September 21, 2009
Fiction
When Lacy LeTush Went Blue, Blue, Blue! (part 1)
“ . . .Two three four five six seven eight — Fuck me! God damn it!”
Lacy threw her feather boa across the stage, drop-kicked her baton and slammed down the bowling pin. She collapsed dejectedly into the wooden chair she’d just been trying to hump, and cursed some more, loudly, her voice echoing through the cavernous environs of the Chimera Theatre. She kicked the ancient cassette boom box with her marabou-clad right foot and Cab Calloway stopped abruptly as the cord yanked from the wall. Good riddance, Cab: hi-de-ho indeed, fucker.
It really shouldn’t be that difficult, Lacy told herself. She danced in front of an audience four nights and one afternoon a week under the nom-de-hump Amber Lust. “Amber” did not shimmy in an old historical theater like the Chimera, of course, but at The Mustang out on Highway 35. Nor did she work it in front of a well-dressed crowd of San Esteban’s screamingest queers and howlingest hipsters swilling highballs and cosmopolitans while yowling “Woo-woo-woo-Take it off!” but, rather, in front of an ill-washed crowd of mustachioed truckers glugging Bud and Jack Daniels and screaming “Show us your pussy!” She also did the Stang’s particular brand of dance minus the feather boa, the rhinestone headdress, the choker, the hot pink bustier and matching satin skirt and the fishnet stay-ups and the fan or the tinsel-trailing baton and the mask and the peignoir and the bowling pins. Instead, she started out in a black string bikini, Sally’s-issue because that was the way they did things at the Stang, black because after her first six shifts she’d begged and pleaded with Bobo not to make her wear neon pink any more. It was kinda hard to striptease when all you had to lose was your top. At the ultra-sleazy Stang, county liquor laws required her to retain the bottoms throughout the performance. But exuding the kind of smoldering sensuality that reduced men to cash-waving lunatics had come naturally to Lacy ever since she started at the Stang late last year; maybe she was just a natural exhibitionist. Whether it was natural or cultivated, there was no question that the moister she was when she finished a show, the more cash she had stuffed in her G-string.
Easy as pie — so why couldn’t she pull it off with vintage lingerie and improbable props? She was a dancer, a professional dancer — had been for months. Shouldn’t this all come naturally to her?
That was maybe the problem — it actually kinda did come naturally, which was where the chair-humping came in. Every time she got up onstage at the Chimera, she did one of two things. Either she stuck to the routine as prescribed and approved by the powers that be, and ended up looking like a white guy from Albuquerque. Or she went with her instincts, and careened from campy innocence directly into X-rated material, strictly verboten for Happy Henderson’s Ba-Ba-Bazoomba Revue, “Where the tease is queen!” as Hap put it. Well, that son of a bitch should know.
Hap, famous for running his dance revue like a well-oiled military machine of unhappy hoofers, had already warned Lacy multiple times about the humping, the nipple-pinching, the thigh-stroking, and that dirty little thing she was always doing with her tongue, not to mention when that one time she spanked herself. Then, of course, there was the popping out of her top — could she be blamed if her nipples didn’t like spirit gum? Time was, girls with D-cups got cut a little friggin’ slack. But Hap was not an understanding guy when it came to Lacy’s problems with her renegade sisters, or anything else. She was one wardrobe malfunction away from being cut loose. Happy Henderson had told Lacy in no uncertain terms that if she didn’t lose the stripper moves and keep her nipples to herself, he was going to bounce her from Friday’s lineup, and “you and your tassels can look for another revue, Miss Le fucking Tush!”
In a college town like San Esteban, finding another place to perform would be no small order. The coastal enclave of culture held one historic theater (the Chimera) and one skanky little gay bar (the Pumping Station). San E. could only support about one burlesque troupe, and Happy’s was the one. Lacy wanted a paying gig in the thriving San Francisco burlesque revival scene, and humping the brass pole at the Stang wouldn’t fast-track her. If she couldn’t land a performance job down in San Francisco, after finals she’d be stuck moving back to her parents’ place in Concord and then on to grad school in friggin’ Palo Alto — and, Lord have mercy, nobody sane wanted that.
Besides, as much of a bitch as Happy was, there was something special about performing for the Revue. The Ba-Ba-Bazoomba Revue traced its lineage back in an unbroken line to Pinky Perry’s Ra-Ra-Revue, the raunchy burlesque troupe that operated out of the Chimera when it was a speakeasy — though the term “speakeasy” implied a covertness that really hadn’t been necessary in this town. At that time, San Esteban was a major staging point for shipments of illegal liquor coming down the coast. It was also a destination for sophisticates from San Francisco; a sleepy coastal burg that the Syndicate had made into a lawless town of drink and debauchery.
In this environment, a number of off-color theaters had thrived along Main Street. Chief among them was Pinky Perry’s Chimera Theater, where drink was served openly and even Treasury agents looked the other way. Six nights a week, Pinky Perry, nee Pino Perelman, could be found greeting guests and wandering through the crowd, drinking imported Canadian whisky from a coffee mug.
The end of Prohibition had called a halt to the corruption and vice, but Perry had soldiered on, reinventing the Chimera as a movie theater and then as a half-assed strip club. But he’d never given up his dreams of burlesque glory. In fact, Pinky Perry had died in this very theater, in 1963 at the age of 60, during the inaugural performance of the Ba-Ba Revue Revival. Reportedly Perry’s last words were, “Take it off!”
The story went that Pinky’s ghost haunted the Chimera because in that final performance he’d died before he got to see the reveal. Plenty of the dancers in Hap’s revue were pretty freaky about the ghost thing, which was why Lacy’d kept her sightings to herself — weird faces in the windows, the faint sound of cheering. Lacy’d always had a tendency to see things, and she tried never to take it that seriously. Her mom, an inveterate hippie, regarded Lacy as a “sensitive,” but Lacy figured it was mostly bullshit —
Wait a minute, had she left the door open? She could hear enthusiastic clapping from the balcony. She peered into the spots, most of which she’d turned on for the practice, and saw a shadowy form outlined against them.
“Gorgeous!” came the voice. “Absolutely gorgeous! I especially liked the chair-schtupping, dollface. Sometimes they say we’re goin’ too blue, but I got one thing to say to that, people — ain’t no such thing as too blue. Va-va-va-voom, miss, you’re a tsatskeh if I ever saw one, if you don’t mind my saying. A maidel mit a klaidel.”
“Excuse me?”
“You look good, toots,” he clarified. “I never saw a girl stiffen my shvantz so fast to Cab Calloway before!”
“Hey!” shouted Lacy.
“Sorry,” the guy said. “Sometimes I go blue myself, a little! No offense meant.”
“Do I know you?” She was in deep shit: Hap had been exceedingly reluctant about letting her practice in the theater after hours; he’d made her swear up and down she wouldn’t forget to lock the stage door. Now some freaky old homeless dude had wandered in.
“Do you know me?” The old guy laughed. “Sorry, Jane Russell, in this case introductions aren’t in order. I know it’s a little rude, but maybe you could give your routine another little run-through for me? Without stopping at that thing you did with, you know, with the spanking . . . that was gorgeous. It did things to me. It’s like I said, blue is a beautiful color.”
“Oh yeah?” said Lacy. “Wish you’d talk to Happy Henderson.”
“Henderson? I talked to him, I talked to him. The man’s a nishtikeit! He doesn’t know a roll from a rimshot. Please, Miss — what was your name again?”
“The name’s Lacy LeTush,” Lacy said. It was dorky, but that was the order of the day with burlesque names. She’d stuck with her real first name but figured “LeTush” was more mellifluous than “Litchfield,” a name she’d gotten teased about her whole life, as if “Lacy” wasn’t bad enough. “And you are — “
“I’m gonna ask your indulgence,” the guy interrupted. “Just for a few minutes, I hope you won’t mind If I go nameless. And I’m gonna ask you a favor — Please, would you run through it again? And this time no stopping at the chair part — or the spanking. I love that. Especially toward the end. Just let those things move, beautiful.”
“Toward the end?” Lacy squinted into the lights.
“Sorry, guess I gotta spell it out. When you’re — you know, en dishabille. After the big reveal, gorgeous.” There was a pleased chuckle that managed to sound obscene and charming. “You’re not wearing any pasties.”
“No shit,” said Lacy, adjusting the bustier self-consciously. Spirit gum wasn’t her idea of a Saturday afternoon. “I’m not wearing a G-string either.” She never did at practice. Who the hell wanted gold lame crawling up her ass if it wasn’t absolutely necessary?
“Yeah,” the guy chuckled. “Yeah, I gotta say, I never got used to the smooth look — but on you, it’s — va-va-voom. You mind my saying?”
“Not particularly,” said Lacy. “It’s that obvious?”
“Obvious? You’re falling out of that skirt, tsatskeh. And trust me on this one, it suits you. You should kinda let it go for a minute. You’ll shock the schmucks, but you’ll get your headlines.”
“Listen, no offense, but you’re kinda freaking me out, Mister. It’s creepy having you watch me.”
“Please, Miss,” the guy said. “Lacy LeTush, you’re the most beautiful woman who ever walked on that stage. I love you, I love your legs, I love your hair. I love everything about you. I even love your Taiwan orchid tattoos. I’ve been waiting forty-five years to see you lose the skirt and do that chair like it was Burt Lancaster. Will you indulge me a little?”
It took a second for the guy’s words to sink in; a weird creepy little chill ran from the tattoos in the small of Lacy’s back up to the back of her head, like a mentholated tidal wave had just exploded through her.
“How do you know they’re Taiwan orchids?”
“I’ve been up here a while,” the guy said guiltily. “I heard you telling the blonde girl the other Thursday.”
“Jeez. Um, creepy much!?” said Lacy.
“Sorry, I probably shoulda said something sooner. I know it’s unorthodox, but I’m not trying to be a cad. Now will you do an old man a favor, Lacy? I’m begging you, Lacy LeTush — you’re the queen of the Chimera tonight, would you grant a little bump and grind to your one loyal subject? And Lacy LeTush . . . I’m on my knees up here, I mean, I know you can’t see it because of the lights, but trust me, I’m on my knees, I’m begging, I’m pleading: Lacy LeTush, go blue, blue, blue!”
Lacy swallowed hard; this was getting a way too weird for comfort, and she was well beyond punchy. Between studying and practice, there’d been little sleep and vast amounts of coffee in the last fourteen days — plus, she was still a little hung over from the last night’s after-party, where she’d drowned her Hap-related sorrows in half a dozen vodka tonics and a shared joint of the local skunkweed. She’d had more than her share of strange experiences in her life, most recently in the town’s purportedly-haunted house on Redwood Highway during a midnight Halloween tour when she thought for a second that a face reflected in a window made an obscene gesture at her — and she did not plan for today’s dance practice to make it two. She was not going to let some weird old dude freak her out by wandering in and being creepy . . . besides, he seemed nice enough. What she was doing was, essentially, giving him a free Stang show. But wasn’t that already what she did every Friday and Saturday at the Chimera, and in those cases for the sole profit of Happy Henderson, who was by everyone’s reckoning a serious son-of-a-bitch?
“All right, Mister,” Lacy said. “But I want to hear some howling.”
“Miss, I guaran-damn-tee you that you will hear some howling.”
• • •
is the author of several hundred published short stories in the erotica, crime, horror and fantasy genres, including work in the Best American Erotica series, the Best New Erotica series, and many other anthologies. His own books include four volumes of horror/fantasy, three volumes of erotic crime-noir, and three short story collections. He blogs about sex, drugs and cryptozoology at http://www.thomasroche.com.
