The Fan-Shaped Destiny of William Seabrook

by Paul Pipkin

“You see,” I told her, trying to keep my voice even and still be heard over the thunder that was crashing around us, “I believe I saw myself in a later time, when I still lived in that house, and was the father of a young woman—who can never now be born in this world.” Justine, hearing my voice betray the emotions, gripped my wrist.

  “Mightn’t it all be, some way, about me?” she asked brightly, near-endearing in her typically postadolescent conceit. “You do know that you could be taken for my father, dearest, in a young boy’s dream, I mean? This is coming out all wrong, before I even finish. As if you weren’t my lover, I’m way sure I wouldn’t mind you being my father, ooh! I did say that, I really did, but… hey, what’s up with the redheads?”

  Unseen in the darkness, I smiled wanly at the evidence that I was not alone—in letting my mouth overload my ass. “Oh, it’s JJ of course. After Linda and I were married, I described JJ to her, when she asked about other women I’d been with. She said, ‘now I know who the little redheaded girl is.’

  “I had no idea what she meant, until she explained that she’d noticed I was never amused by that character in Peanuts. She said that when the little red-haired girl hurt Charlie Brown’s feelings, I always got mad. It hit me between the eyes that she was right. I’d never had any conscious recognition of the identification.”

  This had gone far enough. I had been venturing too near to exposing my motivation for following the trail of the branching-worlds theory. Did all this sound crazy or what? I tried to shift the conversation onto her, but she had another track in mind.

  Taking off from my mention of Linda, she wanted to know all about my wife. I found this acceptable, for it might open the door to discussion of sex and bondage games. I could demonstrate how she would be less limited in her sexual expression with me, than with some young asshole who cherished the typical passion for the practice of monogamy—on the part of women.

  Linda had become a very successful stripper, belly dancer, and all-round showgirl working the national circuits out of Dallas. You might have heard of her, if you’re at least a little older than Justine. Her stage name was Deva Dasi, from a Sanskrit word meaning “slave-girl of the god,” connoting the temple prostitutes of antiquity.59

  Justine was enthralled by the image. When the storm forced us to stop a while longer at Lafayette, she was laughing happily, over a grisly snack of alligator boudin, at Linda’s exploits as a stripper. By then I understood that any strategy based on the bias of young women for talking about themselves would come to naught. This babe was a whole different smoke, first determined to hear all about me. Several times I had seen her psych training play in, and had to accept that I was being consciously worked.

  I did not gloss over the downside, but I refused to take any phony rap. Linda’s folks had been old carneys, hard people from a hard place. While they had sent her to private schools and tried to groom her for a better life, they were incapable of shielding the girl from the nihilism of life on the midway. Long before I’d ever met her, she’d been a teenage alcoholic.

  If it were exacerbated by our lifestyle, I’ll take that blame. I would never have considered steering her away from the dancing or the promiscuity that gave her the only joys she had in her too brief life. It was precisely when she could no longer dance or play that the illness had become acute. Any regrets I harbored on this count were of fantasies left unexplored. Perhaps it’s true that the candle that burns twice as brightly burns half as long. For in her day, before the sickness took her down, Linda had blazed.

  Beautiful and desired by many, men and women, she seemed unable to abide the protective barrier established by the edge of a stage. Her paramount fantasy was of being given to anyone who wanted her. Now, contrary to the swill of idiotic screenwriters, acting this out had limited practicality, even in the days before the epidemic.

  She would try, though, wherever it was to any degree feasible. Her passion for bondage ran as deep as that for the freedom of the dance and, in an odd way, they were intertwined. I didn’t altogether discount the neo-Freudian suggestions that Justine would offer. The influence of a mother, who had for years systematically crushed Linda’s will into a submission of which others might take advantage, couldn’t be ignored.

  Still, I believed that Sigmund, the stuffy bourgeois, had to be discounted after a point. Like most of us, she had no whips and restraints around her childhood home at which to sneak nasty little peeks. Yet such fascinations lurk in the collective unconscious of us all.

  Linda had been booked by one of the old-time burlesque agencies on a Southern tour. In Printer’s Alley in Nashville, she’d played half of a girl-on-girl act. Years later, when we had our own club, we would adapt it to a bondage theme. Then she’d done her first entirely nude work in Panama City. She was pretty keyed-up by the time we had worked our way back to Atlanta to end the run with a three-week booking on Peachtree.

  The gig had begun typically enough with three twenty-minute sets per night; there were fewer dancers in those days, and they performed longer at a stretch. They were fully professional; elaborate wardrobe, props, and effects, including special lighting, were expected to be provided by the performer. A dancer on the road needed a partner for help with lift-and-carry alone. Pay was high, minimal drink hustle or other scams, nothing by commission. They kept all tips and were not expected to support other club personnel.

  “Get outta here!” when I told her the pay to which Linda had been accustomed. “No clue it was so involved.”

  “Why should you? All you’re shown on TV or in the movies are images of cops strolling into lowlife joints like they’re too good to be there. When Hollywood admits the existence of the professionals, they serve up single-moms-supporting-their-children who ‘just-want-to-have-a-normal-life.’ The fact is that most professional strips are in the business to escape from ‘normalcy.’ They’re into it because they get off on it as much as for the money, and that’s the long and the short of it.”

  It would have been four sets a night except, being a feature, Linda did some spots with the comic and was cut in half by a magician’s sword instead. The highly erotic, sacrificial aspect of that role had been simply made for her! Her basic function had been to be distractive.

  All she really had to do was to lie on a blackdraped, altar-looking platform, wearing a gown that fastened behind her neck. The magician would loosen it and push it far down on her hips, baring her torso. Her split skirt would fall open to display a lot of leg as well. From that point no one would notice what was going on with the fake blood and other stuff I was passing to the magician, or much of anything other than her.

  Justine had taken the wheel at Lafayette. As we cruised the causeway above the fifty miles of interconnected bayous, swamps, and waterways, the moon came out to illuminate eerily the sinuous, twisting passages below us. The storm had not yet reached there. Far off, I spied lights moving among the reeds and stumps in the water and pointed them out to her.

  ————————

  THE “BAD JUJU” was probably swamp gas, but this sighting digressed us for a while onto Seabrook’s history with voodoo. The material he had gathered in Haiti comprised the book Magic Island, which would introduce the idea of Voudon as a religion to a mass audience. It included the first use in American literature of the “zombie.” Beginning with the 1932 horror film classic White Zombie, B-movie producers would flourish for decades off what he had initiated. While he was admittedly a sensationalist, sedate academic authorities failed repeatedly to debunk the content of his exposés. Impatiently, Justine pulled me back to my long-ago trip with Linda over this same route.

  Decades later, I had to admit lacking a clear visual of the Peachtree club owner, but that wasn’t altogether a matter of memory. As at that first meeting, she would always be sitting rather back in the shadows and wore a long wig, a variation on “big hair,” which largely covered her face. Her mystery had enthralled me, though I was uneasy about the fashion in which Linda took to her, in a
way that she seldom did with any other women.

  I remembered Linda’s turn of phrase, after they’d been to breakfast together one night after closing. Linda had told me that the darkness was not about concealment. She’d said that the old woman wore the darkness like a protective shawl, helping to keep her warm. That in the darkness, her dreams still lived. Two nights later, she’d asked us to accompany her to another location, a roadhouse she’d opened a few years earlier.

  “Hey, roadhouse?” Justine queried.

  “Old name for a highway bar, usually a honkytonk. This was actually a private club, but it was out on a highway and so she called it a roadhouse.” She’d driven us out in an old black Cadillac, one of those long old boats. No sign identified the large, two-story stone structure, with sealed shutters on its windows, as the club called The Château, but it looked the part.

  The interior had been lavishly appointed. The rear entrance to the stage had been flanked by Grecian columns that rose far up above a second-floor balcony, to a ceiling with a painted moon and stars. Plush drapery framed wall murals, featuring idealized coastal scenes, with what appeared to be medieval ruins.

  There had been service bars on both floors and, when we had been seated at her reserved table at the corner of the balcony, we could observe the entire operation. We beheld a staff of dancer-waitresses, a practice on which we had not been too keen back then, outfitted in short tunics. They worked the tables, kneeling slave-fashion, and danced barefoot on the carpeted stage. The carpet prohibited real dance as we knew it, and the performance in progress was more a posed classical vignette, portraying some mythological theme.

  Aside from the fanciful aspects, the decor had been distinctly early-century. There had even been glass fruit on the tables! The entire ambiance had been something one would have imagined from some exclusive underground establishment forty years earlier. I’d no idea that something such as that existed, but none of it equaled the most unusual aspect of the place.

  It was after hours, and many of the patrons were leaving when I had visited the rest room on the lower level, amused to meet an attendant attired, like the other male personnel, in formal evening dress. I would not see that affectation again until the advent of “gentlemen’s clubs” of the later century. Returning to the clubroom, noting that the inner security door had been closed, I’d almost bumped up against a completely naked girl—hanging by her wrists from chains that dropped from the railing of the balcony above.

  The very young, peaches-and-cream blonde, with a soft-looking but nicely shaped body, evidenced understandable discomfiture. She could only just reach the floor with her toes, so that her straining legs and feet could only partially support her weight. Though a small spotlight illuminated her plight, her trembling muscles and face reflecting her pain, the staff had continued about their business around her as though she were merely part of the decor.

  For long minutes, we had drunk in the exhibition. Our hostess had been explaining to Linda that the hapless blonde, who was fully visible from where we were seated on the opposite balcony, had been accepted to work at the club. She would be “initiated” that night with a gratuitous experience of the corporal penalties meted out for infractions of policy.

  “It’s a game we play sometimes to thrill the supporting patrons,” she’d shrugged. “And, as you observe, it keeps the girls on their toes,” she had punned with a gravelly laugh. “It’s all understood.” Though we might find it strange, she’d told us, the girls performing the roles of slaves held veto power, in many affairs of the club, over the members who supported it.

  Not so strange, I’d thought as I had begun, with some excitement, to surmise what additional diversions The Château might offer. That way, no one could claim that she had been victimized.

  The old woman had gone on to clarify that the girl had been brought around by her husband, a young Army officer who was also present that night. There had been a noticeable component of military couples involved with the club, and our hostess had educated us on that point. She told us that she had a strong affinity with Réage’s erotic classic, which had been released in the States a few years earlier.

  I’d read it then, and had turned Linda on to it, but our hostess had the distinction of having read the original Histoire d’O just after it had mysteriously appeared before the French Academy in 1952. She’d advised us that one could only grasp its full meaning by appreciating its extraordinary use of the French language. The British edition had been widely circulated among the armed services for years before the American publication.

  It had found a ready audience among the young marrieds in base housing, she’d explained. There, “wife swapping” and other late-century variations on the old free-love theme had been popular throughout the Cold War. Only much later would they catch on within a campus counterculture, many of its constituents military brats themselves.

  “Again the lie was given to the conceit that the Baby Boomers discovered everything,” I remarked, then began to digress onto these practices in relation to Seabrook, hoping to tie all this to Justine’s immediate interests.

  “I wanna hear what happened to the blonde! Tell!” I told her, as I will tell all, so just have patience. I would soon have more occasions to recall the sadomasochistic rituals, which I had found meaningful beyond the obvious. Linda and I had both believed that there was something more to it than an erotic display alone. It had been as though the old woman had hoped something specific to be evoked in that temple she had built to her erotic preoccupations. I did tell all, with what I was to fear might be a calamitous result.

  I broke off as I realized that Justine had been silently weeping. Oh man, I thought, I’ve done it now, and thinking I was on the right track, too! I carefully touched her hand on the wheel. “Is this freaking you out?”

  She gripped my wrist and drew a labored breath, “I’m good.” She wiped her eyes, “That was intense. You never went back?” I relaxed a bit. Maybe I’d chanced the gauntlet and gotten away with it again. I didn’t want to get into my misgivings about the effects our experiences might have been having on Linda.

  “We had to go fulfill other contracts back in Texas. Then the agency closed and the old Southern circuit broke up. We wrote them the next year when we saw they had actually advertised for ‘slave-girl dancers’ in one of the big ‘swinger’ magazines that were around back then. I think it was a matter of management changing and the club closing down before we could get back there.”

  The way things had gone for Linda in the end, I’d often wondered if I had made a terrible mistake by not simply staying there. Yet another might-have-been, on which I withheld commentary. I didn’t know how deeply I might be getting in with Justine as things were. I could read nothing in her face in the dim lights of the dash.

  “Of course, that was another time,” I tried to back water. “Today, with all the crazies, the disease, and everything, I’m not sure how far I’d want to push something like that anyway.” Still nothing. The rain was growing heavier again. “Are you ready to stop for the night? We can get some sleep anytime.”

  “I said I’m good!” The green eyes flashed a sideways rebuff. “Damn!” She harnessed the attitude, and continued, “We’ll pack it in soon. You’re saying you talked much with the old woman about your lives? What was that like? Who was she?”

  “We only knew her as something like Madeline, some name like that. Remember, it’s been nearly thirty years. As to being pumped, couldn’t avoid it. She could read me as clearly as you can,” I said sardonically, though the equivalence wasn’t the truth. Many of the memories had been painfully fresh then, and much easier for the old woman to elicit.

  “You talked with her about JJ? That’s a lovely poem you have with her picture, by the way; it would’ve made me give it up.” There was the strangeness creeping into her voice again, and the sudden shift did not bode well. There is some limit on how much a young woman wants to learn about her predecessors, especially one still living. Th
ey certainly don’t want comparisons, even favorable ones.

  I did not trust this a bit, but as if reading my mind, she commanded, “Excuse me? You must have affection for the past, muchly, to revisit like you do. I wanna know about it all—what you are looking back at that makes life seem so wrong and horrid. Why does a man who’s done such interesting things wanna, like rewind and start over?”

  “It’s not JJ alone, babe,” I protested lamely.

  “But that’s where it begins, yea?” I was in the deep shit then. It seemed that I’d run my mouth and exposed myself to the point that there was no way out. The damned little psych grad had me trapped. After starting neatly to confess everything, there would be no way to explore the issues that bound us together—without admitting to the obsession that had led me to discover Seabrook’s influence. I began to tell the rest of the story, and not just of JJ, but my lost ones as well—all the sadly truncated lives with which I could not, would not, come to terms.

  ————————

  WE’D CROSSED THE “STYX RIVER,” as a road sign in the Mississippi darkness had demarcated some whimsical place-name. I felt that Charon’s barge was indeed bearing me into the land of the dead. About me were the ghosts that I could no longer hear “in the whispers that had followed me since we were lost to each other.”60 The past had caught up with the present, and I could feel all those years coming for me now.

  When we finally had exited the interstate and dropped down to Gulfport, checking into a motel near the shore, we were both so run through that sex was not an issue. Justine had peeled off her jeans and burrowed directly into one of the beds. I’d hit the other one and turned out the lights. I’d lain there watching the white line continuing to roll behind my eyelids, wanting to say, good night, I love you, but not speaking. I had said more than enough that night. My life had spiraled wholly out of control.

  Now, it was the classic anonymous motel morning with gray light through Venetian blinds. Uh-oh, the morning after; just delayed by twenty-four hours and several hundred miles. I was alone in the room, but Justine’s bag reassured me that I’d not been ditched outright, not yet at least. “On the pier,” a sheet of motel stationery advised me. While I smelled like a skunk and thought about washing up, I had to know where her head was at before my heart dropped through my bowels.