Sleaze palace (Hustling)

The quickest way to the heart of a city is a visit to the local hustler bar. Not only can one judge a city by the quality of its hustlers, but a weary traveller can also find out pretty much anything he needs to know at these watering holes: local gossip, the availability of pharmaceuticals, the peregrinations of the local constabulary, what have you. If you discover that the hustler bars of a major metropolis are defunct, as they now seem to be in Toronto and New York, it’s a sure sign of a civilisation in decline, of a city that has become gentrified beyond all hope or reason. If the scavengers are annihilated, the whole ecosystem is thrown out of balance, and there’s nothing to do on a Friday night.

I’ve been to a lot of legendary hustler bars over the years – Numbers and the Spotlight in LA, Rounds and Stella’s in New York, Tabasco and Blue Boy Bar in Berlin, Black & White in Madrid – but nowhere have I found one as unique and endearing as the late, great Sneakers in my home town of Toronto, Canada. In its heyday, between 1996 and 2006, Sneakers was the sweetest sleaze palace in town, a place where any night of the week you could find a tweaking hustler primed for a crime spree, a jolly john full of stories of past glories, or a freshly inked ex-con just released from the pen eager to tear up the town. Walking in the front door of Sneakers was like playing Russian roulette: you never knew if you were going to run into a bullet with your name on it.

Sneakers itself was a deceptively simple location: as you breezed past the burly bouncer, a long, narrow bar at the front opened into a small room in the back, just big enough for a single pool table and another small bar. A door at the very back led to a patio in the parking lot that was very popular on sweltering summer nights. A well-stocked juke box provided the musical ambiance, and two television screens, usually tuned to the Maple Leafs hockey game, hung over the main bar. The walls were adorned with an odd combination of movie posters featuring the obvious gay eye candy – Cruise, Damon, DiCaprio – and the hyperrealist art of Canadian painter Ken Danby, often featuring a hockey motif. The grungy toilet, in the basement, featured a large mirror especially designed for hustler primping, and two stalls barely big enough for a sordid coke or crystal transaction.

As for the hustlers themselves, they came in all shapes, sizes and colours. The typical Sneakers hustler look was a cross between hip hop and hoser. (A hoser is a Canadian expression for a proletariat type with two main passions in life: beer and hockey.) Backwards baseball caps, over-sized hockey sweaters or wife-beaters, and ridiculously oversized baggy jeans revealing a plump rumpful of boxer shorts was the uniform of the day. There were other types of hustlers too – muscular Black boys in tight T-shirts, or tough tattooed thugs in fitted shirts and jeans – but the Sneakers prototype was definitely hip-hop hockey. Inevitably there would be a couple of strung-out pregnant girlfriends hanging around, and of course plenty of transsexual hookers and drug dealers. The johns were mostly tubby, middle-aged fatherly types with moustaches, dressed either in cheap suits or high-waisted jeans and plaid shirts, abrasive men with loud voices and fat wallets.

The highlight of a night at Sneakers would be the inevitable fist fight, usually between two strutting hustlers competing for the same john, or over some drug deal gone wrong. You could almost set your watch to these eruptions of brio and braggadocio. There were always some undercover cops floating around, but you would never see the joint actually get raided, although not infrequently you would show up to find the front door locked, the result of another police clampdown. It was amazing that the cops allowed this little den of iniquity – a mere block away from downtown police headquarters – to stay open for a whole decade. They say that hustlers tend to nest close to cop shops for protection from marauding homophobes, like lampreys that attach themselves to sharks.

I held an ambush party to launch my book, ‘The Reluctant Pornographer’, at Sneakers in 1998 during the Toronto Film Festival. (We call them ambush parties because we don’t bother to inform the establishment that we’ve invited a hundred people or so for a little cocktail reception. The result is usually chaos.) The hustlers, 80 per cent of whom were technically straight, got so excited at all the stylish women invading their turf that they started to parade around like peacocks and go into full hustler mode; one of them even threw a chair, breaking the front window. After that soiree, Sneakers became a favourite hang-out for the art crowd at which to slum: any given night you could find adventurous artists and intellectuals hobnobbing with hustler hoi polloi. After several years, however, the novelty wore off, and the art crowd dwindled away to nothing. But the hustlers, oblivious to the incursion, remained steadfast and true.

There are too many stories to tell of the Sneakers dynasty, like the time I took an A-list Hollywood director and his posse there, where I witnessed him sign a contract for his next feature film, or the time I brought a movie star to score coke, or the time I picked up the world’s tallest hustler on whom I could perform a blow-job while standing up without bending my knees, but alas they are all just memories now. The hustlers are homeless in Toronto, and there’s nothing to do on a Friday night.