Читать книгу Blood Count - Jack Batten - Страница 10

Bart the Bulge was in the papers, too. Annie found him.

“Where does that rate on the scale of revolting?” she asked me.

Annie was pointing at an ad in the entertainment pages of the Sun. The ad was for a strip club, and it showed a guy billed as Bart the Bulge. He was dressed in a garment not as small as a jockstrap but not as large as a bikini. The guy’s upper body was coated in oil, and the camera had caught him in the act of grinding his pelvis.

“Think he’s got a codpiece under that scrap of cloth?” I said. “Kleenex stuffed in there?”

“It’s disgustingly unnatural.”

“True to his billing, the bulge.”

“That’s something you’ll find out when you visit the club, the authenticity of the bulge.”

“I’ll find out?”

“At this club, where he’s doing whatever he does with what­ever’s under the Lilliputian panties.”

“This time out, kiddo, you accompany me,” I said. “And listen, if the panties are Lilliputian, how can what’s under them qualify as a bulge?”

“You actually want to take me to a seedy joint like that?”

“With you in it, the seediness will dissolve.”

According to the ad, Bart the Bulge was appearing at the Club Eroticarama. It had a Yonge Street address, and the number would put it somewhere south of Bloor. The ad promised nonstop strip action from both sexes, but Bart was the feature attraction. Showtimes on the hour from nine to one in the morning.

“We’re about set, Annie,” Lynne Jordan called across the room.

Lynne produces Flicks, Annie’s show. The time was around ten-fifteen Monday night, and we were in the program’s offices over a Mac’s on the Danforth. Flicks doesn’t rate the budget to afford much studio time rental, which means that Lynne and Annie have to scare up their own locales to shoot some of the program’s segments in. Tonight, things were simple; Annie was going to perch on a desk in the office and say the introduction and sign-off for the next night’s show into the camera. A guy named Ron had a sound camera strapped to his shoulder, and he and Lynne had been working out angles and backdrops.

“Face around this way, Annie,” Lynne said, steering Annie by the waist. “So the poster for Daddy Nostalgia peeks into the frame over your shoulder.”

“Peeks?” Ron said. “You want, like, a hint of it?”

“Peeks, hints, whatever. Just so the audience doesn’t get hit over the head with the damned thing.”

“Sure,” Ron said, huddled into his camera.

“What’re you getting?” Lynne asked him. Lynne was a big, middle-aged woman who had a whisky voice and wore dresses that fit like tents. “You showing enough poster so we can see Tavernier’s name on there?”

“I got, lemme see, a Bogarde, I got a Birkin.” Ron was a lanky guy in his mid-twenties, not movie-wise enough to register the names of Dirk Bogarde and Jane Birkin, but strong enough to wield the heavy camera. “What’s the name you want?” he asked Lynne.

“The director, for Chrissake, Bertrand Tavernier.” Lynne’s voice roughened. “You need me to spell it? Starts with T as in tits …”

“Okay, got it,” Ron said, not flapped by Lynne. “Looks nice. Annie in the middle, poster on the left.”

“Like to run down the intro one time first, Annie?” Lynne asked.

“Let’s go ahead, do a take,” Annie answered. “My hair okay?”

“Perfect.”

It was. Annie wore her black hair cut as close as a cap. Not even a hurricane could blow a strand out of place. Her face was shaped in an old-fashioned oval, her figure was petite. She’s a smidge over five foot two and a couple of ounces heavier than 105 pounds. She was wearing a belted grey-brown jacket, matching tailored pants, and a black and white printed blouse. She was also wearing a glorious smile.

“Hi, I’m Annie B. Cooke,” she said into Ron’s camera, “and this is Flicks, the program about movies. Tonight we’re concentrating on directors and on one director in particular …”

Annie talked for about twenty-five seconds. No fluffs, no stumbles.

“A keeper,” Lynne said when Annie finished. “Good by you, Ron?”

“Like it.”

“Stay there, Annie,” Lynne said. “I think the sign-off should be from the same angle, right? Because we’re going to be talking about Tavernier some more.”

Annie said yes and raised her hand to straighten hair that didn’t need straightening.

The sign-off took two takes. Lynne didn’t care for the way Annie’s voice dropped at the end of the first take. The second time, her voice rose, and everybody made sounds of satisfaction. Ron packed off down the stairs with his camera, Lynne settled in at a desk, and Annie and I walked across Danforth Avenue. My car was parked at a meter.

“Only fair you come, too,” I said.

“Couldn’t we talk to him at his house or something?”

“Which name do you figure he’s listed under in the phone book? Bart or Bulge?”

I went around to the passenger side of the car and opened the door for Annie. The car was a white Volkswagen Beetle Convertible, eight years old and beginning to develop a slump. I got in the driver’s side.

“Okay,” Annie said inside the car. “You did the Purple Zinnia on your own and the baseball player. I guess I can put up with the club with the silly name.”

“Eroticarama.”

“Isn’t Bart supposed to be a porno star?” Annie asked. “On the word of your source?”

“Malcolm the bartender. There’s a guy, Malcolm, got his eye on the main chance.”

“Bart’s also a stripper? The man is versatile.”

“Guess he favours professions where he can cut down on the overhead.”

“No clothing?”

“Bare essentials.”

I drove across the Bloor Viaduct, down Jarvis, and poked around the side streets south of Bloor until I found a parking space on Isabella. Annie and I walked over to Yonge and went north. The Eroticarama was on the other side of Charles between a discount record store and a Burger King. Annie raised her shoulders in a what-the-hell gesture, and I pushed open the door into the club.

A rush of stale, smoky air smacked us. It was a cavernous room dominated by a bar that must have been seventy feet long. Opposite it, flush to the other wall, was a small raised stage, empty at the moment. The sound system pumped out rock that was heavy on electric bass, and people, mostly women, sat at tables between the bar and stage drinking and shouting against the din. I found a table next to three matrons in Blue Jays caps taking their beer straight from the bottle.

“Feel like I’m on the inside of a piston factory,” Annie shouted at me.

“What?”

“My senses are being assaulted!”

“And this is only the aural part.”

I got a waitress in a deep scoop neck blouse to bring us two white wines. She set them down, dipping low in my direction, and five minutes later, the overhead lights dimmed to darkness.

“Showtime, folks.”

A guy’s voice, professionally excited and broadcasting from some invisible source, rode over the taped rock.

“All right, ladies and gentlemen, especially you ladies, let’s put our hands together and welcome our feature attraction. Club Eroticarama is proud to present Bart … the Bulge!”

A bright spotlight hit the stage, and a figure in silver spun into it, a glitzy, lowlife Baryshnikov. It was Bart from the Sun ad, Bart in head-to-toe silver. Silver shirt, silver cowboy vest, tight silver-sequined pants, silver boots, silver eyeliner, and silver streaks like cat whiskers drawn on his cheeks.

The three matrons in the Blue Jays caps were up and screaming. So were the other women in the club, going bananas for Bart the Bulge, Bart in silver, Bart shimmying and shaking on the small stage, the spotlight catching the winking sequins, the women screeching, Bart eating it up, not a bad-looking guy in a greaseball way, probably late twenties, big smile on his silver-streaked kisser, loving the noise, the tacky glamour.

The music on the sound system changed, soaring strings, electric piano, same pounding bass. And Bart got down to the serious stuff, taking off his silver duds. The vest came off, then the boots. He took longer with the shirt, unbuttoning, dropping one sleeve, pulling it back up, teasing, the women getting off on the tease. The shirt fell into the pile of clothes collecting at the back of the stage, and Bart went into a muscle-flexing routine, shooting the biceps, rippling the muscles across his chest. He had an exaggerated build, courtesy of barbells and a Nautilus machine — manufactured muscles.

Now it was Bart and the silver sequined pants. They came off in a flash, in a single, wild flourish. The move had something to do with zippers down both pant legs. Bart stood before us, arms raised, muscles shiny with sweat, nothing on him except a pair of brief briefs in silver and black stripes. The crowd went nuts.

A new tape came on, pumping and metallic. The rhythm went thump, thump, thump, pause, thump, thump, thump, pause. At the pauses, Bart, deep into it now, concentrated expression on his face, dropped into stances that looked like variations on Rodin’s Thinker poses. He held a pose through the thumps, struck a new arrangement of legs, arms and torso at the pauses. The thumps, pauses, and poses kept up for five minutes.

The act might have been wearing thin, in my opinion, but Bart, Mr. Show Biz, knew where he was taking the audience. He was going for it all.

He whipped off his briefs. And there was no codpiece underneath, no jockstrap, no Kleenex.

“That’s what’s called a throbbing member?” I shouted at Annie.

“His mighty machine.”

“Instrument of pleasure.”

“I wish he’d cover the damned thing up.”

“Way he’s whipping himself around,” I shouted, “a hernia clinic will be his next destination.”

Bart pranced naked along the edges of the stage. All around us and further back in the huge room, women stood on chairs and shrieked. Behind the racket, I could make out music of the Sturm und Drang sort. The pandemonium lasted three or four minutes until a skinny guy in black pants and a white shirt unbuttoned halfway down his chest entered stage right. He was holding a cloak in front of him. It was done in the same silver striped motif as Bart’s long-gone knickers. Bart went into an extended bow, and the skinny guy draped the cloak over his crouched form. Bart whisked himself off stage. The skinny guy stayed behind and gathered up Bart’s discarded togs.

The room had a buzz, coming down from Bart’s act. At the next table, the matrons wearing the baseball caps looked hot and breathless. They ordered another round of beers.

“If Bart’s gay,” Annie said to me, “a heck of a lot of women in here are wasting their sexual fantasies.”

“What do you say we go backstage?”

“Going to be kind of fascinating to find out.”

“What’s that?”

“Which is Bart’s real audience,” Annie said, “sexually speaking.”