“Do you do this in your spare time?” I asked, standing up.
“Well, I run the shop, and the studio, as different arms of my own little adult entertainment empire. It’s a one-man band at the moment, but maybe I’ll get to expand one day. With the right kind of talent. Everyone’s into doing porn these days, so I’m just looking for a different angle, a unique selling point. Y’know?”
“So do you do everything yourself?”
“Not quite. I have my Mum here to help out.” He indicated the old apparition behind me, who smiled horribly in reply.
I whispered at him, “You may want to tell her to put her teeth back in.”
“Oh, it’s alright,” he said cheerfully as he led me past the desk and into the little room he’d emerged from. “She’s resting between takes of a new piece I’m shooting called Granny’s Gumjobs. I’m testing the market, y’see.”
“Interesting,” I pondered as I sat down, and Mr. van Leer sat opposite me behind the Formica table. I unbelted my coat and hung it on the back of the chair, shedding a layer, and revealing a little bit of cleavage.
“So, Annie. Let’s start by getting to know you a bit better. What’s your favorite drink?”
“Orange tequila.” It was the first thing that came to my mind. In fact, it was the first thing that anybody at the Klub had ever bought for me on my first day, which is why it had stuck in my mind.
“Your favorite color?”
“Blue, especially in movies.” I giggled at that. Funny, I thought. A sure sign my old confidence was returning.
“Good, good.” He flicked through some pages on his desk, which all looked to be blank. He said, “Do you normally spit, swallow or gargle?”
I said it depended upon whether it was mouthwash, coffee or domestic bleach. He just looked at me askance for a moment, then laughed aloud.
“Good sense of humor too,” he grinned. “Excellent.” He flicked the pages back and forth again and studied them closely. “I’m just checking the script to see what would be the best part for you.”
I said quietly, “Uh, are all those pages blank?”
He looked up suddenly, startled, as though I wasn’t supposed to have noticed that. “Yeah. I haven’t actually written the script yet. I’m a hands-on kind of producer/director – I like to go with instinct over form. It’s the European avant-garde intuitive school of porno directing, y’know.”
I nodded. “Far out,” was all I said. I was sure I’d understand, one day.
Then Mr. van Leer stood up. “Okay, just one final thing. You’re definitely not shy, are you?”
I laughed at that. “Sure, that’s why I’m here.” I reached under my skirt and pulled the black Lycra panties down to my knees, dropped them and stepped out of them. Turned away and pulled my skirt up to my waist, showing him my full pale ass and the garter straps stretched over it. Without any fear or anxiety now, or concern for my own wellbeing; it was just another audition, for another job involving getting me naked. After my initiation ceremony at the Klub, nothing else could ever bother me now. I had something that people liked – that was a fact now, as unlikely as it seemed to me at first, and I was happy to exploit that for as long as I had it.
“Holy shit, girl, yes. Turn around. Show me it. All of it. Show me what you got.”
I did, slowly, facing him full-on. Hands on my hips holding my skirt up, legs apart and pelvis tilted upward to give him the best view of that strip of shocking pink, my favorite pose for the climax of my stage routine. His hands were already under the desk, fiddling, ripping zips. I threw my arms behind my head, posing now, smiling, loving it, turning myself on even more at his slack-jawed rubber-necked reaction. I was used to my audiences being well out of reach, and often out of sight, buried in shadows and eclipsed by spotlights. Now I was seeing in bright daylight the kind of effect I could have on them, and my pulse quickened at the sight of his trousers bursting with a triangular, tent-like bulge that almost made me laugh aloud.
“Christ, I love being a pervert,” he sighed. “I mean – an artist. Can I – uh – get a bit of you on film just now? Just as a screen test, y’know? Something that I can take home tonight and – uh – study. And. Use. To...uh, develop the artistic project we’ll be working on together?”
“Sure,” I smiled, as I leant across the desk and unpicked the knot of his tie. “Or you could just fuck me over the desk, right here and now.”
His eyes glazed over and he seemed to have forgotten how to blink.
“Let me get the camera.”
I finished off the job he’d started with his zip, ripping it open. He didn’t object or try to stop me. He just looked at me with eyes half-shut and a soft, low Aahhh! escaping from his lips.
His cock spilled out in my hand, twitching and growing as it slid between my fingers. I stretched out my tongue and lapped the underside of the tip.
“Uh, okay,” he conceded, “we’ll just call this your audition, how’s that?”
I bent down and raised his pulsing dick towards my mouth and kissed it all the way back to his white linen slacks.
I flicked my tongue towards him. “Go get the camera.”
He scrambled off the desk, clothes and hair a mess and trying desperately to keep his trousers up. Just as he opened the door of the office, the voice of the old crone screeched through from the reception area.
“Norman?”
“Yes, Mother?”
“Norman, what are you doing in there with that filthy whore?”
He banged the door shut again and flattened himself against it, staring at me in panic while his cock twitched and wobbled, now forgotten, from the middle of his slacks.
“Nothing, Mother. I promise.”
“I don’t believe you, Norman. I can’t believe you would do this to me again.”
The sound of slow, deliberate footsteps in the corridor snapped me out of my infernal sexual delirium.
“Oh, shit,” he groaned. “This is not good.”
I pulled on his dick urgently, hoping he’d snap out of it and remember what it was we were supposed to be doing. “Aw, come on,” I said. “What’s the worst that she can do?”
He dashed past me just as the door flew open and a dark, jagged shadow darted incongruously across the wall in front of me. I could just make out the silhouette of her head, long hair pulled up in an antique bun, and then the raised arm – with its long, pointed appendage at right angles, the unmistakable outline of a heavy kitchen knife.
Norman screamed like a girl.
I screamed like a dozen girls, all competing simultaneously to win a screaming contest.
And then I woke up, sneezing and snuffling and coughing and throwing my arms across my face. Boris was lying stretched out over me and I was naked on top of my bed, and littered in little tufts of cat fur. I must have been pulling clumps out of him in my sleep.
I pushed him aside and turned away to cough. What a ridiculous dream, I thought; where the hell did my mind find all that crap? It had all been going so well, too. I grasped the alarm clock from the bedside table and squinted at it. I was supposed to have had a quick nap before calling the studio, but it was far too late for that now.
I would sleep on it, I decided, as I pulled the blankets around me and closed my eyes again, warm and glowing. There was always tomorrow. My hands squeezed tight between my legs, and forgetting the fearsome crone, I conjured back the thoughts of Norman and me spread out across the office table for Take Two, the safe version, where it was my turn to squeal as something just as long, but much less lethal than his mother’s carving knife, thrust into me repeatedly until my body oozed warm lakes of mutual pleasure.
ACT II
The ‘80s
Chapter Five
Sugar for My Honey
I never did find out if Mr. van Leer was really called Norman, or who the real artistic director of EroFlix was. For things at the Klub had heated up for me from that week onwards, being asked to cover four sessions a week rather tha
n my usual one or two – a sure sign that I had graduated, and was on my way up the ladder. Three days off every week might sound great to those used to a 9 to 5 grind, but it was physically demanding, even exhausting, and I usually spent most Mondays lazing around the house, whether in bed until late afternoon, or wrapped in blankets nursing hot drinks while my feet soaked in basins of hot salted water to help them recover from the relentless punishment I was now inflicting on them. All of that stomping around in heels soon firmed up my thighs and calves but it also took its toll from me in blisters, corns and calluses. (I always thought feet were such ugly, unattractive things, so it didn’t bother me in the slightest that mine were growing even uglier and more gnarled by the week; I had no intention of ever showing them off anywhere in public, but I could certainly have done without the nagging discomfort they brought).
Tuesdays were my usual day of normality, when I ventured outside on shopping trips and errands, and Wednesday was now an early night in order to get plenty of rest before the mad onslaught of the latter half of the week. I hoped that my mother would not succeed in tracking me down and visit unexpectedly some day, for the house was always littered in cast-off underwear, lingerie, and whatever had been my most recent stage outfit. I was turning into a slob, the kind of woman my mother had always despised, and I loved it. No more demands to tidy up this and put that away – one or two Tuesdays a month, I would actually bother to shift the growing mounds of clothing, boots, shoes, hats, gloves, costume jewellery, beauty magazines, dirty dinner plates (usually scoured clean by Boris’ tongue), make-up things, lose pfennigs and weekly pay slips. But I found order in this chaos, and knew exactly where to find anything at any given moment from amid the strewn heaps of stuff.
My worst nightmare was a double-act visit from my mother and Mrs. Groenenberg and finding myself being simultaneously scorned, lectured, sneered and yelled at, until I would be able to take no more and threw myself through the window and onto the balcony to escape. But that never came to pass, and my landlady made no more personal visits to demand overdue rent from me. In fact, paying the rent was one of the few tasks which quickly burned itself into my routine (such as it was) and was always done on time, come hail, shine, or, more usually when I decided to step outside on real business, rain. I found umbrellas such an ungainly accessory, preferring my big red waterproof hat instead, and so I made sure that I attracted attention even amid the most drab and grey of circumstances.
In this way did life go on at the Kitty Klub for me, and all the others. We entered the 1980s, all of us with a brighter, more positive outlook on everything – music, styles and attitudes were shifting, and instead of playing disco records in the afternoons when only the bar was open, we dared to play New Wave, rock, and even punk – we played the Cars and the Commodores in the bar now instead of The Who and The Sweet, although Bruno always insisted that there be plenty of the Rolling Stones, his own favorite group. We adjusted our looks and attire accordingly (all except Petra, of course – still firmly rooted in her 1930s fantasy, and always the exception which proved the rule) – Olivia suddenly favored expensive perms instead of her long, flowing look, a phase which lasted six months before she gave up and began growing her hair naturally again. I even experimented with bleaching my hair blonde but everyone agreed that it made me look rather cheap, not to mention somewhat ill with my already pale coloring, so my peroxide quickly went the way of Olivia’s curls as soon as I developed a coppery stripe of natural roots.
Within the couple of years since my arrival I had developed in every kind of way, and the crowd loved me for it. I was still nowhere near the level of class or polish of Olivia, Gloria, Petra, or the others, but I was getting there. The sudden surge in popularity for VHS hadn’t diminished our audiences, and thankfully people still seemed to like the physical aspect of live performance.
Bruno used to tell us that he would plan our acts the way one would plan a menu – with complimentary acts followed by contradictory ones. He even went so far as to divide us into two lists – ‘sweet’ and ‘savory’. Petra was top of the ‘sweet’ list while Svetlana was her corresponding opposite number on the ‘savory’. Gloria, because she often varied her routine, could fit into either. Melissa was definitely sweet too, no matter the saucy and downright filthy words that came out of her mouth when she was behind a microphone, and I was ‘the equivalent of a steaming bowl of chili’, so Bruno described me once. I’d never eaten chili in my life so I assumed he meant I was a bit spicy.
So much for the performers – but what about our regulars?
Bruno had simple rules for the customers – look but don’t touch, no exceptions – no private sessions, no soliciting. His bouncers were a pair of ex-policemen, twins in fact, who ran their own security business and kept things in check when need be, which was never very often. Fights rarely happened in the club. I found out much later that Bruno was very well-connected with the local press, so perhaps a certain subtle hint of blackmail was what helped them all to behave so well.
The most distinctive was Blue Collar Korean Import Guy, or BCKIG for short, as we called him. He spent every Friday night in his blue denim overalls staring up at us from the front of the stage, as though we had frozen his features in time. BCKIG only ever drank Pepsi, so we deduced that he was either a teetotal or operated machinery in an environment where being under the influence was either a sackable offence, injurious to health, or both. I didn’t usually feel much for any of our watchers, but BCKIG was one I felt a little sorry for. There weren’t a lot of people of his sort around in Old Berlin at that time and I never saw him speak to anyone else in the Klub other than, I assume, the bar staff to order his one single Pepsi that was likely all he could afford on his weekly wage, once he’d paid his admission fee.
“That guy just freaks me out sometimes,” Petra confided in me early on. “He never seems to react to anything. Just sits and stares. It’s like: this is my vagina, darling – and he just sits there!” She mimed a pop-eyed, goldfish-like impersonation of BCKIG, and we fell about the place. “God only knows what the hell’s going through his mind.”
“Thoughts of a very unchristian nature, darling,” Olivia sang as she brushed by. “Or at least, I’d bloody well hope so. We give our all up on that damn stage, so I’d expect at least the odd dirty fantasy to float through these buggers’ heads.”
“I think he’s kind of cute,” I confessed.
Mel crept up behind me and bent her ear close to my mouth. “What is it that does it for ya then, honey? The big glasses? The denim cap? Or the fact he’s probably really nifty with his nimble little fingers?” She scuttled her hand up my neck as though it was a tarantula, and I flinched at the very touch. Mel had managed to switch me from being moderately excited, fantasizing about me giving BCKIG a private dance to see if he displayed any external emotions at all, to being totally creeped out in the space of about two seconds. I’d always hated spiders. And the bigger they were, the more I hated them.
“Never mind, Mel,” I sighed as she went off sniggering, having once more blown my mood apart. (Mel could do that without even trying – it was a feature of her sense of humor, and one which took me quite a while to understand. She sometimes had a manner which could be very curt, even abrasive, but deep down she cared for every one of us and had no difficulty in telling us so after a half-bottle of local hock just how much.)
And getting back to our regular voyeurs, there was the group of professors from the local university – or so we had all decided among ourselves, the Gang of Four as we referred to them. No matter what they were in reality, they were distinguished gentlemen who wore tweeds, three-piece suits and sports jackets and looked as though they all lectured for a living. They seemed to drink brandy and wine mainly, and Saturday nights usually saw them in a little cluster either to the right or the left of the stage. A couple of them also had a passion for laughably cheesy jazz, as they could often be seen bopping along (complete with snapping finger gestures) to our more �
��trad’ accompaniments as though it were ‘41 and they were swingin’ with Glenn Miller. Olivia had decided that they all worked in the Social Sciences department and ventured out to the Klub to study the sociological and psychological impact of live erotic entertainment upon themselves, and take back with them many off-color observations and theories, no doubt purposefully designed to upset the radical feminists of the Gender Studies department.
Then there was ‘Heinrich’, whom we named after Himmler, on account of his strict haircut, bucket-shaped head and bull-like neck (and outsize belly to match). He started to turn up not long after I joined, and Petra disliked him at first sight. She surmised that he spent his time wondering how long it would have taken his father to sign us all up to the local Joy Division as he nursed his beer and contemplated world domination. He always wore a black belted overcoat and we deduced that he was also a flasher in his spare time (although only at Aryan women, so Olivia had decided – which ruled Petra out, much to her irritation).
On occasion we mere mortals would be treated to the undivided attention of God’s Own Sex Machine, or so Petra had dubbed him. I’m pretty sure every bar and club, then as well as now, had it’s very own GOSM regular – this one was strictly of his time, with wide open shirt, gold neck chains, sideburns almost as big as Boris, and trousers so tight they would have made the Bee Gees gasp. He’d usually (blatantly) nurse a glass of champagne from his seat near the front, table pushed to the side so we could see his spread legs and central bulge, which according to Mel’s ribald assumptions, was actually a couple of pairs of his granny’s pantyhose. (I had never seen it change size or position, so could never be sure if that was the real deal.) At times I saw him up and dancing in the early evenings, usually to the latest tunes, but he clearly wasn’t a fan of redheads as I never attracted his attention. Olivia, on the other hand, had rebuffed him several times, refusing to believe his overtures involving his own penthouse, Porsche, and recent exotic holiday destinations.
Phoenyx: Flesh & Fire Page 9
