All I Could Bare: My Life in the Strip Clubs of Gay Washington, (20 page)

Other things were different as well. By this point, I wasn't as open about my time stripping as I had been when I approached the
Village Voice.
The more success I achieved as a writer, the more I felt like I had to play the role of a serious young journalist, not the type of guy

who would romp around a nightclub with his dick out. Perhaps as a defensive overcompensation for my nude dancing days, I showed up for my first day at
Entertainment Weekly
decked out in the only suit I owned, a Kuppenheimer original, paired with a tie I'd borrowed from Seth. This made a distinctive first impression, though not exactly the kind I was going for, since everyone else was walking around in jeans and khakis.

Being a full-time journalist was a lot different from working as a freelancer. There were so many writers and it was quite a competitive environment. Yet I quickly—and somewhat unexpectedly—found my niche because of the ease I had asking celebrities extremely personal questions, especially those having to do with sex and relationships. The funny thing was that I didn't perceive this as anything special. After years of working at strip clubs I had lost a sense of polite conversation. Nothing felt out of bounds to say or ask. It was just sex. Everybody's doing it or wants to do it. What's the big deal?

I discovered my aptitude for this type of questioning one day while I was doing a phone interview with a teenage Bonnie Raitt in training named Shannon Curfman. She was being billed as the anti-Britney because she wrote her own songs and was handy with a guitar. But beyond all of that, I mostly agreed to the interview because my editor had a jailbait crush on her. Besides, she was rumored to be dating two striking blonds—Jonny Lang, another blues-rock prodigy, and one of the Hanson brothers. I wanted to get to the bottom of it.

She called me from a steak house where she was eating while on tour, and after a couple of softball questions about her album, I jumped in to see what was really going on in her teenage love life.

"So, what's the deal with you and Jonny Lang?"

"Nothing. He co-wrote a song on my album. But he's more like a brother."

"Oh, well, speaking of brothers, what about those Hanson boys?"

"What about them?"

"Would you describe your relationship with any of them as not 'like a brother'?"

"I'm not saying anything."

"That sounds pretty suspicious."

She laughed. "Yeah, well."

"Well, the rumor is you're dating Zac."

"Zac, really? I've never heard that."

"OK. So, then it's Isaac."

"No."

"Then it must be Taylor."

She laughed again. "I told you I'm not saying."

We went on and on like this for about five minutes, after I had pretty much narrowed her brotherly blond du jour to Taylor. After I hung up, I realized that my editor had been listening to the interview from the next cubicle. This made me nervous. Did I go too far prying into this tenth-grader's love life? He came over and had a rather stern look on his face. I thought he was mad about something.

"I'm the most persistent reporter I know, but you asked

those Hanson questions about ten times more than I would've," he said. At first, I wasn't sure how to take what he said, but then he cracked a smile and I figured I'd done good.

I think what made me good at asking personal questions was not only that I was used to talking to people about the most intimate aspects of their lives and had no qualms asking about anything that piqued my curiosity, but also that I was used to making people comfortable in uncomfortable or awkward situations. When someone is playing with your dick in public, it's not only potentially awkward for you, the one being played with, it can also be weird for the person doing the playing, because he is exposing his desires so nakedly in front of other people. He loses a certain anonymity that comes with being at a nightclub. The customer goes from being a face in a crowd to being a hand on your dick. It has the effect of having your secret crush revealed in the high school auditorium. In fact, it wasn't at all surprising, after a customer felt you up, for him to rush off to the bathroom, another part of the club, or even head home.

I think customers sometimes felt more exposed than I did. Part of being a good stripper involved putting the customers at ease with what they were doing—otherwise their discomfort could lessen how much they tipped. At the clubs, I tried to laugh a lot and bring some sort of humor to every situation with a customer, and this same approach got me out of a lot of tight spots when interviewing celebrities.

In fact, the only time at
Entertainment Weekly
that I remember a celebrity getting upset with me for asking too many personal questions was when I was interviewing German supermodel Heidi Klum before a Victoria's Secret show.

"What kind of underwear do you like on a guy? Boxers or briefs?" I asked.

"I like briefs. They're sexier. They form the body, I think with boxers, you're hiding something because everything is so loose."

"Does your husband wear briefs?"

"Let's not talk about my husband's briefs too much," she snapped in her clipped Germlish.

I spent about a year and a half at
Entertainment Weekly
before I left to become an editor at
VIBE
magazine, which was the bible of the urban music world. At this job, I was mostly responsible for polishing other people's work. But on one slow Friday afternoon, I got the biggest shot of my still relatively new writing career.

I was sitting in my cubicle, dutifully counting the minutes before I could leave, when one of the senior editors flew out of her office looking stressed. She stopped briefly in the common area outside my cubicle and I asked what was wrong.

"It looks like the Janet Jackson cover story is going to fall through," she said. "Janet's people need it to happen this weekend, but the writer can't do it."

"What are you going to do?" I asked.

She threw her hands up.

"Can't you reassign?" I offered.

"Of course. But who can we get to do it so quickly? And it has to be someone we can trust with such a big cover story."

A voice in my mind starting chanting, "111 do it. I'll do it." The volume grew louder with a force that felt like words were going to thrust themselves out of my mouth. I tightly pursed my lips, trying to lock the words inside. I wanted to say them, but I couldn't. I didn't have the nerve. Sure, I was more skilled at the celebrity interview since my bumbling Mariah days. But still, who the fuck was I? Seriously. Just a little more than a year before, I was selling dick feels for a buck. What made me think I could be a big-time cover story writer? But the voice kept chanting, like the crowd at a football game or a really popular drag show.

The editor stood there thinking for a few moments before she said, "Oh well," and turned to head toward the restrooms.

"I could do it," I said to her rapidly receding back. I winced as the words left my mouth. It felt like I'd just sucked a Lemonhead.

She kept moving.

"I could do it," I said a little louder.

"Huh?"

"I could do it."

She paused. I could see her thinking it over, her expression saying not yes or no but "hmmm."

"You think you could pull it off?" she asked. "Have you ever done a cover story?"

"Uh, well, no. But you know, I did all these big features for the
Washington Post
and everything. And you know, I've interviewed big stars like Mariah before, so, I mean, yeah, I think I could."

The truth was that despite all the short pieces I'd done at
EW,
the number of long features that I'd ever written added up to about a handful.

"Well, let me think about it," she said.

"Cool," I replied, trying my best to embody the word.

The next few hours went by like decades as I waited for her answer. But then, once she said yes, after getting approval from the editor in chief, time went into fast-forward. The next day I was sitting on a plane to Minneapolis, where Janet was recording her new album,
All for You,
with her longtime producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis. A notebook was on my tray table, and I was thinking up questions for the youngest daughter of one of the most famous black families in the world. There was a lot of ground to cover, considering the recent breakup of her secret marriage to constant companion and collaborator Rene Elizondo. But the editor had given me only one strict instruction.

"You
have
to ask if she has a secret love child," she said. "The rumor is that she had a baby when she was married the first time to that DeBarge guy and that her sister Rebbie is raising it."

"No problem," I said. "You know I'll ask anybody anything."

"Yeah, I know. That's why you got the assignment."

21

After a couple of hours in the air, my plane landed at the Minneapolis airport around noon, where I was picked up by a chauffeured black town car (a guy even stood in the arrivals section with my name on a sign) and whisked to a downtown hotel. I checked into my suite and proceeded to watch the hotel phone for about five straight hours, moving only once to take a rushed pee. I'd been told that the interview could happen anytime, so I wanted to be ready. But around five, I got sorta hungry and restless, so I went to get dinner at the hotel restaurant. When I got back, the phone's message light was blinking. Damn! It was Janet's assistant letting me know that the interview wasn't going to happen that night after all. She said she'd call to reschedule the following afternoon.

The next morning I woke up and decided to walk around downtown Minneapolis. It was a Sunday morning and the streets were empty and covered with a fresh layer of March snow. I felt really sad, but I didn't know why. All of a sudden this deep lonely feeling came over me. It wasn't the kind of lonely you get when you need a hug or want to get laid. It was more that I felt completely alone with my wants. I wanted—needed—for this interview to work so that it would give me my first cover story, getting me closer to becoming the established entertainment journalist I wanted to be. But I was the only person who could make that happen. Was I going to be able to make Janet like me? Was I going to get juicy quotes out of her? It was so uncertain, I thought as I walked through the virgin snow.

Later that afternoon, around four, the phone rang. It was Janet's assistant, who, oddly, was also named Janet. She told me to go down to the lobby immediately so that I could ride with Janet to the recording studio. I jumped up from the bed, flicked off the TV, brushed my teeth, grabbed my bag, and headed downstairs.

I sat on the couch in the lobby like a TV cop on surveillance, my head turning right and left. Which direction would Janet be coming from? I wondered. I mean, for all I knew, she could sweep down from the chandelier, all dressed in black, a headphone mike around her face, her arms posed in fierce angles above her head. Or maybe some of her background dancers would slink out before her and then she'd suddenly jump from behind a potted plant or something. I simply didn't know what to expect as about fifteen minutes passed by with my mind coming up with increasingly elaborate entrance scenarios. (The front glass shatters, and she comes swooping in like a ninja.)

Finally, I looked in front of me at the bank of elevators and saw that one was open. Inside was a giant of a black man and beside and slightly behind him was a small figure beneath a baseball cap and a shower of golden brown hair. It was Janet.

I walked toward the elevator.

"Hey, I'm Craig," I said. "I think I'm supposed to be meeting you guys."

"Hi, I'm Janet," she said earnestly. It still surprised me when celebrities introduced themselves like there was any chance I wouldn't know who they were. That was cool, though, because no matter what you knew about them, you were still meeting them for the very first time.

I stepped in the elevator and the towering bodyguard pressed the button for the garage. I tried to make small talk. "So, um, how's it goin'?" I asked.

"Fine," she said, not making eye contact.

"Your hair looks nice," I said quickly. I couldn't think of anything else.

"Thanks," she said, trying to be polite. But I knew she was thinking, "Who is this creep?" like I was trying to pick her up at the hotel bar. I wanted to yell out, "No, I'm gay. Totally a fag." But I controlled the impulse.

Once we arrived in the parking area, we walked over toward two black SUVs and Janet told me that she'd be driving the two of us to the studio while the bodyguard followed behind. I went along with the program, got in the car, buckled up, and sat back as she pulled out onto the street. But inside I was worried. I had heard that during interviews celebrities will sometimes try to do normal everyday things like driving in order to appear regular. But this didn't necessarily mean that they were good at the tasks they were trying to pull off. I couldn't stop wondering who had taught Janet how to drive, anyway. Tito? La Toya? Bubbles?

The car moved out from the underground garage onto the street. When we were about a block away from the hotel, the car jerked to a stop and then shot forward. "Oh no," Janet sighed. "I just ran a red light." I looked up from my notepad to make sure death wasn't impending. I was glad that no 18-wheelers were hurling toward the passenger window, but I secretly wished that I had stashed some Dramamine in my bag or maybe even worn Depends. Now, to be fair, I'd certainly run my share of red lights in the past, but I was always more nervous when I wasn't behind the wheel. Plus, the fact that I hadn't decided on my first official question was increasing my anxiety. All of my meticulously prepared questions seemed lame.

I was lost in this thought, as we pulled onto a snow-covered interstate. Sand, salt, and assorted frozen debris splattered against the windshield. "Look at this," Janet said, increasing the speed of the wipers. "Isn't this a mess?"