Chuck Palahniuk - Mister Elegant

Saying this, her brown eyes mist over.

Clovis can’t recall ever sliding to the bottom of that pole. She woke up backstage and pregnant by some 32 customers. Some twice.

I ask her, What song?

And misty-eyed, Clovis says, “Portishead doing ‘Sour Times’.”

Ah, I agree. The sweet dark vocals of Beth Gibbons. Four minutes and 11 seconds.

“Four minutes and eight seconds,” Clovis says. One eyebrow arched at me, she says, “Always check your deck time. Never trust liner notes.”

I ask, What was her stage name?

And Clovis looked at her wristwatch, saying, “That was a long time ago.” She says, “I’m almost 30.”

Me too, I say.

And looking at some hospital form on her clipboard, Clovis says, “I kind of figured this age they put here was a lie.”

Before she could stand up and walk away, I asked Clovis to tell me what happened. What really went on.

The baby was born, she said, nine months after she woke up, a textbook delivery. A boy. It didn’t look like anybody and immediately drove off in a limousine to live a gated lifestyle in the Malibu Colony with two gay millionaire movie-studio executives.

“Talk about popping out a brainless, heartless stranger,” Clovis says.

She’d already told me about epigastric parasites.

And I said, No. I asked her, What happened to me?

And for a long minute of balls-out silence, Clovis just blinked her eyes at me. Finally, in the voice of a health-care professional, she said, “There’s a videotape of the… event.”

Some bachelorette had smuggled a pocket camcorder into the nightclub and was filming me as I handed out long-stemmed red roses. I launched into my set, and she’d kept filming. They had to digitally fuzz the part where my nuts popped out, but the video had been aired on television. First just a Japanese funny-home-video program, but then in Europe. On the internet, the four-minute, 21-second segment went viral, downloaded worldwide. The stuff of jokes on every late-night talk show.

ASCAP was suing websites and search engines over the unauthorized distribution of “Staying Alive.” The Chippendales syndicate wasn’t thrilled I had on white paper cuffs. Someone claiming to be a producer from the Late Show called the hospital switchboard, asking to be connected with my bedside.

I told Clovis, I wanted to see for myself.

And Clovis said, “No.” She said, “You don’t.”

I asked, How bad could it be?

And Clovis said, “During the episode, you lost momentary control of your bowels.”

The smell in the ambulance.

“A G-string,” Clovis said, “doesn’t leave much room for error.”

I never did watch that video.

Utah was a good enough place to hide, so I stayed in Salt Lake City and let my pubic hair grow back. I dyed my blond hair brown. I scrubbed off my suntan, and ate all the food — fried chicken and Hostess fruit pies and barbecue potato chips — that Mister Elegant could never eat.

By the time you turn 30, your life is about escaping the person you’ve become in order to escape the person you’ve become in order to escape the person you started. So for a while there, I was becoming Mister Fat-Gutted-Pale-Bitter-Pig. I worked a fast-food job, and every few million cheeseburgers some customer would stare at me across the greasy counter, their eyes working fast to figure out where they knew my face.

And I’d snap my fingers, asking, “You want fries with that?”

I never took a single from anybody without washing my hands.

Maybe if I’d been wallowing in my own feces, maybe people would put two and two together, but then all those Chinese died on security videotape in that really goofy department-store fire and the comedy world forgot all about me and my messy disaster.

But Clovis didn’t. And I couldn’t.

Clovis came to have lunch, cheeseburgers, bringing along a young client whose fingers were fused into two fleshy pincers and whose legs were withered and useless. Ectrodactyly syndrome, what people used to call “lobster claw syndrome.” She introduced me to a young woman with pygomelia, which means she had four legs, basically two pelvises side-by-side and four functioning legs, which she hid under long skirts.

Me, I still told time by songs. Joe Jackson’s “Steppin’ Out” is four minutes and 19 seconds, time enough to smoke a cigarette in the alley. Kim Wilde singing “You Keep Me Hanging On,” that’s four minutes and 15 seconds, the time it takes me to change the carbonated gas cylinder for the soda machine.

Everything you want to forget, you never can. Every moment you want to escape.

At last, Clovis asks me back to her apartment to meet some people. I tell her my day is nothing if not meeting people. And Clovis says this is different.

At her apartment, she’s introducing me to a girl with two arms and legs, almost a whole other person sprouting from under the bottom hem of her tube top. My first real heteradelphian, her name is Mindy. Next, I meet a kid with a face huge and lumpy as a bed pillow. Neurofibromatosis, the Elephant Man disease. He’s 23 and his name is Alex. I meet a cute redhead with no legs and only her feet growing out of her stomach, osteogenesis imperfecta. Her name is Gwen, and she’s 25.

Clovis says to me, “You know music. You know the staging.” She says, “It’s their idea, but they hoped you could teach them exotic dancing…”

She meant stripping. A troupe of differently-abled exotic dancers. They were all young and bored with Salt Lake City. Their thinking was: Anyone can bulk up some muscle, bleach their hair, and spray on a fake tan. Why not offer an audience something that wasn’t based on a pile of lies? Why not serve up dancers not hiding behind fake smiles?

The bunch of crazy, idealistic kids. Only in Utah.

I tell them, Sure they’re young and full of dreams. Sure, they’re monstrously deformed. But can they dance…?

And Clovis says, “I’ve taught them what I know about working a pole, but I was hoping…”

The millionaire studio executives had fronted seven figures in low-interest start-up financing.

Hell, if I can teach some of those steroid elephants to dance, I can teach anybody.

Like it says in the newspaper: Live Your Fantasy.

I wish I could say it’s been easy. People will always misunderstand your intentions. People accuse me of exploitation. That, and no small business is all beer and Skittles. In Boulder, Glenda, our girl with both eyes in one socket, she eloped with a stockbroker millionaire. In Iowa City, Kevin, our dancer with parastremmatic dwarfism, he knocked up some bachelorette. It helps that Clovis tours with me and the troupe, as a kind of den mother. God only knows what we’ll do come September, when we launch our new escort service.

Me, personally, not a show starts without me sweating in the wings. Counting the seconds of every song. Watching for ASCAP people taking notes, and every muscle in my legs and arms twitching, reliving every handspring, cartwheel, midair flip, and kip-up I ever nailed on stage. Watching those crazy kids bait the folding money and lap dance for the tips, I catch myself still whispering.

Whispering, “Bless me, for I bring you this humble offering…”

Whispering, “I bring this!”