Bitch Kitty Racing

This was going to be huge. We printed up 500 invitations for a costume party and got back 130 RSVPs, far more than expected. Keith Bingman, the other half of Bitch Kitty Racing, was going to be in town and I wanted to show off the little empire of sin I was building. Keith is also an incredibly talented photographer, and I was excited to provide him with subject matter. This would be a perfect opportunity to get him behind the lens. I also had Shawn McCullough lined up to take pictures of the crowd.

My friend and personal assistant, Corrine Bray, planned food, booze, clowns, fire dancers, music, and other assorted mayhem before we got into a fight over a woman and she stopped speaking to me except in monosyllabic sentences. This made it a bit harder for me to really tack things down and get a schedule going. Nonetheless, perseverance will always pay off so I forged ahead.

Luckily enough, the boys who run the studio space called the Bureau of Unspecified Services have very little sound judgment, common sense, or impulse control and agreed to all of the horrible and quite probably illegal activities that were to take place there. They even agreed to remove the dead raccoon from the boiler room. I love those guys, though in retrospect I’m quite sure that making agreements with amoral and hedonistic Irish Mafia proves that I also have very little sound judgment, common sense, or impulse control.

I planned out the menu, planned out the drinks, forecast probable sales and profit margins, created a time table, arranged entertainment, and generally overthought every conceivable eventuality that could take place that night. I was undeniably, totally, and completely prepared.

By nine a.m. on the day of the shoot I knew I was undeniably, totally, and completely screwed. Rather than sleep the night before I had gone out drinking with friends and then stayed the night with my new love. There was no way in hell I was going to be able to get everyone and everything in place on schedule. There was not going to be enough booze, we were going to run out of food, the lights were not going to show up, one of the photographers was going to die, some horrible accident or violent crime was going to take place, and the FBI was going to raid the place.

Running around at top speed in a bright yellow supercharged car is a great way to get pulled over by the police, and I watched my schedule get further and further behind as the blue and red lights of the SPD flashed behind my car. Nonetheless, I was determined to get all this done so I called Corrine and she somewhat less icily agreed to help. We switched to her aged VW Rabbit, the one without any shock absorbers that rides like a prostitute roller coaster, and zoomed all over Seattle picking up materiel. Somewhere in between Costco and Cash’n’Carry I threw up, but we finally got everything to the studio.

Luckily enough, the aforementioned Bureau boys had gotten the beer. I can only image the sight of two men in black suits and ties literally rolling kegs down the hill that is Pike Street. Why the nice and seemingly sane brewery folks let them do this is beyond understanding, but I will always be sorry I missed the sight of fifteen gallons of aluminum-armored beer impacting a Toyota, and the ensuing arguments and bribes that must have taken place to avoid arrest for drunk, disorderly, negligent, and completely reckless behavior.

I went to the liquor store and finished incinerating any hope I have that my credit card company will not be calling me on a thrice-daily basis by purchasing enough vodka for three hundred cocktails. In line, a bum who had obviously been urinating in his pants on a thrice-daily basis cut in front of everyone. The clerk looked up at him, and apparently thought it would be easier to just check him out and get him out of the store. Though no one with a heart will ever forgive me for this, at this point I snapped. “EXCUSE ME!” I said, perhaps yelled at the bum. “The BACK of the LINE is THERE!” thumb cocked behind me.

“What, you in some big hurry to get drunk, mother?! You got somethin’ against black people?! Cracker!” was his slurry reply.

The two suburban fifty-something housewives in front me trembled. “Just let him go through,” whispered one to me. “We don’t want to get hurt.”

“Jesus, lady. Give me a break.” Oddly enough, this didn’t calm her down. To the bum: “Behind. Me.”

If I had been working the store, I would have asked me to leave, but my neighborhood is of such “diversity” that apparently my outburst was acceptable. Though no one besides me was going to challenge him, the bum nonetheless shuffled to the back of the line without any comment. Perhaps it was my obviously agitated and unshaven demeanor, or perhaps it was the thirty bottles of vodka I carried, but I think he knew he’d met his match in the crazy department.

On the two blocks back to the studio I was pulled over again. Looking at the police officer I had impure thoughts of her handcuffs and bullet-proof vest. I suddenly wanted to leap out of the car so she’d chase and tackle me. While I reflected on how sexually exciting uniforms are it occurred to me: I had neglected to get a costume.

Damn it!

I slowly, carefully drove back to the studio and traded the vodka for Corrine. For some reason, and I admit this is both psychologically revealing and not always a good idea, whenever I panic I find a woman and let her take control of the situation. This time I would up in the teenybopper version of a sex store trying on skin-tight patent-vinyl bodysuits. At the counter, Corrine did something I have never seen a person do outside of a car lot: she haggled with the clerk. “Come on, this isn’t really the price. You guys always put this stuff on sale for half off a day after I buy it. How much is it really?” Incredibly enough, Corrine won me fifty percent off my purchases.

I ran back to the apartment, squeezed into this tight costume and tried to accessorize while jockeying for position with six people in various stages of dress, undress, and body paint. But I did it, though with underwear outside of my pants and a leather harness over my crotch I have no idea what the hell I was supposed to be.

Finally, at the studio, I could relax. Everything was in place: bartender, door people, model release people, photographers. My work was done. Time for a delicious, relaxing, and refreshing Martini. Thus began a set of alcohol-related decision making that can be best described as “bad.”

Personality tests have shown me to be a systems person, meaning that I am able to create functioning operations out of people and materiel for specific purposes such as automobile production, or such things as this party. The problem arises when the systems do not function because of the cogs I like to call “people.” I simply do not understand other people’s insistence that they have free will. Simply do what I told you to do, the way I told you to do it, and I can avoid an aneurysm. Alas, most people do not see their importance to the success of my machines, nor I am able to successfully communicate the reasoning behind this person’s function in such a way that this person feels motivated and happy to do his part. At best, my interpersonal motivational skills can be compared to a monkey trying to teach a house cat to read. The cat has no idea why he would want to read, the monkey knows he doesn’t speak cat, but yet insists on jumping up and down and yelling “ook! ook! ook!” at the cat anyway.

Halfway through the second Martini my phone rang. “Hello?”

“John, where is this party? I can’t find it.”

“There’s a map on the other side of your invitation.” Having worked as a professional mapmaker and draftsperson I had conveniently included a map complete with streets, building names and numbers, and also the names of the business that inhabited those buildings. Furthermore, I had provided a diagram of the parking lot, a clearly labeled and highlighted location of the studio in relation to its surroundings, and a large bold font which said “HERE” with an arrow pointing to the front door.

“I know, but it doesn’t make any sense,” said the caller.

She had to be joking. “Where are you?”

“Tenth and Pike.”

“You’re here. Walk South on Tenth, enter the parking lot, and it’s on your left. There’s a sign and everything.”

“Okay. Which way’s South?”

“Make sure the Mexican restaurant is on your left and the tavern is behind you, then walk.” The Martini was definitely improving my mood. I love being tipsy. It helps me not kill people. “Have you found the parking lot?”

“No. Where is it?”

“Don’t move. I’ll come out and get you.”

So I went out and fetched the guests who were standing confusedly at the entrance to the parking lot and invited them warmly in, admired their costumes, and fed them booze.

The phone rang again. “Where is this place? I can’t find it.”

This scenario repeated itself about fifteen more times. By the time of the night I had expected things to be in full swing, there were fewer than twenty people standing guardedly around in the tight little non-interactive knots that characterize the Seattle social scene. Ask any touring musician; Seattle audiences are the most unappreciative in the world. They neither dance nor cheer. This is why shoe-gazers abound here. These morose little introspects already know that no one loves them, so they are perfectly happy on stage staring at the floor and plinking out the anthems of the perpetually misunderstood. When no one claps at the end of the song, they are validated and feel superior.

I herded what people I could in front of the camera, tried to pose them or least get them to do something entertaining, but there seemed to be some sort of antipathy building up between the photographers and models, and also between the photographers themselves. I would assume that normally photographers know what they want and make the models do it. Here, there was no interaction taking place. There was no direction. Everyone was just standing around waiting for something to happen.

“What do you want, John?” asked Keith, frustrated.

“For you to take pictures?”

“Of what?” Again, reluctant cog which results in system failure. “C’mon, you’re the art director,” he sneered.

Though snotty, Keith was right. Photographers shoot interesting things. When there is nothing interesting going on, they don’t shoot. I was not paying these people. They were here for the fun of it, but no one was having any. I had to make interesting and fun things happen, yet I was also another failing cog. Too little sleep combined with too much stress, then stirred lightly with vodka had left me with the imagination of a cotton ball. I could not see what I wanted, yet motion was necessary.

“Let’s do this…” I bent and prodded the girls before the camera, tried to visualize the finished picture, posed and molded them, moved them slightly. “Uh… Try this. That’s good, now do this. Great. Okay, now move this way. Okay.” I still could not see what I wanted. I could feel a certain enmity building within me for everyone and everything in the room. I wanted to start punching people. “Kill each other,” I said to the models. They began to strangle each other and wrestle around.

Bingo.

“Yeah, that looks nice.”

Of course, in retrospect I see what you, dear reader, have probably already seen by now: while I had the correct structure in place for the system to run well, I had not provided a reason why it should run at all. No one had any idea what they were doing because no idea had been provided. In fact, up until this point even I had been simply standing around and waiting for something to happen. It doesn’t work like that. Nothing works like that. Nothing will ever happen.

So I posed the girls, then posed myself, and staged a few fight scenes with other models for posterity. Everyone seemed to know what they were doing and fun pictures were being taken. There. My job was done. Now I could relax. And what better way than with yet another refreshing Martini?

“Hey, John, there’s nothing really going on here so we’re going to take off.”

I looked up unhappily from my cocktail. It was true. This party sucked. It was totally undercrowded and the entertainment hadn’t shown up. No clowns, no fire breathers, no jugglers. Corrine suggested that she go to the club next door and round up some more people. I agreed.

“John, can I talk to you?” Keith. In the kitchen, he related his dissatisfaction with having Shawn shoot the same subject at the same time. Shawn, being a photographer, was doing the most natural thing in the world to him. He was shooting the most interesting thing in the room, which was definitely not the crowd. There was no crowd. There were only people standing around and not doing anything, highly unscintillating subject matter, so he had been shooting right alongside Keith.

“I hate this, John,” Keith said. “I’m not taking any more pictures. I’m tired. I’m drunk. I’m going home.”

Oh, no no no no… I’d known Keith a long time, almost my entire life. I had seen this mood before. This was not pretty. This was not my friend Keith; this was Artist Keith. This was the Incorrigible Obstinacy Keith. “Why don’t you just ask Shawn to take turns?” I suggested. Obviously I was drunk to come up with such a zany solution, Keith said, but nonetheless, after some ego-smoothing and pep-talking, Keith reluctantly agreed, though I would have to handle the negotiations.

After putting out that fire I walked back into the photo space where a man wearing fishnet stockings, garters, and not much else was on his hands and knees being flogged by a girl wearing liquid latex and not much else. This was so far away from what I wanted I could actually feel blood dripping out of my ears. This was just stupid. Who in their right mind would really want to see this, and why? I tried to form a sentence to Shawn who was happily shooting away, a sentence that indicated that this sort of activity was not what we were looking for, that this was adolescent drunken prurience at best, that re-enactments of pseudo-deviant sexuality just weren’t very interesting. I tried to form this sentence to be encouraging to his creativity, yet firm in my stance.

What came out was: “Stop. Wasting. Film.”

He looked perplexed. “It’s a digital camera.”

“I don’t. Really. Care.”

Shawn is a big man, easily a size 50 jacket to my own slim 36, and I saw real anger flash in his eyes, yet I planted my feet and held my ground. This aberrant behavior on my part in front of someone who has literally picked me up by the head before and bounced me off a wall must have made him nervous, because he waved the subjects off stage and began working on the next set.

At this point I snapped for the second time that day, but the Martinis kept me from berating the models that had just left the stage. Instead I just picked up the flog and began beating one of them severely. Soon my masochistic male subject was moaning in pleasure and I was finally starting to feel less angry, though it was frustrating to me that he enjoyed it. Usually, when I feel like inflicting pain, I don’t want the recipient to be so damned happy about it.

After another Martini it seemed like good idea to accept an invitation into a private room to help a model get dressed. While nothing even remotely sexual went on in that room (I was only lacing her corset) I nonetheless felt the shame of the inveterate philanderer when the first person I saw upon exiting was my new love, freshly arrived after a long night at work.

“Oh, really,” she said.

“Hi, sweetie!” I said and practically jumped into her lap, even though she was standing. My first reaction upon seeing her was always to run around barking in tight little circles, leap into her arms and lick her face.

“Oh. You’re loaded,” she said. “Great.”

We’d been dating for all of six weeks.

I was saved from having to explain my seemingly questionable loyalty by the sudden return of Corrine with an entourage of what my generation calls batcavers, though they refer to themselves as goths. The smell of clove cigarettes and Aqua Net brought a tear to my eye as I remembered the days of my youth. Corrine had brought these kids from a nearby private dance club, and there was obviously a quite few other chemicals than just ethanol bobbing around in their bloodstreams. Still, this was fresh meat for the camera, no matter how juked-up they were.

I knew more than a few of these people from my day job, at least in passing, though I hadn’t really interacted with any of them before. The world of industrial death rock had left me behind when it became passé twenty years ago, and now that it was new again I was passé. However, I will always have a soft spot in my heart for too much black. I love these kids. I love their nasty little superior attitudes and tight sexy clothing, all that makeup and preparation in a city renowned for plaid flannel shirts. These days they’re mauling their faces with steel and tattoos, elongating their earlobes with ever larger weights and hoops, apparently finding the height of punk to be in the jungles of New Guinea, disfiguring themselves for life in the search for personal identity. They’re just so cute!

As if to illustrate my thoughts, a twenty-one year old girl I know, sporting a purple Mohawk (though she would reprimand me for calling it so. “It’s a chicken hawk,” she’d say defensively) and a fresh brand, of course clad in black from head to toe, said to me, “What’re you doing here?” Such adorable contemptuousness!

The models were, understandably, more akin to retarded hamsters than photo fodder, almost impossible to control or direct. They were not the sexually libertine predators they imagined themselves to be. They were, in fact, mostly hams. Lots of bared teeth and saucy poses, portraying what they thought of as dangerous. Still, we had the setup and we shot away, letting them do whatever they wanted until they warmed up and then pitting them against one other is a staged fight for the outcome of the globe. Some of the pictures are entertaining, and some are just bloody awful.

I finally gave in and just flowed with everything that was going on around me, no longer trying to control rapidly degenerating situation. I wound up having fun searching for the ever more realistic fight scene, concentrating on which muscles should be flexed to look realistic, or what motion was necessary to impart the feeling of motion in a still image. My new love proved to be an amazingly fun and willing subject in this search, allowing herself to be thrown around by an orange-dreaded woman who was easily six feet four.

Finally, four a.m. rolled around and I declared myself legally dead. I had consumed twice my body weight in vodka, impossible though this may seem, and been running on three hours of sleep for two days. Keith and I packed up the gear and loaded it out into the waiting truck. Goodbyes were said, though the party still continued.

Finally in bed and curled up around the warm happy goodness that was my new love, I was able to let go of the stress I had created for myself with this experience. Whatever the final outcome was to be, we had all created something that night and I believe that creation is, fundamentally, the point of life.

I kissed my beautiful girlfriend and went to sleep.

Epilog

I stopped by the Bureau of Unspecified Services late the next day. The boys were still up and still drinking. Their feet were up on the kitchen table as all four of them leaned back in their chairs, black suits still immaculate, cigarettes still burning. They had managed to consume the rest of the first keg and had a very good start on the next.

I walked into the main room to grab something, I forget what, and I was stilled by the sight. My jaw dropped, my breathing ceased. The destruction of the studio defies description, as futilely as trying to describe Angkor Wat using pictures from a disposable camera, but I find I must try anyway:

Two thousand square feet of blood-colored floors and low-ceilinged white walls, the remains of thirty broken vodka bottles exploded from a concrete corner, blue, green and clear glass everywhere. From the smashed limes, it’s apparent that a game of cockshies had been taking place, then abandoned in alcoholic frustration, the remaining bottles and limes hurled with ever-increasing velocity at a moving, yet invisible target.

All the food that was left, all the food no one ate, was sprayed evenly on the floor like fake snow. Tortilla chips, celery, carrots, bean dip, peanuts. The words, “OUT PIG DIE LUCKY” were smeared on a wall in hummus, while ranch dressing spelled “splorf” on the bathroom door.

I hoped that wasn’t blood leaking out from under the overturned couch, though a hand was clearly visible through countless empty beer cans, as if the hidden person had taken refuge during a spectacularly lethal game of smear the queer.

The dead raccoon was back.

Termite mounds of cigarette butts still smoldered near every seating area, filling the air with a burning fiberglass smell. The smokers themselves had obviously given up on the piles and started using the floor, then the seats. There was the frame of an armchair, also still smoldering, covered with the contents of a disgorged fire extinguisher.

I backed out slowly, and with no words of farewell left the studio.

Photo Shoot: Costumes