The nick on the back of my neck has healed, healed a long time ago. But it’s only disappeared on the skin. Under the skin, where the nerves feed my brain, the nick festers and oozes and makes me wash my hands all day long and focus on nothing but what I might be catching from these people, what monkey ass plague or scourge of the human race. Catching what deadly pestilence from these barbers who use straight-edge rusty razors, who slit the back of your neck just scraping the fuzz and don’t even know the word germicide; from these fistfucking waiter-muggers who try to accost you in your hotel room and leave dubious hairs on your cheese plate. It’s having an effect, taking its toll. I’m now using men’s rooms in a most guarded fashion; after I wash my hands I’m careful not to shove the wadded-up paper towel into the receptacle with the old, bold thrust of days gone by; most careful not to stuff it into the mass of wadded-up paper towels left by other blokes who pissed and shit and washed before me. Instead, I suspend the bunched, drenched paper gingerly and let it drop, like a lady or a fop dropping a gossamer handkerchief, and keep my fingers at safe distance. Hidden in the mound could be an infected hypodermic needle, sting of the asp, unsheathed and pointed right at me. And the barber and the waiter, every time I think of either of these gentlemen I want to take a shower and get hospital tests.
With a shooting schedule like I have, this distraction is not good. With a partner like Al, this distraction is not good. On our last night off in L.A. he drags me down the darkened aisle of a place that feels like a bus station men’s room with a floor show. I don’t know why; I just write the spots, he’s the art director, so it must be a visual thing–or else he’s been hanging out with the suits, unbeknownst to me.
The theme of the evening is water and wetness, and a liquidy blue phosphorescence spills over the small stage and its central icon, a phallic fountain consisting of a round basin mounted on a single pillar, suggesting a penis or a birdbath, depending on your point of view. Inside the basin, water burbles up out of a single spout, like a drinking fountain, a detail I could testify to in court because Al has us sitting so close–so close my chair actually touches the stage and my elbow, when I raise my glass to drink, passes over one of the blue footlights and turns blue, as though it were part of the show. This I don’t like, not at all. I’m in no mood to be part of a show, certainly not this show, where the saxophone brays like a dirty donkey in heat, telling all us bad old men we’re headed for the bad boys’ island in Pinocchio, a blue phosphorescent island ruled by the porn princess, Madison, named for the avenue we all worship.
Out she comes, toting the usual stripper’s body and the expected paraphernalia, which she casts off as she bumps and grinds around the phallic birdbath, rubbing the pillar with her ass, squeezing it between her tits, hugging it with her thighs. Finally, she loses all clothing and restraint and jumps on top of it, squirming in the water of the burbling basin and moaning at the action of the spout on her crotch. For the gawkers three tables out this may be eye candy, a pure visual delight, but I’m so close that every time Madison swivels her butt in the birdbath she sloshes water and whatever’s hidden and crawling around in the water on my face, which means my lips and tongue, and I don’t want to have an oral experience with a woman I don’t know, a woman who screws every birdbath in town and who, basically, is doing a bidet ablution and making me drink from the bowl. And who is Al to laugh at me as I go through this paranoid shit, as I order a bottle of spring water and wash out my mouth, gargling and spitting into my glass of flat tonic and bar gin, and running my fingers over my cheeks to check for shaving cuts and any and all microscopic perforations. But he does laugh, laughs like a bastard older brother at me–laughs as he sits safe and dry on the leeward side of the table.
Finally, thankfully, the blue light special ends and the pillared geyser hydraulically disappears into the stage as Madison, flaunting her wet, glistening ass at the assembled boozers and losers, dances away to the rimshot rhumba and melts into the curtain. The lights come up, glaring and natural, removing the blue glow from my elbow, and I’m more than ready to pay up and get out, believe me, but grinning Al doesn’t budge, and neither does anyone else in the house. A minute or so goes by and the donkey saxophone brays its raunchiest salute as the curtains part, revealing a dried-off Madison utterly free of adornment; nothing but skin, hair and raw spotlight; and she tells the audience this time it will be just her, the way she really is, Madison unplugged.
That means no drums, she says, and no saxophones. No ass wiggling, tit shaking or lap dancing. Nothing to dilute the experience or spoil her concentration, her meditation, as it were, and she sits, exactly at the spot where the birdbath sank into the stage, with her eyes closed, her legs open and all the fingers of her right hand at work.
I’m still less than ten feet from her, same place as in the blue routine, but the harsh, clinical quality of the light she’s chosen makes it feel even closer, because now I can see every dot and splotch on the skin, the hairy moles, sweat beads, blackheads and whiteheads breaking through the melting makeup. In choosing to forego all of the usual amplification, Madison creates its opposite, the amplification of negative space; a soundtrack where every note is dissonant and edgy; sporadic coughs and whispered curses from the audience, a deep burp wrapped in silence, a dropped, shattering beer glass.
And through it all she sways and moans and works her fingers in earnest, doing it for real, traveling light years from the audience into the caverns of her own images, not theirs. And the farther she travels the closer she gets; not a stage act anymore but a documentary; a nice-looking American girl, college age, masturbating in public, gritting her teeth so hard the tough truckdrivers and bankers start to ahem and turn their heads, ashamed to be revealed as intruders by a moment so private. As if the spotlight, in fact, had turned on them, like the beam from a police car.
When she comes it’s with a grimace and a crescendo of grunts and sharp yelps. The effect is alarming; more like watching a seizure than a burst of human ecstasy; and the crowd mutters and drinks up to keep the mood high. They came to stomp their feet, but Madison has them scratching their heads.
And then she makes them wait. Until she’s ready. To open her eyes and step out of the dream, rising to her feet and holding out the right hand so the spotlight shows how it glistens.
“I’m all wet,” she says. “I need to wipe it.” She scans the audience left, right, then rushes at the nearest target, me, and smears her hand across my brow and down my cheek, smearing it twice to get a good, complete wipe; and I sit there and let her smear to her hearts content, because she ambushed me and what else is there to do.
But the moment she turns and bolts through the curtains, giving a little kick with her bare heel to trigger a riot of applause from the pent-up crowd, I take off running for the men’s room and do whatever disease prevention I can manage with available soap and water. The greasy men’s room mirror, however, can never give me the reading I really want, the lab quality magnification that proves, beyond a doubt, that every millimeter of skin she touched was fully sealed and one hundred percent virus-proof. Because even when I finish washing I can still feel the places where Madison’s sharp nails scraped the side of my face.