The Dead Zone Vernon Wilson (bio) 1 So this your real, ehm, body? The real you? No silicone for Ms. Velvet Lace? I say it’s really me, of course. I say it pleasant as can be, like I’m still working the register at Key Food, even though these men don’t look like nobody I know or want to know. It’s two of them in the VIP room with us. I just keep grinning at the producer, the one asking me questions, a short bald-headed motherfucker that look Filipino or Mexican—he got him a good tan—but say he’s Japanese. I say, Who you think it is? Nigga, I’m the one standing here. Feast yo eyes, I say before my laugh crack straight through me and roll my head for the camera like I had shook my ass before, on stage. Like I’m still on stage, I can hear the music bumping from outside the dressing room. I’m Velvet Lace. Ms. Velvet Lace, like the man say. That’s the name I dreamed up for myself when I started dancing. The words just came out my mouth one day. I must’ve pulled them out of my past. It sound sophisticated, and I wasn’t used to being sophisticated. That’s how I knew I was ready to leave my old life. Or, I thought I was leaving it. But the older I get, the more I realize you don’t know. You never know what life you living. Or what life you leaving behind. Just like my mother, Dorla, she used to have nightmares, sometimes about the past. Couldn’t sleep. You could think you in the present, living away from what you were, then your past’ll come and sit next to you someday. Your past’ll lay down in your bed and sleep, and you right there watching. Like this bald man, the producer. He keep staring at me like he some animal, or like I’m a animal. Anyway, I’m used to that. That’s why I stand up to show them what I mean by feast they eyes. You see that booty, mister? my girl Gigi say. Is a monster. She point at me with her long-ass nails, each one wettish and silver like a dagger in the glare of these hot lights. Me and Gigi the only girls in the VIP. Everybody else working the stage, being somebody they could never be. My first set finished already, but Gigi getting ready to [End Page 176] go out. She take her bottle of Dior in one hand and spritz some spray up under her neck, then her navel, then between her thighs. Her brown skin sparkle everywhere like a bad dessert, but beyond the sparkle, she’s scarless, spotless, with endless legs and that high, hard ass like a Olympic drag queen. Gently, Gigi lay the bottle down by the bright mirrors fanning out behind her, then she spread her legs and bend down. It look like she stretching for a track meet, but it’s for the cameraman that’s taping everything, every movement we make. It’s all for the video calendar. Our club, Sinful, is doing they first one. They calling it Platinum Bodies. It’s not all the girls, neither, just the baddest and the biggest earners: Gigi, Black Madonna, Unforgettable, and me, Velvet Lace. Whatever Gigi doing, it work like a charm. The cameraman keep shuffling around us. He don’t have a big camera, but he wheezing and snorting like a eighteen-wheeler on the Deegan. He ask Gigi to pose with one leg up on the benches, where the girls usually sit to catch they breath and count they money. All a sudden, Taco, our manager, come through the door. First thing you see when Taco come through ain’t even Taco, it’s the big bowl of his stomach. Second thing is his bad skin that’s pocked and pimpled and scarred and scabbed, like the land of the moon. Black Madonna told me and Gigi that Taco’s mother used to burn him as a...
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Feb 1, 2024
David J Neville 
Open Access
