Thrill-Bent (17 page)

“Yes, you!” the woman with the clipboard hisses, “Now!”

Her pageboy haircut is razor sharp—how does she maintain the style with a tic like hers? Does she have a lover who trims her bangs while she sleeps?—and she does not look like she’s going to take no for an answer. She grips my elbow and leads me firmly to the parting in the stage curtain.

I hear Jeannie’s voice again, calm and consoling. “Now, I want everyone here to have my personal assurance that no humans were harmed during the making of this pageant!”

A wave of laughter rumbles through the house and then stops exactly on the same beat. I realize that Barbara Eden’s vocal cadence sounds just like the tinkling of a bell. I wonder if she’s had to practice to get it to sound like that.

The hand at my elbow has migrated to the small of my back and pushes me forward, nails biting into my butt flesh. I hear myself being introduced as “The Human Hummingbird!” and then I am thrust out onto the fiercely lit stage. I feel my pupils contract at light speed as I peer out at the unseeable audience. I am terrified.

But this is
my dream
! I remind myself that these people in the audience are my own creations. If I made them out of scraps of my brain tissue, surely I can hypnotize them into thinking that I am a talented and alluring performer. Plus, if I want to find my dad, I’d better get on and offstage as quickly as possible without stirring up too much suspicion. A few chords boom from enormous monitors at the front of the stage, and I recognize the libidinous syllables of Prince’s voice as he races through the first line of “Purple Rain”: “I never wanted to be! your part-time lover ...”

I know what to do. I turn my back to the audience and the hot lights invade the loose mesh fabric of my blouse; tiny squares are branded onto my skin. I start to shake. I shake my hips fast and loose, vibrating in place. I poke my beak into a bright red feeder, so fast I approach stillness. My vulva is immovable, solid gold like one of Johnny’s rings, my undisputed center of gravity. I lean my head back and shake it too, just as though I have a long mane of strip-club hair. If there were a ten-foot pole up onstage, I have no doubt that I would mount it and ride like the wind. Eyes closed, body quivering furiously, lips puckered like the stuck halves of a yo-yo, I languish in the heat of stage lights that spit imaginary sparks to nip at my shoulder blades. I listen to the terrible sorcery that is “Purple Rain.” Prince cries like a cat and repeats himself like a sex offender, scratches on the locked screen door, pleads to be let out into the deluge. My tremble is so subtle now that I have stopped moving entirely. The spotlight spits me out and I am offstage again in a flash, almost tripping over a pair of identical twins in knickers and Tam O’ Shanters as I rush toward the stage door.

The street is wet and shimmers with reflections from the tasteful neon signs in shop windows and long twin streaks of headlights that glide by in slow schools. No one speeds, I notice; the traffic floats drowsily along at fifteen miles per hour with nary a brake squeal or a heated horn-lean. My black blouse absorbs raindrops like a sponge. My chignon has come ungraciously undone and now hangs in wet ribbons over my eyes, bobby pins dangling in haphazard spikes, plopping occasionally onto the sidewalk. I walk uphill away from the wind, hands jammed into my pockets, and the cold drops pierce my back like icicles. The few people I pass all seem to be perfectly dry, oversized umbrellas poised over their tended coifs. They walk quickly, weatherproofed shoes tapping a solid rhythm as they pass.

“Excuse me,” I say to one passerby, a young woman in a no-nonsense parka walking a bone-dry black dog. “Can you tell me how to get to Headquarters?” In a flash, I know that Headquarters is where I’ll find my father. She stops and utters a few stern commands to the dog, “Heel! Sit! Stay!” and smiles at me politely. Her large teeth look like they have been perma-whitened. There is something disturbing about her smile, though, some lack of cohesion of her features. The shape of her mouth has changed, but nothing else about her face has been altered by the act of smiling. She takes in my soggy state, her eyes moving quickly from my streaming mane to my filthy, bare feet. Her expression lingers, but she clears her throat.

“Headquarters?” she asks, quizzically. “Do you have an appointment there?”

I hadn’t expected her to be so forthright. I imagine there is a long tunnel-like corridor leading to the place where he can be found, a corridor lined with tranquil nude statues made of white chocolate. The portico is crystal clear in my mind’s eye, as though I’m watching it on a video screen a few inches in front of my face, with the word “Headquarters” written in cursive script across the image. But I can’t quite conjure what lies at the end of the hallway—there is only an out-of-focus room, a head of tight black curls bobbing on a cloud of Aqua Velva.

“Actually, I ... I guess not, not in so many words.”

I can tell immediately by her mouth (slight downward turn at the edges, like an autocratic spelling bee judge) that she is not going to give me directions. I do not qualify for membership in the secret club that fathoms the whereabouts of HQ. I am too wet, for one thing. And I’m sure I didn’t convey enough savvy confidence in my mission.

“Look, never mind,” I say, silently adding
bitch
to the end of the sentence, which gives me a moment of exquisite juvenile satisfaction, “I’ll find it myself.”

I walk on without even noting her reaction. Her dog growls audibly. I don’t really care which geometrical formation her lips are shaping now; I just want to find that mysterious ivory tunnel that leads to my father. I just want to figure out what’s going on in this bizarre, housebroken city where people with Tourette’s are publicly exhibited like Salem witches, and everyone else behaves like Swedes on Klonopin. As I again trudge my way uphill, I glimpse a flash of wet red across the street next to the Samarai Sam’s Teriyaki Grill, a bright crimson flag, and then it is gone, slipped between two buildings like a shoehorn.

I run into the street, where the cars are moving slowly enough for me to dodge my way across, and into the crevice where I saw the scarlet flame. Could it be the girl? There is a narrow concrete alley, frosted with swirls of white cement, so narrow I have to turn sideways and sort of shuffle my feet to fit through, and as I do I can still see the vivid red light blinking at the end of the line, a trick of the eye.

The alley opens up after a few uncomfortable yards into a sudden large meadow. This is such a surprise I let out a little laugh. Who would have thought there would be a gorgeous meadow the size of a football field just behind the fagade of genteel storefronts? Beads of water cling to the grass blades and the buttercups. At the far side of the meadow is a big, bright tent, Play-Doh yellow. The wide canvas walls are rippling as they are pelted with raindrops and wind, and splotches of golden light glow from inside. Shadows shape-shift across the billowing cloth, so it looks like the tent’s guts are animated and breathing, pulsing with life. A strange and beautiful spectacle, the silent green rectangle of field punctuated by an undulating yellow box, dappled-black sky pressing down from above like an anvil.

The girl in the tight red dress stops and looks back at me before she slips between the tent flaps, her bare toes muddy and stuck with grass blades. Her Cleopatra make-up has been washed away, but the clinging red dress is unmistakable. Her pale blue eyes meet mine with a defiance I can feel even across the wet meadow.

He is in there, I know. In the blurry room on the vast green rectangle. The girl’s blue-eyed look—protective and menacing—tells me all I need to know. An acidic froth rushes up my esophagus and my face boils with heat. I swallow the bile and lean my head back, letting the rain massage my skin and wash my tongue. I reach out for something to lean against, but there is nothing except cold sky and my arms flail behind me. I look back toward the alleyway where I came in, but the corridor has shrunk to a tight crack, too narrow for anyone but a small child to fit through.

I will face it. Whatever is in the tent, I am ready to look. I survey the dimensions of my dream, my kingdom, the inside of my head. I remember Buffy’s exultant, shining face as she told me about the bumblebees, how they could induce flying dreams—“All I know is, it works!” I crouch down to a sprinter’s pose, my fingers clutching the soft yield of mud, and then spring full-force right up into the air. I don’t have to flap my arms or kick my legs; my body is a bullet sailing high above the gray town. I look down at the drab buildings and wet streets, the tidy lanes of sidewalks, the spiny black domes of umbrellas like android breasts tipped to the sky. The one bright spot in the whole overcast ZIP code is the patch of candy colors behind Samarai Sam’s.

Above the yellow tent, I hover like a hummingbird, my engine set to idle. In slow motion, I let my body fall onto the tight canvas roof. I can see my arms in front of me as I descend, plump and freckled, the long green vein that runs from my left wrist to the knuckle of my middle finger—definitely my hand. How can this be a dream? I am made of flesh, there is no doubt. I can still feel the rain needling the back of my neck. I blink a few times, squeezing my eyelids together tightly, as though the bare force of will might allow me to penetrate the mysteries of existence. But when I open my eyes again, the tent looms closer, and the buttercups in the meadow have shuttered themselves against the wind. I land light as a cat, my fingertips and toes holding my silent crouch. The buzz and glow within the tent continue unabated, and I duck my head down to overhear, like a gargoyle perched on a temple.

“Did you hear what I said?” a voice asks with last-chance conviction, a sadistic warning I recognize all too well. Silence follows, then a sharp flutter that sounds like cards being shuffled. “Yes or no?” More silence. Then, louder, “I
asked
you a question.”

I slide down off of the curved roof and land at the muddy entrance, inches deep in the earth. I reach up to part the tent flaps, but they have been secured somehow? Velcro, maybe?—so I can’t separate them to peek in without being noticed. I hear whimpering now, a frightened, uncontrolled bleating that makes my heart clench like a fist. Is it the girl in the red dress? More shuffling.

“Damn it, just take it off!” Sniffling. The velvety shush of fabric being dragged across skin. “You’re filthy.”

I rip open the tent flaps and barge in. “Don’t touch her!” I shout.

But as soon as I am inside the warmth of the room, I realize I don’t know where to look, or who I am talking to. The tent is crammed with a hundred people, all naked or nearly naked, huddled around a glowing object in the center. No one pays any attention to me as I slip through the crowd to get a better look. My clothes are coming off, I’m not quite sure how, but the closer I get to the core, the less covered I become. There is constant jostling and stomping, lip smacking, whispering and throat-clearing. Fingers are snapping softly, and palms slap at thighs with persistent yet hushed rhythm. A suppressed, reverent cacophony fills the room. This is a Tourette’s version of silence.

I spot the girl deep within the throng, her pale skin flushed and babyish. She sees me, her face flaring with perception, and shakes her head just barely as though to warn me away from here. Her flat nipples shine like raw meat. She is not filthy.

Next to her, my father stands oblivious to our confrontation. He is naked. His paisley patch of graying pubic hair cushions his curved, half-hard penis. One of his lean brown hands holds the girl’s shoulder in place just below his ribcage. I stare at him hard but he will not look at me; his focus is on the red glow that emanates ahead. One of my breasts brushes uncomfortably against someone’s abundant chest hair.

Even when I’ve pushed up right next to it, I can’t tell what the red glow is. It looks sort of like a giant hot coal if you were seeing it through the distorting waves of a desert mirage. From this proximity, I too am enthralled, mainly because of its lack of adherence to any one shape. Just when it becomes an oval, the glow shudders and lengthens unsymmetrically into a pear, and then a question mark. I reach my hand out toward it, and the man on his knees next to me gasps like a fangirl.

“Relax, man,” I say. “This is my dream. A little heat can’t hurt me.”

He raises his eyebrows, but then nods and goes back to his devoted posture. I am not sure if his kneeling and bowing are religious comportments, or whether they are manifestations of his Tourette’s. Either way, I feel that the stage is aptly set for my audacious act of bravery. The rain thumps the canvas roof like an audience demanding an encore; a hundred naked strangers wobble and purr ecstatically around me; my father and a young girl who alone has the power to recognize me are hooked together in some sort of pseudo-sexual arrangement; and the person next to me is cycling through the choreography from a Latin High Mass.

I open my hand in front of my face, study the familiar lines on my palm by the flicker of the red coal, and remind myself that I am acting as an agent for my own subconscious. My mission, if I choose to accept it, is to grasp knowledge from this changeling, this throbbing, clitoral icon: Knowledge about HQ.

I turn my palm toward the glow, and brace myself for the sting.

C
ertain peccadilloes have come to be commonly known as “obsessive-compulsive disorder,” thanks to
60 Minutes
reports that cough up DSM definitions like hairballs and Oliver Sacks case studies featured in double issues of the
New Yorker.
A wacky but heartbreaking medical enigma, OCD habits seem to qualify their performers for membership in almost any twelve-step program or urban circus act. Some of the more famous obsessive compulsions include excessive handwashing; the constant feeling of having left the oven on (with the advent of microwaves, the diagnostic symptoms have come to include auditory pinging hallucinations); and the persistent need to face and numerically order the bills in one’s wallet. Why do these studies never include the obsessive need to pluck the tenacious whiskery hair that grows out of a mole on one’s chin? Or the exhortative desire to give the cat three pats on the head every time she is about to partake of a bowlful of Tender Vittles? What the primetime shows and the magazine articles leave out is that everyone in the world has obsessive-compulsive disorder, to one degree or another.

For instance, in the course of my day as a relatively unsick, intermittently freethinking, predominantly hedonistic adult person, I feel compelled to get out of bed at some point during the morning. Often there is no arguable reason for this springing forth into uprightness: I am not expected at a place of employment; there is no pressing need for food (I tend not to get hungry until the afternoons); no one waits with bated breath for the sunrise installment of my running autobiographical narrative. In short, I could easily lay abed for hours and hours a la Marcel Proust, without any immediate discernible consequences, but I don’t. I feel obliged—compelled—to get up.

If I touch something sticky, I must wash my hands. Not a few minutes afterward, when it is convenient to stop whatever I’m doing and go to a nearby sink or, if I am out, a contiguous public fountain—not eventually, but immediately after the offending morsel has left my palm. If I can’t wash my hands after touching something sticky, I am unable to concentrate on my next task, and I find myself deluged with fantasies of cleansing and sanitizing the gummed-up area. Images of hot water and Lava soap charge through the apertures of my brain, hemorrhaging like fierce caterpillars in their foamy white cloaks until my need to lather and rinse has been satisfied.

Another example: Ignoring the telephone’s ringing is not an option. I would never allow the answering machine to record a message while I sit in the next room and read the erotic escort ads in the alternative weekly paper or, more likely, stand at attention next to the phone with my ears perked vertically like a short-haired pointer, holding my breath, hands up as though to shush any noisy intruders. No, anything but answering is not an option. I am compelled to pick up the call. My inexplicable inability to “screen” has led to many unpleasant and several litigious conversations, as this particular compulsion does not correspond wisely with my scandalous credit history, nor with my capacity for telling occasional lies. If someone needs me to explain why I said I liked pate when they discovered a small pile of it in the dog’s dish after I left the party, or why the direct withdrawal I authorized is being refused by my bank, they know they can call me at home in the morning and demand an explanation: I’ll be out of bed, and I will pick up the ringing phone.

“I don’t do anything you can’t buy with food stamps,” the man I’ve just met tells me. He sips his Shirley Temple, which isn’t really a Shirley Temple, we’re just calling it the most obviously unfunny epithet for a pink drink being drunk by a fully grown man, when it’s really an “ass-juice”—the Double Down Saloon’s secret-ingredient-laden special—without the ass. The cocktail is so salmon-pink and prissy it could stand on one leg and welcome you to the zoo.

The Double Down is the only straight bar in Las Vegas’s gay quarter, and it caters to locals rather than to tourists. I try to come here every time I’m in town, and I’ve always managed to meet someone interesting. In fact, if you sit on one of the DD’s barstools long enough, eventually you will be privy to a naughty state secret or a queasy proposition. There is a mechanical horsie ride in the center of the smallish room, and hanging from the rafters are a multitude of brassieres that have been removed (mainly by the wearers, sometimes otherwise) and flung there pre-ride, as is the bar’s honored custom. When I remark to the bartender that some of the local ladies must be paying out quite a bit of cash for lingerie (I often see the same regulars trouncing atop the mighty thoroughbred), the tiny, bespectacled man on the stool next to me replies that taking off one’s undergarments and mounting a hunk of bucking machinery is covered in the DSM as compulsive behavior, just like smoking or gambling, or drinking. I notice his frothy, flamingo-colored cocktail, and I am informed of its virginal (and its owner’s supposedly vice-free) nature.

He doesn’t smoke, he assures me, though he often has a stray pack of cigarettes flying around in the windows-down maelstrom of his Pontiac Fiero, unwittingly left there by one of his many vice-ridden acquaintances. Nor does he indulge in the kinds of unlawful or even over-the-counter substances on which just about everybody, at one time or another, depends to get through their traffic-was-
horrible
-and-now-we’re-out-of-toilet-paper day. Candy, unless it comes indelibly attached to an otherwise nutritionally unreproachable food (like yams or baked apples) is off-limits, and condoms are unnecessary since he never penetrates women, only woos and rubs and wriggles and tugs, shooting his clean, unrepentant glue on their bellies or in his shorts, somewhere far (enough) away from the hub of reproductive activity.

The mention of penetration (or lack thereof) leads for some reason to a heated debate about the definition of lap dancing. I get the feeling that this little man in the excellent Armani suit, his eyes glittering and sober, awake with boyish arrogance and charm, is engaging in conversational trickery, some kind of linguistic voodoo that subtly steers our discourse into the fast lane and then onto the bumpy shoulder of the road, and off into the coyote-ridden slopes of desert wilderness.

I understand what pole dancing is. I’ve seen it in ’60s movies where girls with dark eyeliner and white sparkly lipstick like Karen Black, or perhaps it actually
is
Karen Black, wrap their legs around shiny barbershop poles and swing like monkeys—like scantily clad monkeys wearing white sparkly lipstick and twelve-inch platform heels. Table dancing, I learned from a lesbian journalist friend who had been given a carte blanche by her employer to research the topic, involves one or more (in her case, two) exotic dancers writhing on the table-top right in front of your eyes, simulating sex or maybe actually having it, these lines of demarcation being rather hard to plot squarely when one is dealing with lesbian journalists and girls plunging into each other’s moist and tender places, their limbs and long hair thrashing out at you unexpectedly like at a dolphin show at Sea World (don’t sit in the soak zone!), close enough to smell their fruity perfume and the seaweed sweat of their pussies. A “private show,” the man informs me, is basically sex, the fee for which can be negotiated with the girl beforehand. A wall dance is a surreal tableau wherein an undressed woman pretends to make love to the grubby plaster wall of a strip club.

“A lap dance,” he takes a long draw of his non-Shirley Temple in preparation for his opening statement, “according to the time-honored tradition that prevails in this sinful city, of which I am by turns puff-chestedly proud and red-facedly ashamed, involves nothing less and nothing more than two simple features: a
lap
and a
dance.”
He pauses for effect, gazing at me with a direct flirtatious-ness that defies me to judge him, as I achingly want to do, as nebbishy and all too clever. “Now, ‘Whose lap?’ you ask. And how do you define ‘dance’ in this context? Those questions are trickier and more difficult to gauge.”

“Does she touch your dick?” I ask, hoping to derail him just a little.

“That depends,” he says, unruffled. “She sits on your lap and wiggles around, so yes, some part of her inevitably touches your dick. But if you’re asking ‘does she give you a hand job?’ the answer is no. These matters are rarely so defined, although of course there are rules, spoken and unspoken. But let’s begin with our glossary of terms. Whose lap? Yours, of course. The tops of your thighs, your groin area, the part of your torso below your belly button. A diameter of about a foot and a half square, depending on how hefty a person you are.”

“Let’s just say the size of a large cat,” I offer.

“Yes, that’s right. As a matter of fact, I’m glad you brought that up. When a cat sits in your lap,
its
belly presses against
your
belly, right?”

“Well ... yes.”

“So, in a way you could say the
cat’s
lap is coming in direct contact with
your
lap. Your laps are forming a union.”

“I think I see what you’re getting at.”

“I’m merely suggesting that if this were a true Socratic dialogue, the question of ‘whose lap?’ might deserve further investigation. But for our purposes, let’s just agree that the lap in question belongs to the paying customer.”

“The ... client?”

“The customer. This is not therapy, darling.” He smiles at me and narrows his already narrow eyes like the Cheshire cat settling into my lap for a long face-off.

“I’m sorry, I guess it seemed like therapy for a minute there because you were the only one who got to talk.”

“Shut up and let me finish.” He smiles. “The definition of ‘dance’ is really the meat of the matter here, is it not? I mean, what you really want to know is what the girl does once she is comfortably installed on the ‘lap.’ And I must say, of the lap dances I’ve witnessed either first-, second-, or thirdhand, the most surprising thing about the lap dance is that it actually does involve choreography.”

“Not jazz hands?” I inquire, oscillating my palms Ben Vereen-style.

This gets a quick laugh, a monosyllabic burst. “Not exactly. But the hip movement, the getting up and sitting back down, the readjusting, the squirming are all performed very much according to the rhythm of the song that happens to be chosen by the DJ on duty, usually culled from a ‘young-urban-contemporary’ songbook. Often a little ditty by Beyoncé, Britney, or Mary J. Blige. Occasionally they go back as far as Terence Trent D’Arby, but not usually. And the dance continues for the length of one song. Sometimes the choreography even includes low-impact, high-profile acrobatics.” He raises one eyebrow. “You know, handstands and jack-knifes and such. The rules are that you cannot touch the girl. She can touch you, but she is not supposed to touch your naked genitals. If either arrangement is broken, a very mean bouncer with little or no sense of humor will arrive at your table in the blink of an eye.”

“Wow, that’s very ... challenging. So you just lean back with your arms dangling at your sides? And how much, on average, would you be paying for this service?”

“Well now, that also depends. For a standard lap dance performed in your seat in the nightclub, with other customers a few feet away, the price is generally twenty dollars. For a lap dance performed in a semi-private area of the club, a more intimate experience which sometimes lasts a bit longer, for two songs perhaps, the price would be more like forty. If you like the girl, and you appreciate her choreography, you can just keep giving her money and she will keep dancing on your lap. Until her name is called for her turn to dance onstage.”

It occurs to me that he seems to know a lot about the phenomenon for a neurotic, well-to-do Jewish tax attorney who not five minutes ago purported to be completely vice-free. “So ... they take food stamps in exchange for lap dances?” I ask, wide-eyed.

He looks at me squarely with his lips pursed like someone’s tsk-tsking grandmother, and I can see a tiny phantom fingerprint on the right lens of his glasses, its abstruse spiral glowing in the gaudy dive-bar light.

“Come on,” he says, snatching my purse and jacket from the back of the barstool. “I’ll take you to Zazzle’s.”

I light a Djarum Special that I cribbed from the pack that was wedged inside the cup holder on the passenger side of this baby-shit-green sports coupe. I haven’t smoked a clove cigarette since 1978, when I used to wait in line outside the Tower Theater in San Diego, dressed as Magenta, for the doors to open for the Midnight Madness
Rocky Horror
screening, the one where they would let you in free if you were wearing torn fishnets. This particular clove cigarette might have hailed from 1978, in fact, judging from how it stinks of caramel-coated sweat socks and the way it’s bent in the wrinkled middle to resemble a lanky, unsymmetrical penis. I absolutely need to stick something in my mouth right this minute—it could be a brick of Bubble Yum or an old Certs with Retsyn, flecks of foiled paper still stuck to its concave belly button, if that’s what I had mined from the cupholder instead. I can feel that I’m starting to tip the scales of discretion; I recognize the imperious feeling of carefree contumacy taking over my blood’s path from chest to neck, neck to brain, brain to mouth. Here I am, in a car with a stranger who is indeed strange but seems at the moment to be somewhat less strange than my own punch-drunk travel choices. I came to Las Vegas to visit the High Roller, the coaster high atop the Stratosphere space needle hotel/casino. They’re tearing it down to build a bigger observation deck a thousand feet above the ground, and no one seems to mind. I guess in Las Vegas there is so much turnover that the destruction of a merely ten-year-old roller coaster doesn’t even raise eyebrows. I was just having a pre-ride, shot-of-courage cocktail to take the edge off, and now I find myself on a sleazy fact-finding mission with a clean and sober lilliputian who seems uncontrollably driven by lust, but not exactly—and I’m both relieved and intrigued when I realize this—lust for me. The first inhale of the stale, Indonesian, practically fossilized cigarillo tastes as sweet and mean as an underage hitchhiker on a two-lane highway. The familiar desire that it calls up in my nether regions reminds me that I am old enough to remember Oingo Boingo concerts.