You Bet I Would - Kim Novak

I don't think I would have needed up on top.

Dead Dreams

Most people think that it is impossible to dream about your death. Common myth upholds to dream of your death would cause your own death, however according to experts most dreams of death symbolize a renewal of life or a change in the path of your destiny. Freudians regard all dreams interpreting the two basic drives in life; sex and death.

I came close to dying in my dream after eating a potato taco in a small Mexican village. That night my stomach rumbled and my head was filled with danger, as I read HP Lovecraft. THE TERROR AT INNSMOUTH was not the best story to read before sleep.

In my dream zombies chased me through a garden. I was trapped in a screened gazebo. Their fingernails scratched at the thin barrier.

"Stop." A dirt-covered zombie called out to his minions. "Tell me the secret of human life and we will let you live for another 60 seconds."

"The secret of human life?" I was stumped having only score a C in Philosophy 101, then it came to me. The secret of human life was that even though my end was going to be horrible, I wanted those extra sixty seconds.

"I'm waiting." The undead's overlord was impatient and I rewarded his vice by waking up and saving the human race. I asked several psychic friends for an interpretation of this dream. Most said that dying wasn't bad.

"But I didn't die. I only met dead people."

The majority of the dream-soothers considered this encounter to be the subconsciousness' way of grieving, except none of the zombies had been family members or friends or foe.

The only psychic with any sense was an old gypsy woman on the Lower East Side.

"Some dreams don't mean anything. They just are. Same as death as in life."

I believed her words until dying in a series of dreams in 1982.

I died from nuclear blasts in New York, Moscow, and a Siberian airfield after making love with a Russian airwoman. The dreams occurred over a three month period during the Pershing missile deployment in Germany. I was living in Hamburg. The sex and death aspects of these dreams were overpowered by the premonition of impending doom.

My fear of nuclear holocaust was superseded by the threat of a German pimp, who said that owed him 20,000 for having sex with one of his girls. Ilsa never said she was working. SS Tommy laughed, saying everyone in Hamburg was working for someone.

I fled northern Germany, leaving behind a car and apartment.

No nuclear bombs killed me and neither had SS Tommy.

Not in reality or my dreams.

THE BOUQUET OF RUINS by Peter Nolan Smith

Dec 1982

Some cities are best defined by songs such as APRIL IN PARIS or AUTUMN IN NEW YORK, but Hamburg defied music, especially as winter weather skimmed off the North Sea to besiege the harbor city with endless rain, cold, and darkness. Every day the night conquered a few more minutes of light and our once-popular club on Epperdoffer Weg was deserted by the attractive youth, the esoteric intelligentsia, and the wicked rich, who sought the warm comfort of their homes rather than B-Sirs.

The sleek nightclub had been designed to resemble CLOCKWORK ORANGE's milk bar.

The fashion people of Hamburg had loved the place throughout the summer, but with autumn the clientele had been replaced by pimps and off-duty prostitutes from the Reeperbahn. Neither liked to pay for their drinks and my share of the profits shrank to nothing.

Henri, the DJ from Paris, and I counted the days until we called it quits, only I wasn't telling management about my departure in case I wanted to come back after the holidays.

Only one person deserved an 'auf wiedersehen'.

I had been seeing Astrid since early October. The blonde twenty year-old studied fashion at the University. Her dramatic overbite and an aquiline nose stole any chance of her being called beautiful, but the slender Astrid was very accommodating in bed and took the time to improve my German.

"I may be leaving," I told her after a lengthy session nearing dawn.

"Are you going for good?" she asked with an imaginative lisp.

"Maybe. Maybe not. You can always visit me."

"Where?" She dressed conservatively for school and stuffed her night clothes in a stylish leather bag. The blonde had morning classes.

"Paris."

"And not New York."

"No."

New York was off-bounds for reasons unexplainable to anyone in Europe.

"And you are not coming back?"

"To Hamburg?"

"Ja."

"Vielleicht." The cold dark wet murk of the North Sea port worsened after Christmas.

"When will you leave?"

"Before Christmas."

"Then we will have more than one occasion to say 'auf wiedersehen'."

"Das ist rechtig."

Astrid kissed me on the lips and left my Milchstrasse apartment.

I returned to sleep.

That evening SS Tommy showed up at the bar early. The few customers in the club avoided the six-foot enforcer for the GMbH. Astrid stood at the door dressed in a fur with very little else underneath. She normally never showed until after midnight. Something about this combination didn't add up to two. SS Tommy handed me a piece of paper.

"What's this." The total came to almost 10,000 DMs or $6500 US.

"A bill." His scarred finger jabbed the top of the 'rechtung'.

"Oh." My high school German coupled with Astrid's lessons allowed my to translate the long list consisted of charges for sex. "What's this?"

"This is what you owe for the nights with Astrid."

"Astrid? I didn't know she worked for you."

She smiled at me with a crooked grin.

"Not all our girls work the Eros Center." His gang ran a string of more than two hundred women on the Reeperbahn. Each had sex five times a night. 200 DMs times five times two-hundred women came to $100,000 a night. SS Tommy owed three Ferraris. He worked for Cali, who owned B-Sirs. "Everything is there."

I checked the bill again. Each act was itemized by date.

"She never said anything about working for you," I said in rough German.

"Everyone in Hamburg works for someone." The Zuhalters were infamously violent and SS Tommy was no exception. I had to offer him a gesture.

"Here are the keys to my car."

SS Tommy took the car keys for the VW, which I had paid 7000 six months ago.

"Where's it parked?"

"At the mechanic shop."

Two days earlier I had driven the orange VW into a tree. The mechanic had said last rites over the chassis. It was a total write-off,

"Warum?" asked SS Tommy.

"Just getting a turn-up." It was an easy lie to tell.

"Das ist gut, du musst gibt morgen 5000 Marks mehr." SS Tommy grabbed my arm in a claw grip to insure that I understood his demands.

"Kein problem." My shoulder muscles had gone dead, as his fingers dug into my flesh. Pain radiated through my body. He wanted money not a car.

"I'll give you a free night with Astrid." SS Tommy clicked his fingers. "Stay with him. I don't want him running out on me."

"Jawohl." She was good at taking orders as are all Germans.

I told the manager that I was going home early and left the club with the blonde. Everyone avoided me, as if I had the plague. No one had friends, when SS Tommy was your enemy.

Back at my apartment Astrid apologized for telling SS Tommy about my departure.

"Kein problem, but why had you made up a list?"

"For me to remember you." Astrid caressed my shoulder. >p>For a few seconds I almost believed her.

We had sex, as if nothing had changed between us and I suppose that it hadn't.

Afterwards I got up from bed.

"Are you leaving now?"

"A little later. There's a late train to Paris," I said nothing about the 5000 DMs under my bed.

SS Tommy wasn't getting a pfennig of it.

Neither was Astrid.

After a glass of sekt she went to take a shower, promising me a night to remember.

"Maybe I do 1000 Marks worth."

"That would be nice." I smiled sipping my glass of pesudo-champagne.

As soon as the bathroom door shut, I grabbed my cash and wrapped a wire hangar around the doorknob, trapping Astrid inside.

Within minutes I was ready to leave. I didn't have much to show for six months in Hamburg, but I didn't need much in Paris.

I heard thumping on the bathroom door.

Shouts followed.

"Chus," I shouted, leaving a note on the kitchen table to SS Tommy that the bed, chairs, table, and everything else were his.

I liked this deal better than paying my debt.

I bent over to pick up Astrid's underwear off the floor. I liked her smell. I stuffed them in my bag.

A minute later I caught a taxi on Mittelweg.

"Bahnhof."

Ten minutes later I was in the station. The night was cold. I bought a ticket for the 12:34am train to Paris.

After that I hid on the platform like a spy fleeing Nazi Germany.

The southbound train pulled out of the station on time. My compartment was empty. The train stopped at every station. The towns sounded like battlefields. I didn't sleep until we passed through Dutch customs.

Dawn brightened the gray skies on a landscape of ruined steel factories of the Low Countries. These industries had been destroyed by Japanese competition. The decay stretched from border to border into Belgium. The wet of the winter carried the corruption of rust and concrete. It smelled of death and I pulled out Astrid's panties. They were French silk.

The conductor announced our ETA in Paris was 9:23am.

After arriving at Gare Du Nord I took the Metro to St. Germain, where I booked a room at the Hotel Louisiane and then breakfasted at the Cafe de Flore

Cafe du lait, croissant, and a Calvados said Paris and I sang APRIL IN PARIS to myself.

SS Tommy would never find me here.

Astrid's panties were still in my pocket. I stole a whiff and inhaled the fading fragrance of cinnamon and sweat with a tang of herring. We had had a good thing for a few months and I smiled thinking that I would never see her crooked smile again.

And that was a good thing for this winter, especially since I couldn't see that far into summer.

For that was Hamburg's season to shine.

EVES IN THE FLESH

In the winter of 1995 I was sitting at my desk in the diamond exchange, when Scottie Taylor phoned from LA.

"How you doing?"

"Great, I'm opening a Milk Bar in Beverly Hills. How'd you like to be the doorman?" The ex-lightweight mentioned the numbers. The salary was on par with what I earned selling diamonds for Manny on West 47th Street.

"What's the weather like?" Gray snow covered the sidewalks of the Diamond District and icy slush filled the gutters. The temperature hovered well below freezing. Business was dead this time of year and I calculated that I could double my salary on tips at an LA nightclub.

"Sunny."

"Any rain?" This time of year Pacific monsoons splashed the Santa Monica Mountains and transformed the yellow slopes to gold.

"Sometimes, but not enough to cause any floods."

"We got a place to live?" I had never lived in California.

"A pool house in North Hollywood. My friend Dennis owns it and a go-go club too."

"Go-Go bar?" I had been a big supporter of the exotic arts ever since frequenting Boston's Naked I in 1970 and honestly preferred stripping to ballet.

"Best in LA. Every morning the girls come over to touch up their tan."

"Naked?"

Paving Over Paradise

My first visit to Bangkok was in 1990. I stayed at the Malaysia Hotel on Soi Duplei, once the 60s haunt of the infamous backpacker murderer Charles Sobhraj. The trees were bordered by sylvan compounds and I played basketball at the military school next to the Lumpini Muay-Thai stadium. Patpong was a twenty-minute walk through small sois. The city retained the charm of its past, although nothing like the Bangkok of the 1950s.

Prominent farangs and Thais drove Ford Fairlanes. Opposing traffic was the occasional tuk-tuk and trolley. The Hotel Royalle had an unobstructed view of the river. A beer on the veranda was 10 baht. The waitress wai-ed with a smile.

Most people traveled by the klong ferries. Kids swam off the docks and the water was drinkable. Klong Toey was the after-night destination for Thais and ex-pats. The infamous Mosquito Bar featuring dim-lighting? First and foremost among the Klong Toey bars was the notorious 2nd floor Mosquito Bar on Kasemrat Road.

According to old-timers this dive's seedy decor was camouflaged by a stygian darkness dispelled by the occasional flicker of a match. The gloom suited the female dok-thongs, since their age in the dim illumination was indecipherable to the drunken patrons. The beers were reputably cold and no one ever got killed in the frequent chair-throwing fights.

Equally disreputable was The Venus Bar, which the late David Musserie claimed was Thailand's seminal go-go bar serviced by Klong Toey slum girls.

When asked about bar fines, he laughed with his ample belly jiggling like Jello under electro-shock.

"I think it was 10 baht. The Venus was paradise, because it was only for locals. We knew each other. Sort of CHEERS for the wicked and the little angels, until they got mad and then it was every man for himself running for the door."

Hundreds of bars are packed in Nana. I can't say I like drinking in any of them.

If only I had a way-back machine.

Wouldn't it be nice?

For further information on these bars please go the following URL

http://snesejler.dk/bill77.htm

GO GO Safety

My cousin Sherrie performed exotic dances around the world. Her skill with a firepole was legendary and a smile graced her face through every routine before a devoted audience smitten with a drool factor of 10. The slim brunette was their goddess, but even goddesses feel pain like mermaids with feet.

No one saw her grimace upon getting backstage or heard her mutter, "My feet are killing me.

Not only her feet, but her hands thighs, knees, and back ached from the exertions of the strenuous acrobatics under the spotlight. She swore the worst damage came from wearing high-heels during these shows.

"Barefoot would be better, but it's so no class."

Things haven't changed much since Sharon's retirement, however a safety class opened in the once notorious Patpong district in Bangkok, so that go-go girls can mesh their fluid movement on a fire pole with elegant dance steps destined to prevent injury usually suffered by ballerinas.

"Go-go dancing should be upgraded to an art," stated Empower Foundation director Chantawipa Apisuk during the Patpong go-go contest of 2006. Her non-profit institution has development many courses for go-go girls and bar workers to improve their lot in life. The contest stressed introductory courses in jazz and ballroom dance to prevent injuries to the over 5000 girls employed at the Patpong bars.

Safety regulation for dancers are non-existent other than for their extra-curricular activities outside the nightclubs, but go-go dancing is an art and should be treated as such by the dancers and spectators. Most girls lazily shuffle side to side.

Beautiful? Yes.

Exciting ? No.

Even the best are imitating the moves from pop stars such as Lady Gaga and Beyonce.

Boring, because most real men don?t want to have sex with those pop sluts.

But better the go-go girls of Patpong and Pattaya concentrate on the learning real dance rather than the spinning firepole routines, because then the real stars came become erotic choreographers for future go-go dancers. Most girls haven?t a clue how to dance and it shows. Not that the beer slobs care. They haven?t seen a naked girl in the flesh in years. And it shows by their appreciation of the less than skillful performances.

Applause for sucking on a banana.

I guess so, but real erotic dancing in the style of Salome comes from practice.

And safety always comes first especially when you want to cut off the head of your rivals. The best acrobatic go-go was GG Barnum?s in New York. Transvestite strippers put on a trapeze act, where they would take off their g-strings in mid-flight. 1978 New York New York It was something back then. No place like that now.

Ashbury Park Bikinis

Jersey beaches have a tough reputation as the land of no.

No radios, no dogs, no beer, no footballs, no, no, no.

Back in 1980 two girls from Ashbury Park saw it different.

They were free to say yes or no.

I like their style.

Foto from Joe Maloney

Which I found on https://missrosen.wordpress.com