Some Girls: My Life in a Harem

by Jillian Lauren

  Scream.

  Cut.

  The next shot was the gore shot. The art-department girl had added a black rubber apron, completing her authentic butcher couture. The rest of the crew buried some clear tubing in the sand and arranged it to emerge from behind by neck. While they bustled around me, I lay back on the sand, closed my eyes, and tried not to hyperventilate. I drew back into myself and became strangely sleepy, my twisted ankle pulsing and hot. I wondered if I might be starting to freeze to death. Voices behind me discussed there being some concern about the blood flowing freely through the tubing because it had begun to thicken and form a Karo syrup ice floe. The script supervisor nudged the director and pointed to me on the ground.

  He mobilized. “Okay. The kill. We gotta go now; we’re losing our Victim. Places.”

  Maria positioned herself over me, her bloodshot eyes sunk with deep exhaustion and hunger. She checked that her fangs were secure. The butcher girl came over with a Dixie cup and filled my mouth with a foul Karo slushie that I was meant to spit out at the moment I surrendered.

  Quiet on the set.

  Rolling.

  Action.

  Maria widened her eyes in her best Bela Lugosi and moved in for a slow, dramatic chomp. I couldn’t squirm much due to the precariously placed blood tubing, so I tried to let my face convey the panic. I considered it to be the kind of challenge that separated the amateurs from the pros; I had nothing but disdain for amateurs. I let out one final and absolutely genuine scream when Maria lowered for the bite and a river of what felt like frozen snot shot out from the tube like a geyser and drenched us both. I heaved in death convulsions as she raised her face toward the moon, her eyes wild with the slaughter. I finally lay still and hung my head to the side, blood streaming out of the corner of my slack mouth, my eyes staring straight ahead.

  Cut.

  “That’s a wrap for Victim One. Maria, go get cleaned up for the next shot.”

  The five or so people there gave an unenthusiastic round of applause and the butcher girl threw me a towel. I made a break for it, limping as fast as I could toward the house. A production assistant guarded the entrance to the porch.

  “Outdoor shower,” he said.

  “I’m dying here.”

  “I’m serious.”

  I took off my now-pink shoes and socks and grimly headed toward what was sure to be the crowning torture of the evening. What I discovered was that in East Hampton, unlike at the Jersey shore, outdoor showers have hot water and showerheads the size of Frisbees. I stood on a patch of concrete and pulled my matted hair out of the pigtails while the hot water washed the slime and the cold away and all that was left of the last few hours was the star-strewn Long Island sky and the black, churning ocean in the distance. I shook off the wiggle of misgiving in my gut. It was all in good, campy fun, right? The next audition would be a real audition. The next role I got offered would be a real role.

  Four buxom girls perched on towel-draped couches in the downstairs den of the house. The makeup girl attempted to apply their body makeup evenly with a sponge, but the white pancake kept getting away from her, too thick and cakey in some places, too thin and drippy in others. The girls ran lines with each other, preparing for their upcoming scenes as the vampire wives who initiate Valerie into their coven.

  I changed into my sweats, pulled back my wet hair, and settled in, preparing to wait out the remainder of the long night. The room was all cherry wood, chintz pillows, and wide navy stripes. A table in the corner offered a liter of Diet Coke, a package of bottled water, a stack of soggy sub sandwiches, and some Cheetos. I circumvented that sad scenario and instead found the wet bar. Then I walked around with the Jameson as if I was the lady of the house, acting the gracious hostess and spiking everyone’s sodas with whiskey.

  The whiskey livened up the party. We got buzzed and talked strip clubs and boyfriends, Scientology and colonics, acting teachers and downtown restaurants. We pondered that great feminist question: Why are female vampires called “vampire wives” when male vampires aren’t called “vampire husbands”? In spite of this injustice to our gender, the vampire wives eventually went to shoot their scenes and I curled into a chair and fell asleep, hugging a pillow with a needlepoint pug on it.

  I woke when the vampire wives returned, freshly showered and wrapped in towels, with faint smudges of white still clinging to their hairlines. The sky had begun to brighten with the pale predawn and only Maria remained outside, still filming her final scenes. The assistant director brought in some of the footage shot earlier in the evening and hooked up a second camera to the TV. We all gathered around to watch. I was excited to see myself. I thought I had done a stellar job, considering the obvious limitations.

  We watched what seemed like hundreds of scenes before mine, and every one of them was unbearable. It shouldn’t have surprised me that when I finally appeared on the screen, the lighting was so poor that you could barely see me. I was a flash of yellow hair ribbon, a pair of bouncing white boobs in the darkness. The close-up of my death throes was blurry and would clearly be edited out.

  I drifted out to the porch to watch the sun rise, deciding I didn’t need to see any more. It wasn’t even good in an ironic way. It was just another night with little sleep and another “deferred” paycheck that would never come. At least I had the story. At the end of all of these surreal and pointless nights there was always the story.

  One of the vampire wives, a girl named Taylor who was a dead ringer for Ellen Barkin, followed me out. She and I swaddled ourselves in overcoats and comforters and nestled together on the porch swing. Taylor wore a J.Crew turtleneck and seemed out of place among the low-budget-porn types who comprised the rest of Valerie’s cast. She had thick, strawberry blond hair and a fading sunburn across the bridge of her freckled nose.

  We talked as we watched the sky over the ocean slide through the palest shades of sherbet—frosty lemon and petal pink and powder blue.

  “So what do you do when you’re not freezing your blood-splattered titties off for no pay, sugar?”

  Taylor spoke with a slight Southern accent, which allowed her to call people things like “sugar” with impunity.

  I told her I worked as an intern for the Wooster Group, a legendary downtown theater company. I spent long days at the Performing Garage, on the corner of Wooster and Grand, where I filed papers for Spalding Gray and fetched lattes for Willem Dafoe. I sat in on rehearsals while director Elizabeth LeCompte, like some kind of postmodern shaman, deconstructed, reconstructed, and midwifed into being their current iconoclastic masterpiece.

  When Kate Valk or one of the other devastatingly chic Wooster Group veterans would take pity on their pet interns and treat us to a drink at the Lucky Strike around the corner, the wine would burn the paper cuts at the corners of my mouth. But my hours at the Performing Garage were my best hours. My intern friends there were going to be the main players in the next wave of New York experimental theater; we were convinced of it.

  “They may be the best theater company in the world and I am right there licking their fund-raising envelopes,” I told Taylor.

  “And what do you do for money when you’re not a slave to the arts?”

  I usually lied when people asked me that question, but for some reason I told Taylor the truth. I told her that I split my time between a seedy but hip Canal Street topless bar called the Baby Doll lounge and a far more seedy and completely unhip peep show in Times Square called Peepland.

  I started dancing after I dropped out of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. I had been accepted at age sixteen through an early-admissions program and my parents had packed me off to a dorm room perched twelve floors above Washington Square Park before I even got my driver’s license. When I quit school six months later, I cited my preference for the proverbial school of life, but my father wasn’t buying it. Over shrimp and mushrooms at Jane Street Seafood, he promptly severed my financial umbilical cord.

  “Six months ag
o it was, I don’t need high school, I’m ready for college,” he said, his face blowing up into a scarlet balloon of rage. “Now it’s, I don’t need college, I’m ready for life. Life costs money.”

  “So does college.”

  “Always with the smart mouth. You think it’s funny, this road you’re on? You get nothing. You see how that works out for you and then we’ll see if you change your mind about college.”

  He was right. Life did cost money. And life in New York costs money and a kidney, and that was way more than I was making as a terrible cocktail waitress at the Red Lion on Bleecker Street. One of the other interns at the Wooster Group worked at the Kit Kat Club on Fifty-second and Broadway and she convinced me that they’d be way more tolerant of my lack of natural waitressing ability. I followed her to work one day and spent about forty minutes as a waitress before I shucked my duds and got up on the stage in a borrowed G-string.

  To those who haven’t profited financially from their sexuality, those of us who have often inspired an extreme range of emotions: Why would we take our clothes off for money? What makes us take that initial plunge? What makes one financially strapped girl into a stripper and another into a Denny’s waitress and another into a med student? You want to connect the dots. You all want reassurance that it won’t be your daughter up there on the pole. Shitty relationship with my father, low self-esteem, astrologically inevitable craving for adventure, dreams of stardom, history of depression and anxiety, tendency toward substance abuse—put it all in the cauldron and cook and the ideal sex worker emerges, dripping and gleaming and whole.

  Just look at that checklist. Don’t worry, that’s not your little girl. She’ll never turn out to be like me.

  Dancing at Peepland and the Baby Doll made me enough to keep me in vegetarian stir-fries, nights out at Max Fish, and a shared Lower East Side tenement apartment, but I was hardly bathing in champagne.

  “You work way too hard and you make shit money and you’re gonna ruin your knees,” Taylor told me. “You eighteen yet?”

  I was, barely.

  “Good, because Diane checks up on it. You can’t hand her some phony ID like she’s a half-drunk bouncer.”

  Taylor handed me a card that read “Crown Club” in gold embossed script, with a little crown over the o and a phone number underneath. She found a pen in her purse and wrote her own number down, too.

  “Diane runs the escort agency I work for. It’s the best in New York. You’ve been way underselling yourself. You come work with me and your whole life will change in a heartbeat.”

  An escort agency. It sounded so simple and classy. I imagined Diane as an elegant woman in a cream-colored pantsuit, sensible pumps, and diamond stud earrings. She would seem shrewd and cold but would have a secret maternal side to her, like Candice Bergen in Mayflower Madam. She would be someone to admire, someone who could help me out. I would be less exhausted, have more time to pursue my performing career.

  Taylor put her arm around me. We were new friends braced against the cold, staring out at the cloudless expanse of sky. The sun had risen; the crew had wrapped the equipment and was loading it into vans. The cast members trickled out onto the porch to wait for their rides back to the city.

  The Mayflower Madam thing was a nice fantasy, but I knew I probably wouldn’t call Diane. Escort work was one step too far. I pocketed the card anyway, just in case I changed my mind.

  chapter 3

  On Thanksgiving of 1991, I pulled the card Taylor had given me out of my wallet and called the number. When you find yourself doing things you never dreamed of, it often happens in stages. You take a tiny step over the line, and then you advance to the next line. You might find you’re lonely one day. Or broke, or depressed, or just curious. Or sitting on the couch at your parents’ house and slowly suffocating, an invisible pillow of memories pressed over your face. And you’re already that kind of girl; you’ve already come this far—so what’s one phone call more?

  My boyfriend, Sean, and I were spending the holiday with my family. I had debated whether or not to bring him along, but my desire to have him with me won out over my hesitancy to bring anyone over to my parents’ house. I thought that I was maybe in love with Sean, though I qualified that with the belief that romantic love was a conspiracy employed by the capitalist establishment as a marketing tool and by the media as a Cinderella soporific.

  Before I met Sean, I had engaged in tryst after tryst, crush after crush, boy after boy (and one or two girls), never blinking at the rapid demise of the flame, never expecting anyone to stay. When I met him, I was still seventeen. I had already been a stripper for six months and had never had a real boyfriend, not even a high school boyfriend. Then Sean dropped by the Performing Garage one afternoon to visit friends.

  Sean was thin and doe-eyed, with wiry, shoulder-length dark hair and gorgeous musician’s fingers. He was a broke artist with a patrician pedigree, a talented actor and guitar player who shared a two-bedroom Rivington Street hovel across the street from Streit’s Matzo Factory. I shared a one-bedroom Ludlow Street hovel around the corner.

  We spent our first date eating egg rolls and drinking beer on my rooftop while above us the clouds hung heavy and low. A sudden clap of thunder startled us both to our feet and set off a symphony of car alarms from the parking lot below. Fat drops of rain pelted the tar roof and we stayed there until we were soaked, him bending to hold my head in his hands and kiss me—slow, beer-flavored kisses—while the remains of our Chinese food flooded. It was corny. It was great. It was the best date I had ever had and he was the best guy I had ever met, by far.

  Sean didn’t really care about my stripping. He even came to see me a few times. He liked the shoes and he found it all somewhat titillating. He regularly listened at length to my Fellini-esque adventures, even though he harbored a misgiving or two around the edges.

  We ate our meals at El Sombrero or Two Boots pizza and we drank late at Max Fish with our friends from various bands and theater projects. We bought bad Avenue B coke and snorted it off his Houses of the Holy LP cover while we drank gin and tonics from coffee mugs and talked all night about art, about levels of disconnection, about media, about our desire for a “real” experience of life. After a while, I figured I was in love, but I kept my fingers crossed when I said it, in case I was wrong.

  Sean and I arrived at my parents’ house by the same bus I’d ridden a thousand times throughout high school when I traveled to the city for acting classes or dance classes or rock shows that I’d lied about and said I was sleeping at a friend’s house. The trees had already shed most of their leaves but the lawn was still bright, poison green. The gray, bi-level 1970s house was a no-statement statement, a proud monument to the status quo. Every house on the street was a variation on the same theme, a different configuration of the same Legos.

  My parents swept us in the door with overeager hugs. My father was thinner than I’d ever seen him, his hiatal hernia making it nearly impossible for him to eat. His cheek touched mine and it was damp with cool sweat. He was visibly sick and it shook me. What would I do if something happened to my father? He had always been a rock, one of those people who think doctors are for the weak and dentists are a waste of time.

  He goosed me on my way up the stairs and I tripped, catching myself with my hands.

  “Hey there, porky. Guess you decided to start eating again.”

  And to my boyfriend, he said, “Isn’t she dainty? She used to dance around up here and we’d call her Katrinka.”

  The Powerful Katrinka is a character in a series of silent films. She was played by Wilna Hervey, a comedic actress who stood six feet three and weighed three hundred pounds. It was my father’s pet name for me when he thought I was being a clod. My father was a rock. A rock tied to my ankle as I fell overboard. That quickly, I shifted from being concerned for his health to hoping he would starve to death right there at Thanksgiving dinner, with a banquet of food in front of him.

  I escaped the ensui
ng Thanksgiving preparations and took a breather in the downstairs den. I sat on the sectional sofa underneath a recent family photo that I had reluctantly consented to. In it, my family stands stiffly on a patch of grass in the backyard. The white pool deck hovers behind us like a flying saucer and the harsh light of the sun flattens us into two-dimensional blocks of color. Incongruously spindly legs support my father’s porcine torso. He squints into the sun, his crow’s-feet an etching of dissatisfaction.

  My mother’s skin is shiny and stretched and still young looking but she stands like someone just poked her sharply in the sternum. My brother, Johnny, wears a gorgon’s head of unkempt dreadlocks and I balance beside him with an innocuous white T-shirt and a strained smile, the same smile that appeared whenever I was in my parents’ house, an involuntary reflex as dependable as a leg twitch following a rubber mallet to the kneecap.

  Sean was with Johnny in his room listening to Pink Floyd. They hung their heads out the window and Johnny shared the joint that was usually glued to his bottom lip.

  My parents adopted Johnny when I was four years old. I waited on tiptoe for his arrival, dangling my pigtails over the white iron railing that ran across the top of the staircase. My mother walked up the stairs holding a blanket-wrapped burrito of a baby with a prune face and black hair that swirled like cupcake icing. I loved this tiny, warm person immediately. He was a living doll for me, with his baby smell, his fat, soft arms, and his wide blue eyes. I liked to cradle him on the couch for what felt like hours, to tickle his ears and kiss his miniature nose.

  Johnny wasn’t an easy baby. He wasn’t as quick or funny or eager to please as I was. Whether or not this was true initially, it’s difficult to deviate from such a script once it’s written for you. Johnny was troubled from the very start, my father says, the implication being that it’s not his fault how Johnny turned out—the Obsessive Compulsive episodes, the ruinous acid trips, the religious extremism.