John wrote, and We indulged in Our own weakness: comedy, and cheap imitations. Well, they’d have to be cheap. Not One of Us has a dime. Some of Us are really good at doing animals (you try imitating a giraffe), others love a Broadway tune. One joker is especially good at Random People in Big Cities. Everyday it’s someone else—a homeless man, a tax collector, a prostitute, a grocer. John wrote all night, and We grew giddy, as if We were reading a fabulously skewed translation, and toward dawn We chose a couple to watch, and they were so fun We reared back with laughter and repeated their exchanges. They were middle-aged and cranky, an Italian cobbler and his wife living in a railroad flat in Brooklyn. Sal and Rosa, two 7s. Three children. We’d watched them before; they had the timing of old radio stars. On this morning Sal was sitting at the kitchen table waiting to start his breakfast, and Rosa was in the bathroom combing her hair. Sal yelled, “Rosa!” She ignored him. He yelled it a little louder, his toast and coffee growing cold. “Rosa!” She ignored him. Finally, he shouted, “Jesus Kee-rist! Get in here!” We can do him perfectly. Rosa sighed, rolled her eyes, shouted back, “I’m coming, I’m coming, I’ll be there soon!” Oh, it was funny.
Geneva, Illinois
The voice of the Lord causes the oaks to swirl,
and strips the forest bare;
and in his temple, all say, “Glory!”
PSALM 29:9
SHE called herself Dina, but that wasn’t her real name. She was a stripper, but there was only so much she could reveal. She would have liked to show us more, but she wasn’t allowed—there are rules about revelation in a “bikini bar.” Thou shalt not show more than six-tenths of thy breast, that portion which is revealed to exclude thy nipple; thou shalt not show more than four-tenths of thy ass. Thy legs must be hidden, but thou mayest use sheer nylons that giveth the appearance of flesh; this deception shall pass, sayeth the Lord and the state of Illinois.
“I’d be raking it in,” Dina told us, “if I just flashed a little.” She grabbed her left breast, smallish and firm, covered by a white bikini with red crosses over each nipple. “But one of the other girls would rat me out.”
The other girls strode by on towering Lucite heels and in thigh-high, black leather boots, their bikinis plunging up when they passed one way, down when they passed the other. Outside it was five degrees, and the one-story cement-block bunker that housed the dark cave that was Club Exotica provided weak insulation. The girls kept moving not just to satisfy the management—a pale, fat, hairless snowball of a man who stood watch from the bar—but also to keep warm. They were like sharks—if they stopped swimming, they’d freeze and die.
But we all knew who the sharks were: the men in the plastic lawn chairs Snowball had set out for his customers; watching it all with gazes sharper than the wind screaming outside.
Some sharks. There was a guy in a leather Blackhawks jacket who occasionally approached the stage, dollar in hand, as if he was going to buy a “dance,” which was the word the club used to describe what happens when the stripper humps the stage in front of the customer, then swings around and drapes a leg over his shoulder, thrusting her pelvis in almost close enough for a kiss. Blackhawk blushed every time the humping began, and instead of staying through the mock cunnilingus to slip his dollar into her garter, left his crumpled bill on the rail and ran back to the bar, where he ordered a Coke he slurped through a straw while he waited for his embarrassment to pass.
Then there was a table full of drama club geeks, all of them either small or round, their hair dyed black and shaved close in back, cut in long diagonal bangs up front; they looked like sheepdogs. And there was a long-haired guy with a beard who everyone called Jesus. It was Jesus’ birthday, so Big Snowball sent him onto the stage, where three girls surrounded him, bumping him back and forth between their hips like a pinball until Jesus, laughing despite the alarm in his soft eyes, looked ready to escape to his cross.
Dina didn’t call him Jesus; that was on account of the fact that she was Jewish. Well, half-Jewish, because her mother was from Spain and was, she said, “Roman.” When we mentioned it, she was sure she’d heard her grandmother say something once about Marranos, the “hidden Jews” who went undercover to escape the Spanish Inquisition. She crossed herself and named the Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost in Spanish, and said hiding might have been a good idea for her father, whom she never knew—he’d been a Polish Jew, escaped the war by an inch and, from what she’d heard, never really seemed to recover from the scare. He died when he was fifty-nine, a few months before Dina was born.
“People gotta hide who they are,” she said. Then she asked us who we were.
So we told her what we’d been doing, about making this book.
“What’s a heretic?” she asked.
“You are,” we said.
“Me?”
By dint of circumstances if nothing else, she was; Club Exotica was six miles from Wheaton, Illinois, which along with Colorado Springs and Lynchburg, Virginia, is a point on the Bermuda Triangle of fundamentalist America, the metaphysical zone in which shades of gray disappear and God is a cross between Jimmy Stewart and Genghis Khan, wholesome in every regard but for the fury with which he regards sinners. And no sin is greater than the revelation of His creation. We were in Club Exotica because we’d been in Wheaton. We were at Club Exotica to see some flesh and movement because we’d earlier seen the stone-still face of Billy Graham a thousand times in repetition at his official multimillion-dollar museum. We were at this temple of cheap caveman thrills because it was there, in the middle of a dark ocean of flat land at the heart of the country, because a freight train without end had cut off our path back east and made Club Exotica a dead end with a brass pole and a disco ball.
We thought of the disco ball Mary Dragon had told us about at Heartland, her idea of God, an endless number of reflections. We mentioned it to Dina.
“Totally,” Dina said. Then she asked us what we had seen when we’d looked into its mirrors. Stories, we said, and found ourselves nearly speaking in tongues, telling Dina about the smoke in the air when we’d left New York City, and Isshizean Zean and her heart tattoo, and about the choir that wore red and sang for blood. We told her about wishing we could speak Spanish in Los Angeles and listening to people speak Elvish in Heartland. We told her about Skyclad, and Dina’s big brown eyes went wide, her shoulders slumped, her professional sex kitten pose for a moment abandoned. She stripped for a living, she said, but she was an exhibitionist at heart, and she loved the idea of a bonfire surrounded by naked bodies dancing; her eyes swung around the room, undressing everyone in it, even Snowball, and setting them in motion.
We told her about Buddhists marching around stupas, the witch shaking her hips in Crestone. We told her about the buzzards we’d seen circling, the Dickheads laughing, the doctor who hunted tornadoes—
Dina took a drink of the kamikaze we’d bought her and leaned back in her chair, a clear plastic heel in each of our laps.
“I’m a writer, too, you know,” she said, and then she told us about the things she had written, reciting poems and letters and stories, some of it funny, some of it sexy, some of it sad, a lot of it lousy, a little bit of it, like that of any writer, very wonderful. She was hard to follow over the sound system—AC/DC’s “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap” and Prince’s “Darling Nikki” and Elvis’s “Fever”—but we caught a story about her junkie cousin—“she gets up in the morning and pushes her life into her veins”—and a sweet-natured poem about Hell, and a wistfully pornographic story about a man in a shower, “every bead of water like a jewel,” that Dina said had won her a state prize when she was thirteen.
“Do my stories sound like prayers?” she whispered, leaning forward, her long, bleached hair like a veil of smoke and incense between us and the rest of the club. She didn’t wait for our answer. Instead, she undraped herself from us and stood, her heels so high she towered above us.
“Don’t go.”
“I have to,” she said.
“He’s watching.” We followed her eyes back into the corner, catching Snowball’s evil glare directed at our table. “You’re not buying,” Dina said. She meant private dances. “But that’s okay. I’m not selling.” She winked. “I’ll be back.”
And just like that Dina set off into the current, shrugging off the gauzy shawl she’d wrapped over her bikini, her fingers drifting behind her across the shoulders of men until one snapped to attention, standing and taking her hand as if at a ball, leading her to the back of the room, where he traded her ten dollars for a song’s worth of tits and ass, heavy whispers and almost-kisses. Then ten dollars for another song and ten for another, until we realized we might not see Dina again.
A tall blonde who called herself Kennedy (“Because I wish I could’ve slept with Marilyn,” she said) asked us to buy her a drink. We waved to the waitress and Snowball sent over something pink with a whisper of vodka. “You boys just passing through?” she asked. We weren’t ready to preach another sermon so we said simply that we were writers, we wrote about religion.
“Well, you came to the right place,” Kennedy said.
“A lot of true believers here?”
“You’re looking at one.”
Kennedy said she was a Calvinist, raised in Kearney, Nebraska, by parents who home-schooled her and forbade even the blackberry wine her uncle made for Thanksgiving. She knew doctrine and theology and every good reason why her Lord didn’t want her to be sitting across from us in a sparkly silver leotard that scooped down to her pubic hair. “But I can’t help it,” she said. The money was good, but that wasn’t all. When she was a girl she’d rebelled—“You know, sex in a cornfield”—and it was only when she broke the rules that she felt like she loved God as much as He loved her.
She glanced over at Snowball. “Here,” we said, opening our wallets and passing her two tens so that the fat man could see the transaction. “Keep talking.”
Kennedy relaxed, signaled the waitress for a Coke. “I dream about God all the time,” she said. “You know, what He wants.”
“What does He want?” we asked.
Kennedy frowned, an expression that for a second seemed to send her hurtling back to Nebraska, her face dour and serious, her black eyes frustrated and angry. “I don’t know,” she said.
In one of Kennedy’s dreams, her mother shared the stage with her at Club Exotica, praying while Kennedy danced. “And she’s making more money than me! They’re slipping twenties between her tits and I’m doing pole tricks and flashing my pussy but nobody’s watching.
“In another, my dad’s car breaks down across the road from the club, so he has to come here to wait for the tow truck. But the tow truck comes and takes his car away, and he still stays. He has his Bible, and he takes dollars out of it to tip me. The other guys want to tip me too, and he’s passing pages around. And this one guy slides the Gospel of John into my garter.
“I have crazy fucking dreams. It’s like I’m a kid, when your dreams are too real, you know. That’s how Christianity fucks you up, it’s like, you get too much of it and you never stop dreaming. And they’re not good dreams. Like for instance the dreams I have about tornadoes.”
“Tornadoes?” we said.
“Yes, tornadoes,” she said.
In the dreams, Kennedy is back in the cornfield, only now there’s no sex, and there’s no God. “He’s not there,” she said, “which really upsets me.” And there are tornadoes all around her. “You know how they call them ‘fingers of God’?” we said. “Yes,” Kennedy said, “but that’s stupid. Have you ever seen what they do?” We admitted that we had not—we never did catch that storm.
“They ruin everything,” she said. Then she paused. “But they are beautiful.” Before a tornado, she told us, the sky turns green, the color of the sea (“I’ve seen the Pacific and the Atlantic,” she boasted). “And it crushes you.” She reached out with flat palms on top of our heads and pushed us down into our chairs. “That’s the dream,” Kennedy said. “Green and crushing and a dozen tornadoes spinning around me.”
“Kennedy!” Snowball’s voice boomed over the sound system. “On stage now! Put your fucking paws together, gentlemen!”
“I’m sorry,” Kennedy said and strutted away to the stage. Her first dance was just hip swinging to hip-hop, but then Snowball cued the Who’s “Baba O’Riley”—a song written for Meher Baba, whose compound we had lived in for a while in South Carolina—and Kennedy looked confused. Big guitar chords, arena-rock drums, a fiddle solo—it’s not really a bump-and-grind. Kennedy straddled the pole in the center of the stage, tried to make like it was the biggest dick in the world and she was loving it, but the illusion wouldn’t take, not for her, not for the audience, not even for the pole. “Out here in the fields I fight for my meals…” sang Roger Daltrey. It was like a bad dream, she was in the cornfield, naked, and He wasn’t there. “I don’t need to be forgiveeen….” Only Kennedy felt like she did, so she started spinning, holdingher breasts in her hands as if they were offerings and occasionally running a finger down to her crotch and back up to her lips as if she was tasting herself, moaning and shaking her head as if she’d just sampled manna. She grabbed hold of the pole with one hand and started swinging around it, faster and faster through the violin solo, until the crescendo. When it was over, she stopped and stood center stage, slump-shouldered, lit by two rinky-dink red spotlights, framed by two artificial palm trees, dappled by the disco ball, surrounded by applause for the undeniable truth of her skin and bones, real here on earth.
“Dina!” Snowball called. Now Dina was dancing, first to “Relax,” by Frankie Goes to Hollywood; then to a song that seemed less like a song than the soundtrack to an industrial assembly line. It began as nothing but the noise of gears grinding, gates slamming, booted footsteps stomping up steel stairs; then all the noises gathered into the boom-clang-boom-clang of a radiator banging, accompanied by two deep piano chords, each allowed to resonate until it faded away. The music of a factory eating itself: first the relentless pulse of its labor, then the rumble of its rhythmic destruction, like electric can openers gnawing into an oil drum.
It was a very slow song, and Dina didn’t so much dance as die slowly for each man in the room. “All the other girls hate her,” a woman called Carmen, who’d seen us talking to Dina and claimed to be Dina’s only friend, told us. “She makes too much money.” It seemed to be true: Blackhawk was wearing a path between the stage and the bar, the drama club pooled its cash and gave her a fistful of dollars, and even Snowball presented an offering, heaving his bulk to dead center in front of the stage, stripping a twenty off a roll, putting it between his teeth, and standing between the small crowd and Dina with no respect for the view. Dina tugged the twenty from his teeth with her own. When Snowball turned away, she spat it on the ground.
After her dance, Dina returned to us. “I thought of a story for your God book,” she said. “It’s about a tornado.”
She took the doctor we’d mentioned and remade him into a hero of a romance novel, a tall, powerful man who nonetheless goes weak in the knees for tornadoes. He has a wife, of course, and he loves her, too, and she loves him. “Now, you know how a woman gets when she really loves a man—he’s her whole world, he’s the moon in front of the sun or the sun in front of the moon—you know what I’m talking about?”
“An eclipse,” we said.
“Yeah,” Dina said. “ ‘Clipped.’ That’s what the wife is, clipped by her love for the doctor who loves tornadoes. She can’t stand it, he runs away from her, he chases storms, he could die. ‘Who do you love?’ the wife demands. The doctor doesn’t answer—This is the sexy part,” said Dina. “He strips her and starts kissing her all over, he’s licking her, you know, and touching her, and it’s just one orgasm after another, it’s fantastic. And then she gets it, I mean, she gets what’s going on, ’cuz she’s so in love with this man she knows all about him.”
“Gets what?” we asked.
Dina rolled her eyes
like we were fools. “He’s fucking the tornado, you dummies! Didn’t you ever read Danielle Steel?
“So he’s shtupping the storm and the wife can’t figure out whether she should be happy or sad. It almost doesn’t matter, because it’s the best fuck of her life. They’re both covered in sweat and the bed is shaking, and her man’s eyes look black and huge like the sun in front of the moon or the other way around. Which isn’t so great because in the dark who knows what’s what? So she tries to uh, uh, what’s the word? Clarify. ‘I’m your wife,’ she says.
Killing the Buddha Page 32
