TALES OF LOHR: "AMERICAN BOY"

Thoughts on "A Profile of Steven Prince"

One of the most memorable one-scene-and-done characters in the history of American cinema is Easy Andy, the skeezy operator who meets Travis Bickle in an anonymous Manhattan hotel room for a sale of some illegal guns in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. Andy cuts an unforgettable figure, alternately amusing and unsettling, as he waxes rhapsodic about his “beautiful” firearms and their hyperbolic death-dealing capabilities (one of his weapons, he boasts, can stop a car at 100 yards: “Put a round right through the engine block!”). His voice is its own wonderful, jittery anomaly, all keening, adenoidal rasp, and once he locks in the deal with Travis for the guns and a special custom-crafted leather holster for the .44 Magnum among his wares, he immediately leaps into a supplemental spiel, offering to also procure for Travis all manner of drugs, or even a hot Cadillac “with the pink slip, for two grand.” Easy Andy is a compelling embodiment of the off-putting yet implacable seductions of the small-time American capitalist drive, a character both tragically timeless and richly redolent of the mid-’70s moment from which he arose.