Bondage story - The Phantom of the Roxy -1

CHAPTER ONE A GHOST BACKSTAGE

Jessica Patterson was an actress, and that’s all there was to it. She was damn good at what she did, she’d spent years studying, and she utterly refused to take a daytime job waiting tables or serving up coffee drinks. She could sing, she could dance, she could improv with the best of them, and with a good, juicy role to play, she could bring tears to old ladies’ eyes.

Not only that, at twenty-two she was vibrant, sexy and strikingly beautiful. Her milk-white skin and long dark brown hair were a potent combination, and with her wide, serious green eyes, delicate features, dainty mouth and round, cherubic face, she had a unique look of childlike innocence about her, which she tried to offset by wearing sexy clothes that showed off her body. Her body was spectacular, with long, slender legs and a lithe, slim torso, and breasts that were full and round on her narrow chest but had not yet succumbed to the law of gravity.

With all this going for her, Jessica should have been able to get any part she wanted. The problem was, Hollywood was overrun with hordes of young women just as beautiful as she was, and whenever an ingenue part came up, she found herself standing in a long, long line of them.

Television and movie producers didn’t seem to care if you could act, either. They were apparently all devotees of type-casting, so when they needed a simple girl from Kansas, for instance, they weren’t interested in a girl who could play a simple girl from Kansas and sparkle while she did it; no, they inevitably hired a girl who was simple and actually from Kansas.

Jessica had been playing the audition game for two long, disappointing years, and her parents were getting tired of sending her money. Something had to break, and she wasn’t willing to join the multitudes who were posing nude or doing porn. So when her agent told her about the Roxy job in New York, she jumped on it. Maybe the Big Apple would have a little appreciation for talent!

The Roxy was an old, decayed brick building on forty-second street with a new, brightly-painted facade sporting four hundred light bulbs and a hodge-podge of retro styles from the thirties, forties and sixties. The huge wooden letters that squatted atop the marquee and spelled out “Roxy” were cracked and pitted and had an Art Nouveau look, apparently a vintage sign left over from the thirties, with paint and light bulbs added. Many of the bulbs fickered sporadically, and a few of them were out. The overall effect was sort of sad, like an aging actress with a partially-successful facelift and far too much make-up.

The Roxy had been a prestigious theater back around the turn of the century, and an expensive attempt had been made to restore it to its original grandeur. It, like the rest of forty-second street, had endured a rough century. After a couple of decades it had fallen on hard times, and by the twenties it had become a vaudevillian stage. Briefy, it was also a cover for a speakeasy in the back. Then in the late thirties it became a burlesque show, and a movie theater in the forties, and fnally by the sixties it had become an X-rated peep show, one of dozens along the sleazy strip that the street had become. Finally, in the early nineties, Manhattan had re-zoned and cleaned up forty-second street, and the old girl had gotten her make-over. Now she was a legitimate theater again, where sophisticated New Yorkers went to sip complimentary wine and sit through deadly dull but “important” theatrical productions like “Death of a Salesman,” “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” and “Equus.”

The particular show that Jessica had been hired for was not one of the traditional chestnuts but one of a new breed of original plays the theater had been doing lately. These were quirky but often brilliant gothic period pieces, full of wit and timeless allegorical wisdom, written by a mysterious and reclusive playwright known only as “Phinister.” At least that was what she had been told by her agent, and sure enough, the press releases would later quote him almost word for word.

When Jessica arrived at the Roxy, carrying so much luggage she could barely walk from the taxi to the door, she was greeted by one Ira Shapiro, who offered smiles only in quick, nervous doses and spouted sporadic pleasantries in incomplete sentences as he helped her carry her luggage inside. He was wiry and pot-bellied, balding and bespectacled, an entirely forgettable fgure of a man whom Jessica found out the following day was the director of the play.

He led her out of the muggy heat of the sidewalk and into the cool darkness of the theater before offering his short, nervous introduction. Then he again shouldered half of her bags and escorted her through the cavernous theater, up onto the creaking wooden stage, and into the labyrinthine backstage, never slowing or checking to see if she was still behind him. A hundred twists and turns later they arrived at a set of narrow stairs that crept up the ancient brick wall to a railed catwalk some thirty feet above. They had to stop several times to rest, but they made it up the stairs. A short distance along the catwalk there was an outside door that took them out onto the pebbled roof of the building behind the theater. Though the sun could barely be seen through the smog, the summer heat was sweltering as they traversed the rooftop and entered what appeared to be an outhouse, but was in fact a covered stairwell that led down into a narrow, musty hallway. There were eight numbered doors, four on each side, and a larger door at the end, which Ira informed her was the bathroom. He opened the frst door on the left, and Jessica entered her new home.

It was a small, shabby room with only the most basic furniture, a dirty, curtain-less window mounted in one of the two outer walls, which were ancient, unpainted brick and more than a foot thick. The room had been part of the deal when the theater had imported her from Los Angeles, for fnding an apartment in Manhattan on short notice was almost impossible.

She was, she learned the following morning during the seven-o’clock rush for the bathroom, not the only imported talent. More than half the cast, six actors and actresses in all, had been hired from other states and put up in these tatty little rooms. It was only much later that she was to learn why.