Phoenyx: Flesh and Fire

Erotic Memoirs of a Striptease Artist

by Morgana Blackrose

ISBN: 978-1-942331-18-6

A Pink Flamingo Ebook Publication

Copyright © 2015, All rights reserved

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Prelude

Number 101 Freudlose Gasse, the end of a side-street in Old Berlin - that’s where the Kitty Klub used to be, a delta of debauchery and a temple to Venus in all her forms; a place where myths and goddesses were born. Since the early 1920s, it had hosted shows, cabarets and every entertainment of the adult kind, and had managed to keep all its original decadent character intact despite the spit-roasting rape of Nazi tyranny and Allied firebombs, which it somehow escaped mostly unscathed – almost as if it was destined to survive for the benefit of future generations, and shake a fist at the cruel ravages of war. Never quite grand enough to appeal to the elite, never cheap enough to be embarrassing or tacky either, the Klub bared its soul with the charm, honesty and humor of a hooker with a heart of gold, as if the venue itself was as much a character as those who lived and worked within.

And in many ways it was.

I was unwise enough to have returned to that spot, many years after my associations with the Klub were over – almost exactly thirty years since my arrival, in fact – to find that not only the building, but the entire street, had been completely erased from existence and replaced by several rows of faceless, soulless apartment blocks, doubtless inhabited by faceless, soulless individuals who knew nothing of the history, the passion, the drama, the tragedy and the excitement which had been enacted within those old walls for the best part of a century.

The sight would have brought tears to my eyes had it not been so totally, utterly inevitable. I did, however, spend about half an hour sitting on one of the street benches (the cast-iron sort which brand vertical bars of numbness into your backside), looking down that avenue not with my eyes, but with my memory – the sights, the sounds, the smells, the sensations, the hopes, dreams, disasters and pains. The music – always the music – the trumpeting, triumphant, bumping jazz of playful horns and scuffing cymbals, tittering pianos and gutsy guitars, the soundtrack to our endless displays of flesh gradually revealed. The faces, the voices, the names, the clothes, and the crumbs of conversation all stirred back into life again, like clouds of dust swept up off an old floor by a vigorous broom. Once again, I felt the creaking stage boards under my feet, felt the blazing house lights caressing my moist skin, heard the roar of rapturous applause and saw seas of happy, cheering, curious, lecherous faces drift before me as if they were pond life in an aquarium. I heard voices in my ear, felt my hair swish across my bare back as I clumped past the heavy burgundy curtains backstage to the dark wood-paneled corridor beyond, where I was greeted by old friends, smiling, laughing, joking, welcoming; the routine of a day job unlike any other.

Had anyone bothered to look at me as I sat and stared, they would have seen a lithe and elegant fifty-one year-old in a long black dress, waves of strawberry blonde hair cascading over her velvet back from beneath a wide-brimmed hat with a yellow rose, which had been liberated earlier that afternoon from one of the public gardens in the old Green Quarter. Picking flowers to put in my hair or in a hat was one of the few rituals I still clung to from my youngest days, the days when I was young and virginal, before I passed through the alchemical fires of the Klub.

I stood up and fumbled around inside my shoulder bag for my sunglasses. I didn’t feel the cut in my heart until I turned away; knowing that it – my past, the best years of my life, the very fabric of my wild existence – was gone forever now. I got the shades on just in time, before the hot treacle ran from my eyes. The black I wore from head to foot might as well have been mourning wear as I scuffed to the edge of the pavement with tiny steps, uncertain of where my feet ought to go, wobbling in my four-inch heels. The paving stones were clean and shiny, unfamiliar, unlike the old rugged slabs I remembered. All that remained were the elderly iron lamp-posts, and even they seemed to be there as much for decoration as they now shared space with tall, sleek and swan-necked modern counterparts.

Much like myself, really.

Yet in a strange way, I felt fulfilled now. I had brought to a close not just one but several whole chapters of my life, and it was time to move away, onwards, upwards; to spread my wings and be free once again, my pilgrimage complete and all my old debts paid off.

As reality swept around me in the form of buses and cars blaring past, I excavated my cell phone from the depths of my bag. My gloved thumb had some difficulty finding the right menu on the damnable newfangled gadget, but eventually I called up the correct number and waited for it to be answered with a growing, swelling sensation of bitter-sweet excitement.

My melancholy soul began to wither and fade, to be ousted by the buds of new growth, new life, and new glories born from old ashes.

For I had a dinner date in Marrakesh, and I couldn’t possibly be late.

I first turned up at the Kitty Klub one afternoon in ‘79 as little more than a kid needing money, friends, and a place to live. I’d just moved into the city from my mother’s old place out in the country and was preparing to make my way, somehow, in the big, colorful, scary and noisy adult world. The sign outside the door had read: “Performers Wanted – Apply Within!” Somebody had gone to the bother of making the vertical shaft of the ‘!’ mark look like a cartoon penis, and the point below it into a circular breast with a huge nipple, a demonstration of earthy schoolroom humor which my unsophisticated mind appreciated and welcomed in that otherwise hostile kingdom of The Big City.

By now I was genuinely desperate, and willing to try anything once. I stomped up the stone steps to the big doors and pushed my way through into a dim and decadent bar smelling of varnish and liquor. The walls were draped in heavy velvet hangings, and mock-classical statues of naked women towered over me from grand plinths, and all at once I felt as if I had entered a different world, or stepped back into a different time. This décor, its furnishings, flooring, and everything had no connection at all with the cool, funky world of 1979 which I had just stepped out of, the world of sports cars and disco. Perhaps that was why I loved it at first sight and chose to investigate it further.

I didn’t know exactly what I was letting myself in for, but I decided to give it a shot. What happened then changed my life forever.

ACT I

THE ‘70S