FROM DOWNTOWN TO DIRTY MAGS
My writing career really begins
My first NYC job was on Wall Street but don’t assume from that I was a financial whiz. I was no Wolf of Wall Street….more of a horny vixen. I was just beginning to recognize the risks and rewards of my sexuality. After a few years I left “the street” for the path of an artist, and scored a column in Adam, a skin mag. It was a defining moment in my life.
My column Veronica Vera’s New York appeared each month for a dozen marvelous years as I chronicled my sexual milieu and that of my vivid contemporaries. I had not walked away from Wall Street with a lot of money but I was rich in stories, my true treasures. For the topic of my very first column I chose the world I knew well, Wall Street. “Flashes of Wall Street” my wry take on that experience laid the ground work for going much deeper in my memoir chapter “Wall Street Assets.” I plan to show other connections between my early sex journalism and my 80s memoir project so an aspect of this new substack will be a kind of collaboration with myself. Here we go….
(Adam, 1983) FLASHES OF WALL STREET
Broad and Wall (ph. Robert Maxwell)
Any tour of Manhattan should begin at the beginning: Wall Street, the southern tip of the island, financial pulse of the nation and the place where our Founding Fathers used to whore around.
In the district known as “Downtown” Wall Street is just one of many paths carving their way through the canyons of skyscrapers and squat landmark buildings. For those of you who have never been there. I will describe Wall Street in very familiar language. Think of it as the center of a woman’s crotch.
On one end just around the area of the asshole are the, waters of the East River. Follow the route straight up and you will reach the black spirals of Trinity Church, resting place of Alexander Hamilton and other revolutionary immortals situated in the position of a big dark clit.
Scattered along the path like fleas in the pubic hair are the New York Stock Exchange, George Washington’s statue in front of the Federal Reserve building and such noble economic fortresses as Brown Brothers & Harriman, Bache & Company and the Seaman’s Bank for Savings.
My career as a glamour girl began on Wall Street, number 70 to be exact, in a building that recently escaped being swallowed by a parking lot. If any area in Manhattan could be called the source of its energy that place would be Downtown. Not so much because of all the wheeling and dealing that goes on there but because of the in· finite variety of strong personalities gathered in the tiny space.
There are some that I remember vividly.
Lucy N. grew up poor in Puerto Rico. She has come to Wall Street to work in a brokerage house because she is determined never to be poor again. After taking stock of her assets, she has given her pussy a AAA rating.
Lucy knows that she is smarter than her older sister Eva, who has returned to Puerto Rico and is having an affair with a priest. She is luckier than her older brother Carlos, who lives in Spanish Harlem with a gay lover. Carlos might have been rich had be been born with the right equipment.
The hardworking hairdresser that Lucy married keeps her in fine clothes with tight skirts. When she sits down to any meeting, Lucy crosses at the knee a pair of long legs wrapped in sheer nylon. She dangles open-toed leather stilettos like pieces of meat in the face of the sharks. Lucy has a real sharp, dirty mind and every time she opens her lush full mouth to speak the perfume of her cunt floats up through her throat.
When she gets into over-the counter stock trading, she keeps her ears open as wide as her legs and finds out about all of the under-the-counter ways to make money. She makes enough to dump the hardworking hairdresser who was not such a picnic to live with in the first place. But her dreams of becoming as rich as her idol Liz Taylor elude her. She really does love to fuck and her hot Latin blood eventually overcomes her ambition for the dollar.
On a trip back to visit her family in Rio Piedras, she is impregnated by the handsome man who owns the local deli. Her high-heeled pumps never return to the pavements of Wall Street, but she was always happier in bare feet and a bikini anyway.
There are many topless bars Downtown and these are frequented by men such as Preston R. Actually Preston’s favorite place is further uptown at the Melody Burlesque. Preston is a lawyer but there are thousands of Prestons: stockbrokers, accountants, insurance executives, bank officers. They love to look at a naked woman-to look at her but not to touch her. Preston often frequents the Mardi Gras at the Melody where the girls walk through the aisles and encourage the men in the audience to stick fingers in their pussies in exchange for a few bucks tip.
Preston never slides his fingers inside. He tells himself that it is because he does not want to catch a disease, but it is really because he is too shy and his desires make him feel deliciously guilty. Preston is 30 but he’ll still be going to places like the Melody when he’s 65. Alone and anonymous, safe from the glare of the corporate fish bowl he luxuriates in the urgently sweet pleasure of his unruly cock as it presses against the confines of his white jockey briefs.
“When the stocks go up, the cocks go up”-or so the saying goes. But there is never a time when the libidos are forgotten. At lunch time on a sunny day around the New York Stock Exchange you can almost see the saliva dripping onto the sidewalk from the hungry mouths of the reporters and order clerks in their respective cotton smocks.
They stuff their mouths with dirty-water franks and enjoy the feminine scenery before returning to the loud fast circus on the floor of the Exchange. Stocks are not the only items up for sale on the Exchange. Some of the men are much more interested in such colorful sidelines as drug-dealing, bookmaking, gambling and, of course, loan-sharking, to name just a few.
Near the steps of the old Federal Reserve building a crowd gathers around a man who wears a top hat and a baggy suit covered with cardboard signs that proclaim, “Jesus Saves.” In Wall Street rumor has it that Jesus also invests.
Traffic flows very slowly against the throngs of pedestrians who fill the streets from nine to five. The best way to travel is by limousine, prefer.ably one that is owned rather than rented. Only the cars move slow. The people move fast, propelled by wet dreams of money or power or something nice and simple like a hard cock sliding into a juicy pussy. As a group they generate enough energy to fuel every computer and telephone line in the district
The photos which accompany this article are my own little Valentine to the Financial District, and that of my friend and photographer, Robert Maxwell. We both got our start Downtown doing far different things from what we do now. But as I said at the start of this story, in New York City it’s the very best place to begin.
Vera my word does this bring back Memories.💋💅🥵