The Jerry Springer Show.

Seventeenth Street between Broadway and Fifth Avenue is coming up in the world, slowly. (At that latitude, Broadway is not "Broadway," nor is Fifth Avenue "Fifth Avenue.") An African art store brought a windowful of juju. Upscale takeouts have joined the check-cashing places and cheap perfume stores. And Johnny Lats Gym has new owners.

Johnny Lats was named after its founder, who competed as a bodybuilder under that name. I never saw his lats, since he worked in a shapeless grey sweatshirt (Johnny Lats observes Casual Monday through Sunday). In time Johnny and his lats went the way of all flesh, but the new management kept his name and the general air of a prison yard. In a burst of glitz and high-tech, they hung a TV over the desk, facing the aerobic equipment. So it is that I was ahead of the curve on America's No. 1 show, Jerry Springer. Jerry, like Oprah Winfrey, comes out of Chicago, but I think of him as a 17th Street experience.

A word about the audience. Murray Kempton once wrote that the only truly integrated group he ever saw in the world capital of liberalism was a Brooklyn association of small landlords, thanks to its high quotient of rapacious West Indians. The ruling passion at Johnny Lats is not rapacity, but definition, which also knows no color bar. There is also a near balance of straight and gay, which is even trickier to maintain in a gym. People must be too busy bulking up to hook up. The only relevant hormones within these grey walls are those that produce muscle mass. Jerry likes to say he is a diverse fellow, reaching the speechless of all hues and gender-shadings. He has them at the gym, only big.

Since the TV's audio must compete with piped-in hip-hop and the clang of free weights, the experience is like watching a silent movie. Only when the gym din subsides do you catch the accents of Jerry's guests: Ghetto Squawk and Hill-Country Buzz Saw. A booker for another show who wanted my wife to come on as a shrink happily admitted that they depicted "trailer-park trash," and this was years before James Carville. Ungainly young women sit in skirts with hems at glute level; their swains sport patches of facial hair like weeds on a schoolyard infield.

Occasionally a parent appears to trade excoriations, giving new meaning to the phrase loco parentis. The emotions of wrath and lust, so carefully pared from the serious business of weight-lifting, flourish on Jerry's stage. Usually all the girls are sleeping with all the guys, or with each other. Sometimes reconciliation is proposed, and guests appear cradling bouquets. But they always end up using them to thrash the heads of their objects of desire. When the brawling graduates to fists or chairs, bouncers swarm in to break it up.

The New York Post recently told a waiting world that the fights were faked, but Johnny Lats was on the case months ahead of them. It was obvious to the regulars, several of them bouncers themselves, that the scuffling went on too long for the efforts to suppress it to be real. "You just pick 'im up," one told me, "and say, `Where you goin'?'" Our incredulity does not extend to the rest of the show, however, which is watched in an earnest, and censorious, spirit. This is one aspect of trash TV ignored by its critics: however gross the guests, or permissive the thought pills administered by the hosts, the audience can be stern judges of folly and lying. Imagine Cotton Mather at a bear-baiting. Maybe Sen. Lieberman should get to the gym more often.

It is still bear-baiting, though, with human bears, and hence deplorable. Most deplorable is Springer himself, who lurks among his studio audience asking questions, then gives a little sermon at the end, offering self-esteem (for his listeners) and bullet-proof First Amendment underwear (for himself--poor James Madison, what have you done to us?). Far and away the worst thing about him, though, is his suit. No bare thighs for him, only Armani. The suit says, "I'm no part of this pistarckle, I only hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature." It is a lie; Jerry Shakespeare is the onlie begetter, barker, and pimp. If Nazis had Schadenfreude, which I don't suppose they do, their emotions running more to hope and hatred, Jerry Springer would be television for Nazis: feral blacks and debased whites, all performing at the behest of a sharpie ringmaster.

At the Johnny Lats New Year's party, we watched a tape of Jerry's out-takes (available by special order) that were too hot for airtime--actual stripping, even more gaudy brawls. One moment stands out: a hillbilly harpy, railing at some inert black kid. I missed the connection between them--evidently not mother and son, though all other options were open. In the gym there were anticipatory murmurs: "Here it comes." She cocked back her arm, made a smooth, double-over-second-base swing, and slapped! his cheek. The young man snapped face-right, like a soldier. "Show it again!" cried my comrades. Hand and head went back and forth, back and forth, like dancers.

Big black men wanted to see the white lady do her thing. I didn't want to go there.