Hella Nation - Evan Wright [29]
The viewing area is nearly pitch-black. Overweight twentysomething Latinas sprawl on the couches. Excess flesh spills out from halter tops and underwear worn as outer garments. Sitting alone at one end of a couch is a green-eyed blond. Her legs are so long that her knees almost brush her chin.
Entering meat-consumer mode, I make my choice. Katya is twenty-one years old, from Orange County. She wears a stretch miniskirt and bare-midriff top. Her skirt is bunched up on one side, an appealing kind of sloppiness that carries over in her loose, hip-swaying gait. I think to myself that Phil, my romance adviser from Club Paradise, would be proud of my selection. I’ve found a hottie.
Katya yanks me against her on the dance floor. The embrace is forceful and direct, like someone hugging a refrigerator in order to move it. “You look like my father,” she says. “In pictures when he was young, before he got sick.”
“Is he OK?”
“He’s schizophrenic.”
One other couple dances. A stocky man in a gray suit—perhaps forty-five, handsome and blond, a well-fed downtown businessman with a gold wedding band on his finger—and a short, chunky Latina wearing a black negligee as a dress. The woman is older than the other dancers, somewhere between thirty-five and forty-five. Her partner has backed her against a mirrored wall. He pulls her negligee up and watches the reflection of his hands fondling her red satin panties.
Katya glimpses the peep show in the mirror and stiffens, as if with revulsion. “I’m tired,” she says. “Can we sit down?”
The Dreamland TV room offers the same airport ambiance as the Flamingo’s. Katya presses into the opposite end of the love seat, pointedly avoiding physical contact, which is good, because she gestures frequently with her long arms. I wince several times, fearing she’s going to hit me in the eye.
“My problem is focus.” Katya bangs her knuckles on her forehead. “Up here, in my mind. I’m diagnosed as ADD, attention deficit disorder?” She stares with dilated pupils. “I grew up on Ritalin, but it wasn’t strong enough. I smoked crystal meth in high school. Now I’m clean. My doctor put me on Dexedrine.”
The poor girl is whacked out on speed.
“I’m an actress. You know, I’m in a workshop, and I do a performance about working here? This is it.” Katya waves her hands as I duck. “We go in front of the class, and we mime to three songs. I start with Madonna, ‘Live to Tell,’ because of her prostitute image, which is how I feel working here. Then I play ‘People Are Strange.’ The Doors. Because that’s how I feel about the world and people in here.
“I do my whole act like I’m in my bedroom getting dressed for work. I’m holding a teddy bear. It’s a symbol for, like, growing up, but I’m still like a child inside. The last song I play is the Police, ‘Roxanne.’ When they sing, ‘You don’t have to put on the red light,’ I go into a rage. I tear the head off my teddy bear.” She flings her wrist. “Then I rip his guts out and kick him across the stage.”
Katya’s recitation, which also includes dramatic monologues from her favorite film, Frances, costs more than $75. We spend two hours and ten minutes together.
My attempt to select a girl merely as a piece of meat is an abysmal failure. Doing my best to find a girl who would “put out” in a Phil-my-romantic-adviser sense, I instead choose a dance partner who hates her job, seems conflicted by displays of sexual promiscuity,