“What are you doing? This is awful!” she screamed, yanking the lace from my hands. I tried cutting fabric for her instead, but I’d never learned to hold scissors properly, and I ruined the expensive brocade. Amber just shook her head. “How can anyone manage to hold scissors wrong?” she said with a sigh.
After that, more dexterous performers did her ironing. I was exiled to tea.
At the party, Marc showed up dressed as a camel’s toe.
Amber had booked us to model for a party hosted by the restaurant Nobu. I spent the day trailing her around Times Square accessory shops. Rain soaked us as she ran from store to store, assembling the paste jewelry and feathers that would effect our transformation. She bought me shoes that, despite being my size, pinched immediately. At the party, the guests were mostly Japanese, mostly in sweatpants. They must be billionaires to dress like that at a Nobu party, I thought. Look how few fucks they give. It turned out to be a holiday party for the kitchen staff. We slunk like chimeras, handing out fake money for a pop-up gambling parlor. To pass the time, Amber sweet-talked the cooks into doing one-armed push-ups, bribing them with the money we were supposed to give out for free.
The next night, we danced go-go dressed as Bettie Pages, then shoved dumplings in our faces in the neon Chinatown dark.
Amber worked a birthday party thrown by a fashion publicist who had lost a hundred pounds. He called it “Half the Man I Used to Be.” She invited me along. Two burlesque stars sat on pedestals, naked, forcing cannoli after cannoli into their mouths. They were so blond, their curves so opulent. They licked the cream from their fingers as starving PR girls stood nearby, staring. Was it with disgust or envy?
We worked another party alongside Ruby Valentine and Dirty Martini. Amber styled us all as showgirls: corsets, sequined Thai bikinis, feathers slung about our hips. We squeezed our asses into beige fishnets and wore heels that pinched.
Amber painted my eyes with white and black, drag-queen style. They looked giant from afar.
Supposed object of desire myself, I had only two desires: to sit down, and to scratch beneath my wig with a chopstick.
“You’re the spirit of joy,” Amber hissed at me, as we minced onto the glittering rooftop. “Smile!”
The host ordered us to give out trays of classic candies. It was a Sisyphean task. The South Beach Diet had just hit, and the fashion girls shrank from the carbs. The host stared with disappointment at the garbage bags of treats he’d hidden in the basement. “Make them eat more!” he demanded. Starving, I gobbled handfuls, hiding behind a fern.
After the party, we piled in a banquette around Patrick McDonald. An old New York eccentric who’d been embraced by the fashion industry in one of its rare good turns, McDonald wore his Savile Row suit, shellacked hair, and beauty mark. We angled our boas. We kissed, we cooed, we feigned our joy. Click click click went the Getty cameras. A woman finally took one candy cigarette, holding it to her injected lips. The lights of the city shone in her lip gloss. All I wanted was to take off my shoes.
Amber taught me that glamour is armor. With feathers and bling, the queer, broke, and brilliant rigged themselves for battle. Glamour was rebellion against the role society prescribed for you. A rich kid in the same costume would bear the same relation to Amber that a plastic Halloween sword does to Excalibur.
But those rich kids paid our bills.
We worked an absinthe party at the Bowery Hotel. There were flip-book makers and a girl turned into a candelabra, clad only in melted wax. I dashed off portraits. Amber stood on a podium, swirling blue fans, wearing her peacock dress. But all that art was for the benefit of a bunch of drunk liquor executives.
Reeling with exhaustion, we ducked into the back room to peel off our painful costumes. A buyer staggered in. He leered as Amber undid her corset. I tried to puff myself bigger. “We’re changing!” I wanted to shout, but my voice came out a squeak. He stayed, his face blank. Why were we protesting? This party was for him.
Amber and I flew to Las Vegas for Miss Exotic World, an international burlesque competition. Women with names like Kalani Kokonuts and Immodesty Blaze spent thousands of dollars on costumes, and they planned acts that might begin with them descending from the stage in golden wings, then jumping through gymnastic backflips, blinding the audience with crystal and tulle. Amber was performing, and I was running a Dr. Sketchy’s.
Though she was broke, Amber bought a lavish history of burlesque at the Miss Exotic World bazaar. It included several photos of her own performances. I leafed through it while snacking on potato chips. Crumbs fell into the book. My greasy thumbprints marked up the pages.
“Oh my god, you animal, what are you doing? That’s my history!” Amber shouted, grabbing the book out of my hands. She wouldn’t speak to me for the next hour.
What a history it was.
In 1955, the burlesque performer Jennie “the Bazoom Girl” Lee started the Exotic Dancers League of North America. At their first meeting, the nine assembled dancers threatened to strike over low pay. The league developed into a cross between a labor union and a social club, and Jennie kept throwing reunions for her colleagues. But the league had another purpose: to preserve burlesque’s fragile history. Jennie began to assemble the art form’s flotsam—G-strings, fans, show programs—finally moving them to a forty-acre goat farm in the Mojave Desert in 1980. She planned to build a museum and even a place for impoverished dancers to retire.
She dreamed of calling it “Jennie Lee’s Miss Exotic World.”
It took cancer to stop Jennie Lee. During the ravages of chemo, her friend and fellow exotic dancer Dixie Evans moved into a trailer on that goat farm to take care of her. After Jennie died in 1990, at sixty-one, Dixie decided to throw a pageant to bring attention to the burlesque museum. She sent out press releases, promising a reunion of the greatest burlesque performers in the world. The first year, it was only Dixie and the cameras.
But that press was enough. The next year, the pageant exploded. As the burlesque revival caught fire in the 1990s, young dancers seeking their heritage flooded Dixie’s trailer, posing in boas in the California desert. The pageant moved to Vegas, where Dixie celebrated her former colleagues. Some were legends, like Tempest Storm, Tura Satana, and Satan’s Angel. Others were forgotten, earning their livings now as craps dealers or nurses. Others were unemployed or disabled. These were tough women, working-class, some with criminal backgrounds. Some started dancing naked as early as fourteen. They fucked celebrities and clawed fortunes in vaudeville’s less-reputable sister industry, only to be discarded as soon as their scars started showing on their faces.
Conventional morality would try to convince us that these women brought their hardship on themselves. Glittering hussies are expected to end up broke, alone, and preferably stricken with some disease—their punishment for flouting society’s dictates.
Exotic World proved this was a lie. The year we attended, dozens of retired dancers stood under the lights, evening gowns clinging to their small, wrinkled bodies. Some danced. Others just told us about their lives. They spoke about hootchy-cooch tents and Cuban burlesque halls; about sleeping with Elvis and dancing with Duke Ellington. They told us about the 1970s, when strip clubs supplanted theaters. After that, drugs and stage fees destroyed their industry. The women had frank, rough voices, and a raw charisma that showed what performers they must have been. When Tai Ping, who once stripped at the Follies Burlesque Theater, took the stage in a wheelchair, forcing her words out with great effort, the young dancers applauded her wildly.
Miss Exotic World was an act of cross-generational solidarity. The women onstage, torn by time, were pioneers for us younger women in the audience. Saluting them was the least we could do. In the sex industry, we were all we had.
On the last night at the pool, Amber Ray danced to “Malagueña Salerosa,” “the girl with the rose-petal lips.” She wore layers of black and crimson, and held a bouquet of roses in one hand.
As Amber stripped, she smashed
the bouquet against the floor. She beat it against her body. She deep-throated the roses. She tore buds from their stems and threw them at the audience. She bit into the flowers, then spat the petals from her dark red mouth.
I watched her dance and saw a grace I’d never have. Like all these dancers, she was an icon. I was something else, something watchful and silent—not a performer but a spy.
After Amber finished her act, I ran to her and told her how wonderful she was. She wasn’t in the mood. She had put everything into the performance. The audience had taken it, and so had I. She had nothing left. As dusk started to fall, Amber held her head haughtily, but I could see the strain on her face. Wrapping a silk robe around her shoulders, she walked over to the poolside bar and ordered a drink.
You entered through a garage door on Chrystie Street, between Stanton and Rivington. Above the door hung a sign advertising lamps. The entrance was made to be hidden, but you couldn’t miss the line. All the way to Stanton, they texted and shoved: giraffe-like fashion models, their high heels snapping beneath them; finance bros, growling that they weren’t inside. A TV star, furious to be kept waiting, swung the post holding the velvet rope at a bouncer. He missed and took out a taxi window instead.
No one who waited in line at the Box got in. The only way in was to call a contact inside. The Albanian bouncer would step aside with a scowl and you’d pass through the hidden door, through drape after crimson drape—like reentering the womb. The door girl was six foot one, perfection with her Afro, her scant, sequined dress, her smile like maybe you belonged. The sign behind her warned “No Photography.” Best to leave no proof of the goings-on inside.
You walked to the bar. It looked like a saloon, like a vaudeville hall, like the Moulin Rouge. This was the ur-nightclub you were searching for, of which all other clubs were faint carbons. There, amid the two stories of Krug Champagne, the walls covered with porn collages, the mirrors reflecting model flesh, you found the place to which all other clubs aspired. Even better, it’s been decided that you belong there.
A naked woman spun on a hoop over the bar, lounging like the girl in the moon. Then, fast, she flipped and hung from one muscular thigh. When a customer looked down at his phone, she swiped his twenty-five-dollar drink. Then she raised herself up, sipped the drink, candlelight soft on her bald head. She smirked.
This nightclub meant war—class war.
The bar, however, was only for peasants and cattle. You needed to get to the front.
Lucca guarded the second barrier. He was so tall, so square of jaw and plush of lip, that it was hard to look at him, but you brazened it out anyway, with all the entitlement you didn’t have. Maybe there was space for you. There were two tables in the center lined with brocade couches. These were for invited guests—those hot or famous enough to increase the Box’s cachet. They were not allowed to leave the table’s perimeter. Booths lined the walls. To sit there cost five thousand dollars. A bottle of vodka started at five hundred. If you were a man, after you ordered a bottle, girls would descend on your table and drink half the liquor. They might have been paid by the house.
At the Box, customers were sheep, meant to be shorn.
The DJ spun. Models crowded the stage steps, thrusting their angular buttocks to “It’s Britney, bitch.”
Down the white spiral staircase was the ladies’ room, where you could buy gold-plated dildos. The men’s room attendant gave you cigarettes, in defiance of the smoking ban. “Because you’re worth it,” he drawled. You were not.
Each stall had a small shelf, perfect for cocaine.
You painted a new face on in the mirror—something hot enough, edgy enough, rich enough, to let you climb the VIP stairs. Upstairs were small alcoves, curtained off. One of them housed the stripper pole where Lindsay Lohan had busted her nose. The crowds were thick here. You didn’t say “excuse me.” No one would have moved. You shoved your way to the booths overlooking the stage. They had brocade seats, mahogany tables, and curtains just sheer enough to reveal what you did but not who you were. They gave the best views in the house.
You parted the curtains. You looked out. The music ended. The room went silent. The show was about to begin.
In 2007, New York was exploding. Wall Street had worked out how to perform transactions in fractions of a second, computer-managed deals that sliced debt into air and air into money, and liberated money itself from matter. Cash would be pure math now, the market dictated: abstruse numerical schemes, as gnostic as the lives we were living mediated by social networks, as fast as the networks’ churn. Superprocessor mathematics had liberated money from the uncertainty and sweat of real companies, real labor, the blood and muck of the body.
But if money has no body, the rich did, and after all their hard work those bodies must be indulged. The Goldman Sachs boys blew their money buying Louboutins for sleek, cat-eyed girls of my acquaintance, girls who babysat them as they came down from coke. Dominatrices who fucked themselves onstage with butcher knives (dull, don’t worry, and the blood was fake) turned up as trophy wives. After the New York Post labeled me one of the “sexiest New Yorkers,” a TV host made discreet inquiries through an escort friend. Did I need a patron, she asked.
“I have Fred,” I told her.
She looked askance. “Oh darling, you’re so terribly bourgeois.”
The Box was the totem of New York’s boom years. Ostensibly a supper club, the Box was run by Simon Hammerstein, scion of that Hammerstein, the one who wrote Oklahoma!, and that other Hammerstein, the one who built the grandest vaudeville hall in nineteenth-century New York. Simon co-ran the club with Richard Kimmel, a veteran theater geek. It was Richard who first dreamed the club, wanting to create an immersive art paradise, a Wagnerian decadence engine where everything would be permitted.
The Box would resurrect vaudeville in New York, Simon and Richard promised, as if vaudeville had not been resurrected a decade ago, and was not being performed at dive bars every night by all my friends. But the media loves a famous name for their origin stories. Poor kids never get the credit.
The Box stayed open till five A.M. every night. Beyoncé, Lindsay, Scarlett Johansson slipped out. I-bankers blew twenty grand on bottles of champagne. Onstage, Russian acrobats did backflips over chainsaws, drag queens in blackface shot fireworks out of their asses, and Broadway dancers shoved their bare breasts into the audience’s collective maw. The singer Raven O presided over the nights like a god of sex.
My mom sent me a New York magazine profile of the Box. “Sounds like all the nudie dancing your friends do,” she said. I just shrugged. We were glamorous in the old sense—purveyors of deception, our fanciness cobbled together from sequins and slap. The Box, though—that was real money.
When the Box opened, my friends clambered to audition. A dive bar burlesque show paid fifty bucks a night; at the Box, you could make hundreds. But with the money came a cruelty that was absent from the cheerful stages I’d once danced on. Simon would demand that dancers fuck themselves onstage, and magicians pull card tricks out of their asses. Backstage at the drag bar Lucky Cheng’s, one of New York’s most famous burlesque dancers told me that Simon had flicked her nipple tassel contemptuously during an audition. “I hate pasties,” he had sneered.
Someone composed a song titled “Fuck You, Simon Hammerstein.”
The Box was purchasing our culture, we thought. Every day, performers lined up, hoping to be bought themselves.
Then Flambeaux, a fire-eater I knew, invited me to check out a show. He wanted me to draw a promotional flyer with him and his partner as Punch-and-Judy-style monsters. Seeing this as a way in, I vowed to make the best drawing I’d ever done.
Flambeaux swore I’d be on the list, but, even so, the doorman almost didn’t let me in. I wheedled, and soon the false door opened and I was shoved toward the front.
Flambeaux ran through the crowd in a top hat, stockings, and girdle, a leer cracking his thin Scottish face. He held a gas can. “Wouldn’t it be fun to
ring the funeral bell/On our civilization, and watch it burn in Hell,” the Tiger Lilies sang.
Flambeaux poured the can’s contents madly on the audience, splashing liquid over their suits and evening gowns. It was water, of course, but they were too drunk to tell. One man tried to run. On stage, Flambeaux lifted a drape to reveal a hog-tied girl. She screamed. He shoved an apple into her mouth. He drew a circle with his torch, and flames leapt around her. Then, from his panties, he pulled another torch, like a penis, and lit the tip on fire. The girl writhed in terror. He pulled her up by her hair, leered, and grabbed the apple from her mouth.
The curtain lowered right before he forced the girl to suck the torch.
I was spellbound.
The next act began. Acantha, a blues singer from New Orleans, slunk out. She wore her hair in forties curls, her skin dark against her white silk slip. “I put a spell on you,” Acantha sang. Around her, girls materialized. They wore slips. They were sleepwalkers, the lights blue on their thighs as they hitched up their skirts. They moved as if through gel. Then they ripped open their slips in unison to reveal small, upturned breasts, which they shoved in the front row’s faces.
The curtain closed. It opened. An acrobat balanced on a dildo with one finger. The curtain closed. It opened. The performance artist Narcissister stood on a rotating platform, nude except for a mask, pulling her outfit out of every orifice of her body. The curtain closed.
It was four A.M. I was delirious, covered in sweat, having consumed nothing but stolen popcorn. My mind swam with images. I was bursting with them, as if I’d eaten too much. I couldn’t wait to get back to Fred’s studio and draw. Broke though I was, I hailed a taxi from the line outside, tearing open the door in my eagerness to get back to the studio before the images fled from my head. As the cab sped over the Williamsburg Bridge, I scribbled with lipstick onto the back of a receipt. Crows. Dancers. The earth. The sun rose. The skyline shone silver in that humid dawn. In my excitement, I broke the lipstick.
Drawing Blood Page 15