We got another letter six months later, advising us that his new Burmese was not a he but a she, and with a litter on the way. Eventually six in all were born, and he named them Phoenyx, Melissa, Gloria, Olivia, Svetlana and Petra, whether they were female or not (two of them weren’t, and I waggishly suggested that he ought to have named one of them Honey instead). Photographs soon followed, and of course they all got pinned up in the special public space as well, an area that was now in danger of taking over half the bar.
Melissa had already taken over the running of the place, and I helped her out when I could, with simple administrative tasks – the place was after all still my home – but the world was spinning on around us, and traditional erotic cabaret with live jazz bands and songs and such was no longer all that cool. It sounds strange to describe a strip club as ‘innocent’ and yet that was the kind of atmosphere we fostered, and enjoyed. The regulars were all perfect gentlemen, and the ladies never seemed to look down upon us or show any kind of jealousy towards us. Quite the opposite, in fact – we seemed to be inspiring for some, and were loved by many. There was never anything crass or gross in what we did – and maybe that was part of the problem, as it turned out. The adult entertainment industry had changed so much, while we remained in our time capsule. The regulars from the time I first joined had begun to fade away, their numbers getting more threadbare as the years passed. Gone were the Gang of Four and Heinrich, and Hansel and Gretel. BCKIG still hung around, but not as frequently as he used to and whole months went by without his stoic, silent presence to perturb and bemuse us.
The younger generations expected something harder, more punchy, and more modern. Gloria had been the first to put over that kind of act but by now she was over forty, and while still sickeningly supple and fit beyond all credulity, there was nothing that she could do which younger kids on the block could not do also. Half of her make-up drawer now consisted of primers, concealers, and other hideously expensive products designed to hide wrinkles, or appear to do so, at least.
Our younger dancers came and went like moths, either filling in time between college courses or while making up their minds what to do with the rest of their lives – and the rest of us were, in truth, getting on a bit to the point that we were almost in danger of becoming a parody of ourselves. This wasn’t rock and roll, where age bred respectability and growing legions of followers; the secret of our success was literally skin-deep and I’d already overheard a couple of the veteran Kits discussing cosmetic surgery. That was a path I had no interest in treading.
The writing was appearing on the wall like dirty graffiti, and while I had no wish to read it, there was no avoiding it. And when finally it came, it did so with a dour-faced, melancholy inevitability, a quiet whimpering with no bang in sight.
Melissa called us all into a meeting in the Klub late one Monday morning before the doors were due to open, and I knew it wouldn’t be a pleasurable gathering.
She got straight to the point.
“Well, we’re another body down again,” she said with a glance at the performance rota, the weekly calendar usually pinned up in the backstage area. She crumpled up the page and pinged it behind her. “Gudrun hasn’t bothered to return my calls, so I guess her no-show at the weekend means she’s not interested in her last pay packet.” She picked one of the temporary weekly green pay slips from the bar beside her (the monthly pay slips we old pros got were blue in color) and shredded it into confetti which she showered behind her, beneath the goggle-eyed gaze of Bruno, who still looked down silently upon us all from on high.
“We outclassed her,” Olivia sniggered. “I could see it in her eyes – she was plain jealous.”
“Shame,” Svetlana said. “I was looking forward to putting her over my knee, as well.”
“More overtime for someone, then?” I assumed.
Mel sat down on a bar stool. “The point of this little Klub Hug wasn’t to ask who wants to cover her shift. But to ask a bigger question: how much longer do you all think we can keep this up? Be honest now.”
Nobody answered, until Olivia said, “Until I fall over?”
Mel skated over that swiftly and cleanly. “Here’s my thing. Our new hires are ambitious. We’re not giving them anything here to keep their interest. Things were different when we started – there’s almost a whole new generation now out there who want everything
now
, who aren’t willing to wait for it, and have dreams far beyond what we might have had.
“Plus the added embarrassment of sharing a stage with someone who’s almost old enough to be their mother.”
“What are you saying, Mel?” I asked nervously, knowing exactly what she was saying – the thoughts I’d already had, but could never bring myself to speak.
“It’s like seeing your grandmother drunk, and grabbing some young guy’s crotch in a bar,” she sighed. “That’s how I see us becoming before too long. A bit crass, vulgar, and maybe even funny, but for all the wrong reasons. Big saggy tits and wrinkles that don’t go away. More and more make-up needed just to keep us looking presentable. Now we’re not quite there yet, none of us look past it – you’re all so wonderful, it makes me cry looking at you all now, how well we’ve worn together – but the beautiful summer days are over. We’re heading into autumn now. And we all know how cold and horrible winter can be.”
Svetlana sniffed. “Try a fucking Medynsky winter sometime,” she muttered through her cigarette.
“No, dear,” Melissa said simply. “I’d rather not. I want us to go out on a blaze of glory, and be remembered for something nice, not fading away in a flea circus in a dirty corner of some red-light area.”
“Glory?” I asked, skeptical.
“I’m thinking about a big charity gala. We get us all up, for one more night only. Twenty marks on the door, all the beer you can drink and all the pussy your poor eyes can bear. And then, we call it quits.”
The tears rolled down Gloria’s tanned cheekbones as she stretched out a beautifully manicured hand across the table. I noticed that with a glowing sense of inner pride, for that was the one great thing about being at the Klub – it kept us immaculate, physically trim and highly presentable at all times. Where other women might have slipped into those comfortable, cozy slippers of apathy on the shallow yet slippery slope towards middle age, being settled and complacent with all home comforts and luxuries (and usually someone else on hand to do all the really hard and difficult work), we were burning off more calories in a single night’s performance than most of the pampered housewives could muster up in a whole week of gym visits and keep-fit classes. Live performance of any kind was stressful by its very nature, and that ate up energy too, forever keeping us firmly in the ‘lean and mean’ category of body types, although Svetlana continued to outshine us all – even Gloria – with her rock-solid, marbled torso and muscles in places most women didn’t even have places.
“Yes,” Gloria sobbed, “count me in.”
Melissa clutched that hand and held it tight. I added mine.
“What’s the charity? Home for retired porn queens?”
She looked down at the table, chewing her lip as she could barely bring herself to speak the words.
“Well, it came from some bad news I heard recently, but was too scared to share until now. We lost Petra last year.” She waited for the gasps and gulps of disbelief to fade, before adding; “Heroin. She never really made it beyond here, it seems.” She shrugged, finding words meaningless. “I’m sorry,” she sniffed. “That’s all. Quick and simple. Gone – like that. Painless.”
My heart plunged down into my bowels. I don’t think I had ever experienced a sensation like it in my life up to that point. I’d never known a human being who had died before, and I wasn’t quite sure what I should feel, or what I should do just then. Should I cry, try to hold firm, feel sorry for myself or shower Mel in comforting hugs? I nearly blurted out, “You’re joking!” before a hand of reason tied a knot in my tongue, saving me from scorn and ridicule, and a forest of frowning eyebrows. As warped, barbed and cruel as Mel could be to us at times, that would have been several steps too far.
I just sat there at the table as stunned as all the others as the drifting smoke from untouched cigarettes filled my eyes with grit. The silence seemed to last forever. Nobody spoke, nobody even dared to make a sound.
“How did we not see—” Olivia began, but Mel jumped down her throat before she got any further.
“
Nobody
here is to blame,” she snapped. “So don’t go thinking back to little signs that we never saw, or turned a blind eye to. She was going through a bad patch when she returned, and after she left, she realized that she’d made a mistake. Too proud to come back to us.”
Nobody could believe it. We just looked at each other, but the truth was slowly sinking in, like a knife in the back, and I was beginning to taste the blood at the back of my throat. Life wasn’t supposed to be this crap. Being a Kit had meant being a part of a very special sisterhood where we all looked out for each other, and I felt sick at the thought that Gloria had actually been right about Petra when she returned. And it was Gloria who ran from the table in a storm of tears, with Melissa chasing her to calm her down and Svetlana, Olivia and I just trying not to do the same. I had never thought of our Russian sister as particularly emotional, but I could tell that she was having a hard time keeping her face together as much as the rest of us.
When Gloria had finally calmed down and come back, Mel went on with the details of her plan.
“I figured that donations to an anti-drugs charity would be the most fitting tribute we could give her. I can see it all in my mind now. We’ll put her picture up all around the bar, and we’ll hold that one night in her honor, so that she’ll never be forgotten, by us or by anyone who comes here. Losing her has helped me put things in perspective, y’know? And when we all split from this place, ladies, for fuck’s sake...let’s stay in touch. People always say that but I mean it. Let’s look out for each other, and not let anybody else slip under the radar ever again.”
The grim and solemn air around us had suddenly, almost miraculously, evolved into one of poignant relief. Petra’s premature passing would also help ease our own departure from the life of the Klub.
Our last night would be a celebration, not a mourning. And now that the unthinkable had finally been discussed in the open and accepted, we could begin to move towards our final destiny with pride.
I left them all to it that afternoon and went upstairs to my rooms, discovering for the first time the real downside of living above the club which was also my place of work. When the venue eventually closed, I would have to walk through those quiet, empty rooms which once had been so full of life and joy for decades, and for generations of entertainers and guests. Doing that every day, I felt, would destroy me faster than just having to leave it alone and never look back. I would have to find somewhere else to live as well as some place else to work, and that was a dilemma I had no wish to consider at that time.
Just like Boris had chosen to do.
And just as Petra had completely failed to do.
Countless stars of the old Klub stage must have died during their tenures there, but I had not known any of them, and as much as it pained me to think of that venue finally closing its doors, it also seemed right: without Petra, that little gang of mine just wouldn’t seem complete any longer. Carrying on would, of course, have been what she would have wanted, but not at the expense of all dignity and self-respect. Petra would have been better not coming back, or just finding something else to do with her life and forgetting about stripping, dancing, and all the rest of it, letting herself age gracefully rather than angrily trying to stab Chronos in the eye with a dirty needle.
Yet I could understand why she did it. She couldn’t let go, didn’t want to see it all end. Her vintage, retro act was more than a mere affectation, I realized. She had really
lived
in the past, even when the past was no longer reachable, or acceptable, or profitable. The poor woman had been born about half a century too late.
In many ways she was just like me, and all the others. The only difference was
we
knew now that we
had
to let go, as much as it pained us to do so.
I looked out of my windows which once had been alight with the dawn of a new era when the Wall came tumbling down. Now the view seemed to have changed to the end of an era, a time of normality, of a return to mundane existence. Of days soon to come of being walked past in the street without turning a single head, just another female among millions, no longer a goddess of wet dreams or a tormentor of hearts. I could only imagine how much stronger Petra must have experienced those same emotions to have ended up as she did, desperately clinging on to the last until she could no longer hold on and was forced to lose herself in the fake dreams of illegal substances.
A rap on the door derailed my miserable train of thought; a rap which reminded me so much of Mrs. Groenenberg. (I wondered, briefly, what
she
was up to now – yet another neurotic female, growing jittery at the sight of her advancing years, thrown suddenly out of everything she knew and loved at the worst possible time. I decided that she had turned her back on the material world, finding it too cruel and difficult for a forty-something divorcee by herself, and had emigrated to Switzerland to join the Cistercians, where she could spend endless glorious nights in penance for her cruel and sadistic desires.)
I opened up and found Olivia there.
“Hi, darling. How goes it?”
I shrugged, unwilling to articulate my deepest thoughts. She deserved the truth, having been everything to me where the Klub was concerned; my first love, my tutor, my partner, my confidante. I owed it to her to be honest now, yet I couldn’t bring myself to say the words:
I don’t want it to end. I want to do this forever.
Saying it would just enforce the idea in my mind and make it even harder to follow through on what I had to do. I couldn’t give energy or currency to thoughts which would only serve to cripple me.