Naked in the Promised Land (36 page)

In the chorus were about a dozen girls, and each time they came out on the stage they wore a different costume—shocking-pink harem pants with see-through bras; satiny black Apache-dancer dresses with a slit all the way to the bellybutton; pleated schoolgirl skirts so short that white panties winked at the slightest move; and, for the finale, pastel muslin gowns, debutante style, that broke away with one brisk pull. No matter what they were wearing, the point was to shed one piece of clothing after another. From my seat at the back of the big, musty-smelling theater I could observe the sparse audience—mostly middle-aged men alone; a couple of clusters of frat boy types; a few opposite-sex couples.

About the time the schoolgirls were wiggling out of their middy blouses, a stoop-shouldered man in a hat he never took off plunked himself down across the aisle from me and opened a newspaper on his lap. The schoolgirls shook their butts at the audience in a mock exercise until the little pleated skirts dropped to the floor. I could hear the man's newspaper rustling in a steady rhythm, and I fought the impulse to gag, to bolt. No, I wouldn't let him scare me off. Now the schoolgirls kicked high in time to drum rolls, pulled at the breakaway white panties, which
came off in their hands, and, finally, faced the audience, bumping-and-grinding Lolitas, twirling panties in an arc above their heads, clad now only in G-strings and pasties that twinkled in the footlights. "Umff," the man softly cried.

But from the stage, with the footlights shining up at you, you probably couldn't see past the first rows. You'd just do your thing and you wouldn't have to think about who was in the audience. You'd be onstage for a total of only twenty or twenty-five minutes during the whole show, and the rest of the time you could be sitting in the dressing room, doing your homework, reading Shelley and George Eliot and Theodore Dreiser.

There were other acts at the President Follies as well. There was a comic, Buddy LaRue, with a bulbous bright red nose, who honked on a horn in the pocket of his baggy clown pants after the punch line of each fatuous sex joke. And there were three or four "regular features" with names like Boston's Blond Bombshell Miss Bathsheba, the Sexy Sultry Satana, and the Electrifying Electra (who, with a dexterous toe, triggered some motor in the drum on which she did her gyrations, causing a gush of wind to send her long, black hair flying straight up in the air). All these acts led up to the two-week star, "the Fan-tastic Miss Brandy Devine," who had a white-blond Veronica Lake hairdo and danced around with a huge fan. Every time she opened it, another piece of clothing would drift to the floor, then she'd close it again so the audience could have a look at what she was exposing now. Miss Devine had long legs and well-formed buttocks, but her breasts and hips were boyishly flat. How much did she make? I wondered. More than fifty-five dollars a week, I was certain. And she had to come out onstage only once. I knew I couldn't dance like her—in fact, I couldn't dance at all—but didn't I have a better body? And wasn't that the main point?

"You'll go in, ask for the manager, say you're my agent." I'd thought it all through. "Tell him that I've worked everywhere—New York, Chicago, L.A. How'll he know I didn't? Tell him you can bring me to town for three weeks at, say, $500 a week. Look, you'll show him my magazine pictures. The
King
cover looks as if I do a sword act. We'll get me a sword I can dance around with. And there's one where I look like a belly dancer."

"It's sordid." D'Or grimaced over a carton of chop suey that I'd brought back for our dinner.

"Then how will we live?" I asked, trying hard to be patient. Her census job would be over at the end of the week. She balanced a single bean sprout between her wooden chopsticks and didn't answer. "Hey, what the hell happened to the iconoclastic, classless, self-defined original?" I snorted.

"What?" D'Or asked.

Now I was too upset to eat. I put my cardboard container down on the red table and went to stand at the front window and stare at the city beneath us. Didn't she care about us? I would rather die than leave her and go back to Los Angeles, but how could I be a student at Berkeley and make enough money to stay with her? Why the hell couldn't she get real work and take care of us until I graduated?
No. D'Or can't do what she can't do,
I lectured myself.
It's cruel to demand it.

That night, as she held her hands under the bathtub jet, scrubbing them with Lava until little drops of blood oozed from a palm, I told her, "I know how we'll do it. Listen. When I've finished as the main feature at $500 a week, you'll go in and tell them I want to stay in San Francisco and that I'm willing to take half the pay to be one of their regular features. If they hire me permanently at $250 a week, we'll be getting about five times what the chorus girls make, and I'll have loads of study time between my acts. There's no other solution. Let's work on this together," I begged.

"Okay ... okay," she finally said, though her lip was raised in disgust.

But in the morning she was in high spirits. "We'll do it right," D'Or declared. My name would be Mink Frost, we decided together over our coffee, and my style would be cool and sophisticated. The Most Beautiful Body in Burlesque, my tag would be. I'd wear the rhinestone necklace and earrings I still had from the Simone days, and we'd find some fake fur that we could cut up into a mink stole. I'd do a classy under-a-streetlamp act. With my first paycheck, we'd get a dressmaker to cut me a fake-mink bikini that I'd wear under my gowns. We were laughing now. Inventing Mink Frost. It was an adventure. "Nothing sordid," we recited together in punchy fun. I remembered Marlene Dietrich images—seductively cold and commanding, sophisticated, mysterious. It would be a role no harder for me to play than that of Blanche DuBois or Anna Christie. We hurried to a Thrifty Drug six blocks away and bought some cans of silver and gold spray. Then, on the dining room floor, we laid out a tight, white backless dress I'd once had made with my modeling money, and—craftswomen, businesswomen—we squirted the canned glitter all over it. My first costume. It looked pretty good by the time we finished.

The next day we decked D'Or out—my high heels, a French beret I used to pose in, her black trenchcoat. We studied the effect together in the long bathroom mirror, delighted at how much like a real agent she looked. In my college briefcase, she carried my girlie magazine pictures.

She came back in an hour, breezing through the door, beaming with accomplishment. "I got you two weeks at $250 a week." She laughed. "I thought $500 sounded like a lot, so I didn't even ask, but he went for the $250 easily. Now do it with class," she admonished me once again. "I saw some peroxided blonde on the stage, bumping her pelvis on the curtain as if she was having sex with it. Disgusting."

***

It happens as I hoped. After my two weeks as the main feature, D'Or goes back to Mr. Chelton, the manager, and says I'll stay on at half the pay, $125 a week. He thinks he's getting a bargain. "Be a vamp, not a tramp," D'Or instructs me for the hundredth time.

I work seven days a week—two shows on Monday through Friday evening, four on Saturday, three on Sunday—seventeen altogether. I do my act once each show, and I also appear in a half-time chorus number and the finale. The rest of the time I can sit in the dressing room and read novels and poetry. I don't say much to the other girls, and they probably think I'm very odd. "How come you're reading all the time?"Electra asks.

"I dunno. I just like it," I say. How can I tell them that I'm a college student? Better to say nothing.

One day Bathsheba presents a quandary to us. She can buy this fantastic Chevy convertible—white leather upholstery, low mileage, practically brand new. The guy who lives next door to her will let her have it for five hundred bucks. "A real bargain," she sighs and picks absent-mindedly at the tomato-red polish on her nails.

"So get it," the new feature, Gilda the Golden Goddess, tells her, slipping into her sequined gold gown.

"I don't have five hundred bucks," says Bathsheba, brooding, as she stirs herself to take off her street clothes. "But there's this guy who's been coming around to the stage door all week. You probably seen him—wears a nice suit and tie and everything. He says he'll give me the money if I go with him just one time."

"Well, then what's the problem?" Satana asks, zipping the black satin she'll unzip onstage in a few minutes.

Aren't they afraid of getting pregnant? How do you even find someone who'll do an abortion? My mother had two abortions. And look how she ended up.

"I never did that before," Bathsheba says and stares down at the floor.

I put my book down on the dressing table and look at Bathsheba. Don't do it, is what I want to say, but she's already told us that on the eighty-five dollars a week she gets, she'd never be able to buy a convertible, and she'd die for one.

Three days later Bathsheba says she got the pink slip on the car.

***

One night on my dressing room table there's a vase holding a dozen yellow roses.
"Dear Mink,"
the note says,
"If you will have dinner with me at the Mark Hopkins, I guarantee you will not regret it. Your admirer, John D."
There's a telephone number at the bottom. Don't the patrons understand that Mink Frost is a stage illusion, that I'm an actress and not the under-a-street-lamp vamp they see onstage? I'm repelled. I lift the note by a corner and drop it in the dressing room wastebasket. The yellow roses I give to Greta, a former stripper who choreographs the chorus numbers and loves flowers. Another night I'm getting into my street clothes after the last show, and Greta comes to say there's a man waiting for me at the stage door. By now I'm a master of disguise. I wipe off my makeup, the scarf I wear around my neck becomes my babushka, I rub a bit of powder on my black coat to make it look soiled. Mink Frost has disappeared. I'm the cleaning lady. That's the way I leave the theater from that night on.

But none of this is really scary, not the way it was when I was a model four years earlier, because I'm getting a college degree now. I know my life at the President Follies is only temporary ... that, really, I'm safe.

D'Or's washing-searching-counting-collecting got worse instead of better. "If you loved me more you'd stop that shit," I yelled at her one day in the spring of my junior year. "I'm working myself to death—fifteen units a semester at Berkeley, seven days a week at the President Follies, and I don't ask you to do a goddam thing but get over your sickness!" Sometimes I daydreamed a D'Or who was perfectly well. "
You rescued me from dragons and devils,
" she'd exclaim in the fantasy in which I became Mary Marvel again. "
You brought me so much happiness that I don't need to do those things now.
" Then I'd hear the gush of water in the bathtub, where she always washed her hands because it made a stronger stream than the little faucet on the sink did.

We hardly ever made love anymore. Instead we fought, a lot, about anything.

One Sunday, before the three o'clock matinee at the President, we went to brunch at a place on Powell Street. Then, despite a San Francisco drizzle, we strolled arm-in-arm and stopped to press our noses on the shop windows around Union Square, and I felt lighthearted, being
away from the manacle of the dressing room for a few precious hours. In a toy shop window was a stuffed bear that D'Or cooed over in a child's voice: "Oh, oh, just like the one I wanted when I was a little girl! They'd never buy it for me."

Monday, after classes, I skipped the usual quick dinner I got at the Berkeley cafeteria before hopping the buses that would take me to the President in time for the seven o'clock show. I headed straight to Union Square. But the teddy bear was gone from the window.

"They're on order," the salesgirl said. "Try us in ten days."

I traipsed through the streets, a knight seeking a treasure for my lady love, until at last, thirty minutes before I absolutely had to get into my costume, I found it. Not a little bear like the one in the window, but a huge bear, a beautiful bear, with rich brown fur and a green satin ribbon and two tinkly little silver bells around its neck, a bear I too would have lusted after when I was a kid. The cashier put it in a big pink box with a white bow. Then I balanced the box in one hand, my briefcase stuffed with books and homework in the other, and dashed down Geary to the President. I felt silly but happy too, and as Mink Frost bumped and grinded and peeled off layers under the footlights, I saw myself handing D'Or the healing gift.

After the second show I rebalanced my load and hurried through the dark streets to hop the bus that took me down Market and then the cable car that took me up Powell. At Jones I jumped off and looked up at our window the way I used to when I first came to San Francisco to be with D'Or. The old feelings I'd almost forgotten came back with a wild rush.
She's up there, my beloved,
I told myself now,
and soon I'll be holding her in my arms and kissing her.
'You remembered!"
she'll exclaim, her eyes overflowing with love.