To the audience of sixty or seventy people, she says, "Yes, that's my mom, and no, I'm not going to do a sex scene with her. That would be too Jerry Springer."
She puts on the high-heeled platform shoes and says, "Check out these shoes!"
The second girl kneels onstage and lifts her black skirt, and the drag queen slaps her exposed ass and labia with a riding crop. The strawberry blond jumps in place, trying to touch the spot where two big-screen erections are sodomizing a woman's stretched asshole. Surrounded by this huge pink genitalia, the blond shouts, "How many of you guys know what 'Russian' is?"
No guys respond.
"You guys don't deal with a lot of escorts, do you?" she says. She shrugs the dress straps off her shoulders, and the tight dress shrinks down to her waist, exposing huge pink breasts that look to be—at least—half covered with nipple.
She squeezes her breasts in both hands, saying how "Russian" means getting off between a woman's breasts. Still squeezing, she says, "I might even let you do it, if you promise not to cum in my eyes."
The drag queen is still spanking the second girl. The movie still towers above them all. Other women in black dresses come and go from the dark auditorium. Men follow them out into the lobby ... to talk. Couples paw each other in the couples-only section.
The theater owner gives the blond a long chrome flashlight and she works the audience, auctioneer-style, coaxing guy after guy to take the erection out of his pants. "I've got seven boners," she says. "Does anyone want to give me eight?" Like a topless game show host, she says, "You guys want to play a sexual/intellectual game?" Pointing the flashlight at each boner in the audience, she says, "I bet you call your dick something different every day of the week. How about everybody shout out the name you have for your dick?"
In the dark guys shout, "Boner... Peter... Willy..."
By now at least half the theater is openly jerking off. The exception is a group of men sitting together in the back, near the couples-only section. This group of men laugh and talk about their jobs, and the blond comes up the aisle saying, "What? You guys think that just because you're friends sitting together that you can't whip out your dicks and get off?"
More women go onstage, making a shadow play against the big porn. They flicker their shadow tongues against the huge shaved vaginas. They put their shadow arms around the thirty-foot erections. As the movie works toward orgasm—the happy ending of porn—the audience talks to the new women who seem to arrive a few at a time. The strawberry blond kneels on a theater seat and leans over the back toward the man sitting behind her. With one hand she's touching his dick. They talk. It's dark.
A little later, the big blond's in the theater lobby, looking at the covers of porno movies for sale. Other men and women meet, mingle, whatever. Some move on to the couples-only section. The blond adjusts the plastic daisy in her hair as she tells the guy behind the candy counter, "If I can get just thirty hard dicks in there, then I'll be happy."
The Jefferson Theater is at 1232 SW Twelfth Avenue. Phone: 503-223-1846.
The I-Tit-a-Rod Race
Organized by the Portland Cacophony Society, this annual race requires you to visit as many nude dance clubs as possible in a twelve-hour period. You need proof you were there, usually a photo snapped outside near the business sign, and you need to consume one drink in each club. Most players work as teams with a designated driver. With as many as fifty strip clubs to visit, no one's been able to hit more than thirty in a single race.
KlNKFEST
This is the annual weekend of workshops and play parties organized by the Portland Leather Alliance (PLA). A recent Kinkfest, hosted at the ACE of Hearts, included seminars such as "Erotic Humiliation and Degradation," "Anal Pleasure for Everyone," and "Saline Inflation." The event is held in the spring, so it won't conflict with the PLA's annual Leather Pride Week in August. For this year's schedule, check out www.pdxleatheralliance.org.
With more than four hundred members, the PLA meets the first Tuesday of each month at 7:00 p.m. at C. C. Slaughter's, 219 NW Davis Street. Many members meet there early, at 6:00 p.m., to have dinner together before the meeting.
Lulu's Pervy Playhouse
Sorry guys. It's women only for this sexy "play party" held on the second Saturday of each month. For time and location, check out the website www.spiretech.com/~auntie/ lulu. htm.
M & M Dances
Named for Marv and Marsha, these swingers' dances are held on the fourth Saturday of each month at 8:00 p.m. For details, call 503-285-9523.
Stripper Bingo
Also organized on an irregular basis by the Portland Cacophony Society, this game uses bingo cards designed for, well, strip clubs. Instead of numbers and letters, each space is marked with a typical stripper detail. Did she slap her own ass? Did she tweak her nipple? Clean your glasses with her manicured pubic hair? Did he pick up your tip money with his ass? You need to watch for all these little details and mark them off until you can yell "Bingo!" And please, tip the dancers who make all this fun possible.
XES
Located at 415 SW Thirteenth Avenue, XES is a private sex club for men. Inside is a maze of black-painted plywood with nonstop porno playing on monitors mounted overhead. Within the maze you'll find plenty of tiny rooms for privacy, plus a leather sex sling right in the center of things. The only room with a bed is also wired with a video camera so the entire club can watch you in action. The club runs from 7:00 p.m. until 4:00 a.m. and has more than fifteen hundred members who pay about $4.00 for an annual membership, plus $8.00 per visit.
Zippers Down
Located in the basement of the Club Portland bathhouse, the "paramilitary" sex club Zippers Down is at 303 SW Twelfth Avenue. Comprising most of the city block, the basement is decorated in army-surplus everything, with barrack bunks and acres of camo netting hung to create the full M.A.S.H. effect. The management has even hauled a real Willies Jeep down here and wired it so the headlights work. Porno plays on monitors overhead, and the fantasy is complete.
A membership fee is required for admission. Hours are noon to 6:00 a.m.
(a postcard from 1992)
Riding my bike, I hear the music and go to look. In the dozen blocks between Lloyd Center and the Steel Bridge, here is the opposite of the Rose Festival Grand Floral Parade.
After the parade on Saturday morning, after the floats are displayed all weekend, this is where they go.
This is a Sunday evening in June, just before dark. And these are the parade floats almost forty-eight hours past their moment of glory. Towed by rusted pickup trucks, towed by flatbed trucks and tractors, they wind through back streets on their way to a pier in Northwest Portland where they'll be dismantled.
The flowers are wilted and crushed. Tens of thousands of flowers. Roses and carnations, chrysanthemums, zinnias, and daisies. Instead of Rose Festival royalty, beauty queens and civic leaders, now long-haired young guys ride, passing a joint among them. Waving. Middle-aged moms in sweatpants ride, toting babies and surrounded by their toddlers. Waving. The sidewalks are empty. No one's here to wave back. Instead of marching bands, different floats carry suitcase-sized radios blaring head-banger rock music. Gangsta rap music. You can smell the sweet dead flowers and bottles of sweet fortified wine. A fat man and woman sprawl in a red carpet of crushed roses, smoking cigarettes and holding tubs of soda pop so big the woman has to use both hands. You can smell the diapers and marijuana.