Come Down: II.6

Jet found me a slot at the Quartz Club’s Fourth of July party. It would, he explained, just be the two of us -- it was, apparently, the club’s preference to have a rotation of dancers throughout the night so the pedestals were never empty, but many of their regular dancers would be out of town for the holiday weekend and at least this way we could trade off. I was to arrive no later than 10 p.m. and be up on my pedestal by 10:30. When I wasn’t onstage, I would be expected to circulate among the paying attendees, making sure everyone was having a good time, even flirting, although I was under no obligation to divulge any personal information if I did not wish to. In return for performing three hours’ worth of these services I would receive free entry to the event and three drink tickets, plus whatever I could attract in tips.

I didn’t own any specifically American-themed clothing, but I owned red-and-white striped boxer briefs that I had acquired shortly into my transition because they reminded me of an old-timey swimsuit, and I had recently purchased from a Malden thrift store a girls’ extra-large tank top, white with little silver stars printed all over it that reminded me of Élouan’s witchy drapery, and shredded it until it barely even covered my surgical scars. I modeled this outfit for myself in the mirror for, cumulatively, several hours leading up to the night I was slated to dance. I went back and forth innumerable times over the issue of glasses versus contact lenses, but -- although the comic-book silhouette of my new frames lent the outfit a camp quality that I could not reconstruct without them -- I yielded at last to the probability that I would be getting very sweaty dancing all night and would find it difficult to keep my glasses securely on my nose. Around 9:00 that Saturday night (actually the fifth of July, the holiday weekend being what it was) I could spend no longer waiting in the too-white light of my apartment, half-listening to a podcast and folding things that did not need to be folded, with my eyebrows already gelled and my costume pinned against my skin beneath a baggy t-shirt and shorts. I took the train to the Quartz Club.

There was already a line to get in when I arrived, and, not knowing whether my status as a compensated performer entitled me to skip to the front, I waited, refreshing my Instagram repeatedly -- I had posted a story about the party and received near-instant reactions and replies from most of Élouan’s friends, although perhaps they counted as my friends, too, at that point, given how excited they all were to see me perform -- but Élouan hadn’t viewed the story yet, let alone made any indication of their plans or even their feelings about it. I had held off on messaging them directly, not wanting to be seen to seek their favor over any of our mutual acquaintances’, but in line I could contain it no longer and let them know, all lowercase, very casual, that they should come by, if they weren’t planning to already, to see a performance I was sure would make Shakespeare and Marlowe proud.

The bouncer wore a cartoonish Uncle Sam top hat that wobbled on his head as he checked my ID.

“All set,” he said.

“I’m actually dancing tonight. It’s my first time. What do I do?”

He squinted at me. “Oh, you’re Jet’s new gogo boy? Let Savvy know. She’ll give you a performer wristband and tell you where to go.”

Uncle Sam shooed me inside and motioned for the next in line before I could ask any clarifying questions about Savvy. Happily, I didn’t need to -- she was the only employee in the club’s lobby, greying ponytail and heavy eyeshadow, surrounded by a cloud of star-spangled clubgoers to whom she doled out blue Tyvek wristbands with practiced efficiency, and when I introduced myself and explained my situation, she pulled a roll of black bands from her pocket and wrapped one tight around my wrist.

“There you go,” she said. “Door by the bar. The code is 7789. Break a leg, kiddo.”

And there was a door with a keypad lock tucked beside the bar, and punching in 7789 caused it to light up green -- that easy -- and on its other side was a low-ceilinged hallway lined with refrigerators and, at the end of it, a door with a printer-paper sign labeling it GREEN ROOM PLEASE KNOCK. The hall was a good ten degrees cooler than the club, at least, and despite being directly behind the bar there was remarkably good soundproofing, or perhaps the white hum of the refrigerators just covered some of the noise that would have leaked in otherwise. I could hardly hear the music. I knocked.

Jet pulled the door open for me, allowing me into a small room with a few mismatched chairs, a card table with a water pitcher and some plastic cups, and an old coatrack from which hung a black windbreaker. He wore the same harness he’d had on at Backwash, although this time he’d paired it with cherry-red Dr. Martens and eerie colored contact lenses that washed his eyes an almost luminescent blue. His skin glistened unnaturally under the green room’s fluorescent lights. He looked like the ghost of Fourth of July yet to come.

“Good, you’re here,” he said gruffly. “C’mon in, get changed, get warmed up, whatever you need to do. I’ll go on right at 10, but at 10:30 it’ll be all you. I’ll time us, so don’t worry about that.”

“Thanks,” I said, closing the door behind me and unzipping my baggy shorts. “My, uh, my outfit isn’t quite as involved as yours.”

“It’s your first time.”

“Right.”

There were two mirrors in the green room: one horizontal, ballet-style, that spanned the whole length of one wall, and one vertical, like a department store dressing room. I could see only Jet’s shimmering, leather-strapped torso in the horizontal mirror, and when I looked at my own outfit in the vertical, I was confronted with the full force of its childishness. A cut-up tank top meant for a middle schooler and a pair of old underwear. My sneakers didn’t go with the rest of the look, but I had no footwear that did, and, having seen the things that got spilled on the floor of the Quartz Club on a weekly basis, I would sooner have died than approach it barefoot. I had to use the bathroom, but according to Jet the nearest one was out in the club proper, and being already in the green room I didn’t want to go back out to the dance floor until I could make a dramatic entrance, because it seemed to me horribly anticlimactic to wander around saying hello to people before I had clambered up onto my little gogo stage for the first time. The power of audience interaction didn’t exist before the audience knew it was an audience, and even though my stomach cramped as I stared at myself in the mirror, I didn’t want to spoil that. So I folded my clothes and left them and my phone on one of the chairs, and I stretched, and I watched Jet do wrist rolls and neck rolls and shoulder rolls and flex at himself in the mirror, popping each of his pectoral muscles individually, and drink the most minuscule shot of water I had ever seen another person drink.

“Too much hydration ruins the muscle tone,” he explained, gesturing first at my torso and then at his own, when he saw me squinting at the half-inch of water in his cup.

I glanced down at myself, and indeed, there was no visible muscle tone to speak of between my shoulders and my hips, although it was generous of Jet to assume that this was due to my water consumption. I closed my eyes, reminding myself that Nicky was built entirely differently from Jet -- albeit entirely differently from me as well -- and that the people had adored him at Backwash. But -- I felt uncharitable even thinking it, like Nicky might see on my face, if I ever saw him again, that I repaid his kindness in getting me the gig with the thought -- was that a fetish thing? Was the expectation that dancers, if they were not conventionally muscled, be either so large or so dainty as to satisfy those with specific body-type proclivities? And did that mean I was to be on display just for those Independence Day celebrants for whom my tantalizingly-visible top surgery scars were the beginning and the end of my sexual appeal?

There was a loud snort, and I opened my eyes to Jet bent over the card table. Thanks to the double reflections in the mirrors, I could also see the credit card, the tiny snowdrift of white powder, the careful rows -- one, then two -- that traveled up the dollar in Jet’s hand; he had rolled the bill into a neat tube. After the second line, he threw his head back and let out a long, satisfied exhale. He caught my eye in the mirror and grinned.

“I’m on. Good luck out there,” he said, turning to pat me on the shoulder with a greasy hand. “There are a few more lines’ worth if you want them. And if you need to shine up, I left my baby oil in my jacket pocket.”

He left the green room, and I was alone with the mirrors and the cocaine and the baby oil, which I pulled out of his jacket pocket but decided against applying, and the thought that I had made a terrible mistake.

It will not surprise you to learn how little I enjoy devised theatre. (I used to think it was inaptly named, devise from the Old French for careful planning and contrivance, but ultimately it’s from the Latin dividere, to divide, and it’s entirely fair to call it a divisive theatrical practice.) I enjoy seeing other people do improv comedy on occasion, although I would probably never try it myself, and I am aware that improvisation is a skill that can be learned and cultivated. But I think that, in almost all cases, taking a group of trained actors whose talents lie in bodily interpreting a text and steering them intentionally away from that text and towards whatever unconsidered ideas happen to pop into their heads during what can only be called a ‘rehearsal’ in the most flexible terms leads to performances that are incoherent at best. There is nothing wrong with having lines and blocking. It is, arguably, the entire point of theatre for actors to have lines and blocking, and know them, and rehearse them, and perform them.

And perhaps Nicky and Jet and whoever the rest of the Quartz Club’s regular dancers were knew their lines. But I was new to the whole thing, and it was late, and I was bone-tired with anxiety. I was improvising.

The tiny pile of cocaine on the table looked very soft. I considered that the main problem with doing a drug for the first time is embarrassing oneself in front of the presumably experienced user who has offered one the drug, but with Jet upstairs tensing his abs at people’s eye level, there was nobody to see me do a poor job of it. So I rolled up the bill he’d left on the table and used the credit card to portion out what appeared to me, based on what I’d seen Jet do and what crime television had shown me in the past, to be a modest line. I didn’t sniff hard enough the first time and had to whip my head around so my sneeze didn’t scatter everything into the air, but I got most of it on the second try. It burned going up, like a nosebleed in reverse, and I sniffed hard a few more times because it felt like there must still be some sticking to the inside of my nostril. The back of my throat tasted gas-station acrid.

But almost at once the air seemed to take on a sparkling, crystalline quality, like stepping outside on a very cold clear winter day, and my heart rate, already elevated with pre-show jitters, kicked itself up into a faltering sprint. I spent about ten more seconds trying to stretch before giving up and running for the bathroom, where I ticked down the remaining minutes before I was due up on the gogo stage, bouncing my leg and reading all of the graffiti on the stall walls because I’d left my phone in the green room. I didn’t even know if Élouan was coming -- the last time I’d checked, they still hadn’t read my message.

When I emerged, Jet was in the middle of executing a smooth body roll, crumpled ones and fives bristling from his harness like so many hedgehog quills. He caught my eye across the dance floor and stepped down, gesturing as he did so to the other pedestal. The Quartz Club did not have a stage proper, but in the midst of the dance floor they had erected what amounted to two large black wooden crates, each about three feet high. Some nights they were there and some nights they were not, but this was the first time I had seen someone atop one. I waded through the crowd towards the one that was not, I imagined, dangerously slick with excess baby oil, and hoisted myself up onto it.

I am not a tall person, but the crate was more than enough to put me well over the heads of everyone in attendance that night. All the gazes nearest to me turned upward, squinting, smiling, like people watching an eclipse, and I swayed back and forth for a moment to get a sense of the song’s rhythm before shuffling my feet into something like a pas de basque and spiraling my arms up over my head so my shredded tank top would ride up as far as it went. At once: cheers from those nearest me. The lights were brighter up on the pedestal, the music just the right volume through the earplugs I had thankfully remembered to bring, the sea of people dancing beneath me uniformly beautiful and interested in each minute movement of my hips, my hands, my legs, and if I had really been tired or anxious in the green room, both sensations were distant memories already and even those were fading fast, because I was electric. The worst part of parties like Fourth of July at the Quartz Club was being unsure what I was meant to be doing: waiting for Élouan and Dolly and the rest, calibrating how far into the dance floor to venture, estimating how long I ought to go between drinks to avoid any potential judgment on the part of the bartender. How silly I had been! This -- dancing three feet above the ground on a box that rattled slightly with every step, just enough to make it exciting -- was the only thing I had needed to do all along. And when I dismounted -- if I dismounted at all, if Jet did not see me gyrating and decide to keep me up there all night, all week, all year, God was I a good dancer -- it was in my job description to drink and flirt and see to it that everyone was enjoying themselves, and who could in good conscience turn down attention from one of the night’s featured performers? Perhaps I had been wrong about devised theatre, or perhaps I had been wrong about the amount of improvisation the night would require, but on that pedestal I was right. (And did the cocaine help with that? Perhaps -- I was already having to remind myself that I had taken cocaine, that life had not simply always been this exciting.) I could hear, in the bumping rhythm of a “Party in the U.S.A.” remix, every phrase and response, every compliment, every song, every line and stage direction comprising the rest of the night, and it was going to be a great show, a spectacle, spectacular, and I wanted all of it as soon as possible; I wanted to take the entire club in my mouth and swallow it and let it buzz inside of me. It would, I imagined, taste sweet. And sour.

A gentle hand tapped me on the ankle, and I glanced down to see a man I vaguely recognized -- thick glasses, trim grey goatee -- Cake Trunks? Though he was of course wearing a tank top with an eagle printed on it and tiny sky-blue shorts rather than anything dessert-themed, so I couldn’t be sure -- holding a five-dollar bill between his index and middle fingers. I reached for it, stopped myself, dropped into a squat instead and offered him the waistband of my underwear. He smiled and tucked it in, the fabric of the bill (it was cotton that currency was made out of, wasn’t it? I couldn’t remember) scratchy against my skin, and as I stood back up I made sure to swivel so my ass was right in his face. More cheering. From my new angle I spotted my friends -- my friends! -- across the dance floor, Paris and Madonna jumping along to the song and whooping, Paris’ hands outstretched towards me, and October flashing me a thumbs-up and Alder bopping his head and Shea grinning like the sun, and Dolly leaning against the wall behind them with a drink in her hand that she raised in a toast to me and, beside her, Élouan, resplendent in an American flag that they had folded into something like a toga, showing off half their chest and several inches of thigh, watching me owl-eyed, intent, intense, like I was the only thing worth looking at, like they didn’t want to look away. They’d all come out to support me. And it was a damn good thing they had, because I was, appropriately enough, a firecracker.

When Jet appeared to get me off the box, I darted into the green room to count my first round of tips (28 dollars, all told) and get a swig of water and do another line of his cocaine. Then I went to greet my public.

My friends weren’t beside the bar when I emerged, so I used one of my drink tickets on a Roy Rogers -- the second line of cocaine had felt as good as the first, maybe better, and I wasn’t about to throw a different substance into the mix and risk compromising what felt, at the time, like the best performance of my life -- and wandered around, smiling at people, striking up brief conversations (“was that you up there just now? You were amazing!”) with anybody who made more than a second or two of eye contact. The Fourth of July theme lent the crowd an unusual level of cohesion, everyone dressed in the same three colors, and I popped from one person to the next without always noticing the difference, awash in a sparkling whirl of red, white, and blue. After what couldn’t have been very long, since Jet looked only slightly less oily than he had when he’d taken over for me, although I’d managed to have probably a dozen conversations in that not-very-long time, I saw Dolly’s dark, stubbly head at the edge of the dance floor, rising a few inches above the masses.

“Hi!” I said, pulling up short a little too close to her, my face nearly touching her long pale throat, exposed above a bright blue tube top.

“Marco,” she said, and slugged the rest of her drink, and handed the empty glass to Shea who was watching with an amused smirk, and hugged me tight. I felt like I might crush her bones if I squeezed her too hard -- they seemed too light, like a bird’s -- but she had no such reservations about me, evidently. She was wearing perfume that did not actually smell like honey but reminded me of honey nonetheless.

“I’m amazing,” I said as she released me.

“You are!”

The others agreed in chorus. I glanced between their faces -- my friends, my audience -- and came up one short.

“Where’s Élouan?”

A delicate grimace passed over Dolly’s face, scrunching her nose as it went, before she was back to her smile, placid, beatific. “Lou had to head out early,” she said.

“They’ve got a Yankees rehearsal tomorrow,” October explained. “But they said to tell you -- shit, what was it?”

Madonna leaned in. “They said to tell you you’re a little exhibitionist,” she said. “Which I’m pretty sure is the highest compliment Élouan knows how to give.”

It sounded warm and sexy in Madonna’s voice, but I could picture it in Élouan’s, picture the bite with which they said it, silk wrapped around a knife, could feel it hit me in the back of the teeth, and at once I was embarrassed and aroused and my nose burned and I swigged my Roy Rogers before remembering there wasn’t any alcohol in it and thought perhaps I ought to order something that would get me drunk.

And then Dolly said, “I need another drink. Marco, can I get you anything?”

“No,” I replied, remembering the two remaining drink tickets tucked into the waistband of my underwear, “but I can get you something.”

I caught Jet’s eye, and they held up four fingers, and I nodded, figuring I could probably manage to get Dolly a drink in four minutes. But there was a line at the bar several people deep and several people wide, so I left her with one of my drink tickets and got back up on my gogo stage. And, incredibly, the magic did not wear off. I was a little more tired and a little less high than I’d been for my first turn, but the attention, the tips, the knowing exactly what to do with myself and how to do it -- it was all there.

“It’s that easy,” I murmured to myself. Then I leaned down to grab a tip from someone’s mouth with my teeth.

~

My friends left after my second turn on the crate, hugging and kissing me farewell, off to other clubs’ parties and other people’s beds, Dolly in particular telling me I’d be hearing from her, which was unusual, since to my knowledge she had no way to get in contact with me, but I imagined she could find me through Élouan’s Instagram and paid it no more mind. I completed the remainder of my turns gogo dancing, collected my clothes from the green room, said good night to Jet, and went home. Only in the comfort of my apartment, dark because I didn’t want the overhead lights to transform the feeling I’d been left with -- shivering and scraped out but warm, every muscle fighting to hold me together, satisfaction and hollow exhaustion like I’d just been in the Olympics -- into the anxiety (a little exhibitionist) that was tickling the back of my brain, did I spread out all the crumpled bills that had been stuffed down my waistband throughout the night and count them.

109 dollars. A few hours of dancing, of flirting, of the activities to which I was already in the habit of devoting my Saturday nights, and I’d earned nearly as much as I made in a day’s work at the university. All passed from the hands (and mouths) of an admiring -- adoring! -- public for no other reason than that they found me attractive. It was applause that I could spend on rice and beans. Or, more likely, on more tank tops to cut to shreds, on more underwear with fun patterns, on more eyebrow gel, because I would be damned if I couldn’t perform at every party that would have me from then until the end of time.

I creased each bill down the middle, stacked them, and rolled them into a bundle that I tucked into my underwear drawer. I needed a shower, desperately -- I hadn’t even noticed how sweaty I had gotten dancing under the lights, but I had, and it had dried down to a sticky, itchy seal over my pores -- but the idea of standing upright for five or even ten minutes registered as improbable at best. I sat down on the edge of my bed and checked my phone, intending to thank everyone for coming to see me, but there was a new text message from an unknown number. Dolly.

Thank you for the drink, she’d written. Allow me to pay you back with lunch this week.

She texted more quaintly than she spoke, everything capitalized and properly punctuated, and it reminded me that I wasn’t sure of her age. I also wasn’t sure where she’d gotten my phone number from -- to my knowledge, even Élouan didn’t have it, and I’d certainly never shared it with the rest of the posse -- but that, at least, was a question I was prepared to ask over lunch. I responded in the affirmative -- just tell me where and when and I’ll be there -- and slouched over. When I awoke, the sun, I realized when I checked my laptop since my dead phone was no help, had already come up and gone down again. My feet were still dangling off the edge of the bed.

Might Makes Write and all the writing shared herein are licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.