Nine Kinds of Naked (21 page)

“Come on,” Diana interrupted, passing the joint and picking up her jug of water. “It's not like he was chanting ‘slut' over a voodoo Barbie doll every night while masturbating in her face. This pubescent prick you're talking about hardly describes a dark magician.”

“Sure he does. We all do. Most of us are oblivious in our wizardry, spellbound by our own social structures, but that doesn't change the fact that every word is a magic word. You do understand that we are only what we permit each other to be, don't you? Well, he and others like him only permitted me to be a slut. Messing with my self-perception like that undermined my confidence, which rendered me even more easily manipulated. Whether or not he was aware of what he was doing, he laid a hex on my sex, plain and simple. Maybe he's a clueless apprentice, but it's still sorcery. An oblivious wizard is a wizard nonetheless.” Elizabeth hit the joint a second time and then tapped it out. She probably shouldn't have taken that second toke. With this shit, as Diana was fond of saying, you take a hit and let it sit.

“But you
are
a stripper who calls herself Betty Boobs.” Diana gestured with her water jug to the V-sling Elizabeth was wearing, a racy costume essentially consisting of a skinny pair of black vinyl suspenders joining just in time to cloak her vulva. It could have been a pair of panties stretched all the way up to her shoulders; a ludicrous getup, albeit alarmingly seductive. It was the supreme elaboration of the decolletage, a neckline plunging headlong and reckless over the precipice of puritanical prohibition. Diana made certain that her glance did not gaze. “How do you know you're not still spellbound?”

“No.” Elizabeth ignored her second question. “I
am
a woman. Everything else is an illusion. Taking my clothes off is crafting an illusion, just like putting clothes on is crafting another illusion. You know that as well as I do. That's why every woman in this place euphemistically describes her job as
dancing.
We're not stripping, we're
dancing.
And actually, we're not even doing that. We're conning. Everything is cloaked in illusion.”

“But you adopted the nickname he gave you as your stage name.” Diana was amused. “You're spellbound and you don't even know it.”

Elizabeth pursed her lips. “There's never been any question that I'm spellbound. Everyone is walking around casting spells on others, conning each other into preferred labels and identities. We're casting spells out there, on ourselves as well as on the customers. And as far as they go, the more the men believe that we are writhing nympho sex objects, the more money they're conned out of.”

“I don't know,” Diana interjected. “It's not all make-believe. There
is
such a thing as a coke whore in this business, you realize.”

“Of course,” Elizabeth replied. “But those are the women who've forgotten that they're acting, and they probably forgot because they used too many drugs to deal with the stress of all the counterfeit intimacy and manufactured rapport. They got lost in the role, and the customers enchanted
them
into thinking that's who they really were. It's mutual enchantment all around.”

Diana nodded, then added, “But it's only half as effective
when you pretend. The spell, in your words, works best when you
become
the writhing nympho sex object they want you to be.”

“Naturally.” Elizabeth adjusted the straps of her V-sling such that her areolas were fully covered. “That's true of any role in any situation, whether you're a stripper or the president. But the goal,” she glanced at her preposterously erotic reflection in the mirror, “the goal is not to confuse your role with your soul.”

 

60
W
AIT A SECOND
, Elizabeth thought as she writhed like a nympho sex object in front of a stern man. It had just occurred to Elizabeth that he who controls the symbols controls the illusion, and though she was casting the sex con, it was only at the command of he who was casting the money con. And whereas her sex magic was very potent in the trickle of this particular tributary, it would be mostly powerless in the gush of society's main streams. His money magic, on the other hand, held absolute power nearly everywhere. Who's conning who?

Elizabeth pulled the straps of her V-sling to the side, dramatically releasing her breasts and revealing her forbidden nipples to the angry fellow who sat there holding his bottle of beer as if it were his cock. And why is there a market for this, anyway? Elizabeth wondered on. And what is he buying, exactly? A doll in the playhouse of his imagination? A fantasy where he pretends that my interest here is less than economic, where I pretend to realize his fantasy, and he gets to enact the masculinity by which he judges his self-worth? A sexuality stolen and sold back to the highest bidder; a masculinity
mangled by the machinery of conquest and commerce. Another spell, another con. He doesn't even know why he's angry. He's one more lost soul, trading enchantments across the universe with another lost soul, pretending my pretenses are not false, paying me to manipulate and deceive him. Where are we that duplicity, disguise, and deceit are the only media by which two souls can acknowledge the presence of another? What lies beneath these blindfolds? And why does this
work?

My, but this is some good herb, Elizabeth noted as she found her favorite frequency of movement, an alluring flow of absolute eroticism that she imagined to be the tip of life's whip, a supersonic snap immensely slowed so that others may withstand its beauty. Elizabeth smiled.
The beauty beneath the blindfold.
The words murmured themselves through her, inspiring further reflection. Humanity is on the lam from love. Unable to bear the brunt of beauty, our hearts are hidden beneath false identity. And as to why this con works: It works because most cons work. No one wants to believe that they've been deceived, and so they censor any information—no matter how obvious—that requires them to confront their own stupidity. Dancing—
stripping
—it's just one more layer of illusion, a deeper version of everyday delusion. Projections replace perceptions, and the rest is history. This poor dupe is paying to sneak a false peek of the beauty forbidden by fear.

Or maybe I'm giving him too much credit, Elizabeth reconsidered. Look at him, sitting there fondling his beer bottle like the cap's about to pop, another slobbering sucktit fantasizing about titty-fucking my banana squeezers. Yes, oh yes, Elizabeth thought, breathlessly contemptuous, let me roll your dick
between my tits. He's buying a lie, and he doesn't even understand that. Just like everybody else, he thinks he's too shrewd to be taken.

Elizabeth pressed her palms against her breasts as her mark dug another twenty out of his wallet. What a peculiar place, she thought with stoned detachment. We trade minds for masks and souls for roles. Society is a sting, a swindle, a scam. And we are all its grifters.

 

61
E
LIZABETH BEGAN
to regret having taken a second toke off that sativa joint. It was allowing her to see a little too deeply into the layers of social illusion. Usually, she enjoyed the kind herb because it relieved the tedium of pretending to have nothing better to do than writhe nakedly in front of men of all manner and demeanor. It freed her mind from the oppressive setting, releasing her imagination to soar while her body went on autopilot and raked in the cash. A little detachment can be nice, but tonight her mind was seeing much too clearly the falseness of the intimacy and the tragedy of the sexuality. Much too bright a light.

To make matters worse, Diana's “mistress of Machiavelli” remark kept slapping at the formerly stout sails of her self-concept. Elizabeth was all about the con, it was true, but she had never thought of it in Machiavellian terms. When her mind drew a surprise lateral association to something she had once read about Hitler and his henchmen—that most of them were never breast-fed and were really just a bunch of bottle-fed brats—her body began to writhe not in sensuality but in worry. As the argument went, reptiles don't breast-feed,
mammals do. The lack of maternal nurturance that Hitler experienced contributes to the creation of a cold, reptilian personality. A simplistic argument, Elizabeth knew, but this dismissal did nothing to assuage her anxiety. For although Elizabeth knew that her mother had died giving birth to her, she had never fully grasped the implications.
I
was never breast-fed, she realized for the first time in her life.
Am I
the mistress of Machiavelli?

Or maybe the intensity of her insights was exacerbated by the presence of another big-breasted dancer working that night, a touring stripper stage-named Judy Juggernaut. Elizabeth had asked her yesterday why not just Judy Juggs, and was coldly informed with a practiced supermodel's snarl that Judy Juggs was already trademarked by a dancer in San Diego. Then she told Elizabeth to go look juggernaut up in the dictionary. Elizabeth did so, muttering all the while something about Judy probably having thorns for nipples, and found that juggernaut describes a large, overpowering, destructive force, often requiring blind devotion and cruel sacrifice. The word is derived from Jagannath, one of Krishna's names in Hinduism, and specifically from a tradition in which an enormous bust of Jagannath on a giant cart is dragged by thousands of devotees from one temple to another. Allegedly, the cart itself has to be guarded by police to prevent fanatics from throwing themselves under its wheels to be crushed into eternal bliss.

Yikes, Elizabeth had thought at the time, not quite knowing what to make of such a parallel. Did Judy Juggernaut really think of her silicone monstrosities as overpowering forces requiring blind devotion and under which fanatics would
throw themselves to be crushed into eternal bliss? Looking at Judy's gigantically jutting profile, and watching how slavishly the gawking googly ga-ga men mannered themselves as they flung money at her, it certainly didn't seem so preposterous.

And money: the ultimate symbol, that which creates a market for breasts in a society that deprives women of their freedom of toplessness and men of the soothing memory of that central sacrament of infancy. Money: that which makes it possible for men seeking some satisfaction of their tortured curiosity—a curiosity so tortured that it vastly dilates the size of its fantasies—to bribe a woman into making an object of her own body. Money: that which makes it possible for a doctor trained in the arts of surgery to step up and offer to slice her safely. Money: that which makes it possible for a woman to subject herself to major surgery and risk the loss of any erotic sensation from the caressing of her nipples, transforming her breasts into literal fun bags for someone else's buoyant amusement. Elizabeth paused in her anguish to appreciate the irony of a man wildly licking at nipples so numb while the woman moans in phony pleasure as her skin, stretched taut over a plastic sack of industrial chemicals, is slobbered upon. An impossible arrangement without the money con. So many layers of illusion. So much desperation.

“So much baloney,” was Diana's reply as Elizabeth relayed a more pebbled version of her stony stream of consciousness, idly rolling another sativa joint. “There are women in Burma who wear coiled metal necklaces eighteen inches high in order to stretch their necks into those of a swan. And men do that sort of thing, too, by the way. I'm sure that somewhere,
some-when, some tribe or civilization developed the idea that men should carry cobblestones in their scrotums to signify virility. There's nothing you can conceive of that hasn't been done. Weren't you just telling me about that juggernaut tradition?”

“Jagannath,” Elizabeth clarified.

“Whatever. It's horrific or it's hilarious, but it's human, and it has less to do with money than with symbols in general. Humans act upon their bodies the same way they act upon the world at large—thoughtlessly, carelessly, and destructively.” She shrugged. “Boob jobs are weird, but whatever. Humans are fucking weird, but what're you going to do? You can't tell another person what she can and can't do with her own body.” Diana paused, carefully licking the joint. “Well, I mean, you can try to,” she passed Elizabeth the finished joint, “but you'll lose her respect pretty quickly.” Diana shrugged. “Like I said, it's weird but whatever.”

“Would you get a boob job?”

“I wouldn't submit to any unnecessary surgery.” She glanced at her breasts as if to reassure them. She quite liked them, her “goblets of goddessness,” as one fan had described them. Perhaps they did not beckon as beatifically as Elizabeth's, but neither did they intimidate with such breasty braggadocio. Subtle and sublime, they were simply another variety of orchid, dazzling in their own way. “But then again,” Diana continued, “a truckload of college boys has never hey-babied at me and then loudly retracted their invasion once they deemed my chest unworthy.”

“Yuck.” Elizabeth wrinkled her nose again. “Where did you come up with that?”

“It happened to a friend of mine in college,” Diana said. “What, did you think only girls like you were teased for their tits? Haven't you ever heard of tiddly-winks, or the itty-bitty titty committee?”

“Did she get a boob job?”

“No, but I wouldn't have judged her if she had, as weird as it all is. We live in a world of others' expectations. It's difficult to resist.”

“But it's so pointless.” Elizabeth was feeling earnest. She even stamped her foot. “We sell so much of our time for the money that we all hold at arm's reach from one another. It's a rip-off. We should be spending our time, not selling it. You know how they say that you can't take money with you? Well, I think there's only the first grain of a truth there. The whole truth is that you can't take
any
symbol with you, no money, no identity, no language of ideas. Nothing.” Elizabeth pulled out of the V-sling she was wearing. “Nothing but the beauty beneath the blindfold.”