This wasn’t like the burlesque shows I’d danced in, where friends cheered no matter how badly I missed my mark. This was New York at its most fucked and glamorous. The rich and poor rubbed against each other until they bled. This was angry. It was louche. It was corrupt with millions of dollars. It was for real.
The car let me out at Fred’s building. I waited outside for a moment. Bushwick was silent, the illegal spray shop closed, a cat prowling outside one of the warehouses. I breathed harder, to cover the ache in my throat.
The Box was my girl. My muse. My Moulin Rouge. I wanted in.
I knelt in the center of Fred’s studio, spreading out the paper. Already I knew what I would draw. In that snowy field, I saw Flambeaux rising like a god. I photographed Fred naked for reference. Flambeaux’s skin would be yellow, licked with flame, and behind him on a platform graven with the tree of life, a fire spinner would arch, bending backward, her hair flowing like water. At his feet, I drew the audience. They were small as insects, swarming, dancing, climbing, taking selfies. I drew a rich geezer, his arms draped around two models in their bubble dresses. On the curtains I carved out other worlds: the private boxes with couples fucking inside, the line of aspirants, the bouncer turning away a yuppie vomiting on the velvet rope. At Flambeaux’s feet, this carnival fought for attention, enlivened by my hatred.
But the stage was Olympus, surrounded by clouds. Flambeaux didn’t notice.
That night, Fred and I slept on the fold-out couch. I propped the drawing up so I could stare at it as I fell asleep. “Stop looking at it,” Fred chided me. “Your eyes aren’t fresh.” But I wanted to fall into it, and each morning I returned, drawing obsessively, populating my world. Then I painted over the lines in watercolor, till it shone warm like candle flame.
It took me a week to fill that three-by-four-foot piece of paper.
I finished it in ecstasy, scanned it, and sent it to Flambeaux.
He wrote me back a week later: “Saw the painting, darling. I was hoping for a Punch and Judy look, but this is more cartoony. Sorry, not really my thing.”
I closed the laptop and looked at the painting. I searched it for flaws, but, for once, I found none. I loved it unreservedly. Its lines were tight. Its details swarmed. It came to me in a fugue, and it was exactly what I wanted.
He’s wrong, I thought. I’m finally good enough.
Without Flambeaux’s help, I wasn’t getting past the Box’s bouncers. I put the painting away and gave up all thoughts of returning to the nightclub.
Instead, I started illustrating for $pread, a magazine by and for sex workers, and got to know its news editor, a then-escort named Audacia Ray. $pread gave me my first taste of sex worker activism. Despite their differences, gay porn stars, street-based prostitutes, phone sex girls, and thousand-dollar-a-night strippers were all finding common ground: They were dismissed by the square world as victims, threats to public health, causes of “pornification,” rescue projects, and idiots. They were a contagion, to be monitored, rescued, arrested, and caged. In the pages of $pread, they could try to push back.
$pread introduced me to an alphabet soup of organizations: SWOP-NY, PONY, the Sex Workers Project. Here, neither my low-cut dresses nor my naked model past was held against me. Instead, they were points in my favor. The sex workers I met were fighters, sarcastic, smart, tough as brass knuckles. In them, I found comrades for whom the naked girl industry was neither stupid nor shameful. It was family. In 2007, $pread included me in an art show titled Sex Worker Visions. The previous year’s poster had been illustrated by Cristy Road, who had silkscreened a stripper, ass in the air, her face ugly and smart. Behind her, tanks invaded Iraq. Her body was a challenge to the state.
I ran up to compliment Cristy. She looked like a Cuban punk Rosie the Riveter, pompadour swept back by a bandanna, script tattoos up her arms. She knew my work. I knew her work. She’d been professionally naked. So had I. The straight world had kicked us both. And yet we kept drawing. We hugged in recognition.
Besides editing $pread, Audacia eked out a living in a dozen different roles, including author, porn performer, community organizer, and curator. She invited me to do a solo show at Arena, a dungeon in SoHo that sometimes hosted exhibitions. More elegant than any gallery, Arena looked like 1890s Shanghai, all brocade, bondage chairs, and glossy red paint. One room was midnight blue, filled with geometric paper screens that concealed a cross on which dommes flogged submissives.
For the show, Audacia and I settled on the theme of demimonde. Demimonde, French for “half world,” referred to the liminal space of prostitutes, journalists, artists, and hustlers. As the American safety net frayed, more and more of us turned to the demimonde as consolation.
Inspired by my painting of Flambeaux, I created more portraits of the demimonde’s darlings. I drew Ophelia Bitz, a London burlesque dancer, as a female Dorian Gray. But unlike Dorian, who was just a model, my Ophelia was an artist too. She painted herself obsessively. She sat surrounded by discarded canvases, each of them showing a different stage of death, while tiny girl-things presented her with more canvases. Her old age watched her from a cage. It was even bigger than my Flambeaux portrait, and the lines even more apt. I stared at it afterward, drunk on my own capacity. Then I gave her a companion: Dusty Limits, a blade-slim London emcee. I drew him the same size but flipped, also painting to avert his own death. But he kept his youth in a cage, dressed as a Catholic choirboy.
I drew Amanda Lepore, a trans performer who’d been famous since the ’90s. Amanda had gotten so much surgery that she looked like a rubber Jayne Mansfield. Her lips were injected till they resembled nectarines, her nose nonexistent, her eyes stretched into slits—a Barbie woman in her fifties, skin smooth as ice. Amber Ray had taken me to her birthday party, held in a half-gay, half-straight strip club. Ignoring the division, Amanda led her muscle boys over to the straight side, where lithe girls squatted over finance bros in recliners, letting the men suck their tits. But Amanda could have given a fuck about the finance bros’ desires. She pole-danced with abandon.
I painted her eating men.
I painted Amber twice. In each, big Amber was a costume shell, and little Ambers crawled over her, gluing on crystals. I painted the dancer Gal Friday as a hot air balloon. I framed the painting of Flambeaux too, for good measure. Who cared if he wouldn’t use it? I would.
The show sold well. I drew more and more demimonde surrealism. I locked away all thoughts of the Box.
Then Buck Angel showed up in New York and pulled me back through its doors.
Buck Angel advertised himself as “the man with a pussy.” He was middle-aged and dangerously muscular, with a lined, boyish face, pierced nipples, and a tattoo reading “Irish Boy” across his massive back. Buck had been born with a vagina. Though his family had raised him as a girl, he knew he was a boy. While he was still living as a girl, he worked as a fashion model; with his platinum crop and catty eyes, he was pure tomboy sex appeal. But he loathed the feminine objectification that went with modeling, and he turned to drugs to cope. Testosterone fixed him. Suddenly, he was exactly as he should have been. Buck cleaned up, went sober, had his tits surgically removed, then pumped iron until he grew menacingly jacked. He worked security at the dungeon owned by his wife, one of Hollywood’s most famous dominatrices. Then, after she left him for one of the directors of The Matrix, Buck started doing porn.
At first, no one wanted porn starring a trans man, even one who looked like Hell’s own Angel. He fought for a space in the world, going to porn convention after convention, selling the DVDs he produced himself, under a banner he hung himself. Though mainstream porn companies looked down on him as a freak, more people came to his table at every event. By 2007 he was a star, flown to Europe to perform at massive gay sex parties, sneering on magazine covers with his trademark cigar. But he also spoke at universities like Yale about accepting himself as a man, and his advocacy made him an idol for many young trans men.
I first saw Buck
in Bizarre magazine. Delighting in his earned masculinity, I sketched him, then sent the drawing to his public email address. I yelped with glee when he sent me a thank-you note signed “woof.”
I kept drawing Buck. Over the years, we became friends, smoking cigars together when he came through New York.
“Women are better at languages because they talk so much,” Buck once told me.
“You’re a sexist swine,” I answered, and he laughed with delight.
Buck had starred in one of Richard Kimmel’s experimental films, and in early 2008, he came to New York to perform at the Box. As he toweled off after his act, Buck saw a copy of my painting of Flambeaux carelessly taped up in a corner of the dressing room. Recognizing my work, he told Richard to invite me over.
At the Box, Buck hugged me hard before depositing me at his table. Forty-five minutes later, he appeared onstage as a strongman in a striped unitard. Smoke rose around him. “What makes a man a man?” Raven purred. Buck lifted a huge barbell. He put out a cigar on his tongue. Girls fell at his feet. Then he tore off the unitard. He sneered, flexing his biceps and thrusting his pussy at the audience. He was as gorgeously lit as a ballerina at Lincoln Center. “Who has big balls? He has big balls!” Raven sang. The rich girls in the balconies swooned. I drew madly.
“Hey! Draw me!” came from below the table. Someone poked me hard in one arm.
I looked down. On the floor stood Marilyn Manson’s three-foot-nine-inch, far more handsome twin. “Move over,” he snarled, shoving me aside and hopping up onto the banquette next to me. He wore a heavy metal shirt with the sleeves ripped off. His biceps, gym-swollen, were covered with tattoos of one of New York’s most famous artists. His black hair hung in a pageboy cut. He had an angular jaw, wide lips, and arrogant, pale-blue eyes. He introduced himself as Nik Sin.
“Stay still, then!” I hissed back. Nik shoved a finger into my nose and then licked it, laughing.
In the dark, I drew him, swatting away his hand. I could barely see the paper, but I tried to capture the rays of contempt Nik was throwing toward the audience. You fucking peasants, he seemed to say with each curl of his mouth. Breaking his promise to stay still, Nik kept peering over at the paper. He scowled with disgust.
When he thought it looked finished enough, he snatched the sketch. He scampered off, I knew not where—until Richard Kimmel appeared in a tuxedo at my table. With his face hidden behind a beard and curling hair, he looked like a black sheep.
“I love it!” Richard cooed. I couldn’t see how that was possible: the sketch barely looked like Nik at all.
“Come back tomorrow, gorgeous,” Richard told me, before disappearing down the stairway to the dressing room. “We’ve always wanted our own Toulouse-Lautrec.”
When you’re a young woman, older men always want to help you.
There was Nathan, who walked into a fund-raiser for the Sex Workers Outreach Project and handed out a card listing the locations of his three homes. There was Adam, who followed me to a convention where I was speaking. He left messages with the hotel staff and had to be dragged out by security after trying to force his way into an event he thought I was attending. Finally he caught up with me at Hooters, where I was drinking with a friend, the artist Katelan Foisy. She had just posed for Dr. Sketchy’s at the convention, and was still painted blue like Kali Ma, with only a necklace of skulls covering her breasts. Adam glared at us from the other end of the room. Finally, a waitress passed me a note, in his wobbling hand, offering to “help me” whenever I was ready
There were the innumerable invites to dinners at clubs with friends’ occasional sugar daddies. We’d doll up carefully, still wondering if the world might open to us that way, but we’d get only free lobster for our trouble.
All these men said they would take us out of our pitiful circumstances and onto the grand stage of life. They never did.
Richard was not like that. He was the first man who saw me as an artist.
I left the Box at four A.M. and fell into a waiting cab. As the car sped over the Williamsburg Bridge, the skyline shone like a promise. I left my apartment dark when I got home so I wouldn’t shatter the magic. Lying on the mattress, I watched the sky turn pale. Roaches skittered over the linoleum. “I found it,” I whispered to myself. “I found my muse. I just have to make them notice me.”
The Box had many owners, but I knew only Richard and Simon. Whereas Richard was all wheedling kindness, everyone hated Simon. He had the sort of wealth that gave immunity—Daisy Buchanan wealth. No matter what someone like that snorted, whom they fucked, or how they failed, their grandkids would never have to work. So much of my life was spent chasing money. It shaped my friendships, distorted my thinking. Money meant nothing to him. Compared with my grasping, Simon was a Borgia prince.
I huddled on the corner of the stage, waiting for Richard to notice me. My thrift-store evening gown seemed so cheap, and I felt the way I used to when I hid in the corner of Shakespeare and Company—small and unlovable.
Richard came over and embraced me. Then the curtains parted. A woman strode onstage in a high Mozart wig and a frock coat, naked from the waist down. She sat on a chair. Nik skulked onstage, in a wig and frock coat of his own, carrying a conductor’s baton. He raised his hands.
The woman queefed Beethoven’s Fifth.
“Le Petomane!” I cried, remembering a history of theater. A nineteenth-century performer at the Moulin Rouge, Le Petomane saved himself from life as a baker’s assistant through his ability to fart whole symphonies. He toured the continent, performing for the Prince of Wales, King Leopold II of Belgium, and Sigmund Freud. Alas, times change, and the horrors of World War I caused La Petomane to grow disillusioned with his art. He fell back onto his first skill, baking, and died in 1945.
“Yes!” Richard grinned. “No one has ever gotten that reference.”
Simon came up to us, shining in his white tuxedo. He was sweating profusely, and his beard was unkempt in the style of very rich men, who do not have to be attractive to sleep with beautiful women.
“What’re you drinking?” he demanded.
“Gin and tonic.”
He flew off. A waitress returned with a tray of seven gin and tonics. She placed the whole tray next to me. I stared at them helplessly. Richard had vanished again.
I drew.
The best art comes out of boredom, and in the hour-long gaps between acts, I was bored. I drew the dancing hedge-fund boys with sparklers shoved into their champagne bottles, like homing beacons for suckers. I drew the beautiful bartenders as crows, the lighting guy as an angel perched high on the balcony, overlooking the dancers. His legs dangled overhead as he pointed the spotlight toward the stage.
I sat next to the stairs that led down to the dressing room. Stagehands slouched on the staircase, smoking. Richard never came back.
I waited for hours, working my way through Simon’s gin and tonics. By dawn, I decided Richard must have moved on to better company—that I and my cheap dress and cheap historical references had failed. I snuck out, slumped with disappointment.
I woke up around noon, scratching a mosquito bite on my eyelid. My mouth tasted sour, and I had a creeping pain behind my eyes. My phone glowed. “Fuck you,” I muttered, wanting to go back to sleep, to hide from last night’s failure.
The phone beeped again. I flipped it open and saw four texts from the same New York number.
“Darling honey baby”
“so sorry I didn’t get to say goodbye.”
“Come back whenever you want.”
“You’re brilliant brilliant brilliant.”
I came back to the Box the next night, and the night after. I claimed my own spot on the stage steps, summoning up the courage to kick off heiresses who stole my designated pillow. Richard told me that no part of the club was forbidden to me, and I explored each corner luxuriously. I could linger in the VIP rooms. I could draw the Hammerstein Beauties, as the Box’s chorus line was known, as they stretched their legs
over their heads in the blue light that shone moments before the curtain rose. We were all working, they and I. With my pen I traced their images over and over, tattooing the moment onto my sketchpad, dancing with my hands.
I hung out in Raven O’s dressing room, watching him squeeze himself into his trademark skin-tight striped pants, flexing his muscles critically in the mirror, twirling his starry hair into horns. Once one of New York’s great drag queens, Raven now strode with cartoon machismo. A former ballet dancer, go-go boy, and stripper, he’d been using his body as a tool for more than thirty years.
I was too broke to buy a good purse, so I stowed my pens in a box from the dollar store. Before turning up each night, I slashed my lips with Wet n Wild, jammed my feet into stilettos, and held my chin up, so the doormen would remember I belonged. Though I could barely see the paper, I bent over my sketchbook and scribbled everything I saw around me. The next morning, the sketches were as indecipherable as cuneiform. I dredged up my memories, turned them into finished drawings, and then showed up back at the club.
No one mentioned paying me, and after the first night, no one asked me to come back. I just decided that the club was mine. If I stayed there long enough, they’d have to offer me a job. At Fred’s loft in Bushwick, I shooed him away as I worked on a new watercolor each day, crying since it was never as good as the scenes I’d seen the night before. I’d make a print on Fred’s printer and present it to Richard, who would coo, hide the print, and vanish.
Some nights I had to pry my fingers apart to keep my aching hands working. With my left hand, I curled my right palm around my pencil, forcing myself to draw the Italian acrobat Rudi Macaggi. The audience mutated into pigs on the page, snorting cocaine like truffles. The backdrops dissolved into stars.
Drawing Blood Page 16