In 2004, MGM unveiled
the “V.I.P. edition”
of Showgirls. It cost about $69
and included shot glasses,
a lap dance tutorial, a nude
Elizabeth Berkley poster
for a game: “pin the pasties
on the showgirl” (!) (?!)
At this, even a hard
heart fizzles.
That famous scene:
Elizabeth Berkley fellating
the stripper pole. My strip
club fellows and I scream into pillows.
We have to rewind,
so that poor ruined
Elizabeth Berkley licks
the pole again
and again, and we always
scream,
and we always scream.
VH1 runs Showgirls
with digitally-rendered
bras and panties
masking the nudity, black bars
of censorship
that move as the women
move, dance
as they dance. We are stuck
with this version, lacking the glitzy
“V.I.P.” edition, or a DVD player
to show it on. Elizabeth Berkley
was twenty-two
when Paul Verhoeven spun
Showgirls out of her hair. It failed.
Her (male)
agent dropped her. No other
(male) agent would take her.
Elizabeth Berkley drowned
at twenty-two, in a man’s failure.
She actually licked
the stripper pole! People
jeer at her stupidity.
My coworkers
many younger
than twenty-two, jeer
at her stupidity. After all,
we all bleach our club’s pole
before touching it, so clean
it peals
against our thighs
when they grip
it. Per our (male)
boss,
“clean as a newborn
baby’s asshole”
(??!!!)
What would serious men
do without women’s flesh
to mortify? Oh!
And as if enough wasn’t enough,
Elizabeth Berkley’s corpse
has been exhumed, mummified
by the icy water:
Showgirls was satire
all along! Jim Jarmusch
claims that he always knew,
as does Quentin Tarantino. Unsunned
boys with their serious
boy films. More important
than ours, their toys: NYU
film school, CBGB, Harvey
Weinstein’s money.
But back to now. Pajamas
and peach Ciroc, and bruise-
colored lip shots
swelling in the islands
of friends’ sandy
laps. She licks
the pole, and again
we scream.
Rax King is a dog-loving, hedgehog-mothering, beer-swilling, gay and disabled sumbitch who occasionally writes and works as assistant editor for Sundress Publications. She is the author of the collection 'The People's Elbow: Thirty Recitatives on Rape and Wrestling' (Ursus Americanus, 2018). Her work can also be found in Catapult, Electric Literature, and Autostraddle.