Some Girls: My Life in a Harem (30 page)

I sat up like a shot, immediately awake and terrified.

“I lost my job.”

It was Mark, of course. I had been having nightmares about Nathan and I woke looking at Mark.

“Andy?” I called out.

“He had to stop at work and get something,” Mark slurred.

Why did he have a key? He wasn’t staying with us. Andy told me he had a hotel room.

“No one will hire me.”

Maybe this guy was a psycho. Maybe he resented me for living with Andy and was going to kill me. Or maybe he was just a sad-sack, alcoholic, run-of-the-mill pedophile. I figured in his current state I could probably take him. My fear was suddenly steamrolled by a surge of fury that rose to the back of my throat, threatening to spew out like vomit.

“Really? Why is that, Mark?”

“Because I like boys.”

“Because I like little boys,” he repeated.

I looked around for a weapon of some kind. Where was that fucking stun gun? What’s the point of a stun gun if you can’t remember where you put it? Maybe he wasn’t the danger here. Maybe I was. Maybe I was going to kill him.

But I didn’t. Instead I yelled at him to get the fuck out of my apartment. When he sat there dazed, I yelled it again. I yelled it after he was long out the door.

Later, when Andy came home, I yelled at him, too. Tall, broad-shouldered Andy sobbed in a ball, hugging the edge of the bed. It never occurred to me to protect Andy, that we should have protected each other. I only expected him to protect me.

 

I broke up with Andy because he gave a predator a key to my home and I felt unsafe, but that was only part of it. I broke up with him because he was never around and I was lonely, because he screened my phone calls and I felt foolish and unloved.

The day after Mark surprised me in my bed, I went to Lindsay’s loft to smoke pot and cry. Lindsay needed a shoulder, too, due to a recent heartbreak of his own. His boyfriend of ten years had just moved out and Lindsay talked about the sad quiet in the morning, the neatness of the bathroom, smoking an extra joint to make it easier to fall asleep alone. I realized I had all those things and I was still living with my boyfriend, my maybe-gay and definitely very dysfunctional and confused boyfriend. It seemed there was an obvious solution—I should move out of my unsatisfying relationship with Andy and be Lindsay’s new roommate.

When I left, I wasn’t kind. I couldn’t wait to get out of that white box of an apartment that I couldn’t figure out how to decorate anyway. Who wanted to see their mistakes, their inadequacies, their attempts at a tile mosaic on the bathroom walls staring them in the face every time they pee? Two roads diverged, and I took the one that looked like freedom. Andy came home one day and I was already packing my boxes.

He sat on the couch and held his head. I was so surprised. I thought he would pop the top off a Budweiser and go off to play
Sonic the Hedgehog.
That is how far I had drifted from knowing him. In my mind, our distance was entirely his fault. He was the one who was absent. My own absence hadn’t occurred to me.

 

The thing I miss most now about doing theater isn’t the applause. It’s the experience I have onstage of being completely present. For me, something about the limited world, the adrenaline, and the lights banishes any sense of self-consciousness. My mind empties out, my body grows balanced, and my heart opens. I’ve never been a big method actor, thinking of starving children or bleeding baby seals or my dead grandmother in order to make myself cry. What I love about performing is that when I’m doing it well, I don’t think at all.

It’s true that you never leave the theater entirely. In
Samuel’s Major Problems
, the whole stage was a spiderweb of string, tied from the edge of a bookshelf to the leg of a chair, from the edge of a candlestick to a chalkboard on a high shelf. In real life the string is there, but it’s invisible. Your body may exit gracefully (or ungracefully) stage left, but you leave with that string tied to your heart. All your life, when you turn the wrong way, when you least expect it, you will feel the tug.

It’s not just the theater. I imagine my heart sticky and throbbing at the center of a spiderweb with its network of silky strands radiating outward, attached to every thing I ever loved, every thing I thought I walked away from clean.

 

 

 

 

A
fter attending her amazing one-woman show
Post Porn Modernist
, I met performance artist and former porn star Annie Sprinkle. I was taken with her bindi-wearing, speculum-toting, vagina-baring antics and we soon became friends. Annie is a true revolutionary. She introduced me to a new option—being unashamed. She does the same for many people.

I went to brunches with Annie and met other people whose work straddled the worlds of art and sex work. Most of them were more famous than I was (they were the kind of people who traded memories of Robert Mapplethorpe), but I had a few unique jewels in my tiara. I was the nineteen-year-old girl with the tattoo on her pussy. I was the girl who had just returned from the harem of the Prince of Brunei. That was how Annie always introduced me.

I modeled for Annie’s Post Modern Pin-Up Pleasure Activist Playing Cards and this catapulted me into fetish modeling, sometimes for well-known artists. Some of the modeling experiences were great and made me feel empowered and others were exploitative and made me feel something akin to when a high school teacher of mine began rubbing my shoulders and I couldn’t find it in me to tell him to stop because I was too embarrassed. Some of the photos make me cringe now, but most of them are beautiful and I’m glad that I have them. I recommend that everyone find a way to get naked in front of a camera when they’re nineteen. Do it. Even if you think you’re ugly. Because fifteen years later you’ll look at them and realize you never were ugly at all.

I constructed an identity for myself by wedding performance art, activism, and sex work. When people asked, I said I was a feminist sex activist. I was a porn performance artist. I even went on a couple of dates with Camille Paglia because she supposedly championed the sacred whore, the sex worker as sex goddess. But I couldn’t seal the deal because she was just so short and bitchy.

She stormed off in a huff and later did an interview with
Playboy
, in which she described a date almost identical to ours and said that if she had been a man, she might have stabbed a woman for teasing her like that. Camille used the treatment to which this tease subjected her as an example of how some men are provoked into justifiable violence against women. And I thought it was just a lousy date.

The performance piece I was writing kept growing and I did actually complete a few video segments of it. But, all told, the experience reminded me of a time I had helped a stripper friend of mine move a futon. As soon as I held up one corner of the futon, the other sagged to the ground. When we thought we had a good grip on it we’d walk a few steps and it would start to unravel. It took us about three hours to drag that thing ten blocks and up a flight of stairs. My theater piece was exactly like that. Every time I supported one end of it the other fell down. I knew it was no good but I had no idea how to fix it.

 

Penn Jillette, the taller half of the magician duo Penn & Teller, lived in the loft below Lindsay and me. Long before I ever moved in with Lindsay, Penn and I had been friends. My moving into his building was one of those small-world moments. Penn’s computer-genius friend, Colin, made frequent trips up the stairs to hang out. Colin and I became, and remain, close friends. It was like living in a dorm. I’d ride the elevator down with computer problems or tuna sandwiches and then back up again to push the rug aside and get two-stepping lessons from Lindsay on the living-room floor.

“Relax that arm, princess,” Lindsay would say. “Don’t make me feel like I’m wrestlin’ a gator.”

Lindsay was like a surrogate father. He not only taught me to dance; he applied first aid to my garish fashion sense. He called my closet Victoria’s Slut Closet, and routinely pointed out to me that Jackie Kennedy wouldn’t be caught dead in the shoes I was wearing. I reminded him that my clothes had been bought for my career as a hooker and not as a first lady. He said that those kinds of rigid distinctions were only a failure of my imagination. I still occasionally wore trashy shoes, but Lindsay’s tutelage did bring my game up dramatically. He also got me to keep the house tidy, dragged me to the gym, and encouraged me to cook meals once in a while.

Even a porn performance artist, a feminist sex activist, has to look at the facts eventually. It had been a year since I left Brunei—a year of changing my hair every month and buying sixteen pairs of boots at Barneys and a complete luggage set at Louis Vuitton (maybe not the Patti Smith-est of moves). It had been a year of cycling through designer jeans and picking up lunch tabs all over town, a year of sleeping in Pratesi sheets and cruising the flea markets for antique furniture I didn’t need.

I wasn’t alone in my excess. That was what all the Brunei girls did. I told myself I was practically Warren Buffet-frugal compared with them. From the occasional phone calls I got from Delia, I knew that the minute the feet of the L.A. girls hit the L.A. soil, to a man they marched to Mercedes-Benz of Beverly Hills and bought the most expensive model on the showroom floor, usually in cream with a tan interior. They all bought L.V. luggage so why shouldn’t I? It was a staple, a loaf of bread, a quart of milk, right? After a year of this stupidity, the well wasn’t dry yet, but I could definitely see the bottom.

The Foreman show had opened up doors for me and, if I seized my moment, there was a real chance that my acting career could take off. What would Patti Smith do? Patti Smith would step up and take what she deserved and knock everybody on their ass. They would hate her; they would love her. But they would all see her and no one would forget her.

But every time I sat down to consider my options, I was distracted and fidgety. I wasn’t in the mood for seizing. I got tired and took a nap. Where had my old sense of relentless ambition gone? It had ebbed somewhere along the way. I tried to pinpoint the exact place where it had leaked out, figuring I could patch it and I’d immediately fill back up with the same drive that had kept me taking the bus into New York every Saturday all through high school in order to take acting and dance classes. When I looked, I saw there were so many holes I didn’t know where to start spackling.

 

I was failing as an auteur. I watched hours of Amy Fisher on Court TV and took long walks up to Columbus Circle. On one of my less slothful days, I visited the Empire State Building. I could see it from my window and one morning I threw on my vintage leather coat and went to see what it looked like from the inside.

On my way to the Empire State Building, I passed by Macy’s and took a sharp right turn on impulse. I went to the men’s department and walked to one of the cologne counters, where I sought out a bottle of Egoiste, Robin’s cologne. I picked up the bottle and sprayed it on the pulse point of each wrist, then waited until the alcohol evaporated before holding my wrist up to my nose. I felt a twinge, small but unmistakable.

At the top of the Empire State Building, I looked down through the netting meant to catch pennies and whatever else people throw. The city looked like a diabolical rat maze, covered in soot and pockmarked with potholes. I put my wrist to my nose again and thought for some reason of Robin’s habit of saying “good girl” to me. It was demeaning that he’d talked to me like a five-year-old or a terrier but I had still kind of liked it. It had still felt like approval, almost like love. It had felt like a victory.

The girl I was in New York might be closer to the real me, but the girl I’d been in Brunei had been purposeful, at least. I had felt powerful. I hadn’t been confronted with things like the prospect that the show I was writing was a failure. I hadn’t done things like getting an abortion, like hurting someone recklessly. I hadn’t succeeded at getting a good acting job and then still felt aimless. In Brunei, even if the course was hazardous, the rules were so simple, the goal so obvious.

I had also spent a big chunk of my money in the year I’d been home, and somewhere along the way, I had gotten used to that money. I had built up a world that required it, even. Sex work has many pitfalls, and this is one of them. It’s the reason that the stripper putting herself through school so often turns out to be a myth. Sure, a lot of strippers start out putting themselves through school, but school starts to lose its appeal pretty quickly. Your sociology degree doesn’t qualify you for an entry-level job that can even come close to making you the kind of immediate cash with which you walk out of a club.

But it’s more than the money. There’s a persona you create to fill in for you on strangers’ laps all day, or to lie forgotten between black silk sheets in a prince’s office bedroom. This persona is sexier, bolder, wilder, and inevitably feels less pain than the real you. If she doesn’t, you haven’t done a very good job inventing her. So maybe you start to visit that persona once in a while when you’re not at work. On weekends, you know, just when you’re being socially awkward at a party, or when a friend hurts your feelings or you’re out on a date and feeling vulnerable. And you find out that she helps you, that brazen stripper, that sophisticated call girl. So maybe you start to bring her out a little more often.