BOOKS: INSIDE THE COMBAT ZONE

LIVE NUDES! DANCING! IN THE FLESH! 

New book chronicles the neighborhood where a dude once flicked a burning cigarette into my face

by Don Stradley

 

If someone were to pay tribute to Boston's old Combat Zone by sculpting certain key faces on a mountainside, the Mount Rushmore of our 1970s "adult playground" would have to include Princess Cheyenne (the thinking man's stripper who danced to the music of Genesis and Cat Stevens); Wilbur Mills, the US Senator whose career was ruined by his untamed affection for stripper Fanne Foxe; Andrew Poupolo, the Harvard football player who was stabbed to death one night after a game; and of course, William Douglas and Robin Benedict, the Tufts professor and the hooker whose skull he crushed. Of course, dozens of others would think they belonged, including every pizza shop owner, prostitute, corrupt cop, pimp, transvestite, and city planner, and anyone else who ever urinated on the sidewalk at 3:00 AM back when the Zone was Boston's throbbing night spot. Inside The Combat Zone, Stephanie Schorow's feisty new book, gets 'em all, some fleetingly, some in detail; if the city never creates a monument for the desperate, colorful characters who populated the Zone, Schorow's book will do.

For a place the Boston Globe once labelled a "Coney Island for the emotionally scarred...the place for the emotionally and sexually deformed," many remember it fondly. Why not? There were rock 'n roll bands, and mobsters, and kids working their way through college as bartenders and strippers. (For students looking for a summer job, the Zone must've seemed like a depraved summer camp.) Still, this stripped down story of Boston's most notorious neighborhood isn't exactly a glowing advertisement. Schorow gives plenty of attention to the eccentric, glitzy atmosphere, and where there are strippers and alcohol there are usually some laughs, but she doesn't ignore the violence and drug abuse and the occasional mysterious death. Schorow's style is brisk but informative; she trims the fat, and though there was some mighty interesting fat in the Zone that might've given her another five chapters, she was probably smart to keep the book lean at 150 or so pages. Her writing, perhaps honed by her years with the Herald and The Associated Press, is tight as a rim shot behind a burlesque dancer.

The recurring theme is that the Zone was fine until you started thinking you could handle it. The Combat Zone didn't set out to destroy people, but when certain folks thought they had things under  control, whether they were smart-ass hookers or Ivy League stars who thought they were untouchable, the Zone had a way of swallowing them up and spitting them out. Then again, little old ladies who worked at nearby department stores often wandered into the Zone for a slice of pizza, unscathed, unbothered, for years. Inflatable love dolls staring out from porn shop windows didn't phase them a bit.(Where do the old ladies go now that the Zone has been replaced by sushi restaurants and high rise apartment complexes?)

Schorow has written many books about Boston history, and Inside The Combat Zone offers enough  interesting background to satisfy the most curious Boston buff. She describes the vanishing of old Scollay Square, where sailors on leave during WW2 liked to stop in for a drink and a brawl; how urban renewal caused changes in the city, and how the always changing pornography laws kept the x-rated movie houses hopping to stay ahead of the game. Other authors might've placed more focus on the Zone's unsavory side, or been more graphic about the murders and dead hookers, and I might've liked to know how AIDS and crack affected the Zone, but Schorow does things her way and keeps the nasty stuff on the fringes. She's at her best writing about the strippers, those strange creatures of fantasy who were, in actuality, just young creative women trying to make a living. And some, indeed, lived fabulously for a while. As one dancer recalls, "Looking back is like watching a movie, so many lives ago." The only thing Schorow didn't quite get was the actual smell of the Zone, that  pungent mix of disinfectant, marijuana smoke, open garbage dumpsters baking in the sun, and buckets of soapy water thrown on the walls of alleys to erase whatever god-awful shit had gone on the night before. There was also the unique scent of dirty bookstores, all rubber and plastic, where magazines were packaged in a kind of thick, odious shrink-wrap; when you walked out you feared the tell-tale scent of porn had gotten onto your clothes and could never be washed out.