One night in 1986, Screw magazine publisher Al Goldstein, who died Thursday at 77, condemned me to death on his “Midnight Blue” cable TV porn show — not once, but four times.
“Just die, Steve . . . die, die, die,” he implored as a dominatrix took a whip to a copy of the New York Post nailed to a pole.
I’m sure that somewhere, Al is still hoping and praying for my demise.
What mainly motivated fat pornographer Goldstein was money — more than sex, on which he made a fortune, and more than food, which he claimed to enjoy more than sex.
I had pinched his cash flow. I wrote a column calling for Manhattan Cable TV’s then owner, Time Inc., to yank commercials for male hustlers from “Midnight Blue” while AIDS was ravaging the city’s gay population — and when the media giant’s own flagship Time magazine routinely featured the plague on its cover.
The ads for men selling their bodies were quickly taken down, although ones for female prostitutes remained. It was too much for Al, who put together a 10-minute opening segment likening myself and The Post to “bacteria.”
And wishing me dead. I thought it was hilarious. My wife and friends didn’t. In retrospect they were right.
Goldstein was funny as only certain personality-damaged types can be. His “f–k you” tirades on “Midnight Blue” aimed at businesses and restaurants which displeased him made me laugh along with everyone else.
Many today fondly recall them as colorful expressions of New York “grit.” But Screw and “Midnight Blue” truly expressed the city’s economic and social tailspin of the 1970s and ’80s. Their capital zone was then-squalid Times Square, shown in all its lurid, neon-lit depravity in the cable TV show’s opening.
Goldstein was detested by business partners, five ex-wives and innumerable ex-friends. He was repeatedly sued, arrested and jailed. But the flesh trade made him for a time very rich, and thanks to clever lawyers whom he later stiffed, the penalties rarely stuck.
Even many who once recognized him as a smiling, sinister accessory to human trafficking later came to view him as a sympathetic, cuddly New York character.
Home video crippled his porn enterprises and the Internet finished them off for good in the ’90s, leaving him bankrupt and homeless. Who could hate even a scoundrel like Goldstein, reduced to working as a greeter at the Second Avenue Deli?
Maybe the countless men and women in his world for whom midnight came too early.
Al Goldstein, f- -k you.