Shark Freak

I sat in the crumbling Times Square theater and prayed I would live to see the credits roll.

This was in 1975. I was an 18-year-old freshman at Hunter College, and a fellow student in my theater class had suggested we take in an afternoon screening of Steven Spielberg’s shark-infested epic Jaws before attending a play that evening.

Jaws, described as the first official summer blockbuster, was frightening as hell, but the most terrifying thing in the theater that day wasn’t the rampaging shark onscreen, but the lunatics in the audience.

You must remember that this was New York of the Seventies, when the Crossroads of the World looked a lot more like the Highway to Hell. There were no Disney stores in Time Square back then, just prostitutes, pimps, drug dealers and three card monte hustlers.

I was just in Times Square last night, taking in a production of Athol Fugard’s Boesman and Lena with my sister, and, except for nonstop noise and lights, the place we walked through on Saturday bore absolutely no resemblance to that dismal place from 40 years ago.

In fact, it was my sister who reminded me of that evening with Bruce the Shark, when I followed my classmate into this dumpy theater somewhere around Eighth Avenue and sat among some of Times Square’s most demented denizens.

I recall the freaks around me laughing at the parts of the film that would frighten normal people--although a shot of a corpseless head suddenly appearing on the screen prompted some serious shrieking amongst the clientele.

But the pinnacle of this debacle was a scene late in the film when the three shark hunters start comparing their various scars.

This was too much for the man sitting right next to me, who stood up, pulled open his shirt and pointing to some scary-looking scar tissue on his chest.

‘Show and Hell’

“Hey, everybody,” he said, pointing to his damaged hide. “Look at this!”

He was promptly greeted with a chorus of jeers and an earnest request to sit down and shut the fuck up.

I had been queasy about my fellow patrons from the moment I walked into this dungeon, but this display had my jaws clenched in terror. It took every ounce of my strength to remain in my seat and not go running up the aisle and racing back to Brooklyn.

Somehow, we managed to see the end of the movie without getting scars of our own.

As soon as the shark was blasted into oblivion, my companion and I headed straight for the exits and went out into the relative safety of the street.

I honestly forget what play we went to see that night, seeing as how the Jaws experience was rather hard to top.

But I am amazed at my youthful stamina as I had enough energy to take in a both a movie and a Broadway show on the same day. Today I can barely make it through a show without nodding off.

Times Square has since gone through a massive overhaul and eventually turned into a place that’s now fit for families. There are those who speaking nostalgically of the bad old days, but I can’t get join that deluded chorus.

Chain stores and rampant commerce can be irritating, but I never want Times Square to return to its Sodom and Gomorrah phase.

But I find myself thinking about that damaged fellow sitting next to me. I wonder how he got his scars. I wonder whatever became of him.

And I wonder what the hell I was doing sitting next to a freak like that in the first place.