The Deuce, episode 2: “Show and Tell”

Directed by Ernest Dickerson. Written by Richard Price & George Pelecanos.

Welcome back, smut-peddlers and street-walkers, to The Deuce. Reviewing a David Simon show week-to-week, episode-to-episode, can be unfulfilling to both the writer and the reader (and apparently to David Simon). The methodical, gradually-paced journalistic storytelling style of Simon can leave an audience member, even one familiar with shows like The Wire or Treme, somewhat dissatisfied until the pieces start to come together. Until those elements gather forth into a cohesive whole, it may be best to look instead on appreciating the subtle atmospheric detail and character work that Simon and company (in this case, co-creator George Pelecanos and notable writers like Richard Price) are able to infuse to the story.

“Show and Prove” begins and ends with NYPD “ho patrol” cracking down — in a perfunctory, workaday way — on Times Square prostitutes, hauling them off to the station, and then releasing them in little time. The title comes from a routine procedure that neighborhood prostitutes have to undergo during a police raid. If the ladies have a paper confirming they were picked up by police very recently, they’re allowed to go their way. If not, they get stuffed in the police wagon and rolled down to the station, where both police and hookers alike are so familiar with each other and comfortable in their roles that a cop like Officer Alston (Lawrence Gilliard Jr.) can take Chinese delivery orders from the women he’s just booked and already seems to know what half of them will want. Like the slingers and po-lice from the Baltimore of The Wire, the characters who inhabit The Deuce know the game, even if they recognize when it’s unfair to them, they know that what happens is all in a day’s work, no matter which side of the jail cell bars they stand on.

But in another sense, the title also comes from something that’s especially highlighted in this episode — people on The Deuce have to play a perpetual game of “show and prove” no matter who they are. When they talk the talk, they might or might not be able to walk the walk. This is actually something introduced in the first episode, where the smooth-talking, silver-tongued pimp C.C. (Gary Carr), who likes to console his “stable” of women with kind words and a layer of personal charm, is revealed in the last scene of the pilot to be just as violent and brutal as any pimp, if not more so, holding his “girl” Ashley at knifepoint and threatening to send her back to her sexually abusive father. Show yourself to be one, prove yourself to be another. And here, C.C. is seemingly up to the same tricks — he talks to new girl Lori after a night in bed about his sensitivities and dreams, how he wants to give up pimping and settle down with a family somewhere far away, before crawling out of bed and ordering her back out into the streets, where, over the course of the episode, she will be nearly abducted by a rapist posing as a cop, who is then stabbed to death by C.C., who then tells her that, “like riding a bike” it’s best for her to get right back out on the street, all while the assailant is bleeding to death on top of her. All in a night’s work in The Deuce.

You see it too in Vincent’s corner of the world. To pay off his brother’s gambling debts, Vincent has brokered a deal with Mafia bigwig Rudy Pipilo (Michael Rispoli). The Mob will consider brother Frankie’s debts forgiven in exchange for a cut of the payroll from a construction job run by Vincent and Frankie’s brother-in-law Bobby (Chris Bauer). Impressed by this, and Vincent’s revival of the failing Korean restaurant, Pipilo offers Vincent a new job — there’s a gay bar near Times Square that’s fallen on hard times, and the Mob wants Vincent to re-open it and “bring it back as something else.” The offer is tempting — Vincent won’t just be a bartender anymore, he’ll actually own the bar (minus a kickback to the organization, of course) — but Vincent is initially reluctant. Despite having been around mobbed up guys for years, he’s never wanted to be part of a “crew.” He’s nervous and uncomfortable around Pipilo, but Pipilo picks up on this and convinces him that this is just another business deal. After all, Pipilo will just be like a landlord, right? As Vincent will, a few scenes later, explain to his twin brother, Rudy Pipilo’s not like those other Mob guys, right? He’s a businessman, right? Yeah, and C.C.’s not like the other pimps. Well, anyways, we’ve seen Pipilo’s “show.” But can he prove? We’ll see.

Across town in The Bronx, Candy fills in for a streetwalker friend who has a court appearance to make but has promised to “act” in a porno flick being shot in a quiet basement in a residential neighborhood. This is the first real appearance of porn films in the series. And in this episode we start to get the distinction between legal and illegal, explicit and illicit, as it is drawn in New York City in 1971. You see, the hardcore porno flick that Candy shows up to film at the last minute, where her and another woman are double-teamed by two naked men in Viking helmets and then doused in “Viking cum” (cold potato soup), is illegal, as is the 8mm film of Darlene engaging in doggy style with a john that gets sold under the counter in brown paper bags without her knowing it. Whereas the softcore films that play in movie theatres under big, bright marquees that proclaim “Sex U.S.A.” are not illegal, because they don’t show any penetration or ejaculation.  In our modern internet age these distinctions might seem arbitrary, but in 1971 they’re very much the difference between being able to operate out in the open, and being raided by the cops. C.C. explains as much to Lori, which helps clue the audience in on where the exact line falls in this time and place between lawbreaking and law-abiding. This is what Vincent’s brother-in-law Bobby is unknowingly hinting at when he calls the skimpily attired waitresses at Vincent’s newly popular Korean restaurant “classy”. Vincent has struck the right balance between the “family restaurant” he was expected to manage (which bored what few customers visited) and a sleazy dive where hookers proposition the barflies. By providing the veneer of class to the naked lust, and the appeal of carnality to the everyday food service, Vincent has begun to hit on the future of the sex trade along The Deuce — the sex will soon be coming out of the shadows, and will be granted a legitimacy.

Further additions to The Deuce in this episode are series regulars Natalie Paul (like Dominique Fishback, a veteran of Simon’s Show Me a Hero) as Sandra, a reporter getting firsthand experience of life along The Deuce, and Chris Coy as Paul, the bartender at the decrepit gay bar Vincent has been gifted by the Mob. The world of The Deuce has continued to expand even as people in The Deuce itself go about their day-to-day jobs — hustling, surviving, whoring, selling, buying, showing, and at times, proving.