By Katherine Dunn She was curled on a bar stool when 1 met her. The odd light picked up the sheen of purple velvet in her vest and made a religious experience in her hair. A friend introduced us. Even to eyes trained in the exuberant costuming of the last decade she was exotic, a reigning gypsy governing her own wildness by an almost genetic courtesy. She is not a domesticated creature. This is Marjorie, five feet two and blade thin, the renegade raconteur, the rebel without a pause. She is warm and the toughness in her eyes is iceclear rationality. This is Maijorie the fire-haired rag picker, poet, radical, world wanderer, subject of a hundred poets. She was waiting when I met her, holding on until a particular event would allow her to leave for the Orient again. I asked her to record some of the tales that were being mutilated by being told third hand. Marjorie agreed; her gift for enjoyment includes that lush capacity to see her own life as a good yam. Beginning with a childhood which Marjorie describes as ‘‘typical 1950s upbringing,” she dropped out of high school at 16 to marry and quickly found herself alone with children to support. “ I got into politics by being poor and choosing to stay poo r ... I learned politically that with my education 1 had the choice of being either a file clerk or a nude dancer. That's the sort of job category which is open to me. Of course I chose to be a nude dancer when I had to supplement my income, or when I had a fantasy bigger than survival.” Marjorie has realized many fantasies heyond survival and developed a variety of methods. She virtually created a profession for herself of collecting and wholesaling used clothing. Her expertise with garments is enormous. I’ve seen her in a 30-year- old dress with the seams sprung and ragged, but the fine quality of the cloth and cut, linked with her personal bearing, are a notification of royalty. She wears silk, linen, and cotton, never artificial fabrics. These things cost her effort rather than money. She finds them. She recognizes them “in America’s garbage,” she says. . Marjorie has completed three journeys around the world, traveling alone on what most of us would consider no money at all. Exploration has given her a profound love of the Orient, where she now spends most of her time. Her political involvement during the sixties was vigorous and profound, though she now says, “ I’m glad I didn’t die in the streets. It would have been for nothing.” The composition, publication, and public reading of her poems w'ould make an ordinary career sufficiently active. But Marjorie’s life is stamped by independence, willingness to embrace hardship, and the unique degree of her yearning for adventure. She flourishes on that buccaneer approach to existence that women have feared and envied for several millenia. In the face of her poverty, small stature, and obvious femininity, she has cocked a snoot at impossibilities until, for her, they cease to exist. Marjorie has discovered an ability as well as a need to set herself in “ lush, exotic, and very unfamiliar contexts,” and yet she returns to Portland whenever she needs “to enjoy what America has to offer. I will always come back to Portland. It’s my home in America. It is America to me. This is where change and growth register for me. I have friends here with whom I share a long history.” Nude dancing seems to be a metaphor of that more enticing hemisphere of the polar alternatives Marjorie envisions in her life. Her references intrigued me. Advertisements in local newspapers for just such jobs had come to my attention in the obviCold Buns And The Cosa Nostra ous way. Several women of my acquaintance applied. A few actually signed on. Nude dancing is not an underground myth but a thriving reality. I asked Marjorie to tell me some of her experiences. Marjorie: When I went around the world the first time, I came back to Portland very broke. I needed to do something. I went to Didak's cafe with the want ads. I found this one that said, “Dancers needed, no experience necessary.” They pay your way and fly you to Anchorage. 1 still had the momentum from having traveled, so I went to the agent and signed a ten- week contract, did all the business and was sent to Alaska the next day. What was the place that had hired you? A skin club. I had danced professionally six years before, and the bait, which I had forgotten, was quick money. Theoretically you're going to get a certain amount of money in so many days and it sounds like a lot and seems very inviting. The hassle that I had with the Mafia had to do with a dancing trip. That’s another interesting story. But I flew up to Alaska in the spring of ’76. I had signed a personal services contract for a ten-week dancing gig. I lived in a house behind the club with nine other dancers, with no telephone and double-paned windows against the cold. It was April and the snow was still on the ground. The breakup was just beginning. I had to wear sunglasses and I had a fur coat. We worked from nine in the evening until five in the morning. The clubs were open 23 hours a day. They close them for an hour so they can clean. There were seven dancers on one shift and .we would all get ready to dance at the club and troop over together. That was an odd part of it, as we came in each night, all perfumed in formal evening gowns, walking through the snow to the back door of the club, everyone would turn around and look at us. We felt very degraded by having to punch in at a time clock right in front of the customers. The first time we would come out on stage we’d have a little bikini outfit on. They deducted from my check for mine because I didn’t have my own. I got a blue one and the young G.I.s in the audience would call me “Blue,” and they’d yell, “Come on, Blue!” The first song, you’re in your bikini. The second song you have your top off, and the next song you’re completely nude. There was one girl who I’ll call Lee, who would be announced by the ex- Las Vegas showgirl manager (who was a real bitch) as “the sexy Lee from Great Falls.” Lee came out on her third song and revealed, to everybody’s amazement (I was thoroughly shocked and completely fascinated myself) that she had a tail. It was about three inches long. Her backbone was ex- tenided. It was brown and kind of twiisted. It looked a little strange. She hacd a great ass and wore a red wig. Shee had tattoos and she wore hats and bocots. What was really interesting to the aucdience, and what seems to be the poiint in nude dancing, is more the speectacle rather than the symmetric or beaautiful. Being a spectacle was where it wwas at. TThe legal age for drinking and for the nude dancing was 19, but some of the girls would come with false LD. and they’d be very young, like 16. Each of the girls became very interesting to me. There was one girl who was about 17, who had a hemorrhage in one of her eyes. She wore permanent false eyelashes and they cast shadows on her face. She had a white cottage cheese billowy kind of girl's body with bruises all over it. Little pink nipples and this gargantuan body. She was a speed freak and she had a gun. She’d lie on her back and sleep with her shades on for a few hours a day with the gun under her pillow. She slept in the hall. We were very crowded. There was also a gambling establishment downstairs from us and we would hear the men yell, “Come on, seven!" up through the shower drains. It was a funny place to live. I loved the girls. Those are the people in the flesh trade who are real and wonderful. The people who are the management, the pimps, the bartenders, the coppers, are bad. The person who signs your check has an Italian name. You never meet him. The bartender in almost every case of nude dancing that I’ve been involved with has been a speed freak and a very touchy guy with guns. The woman manager is often a very slick ex-showgirl type who’s gotten into management. If you reveal that you’re very hip or know very much, you're not wanted because they need to manipulate you a lot. Your way is paid up there and you are guaranteed an amount of money, but to insure that you won’t disppear on them, you are not paid for a week. They withhold the first wreek’s earnings, which is two hundred and twenty-five a week. It turns out to be a hundred and sixty-four after taxes. The agent tells you that you're apt to earn two hundred dollars a night, but he doesn’t tell you how. You do that by becoming a prostitute. Otherwise you’re working for quarters. You are working for tips as well as salary? Sure. What you do is take turns dancing to the jukebox. You dance three songs each time. But it turns out you’re working 48 hours a week and you’re doing stand-up cocktail wait- ressing in between turns on stage. In other words, you never get to sit down unless somebody buys you a drink and one for themselves. And you can’t sit down for more than ten minutes unless they buy another one. You have to keep moving around. If you can sell a bottle of champagne for $30, you get a $10 kickback. It’s a $2 bottle of champagne, of course. Real cheap shit. How much did you actually make on your Alaskan venture? Was it as profitable as the advertisement would lead you to believe? No. The idea is that in order to make the good money you become a prostitute. You can see that you get your ass transported up to the hinter lands and you’re not going to make much on tips. In between your dances you wait on tables, and you're working 48 hours a week, which you’re not told about in the contract. You’ve got blisters all over your feet. You have to soak your feet. Every morning in the kitchen we'd have wonderful conversations. We'd sit soaking our feet and smoking joints and telling our adventures of the night. We’d take off our silly formal dresses and let down our facade of giving a shit about that stuff. Of course, you get hustled by people. The hangers-on wait around until you get off work at five o’clock in the morning and they want to take you out to breakfast. That’s what they call it. A lot of people who hang around are pimps with red beautiful suits and broad-brimmed hats and big fancy soft cars and rings on their fingers. They’ll sweep you away to steak and eggs. But all I really wanted to do was go soak my feet and smoke joints, and get the fuck away from everybody except the other dancers. I really delighted in them during those early- morning conversations. We’d go to work and it would be light and we’d get off and it would be light. For myself I decided not to become a prostitute and to try to get out of there straight. So I just hustled for those quarters. I made about $20 a night. Sometimes people would stick money in my garter. At the end of a dance when you’re on stage, people throw spare change onto the stage. You’re completely nude and you don’t want to bend over for spare change, so you try to slide the money off stage with your shoes. I won't romanticize it. 1don’t recommend it at all. It’s the choice that women in this society are left with who are said to have no skills or education. You can be a file clerk or a nude dancer. All your choices are like that. These are the things that you're left with if you must make a living. You’re always selling yourself on whatever level you can stand it. 1 don’t just follow the nude dancing because there’s nothing else 1can do. I obviously have a fascination for the underworld. I want to know. I want to know how bad they really are. You take a lot of low-class abuse when you choose to be a nude dancer over a file clerk, but it’s just a different level of abuse. I always knew what I was biting off when I made the choice. The trade was that I could make more money faster. I thought I could take it, thought I could handle it. As it turns out, I’ve never really been able to handle it, because it gets too heavy and they're too powerful. 20 21
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