Pretty Mess

by Erika Jayne

  I don’t think the father figures who let me down are bad people. They were doing the best they could, and sometimes that’s just not enough. It’s less their fault than it is the circumstances they were in. I can’t really blame them for what happened.

  Now I’m so far away from these issues that it doesn’t hurt anymore. In those moments, it was excruciating, but you can’t stay in that pain too long. You have to let it wash over you and pass, or else it will drown you. I also have to be mindful that these rejections don’t make me hard-hearted. It can be difficult to trust other people. I’m always waiting for the other shoe to drop, like someone could walk out of my life at a moment’s notice. But I have to evolve beyond that mind-set.

  I have to transcend those people and the pain they brought me. I have to keep walking forward. I have to do the best that I can and hope that everything I’ve learned from these men helps me do things better than they did.

  4

  SO HOT IT BURNS

  When Tom and I fly our Gulfstream to New York City, we land at Teterboro Airport. It’s just across the Hudson River from Manhattan in Bergen County, New Jersey. Like most airports, it’s not necessarily in the most glamorous part of town. If Manhattan is the city that never sleeps, this is the stretch of New Jersey that passes out in the gutter. As our car pulls out of Teterboro toward Manhattan, we turn down a service road that looks like it has definitely seen a body or two disposed of in the past. On that road, right across the street from the airport, is a square, white, run-down building sitting in the corner of a parking lot. This is Shakers, one of New Jersey’s infamous go-go bars.

  In New Jersey, clubs that feature nudity can’t also serve alcohol. To get around this law, there are many go-go clubs and bikini bars. Girls dance wearing as little as they can, while still keeping it legal for guys to unwind with a beer after work. There are several of them near Teterboro, but Shakers loomed large because of its visibility right across the street. I felt unsettled every time Tom and I drove past it, because it was like a ghost from the past. Once upon a time, a whole lifetime ago, I was one of those girls shaking it at Shakers.

  Tom knew vaguely about this particular bullet point on my résumé, but we’d never discussed it in detail. I certainly never told him about any of the clubs I worked in or what it was like. It’s not a time in my life that I’m fond of recalling.

  After I graduated from Northside High in Atlanta, my mother and I both moved to New York City on October 1, 1989. I knew I needed to be in the big city where there were more opportunities to get my start as an entertainer. For Renee, it was the perfect excuse to leave her old life and disappointments behind. She quit her job in the mortgage industry and got another job in Manhattan doing the same thing at a different bank. Renee was always an artist, working on paintings and teaching the piano. She wanted more for her life than just raising a kid in Atlanta. She would say, “Erika needs to leave, and I need to be there because she can’t do anything by herself.” What she really meant was that she wanted to leave just as badly as I did.

  We were living at 215 West 84th Street and Broadway on the Upper West Side. It’s a nice doorman building where Edgar Allan Poe used to have a farmhouse, so it was a pretty cool spot. We lived in a spacious one-bedroom apartment that had a loft over the kitchen. Renee got the bedroom and I slept in the loft. For those unfamiliar with the quirks of New York City apartments, there was a little ladder in the living room that went up to a platform that was over the kitchen, but the open part of the loft looked out onto the living room. You couldn’t stand up in it, but it was big enough for a bed and my artwork on the walls. There were no fights over closet space, because I barely owned anything—just a leather jacket, a few pairs of jeans, and dancewear. I wasn’t a fashionista back then. I was broke.

  I had no connections in New York, but I did have a couple of high school friends who also moved up there to pursue their dreams. We were all eighteen to twenty, and we didn’t know shit. Just like every other theater kid, I was trying to live out some would-be dream of being in show business. I just wanted to perform. I wanted to get a job doing what I was trained to do: singing, dancing, and acting. It’s like that line from “The Music and the Mirror” in A Chorus Line, “Give me somebody to dance for, give me somebody to show. Let me wake up in the morning to find I have somewhere exciting to go.”

  While I was taking the subway all over town going to auditions, I still needed to make some cash. My mom was thirty-six and trying to start fresh. She told me, “You’re eighteen. Pay rent or get out.” And she meant it. Our rent was not cheap, especially for an eighteen-year-old with more promise than income.

  My girlfriend Justine had graduated from Northside before me and immediately moved to New York. When I got to town, she became my best friend and we were inseparable—hanging out, preparing for auditions, and going to all the clubs we could charm our way into. We were both broke, but Justine had it even harder than I did. At least I had my mother in case things got really bad. Justine only had herself. I’ve always admired her, because she went through a lot on her own. I don’t know if I could have done the same without Renee.

  This was 1989, before Mayor Giuliani showed up with his magic wand and Disney-fied large swaths of New York. Justine’s apartment was on the far Upper West Side, and the stroller set was still a good decade from showing up and transforming the place.

  Justine’s apartment had recently been renovated, so it was nice inside. When I would spend the night, I would sleep on what we called the San Francisco futon, because it had lumps as big as hills. But the neighborhood was trouble, and she got robbed a lot. It looked a bit like that movie New Jack City where there were just empty lots all around and some of the buildings were condemned. You could hear gunshots daily. It was that rough.

  We were both incredibly broke, riding the subway to all of our auditions and subsisting on grilled cheese sandwiches and dollar slices of pizza when we could afford them. One day Justine said, “Erika, I have a dancing job for us.”

  I was like, “Okay, what is it?”

  “It’s kind of like the movie Flashdance. You can perform and you wear something that resembles a swimsuit. It’s like a cross between that and a nightclub,” she said. “And it’s in New Jersey, right outside the Holland Tunnel.”

  “What are you talking about?” I asked. It seemed too crazy to be true and, well, not exactly how I was looking to start my career as an entertainer. But Flashdance was one of my favorite movies.

  “Just come with me. It’s going to be fine and we’ll make some cash,” she said.

  One Friday night, we took the subway from her apartment down to the Port Authority and then rode the bus out to New Jersey. This in itself was a treacherous journey. I remember avoiding the rats on the subway platform, and every time I got out of the Port Authority with my life I said a little prayer of thanks.

  The first club I worked in was called the Palace, in Passaic, New Jersey. It was located in a narrow limestone building like you might find on an old-fashioned New England Main Street. There was a small window in the facade with a busted mannequin wearing hideous lingerie. It was creepy and sad. This was not the glamorous life that I had imagined for myself. I thought, This is so gross. Why am I here?

  Looking back on it, I think Justine just wanted someone to tag along with her because she hated it so much. Sometimes you had to go by yourself, and it was depressing as hell. At least if there are two of you, there’s someone to complain to and it’s not as scary and lonely.

  When I arrived I met Gino, the guy who owned the club. He was wearing a cream-colored cashmere overcoat and had a gray John Gotti–style blowout. He wore a pinky ring, drove a white Mercedes, and always seemed to be taking cash out of the register. He could have been a character in Goodfellas.

  Justine took me up to the dressing room and gave me one of her outfits to wear. It was a cobalt-blue Brazilian bikini. That was the hot thing in these clubs back then, basically the smallest bikini you
could imagine, with tiny ties on the side and little triangles of fabric for the top.

  When we got there, Justine told me to call her Justice. She felt like it had a little bit more exotic flair than Justine. She was trying to create a more glamorous stage persona. I just went by Erika.

  At the Palace, like at most of the bars, the girls would dance for thirty minutes and then have thirty minutes off. As we waited upstairs, the DJ would try to get people to stay by announcing over the broken, crackling PA which girls should get ready. If they knew that fresh faces (and fresh everything else) would be out soon, maybe they’d stick around for another drink. The DJ would say, “Erika, five minutes. Veronica, five minutes. Robin, five minutes.” To this day, I still laugh thinking about it.

  Most of the bars were set up the same way—a square bar in the middle of the room with a square stage in the center of the bar. As we were dancing on the stage in our bikinis, a well where the bartenders stood, plus the bar itself, kept the patrons off of us.

  Though many might want to call it one, this wasn’t a strip club. There were no lap dances or glamorous champagne rooms or anything like that. This was just dancing in a microbikini and talking to the guys—all blue-collar dudes after work—for their extra singles. At the end of the night, we’d have to cash in those dollar bills with the bartender to take home larger bills.

  The first time I did it I felt fucking insane. I was wearing this blue bikini, which seemed like it should feel familiar. It was just slightly smaller than the leotards and dance costumes I’d been performing in for most of my life. But I knew that my goal here was to hustle money, and that made it feel scandalous.

  This wasn’t even as fabulous as being a stripper for real. I was just dipping my foot in the baby pool. There are girls at eighteen, living in Vegas, and working at the Spearmint Rhino, making boatloads of cash. I wish it had been something exciting like that, but none of that was happening in suburban New Jersey. The other girls and I weren’t that caliber of talent. We weren’t the women who allegedly make five to ten grand a night at some upscale strip club. It just wasn’t that place, didn’t have that clientele, and couldn’t draw that level of talent, because there wasn’t the audience for them.

  Don’t get me wrong—I looked cute. I weighed 118 pounds and had a lean dancer’s body. This was way before my boob job, so I was small and natural. I looked like this little tomboy running around in a bikini. It was a marketable look, to say the least.

  That first night when I got on stage, Justine told me to just watch her and figure it out. I didn’t know if I was supposed to do choreography or what. I had no clue what I was doing, but she’d let me know if I was missing signals for guys to tip me or if I was hanging out in the well of the bar too long, which Gino didn’t like. I had no clue. I was just trying to pay the rent so I could go out and audition one more time. When the club closed at 3 a.m., I had a few hundred dollars more in my backpack than when we started. Considering this was the eighties in Jersey, it wasn’t bad for a first night.

  The Palace had that gross bar smell of cigarettes and stale beer. It was set up like a saloon, a long room with very high ceilings. For some reason there were multicolored streamers and half-inflated balloons along the ceiling, like a perpetual New Year’s Eve party gone wrong. We would stink when we left, because back then customers were still allowed to smoke indoors. The stench would get in our hair. The lighting wasn’t particularly flattering, either, with blue and pink lights hitting us from above. They tried to make the atmosphere sexy and have us look our best, but when you’re in a club that smells of cooking grease and day-old Newports, there’s not that much you can do about the mood.

  As far as the dancing itself goes, I was pretty good, once I figured it out. When you take as many dance classes as I did growing up, you learn how to control your body. Not necessarily in a sexual way, but it is feminine. Combine that with knowing how to captivate an audience and keep it engaged, which I learned from performing, and I figured I had a pretty good recipe for getting these guys’ attention.

  I would always have to beg the DJ to play dance music or house music—anything with a beat that I could actually dance to. Otherwise it would be lots of New Jersey hairband rock: Bon Jovi, Def Leppard, Poison, Whitesnake. That stuff is impossible to dance to. All you can do is whip your hair around and pretend you’re in the “Hot for Teacher” video.

  I started doing these clubs two nights a week, on Fridays and Saturdays, because that was all I could handle. Those were the good nights when you could make the most money. There was a little circuit of all of these clubs, and I would find out from the other girls which ones were hot, where you could make money, which ones were slowing down, and where the action was. It was then up to me to make connections at those clubs and try to get booked there.

  I went all over, from Secaucus to Newark and everywhere in between. These clubs all had names like Shakers, Bunns, the Palace, AJ’s, or The Navel Base. The Navel Base was actually seized by the Feds at some point when I was making the rounds, and no one ever went there again. I danced once at Satin Dolls in Lodi, New Jersey, which is where they shot the scenes in The Sopranos set at Bada Bing! Shakers burned down at one point. After they rebuilt it, they sold shirts that said, Shakers: So Hot It Burns. Yeah, it was that cheesy.

  Some of the girls who worked in the club had a side business where they would make tiny outfits and the Brazilian bikinis. One girl had a company called Itsy Bitsy, and I bought a bunch of different outfits from her. At the end of a shift I’d fork over a hundred dollars of the money I just made and walk out with new outfits: a fluorescent orange one, a royal blue one, and a sheer black one that made me look like Apollonia or one of those other Prince girls from the eighties.

  The aesthetic was very much big hair, deep tans, denim jackets, and all of those clichés you can think of. Basically everyone looked a little like Snooki, even though she hadn’t been born yet, and was hosed down in sickly sweet candy-apple-scented body spray. I thought of a strategy to make myself stand out, which is how I would make all of my tips. I had long, straight blond hair all the way down my back. I kept my alabaster skin natural, and I would wear bright red lipstick. While all the other girls wore pumps or stilettos, I would wear sexy ankle boots with high heels. Today I perform in over-the-knee boots, so it’s still basically the same idea.

  One of the biggest lessons I learned was that not every man likes the same thing, and this fact applied to me. Blondes with a southern twang don’t always win. I would walk up to a guy thinking that he was going to give me the cash, but no. He only liked redheads or he only liked black girls or he only wanted someone with a fuller body. You never knew what they were going to want just by looking at them.

  Most of the customers were really nice people, but not the kind who were going to help my career. I remember this one guy who would always be at the club. He had a Jheri curl glistening under his captain’s hat, and he would flip his dentures around in his mouth. I’d be dancing onstage and hear this weird squishy, clicking noise. I’d look over and his teeth were upside down in his mouth. That said, he was a very nice man and a great tipper.

  There were plenty of times when I had guys who would pinch or pull at me while I was working. The guys could smell how naive I was and they were always trying to get close or asking me to go out on dates. I always said no. I never saw any illegal activity going on, but looking back, it might have been all around me. I was just too young and stupid to know what to look for.

  Other than the clientele, one of the worst parts of working at the club was the transportation issue. Getting there on the bus was a drag, but even worse was getting home. The buses would stop running at a certain hour, and neither of us wanted to drop half of the money we made to take a cab home. It was cold as hell in the winter, and you didn’t want to be hanging around outside waiting for your ride in these sketchy New Jersey neighborhoods. You would end up a statistic.

  This was way before Uber, but one of the wa
ys we would get home was this guy we called Lobotomy John. He was a freelance driver who would pick up all the girls from the clubs and drive them into the city. All the girls lived in Manhattan, trying to make it as actresses, models, or dancers, and they had to work the clubs to pay for these expensive apartments. He wasn’t dangerous or anything, he was just slightly . . . off. He had a route and would drive around to all the clubs and pick up the girls, packing four or five of them into the backseat of his Cadillac. This was usually where we would “network” to find out which were the good clubs for making money.

  Every time he’d come into the club he’d say, “I’m going to the diner. Do you want me to bring you something?” We would say no as politely as possible. Then he’d say, “You’re sure you don’t want a fruit cup?” Every time it was a fruit cup. No matter what you answered, he would say, “Do you want a fruit cup?”

  “No, I don’t want a fruit cup!” I would say in exasperation. He was just being sweet and asking if he could get us anything, but every time it was, “Do you want a fruit cup? Do you want a fruit cup?” One day, just to see what all the fuss was about, I let him get me a fruit cup. You know what? It was amazing! Just kidding . . . it wasn’t that great.

  With or without Lobotomy John, getting home was always a pain in the ass. One night Justine came up to me and said, “Hey, some friends of mine are going to take us home.” These friends were a band that Justine knew from the city that coincidentally wound up at the club. She was so embarrassed!