Authors: Matthew Crow
It was everything I had heard the men describe in hushed voices across the counter and then some: a neon light in the dark. A ticking beat that moves round and round like a spider in tap shoes.
Blood red smiles. All fours. Upside down. Blonde on blonde.
‘Hey baby I can see your roots!’
‘Then you aint looking right, precious.’
They drool. The living dolls.
It takes me ten minutes and two cigarettes outside those big double doors before I build up the courage to step inside. The nicotine and downtime enable me to slip into fantasy
once more as to J’s etiquette in such instances. Our arrival at any function would mark the beginning of the evening. We’d be the sort of glittering couple you always dreamt of being
friends with: shimmering, assured, glorious.
I stub out my cigarette, breathe in deeply, and open the door.
An intricate web of red velvet and black lace disguise the fact that you’re in a building at all. To enter The Iguana Den feels like stepping into the mind of some
oversexed dandy, where you yourself become the fantasy.
I found myself in a small vestibule manned by an attractive woman wearing suspenders and little else. She greeted me as Miss and offered to take my coat. I obliged and handed her the
garment.
“Twenty dollars entry,” she said without wincing.
“There’s nothing free these days,” I said semi seriously.
“Nothing worth having,” she said as she hung my coat on a padded hook.
I reached into my back pocket and produced a well-used bill. The main entrance led to a series of warrens and boltholes which held little interest amongst the majority of customers, most of whom
were happily girded within a large room to my left. From where I stood I could see shadows float past seemingly devoid of bodies. Scattered applause and the occasional wolf whistle pierced the
foggy atmosphere like the beam of a lighthouse. In the distance an old man pressed his lips firmly into the throat of a slender young thing who managed to open the door on which she leant and slip
both of them inside in a pleasingly fluid manoeuvre. Initially I felt flustered and oddly too hot, but then the music from the main room began to take on a more rhythmic shape as my brain eased
into its new environment the way you slip into a scalding bath. I felt comfortable, almost lethargic, and found my body moving to that distant beat which seemed to be playing from inside of me,
guiding my every move.
“Welcome to The Iguana Den,” said the lady on the door. I thanked her and began slowly walking towards the pulsing main room.
Along the corridor the chipped red paint held decaying photographs in gilded frames. Women in various states of undress glide up and down lubricated poles. Proud looking men grip young flesh in
their papery hands. A larger lady - huge, in fact, almost the size of a cathedral - features in many. Her skirts are many and layered into an elaborate dessert of a garment. Her basque bulging
across the weight of her generous and decorated chest and hair pinned tightly in an archaic nod to propriety.
The beat grew louder until it felt like it would pour from my mouth if I was so much as to attempt to breathe in. I stepped through the heavy velvet of the curtains and into the main room.
The tables are circular and the floor scuffed, somewhat at odds with the opulence of the entrance. The lights shine and flicker at orchestrated intervals in deep, primary colours making
everything seem somehow tamer, as though you would be able to step from this room and dismiss everything you saw as a mere hallucination. Across the wall a long bar is manned by uniformed
professionals who, as the saying goes, see all but relay nothing. Doors lead from every angle though no-one seems to go in or out. Suited gentlemen and plainclothes cops pick fruit at the machines
that dot the empty space. Each table is occupied. Most sit alone. The stage takes the mantle at the front of the room; a round expanse speared with poles, from which two catwalks stretch like
tentacles and are lined by the most expensive tables in the house.
I walked over to the first empty fruit machine and sat hard on the flat leather of the barstool. I dropped a dime and tugged lightly and the bandit’s flimsy arm. The lights flashed and the
pretend fanfare mounted as the salad spun before stopping with a jerk. Two apples and a cherry. Better luck next time. The lights turned out as I rooted in my pocket for a second coin.
“You play these games as much as I do you’re bound to hit oil eventually,” came a man’s voice, light and inflected with a southern twang not dissimilar to my own.
“I play these games as much as you it’ll take more than the one jackpot before I break even,” I said to the slight gentleman in the bad toupee whose tux seemed over the top
even in the most theatrical surroundings.
“Allow me - ” he said, placing a penny into my slot, “ - call it an icebreaker.”
I pulled the arm of the bandit again and watched fortune spin out into another curious bubblegum flavour.
“Two plums and a banana. Why, sugar you’re nothing more than an out and out tease. It’s enough to drive an old dog wild,” he said, riding his hand up the side of my
skirt. “Now how much would it cost for a private view, my dearest?” he went on as his hand attempted to operate me like a glove puppet.
“More than a dime. That’s given there’s enough liquor behind that bar. Which I severely doubt there is,” I snapped, pulling a coin from my pocket and slamming it onto the
ridge of his machine. “That’s for your troubles,” I yelled, turning from him.
“And what are your troubles worth, sweetness?” he asked, placing the penny in the slot and pulling the bandit’s arm. There were three pinging noise as the light of the machine
pulsed whiter and whiter before the tin clank of coin fell cascading into the metal tray. “Looks like I’m in luck, darling. Care to taste my winning fruits?” he laughed.
“Quit jerking Carter and give me your seat,” came a woman’s voice.
The man stood up and presented his seat to the girl before walking off with pockets bulging with coins.
“Don’t mind him. He’s one of our regulars. Poor old Carter. Frisky as all hell get out but dead from the waist down. All you got to do is hug him a half hour and you
don’t need to worry about rent for another month.” She was pretty and tall, and looked alarmingly familiar. Within a five-year bracket of my own age I would have guessed, yet more
comfortable in her skin. The lace suspenders cut into her thighs, which were oiled and golden. And her hair had been teased into curls that made her face seem so angelic the peephole bra she wore
came as all the more of a shock. “I’m Eve. You never been here before honey?”
“No, and I’m Verity. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
We shook hands and laughed at the ridiculousness of the situation.
“You fancy a drink? I got friends and family discount in this place.”
We sat and sipped beer while we poured easy small talk. She told me about her childhood, about the dirt roads and back alleys, about the parents so distant that she barely
noticed when they both passed before her eighteenth birthday, and the various conditions that she had stumbled blindly into and out of ever since. You know that girl? The one you read about in the
newspaper? The kindly hostess whose favourite customer left her his entire estate? Or the ageing pole dancer being hounded by the octogenarian oil baron’s wife and children? Even the breezy
cocktail waitress with the peek-a-boo roots who found herself clutching the bearer bonds of the aged philanthropist? They’re all her. Each and every one. She said she never intended it to be
that way, it just happened by accident then kept on happening over and over again. Of course the money never lasted that long. For every good man there were a dozen monsters, and so she seldom held
her fortune for more than six months.
“Every time?” I asked, perturbed.
“Every time. Those rattlesnakes are the smoothest talkers of them all.”
“Don’t you mind? I’d be half mad or dead by my own hand if I lost the one fortune, let alone half a dozen.”
“Not worth worrying about. Money always turns up. Love’s the only currency worth crying over, and if that aint worth a gamble then I don’t know what is.”
It strikes me as sad, now, to be sitting here writing about her as though she were real, as though she still was. Sadder still that in all honesty I have yet to fully
comprehend that she is not, and that there will come a point when I will have to leave this room and conduct myself in a world where Eve is no more; where she ends with the stained sheets I send to
a comforting stranger some miles away; a fading memory; a hollow sound said so many times it becomes a dead weight on a numb tongue.
Nobody’s mother.
Nobody’s daughter.
So long as I keep writing it’s as if she’s here. But one day I will have to stop. And then what will there be? Nothing. A space where once something went. How can a person just
cease? Where exactly do they go? It’s enough to drive anyone insane if you sit down and think about it. I find more and more that this is the main problem with our arrangement, Jonah. Our
heads are such lovely places to exist in that real life can’t help but come as disappointment.
She told me that she’d been working there for almost two months by that point. Having fled an unfortunate situation with little more than a bottle of bourbon and a spare
bra to her name it was the first place she came upon which required no identification and paid cash in hand.
“It’s easy to hide when you’re a different person each night. Aint that right, Prudence honey?” she said as a black beauty brushed past.
“That’s the truth,” said Prudence with a celestial boom.
“Just look at Alice over there,” she said pointing to a leggy redhead performing the splits in front of a drooling Baskerville of a man. “This time last year she was chopping
breezeblock for a living and answering to Carl.”
I giggled at the sight of Alice, now bending backwards and exposing a scattering of shaving rash as Prudence strutted off behind one of the curtained doors.
“That over there - ” said Eve, pointing to an immaculate and enormous man at the most prominent table, “ - that’s who we all call Kingpin. I’m still the new girl so
I got nothing to base this on, but he’s big around here. Been gone on some important business since I started but now he’s back. We’re putting on a real big show for him tonight I
can tell you. Miss Jemima arranged it herself.
“Who’s Miss Jemima?”
“If Kingpin’s the head then she’s the heart of this place. Been here longer than time and it shows, poor darling. She was good to me though. Taught me the tricks of the trade
and one or two others. She keeps an eye on us girls,” Eve said, draining her beer. “You ever think of dancing?”
I blushed and lit a cigarette. “God no. I wouldn’t know where to start. I have trouble stepping out of the bathtub without falling over, let alone making one of those greased up
sticks my own.”
“I don’t believe that for one moment. It sure was nice to meet you, Verity. You staying to watch us dance?”
“Why not,” I said, feeling somewhat obliged.
“Well isn’t that just fine!” Eve threw her arms around my neck and kissed me. “I hope I see you around. I got friends that are few and far between these days.”
“I know that feeling,” I said, stubbing my cigarette into the marble cup on the bar. “Good luck up there.”
“I don’t need luck, darling, I got my mother’s tits and no shame.” She gave her decorated rear a wiggle as she tottered off into the darkness.
The half hour before the show began seemed to grow more and more intense until the entire bar could have been popped by one careless open flame. Suddenly I felt awkward, alone
and out of place. I pulled apart a napkin and lit matches in the palm of my hand. I blew out my candle, relit it, blew it out again and relit it one final time, deciding that a gentle glow may look
more enticing to prospective company. I craned my neck to see if anyone might take me up on my silent offer, suddenly desperate for company. Most of the men were seated, their eyes glued to an
empty stage. Some milled about the bar. A tall man in the distance caught my eye. He had something tattooed on his knuckles and a grey streak running through the entire length of his hair like a
well groomed skunk. I raised my glass and he nodded once towards me. I nodded back. He turned slowly, maintaining me in his gaze, and headed towards the edge of the room.
I stood up and followed him all the way until he disappeared behind a creaking door. I hesitated for a moment and then entered.
The men’s bathroom was empty and filthy. A warm musk filled the air and made everything illicit and irresistible. He stood alone in an open cubicle. I followed him inside and he locked the
door.
I suppose when following strangers into public restrooms a person wants one of two things. I wanted the second. And within minutes that sweet, metallic smoke was coursing through my veins;
lifting me to a place that felt the same yet different. A place where it didn’t matter that I was alone, or that I had no idea who I was or what exactly I was doing. All I can say is that
whilst not an experience I plan on repeating, for that night only I felt like myself for the first time in I don’t know how long as I watched its magnetic dregs weep from my mouth towards the
ceiling like tears in reverse.
We remained wordless throughout. He began by pulling a small cloth bag from his pocket and opening it onto the ceramic of the cistern, carefully arranging his apparatus like a practiced
apothecary. He placed the rocks in the base of a long transparent tube, those filthy fingernails working the priceless jewels with more care than I’d ever seen a man of his size demonstrate.
Finally, when he felt the arrangement complete, he lit it with a golden click of a lighter. He took a hit and handed it to me. I followed his lead and took a small breath and then a deep one before
handing it back to him.
I slid down, dazed and blissful, as he packed his belongings and opened the door.
“Sweet dreams my little doll,” he said, kissing me once as he left me reeling on the cold tile floor.