2
Performing Artist
Why had I been at Club Gouge the night Nadia Guaman took two bullets? Terry’s question kept running through my head as I drove home. The simple answer had to do with my cousin Petra. Except Petra had been in my life less than a year, and I was rapidly learning that there are no simple answers where she’s concerned.
In a way, that was unfair. It was really Jake Thibaut who first took me to Club Gouge, right after Thanksgiving. Jake’s a bass player who moved into my building last spring; we’ve been dating for a few months now. He plays with a contemporary chamber group, as well as the early-music group High Plainsong. Trish Walsh, a friend of his from High Plainsong, was doing a strange blend of medieval music with heavy metal lyrics, accompanying herself on electric hurdy-gurdy and lute.
When Trish Walsh, singing as the Raving Renaissance Raven, got a gig at Club Gouge, Jake put together a party to hear her. A number of his musician friends joined us, but he also invited Lotty Herschel and Max Loewenthal, along with my downstairs neighbor, Mr. Contreras.
My cousin Petra wheedled her way into the invitation. “The Raving Renaissance Raven!” Petra’s eyes glowed. “Jake, I didn’t realize how totally cool you are. I have the Raven’s Ravings on my iPod, but I’ve never caught her act!”
Club Gouge itself was one of a string of new nightspots that had taken over the abandoned warehouses under the Lake Street L, just west of downtown. Somehow, it had become the hippest scene on the strip, mostly because the owner, Olympia Koilada, apparently had a sixth sense for knowing when to book performers right before they became big.
The Raven, who was opening for an act billed as the Body Artist, sang and played for about forty minutes. Max was intrigued by her hurdy-gurdy, which was handmade of beautiful woods. The Raven had attached an amplifier to it, and the sound filled the club.
Jake and his musician friends didn’t like the distortion that the amp brought to the musical line. Between sets, they argued about whether their friend could have achieved a better effect with a local mike. Petra and Mr. Contreras argued about the lyrics: she thought the Raven’s songs were awesome, he found them disgusting.
It was Max who put my own reaction into words. “She perhaps never has had a wide audience in her early-music performance. Now she can show a young generation that even a gifted musician can shock, and thus build a market for herself.”
“That’s so cynical,” Petra protested. “She’s just being brave enough to put herself out there.”
“Where art and commerce intersect,” Jake said. “You make art, you sell it—to make a living, to get some validation—you make compromises with your art to make a living—why not go the whole way? Which isn’t to say she doesn’t believe as deeply in heavy metal as she does in early music.”
We had planned to leave before the Body Artist came onstage, but the lively arguments in our party—accompanied by the amount of beer and wine everyone was putting away—went on until the houselights were dimmed again for the evening’s main event.
Young men at tables around us gave catcalls and stomped their feet in anticipation. During the intermission, I’d been watching a table in the middle of the room. The five young men sitting there were all drinking heavily, but two in particular had been banging their beer bottles on the tabletop, demanding that the Body Artist get going. When the lights went down, theirs were the shrillest whistles in a noisy room.
We sat in the dark for perhaps thirty seconds. When the lights came back up, the Body Artist had appeared onstage.
She sat on a high stool, very still. She was naked except for an electron-sized thong, but cream-colored foundation covered her body, including her face. Only her brown hair, swept up from her neck in a jeweled clip, belonged to the world of the living.
The Artist was completely at ease, her bare legs crossed yoga style, her palms pressed together in front of her breasts. It was the audience that was disturbed: little rustlings, as people crossed and uncrossed legs or fiddled with zippers. Explosions of whispered laughter.
Behind the woman, photographs of body art appeared on a series of screens: a field of lilies grew out of a vagina, with the flowers blooming across the breasts. A face painted like a tiger, magnified so that each whisker, each stripe around the muzzle, was visible. The tiger was replaced by a jungle scene that covered the back: elephants trumpeted on the shoulder blades, a giraffe straddled the spinal column. The jungle was followed by a giant blue eye, lid lowered, on an abdomen, seeming to wink at the vulva below.
The slides changed in time to a sound track of Middle Eastern music. At the front of the stage, two figures clad in burkas gyrated in time to the music. I hadn’t noticed them at first, but the burkas somehow exaggerated the eroticism of the dancers’ movements and made them almost as disturbing as the body art itself.
I was as uncomfortable as the rest of the audience. The spotlight on the Artist’s breasts, the sense that this was a mannequin sitting there, not a woman, was both arousing and unpleasant, and I resented my body for responding to what my mind rejected. Jake Thibaut shifted away from me involuntarily, while Mr. Contreras said in a loud whisper, “This ain’t right. It just ain’t right!”
The Artist let the tension build until we were all ready to claw at each other, and then she lowered her hands, palms open toward us, in seeming invitation. “Art is in the hands of the maker, it’s in the eyes of the beholder, it’s in the air we breathe, the sunsets we admire, the dead bodies we wash and wrap in linens for burial. My body is my canvas, but tonight it’s yours as well. Tonight is a night to let your imagination run free and to paint, the way you used to paint in kindergarten before you started worrying what someone might say about your work, your art. I’m your canvas, your—bare—canvas.”
The five guys who’d been pounding their table, demanding the start of the Artist’s act, now whistled and called out. One of them shouted, “Take it all off, girl, take off that thong thing. Let’s see some p-ssy!”
I half turned to look at them. One of them was trying to signal for another round. All five were big guys, and the one shouting for the Body Artist to take off her thong had the kind of muscles you get from lifting heavy stuff all day long. The room was lit dimly, but I could make out a thicket of tattoos along his arms.
The woman on the stool smiled. Maybe she was used to drunken vulgarity. Maybe she enjoyed it.
“Can’t we get a drink here?” the tattooed man cried, slapping the table.
“Cool it, Chad,” one of his tablemates said.
I looked around for the bouncer and saw him at the back of the room, talking to the owner. They had their eye on the table and seemed to think the quintet didn’t need professional attention just yet, but as I watched, I saw the owner shake her head at the waitstaff: No drinks right now, at least not in Chad’s part of the room.
The Body Artist held out her arms to the tattooed man so that her breasts drooped forward, hanging like fruit above her thighs. “You and I both like body art, don’t we? Come on up, I won’t bite. Draw your heart’s desire on my body.”
“Go on, Chad,” his buddies urged him, “go for it, do it. Like the lady says, she don’t bite. Or at least not in front of all these other people she won’t.”
The group began to laugh and pound each other, and the tension eased out of the room.
The Body Artist picked up a brush from a tray of open paint cans on a cart beside her and began painting on her leg. For a moment, we forgot the strangeness of her nudity and watched as she picked up different brushes. She worked quickly, talking the whole time, about the body art convention she’d just attended, about gallery shows around town, about her childhood cat, Basta.
As she painted, the two burka-clad figures posed on the stage, periodically shifting legs or arms into new positions that mimed pleasure or excitement in the Artist’s work.
After five minutes, the Body Artist stood, showing off her painting. Only people in the front of the club could see it, but they all clapped and cheered. The rest of us craned, and Chad and his friends got restive again. Before their complaints grew too loud, one of the burkaed figures picked up a camera from the cart that held the Artist’s paints and other supplies. The Artist beckoned a man from the table directly in front of the stage. He had the embarrassed exchange with her that people often do when they’re called up from the audience by the magician. After a moment, though, he joined her on the raised platform that served as Club Gouge’s stage.
One of the dancers handed the camera to the man, and the Artist directed him to point it at her leg. The image appeared on one of the screens: a cat, elongated, disdainful, in the Egyptian style. Underneath it, the Artist had written “Let’s see some p-ssy.”
The room roared with laughter. Everyone had been upset by the catcalls from Chad and his drunk friends and was delighted to see them put down. Chad’s face seemed to darken in the dim room, but his buddies kept their hands on his arms, and he didn’t try to get up from the table.
The Body Artist kidded and prodded the man who’d joined her onstage into taking up a paintbrush. He drew a red stripe down her left arm.
“Now your work will be internationally famous,” the Artist said. She handed the camera back to her dancers. One of them focused on her striped arm, which appeared on the middle of the three screens. “These go up in my picture gallery,” she said. “You can sign it, if you want, or just tell your friends what to look for.”
The man, who was as red as the stripe he’d painted, said he didn’t need all that recognition. “You’re the artist,” he said, “you get the credit.” He bowed to her awkwardly and left the platform, to another burst of applause.
After that, several other people felt bold enough to draw on the Artist. No one was able to match any of the elaborate paintings that kept flashing on the screens, but after a bit they’d covered her breasts with blue and green streaks, and someone had drawn a yellow smiley face on one of the Artist’s shoulder blades.
Mr. Contreras grew more disturbed as the painting progressed. He wanted to have it out with Petra, but Jake persuaded him that a noisy club wasn’t the place for an argument. Max, sizing up my neighbor’s agitation, said he had a meeting in the morning, and Lotty had an early surgery call: they were leaving; they would take Mr. Contreras with them.
The old man grudgingly agreed, much to my relief. The thought of riding home with him while he vented his frustration on me was a treat I hadn’t been looking forward to. I gave Lotty a grateful kiss, and returned to the table with Jake. Mr. Contreras tried to force Petra to leave with them, but she gave him her biggest, brightest smile and said she’d stay until the end of the act.
The Body Artist kept up a sort of patter while people painted on her. Occasionally, someone would say something that seemed to genuinely interest her, but most of her responses sounded aloof, almost amused at our expense, even while her words celebrated “the community of artists” in which we found ourselves.
One heavyset man walked up to the platform with a kind of rolling gait that made me think of a beat cop. In fact, as he bent to inspect the cans of paint I was pretty sure I could see the outline of his holster. I wondered for a moment if he was going to try to arrest the Artist for indecent exposure, but he dipped a brush into the can of red paint. After inspecting her body for bare spaces, he drew some numbers and letters on her buttocks—everyone else had been too squeamish to touch those. He picked up the camera himself and pointed it at his master-piece. Ignoring the applause and jeers from the audience, he rolled back to his seat.
Just as Jake and I decided we also had seen and heard enough, another woman stepped onto the small stage. She didn’t say anything to the Body Artist or the audience, but began painting with the kind of focus none of the other volunteers had shown. The two dancers had mimed enthusiasm throughout the show, but now they seemed genuinely engaged by the work in progress. They began filming, and we all saw the woman’s work: stylized flames that covered the Artist’s back were overlaid with an intricate design, scrolls of fleurs-de-lis done in pink and gray. The painter was adding a face to her composition when the tattooed man began shouting again.
“Are you dissing me, bitch? Are you dissing me?”
Chad stood so quickly his buddies couldn’t hold him. His chair clattered to the floor, and he tried barging past the customer tables to the stage. By that time, the bouncer had reached Chad. He used some moves that I hadn’t seen since I left South Chicago. Chad was doubled over and out the door in under a minute.
The bouncer’s speed and ability subdued Chad’s buddies. When a server suggested they settle their tab and join their friend outside, one of them pulled a fistful of bills from his pocket and laid them on the table without counting or even looking at the check. All four left as quickly as they could.
The owner, a tall woman about my age, climbed onto the small stage. In her own way, she was as striking as the Body Artist. Her hair was black except for a streak of white that fell artistically over her forehead, and she was wearing a big white satin shirt, tucked into skintight black pants. She introduced herself as Olympia Koilada.
“We all owe a big round of applause to our Body Artist. Have fun, but be safe, use protection.” She flashed a peace sign, and walked back to the bar.
Canned music began to throb and whine through the room, and the noise in the audience grew loud with relief. Jake and his friends decided to take the Raven out for a late dinner. He was good-natured enough to include Petra, but she announced that she was staying on to talk to the manager.
“I heard them say at the bar that they’re shorthanded, and I need more work,” Petra said. “You know, my nine-to-five, we’re kind of going day to day on whether we’ll even have jobs at Christmas, so this would be great.”
“A club job would be great?” I said. “It would be even more unreliable than your day gig.” Petra was working for a Web-based design firm.
“Have you seen the way people are tipping?” Petra’s eyes sparkled. “I used to work as a hostess, you know, in the summers, at my folks’ country club. The waitstaff never pulled this kind of change, and we still had some pretty good tips.”
I wondered if I should try to do more to stop her. Petra was only twenty-three, and, in some ways, I felt responsible for her. She’d stopped taking money from her parents after learning about a serious crime her father had spent his life covering up, and she wasn’t used to looking after herself full-time.
Jake waited, a little impatiently, while I tried to talk Petra out of applying for work at the club.
“Don’t be a snob, Vic,” he said. “I was a roadie in clubs like this all through my twenties, didn’t do me any harm. Let’s go. I told the others we’d catch up with them at the restaurant.”
I followed him into the bitter night. The backup at the parking lot exit looked as though it might take twenty minutes, but an alley ran behind the club; I turned my Mustang around and eased my way against the flow of the traffic.
“Petra was right, it was awesome,” Jake said. “And at the same time disturbing, especially those dancers in their burkas. I suppose anyone doing art is manipulating public emotions. I do it myself, so why does her expression seem to cross a boundary?”
“It’s the body,” I said. “You can’t get away from it. Whether we like it or not, we live in a world where the exposed female body is a turn-on. Music only suggests the erotic or the private self. The Body Artist forces you to see the private.”
“Maybe. Bass players, we have a reputation as the crudest of musicians, so if I’m uncomfortable at a public display of nudity it makes me think I’m not a genuine bassist. I will confess, in private and to you alone, that I sat there feeling like I didn’t have enough clothes on.”
I laughed. “Speaking under cover of darkness, I also confess—Hello, what are they doing?”
I had turned in to the alley. Chad and his friends were hovering outside Club Gouge’s back entrance. I stopped the car.
“Vic, please don’t get out to fight them. I’ve had enough excitement for one night.”
“I never get to have any fun,” I whined, but added, “Of course I’m not going to fight them, but I do think the club’s nifty bouncer needs to know these guys are hanging around.”
I made sure the car doors were locked and pulled out my cell phone, but when the quintet saw us, they moved on down the alley. Ice packed with dirt made the going treacherous, and one of the gang tripped and fell, which gave me time to trail them while I looked up the club’s phone number. By the time I’d bumped through the ice and potholes to the street, the men were circling back along Lake Street, toward the main entrance to the club.
“Vic, not that I’m trying to tell you what to do, but you know I’m not going to risk my fingers if you go after them,” Jake said. “And I’m pining for bouillabaisse.”
His tone was light, but he wasn’t joking—his fingers were his livelihood. I didn’t know whether to laugh or feel hurt. “Do you really see me as someone who’s so pining to fight that I’d take on five drunks twice my size and half my age? My only weapon right now is my cell phone.”
“I’ve seen you come home covered in burns and bruises; I’ve never been with you when you got them. How was I to know?” Jake squeezed my shoulder to take the edge off his words.
Of course, when I used to cruise South Chicago in my cousin Boom-Boom’s wake, there were plenty of times I found myself fighting for no reason I could ever figure out. I decided not to tell Jake about it. It would be hard to persuade him that I’d matured since then.
Someone finally picked up the club’s phone. A late-night L clattered overhead as she answered, and, at her end, the music and crowd noise were just as deafening, but she finally realized I wanted to speak to the owner, Olympia Koilada. By this time, I was back in front of the club in time to see Chad and his friends get into their RAV4.
Olympia didn’t seem concerned about the guys. “I don’t know who you are or why you think it’s your business—you’re a private eye?—and you think your nose belongs in my business? I don’t think so. Controversy brings people to the club, and the Artist knows it. She also knows how to look after herself. I’ve got a live show coming on in two minutes. Ciao.”
The girders to the Lake Street L, and all the similar SUVs streaming in and out of the club’s parking lot, made it hard to keep an eye on the RAV4. I finally gave in to Jake’s plea that we get to the restaurant.