The only other most important part of job training is telling time by songs.
David Bowie’s “I’m Afraid of Americans,” that gives you an exact five minutes of fuzzed power chords.
Keith Sweat’s “One on One” is a slow grind song (5:01) perfect for choreographing an elephant. By that, I mean any dancer too bulked up to move except for hitting competition poses. Step, flex, step. The Double Bicep. The Crab.
How you keep from getting a hard-on is you’re counting all the time to anticipate the end of each song. You name a song, and I can peg the time — and not just the minutes and seconds listed on the jewel box liner. I can tell you the actual time that shows on the deck in the booth. A good dancer knows the Digweed remix of Bryan Ferry’s “Slave to Love,” the liner says four minutes, 31 seconds, but in actuality it’s 24 seconds. A lazy dancer will find himself still waist-deep in drunk women when the music stops.
You shaking your junk to a pounding mix of Underworld’s “Mo Move” — a relentless bass heartbeat for six minutes and 52 seconds — that’s artistic. But if you don’t make it backstage by when the music stops, even in just one moment of silence, you shaking your shaved parts at strange ladies — that’s just harassment.
Again, another slippery slope. And do not ask me how I know.
Silence. Silence and the closing lights coming on, bright, that’s Cinderella turning into a grinning, naked, greasy, and sweaty guy with his penis too close to your face and your watery $10 White Russian.
As outlined in the Savage Knights training brochure, Mister Elegant makes his entrance, handing out roses to the front tables. He dances the Joey Negro Club Mix of Raven Maize doing “Fascinated.” A three minute, 42-second grabber song. Then he moves to the edge of the stage and dances one shorter high-energy song to bait out the folding money. He works the edge and the floor, humping laps and taking tips, and he’s offstage just one beat before the Police Officer’s grabber song.
The next night in Spokane, same deal. Then Wenatchee. Pendleton. Boise.
A job so simple even a brainless, heartless parasite can do it.
Mister Elegant loved the dollar tips and the phone numbers. Phone numbers written on dollars. Phone numbers on scraps of paper towel, looped under the elastic leg straps of his black G-string.
All the way up until Salt Lake City.
Don’t ask how I know this, but there’s people with Milroy disease, where their lymph nodes in their legs never develop and they end up with feet the size of suitcases on legs like tree trunks. Or cyclopia, where you’re born with no nose and both eyes in the same socket.
Mister Elegant, his nipples looked too small and pale pink so to make them swell, big and red, he learned to paint them with something called Lip Plumper. Comes in a bottle with a little brush, like nail polish, and when you paint it on your nipples and lips and the head of your dick, they all swell up, huge.
Mister Elegant outlined his washboard abdominal muscles by drawing between them with mascara, then blending with a wad of tissue so his belly wouldn’t look like tic-tac-toe.
If he popped out one blue contact lens and looked at himself in the steamy mirror of a motel bathroom, yeah, he could still pass as 24. But between Billings and Great Falls and Ashland and Bellingham, between the Fireman’s giving everyone crab lice and the Army Soldier’s snoring, Mister Elegant was feeling wore out.
By Salt Lake City, his pickled balls were dragging.
Mister Elegant strutted out with his armful of red roses. Still in his breakaway tux, he gave out the roses, then started into the buttons on his pleated shirt. The only thing that makes Salt Lake City any different from Carson City or Reno or Sacramento is after the tux broke away, after Mister Elegant was counting into his second song, smiling and keeping his pubic hair out of people’s drinks, watching the dollar bills come out of purses and pocket books, the virgins writing their phone numbers on old bank-machine receipts, between his dropping to full splits and bouncing back in a perfect kip-up, one deep breath before his handspring and a full midair flip, two minutes and 36 seconds into the N-Trance cover of “Staying Alive” — (4:02) — the faces and drinks and dollar bills started to blur. Mister Elegant thumbed up the elastic loop around each hip, high and tight for his handspring, crouched down, jumped — and that’s all I remember.
In case you didn’t notice, the music’s stopped and here I am still shaking my dick in your face.
Like after all this time I didn’t learn any better.
What a retard.
Early as I can remember, I used to have Simple Stare Syndrome, a form of temporal-lobe epilepsy. My mom or dad would be talking to me, and I’d freeze. My vision would blur and all my muscles would stop. I’d still hear my mom talking, telling me to pay attention, maybe snapping her fingers in my face, but I couldn’t talk or move. Breathing is all I could do for a half minute, which seems like forever.
They took me in for MRIs and EKGs. I couldn’t ride my bicycle except on deserted streets. I climbed trees and my vision would start to blur. I’d wake up on the ground, my friends asking if I was OK. One school play, the baby Jesus, Mary, Joseph, six shepherds, three camels, an angel, and two other kings waited what felt like a year while I stood frozen with a gift of frankincense, Mrs. Rogers leaning out from the wings, whispering, “Bless me, for I bring you this humble offering… I bring this!”
But after ten years of Clonazepam, I pretty much had that licked.
Trouble was my prescription ran out in Carson City. Being tired makes it worse. Drinking and cigarette smoke, fatigue, loud noise, all risk factors.
In Salt Lake City, I’d pitched what’s called a tonic-clonic seizure, what people used to call a grand mal seizure. I woke up in the back of a screaming ambulance, just in time to see a med tech stuff a thick stack of piss-soaked singles into his wallet, saying, “Mister Elegant…” and shaking his head. A blanket wrapped with belts held me flat, and I could smell shit. I asked the med tech, What happened? And he stuffed his wallet in his back pocket, saying, “Buddy, you don’t want to know…”
By the time the hospital released me, Troupe 11 was already in Provo with a new Mister Elegant shipped out to meet them at the venue. The Motel 6 where we’d stayed the night before, they were holding my suitcase.
A social worker came and sat next to my hospital bed, saying how the human mind is nothing if not a constant cycle of electrical activity. She said a seizure is like a burst of static, a storm inside your head.
I said, Tell me something I don’t know, lady.
And she told me about phocomelia, a condition where you’re born with your hands emerging from your shoulders. No arms. The old-time term for this birth defect was in fact “seal arms.” It’s linked with the sedative Thalidomide, but it’s existed long before that.
She told me about sirenomelia, where you’re born with your legs fused together, to make what looks like a fish tail. Hence the name: Sirenomelia, and possibly the original idea of mermaids.
This social worker, she told me her name was Clovis, and she herself had been a dancer, an exotic dancer, trying to hide the fact she suffered from narcolepsy. She used to have long blond hair and blue eyes, long smooth legs and no tan lines. Next to my bed, her hair was curly and brown. Her eyes were brown, and the thighs of her white pantsuit looked too tight for her to cross her legs at the knee.