Brandon Stanton's Blog, page 46

(29/32) “I can’t tell you the last time I danced burlesque. It...

(29/32) “I can’t tell you the last time I danced burlesque. It wasn’t some big thing. They don’t throw you a retirement party at the Sheraton. The phone just stops ringing. It gets quieter and quieter until one week it’s so quiet that you sorta decide you can make more money doing something else. If anything I was kinda happy about it. I could finally calm down on the make-up and start wearing dungarees. I remember the first thing I did was go out and buy a pair of loafers. But they didn’t seem to fit right. I’d get this sharp pain in my leg every time I walked more than a few blocks. The doctor told me I’d been wearing heels for so long that my calf muscles were completely shrunken. And the only way to build them up again was to wear lower, and lower, and lower heels until I could walk without pain. I guess when you’ve been one way for so long, it’s not easy to be something else. But I had no choice. There’s no next step on the ladder when you’re dancing for tips. The moment you step off that stage, you’ve got to start again at the bottom. So that’s exactly what I did. But I wasn’t worried. I’d been reinventing myself for my entire life. You wouldn’t believe all the things I’ve done: I’ve managed a brothel, I’ve made adult baby clothes, I’ve done make-up for cross dressers. For three years I was one of the top dominatrixes in New York City. I have so many stories. Sometimes I’ll remember the things that happened to me and I’ll just start laughing. I hope when I get to heaven God shows me a movie of my life. But just the funny parts. Not the in-between parts, cause then we’d both start crying. Underneath all the laughs and the gags, it was always about one thing: survival. Tanqueray was a lot of fun. But Tanqueray was Stephanie. And Stephanie was a teenage runaway from Albany: doing what she needed to do, and being who she needed to be, to get what she needed to get.”
The Tanqueray Trust: https://bit.ly/2ZUjifW

(28/32) “Everything was fine when the music was playing. When...

(28/32) “Everything was fine when the music was playing. When people were laughing, and clapping, and shouting for more. But I knew I was tanking. Even when I was on the stage, and having fun, I was tanking. Some nights I’d go back to the dressing room, and look in the mirror, and I’d realize that I don’t even exist. Nobody’s clapping for Stephanie. They’re clapping for Tanqueray. And sometimes I’d get so depressed thinking like that, I’d just start crying. I’d feel like running away and hiding from everyone. At least when I was a kid, I could crawl under the card table with my dolls. But that pretend shit wasn’t working anymore. I was too old to fake like someone cared about me. But whenever I started to fall apart, I’d pull myself together and think about how lucky I was to be Tanqueray. At least I was successful.  At least I had a career. At least when I’m Tanqueray, and I’m around people, I make them smile. I make them laugh with my stupid jokes. They’re not trying to hurt me. But Tanqueray never came home with me. She always stayed out on the stage. It was Stephanie that walked out the back door, and nobody cared about her. Nobody except for Carmine. A few years after our divorce, he reached out through a mutual friend and asked if we could talk. They both came over to my apartment together. Carmine looked nice. A little older, but nice. He was dressed like the old days. He told me that he’d started a new life as a limo driver, and he wanted to work things out. He promised he was off the drugs. I listened to his whole speech, but then I told him that I wasn’t sure. I was scared. I couldn’t tell if he was on drugs or not. He seemed clean, but he had seemed clean when I was living with him. And if he started acting rough again, I had nobody to call. I didn’t know any mob guys anymore. I think I told him that I needed a few days to think about it, and that I’d give him a call. But I knew I was never going to call him. As soon as the door closed, I fell on the floor and started to cry.”
The Tanqueray Trust: https://bit.ly/2ZUjifW

(27/32) “Everybody wanted a piece of Tanqueray. I was getting so...

(27/32) “Everybody wanted a piece of Tanqueray. I was getting so many calls that I had to hire an answering service. Before long I had every account in the city. I mean everybody: the investment banks, the sports clubs, the unions, the masons. FDNY was my account. Transit was my account. I used to bring Ronnie with me every time I danced. We were having so much fun. I remember one night we were working the Friars Club together. They were roasting some television host that came on at 11:30, and this guy starts choking on a chicken bone in the middle of Ronnie’s act.  Somebody turned off the music and started screaming for help. Ronnie was a nurse, so she knew what to do. She yanked the guy out of his chair and did the Heimlich right there. He spit that chicken bone across the room, and Ronnie just went on with her show. We’d get $500 for every gig, and at the end of the night we’d split it down the middle. The NYPD was the only account we ever made pay up front, just in case the crap hit the fan and we needed to get out of there. Those parties were wild. All of them would be gambling and doing cocaine. After they cracked the Son of Sam case, I danced for one of the lead detectives. And he was dressed entirely in drag. Sometimes an entire precinct would rent out a boat on the Circle Line and ride up and down the Hudson all night. Ronnie and I would just set down a portable radio and get to work. The cops were great. They treated us like royalty.  One night a rookie got so drunk that he threw Ronnie’s costume into the Hudson. They stopped the entire boat, and made him jump in and get it for her. A lot of times those parties would go until 4 AM.  And by the time we got back to Ronnie’s house, we’d be so tired that I’d just spend the night. Her kids were asleep in the other room, so we’d always share the same bed.  One time she rolled over and started rubbing up against me. I said: ‘C’mon Ronnie, forget it.  Don’t even go there.’  We never talked about it again. But there was nothing to talk about. I got it. She was lonely just like me.”
The Tanqueray Trust: https://bit.ly/2ZUjifW

(26/32) “I could bring home $3000 a week if I was working the...

(26/32) “I could bring home $3000 a week if I was working the road. That was real money. Only the porn stars were making more than that, because nothing draws a crowd like having your face in a movie or magazine. In the 1970’s, the biggest porn star around was Gloria Leonard. She was like the Meryl Streep of porno. I used to work with her a lot. Whenever she had a new movie screening at Show World, I’d go along with her to warm up the crowd. But Gloria wasn’t just a famous actress. She was the publisher of High Society, which was one of the biggest adult magazines going back then. Gloria was always trying to convince me to do a spread in her magazine, but I kept saying ‘no.’ Those shoots were full nude. But Gloria and I became good friends because she loved listening to my stories. One day we were laughing about something that happened, and she tells me: ‘You’d make a lot more money if you wrote for me.’ I told her: ‘C’mon Gloria.  It’s all an act.  My sex life is boring.  There’s nothing to write about.’  That’s when she leaned in real close, and whispered: ‘It doesn’t matter.  Just make it up.’  I went home that night and started typing. And when I showed Gloria what I wrote, she agreed to give me a column every other month.  We called it Tattletales From Tanqueray.  The pay was $500, and it only had to be two pages. The writing part took me forever because I’d failed typing class three times.  But the ideas came easy.  All I did was take a regular situation, and make it X-rated.  I pretended like I was having sex everywhere: grocery stores, movie theaters, the DMV. I even wrote about having sex in prison. And people believed I was actually doing that shit. Gloria published everything I wrote. She said I was the only writer that they never had to edit. I still wouldn’t let her put my picture in there, just the headshot. But it didn’t matter. Because everybody read High Society.  You couldn’t buy that type of publicity.  And after the first issues came out, I was like famous.  Gloria would send boxes of the latest issue to all of my gigs.  Guys would be lining up on the street to get a signature. And my salary went up, big time.”
The Tanqueray Trust: https://bit.ly/2ZUjifW

(25/32) “The other dancers weren’t too happy about my success. A...

(25/32) “The other dancers weren’t too happy about my success. A lot of times they’d go out together after a show, but I was never invited. I didn’t really fit in with them anyway. No offense, all of them were gorgeous.  But they all had problems. I don’t think any of them wanted to be doing what they were doing, so they were always drinking and snorting cocaine. My only friend in the community was a girl named Ronnie Bell. She was drop dead gorgeous.  I mean next level.  With or without make-up. All the other dancers were jealous of her, I’m not sure Ronnie realized it, but they were. Because she stole the show whenever she worked. This girl would have double gigs some nights.  One show at eight.  One show at ten. And the moment you saw her, you understood why. Ronnie had a tough childhood. She grew up in New Orleans, but she ran away from home at the age of fourteen to join the circus. Then she saved all that money and put herself through medical school. During the day she worked as a registered nurse. Ronnie never had to do any of it. She lived in a big house out in Queens. She only danced because she enjoyed it. That’s why we got along so well, neither of us took ourselves seriously. We used to work a theater together outside of Fort Dix, where the black soldiers trained. I was always the feature. The promoter would lie and say I was ‘Ms. Black Universe’ or something. Ronnie and I used to meet at my apartment and drive out there together. As soon as we got on the Jersey turnpike, we’d take off our shirts, and wait for a big rig to come by and see us.  It never took long because Ronnie was stacked.  And I mean stacked.  We had one of those CB radios in the car, breaker nine or whatever.  So we’d egg them on.  And next thing you knew we’d have a convoy of tractor trailers escorting us down the highway. And when we finally got off the exit for Fort Dix, they’d all start honking their horns.  TAH TAH TAH.”
The Tanqueray Trust: https://bit.ly/2ZUjifW

(24/32) “I always saved my special magic trick for the grand...

(24/32) “I always saved my special magic trick for the grand finale. I’d bring it out during my final number, which was usually Donna Summer’s Love To Love You Baby. The guys would start roaring as soon as the song came on, because they knew what was coming. By that time I’d be down to a silk negligee made from thirty yards of silk. And even though I was full nude, I could twirl that negligee so fast that you never saw a thing. There would always be two baby bottle tops covering my nipples. And right as Donna was hitting the high note,‘I love to love you, babbbby’, I’d start tugging on those bottle tops, and chocolate milk would shoot out into the front row. It drove all the guys crazy. And I never let anyone near my equipment, so nobody could figure it out. There was a full blown rumor in the community that black girls make chocolate milk.  And I just let them run with it.  Because my shows were always full. The minute the doors opened, the guys would be running for the front row. I worked my way up to feature in less than a year. Nobody had ever done that before. I was just like Jackie Robinson, black number one. Make room for Tanqueray, cause here I come.”
The Tanqueray Trust: https://bit.ly/2ZUjifW

(21/32) “Every once in a while when I was dancing, guys would...

(21/32) “Every once in a while when I was dancing, guys would ask me if I did bachelor parties. And I always said ‘no,’ because I knew they wanted me to strip. But I wasn’t stupid. I knew that dancing wasn’t going to last forever. So when things fell apart with Carmine, I started saying ‘yes.’ It was all about money. A good GoGo dancer could make $100 in tips over a four-hour shift.  But burlesque paid $150, and your set only lasted eighteen minutes. My first gig was at a volunteer firehouse in Long Island. I was so nervous that I had to pee every five minutes. And I kept having to stop the performance while they drove away on calls. But I must have done something right, because they booked me again on the spot. And the captain drove me all the way back to New York with the siren going. I decided right then to make a career out of it. The first person I told was Oscar. We were having a drink one night, like we always did, and I told him I was thinking about doing burlesque. But there was only one problem: ‘Stephanie’ wasn’t sexy enough for burlesque, so I needed a new name. Oscar tried to help me come up with ideas. He kept sipping on his drink, and thinking real hard, but nothing was coming. Then after a few minutes, he slammed his glass down on the table and said: ‘Tanqueray.’ It sounded perfect to me. But that was the last thing that Oscar ever gave me. The next month he quit taking his blood pressure medication because he wanted to get a hard on for a stripper named Crystal Blue. And he ended up having a stroke. He lived for a few weeks after that. He couldn’t move much. And he could barely speak. But every day I visited him in the hospital. I put the word out to all the other girls, but none of them came. In the end I was the only one there. He started crying on the night before he died, because I think he knew he was close. And nobody had come to see him. All those years, all those chocolates, and all those silver dollars. They hadn’t bought him a thing.  He died completely alone.”
The Tanqueray Trust: https://bit.ly/2ZUjifW

(20/32) “I still have the last Christmas Card that Carmine gave...

(20/32) “I still have the last Christmas Card that Carmine gave me.  It was the Christmas he bought me fake tits. On the card he wrote: ‘I hope our next five years together are better than the last five.’ But we weren’t even together for five weeks after that. I went to the courthouse and filed for divorce. I didn’t want his money. I didn’t want any of his stuff. I even gave him back the motorcycle, because I didn’t want him to have any reason to come around. He started ringing my doorbell at all hours of the night. He was screaming outside my window. He was out of his mind on drugs, and I called the cops so much that they stopped responding. At the time I’d taken a second job working as a coat check at The Wagon Wheel, and that’s where Carmine finally found me. He walked right past the bouncers because everyone knew him. He stood right in front of me. He looked like he’d been crying. Then he pulled a gun out of his coat, and pointed it at my face, and told me that he still loved me. I looked him right in the eyes. I didn’t even say a word. But my knees were shaking so bad that I could barely stand up. The bouncers saw what was going on and they wrestled him to the floor. Then they threw him out on the street. But nobody called the police.  Because everybody loved Carmine. That night I called Joe Dorsey and told him what happened. I wasn’t selling coats for him anymore, but we were still friends. So he told me not to worry. I knew that Carmine scored his heroin at a burned-out apartment on 50th street. So Joe Dorsey and his goombas parked across the street, and rolled up on Carmine right after he scored. They told him that they could care less if he was Italian. And they didn’t care if I was a black girl. If I ever fell down the stairs, or got a scratch on my face, they were gonna shoot him full of heroin and throw him in the river. He’d look like just another dead junkie. There wouldn’t even be an investigation. Carmine stopped coming around after that.”
The Tanqueray Trust: https://bit.ly/2ZUjifW

(19/32) “We’d been living on 34th Street for a few years when a...

(19/32) “We’d been living on 34th Street for a few years when a prostitute moved into our building. Her name was Candy or something. And at first I thought Carmine was fucking her, because she kept knocking on our door. But one day the elevator wasn’t working and I caught the two of them shooting up in the stairwell. Carmine swore it was a one-time thing. But I started to notice little changes. He didn’t want to go out much anymore. He kept dozing off on the couch. And then my tip money began to disappear. Later I’d find out that Carmine had been using for years. But I’d been too square to notice. He was the only junkie in the world who could keep a 9 to 5. And he was shooting up between his toes, so I never saw tracks on his arms. Everything seemed normal. I never had to tell him to do anything.  It would always be: ‘I’ll wash the dishes tonight,’ or whatever. Junkies don’t do that. There wasn’t much sex, I remember that.  But he’d give me hugs.  We’d watch TV together. So for the longest time I never knew.  We tried a few programs after he finally came clean. But every time he went to rehab, he’d just meet another connection. Then he’d go straight back to the drugs. I couldn’t handle the lies anymore. It was like I was living with someone who wasn’t real. And everything he said was part of a script. I think Carmine sensed what was coming. Because every day he was asking me to marry him. And the worse he got on drugs, the more he asked. I’d always tell him no.  It wasn’t because I didn’t love him,  I loved that man more than I’ve ever loved another person. I just couldn’t be with a junkie. It wasn’t easy to leave. We didn’t have any savings. And the apartment was in his name, so I had nowhere to go. At some point I figured in my crazy mind that if I married him, I could divorce him. And if I divorced him—at least I could keep the apartment. So the next time he proposed, I said ‘yes.’  We went to city hall. I wore a black dress because I knew it was the end.  He didn’t know, but I knew.”
The Tanqueray Trust: https://bit.ly/2ZUjifW

(18/32) “Carmine was a hustler, but he was steady. Our bills...

(18/32) “Carmine was a hustler, but he was steady. Our bills were always paid, so I never had to dance much when I was with him. The only job I kept was at a place called The Metropol. It was a big, three-story club owned by a bunch of mob guys and one connected Israeli. And it was the best place in the city to dance go-go, because they booked by the week and the place was always packed. There were a lot of office buildings around so the customers had money. And the stage was behind the bar so they wouldn’t even try to touch you. We always had three girls dancing: two on the floor, and one doing sexy moves on a red velvet couch. Things got so hot on that couch that guys would sometimes try to jerk off at the bar. We called them ‘shoulder jumpers.’ Because even if they covered their lap with a coat, you could always see their shoulders jumping. A lot of my old followers couldn’t afford the Metropol. But Oscar still came to every one of my shows. He wasn’t allowed to wear his greasy uniform, but he still showed up. He’d always sit in the same seat. He’d order the same glass of Tanqueray. And every Christmas he’d give me the same chocolate box covered in silver dollars. Sometimes when my shift was over, Oscar and I would sit at the bar and talk for hours. He never hit on me once. He was the closest thing to a father figure that I ever had. He always picked up the phone when I called. One weekend Carmine was in Vegas, and I got diarrhea so bad that I couldn’t get off the toilet. I called every single girl I knew. But nobody would come help me. Oscar drove all the way from Brooklyn to bring me a bottle of Imodium. He didn’t even ask questions. That’s how he was. He’s the only one I could completely trust. I told him everything about my personal life. So he’s the only one who knew that things had started going south with Carmine.”  
The Tanqueray Trust: https://bit.ly/2ZUjifW