Tales of Times Square: Expanded Edition Read Online Free PDF Page B

to be Wonder Woman; Rave is just snapping on the finishing garters. Before going, I can’t resist asking what advice she might offer young, aspiring strippers out there in mental-illness land, who bungle their way into the profession. What brand of sanitary napkins, for instance, should they use?
    “Some girls wear Tampax. You have to. You can’t wear sanitary pads onstage Make sure you don’t have the string showing. A lot of the audience is real juvenile and they’ll point and laugh: ‘Haw haw, string!’ There are some dreadful stories.
    “For instance, this untogether black girl with long, pendulous breasts, a big butt, wild hair. She was onstage and her G-string was black, but she forgot to put it on. This was in Toronto at Zanzibar’s, where you have to have your G-string on or it’s a $500 fine. No one really noticed at first. She was very black, had a perfect V-shaped you-know-what. Suddenly guys started cracking up, it rolled back through the theater in waves. The girl looked down in the middle of doing a split and there was this little white string hanging out.”
    A five-minutes-to-showtime knock on the door comes. I leave and pick me a nice old seat in the third row, facing the T-runway head-on. A lot of royalty present; about a hundred old duffers show up for a midnight bosom erection.
    Rave moves about the stage in a jazz ballet, an Indian maiden gliding through the woods. She is applauded, however, only after removing each article of clothing, particularly when the Wonder Woman bra comes down. The applause is businesslike, like that which accompanies new elections to a PTA council. J.J. remains bundled in his winter coat in the first row. Only a small portion of him fits over the seat, and he giggles throughout the set, friends slapping him from behind. Uncle Lou makes three separate trips during the set to deposit a one-dollar bill onstage. Rave uses a transparent veil to keep the view of her you-know-what to a minimum. Normally she doesn’t remove her G-string, but at the Melody it’s a requirement.
    “Any questions about Hollywood?” asks Raven during a little Q&A after her last number.
    Friends badger J.J. to ask a question, but he breaks up giggling, waving his hand, out of breath.
    “You’ve got God-given talent,” declares an admirer.
    “Talent? It’s just flesh,” says Raven.
    “How much does a guy need to take you out?” inquires some old Festus.
    “I believe in love and magic. Money can’t buy that.” A few of the old dukes smack their knees over this retort, with a good chuckle at the expense of the wiseass who cracked the question. Rave bids them good night.
    When she returns from her dressing room, her contingent is again waiting patiently in the lobby. “Good snakes!” she says, greeting a lineup eager to pose for Polaroids. “I can pay for a daily Shiatsu massage at the hotel with these,” she tells me—but I don’t see her accept one dollar. An assortment of old codgers are lined up like little boys in a candy store, smacking their lips, smiling wide, and shaking their heads in wonder. One grabs her hand, congratulating her on her marvelous pair. Another, who resembles a middle-aged Dennis the Menace, snaps off a few pix, then declares his undying devotion. “I’ll be back tomorrow night, Raven,” he says, looking up to her as if she were a mommy.
    In a few minutes she will make a lonely retreat to her hotel room. She’ll remove her sparkles in the bathtub, same as every night on the road, then receive a blabbering phone call from an agent, an old-timer who never gets her any work. She does it all herself.
    An old titmouse of a man stands behind the Polaroids, nibbling all his fingernails. “This is my crazy face,” says Raven, sticking out her tongue and crossing her eyes. The little gent buckles into a spasm of admiring laughter, his eyes all aglaze. You could barely hear him rasp, under his breath... “What a dame!”
    Uncle Lou’s Scrapbook
    Lou Amber