Vikram Chandra - Red Earth and Pouring Rain

When I went into Joyland they assumed I was looking for a job, and I didn’t say no. Because I was so young they were nervous and yet obviously they wanted me, so I let them go through their moves, bargain and slick and wheel and deal, I knew as soon as I walked in. They took me behind and I waited in the wings until it was my turn. Then I walked onto the stage, ignored the music, sat on the edge and slowly pulled off my clothes. I mean it wasn’t a show or anything, I didn’t even try to dance, I just took off my clothes, but they seemed to love it because after a while I called for the lights to come up and I looked them in the face and met their eyes and just sat there and took them all off and then I sat there some more and stretched back a little and that was it. I mean it wasn’t much and I’ve often wondered why there was that sudden quiet and the other girls stopped moving around on the floor and everyone just watched. I sure as hell don’t believe that I have the kind of looks that stop people from drinking and buying stuff and going on just because I take my goddamned clothes off, so I wonder what it was that first night. I don’t know. Maybe it was just that I looked everyone in the eye and I wasn’t trying to sell anything.

So I started there. I don’t want to tell you that it was all pleasant: there was booze on the floor, women working to feed kids and others, drunks in the bathrooms, all those men sitting in the darkness, their eyes, knifings now and then, cruising cops, bad money from the Families, all that. But three nights a week I told Mother I was off to see Eddie and Barbara and Pennel, and instead I went down to Joyland and did my thing. Why, you ask, who knows, it did good for me. I would have done it anywhere, I think, on the street or on a bus, but at Joyland it was all set up and I could do it, so I did.

Some of the women despised me, and others took care of me. The men circled and watched, not at all sure what to think, and all kinds of rumors flew. But still, you want to know, what did I get out of it, what did I feel, didn’t I feel cheap and used or something? No, what I felt, under the sharp moon of the spotlight, was just me, the sweat on my skin. I think for sure there were others who danced there who despised those who watched and themselves, but to me that wasn’t even important, that, or money, wasn’t why I walked to the edge of town. It was that it anchored me. In there I was free of the knives of progress, at least for a while. And it was truly for me very innocent: I went straight home afterwards, ignoring all the invitations, the sad and hopeful queries.

Time went: I graduated, and did what I did, and one hot July night I walked home, and everywhere small groups of people gathered in front of store windows, watching a gray, rocky surface, a small white craft floating in black. When I got home Mother was sitting upright at her table, and in the back the television spoke softly, urgently. She was looking at me.

“You know?” I said.

“I know.” It was no use to ask how, there were a hundred men who came to my shows, and so somehow she knew. She had her hands flat on the table in front of her, her face was in the darkness, but flashes of light danced over her head from behind.

“You filthy creature,” she said, in a voice more full of wonder than anger. “You could have been anything, you could have done anything. But instead you —” and now her voice cracked, “you chose SHIT.” Her gesture as she held out the world to me, my future, took in the small kitchen, the Saturday Evening Post covers framed on the wall, and especially the image on the screen behind her. She stopped, turned away from me, looked deeply into the television, then dismissed me: “You barbarian.”

So I left. I walked down the street, and you know what I saw on the hundreds of brightly lit squares on both sides of the streets, in shop windows and in living rooms, you know whose voice followed me, repeating again and again, metallic and hissy from thousands of miles of space: “That’s one small step for a man, but a giant leap for mankind.” You know what I watched: a white form, light and clean, pushing a flag into the moon. So I found a telephone, and I called. There had been people asking me things, to do things, so now I called, and in a few hours it was all ready: a creaky metal bed in a faraway, smelly house, a torn mattress covered with a cheap but brand new cotton sheet, two small baby spots on metal stands, an ancient and scratched but working sixteen-millimeter camera, a photographer, and a man. At first the man, long-haired but cowboy-booted, thirtyish, and drinking from a small bottle, at first he smiled at me, baby don’t worry I’ll take care of you, but I didn’t say a word and he shut up. I mean I was calm. In a minute I had everything off and I said, let’s go, and he looked over behind the camera, surprised, I think he thought, maybe wanted, that I’d be scared. He sat on the bed and I rolled over him, skimming and struggling off his shirt, and then there was the bumpy skin on his shoulders, the slight sourness of his underarms, neck and pulses, sharp taste in the mouth, bourbon, smoothness of the inside of the lip, eyes darting under closed eyelids, each hair on the chest distinct, goose-pimpled nipples, my tongue like a dart, a swallow, teeth pinching skin, the trembling breath in the stomach and the twitching muscles, blessed solidity and the warmth, welcome hint of a pungent bouquet underneath, nose nuzzling and burrowing, wrinkled skin, so soft, and sliding and precious underneath, mouth opens and comes up to welcome: cock is good, and then visiting the knees, the poky and scarred childhood knees, extended ankles and curled toes. I swing up, and he moves kiss by kiss over my back, the side of me, arms and neck and ears, small wet animal, warm and nipping, vibration along breasts, nipples alert, scoots down and I hunch over his face, smell of myself, lips over me, each movement a long lightening into my heart, labia luxuriant and thick, ballooned, circling tip searching clit and finding and losing, hands spread on cheeks, my fingers on myself: sweet inexhaustible goodness of cunt. The camera whirs, I lean back and reach under, take him, now bouncy against my hand and muscled, move my hips until I hold him, then settle back, the sting takes a scream from me, but I can see my body shining and wet and above his, holding him inside the reach of him feels so strange, the thought of it — I have him in — so unexpected and wonderful that I laugh, he trembles and laughs too, and for some reason the giggling takes us, and we laugh and laugh until I slump and still laugh and the camera stops and all I can hear is the three of us laughing.

So we ran out of film and had to come back the next day to get the come shot. Then we sat up stickily in bed and ate doughnuts. When I asked why the come shot (this one in slow motion, luxuriant sprays of liquid), they both shrugged, said that’s the way it’s done, babe, it’s the money shot. Weird, I thought, but I didn’t really care, because I really was okay. People don’t believe me when I tell them this, straights, I mean, squares, good folk, Mom and Pop with their two-point-oh-five kids. They look at me with pity and horror alternating over their faces, and when I insist, they try to pretend I don’t exist. You’re just deluded, Mom says, you’re crazy, you don’t really know what’s happening to you, you don’t know what’s being done to you. When I still say, no, no, this is me, they snarl “slut,” and try to forget about me. But, hey, I’ve been all over. After that first day, with the money I got, I bought a beat-up Packard, got in it and drove. I’ve been to every small town from Albany to Zanesville, every city, and when you get in, when you start seeing the shopping malls, you swing past the stores, you avoid the commercial streets where the suits live, you angle away from the suburbs and the lawns, and look for ruined buildings, bums, police cars, rain, and there you find it. I went from town to town and did strip. Then I came back up east and I did loops, grainy black-and-white stuff, badly lit, the guys sometimes with their shoes on for fear of cop raids. Then suddenly it was the seventies and we were doing film, with credits, music, and everything, and people, even women, started to know who I was. I never went home.