Face Value

by Lia Matera

  “Missed you, too, Laura.” He gave my hand a quick squeeze. “But I guess you know that.” He turned his attention to his calzone.

  We ate in silence for a while.

  9

  Sandy rang my bell at about six-thirty. Traffic had been heavy, and I’d only been home twenty minutes, time for a fast shower and a change into unwrinkled clothes.

  He looked surprised when I opened the door. My shirt was flannel, my jeans faded, my shoes comfortable. I’d developed a preference for the wash-and-wear comfort of rainy-climate clothes.

  “New place,” he said.

  I waved him in. The apartment was larger than my last. But the neighborhood, a neglected enclave between the avant-garde bustle of Castro Street and the middle-class stolidity around Mission Dolores, brought the rent down. And the place needed paint, needed its floors stripped, needed new curtains. My furniture, battered as it had become, dressed it up.

  Sandy looked around. “Thought you’d sublet your place. Thought you’d move back there.”

  It didn’t feel right, baring my financial soul. The fault was mine. I hadn’t made my limits clear. I didn’t grudge what I’d spent on Hal’s medical bills and what I’d hoped would be a healing hermitage. But I wasn’t sure either of us had gotten my money’s worth. And sure, I felt a little bitter now.

  “This place cheaper?” He eyed me coolly as he spoke.

  “Quite a bit.”

  “Pricey location, your old flat.” He continued watching me. “But you had your golden parachute.”

  I looked up at him, at his crinkled cowboy face and seen-a-lot blue eyes. We’d been able to work well together, to do everything well together, because we’d always been direct. He knew what had depleted my White, Sayres severance package. He was asking me to put it out where we could talk about it.

  If I didn’t, our relationship remained professional.

  But I didn’t need to hear his “I told you so.” I’d heard it in my head often enough.

  I changed the subject. “It’s all set with the guru. I got it in writing from yesterday’s client that the switch is okay with her. I’m flying to the guru’s island in the morning to meet with him and get our retainer.”

  He nodded.

  “I’m not exactly hot to go to The Back Door. But I want to see this dancer. I want to see what she does. It might become an issue if she decides to sue.”

  Sandy knew I always scoped out parties’ places of employment and other potentially relevant locations. There was no need to explain. The justification was for my benefit. I’d never been to a sex club.

  “My car or yours?” He fumbled for keys in his anorak pocket.

  “Yours.” I didn’t relish parking my Mercedes 380SL in the Tenderloin.

  He held the front door open for me. I glanced up at him on my way out. His face was grim. Since he knew what to expect, I took it as a bad sign.

  10

  The club was a big stucco box painted black with gold stars and silver moons. The marquee announced show rooms and times—Naughty Showers in the San Francisco Room; Space Girls in the Ultimate Room; Crime and Punishment in the Berlin Room—plus The Big Show, Private Rooms, Lap Dancers, and Continuous XXX Videos. “Tonight from 6 to 8,” a hand-lettered sign announced, “a Benefit for SF-FASEL (San Franciscans for First Amendment Sexual Expression): Keep Fun Legal.”

  I’d walked and driven past this club dozens of times on my way to the State Court and the Federal Building. I’d averted my eyes from glossy photos of arched-back, long-haired women in posed pouts. I’d averted my eyes from the smirking men out front.

  It seemed surreal now to follow a cabload of Japanese tourists through the front doors.

  Behind a counter, a sleepy-looking young man sold tickets for twenty-five dollars apiece. A sign propped in front of him announced explicit sex acts within and warned anyone offended by such acts not to enter.

  The ticket seller told the Japanese men that the Main Room was closed until eight o’clock for a benefit. They all nodded in nervous nonunderstanding and paid their money.

  Then he looked at me. “You’re here for the benefit. Pay inside. Main Room. Sliding scale donations, fifteen to fifty dollars.”

  I pulled out two twenties and a ten and handed them to him. “We’re staying for the other shows, as well.”

  He took the money, averting his eyes. I was apparently buying a lack of scrutiny.

  “Enjoy the shows.” He brandished a rubber stamp.

  Following Sandy’s example, I let him touch it to the back of my hand. In riotous script, the ink read “Sex-Positive.”

  He kept his eyes lowered. “Main Room is straight down the hall.”

  Men milling around the lobby saw me and quickly looked away. Each stood apart from the others, reading show-time signs or checking his wallet. They didn’t glance at one another.

  Sandy put his arm around me as we walked past the ticket counter. I turned and asked the ticket seller, “When and where can we see Arabella de Janeiro?”

  His already closed expression clamped tighter. “She may be part of the benefit.”

  I’d taken Margaret’s word for it that Arabella would be here either during or after. I hoped she hadn’t been mistaken.

  We walked down a carpeted corridor, brightly lighted. To our left, thick velvet curtains hung beneath a sign that read “Films.” I stopped, taking a breath.

  At the end of the corridor, under a “Main Room” sign, a large group was assembled. I was relieved to see a fair number of women. As we drew closer, I noticed many had dressed for the occasion, in tight leather and rubber and metallic vinyl.

  Some must have been part of the show. Their bodies were dramatically voluptuous, and their dresses flashed more than teasing glimpses of breasts and buttocks. They mingled with spike-haired groupies with bejeweled ears, lips, and noses. One autographed a nude poster of herself: “Make me wet,” her loopy script requested.

  Beside them were knots of stagy transvestites and a fair number of just-off-work professionals in business suits. A few longhaired old men appeared to be, and perhaps even were, beat poets. Several couples looked like me and Sandy, like intelligent—and slightly uncomfortable —liberals. Others in the throng wore nothing but body paint.

  We stopped at a card table laden with pamphlets, and I offered our donations. We threaded through the crowd and stood in the back of a room painted black like an avant-garde theater. The ceiling was tracked with lights that hit a polished wood stage lined with stripper poles. There were four rows of seats on three sides of the stage, so everyone had a close view of two women acrobatically dancing and licking each other’s bodies.

  I was struck by how beautiful they were. Their figures were utterly perfect. Maybe I’d assumed models in girlie magazines were airbrushed and retouched. These women weren’t. They looked like anatomically correct Barbie dolls.

  As they concluded their dance, a voice from a speaker boomed, “Oh, yeah, aren’t they gorgeous? Aren’t they hot? Now don’t forget, even though this is a benefit, that doesn’t mean you can’t tip. Show these dancers how much it means to you to be sex-positive. Show these ladies how much you appreciate living in freedom. Freedom of expression means no repression and a lot of sex-pression. So come on now, be generous with those tips.”

  People tossed dollars onto the stage, which the women gathered as they minced around, shaking their fannies and running their hands over their breasts.

  As they disappeared behind the curtain, a redhead in skintight black took center stage. “Thank you again for coming here tonight and showing support. As you know, sex workers have finally begun to have a real voice in their own employment.”

  A loud whistle and shouts of “All right!” from the audience.

  “We’ve begun to shape some traditionally male areas of entertainment like porn films into something that bot
h straight women and lesbians can get very turned on by. So we’re especially happy to see that right now, when we’re just beginning to find our voices and take some control, we have your support. Because, as you probably gathered from the disruption earlier, as we become empowered to make some wonderful changes, there is that part of the anti-sex, anti-porn, so-called feminist movement that would shut us up and shut clubs like this one down. And I call that censorship. I call that a lack of understanding about what it means to be a sex worker.”

  To our right, a group of leather-clad women, too assorted in shape and age to be dancers, began whooping and waving fists.

  “Yes, that’s right,” the woman on stage shouted.

  “Let’s tell them you can be a sex-positive feminist, and a sex-positive lesbian, and a sex-positive business person or librarian or whatever you are! Because sex is good, and sex work is good work!”

  “Right on! Right on!” The audience response was country-bar jolly in tone and accent, as if the women were playing a role and having a lot of fun with it.

  A voice at my shoulder said, “Hi.”

  I turned to find the blond lawyer from Hyerdahl’s office standing beside me, still in that day’s purple suit. She was grinning.

  “I love this stuff,” Pat Frankel said, glancing curiously at Sandy. “Naked breasts and butts and loudmouth lesbians. My kind of joint.”

  The speaker announced that she’d be reading an essay from her new book Women With Short Red Nails.

  The three of us were forced back against a wall by people streaming into and out of the small theater. Behind Pat Frankel, a leering middle-aged man tracked the breasts of passing women. Beside Sandy, a tall transvestite, arms folded over his chest, cast darting, almost fearful, glances around the room. Naked people streaked with body paint pushed past, reeking of sex.

  The woman onstage began reading a piece about two lesbians masturbating in a car. I could feel Sandy fidget.

  I turned to Frankel. “Have you ever been here before?”

  “Are you kidding? I got so nervous just walking up to the place I thought I’d chicken out. But I’m glad I came. I always wondered what it was like inside, what kind of shows they have.”

  “Were you here for the disruption she mentioned?”

  She leaned closer, so our conversation wouldn’t disturb others. “An anti-porn group. They came in and tried to grab the mic. Tossed literature into the audience—porn-causes-rape kind of stuff.” She shook her head. “Even Nixon and Reagan couldn’t buy themselves commissions willing to find a connection between pornography and violence.”

  “What happened to the women?”

  “Hustled out. My whiner was with them. I’m doomed to see her everywhere, I guess.” She joined the people around us in applauding the essay we hadn’t listened to. “The protesters get points for costumes, though. One woman wore a giant Styrofoam tray with plastic wrap, like supermarket meat. Another one had a sandwich board plastered with weird pics from S and M magazines. A couple had bondage masks and fake blood, stuff like that.”

  The stage was taken over by a transvestite trio in high drag singing a Jerry Lee Lewis—style rock song titled, “Give Me a Licking.”

  We didn’t talk through it. The singing was good, and the lyrics were funny.

  When they finished, a woman wearing lots of makeup and a frontless dress took the stage. She reminded us where we could find petitions, which organizations we could join or support tonight, and whom we could contact to express our sex-positive attitudes.

  Enlivened by the rock-and-roll piano of the last act, I considered picking up some of the literature. The club vibrated with giddy energy. It was an interesting mix: sex workers, gays and lesbians, intellectuals, people who could belong to any profession, some in business attire, some in jeans.

  Why force this kind of place underground? Most of what sold in this country was merchandised based on sex. It had been commercialized into a capitalist religion, with icons of bikinied women on billboards and TV screens everywhere. Protesting against strip shows seemed as pointless as cutting off a pit bull’s tail.

  The woman on the stage continued, “Now, don’t think we’re going to send you out of here tonight all calmed down, because our last act tonight, well …” She paused, her eyes closed, while a rap tune pounded from the speakers. She retreated as a woman in skintight polka dot shorts began a gyrating dance around the stage, her glossy blond hair swirling.

  For a few minutes, the blonde engaged in pure tease—a flash of genital, a flash of breasts, lots of seductive licking of her fingers and squeezing of her nipples. Then a quieter jazz tune played. She pulled the halter and shorts off and spent most of the next five minutes displaying her genitals at the edges of the stage. There wasn’t much pretext of dancing, just a lot of spread-legged Vs and on-all-fours undulating. Occasionally she turned cartwheels or did roundoffs. Mostly she was on the floor touching herself or hanging over the edge of the stage with her large, perfect breasts in men’s faces.

  I wished I knew what Arabella de Janeiro looked like. I might be watching her now without knowing it.

  Pat Frankel commented, “It probably enhances the show if you’re a lesbian.” From her rapt look, I concluded that she was.

  But even from my less-susceptible vantage, I had to admit the dancer’s routine required exceptional muscle tone and control. If she’d done it clothed on a gym floor, it would have looked like an Olympics warm-up.

  Watching her collect tips, I could hear Sandy’s deep breathing beside me. I could feel myself, totally and immutably heterosexual, respond to her beauty and gymnastic energy.

  I looked at the stamp on my hand. Sex-Positive.

  I whispered to Pat, “But it must be a hard job. It must be atrocious if you’re having an off day.”

  “That’s the truth no matter what your job is,” she countered. “Can you imagine working at McDonald’s with some pimply asshole bossing you around? Or being a motel maid and having to deal with body fluids on the sheets? Or being a farm worker, with all the pesticides they use now?” She looked up at me. “But I hear what you’re saying. I just don’t get why people single this group out and want to make them do something else for a living.”

  Sandy tapped my arm. I turned to find him glancing pointedly at my companion.

  “Oh, I’m sorry. Sandy, this is Pat Frankel.”

  She extended her hand for shaking. “Hi. I work across the hall from Laura.”

  “Sandy Arkelett,” he said.

  “It’s nice you came to this.” She smiled as if it were her party. “I was happy to see you walk in.”

  “Did we miss much?”

  “A couple of strippers, a reading. The outraged anti-sexers were the highlight.” Her smile broadened; she’d enjoyed the strife. She addressed Sandy. “Did you like the show?”

  “I’m with Laura, I guess. I can see why these women trade on their physical perfection. But there’s got to be days it’s near impossible to keep this positive attitude up. That’s got to take its toll. And what for?” He looked around. “Get a bunch of strangers off.”

  “That’s jobs in general. Talked to any lawyers lately?”

  The MC came back onstage, reminding us about the availability of petitions and literature, and inviting us to come back soon.

  As the three of us filed out with the rest of the group, I eavesdropped on conversations: a dancer introducing leather-clad lesbians to her “trainer,” a dowdy older woman embracing a stripper and introducing her to another woman as “my wife, the porn star,” a couple of bleach-haired, earnest men discussing an assembly bill, a woman in skintight stretch lace and four-inch heels telling a long-haired senior that she knew Ken Kesey, too. Several men and women complimented the performers with almost sycophantic effusiveness. I wondered if that was a function of the exaggerated respect liberals felt for “real” workers, or if
it was sexual in nature, if these people had been turned on and were, in essence, flirting.

  We walked out with Pat Frankel, knowing our hand stamps would get us back in.

  “You guys had dinner?” Her cheeks were flushed. She looked amped.

  “We’ve got an engagement,” I told her. “Can we take a rain check?”

  I felt Sandy’s surprise. We really weren’t a “we,” I guess.

  “Of course.” She took a step, waiting for us to walk with her. When we didn’t, she moved on, saying, “Well, good to see you. Glad to meet you.” With an impish smile, she added, “Talk to you tomorrow, Laura.”

  Sandy and I watched her leave. We stood out front a few more minutes until the rest of the benefit crowd dispersed. Maybe we were avoiding being conspicuous. Maybe we were embarrassed about going back in.

  But seeing Arabella, checking out her workplace, was the point of this excursion. It might be my last chance to get a sense of her without her lawyer present, my only chance to learn about her work.

  I would ask her no questions, of course. I would say nothing at all. I’d give her lawyer no excuse to make a fuss later. But I’d take careful mental note of what I saw.

  11

  The ticket seller seemed surprised to see me again. He muttered something about the benefit being over. “I know that,” I said, showing him the stamp on my hand.

  I felt much more flagrant now. Men in the lobby stared at me, then turned away.

  “Come on.” I tugged Sandy’s sleeve. If we didn’t move quickly, I’d lose my nerve. The ticket seller’s reaction told me I’d discover something different from what I’d seen at the benefit.

  As we walked down the bright corridor, I found myself clinging to Sandy’s arm. I was grateful he’d joined me. I’d have hated being alone here.

  We passed an open door marked “Private Room; Separate Admission.” Inside, two nude women sat on a large, low four-poster bed with a scatter of dildos, vibrators, and even, I noticed, a clear plastic speculum. On the other side of the room was a chair. Separating it from the bed was a filament strip I took to be an electronic barricade. One of the women called out, “We’ll get real nasty for you. Buy a ticket and come on in.”