The Designer
by E. P. Lande
When was it that I began to know Steve, I mean, really know the Steve who became a designer? For he wasn’t always a designer. Steve had been a stripper, a male stripper, known in the trade as Todd.
Steve liked being a stripper; Steve liked being Todd. He liked the lights; he liked the pulsating music; he liked the camaraderie of being with the other strippers; he even liked the whistles, yells, and screams that his performances squeezed out of the club audiences. He sometimes liked the customers, too, but not all the time.
And the money. Steve did like the money, always cash stuffed into Todd’s G-strings and ultra-brief Hugo Boss underwear by both the women as well as the men who attended his performances.
As Todd, Steve was an extravert. You almost had to be to survive in this business, to succeed, to be good. And Todd was good. Some club managers considered him the best. Todd wasn’t self-centered but he lapped up the attention like a thirsty cat.
Back in his apartment, Steve would practice his Todd routines in front of a full-length mirror, perfecting his moves and gestures to the music of Luther Vandross. He would tweak this move or that gesture; shake his hair, which he wore just above his shoulders; move his eyes — his super-sexy eyes — first down, then up until they met you straight on and sucked you in.
Once there, once in his gaze, you couldn’t escape. You were the deer transfixed in his headlights. Looking at his reflection in his apartment’s full-length mirror Steve created Todd, the most desirable man on any stage, anywhere.
Steve looked at Todd’s reflection. ‘Yes.’ Steve grinned. ‘You’re just what they want, you hot sonofabitch.’
And he was. As Todd, Steve had offers from clubs in all the major cities in the States, in Europe, in Australia, and even in some of the Latin American countries. When he was on stage, no one paid any attention to the other strippers and often not even to their dates or escorts that evening. And this applied equally to the men as well as the women, for Todd’s appeal transcended the sexes. He mesmerized his audiences. He had them in his power, which he projected into his body and into his moves and gestures.
Todd knew the audiences wanted a panther: lithe, toned and, above all, sensual. Combined with his practiced moves, Steve created a human cat that no one could resist. Todd didn’t have to purr; the money kept showering in.
But is this what Steve really wanted out of life? How long would Todd remain the top attraction? Steve knew the toll nightly performances took. As much as he enjoyed performing, Steve was realistic. Eventually someone else would eclipse Todd; someone younger, with more energy, would attract the attention of his fans. And then? What would Steve do when Todd was no longer the top attraction?
Steve had always dreamed of being a designer, an interior designer of space. Had he been younger, he would have studied to become an architect, a designer of skyscrapers. But he knew this was now beyond his reach for, at forty, reality had to be considered. Between school and articling, he would be fifty before becoming a registered architect. No, that was a dream but unrealistic. On stage, Todd went through his routine, no one knowing what was on his mind.
* * *
His audiences watch as Todd walks and struts, not stiff like a peacock, but sleek and catlike, a predator. As the music pulsates Todd visualizes a four-story brownstone building in the heart of the Hasidic section of Brooklyn. The strobe lights light up as Todd walks up the outside stairs to the front door. On the beat he discards his tank top, envisioning the four apartments, one on each floor that he would design.
The whistles and shrieks follow Todd up the the staircase connecting the individual apartments Steve would carve out of the floor plan. He enters the ground floor to the pulsating rhythms of Luther Vandross. As he moves from room to room, in his mind knowing how, as Steve, he would tear down walls and reconstruct space, Todd slithers across the stage, twenty-dollar bills hanging from the inside of his low slung A & F jeans that sit strategically well below his carved waist, revealing the tip of his Hugo Boss, anonymous fingers sometimes lingering as he imagines how a picture window would fit between the Ionic columns, to give a view of the East River.
Then, moving to the other side of the stage, Todd enters a remodeled kitchen and dining area. He grabs hold of the pole placed in front-centre, swinging around and around, admiring the stainless steel appliances, the Garland eight-burner range, and the flame birch cabinets specially made to his detailed requirements by a gifted furniture maker in the northeast corner of Vermont.
Applause and more whistles accompany Todd as he climbs the stairs to the second floor, taking off his A & F jeans, leaving them on the landing. He enters the second floor space to more Luther, becoming more animated as he fantasizes on what this building will eventually become. Todd feels more bills being stuffed into his Hugo Boss as he moves about the second-floor apartment, taking down walls, replacing partitions, renovating dated bathrooms.
Back on the landing, Todd pauses and gazes out into the audience. He lowers his head, slightly tilting it to one side, the side he knows catches the glances of both men and women, the side that caused his mother to capitulate no matter how bad he had been. More whistles, this time shrill, short but loud, as though a battalion were hailing taxis, as Todd strips years of grime from the hardwood floors.
He saunters to centre stage and slowly, like a snake shedding its winter skin, peels off his Hugo Boss, revealing a gem-studded G-string: his signature.
More whistles, this time mostly from the women, and Elvis screams accompany a shower of floating twenties, littering the stage. Onward Todd slithers, climbing the staircase to the upper floors, his ass beating time to Luther.
His fans are bewitched, for Todd’s attention has always been on the details. Should the kitchen counters be mahogany or granite? He sees using the lustrous deep red and green granite he had found in a home in Aspen last winter, for one of the kitchens, and mosaic slate from India to create an entire bathroom, not just the stall shower.
Brass fixtures and marble foyers; tin ceilings and Art Deco overhead lighting; butcher-block tables and Venetian stuccoed walls; garbarators and insinkerators; bidets and six-foot birthday baths; jacuzzis and whirlpools. All these float through Todd’s head like sugar plums at Christmas as he grinds his way from one end of the stage to the other, bewitching his audiences, sweeping up the raining cash to be invested in his dream.
* * *
Backstage, after the show, Steve stuffed Todd’s evening’s earnings into one of the deposit bags he kept in his locker, ready for his trip to the bank the following morning.
Out on the street, back in reality, Steve began to wander, his head filled with the night’s happenings and Todd’s routines, the air clear, the sky a dramatic mix of orange/pink fringed with mellow clouds. In spite of the hour, many people seemed to be going — or coming from — somewhere. Lost in his thoughts as well as his dreams, Steve followed his feet wherever they took him.
Steve didn’t know how long it had been since he had left the club. It must have been several hours, for he noticed that the sky had become visibly brighter. He looked around and realized he was unfamiliar with the neighborhood where his feet had taken him. Signs in a language foreign to Steve met his eyes as he continued his wandering. Had he crossed a bridge? Steve had no recollections except memories of Todd’s performance. One sign, with the symbol of bagels being juggled, lured him, for, by now, he was hungry, not having eaten since before Todd began his show that night.
On entering the store, Steve was met by the strong, warm and enveloping odor of freshly baked bagels, for he had wandered into the Brooklyn Bagel Factory, a 24-hour manufacturer of the world’s most famous Jewish doughnuts.
“Wie gehts?” asked the man in a flour-coated apron who Steve assumed must be the baker himself. When Steve didn’t answer the man’s assistant said, “Er ist ein Goy!” pointing to Steve and turned, plodding back to the wood-fired oven to check on the batch of bagels being baked.
“You from this area?” the man asked Steve.
“No, I’m not,” Steve replied. “I must have lost my way.”
“Where you from?” the man asked.
“New York. Manhattan, midtown,” Steve answered.
“Manhattan? Oi vey!” the baker exclaimed, throwing his flour-dusted arms up into the air, allowing them to flop down to his sides with a slap, causing the air around him to be flour-laden.
“Where am I?” Steve asked, picking up a loose bagel and looking it over.
“Eat, eat. You hungry?” the bagelman asked, ignoring Steve’s question.
“You bet. I haven’t had anything to eat since noon.” Steve never ate before Todd’s performances and, during sets, Todd wouldn’t snack as it threw off his concentration.
“Here. Cream cheese. Ist gut.” And the bagelman slathered a good portion of a Philly cream cheese carton in between a freshly sliced bagel.
“Thanks. I’ll take a half dozen.” Steve handed the man some money.
“Du bist in Brooklyn, in Yiddishe section,” the man told Steve.
“The what?” Steve didn’t understand though he realized the language must be common to many residents of the neighborhood.
“The Jewish section. Businesses and people here sint Jewish,” the man replied.
The man’s words latched on to some memory in Steve’s subconscious. Why should what the man told him be familiar? Steve couldn’t remember being in the area before. Suddenly he recalled Todd’s fantasies on stage about redesigning a brownstone in exactly such a neighborhood. He remembered Todd visualizing a future career somewhere in the Jewish section of Brooklyn.
Steve turned to the bagelman before reaching the front door.
“Would you know if there’s a brownstone for sale around here?” he asked.
“Brownstone? Next block. They have 24-hour open house, like me. Shapiros,” the man replied.
“Thanks,” and Steve held out his hand to shake the man’s and bid him goodbye.
* * *
Back outside Steve turned away from the bagel store into the direction the man had indicated. On the next block, Steve found the “For Sale” sign outside a four-story brownstone — just like the man had said — looking out onto the East River. And immediately below the “For Sale” letters was written “24-Hour Open House: Today Only”.
He raced up the steps. As Steve opened the front door and stepped over the threshold he was hit by strains of Luther Vandross.
Then, transformed, Todd emerges, strutting into the entry hall. With Luther blasting in his ears, Todd panthers his way from one room to the next. Whistles, screams, and calls to “Take it off, babe” rain down on him as Todd makes his way through the ground floor rooms, becoming increasingly louder as he climbs the stairs to the second floor.
More applause greets Todd on the second-floor landing where he begins stripping walls of old wallpaper and floors of generations of accumulated grime. Grinding his way from room to room, Todd visualizes Venetian stucco walls and stainless-steel appliances.
Todd continues to pole his way to the upper stories, cheers ringing in his ears, Luther competing with the audience, until Todd doesn’t know which music is which. The urgings in his head drive Todd from room to room, as he wildly grunts and grinds to the vision of walls demolished, open spaces created, floors refinished, bathrooms torn out and replaced with Kohler and marble.
From the top floor landing, Todd begins his descent — slowly — to Luther’s pulsating rhythms. Down Todd goes — from the third to the second, and, finally, reaching the ground floor — to the deafening applause and the cheering, pulling him further and further into his descent.
As Todd opens the front door, Luther stops, the whistles and applause cease. He steps over the threshold into the clear early morning air of the Brooklyn day and... I emerged on the other side.
I glanced back, through the still open door and watched as Todd takes a bow, becoming fainter and fainter until he disappears. I turned, to face the street, turning my back on the vanishing Todd, knowing that it was the last time I would see my friend. I now knew I had been liberated; I had found the person I was meant to be. Todd belonged to another world, a world I knew once but no longer.
Copyright © 2021 by Eric P. Lande
