Chapter 16: Funny Girlfriend

BATHING ROSE was a treat. We touched and kissed and talked. She’d been in Las Vegas since she got out of high school, starting as a stripper, and then getting a chorus part in a revue. You don’t move up all that fast as a Las Vegas showgirl. But she’d come to the attention of a rich guy who said he’d help with her career. She called him a sugar daddy and said most of the girls tried to get one.

“Al’s a good one,” she said. “He likes to have time with me, but he isn’t hung up on being my only guy, as long as he’s my only sugar daddy. If he found out I was taking money from other guys, he’d get pissed. But he doesn’t get upset if I see a guy who revs my engines a little.”

“Is he in our audience?” I asked.

“No. He set this all up for me and talked to me a long time about whether I really wanted to do it. It was obvious, though, that he wanted me to, so of course I agreed. And I can’t argue with the money and a first class trip to Chicago. My lower lips were freezing on the way over here tonight. I’m not used to being this cold.”

“Oh, it just started warming up here. But let’s see if I can warm up your poor pussy a little.”

I crawled down under the covers and got myself intimately acquainted with her pussy. And I got to hear her orgasm for the first time. That was just the first time for the night. We did a lot of petting and kissing and talking. And a lot of fucking.

“The guys—you call them your patrons—aren’t the nicest people in the world. If you hadn’t come to my room with me tonight, it’s likely one of them would have and I wouldn’t have had any choice in the matter,” she said.

“Shit. You invited me here to protect you? You didn’t need to fuck me to get that. I’d have just stayed out on the sofa.”

“Nate, I wanted to fuck you. I didn’t invite you just to protect me from someone else. I’d have called Al and he’d have put the word out that I wasn’t to be disturbed. The guys have a kind of ethics, I guess you’d say. They won’t infringe on each other’s property. But they lack morals. I think they’d do just about anything,” she said.

I was enjoying some nice time just kissing and petting her. She truly had a great body. And she was an enthusiastic lover.

“I don’t really know any of them. The only people I ever have contact with are Mr. Levinson and Mr. Mayer. I don’t think either of them are really part of any organization. My patrons have all been anonymous, except the one guy from the equipment company that I’ve met once.”

“I don’t know everyone who was here,” Rose said. “There’s been a lot of shifting around in Vegas the past three years. Howard Hughes owns, like, all the strip now. Even some of the guys who used to be involved at low levels of the family are employed by Hughes now. You’re probably getting money indirectly from him.”

“Isn’t he, like, an airplane guy?”

“From what I hear, he’s mostly just weird. No one ever sees him, but he’s got people running all over everywhere carrying out his orders. He’s produced some movies, too, I guess.”

“I’m sure they’ll tell me what they want me to know eventually. Until then, I’ll keep doing what I do,” I said.

“Yeah. Keep doing what you’re doing right now. There. Yes! Do me again, Nate.”

I pressed into her again and we began moving. By morning, we were both exhausted.

We got to the studio at eleven, carrying breakfast from a local deli and coffee for all the girls. They’d been there an hour already and had the castle drop set up and some medieval props set out. We all sat and talked while we ate and drank our coffee.

“Did you get what you wanted last night?” Elizabeth whispered to Rose.

“It’s a wonder I can walk,” Rose whispered back. I think both girls knew I could hear them since they were sitting on either side of me. “Just thank you for letting him be with me. You know I was just so charged up after yesterday I was ready to explode.”

“Don’t I know it. Are you wanting to become a girlfriend now?” Beth asked.

“Um ... No, thank you. I mean, last night was great, but I live in Vegas. I definitely don’t need a boyfriend in Chicago,” Rose laughed. “But you guys have to come and visit sometime. Bring all the girlfriends and I’ll be happy to show you around.”

“There isn’t all that much for us under twenty-one to do,” I said.

“You’d be surprised. There are lots of shows and some great places to explore outside. And just walking down Fremont will give you an idea of what Vegas was like when they first created a town out there,” Rose said. “Listen to me. I sound like a travel agent.”

“Nothing wrong with liking your town,” I said. “I think we should start. How’s the fan working with the fabric?” I asked as we headed to the stage area.

“As long as we don’t use too much fabric, we can really make it whip around,” Theresa said. “If she’s cloaked with a lot of fabric, it will move, but it won’t flow out much.”

“It’s so noisy!” Rose said. “We’d never be able to use something that loud in our show. It would drown out the singers.”

“True, but we don’t care if our audience hears anything,” I laughed. “We aren’t recording sound in our pictures.”

“Oh, yeah! Well, what do I need to do?”

We started experimenting with the wind and fabric, testing different combinations as Rose held them and moved around.

“Okay, we’ll set this up as the princess fleeing the castle,” I said. “I’ll want to isolate action against certain parts of the backdrop. Leora, let’s get Rose into one of those formals we’ve got that looks like a princess gown. We must have a tiara back there someplace. And what is she fleeing with? Cassie, is there a big old-fashioned book back there? Something that looks like it could contain the history of the kingdom, or all the magic that has accumulated over the centuries. And she should have a leather bag, too. We’ll think about what to put in it. If we don’t have leather, just make sure it doesn’t look like a purse or a shopping bag. I think we want a tree. Do we have something?”

The girls started scrambling. I took Rose behind the privacy screen and started undressing and dressing her.

“It’s not quite as tense today as yesterday,” she said. “I know I don’t mind having you touch me anyplace. Kiss me?”

I gave her a little kiss and then went back to fastening the princess gown on her. She looked like Snow White.

“That’s one of the reasons for the no sex rule that I thoroughly violated last night,” I said. “Everything should have that tension and excitement. You should never expect that I will just come back here and make out with you. When it happens, it should be a surprise.”

“Yes, sir. I understand and I’ll be good. As much as you want me to be,” she giggled.

“Barefoot for this. You haven’t had time to put on shoes before you fled. Your dress isn’t even completely fastened. You’ll need to hold it here so it doesn’t fall off,” I said as I led her to the stage.

Cassie handed me a big old leatherbound book. It looked like a Bible when I opened it, but it wasn’t written in English. It didn’t say ‘Bible’ anywhere, so I figured it would work just fine. I put the tiara on her blonde hair and stood back to look. Not bad. Cassie hung a canvas bag on her shoulder, almost causing the front of Rose’s gown to drop. The bag was blue, which I considered a little out of place, but the color would be lost in my black and white photo. We had to make sure that the logo for the Chicago International Livestock Show was on the side of the bag away from the camera.

Then we started with the poses and I started taking pictures. I hadn’t noticed if the audience had arrived, but if they were late, they didn’t disturb us. We set the lighting as if it was a night scene, making the backdrop into a shadowy presence. I positioned Rose in different action poses, including tripping, falling, crawling, and rolling. In the course of the action, as she made her way across the stage and we continually shifted the lights, her dress came loose and she crawled out of it, dragging it behind her.

We worked for over an hour and a half before I scooped Rose up to carry her behind the privacy screen to change for the next scene. The girls went about changing out the backdrop to the forest scene.

“You carried me off like I couldn’t just stand up and walk,” Rose said as she hugged me before I set her down in the chair. I took the book and bag from her. The dress was still on the stage.

“The audience can see you when you’re performing,” I said. “They don’t need to stare at you as you are leaving the stage or changing costumes.”

“That’s sweet,” she said.

“More than sweet,” I answered. “Even in Vegas, you develop a mystique on the stage. The audience might see you completely nude, but then the curtain comes down. They aren’t invited backstage to see you change costumes or have a drink of water. Seeing you in the dressing room would break the mystique of the stage.”

“You’re right. Being seen naked on stage is part of the performance,” Rose said. “Being seen naked in the dressing room is an invasion of privacy. It is different. I just didn’t think of it translating to what we were doing in the studio.”

“I first realized it when truck lights picked out Avery in the fog and she fell. I rushed in and picked her up so the trucker couldn’t see her. That was an intense moment and Avery appreciated that I protected her,” I said.

Leora brought the thin white fabric to me and I nodded.

“Now, we’re changing up the action. You are still my beautiful, innocent princess, but now you have fled deep into the forest. Here, you are opening the book and intending to work the spell that will save the kingdom. Unfortunately, we can’t light a fire here. We’ll have to do a lot of work with the lighting,” I said, looking critically at her makeup. “Leora, can you work a little makeup magic for me? Don’t exaggerate, but I’d like her cheeks just a little more sunken. Eyes deeper. Don’t make a ghoul out of her. Just a subtle change.”

“We can do that,” Leora said. I left her with Rose behind the privacy screen.

I talked to Theresa and Cassie about positioning things on the set and what I wanted to achieve with the lighting. We had a boulder and a tree stump and we had the tree from the previous scene. The more three-dimensional objects we put in front of the backdrop, the less flat it would look. Cassie moved a couple of potted plants into the scene and then went to work disguising that they were potted. In the low and dramatic lighting, they just looked like part of the landscape.

I assessed what we had and nodded. It wasn’t perfect, but I thought I could filter out the difficult parts. Someday I was going to try staging scenes out of doors. I wondered how I’d handle the lighting.

“Let’s get started,” I said as I went behind the privacy screen. I loved Rose’s makeup. We started draping yards of a white gossamer over and around her. She would approach our little clearing almost as if she were a ghost. “Theresa, put a blue gel in that Fresnel that’s picking her up on this side. I don’t want the white veil to be too glow-in-the-dark.”

“Got it, boss. We can hit a bastard amber on the backlight, too.”

“Try it and let’s see what we see.”

I led Rose into the light and Theresa and I worked on the lighting. Cassie and Leora got Rose’s book and bag props and arranged her veils. It looked great and I started taking pictures. For the next two hours I worked on repositioning Rose, resetting lights, and getting the wind directed in such a way that it shifted her veils to reveal the beautiful girl beneath. We had a great scene in which Theresa managed to conceal a flashlight bulb and battery in the book so that when Rose looked at the open book, the light shone up on her face. It looked incredibly spooky.

All through the session, I moved and petted Rose, reassured her that we were getting something good, and made sure that she felt like more than a prop on the stage. The last scene I shot with her, she leaped onto the stage into the wind with the veils flowing out around her. I liked what I was seeing and we adjusted the lights and direction of the wind slightly. Then she leapt again. And again. I shot an entire roll of film just changing settings slightly and adjusting my timing to catch her exactly where I wanted her.

“We did it,” I said, moving to Rose and picking her up to carry her behind the privacy screen. She didn’t hesitate to pull my face to her and give me a deep and sizzling kiss while my hands were free with touching her breasts and delving into her pussy. She breathed out a moan of satisfaction into my mouth and we parted.

“That was better than yesterday,” she sighed. “Maybe even better than last night.”

“That was the result of creating a work of art. You were magnificent.”

Uncle Nate took Rose straight to the airport. The girls cleaned and tidied the studio. The patrons left with Levi, and Beth was called down to continue bringing them drinks and food in the office on the mezzanine. I headed for the darkroom. I went straight to the last roll of film. Cassie had them all labeled and organized for processing. I processed the roll and examined the negatives with my loupe. I wasn’t even going to do a proof sheet. I was too excited to see this one print. I did a test strip and verified that it really did contain what I thought. I loaded the enlarger with 16x20 paper and cropped to the part of the picture I wanted.

I’d learned recently that while composing a full frame photo was really a great process, there were some visions that simply didn’t fit in the square 2x2 format. I still considered the photo to be composed, but it was composed for a landscape image rather than a square one.

I’d been in the darkroom for an hour before I brought the drying photo out to the table to inspect. Elizabeth was sitting on the couch reading. The other girls had gone. She stood up and joined me at the table to see the photo.

“You did it again,” she breathed. “It’s beautiful.”

“I don’t know what those guys wanted to see, but I’m happy. I wish I’d had a copy to give to Rose before she left.”

“Better to ship it than to have her try to carry it on the plane.” Beth kissed me. “Levi wanted me to let him know when you came out. He wants to talk to you.”

“I guess I shouldn’t just drag you into the darkroom with me, then,” I chuckled.

“Your bed, tonight,” she said, kissing me again.

A few minutes later she came back with Levi in tow. Uncle Nate was with him, too. I guess I figured these two guys were different than patrons. They were more like my agents. They got models and signed releases. They got me materials and supplies. They were the ones who got me my studio. I guess that all counted as patronage, too, but I really felt differently about them.

“Nate, good session this weekend,” Levi said. “I don’t know how you manage to still stand up. Those guys were exhausted.”

“Well, I’m pretty tired, too. But take a look at this.” I handed him the photo of Rose’s leap into the wind, still on the drying plate.

“They’ll choke when they see this,” Uncle Nate said. “They were looking at the show and forgot about the product. Well-done.”

“And apparently, they figured the product would be as good as the show. They want you to spend a few weeks in Las Vegas this summer,” Levi said.

“Las Vegas? What for?”

“There are a couple of reasons. First, there’s money in Las Vegas. More money than there is in all of Chicago. Their entire business is money. They want you to be seen by the money.”

“Sounds expensive.”

“You can’t gamble or drink there, and you have your own women, so you should get off pretty cheaply.”

“What other reasons?”

“There are a lot of girls in Las Vegas who are willing to get naked for just about any reason. Basically, they want you to work full time for a few weeks with an unending supply of models, just so you can hone your work.”

“Well, that’s nice. It sounds like a lot of work. I hope they don’t expect that I’ll get something like this from every model,” I said.

“No. These guys aren’t artists, but they’ve looked at your gallery and albums. They know works like this only come along once in every couple of dozen models. They’ll be happy with more of the Attic Allure photos,” Uncle Nate said.

“That presents a problem,” I mused. “I have a studio full of junk here and another one in Tenbrook. Do they think I’ll move everything to Las Vegas?”

“No. But believe me when I say there’s a lot of junk in Las Vegas that they’ll be moving into a studio space for you.”

“Okay. Well.” I looked at Elizabeth and she was nodding enthusiastically. “When do they want me there?”

“In the most miserable time of the year,” Levi said. “I can’t think of anyplace less comfortable than Las Vegas in July.”

Of course, I spent a good bit of the evening—after Beth and I made love and she went to her room in the dorm—out on the payphone with Ronda. I knew I could get hold of her and tell her about what had transpired. I wasn’t always sure where Patricia was, so I never called any of her numbers late at night. Anna had a shared phone in her apartment complex that was about as dependable as mine.

“They just want you to go to Las Vegas for a month and take pictures of models they send you so you can hone your skills,” Ronda repeated. “They didn’t say anything else about what they wanted you to do?”

“That was all Levi and Uncle Nate could tell me.”

“They’re lying. I don’t mean your uncle or Levi. I mean your patrons. How many philanthropists have you ever heard of who just supported a single artist and tried to get him better? Since the Renaissance?” Ronda asked. “There are grant programs that offer money to individuals in certain areas, but no philanthropists who just single out an artist and have any thought of how to help the artist. They all figure there is a way to make money off the artist. They’ve got another agenda.”

“So, you don’t think I should go?”

“I didn’t say that! Of course you should go! I’m just saying they’re going to want something else. And when they tell you what they want, they’ll have you in a corner where you can’t say no.”

“They all know I won’t do porn,” I said.

“Is that as firm as no sex in the studio?” Ronda dug at me. “That’s finally gotten down to no fucking, except in the darkroom, hasn’t it?”

“Geez. I really blurred the lines up royally, didn’t I?”

“Yeah, but don’t worry about that. They aren’t a national border. We’ll never invade Cambodia, right?”

“I should probably turn the opportunity down,” I said. “Summer is the only time we all have to be together and I’d be gone for a month.”

“From Beth’s reaction, it sounds like she’ll go with you. I have no reason to stay behind. I’ll go with you. I’m willing to bet Anna and Patricia will go with us, too. You’re going to need assistants and who better than us?”

“You’d do that, Ronda?”

“Believe in me, Nate. Like I believe in you.”

The weekend was quickly approaching for Starr’s big comedy debut. It was a pretty cool thing. The college theatre set aside a weekend for standup comedy. It would all be students who would get ten minutes each on stage. Anna was coming into town and planned to be there for Starr’s big opening. She’d planned to come into Chicago soon anyway to go over books and make sure we were tracking with the crew.

I picked Anna up at the bus station at four in the afternoon and we went to the studio so she could greet everyone. Elizabeth had already told us that she would not be available for dinner before the show and that we should just come into the theatre at the appointed time and not tell her where we were sitting. She did have a bit of pre-show jitters.

I don’t think Anna and I had much to eat either. Sympathetic jitters? We were at the theatre right on time and sat about mid-way back so we weren’t in a direct line of sight from where the performers would be. We’d be just a little bit off to stage right. The first performer was pretty good, but I thought he did an awful lot of cursing in his routine. I guess that was popular among some of the big names in comedy. Lenny Bruce had made vulgarity his theme until he died a couple of years ago. Richard Pryor was known to toss out a few bombs, as was Dick Gregory. Don Rickles made his whole schtick up by insulting people in the audience.

The next comedian was a guy who just kept pulling stuff out of a bag and tossing out one-liners to go with it. Like he opened up a purse and a flame shot out of it. “Hell in a handbasket,” the comedian said. Then he tossed that aside and pulled something else out. He’d probably have a blast in the studio props closet.

Finally, it was time. “Ladies and Gentlemen! Please welcome to the stage, Starr!” the announcer said. And then she was out there on stage bowing as people applauded. I think they were applauding her looks. She was in a leotard and a tutu. And she looked pretty damn yummy. She even had her new trademark eye makeup.