Late in the summer of 1978 an Upper East Side photographer asked me to write a photo-roman about a sadistic kidnapping. I cast my co-worker Klaus Sperber as the black leather villain. The Gothic singer was the daytime pastry chef at Serendipity 3. I was a busboy there and Anthony lived above the swishy ice cream shop of East 60th Street. Upon meeting Klaus at the Kiev Coffee Shop, the photographer was smitten by his ghostly face.
"You were made for film." Anthony started snapping pictures. We were waiting for our female lead. I didn't know her.
"My voice was made for the opera." The gaunt German loved to perform forgotten castrati role. "But I don't believe in movies. Too many frames showing the same thing when only one needs to show the true emotion."
"Like Gloria Swanson at the end of SUNSET BOULEVARD." I loved Billy Wilder films.
"I can always pretend to be her." Klaus grimaced with a stolen toothy smile and pursed his black-painted lips. He was a natural mimic. "Who is the leading man?"
"No one yet." Anthony's eye hadn't left the viewfinder.
"What about him?" Klaus pointed my direction.
"He’s a little brutish." Anthony swung the camera and focused the lens on my face.
"Like a caveman." Klaus snidely commented about my hard-boned features. "You know his name at Serendipity 3 was Bam Bam after some stupid American TV show THE FLINTSTONES."
"I'm not an actor." I trembled like LA in an earthquake.
"You don't have to act. All you have to do is pose." Anthony shifted his camera to the entrance, as the second coming of Veronica Lake entered the diner. Every man at the counter followed the click of the blonde's stiletto heels. Her knee-length black skirt was slit to a vee revealing her white upper thigh and her black polka-dot shirt was unbuttoned to a vanilla navel.
"This is Clover." Anthony invited her to sit down. "We met at Club 82.”
"I like dancing with transvestites. They don't hassle me like straight men." Clover pushed a sheet of blonde hair from her face. She wasn't wearing a bra. Anthony lifted his Leica. Clover dropped her head for the curtain of hair to cover half an eye. "Are you the hero?"
"Yes." There was no saying no.
"Good. I like my men rough." Her voice slurred this preference for sultry surrender. "My sponsor like it rough too."
"He's also the writer." Klaus said with a keen interest in his acting partner. He was into straight men.
"So what's the story?" The 19 year-old arched an eyebrow. "Something sexy I hope."
"It's about the three of us."
"And?"
"I haven't written a word," I confessed with a shrug.
"The story will write itself with you three in it." Anthony pressed the shutter button. The camera swiveled from Klaus to Clover to me. Its aperture clicked open and shut like a robot attempting to wake from a long recharge. "We can make it up as we go."
"Like life. Like Art." Klaus believed in keeping it simple and I built a story around his kidnapping Clover's character to finance an opera about the last castrati on Earth.
We huffed poppers for one scene. Clover stripped near-naked in another. Klaus cut my eyes blind in another. Bandages transformed me into a blind mummy. She lay on my bare flesh wearing nothing but a scent of another man.
"My sponsor had me when I was a little girl. He thinks I'm too old now. Nineteen isn't old, is it?"
"No." I was twenty-five. When I was fourteen, Clover had been eight. “You were lucky to get out of Texas."
"I never looked back." Clover could make it to the bright lights of Hollywood. Nothing was pretend with her.
Our shoots ran late, as we shoot scenes over the city. Tenement fires were our lighting. Sirens backed our sound. My girlfriend accused me of having an affair.
I wished that Alice were right, except Clover slept with men for money.
"I don't tell the oilman about them. He thinks he's the only one, but his friends pay me $1000 a night and I'm worth every penny."
A grand a night was out of my price range and I had to be satisfied with pretending that I was sleeping with her. Alice was not pleased with the illusion and neither was I.
Our last shoot was on 42nd Street.
After midnight Times Square was awash with wickedness. We posed on 42nd Street with the pimps, whores, and drug dealers. Clover looked the part of a rich man's mistress and I could pass for a detective in my pinstriped suit. The final scene was set in a XXX shop. The clerk would allow anything for $20. Anthony set up his tripod before the open doors of a porno booth. The voyeurs watched us for free. Clover wanted their quarters. Behind us the booth's 8mm loop repeated the ravishing of a young blonde by an older man.
When I imitated the on-screen action, Clover whispered, "On my fourteenth birthday the oilman raped me. He bought my parents a new house. He's been taking care of me ever since. You ever rape anyone?"
"No." Soldiers of the Sexual Revolution raped no one.
"Do you think you could? If it was me?" Five years as the oilman's mistress had introduced a special game to Clover and she teasingly shut the booth door. "If it was a game?"
"No." I snatched at her arm.
"Too bad. You'll never know what you're missing." She pushed open the door and the camera strobe caught our struggle.
