Woman in the Making: Panti's Memoir (9 page)
We did silly, fun lip-sync shows in basement gay clubs and hostessed and acted the fool at mixed dance clubs. We performed at parties in art galleries and wound up in pop videos and magazine spreads. We paraded damply in the sweltering humid heat of Tokyo’s first Pride parade and clambered giggling into cars with gangsters and tranny-chasers. We took ecstasy and smoked speed and fucked till we were sore, while club owners paid us to be the most fun, most outrageous people in the building and we were happy to oblige.
We had a regular gig at a cavernous club called Gold, spread over five massive floors in an awkward-to-get-to industrial part of the city, where achingly cool club-kids took ecstasy with fashion photographers and gangsters. There was a beauty parlour on one floor where two ‘Harajuku Girls’, with giant eyelashes, doll makeup and enormous platform boots, would smoke cigarettes and pretend to do hair and makeup while their friends sat around like extras from
Barbarella
. You could take an elevator up to the top floor, and when the doors opened, you found yourself standing in the front
yard of a typical Tokyo suburban family home complete with kids’ bicycles abandoned on the path. Inside you could hang out in the perfect-down-to-the-smallest-detail living room and play cards with ‘Granddad’ while ‘Mama-san’ got you a beer from the kitchen, or play computer games with the ‘son’ in his bedroom or giggle with the ‘daughter’ over the cutest pop star while flicking through magazines on her bed. This was ‘bubble-economy’ boom-time Tokyo, and if you wanted a suburban home complete with perfect family on the top floor of your nightclub you could have it.
In 1994 Cyndi Lauper – who was absolutely
huge
in Japan – came to Tokyo to promote a new album, and a single, which was a reggae-flavoured version of her classic hit ‘Girls Just Want To Have Fun’. The video featured a gaggle of drag queens, and when she was booked to appear on a famous New Year’s Eve TV show, which was to be pre-recorded, the TV company came looking for drag queens to provide colour for Cyndi’s performance.
There wasn’t much choice when it came to foreign drag queens in Tokyo, so Lurleen and I, along with a gang of Japanese queens and a couple of other foreign gays from the clubs (who were shoved into dresses and wigs and too-small shoes), ended up on TV dancing with Cyndi Lauper, pretending it was New Year’s Eve, while a live studio audience of screaming Japanese girls flipped out. Cyndi was fun and sweet, but she was also all
business – she was the boss: she knew what she wanted and expected to get it. And, luckily for us, I guess what she wanted was a couple of crazy messes full of vodka and LSD, because afterwards we were asked to do pretty much the same thing at her live gigs.
On the opening night in Tokyo Cyndi tripped onstage and awkwardly twisted her ankle. By the time she came off, it was swollen and painful, so the next night international superstar Cyndi Lauper was pushed around the stage in a feather-boa-covered wheelchair by two drunk drag queens in cut-off denim shorts. Coincidentally, Diana Ross was in town to do some gigs at the same time. After the show that evening the dressing-room door swung open and Miss Ross herself swept in. In a roomful of Japanese gays, she dramatically declared, ‘RICE!’ It turned out she meant Rest, Ice, Compression, Elevation, the recommended treatment for a sprain – a piece of advice I was unlikely to forget, given the circumstances. Indeed, over the years a number of clumsy limp-ankled gays at various parties have Diana Ross to thank for a speedy recovery.
Oddly, it was during my time in Japan that my friendship with my college pal Niall – the ‘other gay’ – was forged. I was having this chaotic adventure, one framed by nightclubs and drag, drugs and sex, and there weren’t many people I knew who would appreciate the story I had to tell, cheer me on and not worry or lecture me. But Niall revelled in my adventures. So, this being
the early nineties when the fax machine was the height of cutting-edge technology, I bought myself one and began sending him long handwritten, illustrated faxes that poured out of his office machine in Dublin at all hours, telephonically printed missives of ludicrous adventure from the other side of the world.
Tokyo, Japan, 1993
The club is big, and crowded. Metal tubing, pipes, machinery push through the concrete walls and thrust down from the floor above. On the dance floor the flashing lights pick out billows of dry ice and abandoned dancers. Pumping their bodies to the constant beat. The dark, the lights, the sweat, the beats, the smells … sensory overload. I’m leaning against the wall at the side of the dance floor. My heart is pounding with the music and I’m covered in dance sweat. A friend is beside me but we don’t talk. Someone brushes by me and excuses themselves, ‘Sumimasen.’ It’s a boy? A girl? Clad from neck to high-heels in black PVC, there are holes where the sweat and flesh are exposed. The face is painted and glittered. S/he continues on and disappears into the dark, the lights, the noise, the beat, the sweat, the dry ice.
A boy appears in front of me. He’s nineteen, he’s boyish, he’s very pretty. I’ve slept with him
before and he thinks he’s in love with me. I haven’t seen him in a few weeks and I haven’t returned his calls. It doesn’t matter. He puts his hands in my front pockets and kisses my neck. I smile at him but I don’t move another muscle. He smiles back. Has he taken something or is it just the atmosphere, the sensory-disturbing lights? I can’t tell … the lights, my pounding heart, the dry ice. He leans himself along me and I can feel his erection. He kisses me on the mouth. He kisses my neck again. I let him, but I still don’t move a muscle. I just smile. I don’t move because I don’t want to encourage him. I don’t want him hanging off me all night. What if I see someone I really want? But I let him kiss me because he’s pretty and sweet and has a beautiful small bottom. He mouths, ‘What are you thinking about?’ and I almost tell him. He moves to my side and links his arm through mine. I feel uncomfortable now. There is no sex in linking arms, only domestic bliss. I tell him I’m going to get a drink in a way that I know he won’t follow me. I nod to my friend. A knowing grin and I move off into the bodies on the floor.
I pass a cute guy I know. He’s holding a small laser in one hand. He smiles, a big cute smile, but doesn’t wave. His left hand has no fingers and he keeps it in his pocket self-consciously. I smile back at him and consider kissing him …
Maybe later. I need a drink.
The bar is populated with more of the same: the beautiful, the cool, the bizarre and the ordinary. I look at the drinks menu, and for the first time I notice they have Guinness. It’s bound to be the awful Irish-coffee-tasting stuff I got once before in a bar in Tokyo, but the novelty of it amuses me so I ask for one. I get a blank look. They don’t have it. I buy a beer.
I manoeuvre carefully back towards the dance floor, drink my beer down in two, then move onto the dance floor and begin to dance. At first with little effort or energy, but before long my body is jerking and pumping. The beat is loud and I can feel it inside me. I push my hand through my sweat-drenched hair, and though I can’t see it, I know it sprays droplets over the people around me. How long have I been dancing? I don’t know. I move across the floor towards where a wide, curving metal staircase winds up off the dance floor.
Upstairs where there is a cooler, quieter bar, I meet a girl friend and we sit and drink and talk. A transsexual woman leans over as she squeezes by and the nipples of her exposed breasts brush against my elbow. I talk to my friend about Ireland and Catholicism and abortion. The case of a fourteen-year-old Irish girl, molested and pregnant, is getting a lot of coverage in the international press here. The articles say things
like ‘in this ultra-conservative society’ or ‘it may be difficult for outsiders to grasp how much power the Catholic Church wields in this secular state’. The transsexual squeezes by again, though this time she is careful not to brush me with her nipples. She grins.
We make our way back downstairs. At the bottom of the stairs I feel the pressure of someone against my side. I look around. He’s fairly attractive. I’d sleep with him. He’s wearing a thick padded jacket in this heat. Outside it’s snowing lightly, damply. I move my elbow and it presses against his flat stomach. A friend of his appears and talks to him. His friend looks just like him. I move my elbow away. He’s acting cool towards his friend and glancing in my direction. His friend doesn’t get the hint. I decide I’m too tired to play these Japanese-boy games anyway. I move away without looking back and into the thrusting, the sweating, the flick of girls’ long black hair. Hands appear under my arms and press for my nipples. I take the hands in mine and turn around, knowing before I see him that it’s the nineteen-year-old. He puts his hands on my neck and lets them slide down over my chest, my stomach, my crotch, my thighs. I smile. I kiss him on his soft lips, feel the smoothness of his chin, smile and turn and walk away. He pulls at my hand so I stop and start to dance. He dances
energetically. He pauses to touch me from time to time. How long have we been dancing? I don’t know. I turn and walk away. His head, his lovely pretty head, is tilted back. His eyes are closed, his head is all music. He doesn’t notice me leave.
There is a guy blocking my way. I go to squeeze by him. He turns around: mid-twenties, the same height as me. Unusual for a Japanese. He’s handsome. He smiles. I lean forward (I don’t have to lean far) and I kiss him. His tongue is in my mouth. At first it’s cool against my own warm tongue. He’s been drinking something with ice in it. Something tangy. I can taste citrus and alcohol. Then it’s warm. I feel his teeth with my tongue. I can feel the heat of his chest against mine. I can smell the sweat on his neck. I can feel the hardness of his erection against my hip, his hand in the small of my back, the edge of his eyebrow on mine, the sweaty moistness of his nose against mine. We separate and I smile. He smiles back and his teeth are caught in a flash of UV. It’s a wolfish, sexy effect. I linger. His fingers touch mine. I move on.
A girl is looking at me as I begin to dance. I ignore her and dance, but she still manages to catch my eye again. She is moving to the music, but not a single bead of sweat mars her pretty face. Her hair (thick, long, glossy, black, like everyone else’s) is pulled tightly off her face. She wears a black
bra-top under a see-through shirt, and colourful, embroidered, heavily buckled pants, metallic earrings and a matching wrist cuff. Her eyeliner is thick, in perfect sweeps along her upper lids. She is looking appreciatively at my dancing. I give her the smile I use for just these occasions. The smile that says, ‘You’re very pretty, and I’m flattered, but I’m gay. Really gay.’ She seems to understand. She smiles, she laughs, and jokingly imitates my dancing. I speak a few words to her. She’s funny. What are we talking about? I don’t know, remember. But she’s funny.
I’m tired now. I move to the side of the floor and sit on a stool. My head back against the wall, my eyes closed. I can see, feel, smell (?) the lights flashing against my eyelids. I can feel the beat resonate in my chest. I can smell the heat, the smoke, the dry ice. I’m tired, my senses feel dulled but I feel very much alive. I don’t seem to know which of my senses are sensing what. Am I smelling the sweat, or tasting it? Feeling it? Hearing it? I light a cigarette and take a deep drag. I feel it in my mouth, hear it in my throat, taste it in my lungs, I see it. I can feel the beat through the floor, through my dully-aching feet. I’m tired.
It’s 5 a.m. on Friday morning. I’m tired. It’s Tokyo. I’m tired. Time to go home. Where’s that boy? The one with the citrus-coated tongue.
I had arrived in Tokyo full of the unbridled dangerous energy of youth – the kind of boiling, marauding energy that (as any horror fan will tell you) once unleashed can’t be put back in its box and will either make you or destroy you. I was hungry for life, for experiences, for the
extra
ordinary. Not just hungry – ravenous. I wanted the whole world and I was going to have it even if it killed me. Painted and teased and tottering in heels, I tripped and ran and stumbled and crawled my way through emporia of night-time iniquity. I devoured everything I came into contact with, like a glamorous Ebola virus: art, drugs, boys, music, gangsters, dykes, drags, gays, love, sex, beauty. And my appetite was insatiable. No experience would be left unturned and no offer rejected. I lived my life by the adage ‘Nothing ventured, nothing gained’, and whatever murky situation presented itself, I simply asked myself, ‘Have I done this before?’ If the answer was, ‘No,’ then I threw myself into it head first and simply trusted I’d come out the other end. My constant mantra – and excuse – was ‘Well, it’ll make a good story.’ It’s not necessarily a course I’d recommend to everyone – there are times when I’m amazed I got out alive. Yet it worked for me, because when I finally stopped and looked in the mirror, I was a bit battered and bruised but, for maybe the first time in my life, the person looking back at me was me. Even under all the makeup.
Eventually, after four years, I ran out of steam. Or at least, life conspired to run the steam out of me. Helen had fallen in love with a handsome man from San
Francisco, whom she’d met at a club where CandiPanti were performing, and now she was planning to go with him to California. Angelo, who had always intended to pursue a ‘proper’ career in education, was considering returning to New York to take up a job opportunity at a university. And I had begun vaguely to consider the possibility that I might leave. I was comfortable there, though, had lots of other friends and I was still having lots of fun so I was in no immediate rush. Until I got sick.
At first I thought I just had the flu, but I couldn’t shake it, and I became more and more tired, listless and achy. By then Angelo, Helen, our friend Hiroko, a French ex-boyfriend of mine and I were all living in separate small apartments in the same small ‘traditional’ block in the thick of things in central Tokyo. It was the perfect social living arrangement for a gang of twenty-somethings, with lots of running across the hall in a towel to borrow shampoo or stumbling in late at night and banging on Helen’s door to tell her everything that had happened at the club in minute detail. All the apartments were similar: two rooms separated by a sliding screen,
tatami
-mat floors, a stow-away futon to sleep on, and a bathroom with a traditional Japanese hot tub. The apartment building was owned and run by Asakawa-san, a jovial, organised, nattily dressed older lady and her kindly retired-doctor husband, Dr Asakawa.