Social Climbing at Jumbo's Clown Room
A tale of a few strippers
By Cole Coonce
It was a couple of hours after the bars and liquor stores closed, and back in the days before 1) punk rock broke and 2) Kurt Cobain's widow got fake hooters and a nose job. Somehow, this skinny guitar player from a half-famous North Carolina new-wave band ended up at my house with our mutual pal Hofer. We were drinking cheap Mexican beer, smoking sticks and coffin nails, listening to records, and arguing about the dubious merits of Camper Van Beethoven. In a non-linear manner, the topic became Alex Cox films ... .
"Hey, man, y'all ever heard of Courtney Love?" asked the aw-shucks bumpkin guitarist. We nodded, and Hofer referenced Jumbo's Clown Room, a stripper bar on Hollywood Boulevard, where Ms. Love did a slinky bump-'n'-grind for money.
"Well, then, I gotta' show y'all sump'n," the bumpkin said, peeling off his shirt.
Proud as a peacock, he displayed some disturbing, striated cuts across his bare back.
"I was in Jumbo's last night to grab a couple of beers, and she danced for me, and we got to talkin'. I ended up going home with her," he winced. "Shit fire, that gal sho' is a wild one."
"You want some hydrogen peroxide for those flesh wounds?" I asked.
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I was having a drink with a couple of expat Brits who were now living in Los Angeles, editing Rob Reiner movies. They said that, back in Ol' Sod, friends in L.A. would tape KCRW's The Cool and the Crazy off of the radio and then mail them the cassettes. The Brits were always curious about the DJ's signoff, which was something to the effect of: "The show's over, folks; now we're going to Jumbo's Clown Room!"
"By absentia, that place has always held an exotic, quintessential place in my heart and mind," one Brit told me, as we paid our tab and prepared to drive down Hollywood Boulevard to watch chicks squat and climb a greased silver pole for a couple of sawbucks.
Jumbo's smelled of Listerine and popcorn. A straw-haired dancer dervishly slithered up and down a pole while "Round and Round" by Ratt played over the sound system. Later, this same lass took our orders and then served us watery $5 beers.
In some attempt at socio-anthropological discourse, I coughed up the old saw, "What's a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?"
"Oh, just trying to stay in shape and make money for tuition."
"You mean you mount that eight-foot silver marital aid in front of strange men for muscle tone and college money?"
"Yeah, well, it's hard to work this place into my schedule because I have another job teaching aerobics and I'm pre-law at UCLA. But this is fun, and the money's pretty good."
"Are you sure you're not living with a junkie musician and just dropping trou for strangers to keep him in clean needles and bass-guitar strings?"
She laughed. Knowingly. Yes, this UCLA student was living out Camille Paglia's wettest dream: a smart woman using her toothsome and fetching body as a tool of empowerment.
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A year or three ago, around Thanksgiving, a friend and I cycled down the Pacific Coast, into Mexico. We ended up bumming around in Tijuana after dark. As proper American turistas, we felt it was our duty to help the local economy, which in this case meant patronizing a Mexican gentlemen's club.
Sundry señoritas made their rounds, cervezas were quaffed, and laps were straddled. While U2's "Numb" blared through speakers, an olive-skinned miss of prodigious pulchritude, with eyes like moonlit pearls, danced at our table. Ostensibly, she took a liking to my person - if not my cash flow - and offered a pair of private lap dances, the first one free.
At first, it was erotic and titillating ... but upon closer and continued contact, it became just bizarre, absurd, and bathetic, as I could smell the dirt and poverty of her native village in her honeyed hair and across the perfumed nape of her neck. To her credit, this whore/goddess had catapulted her way out of squalor. Was she was probing me for an opening to a better life across the border?
What to do? What would Meta-Feminist Paglia advise? Third-world advocate and Nobel Peace Prize nominee Bono? To take the Mexican lap dancer to a new life up north? And what would that better life be? Raising our bambinos as Good Catholics between her shifts at Jumbo's?
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Last Good Friday, I attended a semi-private screening of Dark Arc, a film starring and directed by Dan Zukovic, a professional acquaintance who, between projects, lives in the Winona Motel across from the Clown Room. The movie poster featured a quote from the Independent Film Channel: "[Dark Arc is a] bizarre blend of art, sex and opium ... [and] plays like a candy-colored version of David Lynch."
Afterward, there was a party for cast and crew at the Clown Room. Seated at the lip of the stage was this guy with a gray Eraserhead pompadour, mutely admiring the talent. I blinked to clear my eyes, and, yes, I was seeing it properly: David Lynch.
I am used to coincidences in this town, but this was a rather pushed and weird meta-media doppelganger: Here Dan Zukovic was kibitzing with David Lynch ... yes, the director whose movie the IFC called "Lynchian" was talkin' turkey with Lynch hisself.
When the two filmmakers shook hands, I feared there would be two piles of ashes where each man had been sitting. You know: Lynch and the anti-Lynch, intersecting like matter and anti-matter, creating the mother of all cosmic and metaphysical implosions inside a tittie bar on Hollywood Boulevard.
To my surprise, the world did not split like an apple. The world kept spinning. And "Round and Round" played over the sound system. Again. And, in gestures of both dominance and submission, the dancers really cranked up their mojo when it came time to stick their moneymakers in Lynch's face. They knew Jumbo's might be their ticket to greater things. Just like Courtney Love.
