I didn’t know what to do. Was I supposed to just get in front of the camera and start posing? How did it work? I had no clue, so I stood there. The photographer threaded some film into his camera and twisted the lenses around. He was a skinny man and I could smell the cigarette stench in his clothes from five feet away. I’m sorry, but I’ve never had a good feeling about a man with a braid. Men in pigtails kind of freak me out and his puffy white shirt, buttoned only to the second button and tucked into disturbingly snug jeans, didn’t help. Annie Liebovitz this wasn’t.
What would happen if I changed my mind, I wondered. I could leave, right? I was free. No one held me captive and I wasn’t being forced to pose for this calendar.
“What’s the matter with her?” the photographer asked Velouria.
“First time. She’s the door girl,” she told him.
The photographer turned to me and appeared to size me up. I attempted a close lipped smile.
“You want a drink? Champagne? Vodka?” he asked.
“It’s only ten in the morning,” I replied.
“She’ll be fine,” Velouria said as she pulled several colorful silk pillows from a trash bag and arranged them on the white sheet in front of the camera.
“Come on,” she said to me, “Drop the robe.”
I took a deep breath and didn’t exhale. My eyes darted around the room, as if looking for a way to escape, and finally fixed on the tinted windows with their lovely view of the Target parking lot across the street.
“Off with it.” She tugged at the kimono’s hem.
I pulled the sash and the knot holding it together sprung apart, revealing a peek at my red underwear. What was the big deal? Velouria had already seen me naked and that hadn’t bothered me. Think of Rose in Titanic, I thought. And Iris.
“What the fuck do I care?” Iris had said to me one night when I asked her how she did it, how she took her clothes off for strangers every night.
“Pussy and titties are nothing but skin and if some asshole wants to pay me to see some skin then good. It’s no different than showing somebody your ear as far as I’m concerned,” she’d said.
And then there was Falcon.
“It’s all an act,” Falcon explained to me one night, and for her especially, it was.
“A performance. We’re actors,” Falcon believed and then she shook her head of honey colored curls, rolled her eyes and laughed a deep hearty laugh like a man.
By her own description, Falcon was a bull dyke. When Falcon wasn’t at work she wore nothing but jean shorts that reached her mid calves and white men’s tank tops. She liked her shorts to sag so low that her boxers showed and she stuffed her wallet in her back pocket, attaching it to a long chain that swung to her knees and she was, as she liked to say, one bad ass bitch. The problem was, she was stuck in the body of a super model: six feet tall, willowy, all slender limbs and satin skin, big green eyes like a housecat. She was one of the ones who was truly born beautiful and she didn’t need Velouria to contour the illusion of cheekbones and full lips with paints and dusts. She just needed Velouria to turn her into a girl. She’d show up at the backdoor on her motorcycle looking exactly like a high school boy, saunter in and let down her hair so the transformation could begin. She wore her hair in a sort of mohawk, shaved almost to the skin on the sides and back of her skull. The hair in the center she grew very long and in the day she kept this hair knotted up and out of the way or tucked under a baseball cap. When she came to work she’d undo it and the golden waves would bounce free past her shoulders to cover up the shaved sides. Instant feminization. Out of her wife-beater and into a Lycra gown, all Falcon needed was a smear of lip gloss and a few dabs of mascara before she could dominate the stage and sweep up the cash that her adoring fans dropped at her feet. She was ridiculously popular and she could work her customers like few other dancers. She even changed her voice to a delicate, whispery purr while she strutted the floor. None of her regulars would have believed she was a butch, but once she was backstage she’d kick back on the sofa, legs open and a bottle of beer in hand Al Bundy style to check the scores of whatever game she could find on TV. Everyone knew not to mess with the remote if she was around because Falcon would cut a bitch, especially during basketball season. Falcon’s split personality was disconcerting to me, to say the least. I asked her about it, how she did it and why?
“Money, why else?” was her reply. She guffawed and explained how she was a performer so she performed.
“Shit,” she added, “I’ve got the assets, why not use them?” She grabbed her left tit (it was small and real) and squeezed it hard, turning her nipple into a red gumdrop.
So there it was. Pussy and titties were nothing but skin and stripping was a performance. Rose empowered herself and took control of her life by posing naked, so why was I shaking so badly? It wasn’t Iris or Falcon or even Kate Winslet that finally made me drop my robe though. It was Evan. Frigid, unadventurous, unsexy, neurotic, he’d called me. He cheated on me because I was a drag and a frump who lacked both passion and style and I wanted to prove him wrong. If only he could see me now, I thought, and wouldn’t this show him? I bet nobody would want his girlfriend to model anything.
I sucked in my gut and lifted my chin (I’ve heard that makes your posture better and good posture makes you look skinnier), shook my lacquered curls and kicked my kimono to the baseboards. Fuck you, Evan. Fuck you.
And that was that. I was, except for my new red underpants, naked in an unused room of an office, overlooking a Target parking lot with no one to admire me except an enormously fabulous makeup artist and a sketchy photographer with dreadful hair and they didn’t really care because I had nothing they hadn’t seen before a thousand times and we had work to get done. Diana’s shoot was in two hours and Velouria had a lot more work to do on her than she did on me. I guess I’d expected more, I don’t know, drama? Sudden miraculous inner transformation? A revelation? A defining moment perhaps? But the only enlightening wisdom I found in that moment was that walking around without any clothes on is, well, kind of chilly.
If praise were a drug, I’d be a junkie, homeless and strung out on a street corner begging for compliments. Because I couldn’t see my own beauty and worth, I needed other people to convince me it was there, and I needed a lot of convincing. Just like any other fiend, I’d do anything to get my fix, even pose nude for a strip club calendar. When the photographer began to gush about my smooth, clear skin, my classic nose and my “awesome” hair, I got high because I mainlined flattery. Everyone knows that when people are under the influence their inhibitions are lowered and they exhibit poor judgment. That’s how the new red panties ended up on the windowsill. They’d landed there when I tossed them off.
Apparently, I didn’t mind showing my pussy after all.
“She’s incredible!” the photographer raved as the Nikon clicked away, “A fucking natural!”
And the more he talked, the more I hammed it up. I didn’t just “make love to the camera,” I fucked the shit out of it.
Velouria’d helped at first, by posing me. She had me sit straight up, surrounded by the silk damask pillows and she’d draped magnificently dyed, Indian saris in mango and indigo artfully over my left shoulder and across my lap to conceal my belly flab. Long strands of beads she wound around my neck, instructing me to finger them flirtatiously.
“Props help you get into the character,” she explained and they worked.
I loved playing dress-up as a kid and I remember being loathe to give it up, still wanting to fling some of my grandmother’s old silky nightgowns over my head when I was in the sixth grade. My friends had all moved past playing pretend and now wanted to gossip about who frenched who at the middle school dance and how cute Ricky Schroeder was on Silver Spoons. I hated leaving the escape hatch of my imagination and the freedom of play for the perils of puberty. I mourned that loss and hung on to my chest of tiaras and costume jewels much longer than my peers deemed normal. As an adult, I’d
often thought that if I could still play dress up, I would and now I could, except, well, I wasn’t exactly dressed.
I sprawled out over the pillows with my arms over my head and my neck craned back while the strands of beads glittered across my belly. The photographer ate it up so I flipped over onto my stomach, resting my chin on my folded hands and gave him a coy hint of a smile and my best approximation of bedroom eyes. Velouria clapped with delight, threw her head back and howled with laughter.
“You’re amazing!” she shouted.
I sat up in a full lotus and tilted my head first to the left and then to the right.
“Love it!” the photographer said.
I was lightheaded. Giddy from the sheer thrill of the camera and the makeup, the props and the praise. I saw stars from the flash and the spotlights and couldn’t make out anything further than a few feet away, so I forgot that I was in a shabby office with oily grey carpet and I stayed blind to the parking lot view. I could have been in Hollywood. Even though I wasn’t.
As I flirted and preened for the camera, as I pouted provocatively alternately narrowing my eyes for a femme fatale glare or opening them wide to feign innocent charm, I felt vindicated. This was my revenge, I believed, spreading my legs and covering my crotch with my hand while I made an open mouthed face of fake surprise. I’d seen that pose in one of my dad’s dirty magazines back when I was a kid, I’m fairly certain. The photographer laughed drily in encouragement. He sounded like he needed a cigarette, or a whole pack, with that wheeze.
This was for the popular girls who called me names and didn’t invite me to their parties. This is for you, Shauna Stuart, for telling all the boys that I farted and smelled up the classroom when all it was was someone’s egg salad sandwich reeking in a Carebears lunchbox, and this is for you, Jenny Barton, for wrinkling your nose and pretending to gag whenever I passed you in the hallway. Jessica Mall, who wore makeup in fifth grade for God’s sakes, this is for you most of all, for convincing me that I was the ugliest girl who had ever lived. For Keisha, who’d stolen my fiancé, for Evan who was the fiancé, this was for you too and I was beautiful and sexy now, so again, go fuck yourselves. All of you, eat your hearts out. And choke.
Revenge is such a potent motivator. Combine that with too much flattery and I was about to OD on ego.
We did a few more shots of me sitting on a pillow before the photographer wrapped it up.
“I could do a couple standing,” I offered.
“No, Chanel did hers standing up. I like a range of poses for variety,” Velouria said.
“How about like this?” I said. I kneeled with my hands on my hips and tipped my chin down with my eyes gazing up. I thought it would look sassy.
“Nope,” Velouria said, “We’re all done!”
“I think I got more than what I needed! Fantastic shoot,” the photographer said, reaching out to shake my hand.
A handshake? That was it? Somehow I’d expected more, though of what, I had no idea.
It’s hard to come down off a high like that and when you do, the first thing you want is to feel it again, to top it even. I was almost frantic trying to figure out how to recreate the kick it gave me. I didn’t want to go back to being an ordinary door girl again, a jilted fiancée, a hot mess of neuroses who couldn’t get a second date. I wanted to be Vixen again, powerful because she was desired.
The photographer jammed his hand into his pocket and for a second I was pretty sure his hand was going to get stuck or at least come out bleeding because his jeans were so tight it didn’t seem like there was enough room for his knobby knuckles. He withdrew a card and handed it to me: a white with black ink, laser printed and you could see the perforations on the sides. He’d made his own business cards from the kits they sell at Office Depot. Glamour Shots, Boudoir, XXX Adult Photography, it read in corny Comic Sans.
“I do a lot of work in South Beach. I’m one of the top photographers around. You know those ads in the back of The New Times? Most of them were shot by me,” he bragged.
“You mean for escort services?” I asked, scratching the back of my neck. All that hair product was starting to itch.
“And massage parlors, lingerie modeling, peep shows. I do all the promotional work for the top clubs in town. I’ve shot for Jugs, Hustler a couple times even. Score, Oui, Perfect Ten. Buttman, Spank you name it.”
I guess I was supposed to be impressed, but all I could think of was that there was a publication named Buttman and that it had employees and when people asked them where they worked they had to say “Oh, yeah I work at Buttman” but honestly, was I one to talk? I worked at a place called the Bubblegum Kittikat.
“How old are you?” the photographer asked, stroking his ponytail I guess to make sure it was still there.
I told him.
“I’m shocked,” he said, “I’d have pegged you for eighteen. I could still get you into Barely Legal and that’s a hot gig. You can make a career out of a Barely Legal spread. Let’s do something. You keep my number and give me a call anytime. Soon.”
Barely Legal didn’t sound a whole hell of a lot better than Buttman. What did they do in a magazine like that? Pretend to be kids? And people got off on that? Gross. Of course they did and just the thought of this made me sigh. Look at Amberlyn. She could have been the centerfold in a magazine that glorified grown women who looked like children and for all I knew she already was. She’d quit and gone to work at one of the glitzy Palm Beach clubs with stars in her eyes and talk of moving to New York soon to try her luck at Scores, which was the ultimate goal of just about every stripper I knew. Scores or Vegas. They all believed that was where the “real” money hid.
“Sure,” I heard myself saying, “Let’s set something up.”
“I got some work coming up for Exxtacy Escorts,” he said. He pulled a pack of Pall Malls from his back pocket.
52
Velouria rushed me out so she could get back to the dressing room to start on Diana and I, needing to return the kimono and put some clothes back on, followed, clutching the photographer’s card in my wet palm. We had to pass through the club to get there and at eleven am, it wasn’t yet open though most of the dayshift employees were already in their uniforms and setting up their stations. Barefoot cocktail waitresses, who understandably waited until the last possible second before sticking their feet in the heels of death, unpacked napkins and wiped down glassware while the corseted bartenders sawed citrus into wedges and dumped sticky piles of maraschino cherries into the fruit trays where they kept drink garnishes. As I walked through, I felt like royalty. My coworkers looked up from their tasks, smiled and waved. A barback set down a case of Red Bulls just to high-five me and the daytime DJ stopped on his way up to the booth to compliment me. He said I looked hot.
“Are you dancing today?” he asked.
“Oh gosh, no, I was just shooting for the calendar,” I said with a nervous giggle.
Lizzie, who was setting up the main bar overheard. She was a sweet girl who daydreamed about putting down her cocktail shaker and stepping out on stage herself and I often hung out at the bar and talked to her if I was working dayshift and it got slow. She was really into fishing, so a lot of our conversations revolved around marlin or dorado or whatever tournament she’d just won. Lizzie wanted to strip to buy herself a boat.
“With a tuna tower,” she’d said dreamily.
Lizzie let herself out of the bar and ran up to hug me. She was one of those affectionate sorts who must hug and kiss everyone each time you see them and normally this unnerves me as I am not a particularly feely person, but I was coming off of my speedball of compliments and attention so I needed some more to stoke my buzz.
In a hurry, Velouria told me to go ahead and hang out in the club as long as I wanted, though she had to get back to the dressing room fast to put in Di’s hair extensions.
“You look AWESOME!” Lizzie said, almost shouting and then she had to call everyone within range over to look at me.
“You’re dancing today,” she declared. It wasn’t a question or a suggestion. She’d decided for me.
A chorus of cocktail waitresses nodded in unison and the DJ broadcast it over his microphone that he too thought I needed to hug the pole, which brought more people running over and pretty soon I had a crowd around me and there it was. I was high again. Dizzy and spinning with it. Me, the center of attention.
“Take your robe off!” Lizzie egged me on, “Let us see how gorgeous you are.”
My flair for drama took over and I spun around, looked over my shoulder and dropped the kimono to mid-back.
“More! More! Come on!” Lizzie squealed, jumping up and down and clapping.
The kimono crumpled on the floor and I wiggled my ass in its red panties, keeping my arms crossed over my boobs. Everyone went wild clapping and hooting. I heard a few approving whistles as well, so I pivoted on the heel of one bare foot until I faced the rowdy group. I flung my arms out to the sides and then stretched them up over my head like I was an Olympic swimmer balanced on the furthest edge of a terrifyingly high platform about to dive into a pool three stories below.
I had lost my god damned mind.
And then somehow I was back in the robe and a cluster of waitresses was dragging me backstage, back to the dressing room where we startled Velouria in the middle of what looked like airbrushing Diana’s face.
“Victoria’s going to dance today!” someone announced.
Velouria was absolutely unfazed by this news and couldn’t have cared less.
“She needs shoes!” Lizzie explained.
Amateur Night at the Bubblegum Kittikat Page 34