Special to The SunBreak by Heidi Boren
Things have come full circle for me and for Seattle since 1994. That was the year I danced at The Lusty Lady. It was also the April that Kurt Cobain ended his life. Now, The Lusty Lady is shutting its doors this June 27, while the Kurt exhibit draws visitors just across the street at the Seattle Art Museum.
SAM, the reborn Seattle Art Museum on First Avenue, was just a baby back then. Hammering Man had been recently, uh, erected, and The Lusty Lady had the cheek to comment on him from its pink-framed marquee with "Hammer Away, Big Guy." But as pithy as the marquee had always been, the Lusty was still just another sex arcade down at the end of "Flesh" Avenue. A girl who worked at one of these places was probably also a hooker, and most certainly suffered from low self-esteem.
A stripper named Jane, who I met in New Mexico, had challenged those notions for me. When I asked her why she, someone who had a high school diploma, no addictions, and could have worked anywhere else in town, worked as a dancer at a strip club, she told me she didn't want to end up "one of those people from suburbia who thinks Cat Stevens is a real person."
As my musical tastes ran directly to Cat Stevens and Suzanne Vega, I didn't really grasp what she meant. When she died in a motorcycle accident a few months later, however, I decided I wanted to find out.
Having written a single, five-page play that had been well received by my professor in college, I considered myself the premier dramatic voice of my generation. My plan was to get myself back to Seattle where I had a sister who was a soft touch with money. There, I would live out Jane's quest and write an award-winning play about it.
My sister worked as a security guard at SAM. She told me to meet her for her half-hour lunch to discuss having me crash on her couch for a few weeks. On the way to meet her I looked up and saw The Lusty Lady's marquee about the Hammering Man. I was instantly intrigued. The place looked…charming, with the goofy smiley-face and the announcement "Every Miss is a Hit!" Somehow my sister knew that The Lusty had a good reputation with dancers and that it was managed by a woman. After lunch, I walked in, auditioned, and was hired to start the next day.
The first thing I noticed, to my horror, was that all the customers jacked off. Call me naive, but I thought the customers just put quarters in the slot to stand there and watch a show. I had no idea that they also routinely pleasured themselves. After my first Friday night shift, as I sat listless on the backstage couch, kernels of popcorn dribbling down my chin, another dancer took pity on me.
She suggested I might prefer the Private Pleasures talk booth to the Live Stage. "And you'd make a killing because of your looks," she had added. I jumped at the chance to only have to face one customer at a time, perhaps just to chat.
As luck would have it, I began to attract the "talkers." These were the guys who didn't always unzip their pants but were more interested in having a conversation or telling me their secrets and fantasies. At first, this was great. I'm a good listener and I liked being away from the loud, largely undanceable music and onslaught of male nudity that was the Live Show. In the name of artistic research, I wrote down every word. What transpired inside the talk booth, however, soon turned darker than I was prepared for.
Mr. Tuesday at 10 p.m. told me his three-year-old granddaughter was living with him and had an infection "down there" but he was sure that it was not his fault because all he did was bathe her. He placed shaking hands on the glass and told me to tell him over and over again that I believed him and that it wasn't his fault.
Mr. Friday at noon said he was misunderstood by women. I pointed out that Einstein was also misunderstood. Mr. Friday erupted in anger, slamming the glass and trying to get his money back. He said Einstein had been married twice, so he was at least understood by two women and what kind of an idiot slut was I, anyway? He then settled down and proceeded to tell me, in lurid detail, just what kind of a stupid slut I actually was.
The majority of the customers just wanted to talk to a pretty girl about a fantasy; nothing real, and nothing sinister. It was the three or four customers a day like Mr. Tuesday at 10 p.m. and worse (much, much worse) that began to haunt me.
Until then, the grunge music scene had never really moved me, but it was at this point that I began to relate to the angry, atonal noise that spewed from the jukebox. The songs were mostly tracks from local Seattle bands my sister had been dragging me to see for years at The Off Ramp, Central Tavern, and house parties on Bainbridge Island--bands like Soundgarden, Mudhoney, Mother Love Bone, and Nirvana.
As I listened day after day to betrayals, degradations, and just plain sicknesses, all the while having to smile and look my best, the punk-infused songs began to make sense. The music was about knowing what people wanted from you and refusing to give it to them on their terms. The upper-middle class kids on Bainbridge and the dancers from the city high schools had one thing in common: They weren't going to live their parents' boring repressed lives no matter what.
I saw the way the dancers needed the music: Veronica swinging her dark hair with abandon and spinning around the stage when any song from the newly released In Utero played and a customer had given her the curt hand signal that meant "turn around and bend over"; Wren lifting her leg up and slamming her platform heel into the mirrored wall in protest when a song from Hole's album Pretty on the Inside started skipping and she had just had a customer walk out on her.
The songs helped me deal with the talkers on my terms. And my terms were that I could smile and smile, but I was going to record every word they said in my journals. I liked Pearl Jam's "Black." I think it's a song about a break-up, but I liked the idea of being able to tattoo over memories. All the images from my Private Pleasures shift could be inked out of existence for me with my black pen. If I got down the lies and betrayals on paper and away from my soul, it would just be so many stories in a notebook and nothing real.
The lyrics from Nirvana's song "Francis Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle" were my personal favorite: "She'll come back as fire and burn all the liars." That was like a promise of my life without the talkers. A day in the future when I didn't need them to pay my rent and I could burn all their words.
Then one morning in early April of 1994, Kurt Cobain killed himself. I wasn't shocked. It was no secret he was a tortured soul. But Kurt had been my personal frontman for the whole Seattle music scene. I instantly focused on his wife, Courtney. For better or worse, she had been his soulmate and I desperately needed to hear from her.
A radio station announced that she would appear live the next morning at the Seattle Center fountain lawn to give a eulogy for the fans. I took off work and made my way to the Space Needle, sure that I would be mobbed by the thousands of fans the radio station reported had cut school to be there. When I arrived, a few hundred high school kids were milling about in their flannel shirts. I found some dancers I knew huddled in a cigarette haze by the rusty fountain.
After an hour, a public address megaphone began to crackle and pop above our heads. Then a canned recording of Courtney's froggy whine came in and out, telling us she was sorry she couldn't be with us but that she loved Kurt and she knew we loved him, too. I don't remember what else she said. Generic things, with a voice that clearly was not going to be breaking down into sobs anytime soon. Fuck you, Courtney, we thought. Did you even like his music? Where the hell was she? Where was anybody? Who gave a fuck about anything? It was all pointless. Seattle and the entire sound had suddenly become as arcane and lifeless as the stupid '60s era Seattle Center.
Around this same time, a state-funded gallery show of photos of exotic dancers opened to cries of "Indecency!" from the public. The photographer, Erika Langley, a Senator's daughter from Virginia, had received an art grant to document the lives of exotic dancers. Consequently, she had started working at The Lusty Lady a few months earlier.
Perhaps due to the controversy, or perhaps because sex sells and May is sweeps month, the local KING 5 television show Evening Magazine was interested in shooting a segment on Erika and her photos. The show's producers also wanted to include another dancer in the segment; a dancer with a college background, who, like Erika, was working as a dancer because she wanted to, they had said, and not because she had to, which they hadn't said, but which they meant. My boss, June, thought I'd be a good choice and I agreed to an on-camera interview at my apartment.
That was a mistake. I had no furniture except my Murphy bed and a card table. The only other things present were the stacks and stacks of my customer journals. I instantly wished that I had stashed them in the bathroom. The cameraman's lens swept over the stacks like a searchlight as the reporter, a perfectly poised Asian woman, asked me three hours worth of questions.
I have no memory of what I said. Erika was there, probably for moral support, and as she flipped idly through the pages of one of my large binders, all I could think of was what horrible secret she was discovering on each page. Maybe she was just glancing at the words, killing time. Maybe she had chosen the harmless journal that described the daily nuts and bolts of my life at The Lusty and not the customers' confessions. I do remember that the reporter asked about the dancers, or the dancing, and not the customers. Erika's photos (and the controversy) dealt with the dancers, not the customers.
But the elephant in the room for me was the customers. The interview and the segment helped bring that front and center in my mind. I had to go to work that night and face the pedophiles and misogynists whether exotic dancers were a symbol of feminine power or just smut. The creeps were my bread and butter. I had to listen to them and validate them and smile at them if I wanted to pay my rent.
With Cobain dead and the knowledge that his lyrics would never again exist in the present moment, I wasn't sure how much longer I could do it. Grunge was just some dumb sound from high school. Its veil of protection and release had washed away with the tide. I didn't care about my play anymore. I didn't care about Jane or about running from Cat Steven's "Moonshadows." I had stomach ulcers and had cracked my back teeth from grinding them in my sleep.
As I paced the back hallway of The Lusty, debating whether or not to give notice, one of the owners, Darrell, was emptying out a change machine from a row of booths I had never noticed before: the video booths. Darrell told me they made three times the money as the Live Show and Private Pleasures combined.
I was crestfallen but also curious as to what all the fuss was about. He dug out a handful of quarters and suggested I take a gander. The porn fare displayed on the small screen was the average variety legally available. A customer could click through to what he or she preferred: college girls, girl with girls, etc. Maybe it was just the privacy that was the big deal, I thought, or not having to rent a whole video.
Then I noticed something inserted into the frame of the video screen. It was a wallet-sized school photo of a girl about seven years old. She had a round, open face and a gap-toothed grin. I knew the staff had seen much worse, they'd probably just throw it away. I put the little photo in my pocket and recognized it for what it was: my sign to leave The Lusty Lady. I still have that photo.
As strip-culture chic came into the mainstream and gyms all over the country installed stripper poles so women could discover their sexuality while getting fit, I had the photo as a reminder that for me (and the girl in the photo) it wasn't always fun and games.
Five years after I quit, Courtney Love was starring in a film about porn king Larry Flynt, Pearl Jam had a greatest hits CD released just in time for the holidays, and I lived in California and worked at a radio station. My sister eventually mailed me the boxes of my customer journals she had been storing. The pages were yellowed, but not by much. She told me I should either burn them or publish them. I did neither.
At 8 a.m. on Sunday, June 13, 2010, I am at The Lusty Lady as the last-ever live dance shift comes to a close. The video booths are to stay up and running for a few more weeks. Outside, SAM feels closer now. Before, Hammering Man was just a hard-working statue minding his own business, occasionally winking at us ladies. Now he looms only an arm's length away, inviting us to view artists' renderings of the Gen X icon Kurt: hammering, hammering.
Inside, a few actual customers holler from the booths as 27-year veteran dancer and manager Candy Girl yells, "Twelve more minutes of puff-puff, people…five more minutes of puff-puff...." But the viewing booths are mostly filled with current dancers, staff, and me--clapping and laughing at the antics onstage.
A tall, blonde dancer wears a '60s era prom dress and pretends to spank a dancer in jeans and boots. Another wears candy-cane stockings and a Santa hat and waltzes with a longtime customer they have let onto the stage and who looks like Santa himself. As Tina Turner's "Private Dancer" comes to an end, we hear Candy Girl announce from the PA: "That's it, Seattle! No more puff-puff!"
I say goodbye and make my way up First Avenue through the fruit and vegetable stalls of the Market just setting up for the day. A vendor has music playing as he works. The song is folksy and melancholic. It suits my mood and I stop to listen. The vendor has a youthful, vegan look, though his hair is peppered with grey.
Fifteen years ago, we might have exchanged phone numbers over Red Hooks in a Pioneer Square pub. As a well-kept older couple maneuvers past with their dog, the vendor asks if he can help me. I tell him I just really like the song that's playing and I'm trying to figure out who it is. "Oh, yeah, that's Cat Stevens," he says, and keeps sweeping.
Heidi Boren is a freelance writer and playwright currently commuting between Seattle and Los Angeles. Her play about an exotic dancer was produced at The New City Theatre's New Playwright's Festival and the Seattle Fringe Theatre Festival.
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