Pretty Mess

by Erika Jayne

  Mikey and I talk every day on the phone at 7:30 a.m. while we watch Good Morning America. We start talking about Mikey’s personal life, then about my personal life, and then about twenty minutes later, we finally get to talk about an upcoming show or a costume fitting or photo shoot. Sometimes he just calls me at 7:30 to tell me he’s on his way over and he’ll be there in fifteen minutes so we can do all of this in person.

  Beyond work, Mikey is someone I really love and cherish my friendship with. It’s like we’re of one mind now. Mikey is my closest confidant. I admit my anxieties, fears, frustrations, and self-loathing to him. He knows my husband, my son, and my mom. He’s at my house so often people think he lives in my closet. You can’t travel the world and spend that much time with someone and not know them through and through.

  It’s not as if we never have our differences. When he knows he is about to say something I might not like, he’ll lead with, “Just hear me out before you say something. What we have done before is this . . .” Usually that ends with me finishing his sentences. We’re always thinking the same thing at the same time, like we have some sort of crazy psychic bond.

  In June 2017, I was back performing at LA Pride, but this time I was headlining on the main stage. We were at the hot, dusty sound check early in the day, and I was feeling overwhelmed by everything. Especially because this was the first time that I’d be performing since I hurt my shoulder on Dancing with the Stars. I was also bringing back my high-heeled dancers Johnny and Anthony for the occasion, so I was a little emotional.

  “You know, I’m a little freaked out about coming back to LA Pride,” I told Mikey, because last time had been such a disaster.

  “Yeah, but you’re so much different, Erika,” he said.

  “Do you remember the first Pride we did on that tiny little stage up the street?” I asked.

  “Oh, do I!” he said.

  “I’ll never forget the way you shook your head when I fell,” I said. I looked at him and I knew it wouldn’t happen again.

  We killed that performance. They wanted boys, I gave them boys. They wanted hot sluts, I gave them hot sluts. I even threw in some nineties reminiscences, giant LED screen graphics, pyrotechnics, and glitter cannons. It was the Super Bowl halftime show of West Hollywood. As always, I gave the gays everything they wanted.

  I thanked the crowd and walked offstage. Mikey was dance-moming right where he should be, at the side of the stage. He was jumping up and down, and we both just started screaming. We were so excited, not just for this performance, but for all of them. For all of the crappy ones that didn’t go as planned, for all of that time we weren’t together and I was working with fools, for just how far we’d taken this whole thing.

  I knew I’d put on a good show and that people liked it. I knew what we had set out to do and that everything had gone exactly as we had planned. The show went off without a hitch, and the crowd went home happy. I felt my own sense of pride that we had come from that little stage down the street all the way to the main stage to close the show. It was also nice that they chose me as the headliner, even though they could have selected one of the bigger acts that went on before me. Everything had come full circle in such a satisfying way, it was like the ending of a movie.

  The silly credit sequence of this movie would have been shot later in my suite at the London Hotel, where Mikey and I got well lit on more than a couple of celebratory cocktails. But hey, I think we really earned them!

  12

  REBORN ON THE FOURTH OF JULY

  Erika Jayne was built and perfected at Pride performances, gay clubs, and circuit parties, which are high-production, all-night sweaty gay dance parties with thousands of shirtless boys (and probably a psychoactive drug or two). I’ve always been lucky to have a huge gay following. As Saturday Night Live joked, I’m the Kitty Ambassador to the Twink Republic of Qwonk. One reason is I make dance music, and no one likes dance music like gay guys.

  There’s a deeper connection between Erika Jayne and the gay community, though. I think the character has always been about having the audacity to be herself, and not give a fuck what anyone says. She is always comfortable in her own skin and says, “This is my life. This is who I am. I embrace myself, and I embrace those around me.” I think that gay people, more than anyone else, understand how important that is. There is a lot to gain by living out loud and being proud—even for this straight woman.

  A couple of years into my project, I hooked up with Orlando Puerta, who owns Citrusonic, a company that does music marketing and live events. He books a lot of acts for pride events all around the country and was instrumental in getting me in front of a gay audience.

  Back when this project was just starting, I would do a gig anywhere, no matter if people were paying attention or not. I literally danced on a tiny card table in a VIP section of a Miami club to get my music more attention. I also love performing, so to me even the world’s smallest stage is better than no stage at all.

  I performed more than once at Splash, the legendary gay club in Manhattan. They used the stage for go-go boys to take showers in their bathing suits over the dance floor (which is why they called it Splash). So my dancers and I would be on that stage trying not to slip or get our feet stuck in the drains on the tiled floor. As a side note, my son went to high school down the street from Splash. They had open campus for lunch, so they could walk around the neighborhood and go wherever they wanted. One time there was a poster of me in the window of the club advertising an upcoming performance, and my son saw it walking back from school. He was too embarrassed to tell his friends, but he called to tell me about it. His tone implied, “Really, Mom?”

  At a recent show in Vegas, after my second song finished, the lights and sound mysteriously shut off. Not just onstage, but in the whole club. I looked from right to left and thought, Where’s the next musical cue? I said, “Thank you,” to the cheering crowd, so I knew the microphone worked. When I saw that it was panic city in the sound booth, I quickly realized the music would be returning as soon as it was fixed. I immediately popped up and said to the crowd, “I thought I’d take this time to say how much I really appreciate you all supporting me,” and blah-blah-blah. I was making things up to kill time.

  Through the darkness, I could barely see Mikey on the other side of this big room, looking at me like, “Just keep talking.” I saw my soundman working the shit out. All of a sudden—boom!—the lights are back on and the music cue hits. It was impressive that the show was falling apart and the crowd thought the whole thing was planned. I wish we were that genius.

  Sometimes, especially in those early years, the audience would be really into me, and other times they wouldn’t. Still, Mikey choreographed every show like it was a performance at the MTV Video Music Awards. I performed like it was, too, no matter how many yawns we got from the guys at Splash wishing I were a go-go boy instead.

  Even that rejection, though, made me a better performer. You have to be willing to be ridiculed, laughed at, and mocked. You have to have people not believing in you. That makes you your own biggest cheerleader. That makes you say, “This is do or die, and there is no way I’m going to fail up here.”

  Forgetting that motto is the real failure. Fuck it if your costume falls apart or you twist your ankle or the DJ knocks the soundboard over. Shit happens. It’s when the performer doesn’t bring it, that’s where the failure is. I’ve failed many times when I was afraid or not feeling it or being bratty. That’s not what the people pay for. I always need to remind myself of this truth.

  That said, there have been a lot of crazy Erika Jayne shows over the years. One year, we played a Toronto Pride event on Hanlan’s Point Beach. It’s a popular nude beach with a huge gay following. (I learned from a plaque near the venue that it is where Babe Ruth hit his first home run, which is bizarre.)

  We did our sound check early in the morning and everything seemed cool. But by the afternoon when we got onstage, half of the people in the crowd were jus
t totally naked. I’m used to Erika Jayne being the person in the club wearing the least amount of clothing, but not this time. I looked down at that crowd and thought, Wow, you people have nerve. I thought I had nerve, but I’m a damn fool. So, good for you.

  No matter what I did, or what happened on that stage, nobody could call me crazy that day. I was working with my two androgynous dancers, Johnny and Anthony, plus four other male dancers wearing next to nothing. But why would anyone want to look at them when there was full nudity everywhere around us? All the guys on that stage with me had performed with Britney Spears or Christina Aguilera or some other diva. They thought they’d seen it all, but it took Erika Jayne to deliver their first performance for a nude audience.

  One of my worst gigs of all time was in San Francisco. We were set to perform at a winter-themed circuit party. We went and did the sound check and the venue was all tricked out in a really cute way. The stage even had this huge polar bear on it.

  We came back to the club that night and were all dressed in costume and ready to go. The security guy was at the back door and said, “They look young,” pointing to my four male dancers. He asked them for their IDs but they didn’t have them. They were in costume and we were never told we would need IDs.

  I told him that they’re all over twenty-one and we just don’t have our IDs on us. Then another guy (who I later found out was an off-duty San Francisco police officer hired by the club) stepped in. “Yeah, I need to see their IDs,” he said.

  “We’ve been hired to perform,” I explained. “We’re just going to do our show and leave. We’re not going to hang out.”

  He pulled me aside and was being kind of a dick to me, talking at me rather than listening to me. Finally he said, “Ma’am, I’m a police officer,” as if to explain he wasn’t just some bouncer, as if his authority could somehow intimidate me.

  “My son’s a police officer,” I replied. “So what? What does that have to do with this?”

  He questioned the boys, and obviously they all told the truth about being of legal age. Finally, he let us inside. We went upstairs and were waiting in the greenroom. All of a sudden this police officer, the same guy, came up to me and said, “You gotta leave.”

  “Why?” I said, not in a loud voice. It’s funny, when I get challenged on a level like that, I don’t become rude, but just very matter-of-fact. I’m certainly not intimidated. I was angry more than anything, because this felt personal. We were there to do a job and this aggressive off-duty police officer was interrupting our whole show.

  He said to me, “It’s because you said something to someone and they want you to leave. So let’s go.”

  “I didn’t say anything to anybody. We just came up here and started getting ready. Who told you that?” I said.

  “I told you to leave,” he said, getting in my face a little.

  “I didn’t talk to anyone,” I said, still not raising my voice. I was being very defiant at this point, because I don’t like to be bullied. It was bullshit. To me, this cop should have been worried about the obviously intoxicated people in the crowd. They were breaking more rules than we were that night. I don’t know why his focus was on us and not these other people who, in my opinion, looked underage and like they were about to pass out.

  “You’re going to have to leave,” he said again. “Now.”

  I stared at him, and I just went, “Okay.” I shook my head, as if to say, “Whatever, dick.”

  I took the slowest, most defiant walk out of that club. I mean, it was so slow, so calm. They threw us all out before we even got a chance to perform.

  But they would not let my soundman, John, back in to get our tens of thousands of dollars of sound equipment. We had set it up during sound check. We all went back to the hotel and John stayed there and waited until the party was over, at which point they finally just threw it all out on the street. He put it back in the SUV and finally got to come home. Ever since then, we have a rule: everyone brings their ID to every performance—no matter how old they look or how few pockets their costumes have.

  Not all promoters are as unprofessional as that one in San Francisco. I’ve worked with Jeffrey Sanker, who throws the White Party in Palm Springs every Easter Weekend. In 2016, I was named Queen of White Party and invited to headline the main stage. This weekend-long gay dance event attracts thirty thousand people, and Jeffrey always has his act together. His production is totally top notch. We gave them the full fantasy, as Mikey and I like to call it, serving up killer costumes, a dozen dancers, glitter bombs, pyrotechnics, and my giant LED screen projections.

  I was so impressed by Jeffrey’s stage. When we walk into a venue, we have no idea what we’re going to get. Madonna—who brings her own stage on every stop of a tour—and Britney Spears—who is performing on the same stage every night in Las Vegas—have the luxury of knowing the exact topography they’re performing on. They know where the dips and creases are, where the elevators come up, and what the slope of the stage is.

  When you’re me, sometimes you’re on fucked-up stages that are cobbled together on an uneven surface. There might be holes in the stage, or there are weird dips in it, or you have to make sure not to trip on the floor drain, like at Splash. One of the first things I have to do as a performer is go out and look, so I know what I’m working with. At this point in my career, I can walk into any venue and immediately assess its strengths and weaknesses. Then I tailor my show to maximize it within its limitations.

  That’s what I need to do so I can go out there and not think about anything other than performing. So I can deliver what the people came to see. Peace of mind is something every performer really needs, no matter if we’re at the biggest concert venue on the planet or some rickety card table in a VIP room.

  Another memorable show took me halfway across the world. One day, Tom came home and said, “You’re gonna go do this thing for this lawyer guy I know and perform on one of those, I don’t know, one of those ships.”

  “What are you talking about?” I asked him.

  “Yeah, I committed you. He’ll call you.”

  See, the thing about Tom is that everything is really casual with him. He’ll say, “Meet me for dinner tonight,” and then you show up and it’s like a black-tie gala.

  Eventually, this lawyer I’ve never met before called me. He said he asked Tom if I would be interested in performing and Tom told him I’d love to. “We’re so excited to have you,” he said. “Here’s what you need to do to get all of your security clearances.”

  Excuse me? Security clearances? I said, “Sir, could you please tell me exactly what this gig is?”

  He told me he was with a civilian organization called Cooks from the Valley, based in Bakersfield, California. Every year, they go to different ships and aircraft carriers all over the world and throw July Fourth barbecues for service members. I was being enlisted to perform at one of these barbecues.

  When Tom got home that night, I was a little miffed that he had signed me up for such an event without asking me first. “I’m not even sure I want to do this,” I said.

  “You’re doing this because it’s going to be an interesting experience,” he told me. “Trust me.”

  Now I had to sell this to my team. I went to Mikey and said, “Well, the boss said that we have to go do this performance on a ship for a bunch of sailors for July Fourth. He said it’s going to be interesting.”

  “Sailors on a ship?” Mikey asked. “Well, I guess we’re going to need some female dancers.”

  I was forty-one and I had just gotten a nose job at the beginning of June. It had only been a few weeks since I’d had the surgery. You’re not even supposed to wear heavy sunglasses, much less whip your head around, so soon after getting the procedure. I still had two black eyes.

  We were booked to do a morning show in Toronto. I took four female dancers, my hair and makeup guys Preston and Michael, my sound guy, and my assistant at the time to go do it. Then we were leaving right from there to
go perform on the USS Enterprise. No, not the one with Captain Kirk. It’s the aircraft carrier where they filmed Top Gun. At that time it was deployed in the Persian Gulf.

  We flew to Maine, where the military transport would pick us up. We got on the plane with the Cooks from the Valley crew and all the meat they were going to be grilling for the troops. “So, Erika Jayne is going in with the steaks,” we overheard someone say to a commanding officer.

  My dancer Erin leaned over to me and said, “We should forever be known as Erika Jayne and the Steaks.” It’s something I still laugh about to this day.

  We flew from Maine to Shannon in Ireland, then to Crete, and then to Bahrain. This was a military transport, so far from business class it made me yearn for economy. Even to get up and go to the bathroom was an ordeal. We were just trying to endure all of these flights and get some sleep when we could, because when we got to our destination we’d have to perform.

  After the long journey, we checked into the Diplomat Radisson Blu Hotel in Bahrain, which was fabulous. It’s where the former vice president Joe Biden stayed when he was there. After all of those rough flights, my face was just throbbing. To make it worse, the dust in the desert gave me an ear, nose, and throat infection.

  The next day, we performed in the theater at the base in Bahrain. It was great. We did meet and greets afterward, and this one soldier came up and said, “I have to tell you my wife’s been a big fan of yours for a long time because she loves club music. Can we take a picture?” Of course I was happy to!

  It was interesting. Some people were like, “I’ve never heard of you.” A few people were like, “Oh my gosh, Erika, I love ‘Stars.’ That song was amazing.”

  I thought, Are you kidding me right now? You really know who I am?

  The next day, we had to take a short flight out of Bahrain and then drive to the USS Enterprise. It was in port and we were going to walk onto the ship. It was a ninety-minute drive through the desert, where there was nothing but sand and 120-degree-plus heat. It was so hot that the air-conditioning in the car couldn’t keep up.