Jim Morrison's Adventures in the Afterlife (19 page)

Since they were to appear on the show naked but for shoes, the exteriors of Semple and her companions had been layered with cosmetics from head to toe, from glitter nail varnish to a special color-blended rouge that had been liberally applied to their nipples. They could neither sit nor lean. Although crowded together, they could not touch each other, and if they so much as sweated under the studio lights, a bad-tempered makeup boy would rush to powder them down.

The boy was something of an ordeal all on his own. He had the knack of maintaining himself in a state of perpetual snit. While he powdered, he mercilessly berated the woman on whom he was working, and even those around her, in a low querulous voice. He was
also armed with a flashlight-sized version of the prison guards’ Lucite shock prods, and if Semple or one of her companions especially aggravated him, he would administer a waspish, stinging jolt to a part of her anatomy where the resulting red mark would not be visible on camera. The entire production of
Fat Ari’s Slave Shopping Club
seemed to be run on the dynamic of intimidation and spite.

That Semple and the others were merchandise had been made abundantly clear from the moment their prison escort had accepted a receipt for them from a harried associate producer and they had become the property of Fat Ari. After being stripped of even their prison kilts, run through a fast shower and blow-dry, they lined up for a perfunctory camera test. Three times, they were made to walk past a static camera, nude and unadorned. After that, Fat Ari and his director went into a two-minute huddle over the results, looking from the screen to the real woman and back again. Finally Fat Ari made an angry, disparaging gesture and stalked toward the women as if, whatever the current problem might be, it was definitely their fault.

“For my sins, you are all going to appear on tonight’s show. Personally, I would rather have hot needles jabbed into my eyes than let a substandard collection like yourselves loose on an unsuspecting public, but since the incompetence of my staff leaves me no other alternative, there are some things you need to hear before the worst happens.”

Fat Ari turned and, with a dramatic flourish, pointed in the direction of the long catwalk that was the centerpiece of the show’s set. “Behold the runway, the place that makes or breaks you. The place where you will be sold or remain unsold. That is where the great viewing audience will decide if you are prime merchandise or merely damaged goods.”

He gave a theatrical shudder as if to say he himself would be horrified by the spectacle. “During our short time together, there’s really just one thing I expect you women to grasp. I don’t know where you came from and I don’t know by what accident of circumstance you got here. You can also rest assured that I absolutely don’t give a fuck. As far I’m concerned, you have no history, no background, and no sad stories. You are my product. That’s all you have to know.”

Fat Ari looked at the women to make sure they were paying complete attention. Not one of them, Semple included, would have had the courage to do otherwise. When satisfied, he continued, “You are
merchandise. The ‘For Sale’ sign is upon you. You are stickered and listed, and my job is to sell you. It is also your job to sell yourself. You sell yourself by doing exactly what you are told, and by making the maximum possible effort when your turn on camera comes. Your goal is to persuade the great unwashed to lust after you, to persuade them that they can’t live another day without you. You have to convince them to bid their hard-earned credits like there’s no tomorrow, just to get their greasy hands on your illusionary flesh. We have no artistic standards here. Be sensual, be erotic, be downright lewd and dirty. Just be sold. There’s no second chance for unsold merchandise on
Fat Ari’s Slave
Shopping Club.”

If anything, Fat Ari was more Mediterranean than Egyptian. He wore his hair and beard so long and unkempt that it was hard to tell where one set of greasy ringlets stopped and the other began. It was all too possible to imagine him cheating crusaders out of their gold, somewhere in Constantinople in the twelfth century, or selling whores and hashish to GIs in the twentieth. Fat Ari was the universal merchant/pimp/hustler. As his dark, infinitely calculating eyes moved from one woman to the next, Semple decided that he’d probably been exactly the same in every life he’d ever known.

“Some people in this business will tell you that rejection is something to be faced philosophically. That rejection is something that shouldn’t be taken personally. You will not find that attitude on this show. On this show, rejection by the viewers is strictly personal, very personal. I take it personally, and I can assure you that you will do the same. Those who fail on my show, those who remain unsold, receive no condolences. They are not told, ‘Better luck next time.’ Rejection on this show is followed by recrimination, humiliation, misery, and pain. I hope that you all fully understand that.”

The women all stood transfixed, but this wasn’t the response that Fat Ari was looking for. He singled out one woman, just beside Semple, and he and his caftan bore down on her like an angry galleon in full sail. “Well? Do you understand?”

The woman’s eyes widened as though she were about to die on the spot. “Ye-yes.”

Fat Ari rolled his eyes heavenward. “I don’t know why I waste my time.” He gestured to the entourage around him. “Get this worthless trash into makeup. Tonight is going to be a disaster. I know that for a fact. We are beyond help. Just get them to makeup and pray for a miracle.”

Makeup was by far the most elaborate phase of the preparations. Out on the studio floor, the black-cowled techno-priests might sweat over the positioning of lights and struggle with their bulky cameras, but for Semple and the other women the long narrow makeup room—with its bright lights and greasepaint smells, lines of mirrors and milling bodies—was the hub of the universe. Inside that hub, they were both the core and the focus. They were greased and teased, oiled and manicured, painted, powdered, and latexed, with ultimate attention to detail, all the way to the trimming and shaping of their pubic hair. All blemishes were eradicated, anything unsightly disguised. At regular intervals Fat Ari’s immediate underlings would storm through, checking the work and demanding that some particular woman be done over.

Semple wondered if this was how it had felt to be a Las Vegas showgirl, or a top-line Paris stripper, like one of the girls at the Crazy Horse, waiting backstage to go on, anxious amid all the bustle and excitement. She found that she could almost stop thinking of herself as naked and helpless and take a weird pride in becoming an object, a product, something to be desired, to have her true worth actually measured out in hard currency.

At least in the TV studio, unlike the jail, they were allowed to talk, although it seemed as though the makeup people did most of the talking. An effeminate and motherly man called Remu even went to some pains to explain that it wouldn’t be half as bad as they imagined. “Actually a girl can do very well for herself if she puts her mind to it. Get bought by some horny old idiot and you’ll have him bent around your little finger in no time. Next thing you know, he’ll be springing for your freedom and a pardon and you can go your own sweet way.”

One of the women from the prison was less than convinced. “Yeah, but what happens if you get bought by some psycho who wants to do all kinds of terrible stuff to you?”

Remu plainly didn’t think the girl was taking a sufficiently positive attitude. “Well, my dear, accidents do happen. I mean, if you didn’t want a few problems and uncertainties, you should never have got yourself put in prison in the first place, should you? Nobody said there were any guarantees. You’re lucky this isn’t the old days, when it was really rough and ready. Back in the Dark Ages, before we even had color, the Fat One sold anything. Domestic servants, big strapping quarry slaves, huge Nubian overseers with
whips, you name it and he had it up on the runway. The entire place smelled of sweat, toil, semen, and the gods only knew what else. At least, since he discovered that the big score was in sex toy auctions, most everyone who comes in here is reasonably decorative and unthreatening.” He rolled his eyes. “Unless, of course, you count the specialist oddities.”

The woman with the negative attitude, far from being reassured, was becoming increasingly agitated by what Remu was saying. “I don’t want to be a sex toy.”

Remu’s eyebrows arched. “Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it, darling.”

“But it’s all a mistake. All I did was cheat on a devotional audit.”

“With that attitude, girl, you’ll wind up not getting sold at all. And then Heaven help you. You heard Fatso’s little speech of welcome. He wasn’t flapping his gums to be nasty, you know? He gets very disappointed with the unsold.” He looked at his chronometer, which hung from a collar fob. “But I can’t stay here all day chatting. I have to go to the other side and see that they’re not making too much of a mess of the boys.”

According to the gossip in the makeup room, a dozen young men had been brought to the show at approximately the same time as the women. It may have been that the young men were being processed and prepared for sale separately, but at no time had the women been allowed to set eyes on them, any more than the men were allowed a glimpse of the women. Semple could hardly believe that, in a sink of ethical and moral degeneracy like Necropolis, slaves of different sexes were segregated, but different places did have their different quirks.

Since the makeup crew working on Semple and the others was composed almost entirely of women or gay men, the conversation frequently strayed back to the subject of what might be going on in that other makeup room. One of the women on the crew who specialized in doing eyes had winked at Semple while she was carefully tracing the contours of her right upper lid with a fine brush. “Of course, doing the boys is a lot more fun, if you know what I mean. There’s always the bit about the size of their cocks just before they go on camera.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“Keep still, dear, or you’ll fuck up all my good work.” The eye expert tilted Semple’s head back. “Fat Ari’s got this thing about how
the boy merch has to be well hung. So we have this little exercise just to slightly enlarge the size. Not a full erection, you realize, nothing . . . how can I put it? Nothing overt. Just a little manual enhancement at the last moment. That’s not to say that every so often somebody doesn’t take it a tad too far, or one of the boys doesn’t get a bit overexcited, and then the obvious happens and the boss has a shit fit.”

As showtime grew closer, the level of tension escalated. For a while, as long as the merchandise kept themselves still and quiet, they were exempt from most of the last-minute yelling and vitriol. When, however, the time came for their first walk-through on the runway, they were irrevocably drawn into Fat Ari’s orbit of fury. For Semple, this fury reached its crescendo when the twelve naked but lavishly packaged ex-prisoners were paraded for final inspection. Fat Ari advanced down the line with the grim determination of Napoleon before Austerlitz. As he glared at each woman in turn, each did her best to look desirable. To Semple’s horror, Fat Ari chose to stop dead in front of her. He leaned forward and peered into her face, then he rounded angrily on his nearest assistant. “And what the holy fuck is this supposed to be?”

The assistant looked blank. “She’s number five on the roster.”

Fat Ari’s expression turned corrosive. “I can count that far on my fingers.” He seized the assistant by the back of his head and thrust his face right into Semple’s. While Semple wished that the studio floor would open up and swallow her, Fat Ari quizzed his assistant like a retarded child. “And what’s wrong with this picture?”

Semple wasn’t sure if she or the assistant was more terrified. The pitch of the assistant’s voice climbed in direct proportion to his desperation. “She doesn’t have a barcode.”

“Very good. She doesn’t have a barcode.”

“But we already knew that.”

“We did?”

“I thought we did.”

Fat Ari let go of the assistant. “It’s the first I heard about it.”

The assistant looked betrayed. “But at the meeting this morning—”

Semple would not have thought that Fat Ari’s face could grow any darker, but somehow it managed to when the assistant mentioned the meeting. Even Semple had realized by now that one would only be courting disaster by contradicting Fat Ari. His voice turned chill and absolute. “I said it’s the first I heard of it. You understand me?”

“Yes, I’m sorry.”

“So why doesn’t this bitch have a barcode ?”

“She’s an outlander. She has no barcode.”

“So why wasn’t she branded?”

“We thought she’d be exotic the way she was.”

“You thought?”

“Yes.”

“You shouldn’t think. You don’t have the capacity.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You thought it might be exotic to have this outlander running up and down without a barcode? You thought a piece of unregistered cooze would get the rubes all hot and bothered?”

“It wasn’t put quite like that, but yes, that was the general drift.”

“Then perhaps you’d like to tell me, when they reach this state of carnal dementia and want to make a purchase, what happens when they zoom in to bid on her by barcode?”

“They’ll find no barcode.”

“And what would happen then?”

The assistant knew he was cornered and his responses turned into a guilty rote. “The rubes will get confused.”