Being a Times Square Elmo
being a Times Square Elmo Last Saturday, a few blocks north of Times Square, a nineteen-year-old named Virgilia Reyes was wearing a red Elmo costume, with a drawstring bag slung across her back and an Android phone in her hand. She was moving up and down the block, and had been texting her shifting coordinates to me for half an hour. It was 4:30 P.M., and the streets were jammed with tourists. On each corner, and everywhere in between, a swarm of characters, Reyes-as-Elmo among them, tried to pose for photos with the passersby, then relieve them of a few dollars in tips.
On the median strip at Forty-fifth Street and Seventh Avenue, a woman stood naked from the waist up, her bare chest painted the colors of the Brazilian flag. Statues of Liberty, swaddled in spray-painted silver gowns and perched on stepstools, held plastic torches and called out to each other in Spanish. A man with a ponytail sold tickets to a comedy club, while guys in green vests hawked tickets for a bus tour. The crowds inched past. In the interstices of the mob were a Power Ranger, a Spider-Man, a Woody from "Toy Story," Minnie Mouse, two Cookie Monsters, a Super Mario, Hello Kitty, two more Elmos, and a Batman.
Reyes summed them all up in a word: competition. "There are too many characters out here," she told me. The streets were full of easy marks, but also too many hucksters. She fixed her stare on the topless Brazilian. "Who does that? I have too much respect for my body for that."
The characters in Times Square work for themselves. They do not have employers and do not belong to a union. The characters pocket their own earnings, up to two hundred dollars for eight hours, on a good day, but usually less than a hundred dollars. They buy their own costumes, which cost anywhere from two hundred and fifty dollars (for a standard Elmo getup) to four hundred dollars (for a souped-up Mickey Mouse, with a moving mouth and eyes that open and close). Reyes sends away for hers, paying by cash, from a designer in Lima. ("See those superheroes?" she asked, motioning toward a threadbare Batman. "They’re not from Peru. They look like Halloween costumes. Like, from Party City!") They also set their own hours, which, for Reyes, typically amount to eight-hour shifts five days a week, with breaks on Tuesday and Wednesday, when there’s a lull in tourist traffic.
If their autonomy is a point of a pride, it’s also a liability. A few days earlier, at Forty-second Street, I had discussed this with Emer, a fifty-year-old Peruvian, who was dressed as Woody and didn’t want to provide his last name. "I don’t work for anybody," he boasted. "I’m free to do things my way." Emer had been there almost five hours, and had earned about fifty dollars; it was already dinnertime, though, and he was about to go home, to New Jersey. Ebbs in traffic and a glut of competition mean diminished returns. "Normally, with work, you know how much money you’ll get based on the hours," Reyes said. "Here, there’s no telling." She had spent eight hours on the same corner a week earlier and came away with fifteen dollars; she was still distraught about it, and told me that she’s started looking for another job.
To hear Emer and Reyes tell it, they suffer all sorts of indignities. There are daily torrents of verbal abuse (most of them variations of "You illegal Mexicans!") and constant struggles to find public bathrooms and places to have lunch without being turned away. Reyes used to dress as a minion from "Despicable Me," but she "kept getting beat on by people, kids and older guys, just knocking me around." A wayward punch broke her nose several months ago. She chalks up some of it to malice, and the rest to Disney-influenced confusion: "In the movie, the minions are always beat on. I think some kids just think it’s part of the game."
When the Times Square characters do shed their masks and make the news, it’s usually not for their acts of endurance. Earlier this month, two Statues of Liberty got into a fistfight over disputed turf, and one was arrested. A judge, two weeks ago, found a Spider-Man guilty of harassing a family that had allegedly shorted him money while taking a picture. The police have a loose policy of begrudging acceptance toward them, with the occasional lashing out. ("You can’t stand there!" "Move along!" "How much money did he just give you?") The police lord it over them that so many are immigrants without papers, Emer said. He was in the middle of a story about a policeman when two teen-age girls walked past. Emer’s mask was up, and his flushed face was exposed. "Hey, baby," he called out, in shaky English. "Want to take a picture?"
The Times Square Alliance, which oversees businesses in the area, regularly receives complaints from people who claim to have been harassed by the characters: women who are ogled and occasionally groped, bewildered foreigners accosted for not paying enough in tips. Tim Tompkins, the president of the organization, tried to sound measured when we spoke by phone. "Many of them are just honest folks trying to make a living," he said. But he clearly had an agenda. His office sent me dozens of citizens’ complaints, and, for days after we spoke, he forwarded me more. There are no rules governing their conduct, though Tompkins would like to see something. "Quirky is fine; creepy is not," he said.
Reyes recalled a turning point about a year ago, when a deranged Elmo started spewing anti-Semitic tirades in front of the Toys "R" Us. (He was later arrested.) "Ever since, it’s been downhill," she said. Tourists are warier and tips scarcer. "Everybody sees everything. Everybody has a camera. It’s all on YouTube. The fight between those two Statues of Liberty, for example, someone recorded that. After that, I heard people say, ‘We got to get rid of these characters. They’re a bunch of illegals.’ "
Reyes is enraged when she hears things like this. It’s a sensitive subject. (A relative of hers was recently deported.) She is also uncharacteristic for a Times Square character: she’s an American citizen and speaks both English and Spanish. This affords her some protection. When nearby policemen snicker and tell her to move along or laugh that she’s "illegal," Reyes barks back; often, her hecklers relent. She offers to show people her I.D.: born and bred in the tri-state area. (Even so, her friend Noelia, the twenty-three-year-old Peruvian Cookie Monster who introduced us, calls Reyes a "Boricua"—a Puerto Rican.) At one point on Saturday, she took off her mask for a moment while we talked. A tourist scurried over and tried to take a photo of her. "Not my face, please!" Reyes said sternly. "That’s very rude!" It’s hard to imagine some of the other characters behaving with such aplomb, though the woman just rolled her eyes and took the photo anyway, then absconded.
Reyes used to work at a Taco Bell and at TGI Fridays, in New Jersey, but she quit after getting pregnant about a year and a half ago. She introduced me to her boyfriend, Joshua Estrada-Barillas—"Buzz Lightyear, the father of my child," she said. Their goal was to surpass a hundred dollars for the day, and they were prepared to stay until 11 P.M. to make it happen. ("My baby needs milk today, and it’s expensive," she told me, of her seven-month-old son, Jaybian.) They work as a pair, and have a strategy. Either she or Estrada-Barillas snares a young tourist—"Kids’ smiles are the way into parents’ wallets," Reyes sagely told me—then the other darts over to join the photo. When it comes time to tip, one takes the money, then points to the other. Most of the time, the tourist pays them both. After watching them pull this off with one guy, I overheard his friend, in a flat-brimmed Yankee cap, laugh, "Elmo totally photo-bombed you, dude!"
On Saturday, Reyes and Estrada-Barillas also partnered up, on an ad-hoc basis, with two Statues of Liberty. Because they’re restricted to their stepstools, the men can’t move around to approach tourists, so they rely on Estrada-Barillas to steer people their way; in turn, he gets a cut. These particular Statues of Liberty don’t speak good English either, and every once in a while Reyes had to haggle with tourists on their behalf, then pocketed a small commission, like a finder’s fee.
Estrada-Barillas was having an easy time of it. He sidled up to tourists, putting his arm around them gently, without seeming to touch them, and then stood about a half step away—a distance both respectful and imposing—while they hastily peeled off a few bills. Half the time, he had to cajole them, saying either "tip, please" (to anyone who did not immediately reach for his wallet) or, more elaborately, "five dollars, or ten" (to someone who had paid him promptly, but with a single dollar). He’s done this work for the past four years, and Reyes, who’s been at it for five months, admires his skill. "We’re the opposite," she said. "He doesn’t know how to play the character. I know the character, and play the character. He plays with the character. He knows people."
Reyes was having more trouble, if only because there were more Elmos to compete with. She made a point of taking her mask off after every photo. "That way, when they’re about to pay, they see that they’re dealing with an actual person," she said. At least half the time, people came up to her, took a photo, and then walked away without paying, ignoring Reyes as she protested.
Along the four corners of Forty-fifth Street and Broadway, a rival gang positioned itself: Hello Kitty, Cookie Monster, Woody, and Super Mario. "We’re enemies," Reyes said. "We used to work together, but they were taking our money. We did all the work, and they just took from us." When Reyes and Estrada-Barillas confronted them about it, their conversation nearly came to blows. Now there are harsh words when they cross paths ("Desgraciados!" "Cabrones!"), and Reyes and Estrada-Barillas keep their distance.
Reyes looked up the street, surveying her options, when a young child crossed her sightline. The kid’s eyes widened, and she shouted delightedly, "Elmo!" Reyes motioned to Estrada-Barillas, and the three posed. The little girl’s father, standing five feet away, was filming Times Square with a small digital camera, spinning in a circle to capture a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view; as he wheeled around, he caught sight of his daughter with Elmo and Buzz and laughed, then took a photo. Before Estrada-Barillas, Reyes, and the girl could even drop their poses, the father had moved on to another shot. Estrada-Barillas and Reyes looked at each other and shrugged. I recalled something that Tompkins, from the Times Square Alliance, had told me: Times Square is the closest thing to Disney World that many of these tourists have ever experienced. (His point was that they could perhaps be forgiven, now and again, for skimping on tips; the Times Square scene could feel more like a show, put on for ambient amusement, than a web of business transactions.) For Reyes and Estrada-Barillas, it will always be a struggle to convince onlookers that they are working people and not just part of the spectacle. Reyes, who never shies from confrontation, is normally the one to "educate" tourists at a time like this. But there was work to do—a baby to get home to, and a hundred dollars to make before then.
photographs by Ruddy Roye
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