretty surly, like he knew what happened behind the double doors and did NOT approve.”

What happened behind the Bijou’s double doors was anonymous sex between men. The Bijou opened as a porn theatre and somehow kept kicking despite threats to its business model from high-speed internet and Mayor Giuliani’s war on the city’s sex industry.

“It's so dark that you have to let your eyes adjust, and the only lights you can go by are the red Exit signs and the glow from the movie screen. There’s 30 or so theater seats, and then a hallway on either side. There was one hallway of private booths where men were having sex, and they'd usually make eye contact as a way of inviting you in.”

This, by the way, is my voice pitch-shifted, but I’m reading the words of some anonymous former Bijou patrons. Listen I may be a gossip but I know how to be discreet.

“It’s the dingiest basement you've ever seen. The smell was musty, punctuated with the scent of bleach. I don't know if or when they ever turn on fluorescent lights, but I don't want to be anywhere near there when they do.”

There was also, apparently, a bar—although I can’t find any reports of people being served alcohol inside the Bijou. In fact, a friend confirmed:

“There's nothing behind the counter. Empty shelves. Both times I went there was a theater employee wearing a white shirt and a red vest endlessly wiping down the countertop, even though no one had been there. I thought it must have been a hallucination.”

[underscoring winds down]

I love collecting these sleazy little stories. But the Bijou era wasn’t that long ago, and I don’t need ghosthunting apparatus to talk to its patrons. If I wanna get to the ghosts, I gotta turn to 82 East 4th Street’s glory years: the 1950s and 60s, when it was Club 82. 

History: Club 82

[Few seconds of “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” continues under VO]

Descend that staircase with me again, but this time, it’s 1953, close to midnight. Instead of movie theatre seats, there are palm fronds, white tablecloths, tuxedoed waiters delivering bottle service. The place looks like the inside of a disco ball. There’s an audience of affluent white patrons, some of them celebrities, sipping cocktails.

And where the Bijou’s movie screen would later be is a stage, and on that stage, delighting the audience, is one of the glitziest and most popular drag shows in town.

[Few seconds of “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”]

The woman who greeted you when you came in, that’s the owner, Anna Genovese. Anna was a nightlife impresario. She had a real “don’t fuck with me” face; thin dark heavily plucked eyebrows; severe makeup; big jewelry. She was also mob royalty. She married into the crime family that first brought the mafia from Italy to America. This family ran most of Lower Manhattan’s nightlife (including Stonewall, and the building that would become the Neo-Futurists’ home).

But by the time Anna opened Club 82, she’d left her terrible mob boss husband and was doing her own thing—selling liquor and drag to straight people.

[Clip of “Give It Away” that includes the lyrics “I’ve got the stuff that’ll make these old daddies pay”]

Club 82 shows had cheeky names like “Sincapades,” a huge cast, dazzling costumes, and ran three times a night: 10:30pm, 12:30am, and 2:30am. (Which, as a performer who also does a 10:30pm show right across the street, sounds exhausting.)

Now, the American mafia has a long history of exploiting the gays. Anna, however, was family.

Club 82’s entertainers were mostly drag queens (or “female impersonators”), who seemed to respect Anna. She was known to say shit like, “Hey, if you miss another cue, I’ll run over your legs!” and they would all laugh. Y’know, mob humor.

Offstage, the waitstaff were what we might call drag kings. These servers lived as women during the day and at night put on a tuxedo, slicked back their hair, and adopted names like Jerry, Frankie, Robbie, Louie, Marty, and Vic. There was Tommy the bouncer and Butch the bartender.

There was also Duke, aka Jackie, a handsome king with a strong jaw and big smile. Free from her abusive husband, Anna and Jackie started dating. She even bought Jackie a Cadillac. As far as we know, their relationship was the longest and most loving of Anna’s life.

[maybe “Living the Life I Love” underscores the following?]

Club 82 was not FOR queer people. Its priority was the comfort and entertainment of straights. “Otherness” (specifically sexual or racial otherness) was permitted only if it could be safely defanged, sexualized, and sold.

And yet, the club provided an excuse for queer people to gather, and provided an opportunity to earn a living. And for its gender non-conforming workers, it provided a protected place and time to drop the drag they wore in everyday life and present as themselves, conceive of themselves, and survive an era that offered so few pathways for survival.

[“I’m more of a man…” bit]

[then “Living the Life I Love”]

It is so, so difficult to imagine your transness into existence in isolation. Being witnessed and witnessing others was critical to my transition and many others. (In fact, a lot of that witnessing happened for me on East 4th Street, on stage with the Neo-Futurists.)

I don’t know if any of Club 82’s servers would’ve claimed a transmasculine identity, had that concept been available to them at the time. And speculating on the gender identity of historical figures can be problematic and counterproductive. But I think about Tommy the bouncer or Butch the bartender or Duke showing up for their first shift, putting on the tuxedo, slicking back their hair, and looking in the mirror for the first time, and suddenly seeing what’s possible.

Which brings me to another reason for my fascination with this particular address.

History: Glenn Haberstroh

[environmental sound]
Lee: Can you tell me what it says?

Tobi: It says…

Lee: This is Tobi, one of my partners.

Lee: Where did you and your mom find this program?

Tobi: We found it in my grandfather’s belongings…

Lee: Tobi remembers his Grandpa Glenn as an introverted electrical engineer with a dry sense of humor, in a quietly unhappy marriage to Tobi’s grandmother. Then, one day, Tobi’s mom is renovating her late parents’ house.

[Tobi describes the house]

Hidden in the ceiling was the surprise of a lifetime.

[Tobi describes the collection]

They also found a bottle of estrogen tablets, which were and still are one of the most common forms of hormone replacement therapy for trans women. Now, as I’ve said, making inferences about the gender identities of people who’ve passed away is thorny territory. With that in mind…

[Tobi: I’m going to keep using “he”...]

I asked Tobi, how do you think that program for Club 82 ended up in Glenn’s belongings?

[Tobi: I hope…]

Club 82 eventually closed its doors. Folks from the music industry reinvented the place as a rock venue in the 70s and 80s. Then, the door was locked for good in 2019.

Right now, it’s August of 2023. It feels like I just barely missed the chance to visit that basement, heavy with history, and enjoy a voyeuristic night at the Bijou or stand where Butch tended bar or backstage where the queens and kings transformed or where Glenn may have sat and watched it all. The closest I can get is the sidewalk up above.

Luckily, that’s close enough.

Ghost Hunt Preparation

[Lee: It’s here… my ghost hunting equipment…]

This is the part where I confess that I am a skeptic. I don’t have a strong belief in an afterlife, or ghosts, or spiritual forces of any kind. And neither do my ghosthunting companions, Tobi and his boyfriend, my other partner, Zo.

[Me: Do you believe in ghosts?

Tobi: Honestly no. But I think it’s fun to try to talk to them.]

So our team is 0 for 3 on True Believers. And yet, I find myself wanting this to work. And if I want this to work, I need to do it right. I need to talk to an expert.

[Dash: I’m Dash Kwiatkowski…]

This is my friend Dash. They’ve traveled all over the country investigating ghosts, cryptids, and other paranormal activity. Their background is in comedy; they now host a psychic advice podcast called Psychic Friends; and they introduced me to the method I’ll be using for my ghost mission: the Estes experiment.

[Dash: So, there’s a device called a Spirit Box, and what a Spirit Box does is it clicks through radio frequencies.

[Radio scanning underscores parts of Dash’s explanation]

Dash: Some people will tell you…

That Sony Walkman you heard earlier, the one I got off eBay? That’s our Spirit Box. You can get fancy Spirit Boxes for a hundred bucks, ones that are custom built for paranormal communication, but I’ve chosen the $20 option and have been assured it’ll work just fine.

So Spirit Box, check. Noise canceling headphones, check. Blindfold, check. I asked Dash if there was anything else I should be sure to bring with me. They recommended: a crystal or charm of some kind.

[Dash: So amethyst is a very important stone…]

We’ve got our equipment. We’ve got our destination. Let’s do this.

Ghost Hunt Field Trip

We arrive at 82 East 4th Street on a balmy Sunday evening.

[Lee: Do we all have our charm?...]

Tobi’s up first. He puts on the blindfold and headphones, which are plugged into the spirit box. Any words he hears break through the radio static, he’ll repeat out loud for us to hear. He can’t hear the questions being asked.

[Lee: Who are we talking to?...]

We keep listening, trading off who’s plugged into the Spirit Box, and we keep having these moments that feel like supernatural conversation. But each time, the exchange dissolves into long silences or word salad.

It’s getting late. Whoever’s been talking to us has stopped making sense, or lost interest. We decide to pack it in.

[Tobi: We kept you in there a long time…]

Conclusion

Later that night, back home, I scrubbed through our audio, and I cross-reference words that came through the Spirit Box with all the records I can find of people and events at 82 East 4th Street. I did the same thing the next day, and the next, and tonight. I’ve spent too long, longer than this podcast episode requires of me, digging for meaning, hoping for some sort of paranormal Rosetta Stone. I even caught myself looking for signs of haunting: flickering lights and apparitions and stuff. Nothing. Whoever we made conversation with has remained a mystery.

Usually, when you try to conjure a ghost, you don’t want it to linger after the conjuring. You don’t want the haunting to stick to you.

But I WANT to connect to my origins, and talk to my ancestors. 

Did we have a fleeting moment with the ghost of some closeted commuter from Long Island, or with Quentin Crisp, or some nightlife legend who wouldn’t tell us their name? 

[“Living the Life I Love” comes in underneath this?]

Answering this, as it turns out, is an impossible task.

But. I’m not quite ready to count this task a failure. Not yet. Not if you do me a favor.

Next time you visit the East Village, take a detour down East 4th Street, and say hello to number 82. Let them know the land of the living is listening. Maybe you’ll be the one to conjure the ghost. And if you do, well, make sure you give me ALL the gossip.

[a few beats of “Living the Life I Love”?]