Phoenyx: Flesh & Fire (11 page)

The studio – or what he had called the studio – stood in the heart of the Red Zone, a three-storey tenement block with the name painted on a piece of board above the front door. And painted rather badly, as the name looked more like
EroFux
– or perhaps that was intentional.

Once inside, I had to get past the female Rottweiler at the desk. She looked like she might once have been a starlet, at the time Mae West was talking about some guy’s six inches, but the last thirty years’ worth of collagen and silicone had puffed and swollen her up to look a bit like a rubbery real-life version of Olive Oyl, aged 89, as she might look if drawn by Robert Crumb.

“Yerrrs?” she squeaked at me.

I blinked, thinking she was referring to my rear end. “My what?”

“Yerrrs, can I help you?” the voice creaked out of her throat like an old attic door hinge in need of oil. I didn’t want to think about where else this old lady might need lubrication.

“I’m here to see Mr. van Leer.”

“Name?”

“Mr. van Leer, I just told you.”

“No. Can – I – take – your – name – dear?”

“Annie.”

“Second name?”

“Fotzenlekken.”

She wrote down what my mother would have slapped me scarlet for even uttering in her presence.

“Is that a name or your specialty?”

“Uh, it’s my stage name,” I stammered, finding my façade begin to crumble in the face of stark reality and such direct questioning. I could feel the confidence drain from me. I didn’t know how much longer I could keep this up.

The ghost of Joan Crawford scratched something on the desk in front of her. I couldn’t see if it was a ledger or what, but it sounded like a rasp on a concrete block.

“Mr. van Leer will be right with you,” she said sharply without looking up. “Sit down.”

“Yes, Ma’am,” I mumbled, feeling suddenly very intimidated. I was about to be introduced to a cigar-chomping mogul, a producer, a director, who would size me up in a single glance and determine if I ‘had it’ or not. He would never be as kind and forgiving as Bruno. What would I be willing to do to get into movies – suck his cock? Let him stick it up my ass, tie me up, humiliate me? What would his audition entail? Pleasuring the cracked old crone seated across from me?

I pulled my coat tighter around me as I sat on the hard plastic chair opposite Madame Rottweiler’s desk. It felt like those cheap, nasty little chairs you usually find in doctors’ surgeries and dentists’ waiting rooms – in any case, having to sit in one was usually the rather uncomfortable prelude to much worse to come, and it set me on edge even more.

I couldn’t stop myself from chewing on my dark red fingernails as I looked up continually at the clock above her head. It felt like time was standing still for me now.

And then I finally realized, the clock
had
stopped, and it was still showing five thirty-two. I have no idea how long I sat there, until a door opened in the corridor behind the front desk and a gentleman in a white suit, looking very like the man who’d served me in the video shop earlier, walked out.

“Ah, hello again,” he said as he approached me, and held out a hand. “I’m Mr. van Leer. Glad you could make it.”

“Hello,” I replied, feeling a silly grin break across my face. I felt at ease again now. He was nervous, possibly as much as I was. He wasn’t too used to doing this, I surmised. Or else I was a little better quality than he was used to – well, the thought set my fears back a good few paces, anyway.

“Do you do this in your spare time?” I asked, standing up.

“Well, I run the shop, and the studio, as different arms of my own little adult entertainment empire. It’s a one-man band at the moment, but maybe I’ll get to expand one day. With the right kind of talent. Everyone’s into doing porn these days, so I’m just looking for a different angle, a unique selling point. Y’know?”

“So do you do everything yourself?”

“Not quite. I have my Mum here to help out.” He indicated the old apparition behind me, who smiled horribly in reply.

I whispered at him, “You may want to tell her to put her teeth back in.”

“Oh, it’s alright,” he said cheerfully as he led me past the desk and into the little room he’d emerged from. “She’s resting between takes of a new piece I’m shooting called
Granny’s Gumjobs
. I’m testing the market, y’see.”

“Interesting,” I pondered as I sat down, and Mr. van Leer sat opposite me behind the Formica table. I unbelted my coat and hung it on the back of the chair, shedding a layer, and revealing a little bit of cleavage.

“So, Annie. Let’s start by getting to know you a bit better. What’s your favorite drink?”

“Orange tequila.” It was the first thing that came to my mind. In fact, it was the first thing that anybody at the Klub had ever bought for me on my first day, which is why it had stuck in my mind.

“Your favorite color?”

“Blue, especially in movies.” I giggled at that. Funny, I thought. A sure sign my old confidence was returning.

“Good, good.” He flicked through some pages on his desk, which all looked to be blank. He said, “Do you normally spit, swallow or gargle?”

I said it depended upon whether it was mouthwash, coffee or domestic bleach. He just looked at me askance for a moment, then laughed aloud.

“Good sense of humor too,” he grinned. “Excellent.” He flicked the pages back and forth again and studied them closely. “I’m just checking the script to see what would be the best part for you.”

I said quietly, “Uh, are all those pages blank?”

He looked up suddenly, startled, as though I wasn’t supposed to have noticed that. “Yeah. I haven’t actually written the script yet. I’m a hands-on kind of producer/director – I like to go with instinct over form. It’s the European avant-garde intuitive school of porno directing, y’know.”

I nodded. “Far out,” was all I said. I was sure I’d understand, one day.

Then Mr. van Leer stood up. “Okay, just one final thing. You’re definitely not shy, are you?”

I laughed at that. “Sure, that’s why I’m here.” I reached under my skirt and pulled the black Lycra panties down to my knees, dropped them and stepped out of them. Turned away and pulled my skirt up to my waist, showing him my full pale ass and the garter straps stretched over it. Without any fear or anxiety now, or concern for my own wellbeing; it was just another audition, for another job involving getting me naked. After my initiation ceremony at the Klub, nothing else could ever bother me now. I had something that people liked – that was a fact now, as unlikely as it seemed to me at first, and I was happy to exploit that for as long as I had it.

“Holy shit, girl,
yes
. Turn around. Show me it. All of it. Show me what you got.”

I did, slowly, facing him full-on. Hands on my hips holding my skirt up, legs apart and pelvis tilted upward to give him the best view of that strip of shocking pink, my favorite pose for the climax of my stage routine. His hands were already under the desk, fiddling, ripping zips. I threw my arms behind my head, posing now, smiling, loving it, turning myself on even more at his slack-jawed rubber-necked reaction. I was used to my audiences being well out of reach, and often out of sight, buried in shadows and eclipsed by spotlights. Now I was seeing in bright daylight the kind of effect I could have on them, and my pulse quickened at the sight of his trousers bursting with a triangular, tent-like bulge that almost made me laugh aloud.

“Christ, I love being a pervert,” he sighed. “I mean – an artist. Can I – uh – get a bit of you on film just now? Just as a screen test, y’know? Something that I can take home tonight and – uh – study. And. Use. To...uh, develop the artistic project we’ll be working on together?”

“Sure,” I smiled, as I leant across the desk and unpicked the knot of his tie. “Or you could just fuck me over the desk, right here and now.”

His eyes glazed over and he seemed to have forgotten how to blink.

“Let me get the camera.”

I finished off the job he’d started with his zip, ripping it open. He didn’t object or try to stop me. He just looked at me with eyes half-shut and a soft, low
Aahhh
! escaping from his lips.

His cock spilled out in my hand, twitching and growing as it slid between my fingers. I stretched out my tongue and lapped the underside of the tip.

“Uh, okay,” he conceded, “we’ll just call this your audition, how’s that?”

I bent down and raised his pulsing dick towards my mouth and kissed it all the way back to his white linen slacks.

I flicked my tongue towards him. “Go get the camera.”

He scrambled off the desk, clothes and hair a mess and trying desperately to keep his trousers up. Just as he opened the door of the office, the voice of the old crone screeched through from the reception area.

“Norman?”

“Yes, Mother?”

“Norman, what are you doing in there with that filthy whore?”

He banged the door shut again and flattened himself against it, staring at me in panic while his cock twitched and wobbled, now forgotten, from the middle of his slacks.

“Nothing, Mother. I promise.”

“I don’t believe you, Norman. I can’t believe you would do this to me again.”

The sound of slow, deliberate footsteps in the corridor snapped me out of my infernal sexual delirium.

“Oh, shit,” he groaned. “This is not good.”

I pulled on his dick urgently, hoping he’d snap out of it and remember what it was we were supposed to be doing. “Aw, come on,” I said. “What’s the worst that she can do?”

He dashed past me just as the door flew open and a dark, jagged shadow darted incongruously across the wall in front of me. I could just make out the silhouette of her head, long hair pulled up in an antique bun, and then the raised arm – with its long, pointed appendage at right angles, the unmistakable outline of a heavy kitchen knife.

Norman screamed like a girl.

I screamed like a dozen girls, all competing simultaneously to win a screaming contest.

And then I woke up, sneezing and snuffling and coughing and throwing my arms across my face. Boris was lying stretched out over me and I was naked on top of my bed, and littered in little tufts of cat fur. I must have been pulling clumps out of him in my sleep.

I pushed him aside and turned away to cough. What a ridiculous dream, I thought; where the hell did my mind find all that crap? It had all been going so well, too. I grasped the alarm clock from the bedside table and squinted at it. I was supposed to have had a quick nap before calling the studio, but it was far too late for that now.

I would sleep on it, I decided, as I pulled the blankets around me and closed my eyes again, warm and glowing. There was always tomorrow. My hands squeezed tight between my legs, and forgetting the fearsome crone, I conjured back the thoughts of Norman and me spread out across the office table for
Take Two
, the
safe
version, where it was my turn to squeal as something just as long, but much less lethal than his mother’s carving knife, thrust into me repeatedly until my body oozed warm lakes of mutual pleasure.

ACT II

The ‘80s

Chapter Five

Sugar for My Honey

I never did find out if Mr. van Leer was really called Norman, or who the real artistic director of
EroFlix
was. For things at the Klub had heated up for me from that week onwards, being asked to cover four sessions a week rather than my usual one or two – a sure sign that I had graduated, and was on my way up the ladder. Three days off every week might sound great to those used to a 9 to 5 grind, but it was physically demanding, even exhausting, and I usually spent most Mondays lazing around the house, whether in bed until late afternoon, or wrapped in blankets nursing hot drinks while my feet soaked in basins of hot salted water to help them recover from the relentless punishment I was now inflicting on them. All of that stomping around in heels soon firmed up my thighs and calves but it also took its toll from me in blisters, corns and calluses. (I always thought feet were such ugly, unattractive things, so it didn’t bother me in the slightest that mine were growing even uglier and more gnarled by the week; I had no intention of ever showing them off anywhere in public, but I could certainly have done without the nagging discomfort they brought).

Tuesdays were my usual day of normality, when I ventured outside on shopping trips and errands, and Wednesday was now an early night in order to get plenty of rest before the mad onslaught of the latter half of the week. I hoped that my mother would not succeed in tracking me down and visit unexpectedly some day, for the house was always littered in cast-off underwear, lingerie, and whatever had been my most recent stage outfit. I was turning into a slob, the kind of woman my mother had always despised, and I loved it. No more demands to tidy up
this
and put
that
away – one or two Tuesdays a month, I would actually bother to shift the growing mounds of clothing, boots, shoes, hats, gloves, costume jewellery, beauty magazines, dirty dinner plates (usually scoured clean by Boris’ tongue), make-up things, lose
pfennigs
and weekly pay slips. But I found order in this chaos, and knew exactly where to find anything at any given moment from amid the strewn heaps of stuff.

My worst nightmare was a double-act visit from my mother and Mrs. Groenenberg and finding myself being simultaneously scorned, lectured, sneered and yelled at, until I would be able to take no more and threw myself through the window and onto the balcony to escape. But that never came to pass, and my landlady made no more personal visits to demand overdue rent from me. In fact, paying the rent was one of the few tasks which quickly burned itself into my routine (such as it was) and was always done on time, come hail, shine, or, more usually when I decided to step outside on real business, rain. I found umbrellas such an ungainly accessory, preferring my big red waterproof hat instead, and so I made sure that I attracted attention even amid the most drab and grey of circumstances.

In this way did life go on at the Kitty Klub for me, and all the others. We entered the 1980s, all of us with a brighter, more positive outlook on everything – music, styles and attitudes were shifting, and instead of playing disco records in the afternoons when only the bar was open, we dared to play New Wave, rock, and even punk – we played the Cars and the Commodores in the bar now instead of The Who and The Sweet, although Bruno always insisted that there be plenty of the Rolling Stones, his own favorite group. We adjusted our looks and attire accordingly (all except Petra, of course – still firmly rooted in her 1930s fantasy, and always the exception which proved the rule) – Olivia suddenly favored expensive perms instead of her long, flowing look, a phase which lasted six months before she gave up and began growing her hair naturally again. I even experimented with bleaching my hair blonde but everyone agreed that it made me look rather cheap, not to mention somewhat ill with my already pale coloring, so my peroxide quickly went the way of Olivia’s curls as soon as I developed a coppery stripe of natural roots.