Woman in the Making: Panti's Memoir (12 page)

In one of the store’s big windows Frank installed a huge metal swing in the shape of a bell, and on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays of the Christmas period I would sit in the swing, wearing my Panti Claws outfit and lip-sync Christmas songs. Frank also installed an intercom system and people outside on the street could talk to me, which mostly involved kids making farting noises. It all caused quite a commotion. The bus stop across the road was temporarily moved so passengers (and the drivers) could get a better view, and sometimes huge crowds would gather outside, spilling into the street and blocking traffic. Bizarrely, people were sometimes not sure if I was actually real. One evening I was swinging back and forth to Eartha Kitt’s ‘Santa Baby’ when a woman’s hand slowly sneaked its way through the curtain behind me, felt around till it found my ankle and squeezed. Then it disappeared in a flash and a broad Dublin accent from the other side of the curtain cackled, ‘It
is
bleedin’ real!’

Niall and I were friends with an earthy, bossy, gregarious straight girl called Claire Crosby, who had a mouth like a sailor and a mischievous attitude, and somewhere along the way the three of us decided we should start a club night together. For the fun. Our motivation was never about making money – there are easier ways to do that than in the notoriously fickle world of clubbing. We were interested in having fun, in making things, and in
not being boring
. Being boring was our great fear and boredom our great motivator. Not
being boring had become a kind of mantra. Bill Clinton had his ‘IT’S THE ECONOMY, STUPID’; our bumper sticker was ‘DON’T BE BORING’.

Somewhere
else
along the way, no doubt fuelled by booze and one-upmanship, we decided it should be a fetish club. None of us had any particular interest in or knowledge of the fetish scene but that didn’t stop us. In fact, in those pre-internet days we weren’t really sure if there even
was
a fetish scene in Dublin, but that was exactly why it seemed like a good idea – it wasn’t boring.

However, when we went to London and checked out a few big fetish events and spoke to people in Dublin’s sex shops, one of the things that struck us was that, actually, the fetish scene seemed … well … a little boring. People took it all rather seriously. It came across as quite po-faced and it just didn’t seem that much fun. If we were going to run a club night it needed, most of all, to be fun. It needed a sense of humour.

We called it GAG. The first job was to find a venue for it, which was relatively easy in those early days of the Celtic Tiger. There were still plenty of dingy, half-empty venues around town with owners willing to let us try to fill them with whatever craziness we were planning while they waited for some developer to come along and buy the place to build offices or a shopping centre. The problem was
keeping
the venue after they’d seen what we were actually up to.

We held the first event at the Tivoli on Francis Street and spent the day unscrewing light bulbs, covering
everything in PVC, stretching rubber sheets from the ceiling and wrapping everything with construction tape. We put an ad for the party in the small ads in the back of
The Irish Times
(because we assumed it would be the paper of choice for the pervert set) but when Frank called to place the ad, the woman in the advertising sales department assumed that GAG was an acronym and wouldn’t take the ad till Frank told her what GAG stood for. With no time to think Frank said, ‘Eh … It stands for Gays Against Germaine Greer.’ She was happy with that and the ad went in. We covered the city in mysterious GAG stickers, handed out beautiful kinky-looking fliers and told everyone who would listen it would be a party like Dublin had never seen. And it almost was.

The people who turned up were all sorts: gay, straight, older, younger, fashion types, perverts, students and businessmen, and we welcomed them all, as long as they passed the ‘fetish’ dress code. We were pretty relaxed about how people interpreted it – partly because we were trying to grow an almost non-existent scene and didn’t want to scare people off who didn’t have ‘traditional’ fetish gear (leather, rubber, etc.) but also because we figured a nutty mix of people would be more fun. So, if you turned up to the club in a rubber nurse’s outfit or a gas mask, in drag or riding boots and a tweed jacket, it was all fine with us, so long as we believed that
you
believed it was sexy. And if someone turned up wanting to come in in regular street clothes we told them they
could if they stripped to their underwear. And most of them did.

At that first party Niall and I did the first of what would become infamous GAG performances and it set the template for the rest that would follow. We knew that we wanted to do something that would slightly shock people but at the same time make them laugh. Something they would gleefully recount to open-mouthed friends the next day. I don’t remember who first suggested that Niall should pull a six-foot-long string of pearls from Panti’s ass but, whoever it was, I, as usual, agreed to do it because … well, because it wasn’t boring. Anyway, it wasn’t really such a crazy idea, as far as I was concerned. Leigh Bowery had given himself enemas during some performances, and during a student summer in London I had once seen legendary New York performer Lactating Lady Hennessy Brown in Heaven, where, before squirting the audience with milk from her legendary lactating breasts, a man put his head between her legs, emerged with a string between his teeth and backed all the way across the crowded dance floor with it until eventually she released it with a flourish. Then she did ‘the crab’ and blew out flaming torches with her pussy. No one could accuse Lady Hennessy of being boring.

Of course, there were logistics to work out first, so I bought a long string of cheap plastic display beads and set about experimenting, disappearing into the bathroom to work it out (or, perhaps I should say, ‘work
it in’) before backing into the living room to show my handiwork to a cackling Niall and Frank. Then there was the problem of how to show the, eh,
mechanics
of the performance to all sides of the room so we got a heavy-duty electric rotator (the kind they use to slowly turn cars around in showrooms) for Panti to perch on.

And so I found myself in a cold, cramped club toilet awkwardly douching with cold water before lubricating a string of plastic pearlescent beads and slowly (and carefully!) inching them into my ass till there were only a couple of inches of pearly tail left hanging out. Then, dressed in a short black slip, stockings, suspenders and a black jockstrap, I took to the stage, perched daintily on all fours on the rotating stand, my rosy rump presented and slowly scanning the room with its pearly eye. While I dramatically lip-synced to Édith Piaf’s ‘Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien’, Niall – dressed all in black rubber and calling himself ‘Mr Sphincter’ – slowly and teasingly (and, dare I say,
lovingly
?) pulled the beads from my ass, swung them over his head and tossed them into the gobsmacked crowd as Piaf crescendoed. Veda Beaux Reves claims the flying beads wrapped themselves around her then-innocent boy-neck but I think she just says that to be nice. I hope it’s true because, if it is, it’s sweet that we later became great friends and drag sisters after such auspicious beginnings.

We called the performance ‘Pearl Harbor’ and it did everything it was meant to do. The club was the talk of the
town the next day, but more than that, the performance set the tone for the party. When people see a performance like that in a club it gives them permission to let their hair down. It gives them licence to be licentious. If everyone has just watched a drag queen have a string of pearls pulled out of her ass to the strains of France’s national treasure they aren’t going to be bothered if you get a little wild on the dance floor or hook up with some hot guy in a toilet cubicle. So people did. The only problem was that the management and staff of the Tivoli weren’t used to finding a corseted woman giving some bloke a good trashing with a riding crop in a corner of the dance floor, or walking into the toilet to find all the bulbs had been removed and rubber-clad guys were having sex with each other in the dark. So, even though the party was a success, we had to find a new venue.

We went through three venues before we found one that was happy to have us. The club was owned by one of the ponytailed young businessmen who were beginning to emerge in the economic boom. Unfortunately for him, his club had developed a reputation after it had been adopted by one of the city’s most notorious criminal gang families as a hangout, and there was nothing he could do about it. Nobody messed with that family and no bouncer in his right mind was going to refuse them and expect to be able to walk home from work. There wasn’t much the gardaí could do about it either. The story goes, whether true or not, that eventually his security people
turned to those who
could
do something – the IRA, who conveniently weren’t too busy at the time because they were not long into their ceasefire. New bouncers started to work at the club, who had a few quiet words, and the criminal family set up shop somewhere else. By the time we arrived, looking for a venue, the club was rid of its criminal problem but was still struggling to overcome its reputation, and the management’s attitude was ‘If you can get people in here you can do what you want.’

The club was in the Docklands, on a part of the quays that is now all shiny glass office blocks and gleaming desirable apartment buildings, but at the time was a fairly bleak, dark part of town full of old warehouses, the odd dodgy character and the occasional slow-moving car. Back then, it seemed far out from the city centre, a damp trek along the quays at night. The location would have been a drawback to most other parties, but it worked in our favour – it added a certain
frisson
of danger, and it was away from prying eyes. No one was going to stumble across it accidentally so you didn’t need to worry that your boss might happen upon you in your leather harness unless he wanted to.

Once a month a group of us would spend hours plastering the walls with graphic or silly sex words, hanging slings and meat hooks from the ceilings, filling old tin shower cubicles with foam, building makeshift darkrooms, mounting slide projectors, painting walls and generally destroying the place. And every month more
and more fun-loving perverts would turn up. There were the professional perverts – straight women in shiny latex, gay men in leather harnesses, lesbians in sharp suits with fat cigars, straight men in studded collars, transvestites in thigh-high PVC boots – but there were also half-naked clabbers in homemade outfits, nervous office workers in football gear, adventurous farmers up from the country, and excited beer-couraged straight guys, who’d heard something wild was going on down the docks. And if that straight guy seemed easy-going and nice and was prepared to strip to his underpants, we let him in.

Inside, elderly transvestites would be chatting at the bar with a straight woman, who was nonchalantly tugging on her husband’s leash, while shaven-headed gay boys in rubber and tattoos made out on the dance floor, and a straight businessman in a corset engaged in conversation with legendary Dublin DJ Tonie Walsh, who was holding forth while lying in a bath full of jelly.

In a sign of the times, I had first met Tonie at the funeral of a mutual friend who had died of AIDS. Tonie had turned up looking for all the world like an American Indian from the Saturday-afternoon movies of my youth, his long, straight hair dyed pitch black, his aquiline nose summer-tanned, and a dramatic scar (with an appropriately dramatic story) etched across his cheek. I didn’t know it then but Tonie’s indefatigable enthusiasm for life and hedonism, and his ability to turn up at every event in an outfit he had spent a week making out of chicken
wire, plastic, papier-mâché and resin, would make him a permanent fixture in my life for the next twenty years.

Niall’s and my performances, mostly based around pulling things from my ass, became much-talked-about focal points of the parties, and as time went on we had to get creative about what was coming out of my ass and how.

So, I have squatted over an inflatable globe while emoting to the dulcet tones of Karen Carpenter singing ‘Top of the World’ and squirted out milk, which sprayed off the North Pole and covered the front row of perverts in a fine milky mist. I’ve douched with poster paint (non-toxic!) and splashed out onto canvases that were then auctioned to the assembled clubbers. I’ve had minced meat shoved in one end, a handle turned on my back, and a string of sausages pulled out the other. I’ve even dressed as a secretary perched at her typewriter lip-syncing to Dolly Parton’s ‘9 to 5’ while a suited Mr Sphincter pulled the lyrics of the song from my shiny rump, like a perverse karaoke machine. Though just the chorus because, after all, it was my ass and not the Port Tunnel. We’d actually spent a lot of time trying to work out a way to get the lyrics up my ass, then back out again on cue in a readable form. Which is more difficult than you might at first imagine! Eventually we printed the lyrics on a long thin strip of paper that we then rolled up and put inside a soft rubber cup-type thing we’d found (which had a wide lip to prevent any sudden disappearances!). I then
very
gingerly (with
paper cuts in mind!) popped the whole lot up my bum, leaving the mouth of the rubber cup accessible, with the end of the paper strip hanging out like an eager dog’s tongue. In rehearsal it all worked perfectly, and when Dolly hit the chorus and Mr Sphincter pulled, the lyrics appeared perfectly on cue. But when we did the actual performance, I think I must have rolled up the lyrics a little too tightly because when Mr Sphincter pulled, the lyrics appeared from my end like a long, pointy, uncoiling paper cone, extending from my glossy rump like an alien horn until eventually it reached the point of no return and collapsed in a tangled mess on the stage. No one seemed to mind. I think the perverts were just happy to be out of the house.

To celebrate the club’s birthday we turned the tables, and with a rubber-clad Mr Sphincter on all fours, I messily and stickily made a cake out of him, dumping big bowls of cream, custard, jelly, and hundreds and thousands all over him before finally shoving a candle up his ass and lighting it – somewhat awkwardly because my hands were covered with sticky trifle.