For one whole year, I was teaching a stripper how to sing. Not exactly a stripper, more like a discount burlesque dancer. Very little clothing, but it never really came off.
For a year, once a week, I met up with her in a high-rise condo on Wilshire Boulevard. It was part of that man-made mountain range of multimillion dollar apartments and condos that line Wilshire Boulevard, leading up to the country club. Like many of these, it was a high-end residence with an air of quiet abandonment. Every time I entered the lobby, I passed the same couches, spotless, unused, weary. Same pastel art on the walls. No music in the elevator up.
Upon entering the apartment, the first sounds of life were the intermittent soft tweets of a bird, somewhere out of sight. This sound receded easily under the welcome of Her Manager as he led me down a longish hallway into a common room. The rug used to be white, but now it was giving “old Shih Tzu.” It was one of those low-knit rugs and always looked frazzled, like it was confused because it thought it would be 1987 forever.
In fact, it was 2008, but the apartment retained those very particular angles which were the cutting edge of 1980s interior design. The kitchen bar was at a diagonal to the far wall – stucco, and almost perpendicular to the window. Long, vertical blinds connected the oatmeal ceiling down to the rug, and clicked like thin, warped, hanging dominoes. They also used to be white.
I set up my keyboard between the pleather sofa and the large television and continued observing the space. Every right angle had to be countered by something acute or obtuse, because the world of the neon future could not be contained within the equilateral mindset. Among these architectural angles, I sat and waited for her to appear.
Anna was always prompt. Ready with her microphone headset on when she appeared. She arrived to her lesson in uniform: a skimpy tank top, a flouncy, school-girl-adjacent mini-skirt, and platform high heels. She was a yellow-blond, and her face was even paler. A little bit of acne on the hairline, and some dry skin at the tip of her nose under her make-up, a result of skin medicine of some sort – this was an imperfection we shared. She was a work in progress, though she was already amply shaped. Truly, she had a natural beauty, which is why she was the jewel of the whole “pop-star-in-training” grift.
Anna had an airy, thin soprano, but sweet. Good pitch. She took every note I gave her about breath support and tone placement and incorporated them into the rhythm of her gyrating pelvis. The gyration never stopped. For a solid hour and 30, she ran scales, puffed air through diaphragmatic aspirations, buzzed “eeeeeee” and “aaaaaaah” and “oooooooh” vowel reverberations through her nasal bones. She felt it in the maxilla, chirped and exhaled, all while stirring the pot with her hips, in three-inch platform, sling-back heels.
When we got into her performance repertoire, the singing was inseparable from the motion. She was like a pump-organ, no sound without undulation. Her songs had the hot-kitten pubescent sparkle of Katy Perry, cut with the retro lust of Samantha Fox. Electronic beats and synth leads under hooky, repetitive melodies about beckoning love, teasing love, everything but giving love. The vibe was dated, but not intentionally. It was like they had the budget to get someone to write the music, but not the budget for modern drum and synth samples – like 1995 trying really hard to be 2005, with equipment from 1989.
Still, the music fit her movements. Her body reflected the text in wave after wave of enticement, with no endgame but more desire. Her hipbones, if equipped with extended writing tools, could have inscribed horizontal figure eights in the air. Watching her for technique, my hip sockets suffered vicariously. Despite the relentless, repetitive movement, her core – I mean the core of her disposition – was solid. Under the turquoise eyeliner and the above the bounce of her chest, she possessed an immovable, laser-locked sense of calm.
As the weeks rolled on, we got to know each other. Anna had come from the Midwest to Los Angeles with her mother, who had by then gone back home. She’d responded to an ad placed by Her Manager, the guy who now paid her rent. There were three bedrooms off to the right, for three other young women. Her Manager oversaw all of them, under strictly enforced rules about dating (none), and some sort of financial agreement for his support. At the beginning of each lesson, he would lean over the diagonal kitchen bar to observe, then he’d retire to another room to tend to the publicity machinations of soft-core girly shows.
Anna seemed oddly free within this circuitry. She had the tenacity of those who travel across the country to find Hollywood and the naiveté to believe in a thing called “pop-star training.” We were close in age, and sometimes the line between friends and teacher/student felt blurry. We laughed a lot, and I was fascinated with her, a real-life Barbarella. A musical sex alien, to whom I had been tasked with teaching the musical ways of my people. Anna’s story was so cliché. She was a true believer in the Big Showbiz myth, my photo negative. I’d grown up in Los Angeles surrounded by the business of Hollywood, so I’d never had the chance to buy the dream. You feel it, the energy of it, but it’s so constant that you don’t recognize the weight of it, until you meet someone who has yet to bend under the pressure.
Weeks became months. Months of the pastel art in the lobby. The lobby couches. Spotless, unused, weary. Silent up the elevator. Down the corridor, past the ghostly chirps of an invisible bird, down between the couch and the TV, where Anna swiveled, and chirped, and ran scales. She memorized the saucy lyrics, written just for her, and she began to embody an alter ego, not far off from the actual Anna, but more flip, more sizzle.
The day of her show arrived. The performance space was on a side street off Sunset Boulevard. I drove the boulevard slowly, remembering when I was eight years old and my dad lived near here, on Hollywood Boulevard. In the 80s, we would sometimes come to this part of Sunset for various stores or restaurants.
I remembered that this stretch of Sunset Boulevard was where the prostitutes used to walk – between Fairfax, down past Guitar Center and Famous Amos, all the way to La Brea. I knew that some of the street walkers were transexual, and I remember taking note of that as a little girl, because I was just becoming aware of adult body forms. I couldn’t always tell which of the walkers were cis women, and which were transexual, and that fascinated me. As a pre-pubescent girl who did not yet possess any feminine curves, they all seemed equally womanly to me, equally alluring. Really, I thought a lot of the sex workers were pretty. I thought short skirts and high boots were cool.
My father had darker thoughts about them, of course, being an adult who understood the duress under which they were forced to sashay. And a man of his generation, coming from a Catholic household, was not apt to lean into a compassionate reading of the lives of streetwalkers, especially the gender nonconforming. Given his disapproval, I wonder why he told me about them at all. I suppose he wanted to be the one to explain this complexity of the world before somebody else did, so he could put it in a moral context – but even he didn’t condemn them. After a few years, they started disappearing. Word was Hollywood was getting a spit shine, and the police were sweeping, and they moved to Ventura Boulevard, down in the San Fernando Valley.
Popping back into the present time, I let my eyes wander the relatively unpopulated streets. I found the side avenue. The venue was a tiny, black-box theatre with bars on the door. I almost drove right past it, because the curbside lighting was haphazard, and jaundiced. And I had a bad cold. I arrived just after Her Manager got there, and we sat in the lobby space, which was not a lobby, just a short hallway with some chairs.
Men began arriving. All men. All solo. Each one entered with the same darkened countenance. Looking up to see the other men, they seemed invaded. They’d come to be alone with a fantasy. I sneezed. The dark herd of men shifted their eyes, en masse, towards my noise. I looked down at my feet.
Once Her Manager opened the doors, the crowd shuffled through, and I found a seat in the way back. I didn’t want to be too close to the stage because I knew I was going to be blowing my nose. The stage was bare, no set, no props. With all the work they’d put into the music, I’d expected more of a production – but Anna was to be the production. She was the main product.
The lights dimmed, and Her Manager began the backing tracks. Anna appeared from between curtains at the back of the stage in a swish of pink, lower half in full swing. White baby tee under a plastic, pink, plaid, schoolgirl jumper. After her first number, she did a little monologue about herself, her likes and dislikes, like a dating profile. Finally, she turned her back to the audience, and peeked under her skirt. She smiled back over her right shoulder.
“In case you were wondering, they’re pink!”
Anna rotated, bodily, through three or four songs. It was the same dance again and again. I began to watch the crowd for signs of boredom, but they were as engaged as ever, if this could be called engagement – it was a hulking and profound stillness.
By her third song, my nose had started going like a faucet, and I’d gone through a whole package of tissues. I tried to sniffle quietly, but nobody appeared to notice anything to their right or left. In fact, the audience, this dark block of men, was completely unresponsive to anything. Outwardly. The theatre seats held shadow, like a communal confessional.
Thirty minutes in, I was out of tissues, and my cold was getting worse. I had to go. I slowly stepped down from the black-painted theatre riser, grazing my tights on it. I peeled around the corner, next to the sound booth. I apologized to Her Manager for having to leave early. I pointed to my nose. He nodded and walked me out down the short hall.
Her Manager thanked me, and followed with,
“When are we gonna get YOU up there?”
I laughed, as if we both knew it was a joke, and he laughed too.
We both knew he wasn’t joking.
After the show, I continued with Anna for a few more months. One of the last times I went to coach her, I heard that tweeting bird again. I asked her about it, and she turned on her heel and bounced around the wall into her room. She came back out holding a cage with a round, feathery parakeet. Blue and green, chittering to itself.
“Here she is.” Anna smiled.
She set the cage on the kitchen bar top. Temporarily paused from “pop-star training,” I saw a different shade of Anna. She was still for once. Her face was easy and natural, truly enchanted with the budgie bird.
In this respite, while Her Manager was out of earshot, I wanted to tell her that this life was not the road to pop-stardom. I wanted to tell her that this road was an end unto itself. I wanted to tell her that she didn’t have to give her life to this rug, and these blinds, and those toe straps across her knuckles, and that Lucite platform click against the linoleum. I wanted to tell her that those rows of shadow men were only a fraction of the people who could love her, if she wanted to do something more – but she was in a rare place of serenity.
I shuffled my flat heel on the rug. I asked if she ever let the bird out.
She answered, “Sure, all the time.”
She opened the wire door and reached in.
A tiny claw tipped onto her acrylic pink fingernail.
She lifted the bird out, and it flew up to a bookcase, facing out the window.
“Does she want to go out?” I asked.
Anna smiled.
“She’s where she wants to be.”
