The Corpse Wore Pasties (2 page)

Still, bottom line, I get paid to take off my clothes.

And so do all the women who were in that room with me.

The room, if you want to get technical about it, was a dressing room—although since we were in the back of an East Village bar perhaps “dressing room” is a bit of an exaggeration. “Oversized supply closet with mirrors” might be closer to the mark. The reason we were all in the aforementioned state of undress is that we were getting ready for a show. A burlesque show. Dreamland Burlesque, to be specific, which—though not the show I usually front for—is one of my favorite places to perform. It’s been running for years and so manages to be both professional and relaxed at the same time, which makes it an enjoyable night for performers and audiences alike. In general, burlesque in New York City is a pretty friendly enterprise—most everybody gets along with everybody else, most of the time. It’s nothing like you hear about in the old days, with one dancer putting ground glass in another’s face powder—but like anything else, there are better and worse shows to perform in, and Dreamland was one of the better ones. Which made the current chill all the more unusual.

But not exactly unexpected. Because I knew the reason for it. And that reason was, much to my chagrin, talking at me as I attempted to get dressed.

“I know the setlist is already done,” said the reason, as she emptied half a can of spray-tan over her ass. “It’s just that I have another gig after this, honey. So if you can move me earlier in the lineup?” The inflection made it resemble a question, but her tone of voice made it clear that she wasn’t expecting any answer that wasn’t affirmative.

I told her I would check with the other performers to see if anyone was willing to switch. Given the rancorous looks being thrown her way by the five other women in that dressing room, I wasn’t optimistic, but I figured it was worth a try; anything to get her spraytanned ass out of that venue more quickly.

The reason’s stage name was Victoria Vice, and she was the rare performer that absolutely nobody liked, including me. And for good reason. But unlike everyone else in the room, I was obligated to talk to her. Because I was running the show. It wasn’t my usual gig, as I’ve mentioned (that one’s called Pinchbottom, you can look it up online, and that’s the last shameless plug for it I’ll throw in), but Dreamland’s producer and regular host, LuLu LaRue, was out of town and had asked me to handle things for her.

And when a beautiful woman asks you to
handle her things
—

Right, right, sorry.

At any rate, this Wednesday’s performance of the Dreamland Burlesque had been entrusted to my tender care, which meant I couldn’t join the rest of the dressing room in giving this woman the silent treatment she so richly deserved.

I pulled up my pants and, in my most innocent of innocent voices, asked her what number she was planning to do tonight. I used the innocent tone because the question was more loaded than the maid-of-honor in hour six of a bachelorette party. Because Victoria Vice was a thief.

I’m not talking about the exciting, sexy type of thief, the kind who dresses up in skintight black outfits and goes running around on rooftops, sliding into bedrooms while people are sleeping, reaching into their nightstands and... But I should stop before I write an entirely different book. No, Victoria was a plagiarist, which in our line of work is the worst kind of thief you can be. Maybe it doesn’t sound as bad as stealing, say, a pair of Swarovski crystal-encrusted pasties, but to a burlesque performer it’s much worse. “She who steals my purse steals trash,” the performer getting dressed next to us had said, paraphrasing Shakespeare, after she had fallen victim to Victoria’s creative larceny, “but steal my burlesque numbers and I’m gonna cut a bitch.” Now, Cherries Jubilee was attempting to appear as if she were focused on avoiding a run in the nylon as she put on her stockings, but I could tell she had an ear cocked in our direction. No foot covering requires quite the level of attention Cherries was giving it.

Victoria replied: “It’s a brand new act, actually. Everyone will love it.” Which didn’t tell me anything about it, of course. A nice dodge. I would have pressed further, but she didn’t give me a chance. “Which way is the little girl’s room, honey?” she asked.

Little girl’s room. What was she, eight? But I gave her the directions: out the door into the main room, follow the curtain that hides the backstage area from the audience (more or less), when you hit a door, that’s the bathroom.

“Oh, no! Really? Out
there?
That’s kind of unprofessional, isn’t it? The audience will see me if I go out there.”

I plastered an unconvincing smile on my face, bit my tongue, and explained through clenched teeth that since the house wasn’t open yet, there would be no audience to see her.

“Hmph. Well, just in case,” she said, and reached into her gig bag. It was a standard black suitcase, a “drag bag”—you know, the kind with wheels on one end and a telescoping handle at the other, the sort that stewardesses use to drag around their street clothes and burlesque performers use to drag around their stewardess costumes. Since walking into the dressing room Victoria had been clutching it between her knees like a reluctant lover. She pulled out a cape of the most obnoxious purple—that’s not fair, the purple was fine, it was the woman who was obnoxious—and threw it over her shoulders.

“Thanks
oodles
,” she said and, dragging the suitcase behind her, headed for the door, where she ran into the show’s tech guy, an 80s-throwback named DJ Casey, on his way in. Casey stepped aside to let her pass. Instead, she blocked the doorway and pointed a finger at him.

“You. What was your name again? Charlie?”

“Casey,” said Casey.

“You handle the music for this show?” Victoria said.

“Um, yeah...I’m the DJ, yeah,” Casey replied.

“Right,” she said. “Look, play my music loud, okay? No matter how many times I tell you guys, you always play it too soft. Got that? Loud.”

Casey nodded.

“Sorry, what?” Victoria said. “I didn’t hear you. How did I just ask you to play my music?”

Casey looked puzzled, his standard defense mechanism when dealing with difficult people. He wasn’t dumb, but he played dumb for special occasions.

“Um, loud?” he said.

“Louuuuud,” Victoria repeated, making it a three syllable word. Then she pushed past him and out the door. Some of the tension left the dressing room with Victoria, but not much. After all, we all knew she was coming back.

“Wow,” Casey said as he walked in. She must really have pissed him off—from Casey, that one word was the equivalent of an obscenity-filled diatribe by anyone else. He announced to the room that he was opening the doors to let the audience in, which meant the show would start in fifteen minutes. Then he pulled me aside and reminded me that I needed to gather the performers’ music for him before that could happen. As he left the dressing room, he glanced toward the bathroom. His brow furrowed, briefly. Then he pushed the backstage curtain aside and walked down the aisle to open the house. As I swung the dressing room door shut, the first few audience members were making their way in and handing him their money.

I finished getting dressed (ruffled shirt, rigged with snaps for quick removal; bow tie; tuxedo jacket), grabbed the clipboard with the setlist on it, and took a deep breath. For the first time in my life, I wasn’t looking forward to talking to a room full of naked women.

Cherries Jubilee is, in normal circumstances, a close friend of mine.

But when I walked up to her, she practically threw her CD in my face.

“What the hell is
that
one doing here?”

“I’m just running the show, Cherries, I didn’t book it.”

“Why the hell would you book her?”

“I didn’t book her.”

“I don’t mean
you
you, Porkpie. I mean the royal ‘you.’ Why the hell would LuLu book her? Why the hell would
anyone
book her? Did you know she was going to be in the show? You would have told me if you knew she was going to be in the show, right?”

“I found out exactly three seconds before you did,” I said, “when Casey stopped me on the way backstage and handed me the setlist. Speaking of which, do you want Casey to play your music right after I introduce you, or when you’re in position on stage?”

“In position. If she the hell does my football number again tonight, I’ll kill her. Hell, I’ll kill her if she does your—”

“Didn’t she tell you she wasn’t going to do that number anymore?”

“Yeah. And I’m blonde, so I believe everything she the hell says.”

I shook my head. “I don’t think that even
she
would be stupid enough to do a number she stole in the same show as the person she stole it from.”

“The hell you don’t,” Cherries said, and turned back to the mirror, checking her teeth for lipstick.

I didn’t bother asking if she’d be willing to switch with Victoria in the lineup.

The next performer was putting on a corset, angrily. Which is no way to put on a corset. As I approached, she shoved the laces into my hand.

“Tighten,” she said. I slipped the clipboard under my arm and pulled.

Jillian Knockers is a legend in the annals of bump and grind. First of all, she’s not called “Knockers” for nothing. On the contrary, she’s called “Knockers” for two things. But it’s not just the obvious talents that make her a star; the woman has been in the burlesque business longer than almost anyone, and it shows. Not physically—if you saw her onstage and tried to guess her age, I guarantee you’d be wrong by a decade or two, on the young side. Where it’s obvious is in the quality of her performance. She mostly does variations on classic stuff like fan dances, glove peels, feather boas, chair work. When she’s on stage, she doesn’t make a single move that isn’t calculated to get a rise out of the audience, and she gets it, in every sense of the word.

“
Tighter,”
she said, as I pulled. “Hey, Jonny, I have your opening line
(tighter)
: Ladies and Gentlemen, tonight Dreamland Burlesque is proud to present
(tighter)
plagiarist Victoria Vice and a
(TIGHTER!)
veritable Who’s Who of performers
(Jesus, Porkpie, don’t be a wimp, pull harder, I’ll tell you if it’s too tight)
the bitch has screwed over.
”

That was a terrible opening line. I wasn’t going to use that.

But I sympathized with the sentiment. Jillian, too, had once had a run-in with Victoria. I’d never heard all the gory details, but it had something to do with the Gotham Academy of Ecdysiasts, the school of burlesque that Jillian had founded a few years back. (She calls herself the “headmistress,” a title inspired in part by her side job as a dominatrix. Headmistress, I’ve been bad. Take me to detention, Headmistress. Oh, Headmistress.)

Jillian didn’t like to talk about it, but from what I’d gathered through the grapevine, she had a problem with a competing burlesque school Victoria had opened in Philly. That was all I knew, except that Jillian wasn’t any fonder of Victoria than Cherries was.

“I can see why LuLu would want to get out of town for a show like this,” Jillian said. ”What I don’t understand is why she would book it in the first place.” She took the corset laces out of my hand and shoved her CD at me. I took it and moved on. Once again, I didn’t ask about the switch, but this time for a good practical reason: Jillian was the final number in the show.

Angelina Blood just looked at me. Didn’t say a word when I asked her for her music, just paused in the middle of applying a thick halo of black eyeliner. Her eyes had been fully surrounded by black when she arrived, and now she was adding more. She pushed a raven-black lock of her raven-black hair to the side, and her raven-black eyes (I didn’t know if they were contacts, but I’d never seen her without them) flicked over to the banquette next to her, where a CD lay next to a pair of skull-and-crossbones-shaped pasties on top of her raven-black suitcase. She didn’t say a word when I asked when she wanted her music to start, but those black eyes flicked to the CD again, and I saw that she had written instructions on it. She didn’t say a word when I asked her if she wanted to switch places in the lineup with Victoria, because I didn’t bother asking. I didn’t feel like wasting my breath.

The last two performers had been talking together, softly, as I gathered the music from the other three. They shut up before I got close enough to hear anything. I decided I needed to make my culpability—or, rather, lack thereof—clear right off the bat.

“Just for the record,” I said, “I don’t know what problems you have with Victoria, but whatever they are I agree with you. And I didn’t book this show. I’m just running it.”

“I blame you
entirely
, Porky,” said Eva Desire, an alabaster beauty with pink streaks in her hair. Eva had shimmied into town a few months ago. She and I weren’t exactly friends yet, but we had done a few gigs together and got along pretty well—at least, until now. “But I’ll let you make it up to me,” she continued. She put on a breathy stage voice.
“Peel me.”

She handed me a pair of pasties, the small circles of adhesive-backed decoration that keep burlesque performers away from the long arm of the law. Due to an archaic cabaret restriction, although a woman can legally appear topless in the streets of New York City, if she wants to do so on a stage in the back room of an East Village drinking establishment, she is required to cover her nipples. Pasties come in all shapes, sizes and styles. This particular pair had tassels dangling from the center, tassels that would no doubt be twirled at some point during Eva’s performance. I peeled the backing off one and handed it to her, careful not to get the fringe caught in the exposed tape. Eva took out a lighter and held the flame under the tape. (Professional secret—heat the tape, it sticks better.) She centered the pastie over her nipple and pressed it down, hard. I peeled the other pastie and handed it over.

“Okay, Porky, I forgive you,” Eva said, bouncing to make sure the tassels would twirl and the pasties were securely attached. They were. She grabbed my ass to let me know there were no hard feelings.