Paul Morrissey | Forty Deuce / 1982

the boy in the bed

by Douglas Messerli

Alan Bowne (screenplay, based on his stage play), Paul Morrissey (director) Forty Deuce / 1982

 

Forty Deuce is the Paul Morrissey film that every talks about but very few have ever seen. The film was never released as a DVD, and hardly had a movie theater release in the United States, although it was screened at the 1982 Cannes Film Festival in Un Certain Regard. Certainly Americans gave it little regard, with their intense distaste and disapproval whether or not they’d actually seen it. The only version I could find was probably a DVD retape a French VHS tape with subtitles in that language. The only other DVD representation of it that I know about is a short series of snippets from it featured in a series of trailers described as “Weird Movies.”

       Add to these facts that it stars, among others, Kevin Bacon, playing the role of the drugged-out gay street punk Ricky at the age of 24, in only his second film role (for which he had won an Obie in the stage version in same year); the reputable Orson Bean, playing an older closeted gay business man, Mr. Roper, who’s into sadistically torturing young boys; a 12-year old lying on the bed, brought there by Blow (Mark Keyloun); and Augie (Harris Laskawy), Ricky’s older brother who is the head of a small gay prostitute ring that also includes Crank (Tommy Ciera) and Mitchell (Esai Morales)—all of whom discover early in the movie that their new child recruit has died, probably of the drugs supplied the previous night by Blow which also made Ricky and the others sick.

     Shocked by their discovery, Ricky and Blow convince Augie, who’s mistakenly left the room in their hands for the night, that they go ahead with the meeting with Roper, get him high on “dust (PCP),” and then blame him for the kid’s death, forcing him to hand over cash from a local ATM. They also have an appointment with a volatile black couple from Harlem for a purchase of heavy drugs and who knows what else, which is why they need Roper’s money.

   Blow, moreover, who used to work for Augie has tried to go solo, but in “borrowing” the old room, has certainly brought down Augie’s wrath. And all of them are even more nervous about what the real boss, Mike will do if he finds out about all their bad deeds, and who seems to know everything. Mike may be Augie’s imaginary name for any being in control of things or actually his “protection,” but we never find out.

      Accordingly throughout the entire film, a dead boy, who has just arrived in New York excited, Blow claims, to become a male prostitute and enjoy queer sex, lies dead in a bed while around him these players let loose a volley of machine-gun-fast obscene, racist language that even David Mamet couldn’t have dreamed of and would make an ex-navy trucker blush. Based on the play by Alan Bowne, this is a piece whose language for many if not most Americans is quite incomprehensible.

      A couple of short passages will have to represent the entire hour and a half of Morrisey’s movie. The first is when Augie first discovers the 12-year-old boy in the bed, still alive, representing the first lines of the film:

 

(Unlocking the door, he enters the room, sees the boy in the bed, picks up the blanket and drops it).....

Shit. Fuckin’ shit! Fuckin’ bozzo, fuckin’ bozzo queen. (He storms out of the room.) (Pausing to look back in) Fuckin’ shit! .....(continues to swear as he returns to the street. To Crank, one of his boys) Dumb shit, who’s that fuckin’ twerp up the fuckin’ stairs?

     Blow bring him in and Micky let him stay, I dunno.

     I take off one fuckin’ night and Ricky and Blow married again? Fuckin’ Jesus.

     He looked kind of sick today, Augie. That was some bad dope that Blow bring us.

     That fuckin’ Blow. He drops a 12-year-old up my room. He deals shit out of my room. He’s running my fuckin’ operation right? And you and Ricky say, yeah, go ahead, sure, go ahead Blow. Piss all over Augie’s room where is that big shit?

     Over at his business. I dunno.   

     Business. Whatever his fuckin’ business is I don’t fuckin’ like it. Where’s the fuckin’ greaseball?

     Ricky’s Port Authority.

     Port fuckin’ Authority. You go up (pointing back to the stairs) to that fuckin’ room and stay with that fuckin’ twerp. I don’t trust twerp alone in my facilities. (slapping the boy’s face) You understand?

     I understand (goes off. Runs up a couple steps, turns around and exits back into the street.)

     (Augie heads off toward the Port Authority. To himself as he walks) Fuck. Shit. Guinea bastard. I swear....Guy will never know if he had any balls I’ll squeeze them off like a fuckin’ grapefruit....

 

     On his way to the Port Authority, he runs into another his boys, Mitchell, talking to an older man in the street near the Biltmore Theatre.

      You see Ricky, bozzo fuck, bozzo queen?

      Augie, please I’m doing business.

      Last night I leave Ricky in charge. Today I got a 12-year-old twerp up my room, Blow dealing shit of my room. Where’s my commission?’

      Look, forget about Blow’s dope. Last Night we party off of Blow’s dope.

      You shoot it, you shoot my commission?

      She wasn’t no dope, she was Draino. We all get sick. Especially that little number from Blow.

      He wants my commission. He’s a three-year-old up in my fuckin’ facilities.

      Augie, don’t worry. Money. He’s got money.

      Those new ones he fuckin’ up there?

      Those Rabbis, oh Jesus. Plus I telephone him from the Haymarket, but that’s mime.

      You use my room?

      Sure I use your room. I give Ricky a cut to use your room.

      When you’re dealing with tricks you deal with me.

      And where was you?  

      None of your asshole. You don’t deal with me you go fuck off. You wanna use the facilities you don’t deal with nobody but me. I’ll freak your fuckin’ arm (grabs him) if you don’t come up with Ricky. Crank says he’s over at the fuckin’ Port Authority?

      That’s where I left him. Asleep in the bathroom.

      Asleep in the bathroom?

      Right when he’s doing this trick, he falls out on the toilet.

      Asleep on the toilet?

      What fuckin’ toilet?

      In the little one. For the Jersey commuters. He likes that one. That’s his headquarters.

 

      So in the first 8 minutes (which I’ve tried to record to the best of my listening abilities, with surely lines and words misheard and missed) the film has established the major figures, except for Blow and Ricky, both of whom we soon after meet, discovering them to be sort of mirror images of one another, Blow being perhaps a younger version of the now washed-up and drugged-out Ricky, who’s now so strung out and lost that it’s hard for him to have any true feelings. Blow is trying to make it on his own, which clearly Ricky has tried and failed many times to do. Ricky has become bitter, taking his anger out on anything and anyone, as his long diatribe, early in the film, against the Greeks who are taking over all the bodegas reveals.

      But all eventually are forced to return to the lowest rung, Augie, who keeps them busy with $20 tricks, $15, two for $30 when it comes to the orthodox Jews he sends them. These are young men so devoid of imagination that the best idea they can come up is the find a richer customer or score a better drug deal. As Blow says, “I sell dick, I sell dope.”

       So too do the boys of 42nd calling out moment to moment to anyone who passes: “Speed, crack, cock.”

       But Blow is determined to find something, anything better, and it’s clear the boy was part of that plan, and perhaps he also somehow fell for him. They seem to him as something special, even Ricky who instead of taking advantage of the kid, saves him for Roper.

      Blow, however, is the only one who appears to still care for the 12-year-old, who he discovers upon the group’s meeting up in “the room” that he is now dead. And he continues to care for him, demanding even after they’ve hooked up Roper with the corpse, to not hurt him, knowing from his own experiences how Roper likes to hurt the boys before making love to them.

   But as expected everything goes wrong. Roper gets so high that he cannot even properly communicate, let alone crawl into bed with the kid. For this last scene Morrissey has created an oddly split screen, clearly demonstrating the two losers, Ricky and Blow’s inability to create a full view of the world in which they live. Each try to trick and tempt Roper into bed with the dead boy, and when he finally does slip into bed beside the boy he immediately falls to sleep.

     Discovering that he doesn’t even have much money his wallet, they threaten him so they might carry him off to an ATM to collect the money, as he crawls under the bed as in a farce, refusing to even come out.

      Meanwhile, they are expecting the Harlem couple who if they don’t get their money will surely, as they promised, cut both their throats. Even Crank and Mitchell enter the scene trying to figure out what’s happening.

      Only when Augie shows up is the situation resolved. Mike, he tells them, has arranged for the police to make a crack-down on the place soon after the drug dealers show up, arresting them not only for the drugs for the death of the kid. Augie coaches the terrified Roper out from under the bed and sends him on the way. The other boys are temporarily forced to return to the streets, to get lost, better back in Haymarket, presumably the name for the Village territory where there is little interest for male prostitutes, that section of town being already filled with gays and lesbians. It’s the tourists and up-towners who haunt Times Square, the ones who can’t get boys find boys in any other manner.

       Crank and Mitchell sadly go off to where they began. And even Blow is ready to admit what he sees as a temporary setback. But when he checks on Ricky, who has retreated to the bathroom after it has become apparent their plan is doomed, he reports that there’s no longer any need to worry about him.

     Presumably Ricky has now overdosed on the “Draino,” and is dead. They leave the 12-year-old and Ricky together for the police to deal with. Human beings in this dark world—darker that even than Wiktor Grodecki’s trilogy of films on boy prostitution in the Czech Republic in the late 1990s—are dispensable, all for the sake of twenty-dollar tricks. You make enough you can get cottage on Long Island.

      Despite this film’s lurid subject and a language that would probably require subtitles for contemporary viewers, I believe this to be Morrisey’s very best work, and the promise of a much more substantive career than the one that actually followed.

 

Los Angeles, March 23, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2022).