Hustler

So this guy named Peter wants to tell me this story, but I have no idea why he wants to tell me this story because it's just so embarrassing. (I mean, it would be like me telling about the time the plastic pen cap got stuck in my ear while I was on assignment in Rome last year.)So maybe Peter wants to tell his story as a warning to others. (Which would be a good reason for me to tell the story of the pen cap getting stuck in my ear, except it's just too embarrassing to even mention.)Anyway, this Peter is British, which might explain something.

Sorry to break it to you, Baltimore. But you may have seen the last of Larry Flynt 's stripper-mobile. The converted U-Haul truck advertising Flynt's Hustler Club is outfitted with a Plexiglas box, sort of like the Popemobile. But this vehicle is outfitted with a stripper's pole and a bunch of itsy-bitsy-bikini-clad dancers doing – what else? – pole dancing. It was last seen rolling around Camden Yards as a game was letting out, treating fans to more action than the Orioles seem capable of providing.

In the church bulletin celebrating his 63 years of life handed out at his funeral on Wednesday, Harold Lee Able Sr. is affectionately called a "hustler at heart." He died April 15 like too many others in Baltimore - by homicide. He was shot in the head while sitting in a car in East Baltimore, and police said they believe he was working as an unlicensed cabdriver, a "hack," scraping up a few dollars here and there delivering people who can't afford taxis in the city. Harold Lee Able Sr. was hustling.

In the church bulletin celebrating his 63 years of life handed out at his funeral on Wednesday, Harold Lee Able Sr. is affectionately called a "hustler at heart." He died April 15 like too many others in Baltimore - by homicide. He was shot in the head while sitting in a car in East Baltimore, and police said they believe he was working as an unlicensed cabdriver, a "hack," scraping up a few dollars here and there delivering people who can't afford taxis in the city. Harold Lee Able Sr. was hustling.

Paul Newman won his only best actor Oscar for Martin Scorsese's The Color of Money, the 1986 sequel to Robert Rossen's 1961 masterpiece, The Hustler. But he ought to have won it for The Hustler, as any viewer can see when it plays tomorrow at noon at the Charles Theatre's Saturday revivals series. (Admission is $5.) As Fast Eddie Felson in The Hustler, Newman creates a portrait of the artist as a pool player. His pride in craft should make him a Hemingway hero. But he exhibits gracelessness under pressure in an epic bout with Minnesota Fats (Jackie Gleason)

Not that anyone asked, but I'll admit it anyway. I've lost more gambling at poker and golf than Michael Jordan. There, I have bared my soul, unburdened my conscience.I'm not the only one. Thousands of readers of this paper have lost as much. For that matter, so have some of the journalists who are moralizing and hyperventilating about Jordan's $57,000 in lost golf bets.But let me clarify something. I didn't lose $57,000. I don't bet that kind of money on anything. The reason I don't bet that kind of money is that I don't make the kind of money Jordan does.

BOSTON -- I have long regarded Larry Flynt as the curse of the First Amendment. He's the catch that comes with the freedom of speech. The asterisk on the Constitution.The right to publish a cartoon about Bill Clinton and Paula Jones on the editorial page comes with the curse of a sexual satire in Hustler about Jerry Falwell and his mother. The right to an unauthorized wedding photo of JFK Jr. and his bride comes with the curse of a photo of Jackie O in the buff.You want the freedom to say whatever you want?

When the tag end of Hurricane Andrew raced through town last Friday, it brought 30-plus-knot winds and very choppy seas and got the annual J/29 North American Championship regatta off to a wild and woolly start.Challenging conditions continued even after the skies cleared Friday evening, and excellent heavy to moderate breeze held for the next two days. That allowed the 14-boat fleet to complete a record nine races before the regatta ended last Sunday afternoon.Courses for the event, which was managed by Maryland Capital Yacht Club, were four-legged windward-leewards and a five-legged version in the final race on Saturday.

RETURNING from a preview of "The People Vs. Larry Flynt" last week, I stopped by a convenience store and picked up a copy of Hustler magazine, Flynt's flagship publication and perhaps the raunchiest skin rag in America. I wanted to make sure whatever I said about Flynt and the movie about him bore some relation to the reality at the newsstand. For this I was punished severely.The other patrons gave me a wide berth as I walked to the checkout counter.A couple in front of me took snide delight in prolonging what seemed an interminable transaction involving a Lotto ticket and a carton of milk.

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa -- South Africa passed yet another milestone in its return to the world stage last week when the country got its very own edition of Playboy.In his opening letter from the editor, Hugh Hefner compared the assault that he led against "conformity and repression" in the United States when he founded the magazine 40 years ago to the changes going on in South Africa."There were those willing to challenge the old order, to reinvent America, to launch a great cultural experiment," he wrote of his compatriots in the 1950s.

NEW YORK- - In publicity shots, he's mean and threatening - all muscles, tattoos and bullet wounds. His lips are usually tight, his eyes like razors. But here in his hotel suite at the posh Essex House Hotel in Manhattan, Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson often flashes a toothy, boyish grin. He's easygoing, downright gregarious. The rapper reclines in a plush chair, swimming in dark jeans and a black and white pullover from his G-Unit clothing line. Sometimes, he jumps to his feet, lithe and animated, to illustrate a point.

FOR EIGHT years now, Steve Walden and Raymond Whye have been doing business at Howard and Lexington streets in what we used to call the heart of downtown. The business exists on a sidewalk. It consists of a beat-up card table offering bargains of the day. As it happens, Walden and Whye are black. They are today's link to Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. and William Donald Schaefer, who agreed last week that a state program to help minority businesses "needs to end." Mr. Governor and Mr. Comptroller, say hello to Mr. Walden and Mr. Whye.

The owners of Larry Flynt's Hustler Club were fined $525 by the city liquor board yesterday for violating the prohibition on sexual touching. Owner Jason C. Mohney was facing four charges of violating the city's adult entertainment rules, and the Board of Liquor License Commissioners found him guilty of two. It also reduced his fines by $400. "I realistically thought we would be found not guilty of everything," said Mohney's attorney, Peter Prevas, adding that he was considering an appeal.

Before Larry Flynt's Hustler Club opened in downtown Baltimore, the manager said he would run such a clean operation that it would be "just like you go to T.G.I. Friday's" restaurant, except for the nude women on stage. "No touching," promised Jason C. Mohney, 30, trying to distinguish the huge new club from the nearly 20 other strip joints crammed onto The Block, steps from City Hall and police headquarters. Today, the city liquor board is scheduled to hear police allegations that four days after the club's Nov. 12 gala opening, several people -- including Mohney's brother -- violated the city law barring sexual touching.

The King of Porn arrived on Baltimore Street last night, diamond watch sparkling, to promote his new Hustler Club. His entrance into the loud club was less than grand, as an attendant wheeled his gold-plated wheelchair through a back door and to one of the red crushed velvet chairs. Most of the clubgoers hardly noticed -- their attention was turned to the women on the club's three stages. But the throng of reporters waiting to talk to the magazine publisher pounced, circling the expressionless man in the blue suede jacket.

Larry Flynt, the man who made America safe for pornography, will open a new "gentleman's club" in Baltimore tonight with a promise to add some class to the seedy strip-joint center known as The Block. If nothing else, Larry Flynt's Hustler Club will bring a new architectural feature to the city's tenderloin, one block south of City Hall: a glass dance floor that allows patrons on a lower level to look up performers' skirts. Except they won't be wearing skirts. The club is all nude. "It's not a sleazy operation," the Hustler magazine publisher said in a telephone interview yesterday.

WASHINGTON -- From Betty Grable pinups during World War II to Playboy centerfolds in Vietnam, photos of beautiful women -- clothed and otherwise -- have been as much a part of military life as C-rations and shore leave.Now, though, in the nation's political battle over morality, Rep. Roscoe G. Bartlett wants to take so-called "skin magazines" out of armed services stores.The Western Maryland Republican is sponsoring a measure that would prohibit military exchanges at American bases worldwide from selling such adult fare as Playboy, Penthouse and Hustler.

Back on the evening of April 26, a 33-year-old Baltimore businessman went outside Camden Yards to try to sell two extra O's tickets at face value -- $12 each. A hustler walked up and offered to broker the sale for him, but the offer was rejected. A few minutes later, the hustler returned, this time with a customer."Twenty dollars each," the fast-talking hustler announced."No," the businessman countered. "Only 12.""You're under arrest," the customer barked.The customer was an undercover cop, another of Baltimore's finest on dubious assignment at Oriole Park.

The Madam, by Julianna Baggott, Atria Books. 304 pages. $24. Who wrote the book where a dancing bear lived upstairs in the boarding house -- with an orphanage thrown in for good measure? Aha! John Irving! But not this time. It's the third novel by Julianna Baggott -- although one of the children happens to be named Irving, and coincidences are always suspicious. As in the real Irving, when the dancing bear is dead and buried, we know that the other characters have also struck the worst of times.

Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt, a man both hailed as a free speech advocate and loathed as a smut peddler, is headed to Baltimore in a big way. Flynt is a partner in what will be the largest "gentleman's club" on The Block, the worn row of strip bars in the heart of downtown. A hot-pink neon sign on East Baltimore Street will blare the presence of Larry Flynt's Hustler Club. The full-nudity show bar, originally to be called Deja Vu, is still months away from completion. Once finished, it will fill the upper two floors of the graceful old Gayety theater building, one block south of City Hall.