Old Berlin, the late 1970s.
As a somewhat innocent and hopeful girl of twenty-one years old, Phoenyx applies for a job as a stripper in the Kitty Klub of Old Berlin, a venue with a long and respected history of adult entertainment. New in town and in need of rent money and friends, Phoenyx soon finds both among the other entertainers and regulars at the Klub—and much more besides.
Along the way, she slides from one breathless erotic adventure to the next: from her first lesbian and group encounters with the flirty Olivia, to her first taste of transgender sex with the feisty hermaphrodite Honey, Phoenyx experiences the full range of tease, love, and lust, including a walk on the darker side of desire with her frustrated and dominant landlady, and passing affairs with just about anyone she takes a fancy to. But as she matures into a veteran erotic performer, can she also find true happiness in the glare of the red light—and whatever would her mother say if she found out about it all?
A trip to Tokyo with Honey opens her eyes to a new world of possibilities and provides her with an exotic tattoo, courtesy of Honey’s old flame, Johnny Iko, which he tells her is magical and will define her future. The journey certainly changes her life—but whether for the better, only Fate, and the reborn Phoenyx, can decide.
But time and reality finally catch up with the Klub and its performers, heralding the end of an era of innocent debauchery. Can Phoenyx see all her dreams come true before the curtain falls for the last time?
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 were destined to survive for the benefit of future generations and shake a fist at the cruel ravages of war. Never respectable enough to appeal to the elite, but never so cheap as to be embarrassing, the Klub bared its soul with the charm, honesty, and humour of a hooker with a heart of a gold, as if the venue itself were 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, 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 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, clothes, and 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 heard the stage boards creak 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 swished my hair across my bare back as I clumped past heavy burgundy curtains backstage to the dark wood-panelled 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 pale 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 earliest days, the days when I was young and virginal, before I passed through the alchemical fires of the Klub.
I stood 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 oozed from my eyes and challenged the advertising claims of my no-run eyeliner. 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 minefield of old cobblestones I remembered. All that remained were the elderly iron lampposts, 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. I had brought to a close not just one but several whole chapters of my life, and it was time 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, new glories born from old ashes.
For I had a dinner date in Marrakesh, and I couldn’t possibly be late.
