The Savage Girl - Alex Shakar [76]
“Um, Bossman,” he said. “Hate to say this, but maybe you’d better, um, scram?”
He flashed Chas a toothy smile. Chas glowered back at him and then, infuriated, embarrassed, and possibly heartbroken, turned and stalked off.
Once Chas had left, Couch went back to whispering in Ivy’s ear. Gradually, as he talked, her arms and shoulders started relaxing, her posture started straightening. Her eyes closed for a moment and then reopened, still glassy but no longer wild. He placed an arm around her and asked her a question, and she responded docilely with a couple of words Ursula couldn’t make out. The two of them began to walk. Cabaj and the makeup artist stepped aside to let them through, and Ivy took her place in the tenement entranceway. Couch motioned for the photographer, and Ivy allowed the man to guide her into position.
The shoot commenced. Ivy’s face was as pure and blank as a projection screen. And Ursula knew in that moment that the pictures would be good, and that Chas, despite his present humiliation, would be vindicated, and that Ivy’s savage girl would seduce the world. And more than anything else, she felt relief.
The Litewater campaign coincided happily with the introduction of Avon’s Tribal Paint makeup, which, according to the trade journals, has been selling out everywhere except the Third World, where it obstinately underperforms. Litewater’s own performance began respectably and grows stronger by the day, despite sporadic reports of dehydration and anal leakage. There was a segment the other week on the Jenny Jones Show entitled “Hides for Hos,” in which prostitutes were given “savage makeovers.” The prostitutes entered stage left, one wearing a faux panda-skin top and miniskirt, another a short, low-cut faux lion-skin dress with a lion’s tail attached to the back, and a third a sealskin halter top and a walrus-head hat replete with tusks and white marbles with black cartoonish Xs for eyes. They all seemed to take being on TV in stride, strutting in their choreographed paths across the stage with neither hesitation nor enthusiasm.
Cut to the audience members, standing and hooting, standing and jeering, applauding the fact that they’re going to be on television applauding.
Cut to the blond, Harvard-educated host, hand over smiling mouth as though someone had made a dirty joke.
And that’s the savage trend so far, a small but far-from-insignificant fashion tremor registering a 3.5 on Trend Journal’s “Dichter Scale” and, strangely enough, seeming to embrace few to none of the values Ursula originally associated with an interest in primitive peoples—values such as simplicity, autonomy, inner growth, spirituality, self-empowerment, and the idea that in the primitive experience there may be something we have lost, an ability to synthesize materiality and spirituality into a way of life that is dignified, satisfying, and beautiful. Instead, interest has surged in bizarre rituals and acts of bondage and scarification. Theme restaurants with vaguely cannibalistic themes, already popular here in the Mid, have begun opening franchises in other cities across the country. And the “primitive” aspects of savage wear have done nothing to unsnarl the social complexity of dress codes. Hide skirts have appeared in both upscale boutiques and ten-dollar-knockoff stores, but it’s relatively easy to tell real animal skins and feathers from the synthetic variety, and real ones are of course more expensive, so, paradoxically, the most credible savages are the wealthiest and most refined. To complicate the issue further, there appears to be a burgeoning