Touchy Stuff
It’s pretty clear what Ray Parker is doing, and it’s fairly easy to guess why. But the value of his pious little protest? Now that’s a tougher question.
See, Parker is taking a moral stand, and he’s doing it as a favor to all of those parents who have just loaded up their cars with the belongings of their children and headed off to Lawrence. Those hundreds (if not thousands) of parents who mistakenly interpreted the endless miles of prairie surrounding Lawrence as some sort of buffer that would protect their children from the evils of the world (sorority “date dashes” excluded); who drove through Lawrence and ate lunch on Massachusetts Street and longed to have it all over again; who saw the town as a kind of harmless, liberal bohemia where even the temptations of college life —the endless number of bars, the finite desire to study —are somewhat charming; who could not imagine that one night, their eighteen-year-olds might be looking for something to do and find themselves in an unrefined bar called the Bottleneck — those parents could not conceive of the things their babies might see. The man whose butt cheeks hang out of his leather pants. The woman whose breasts are knotted up in rope. The 6-foot-tall bald woman struggling like holy hell to attach a gag mask to her face and then, in the face of defeat, lifting her already short rubber shirt to get some ventilation in her crotch.
And that’s just the audience. Elsewhere in the club, a phone booth-size structure punctured with holes stands in the corner. People surround the booth and stick their hands through the holes, presumably to grope the person inside, because it’s called the Groping Booth.
Near the booth, a butt cheek-exposed man called Gunner operates a massage table he calls the Sensation Station, decked out with different ropes and straps and devices for spanking. A loud smacking sound echoes from the table, followed by another and another, in a series of well-timed strikes of a paddle on the backside of a sprawled-out young woman. The smacking becomes a syncopated beat over the moody music originating from the DJ booth. It draws a handful of people to the dance floor in a listless shuffle, all shoulders and swaying.
Then the show begins. This time it takes on an itinerant-preacher theme, with the “Rev. Fred Felch” addressing his audience of fetishists, goths and underage college kids from a pulpit in a stereotypical Southern inflection.
“Welcome, brothers and sisters, welcome to another fetish night, brought to you by Contra Naturam. Once again, our traveling revival has come to you in the hopes of helping you, if only for one night, to throw off the chains and put on the rope…. I’d say we’ll endeavor to do this without restraint, but, oh no, brothers and sisters, restraints will be incorporated. We come to you in this secret place not only to perform for your pleasure but to GIVE you pleasure, pleasure that has been denied you for so long…. Yes, folks, we come to SAVE you! We come to FREE you! We come to untie the rope that the new order has bound you with, take those gags from your succulent, sensual lips and LET you be FREE!”
It is all enough to get Ray Parker’s blood up, and the Overland Park man will start spewing his own sermons a few weeks later in the Lawrence Journal-World.
A few years ago, Parker wouldn’t have had such great material to work with. Such events simply didn’t happen around here, except in private; in which case, they took place in homes that probably weren’t any different from his, where the spring project was a basement dungeon as opposed to, say, a new deck. By day, the participants lived what Parker might call normal lives. They wore normal clothes, short-sleeved polos and such. They paid taxes. By night, they parked their cars, ate their dinners and changed into something more constricting. They exchanged the TV remote for a paddle and channeled pleasureful pain. Then in the morning, they put on their normal clothes and headed out for a day of work, and people like Parker were none the wiser.
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There were fetish events outside of homes, mostly exclusive parties hosted by a well-known, local dominatrix named Mistress Deborah, who works out of her own downtown dungeon now. For the cover-paying crowd — maybe interested in some light spanking, maybe looking for something more — there was simply a dearth of action. Nothing to do.
By contrast, this year alone has seen more than a dozen public fetish shows in Lawrence and Kansas City (including Submission, My First Fetish Ball, The Great Exhibition and Fetish A Go-Go), all of which attracted fetish lifestylers (the less secretive ones, anyway), goth scenesters and a handful of plainclothed curiosity-seekers.
The man who takes credit for this kinky bloom is a 31-year-old named Jericho van de Velde, the “CEO, president, founder” of Contra Naturam (translated as “that which is against nature”). He is gaunt, pale and baby-faced, forever clad in a pair of worn, black leather pants. Two parallel mohawks rise up the back of his head and drape over his face in the goth equivalent of a pompadour. His smile is a crooked microcosm of the deviant sexuality he hopes one day will make him his living.
He is endlessly ambitious and believes his troupe’s semiregular performances at the Bottleneck are just the beginning of a full-fledged fetish cottage industry: Contra Naturam clothing, Contra Naturam sex toys, Contra Naturam BDS&M equipment, Contra Naturam DVDs, Contra Naturam cross-country tours and whatever else Jericho sets his Contra Naturam mind to. He also is a marvelous bullshitter.
“This has made me a celebrity in Lawrence,” he says. “I don’t mean celebrity as in there are parades being held for me. But not a week goes by that people don’t come up to me and say, ‘Hey, you’re the guy that does that fetish show. When are you going to do the next one?’ People I don’t know.”
Actually, there is a certain amount of truth to this. On a pleasant afternoon earlier this spring, he walked along an enlivened Massachusetts Street in downtown Lawrence, and not a block passed without someone at least shouting hello. One guy, apparently a glassblower, offered to manufacture Contra Naturam-brand dildos.
Dildos aside, there is nothing that says fetishism must be sexual, and this is probably the first of many misconceptions about the world of kinkdom. It can be sexual, sure, but it also can stop at mere sensuality. And “it” is a fairly extensive thing, covering everything from a woman’s desire to have her feet tickled with a feather to a man’s desire to be hog-tied and slapped senseless with a paddle.
Pain is not a necessary component of fetishism, though it certainly plays a part. Trust between partners, now that’s a far more universal element. The phrase “safe, sane and consensual” is so ubiquitous in the fetish community that some people roll their eyes at its mention. But the truth is, every fetish act demands an understanding among its participants. Once that trust is broken, the delicate relationship tends to fall apart.
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It is also wrong to assume any intrinsic link between the goth community and the fetish community. Not all goths are into fringe sex, and certainly not all fetishists listen to Peter Murphy. Nonetheless, their social paths overlap like concentric circles, so you’re as likely to find a fetishist at a dive bar on goth night as you are to find a flirt at a sports bar on game night. Realizing this, the promoters behind the Monday night goth at Davey’s Uptown Ramblers Club in midtown Kansas City decided a few years back to host the occasional fetish performance. They soon met Jericho, who had been looking for other fetish entertainers, and collaborated with him on several shows, first at Club Chemical downtown and later at Davey’s Uptown.
The relationship between the Davey’s promoters and Jericho had ended by January 2002; both sides give such differing accounts that the true reasons for the breakup are impossible to discern. In any event, Industrial Area Productions began looking for another fetish troupe, and Jericho began searching out his own permanent venue.
Eventually, Jericho struck a deal with the Bottleneck that allowed him to arrange shows every few months on dates not taken by the Bottleneck’s usual roster of nationally touring rock bands. Unlike most bars in Kansas City, the Bottleneck admits anyone over age eighteen. Not only did that bring in the numerous underage goths looking for something to do, but it also just about guaranteed that a handful of wide-eyed, gawky freshmen in baseball caps would pay the cover if only to walk out a few minutes later. And that doesn’t mention the dozens of fetish lifestylers encouraged to attend through postings on Internet message boards.
By their second show, the half-dozen performers of Contra Naturam were drawing a couple of hundred people and putting a chunk of their earnings into subsequent performances. The twenty-minute acts were often late to the stage, but many people in the crowd, entertaining themselves with home-brought toys, hardly seemed to notice. Jericho hired DJ Kaos, one of the more familiar figures in the goth and industrial scenes, to spin music throughout the night. For most of the evening, the Bottleneck felt less like a concert venue and more like a free-for-all.
Typically, a Contra Naturam show features three different acts taking place onstage at one time, variety being the key ingredient to an interesting performance (you never know how many people will wince at the sight of a scalpel being dragged across a young woman’s back). At the same time, performers can’t get wussy, either. “There has to be pain involved,” says Ion, Contra Naturam’s resident submissive. “For an audience like this, you can’t just do foot worship the whole night. That gets boring.”
From the start, each show centered on a theme. A vague yearning to combine fetishism and Santa Claus led to a Christmas show. Jericho’s desire to be beat with thorny roses developed into a Valentine’s Day show. “There was a person who once referred to me as the STD-infected pimp of a glorified strip show,” Jericho says. “That is so far off from what we are. But I don’t know, I was kind of thinking about it. OK, strip show. You want a strip show, we’ll give you a strip show.”
So in April there was a strip show, wherein an innocent, all-American lap dance turned increasingly violent, and hair metal gave way to a moodier soundtrack.
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Jericho insists that after each Contra Naturam performance, two things occur: People go home and have amazing sex, and someone in the audience begs to join the troupe. He takes great pride in sending the fornicators on their merry way and hands an application to the others. It is a seven-page form beginning with some general health questions and then asking applicants to rank, on a scale of one to five, their interests in a myriad of fetishes:
Abrasion, age play, anal play, anal toys, animal play, asphyxiation, cock and ball torture, bathroom training, soft beatings, hard beatings, severe beatings, blindfolds, biting, bloodletting, light bondage, heavy bondage, severe bondage, breast whipping, caging, caning, castration fantasy, chains, chastity belts, Christmas lights (as rope), choking, clothespins, cock rings, corset training, corset wearing, cutting, dilation, dildos, electricity, enema play, erotic dance, physical examinations, forced examinations, exhibition, eye-contact restrictions, facial slapping, fantasy rape, fantasy gang rape, fear control, fisting, fire play, following orders, foot worship, forced eating, forced servitude, forced smoking, full-head hoods or masks, gags, gagging, gas masks, golden showers (simulated), golden showers (genuine), hair plucking, hair pulling, harems (owning), harems (being in), harnesses, high-heel worship, hot oil, hot wax, humiliation, ice, immobilization, infantilism (baby play), initiation rites, intricate bondage or shibari, interrogation, kidnapping, kneeling, knife play, leather, nonsexual licking, mummification, needle play, nipple clamps, nipple torture, nipple weights, penis pumps (as torture), over-the-knee spanking, orgasm denial, light pain, moderate pain, severe pain, play piercing, permanent piercing, prison scenes, pony play, public exposure, public punishment, pussy worship, riding crops, religious scenes, rubber/latex, rope harnessing, saran wrapping, scratching, sensory deprivation, serving as art, serving as ashtray, serving as furniture, serving as maid, serving as toilet, shaving body hair, shaving head hair, spanking, speculums, spitting, spreader bars, stocks, strap-ons, stun guns, suspension, tattooing, tickling, trampling, vibrators, violet wands, voyeurism, water torture, waxing, whipping, wrestling.
And there’s a blank space marked “other.”
By early summer, Jericho believed he’d found his permanent cast: Ion, the “sex kitten,” adored by eighteen-year-old preppies and middle-aged sex slaves alike; Miss Saphron, an experienced performer and authoritative vixen; Persephone, the enigmatic utility player and backstage voice of reason; Kittirina D’Meanor, the sensual fire expert; and Gunner, a Contra Naturam performer who’s also the esteemed operator of crowd-favorite “Sensation Station,” where audience members can request hands-on entertainment.
And then there is the man himself.
“I’m kind of the ringleader,” Jericho says. “Onstage you’ll often see me playing roles where I may not get too involved in all the action but will be directing it. I do most of the emceeing, talking to the crowd — flirting with the crowd is how I like to think of it. And there are a few techniques I do. There’s a double-flogging technique that I do that I think is a little bit flashy. At this point, I think there’s only two or three people in town that actually have the pattern down. So I add a certain amount of flair sometimes. I’m also the one who’s willing to go the farthest. I’ll definitely do the edge play, the cuttings, the fire play. The really dangerous stuff.
“Behind the scenes, I’d say that for every hour that everybody puts into Contra Naturam, I’m putting in ten. Even if most of those hours are just sitting somewhere going, ‘Oh my god, what are we going to do? What are we going to do? Fuck, fuck, can’t think of anything. What are we going to do?’
“I try to be the leader in the group. I try to get a good handle on everybody’s positive and negative qualities, and try to exploit the positive. I try to manipulate people into situations onstage where they’re going to look good whether or not they try.
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“I try to exert a certain amount of humility with it. For the longest time, I wouldn’t take bows onstage. I mean, I wrestle with that constantly. I had a friend once tell me, ‘You should be the asshole superstar people expect you to be.’ I’m not like that at all …
“But at the same time, and it’s been pointed out to me by other people, why don’t I sit back, take a look at what I’ve done and live it? I made this happen, this whole thing happen. Why not be a rock star? So that’s something I constantly am in war with — should I be the celebrity version of myself or the real version of myself, and when can the two meet?”
People like Jericho are bound to rub some folks the wrong way. Not just the usual suspects — people who believe his shows are morally repulsive and believe his influence is that of the devil (which he has personified in a few performances) — but other fetish players.
There are some people who dispute Jericho’s claim that Contra Naturam “originated” the scene in this area. The promoters at Davey’s Uptown, as well as Davey’s resident fetish troupe Inferno de L’Impur, credit a trio of promoters known collectively as Graveland for hosting fetish events at Davey’s as far back as 1998 — nothing quite as elaborate as the shows going on now, but something nonetheless. “It was pretty much a friendly place for the fetish kids to go,” says Industrial Area Production’s DJ Sacrifice.
Such historical disagreements only hint at the larger, more festering issues at hand.
In the beginning, Contra Naturam consisted of Jericho, Ion, Miss Saphron and a romantically involved couple who performed under the names Famine and Sterling. Unlike Jericho, who wears the role of fetish performer on his sleeve, both Famine and Sterling kept their kinky sides relatively secret. Famine did so because, by day, he worked for bosses who had little patience for employees with dungeons in their basements. Sterling was careful because of her extremely religious family.
Shortly after Contra Naturam’s first show at the Bottleneck, the University Daily Kansan, a newspaper put out by KU journalism students, published a photograph of Famine onstage. “And all of a sudden, it was on file with human resources at the place where I worked,” he recalls. “About a week later, I walk in Friday morning thinking everything is hunky-dory, and I’m home by noon that day without a job.”
Famine decided to stay out of the spotlight while sorting out his job situation, telling Jericho he’d work behind the scenes as much as necessary but wanted a break from performing. At the next troupe meeting he attended, Famine says, he learned that the other members had been told he quit.
“Jericho came up with his, ‘I started this, I built it, I made the Web page, I brought everybody together, blah, blah, blah,'” Famine recalls. “I said, ‘Wait a minute, this has been a group effort. Everybody has worked to make this happen. And if you want to start taking individual credit for stuff, I’m the one that told people about it, I’m the one that made the Web page, I’m the one that designed the fliers, I’m the one that did all of this, so give credit where credit is due.”
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After Jericho officially fired Famine, Sterling left the troupe as well. It wasn’t a difficult decision, she says. “Everybody in the troupe had so many amazing ideas for different themes, different scenes,” she says. “Really, really exciting stuff that I would love to see onstage that would be so different. Yet everything was always done exactly how Jericho wanted it, and only how Jericho wanted it. And I feel like every single show that they do … it’s the same thing repeated over and over and the same theme. It’s like Jericho is this godlike individual, these are his little minions, and we’re going to put [Ion] up onstage and whip and flog her.”
But Sterling, who played both dominant and submissive roles for the troupe, also gives another reason why her tenure with Contra Naturam was short. “The sub is the one who is supposed to be in power,” she notes. “The dom is strictly pleasing the sub and making sure that it’s enjoyable for them and they get out of this experience what they’re supposed to. For somebody to break those limitations and do something the sub doesn’t enjoy is not sane and not consensual, which breaks two of the biggest rules. Jericho was always the one who physically hurt me, and he did physically hurt me.”
Sterling mentions one incident at a private party where Contra Naturam had been invited to perform. She says Jericho cut her back with a heated knife, despite her objection to anything that could leave a scar. At the time, she says, her arms and legs were bound, her mouth gagged. “I knew I was going to get some flogging and some fire play, and all that is fine,” she says. “I had no idea there were even knives around.”
Another time, Sterling says, Jericho used a bullwhip on her — another objection — and left her to recover on her own after the scene. “That’s another big no-no,” she says. “There is a place called a ‘sub zone’ or ‘sub space,’ whatever you want to call it. After you’re worked with, it’s so emotionally and physically indescribable, and you’re in this place, so you need to be calmed. With me, sometimes all I need is somebody to put an arm around me and say, ‘Are you all right? Are you OK? Do you want me to get you some water?’ versus just strictly untying me and letting me go. Aftercare is as important as the act itself, because without proper aftercare, it ruins everything.”
“He has that nasty habit that if you say, ‘Don’t do this,’ that’s one of the first things he’ll try to do,” Famine says of Jericho. “There were times that we were working on practice stuff, and we were doing fire play and things like that, and I told him, ‘If you’re doing anything that’s going to leave a mark, make sure it’s not going to show with short sleeves, polo shirts, because that’s what I wear to work.’ Fairly shortly into it, he took a cigarette and burned me right at the top of my neck that left a pretty nasty mark that I got a lot of questions about at work.”
Such complaints are especially damning in the fetish world, where there’s nothing to accredit a professional dominatrix or performer other than his or her reputation.
In his defense, Jericho volleys a similar accusation. He says Famine exaggerates his fetish experience to make himself look better. And because all of this goes beyond the personal, because it threatens his business, Jericho says this: “What it really gets down to, what really matters most, is there’s nothing they can do to stop our shows or make our shows worse or change people’s opinions. Even though there are personal issues, and even though there might be some fighting and people may hate each other for good or bad reasons, it doesn’t affect the show.”
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In fact, it’s already affected the show in at least one way, and Jericho knows this. “It’s annoying. It’s very annoying. Contra Naturam created the fetish scene in this area. While I don’t expect people to jump on the bandwagon … I do think it is rude to pick up an idea, look at the people who originated it and spit on them.”
The Palladium Complex sits just northwest of the West Bottoms’ brick skyline, on the corner of a street otherwise occupied by low-rise warehouses and semitrailers. The club opened this spring, hosting various shows before tonight’s leathery playground billed as the Fetish A Go-Go.
Just inside the Palladium’s front door, a bar stretches the length of the room. Three attractive young woman run the bar, each of them dressed, presumably for the occasion, in all black. More black-clad people fill a row of booths, with a large cluster standing around a table that’s been reserved for a body painter. One bony young woman turns around to face the bar and reveals a chest covered only by smeared-on colors.
A short, narrow hallway beside the bar leads to the Palladium’s second main room, a stage area. The stage overlooks a floor lined on both sides by mirrors that have a multiplying effect on the perceived number of people in attendance. Onstage, a cartoonishly lanky man strikes again and again on the backside of a woman whose head and hands are locked into a wooden stockade. Beside the stage, a poolroom has become the hangout spot for those wishing to partake in the flogless fun of foot worship.
For all the enjoyment in worshipping feet, this is a boring spectacle to witness, far less interesting than just the wooden stockade itself — a great period piece. Two stocky, middle-aged men buzz around the stockade like manic flies, snapping photos with long-lens cameras and maybe, by accident or chance, capturing the blurred image of DJ Kaos speed-walking inside from the Palladium’s outdoor patio. A mane of black hair follows him in a horizontal posture of flight, while his pudgy, goateed face looks frozen in the pensive expression of a man in charge.
In April, Kaos held The Great Exhibition at the Pyro Room, a small bar in the basement of Balanca’s near 18th and Grand. For years, he’d promoted occasional goth and industrial shows, including a run of events at the now-defunct Gee Coffee in Olathe that was popular with the under-21 crowd. But while he’d hosted dominatrixed events before, The Great Exhibition marked new territory, appealing directly to fetish lifestylers through word of mouth and Internet groups.
The idea was to focus less on showmanship and more on the environment, creating a space for lifestylers to play and for other people to witness the lifestylers playing and maybe play a little themselves. So he invited fetish performers to serve as both entertainers and educators. Among them were Famine and Sterling.
“I originally intended for the whole Contra Naturam troupe to come over and work with me and one other dominatrix, a real dominatrix who came down from Toronto,” Kaos says. “Unfortunately, through some miscommunications, Jericho backed out of that one and another show I had booked.”
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The miscommunications were insurmountable. Jericho says he fired Kaos, but Kaos says he left Contra Naturam willingly, to pursue his own events at his own venue — not unlike, he adds, when Jericho left Davey’s Uptown. It probably didn’t help that Kaos invited Contra Naturam players to perform under their own names, that he got acceptances from Miss Saphron and from Gunner, who brought along his famed Sensation Station, or that Famine and Sterling were two of his biggest collaborators.
“It’s a tricky business with Jericho, because he can be really nice, but he can also be shortsighted on how to be polite,” Kaos says. “He was very fair to me when I worked with him, though I saw a lot of politics that surrounded him. A lot of people would say that about me, too. But I honestly will say this on the record: I don’t think he has a grip on how to project the safety issues in his shows. I really don’t think he does that correctly.”
In June, Kaos and his business partner, Krimson Fever, hooked up with the Palladium, which not only offered them more space and an outdoor area for fire play but also the ability to admit anyone over eighteen. Fliers for the June 21 event emphasized a “safe, sane and consensual” environment and “two large rooms of exhibitions, bondage, skits and fire play.” The show was successful enough to book another for July.
Now a couple of hundred people have paid a $10 cover charge for the freedom to spank in public, to be spanked in public, to win sex toys, to brave an S&M obstacle course, and to wear acrylic shirts with real nipples.
Outside, a pleasant summer breeze sweeps the patio, where a couple of dozen people chatter over the sounds of a DJ. A jolly guy with no readily apparent connection to the fetish scene produces a tray full of shots and invites anyone and everyone to help him finish them, and nearly everyone does. A woman wearing a skirt made from a pool cover bends over for her friend Bill Drummond, the promoter of yet another local fetish event, as he repeatedly whacks her with a borrowed flogger. She smiles widely.
“I don’t mind that these people are doing the same thing we do,” Jericho says. “I don’t even mind that they’re slamming me and trying to make me look bad. That’s cool. But I think it’s really cheap.”
It is the day before DJ Kaos’ show at the Palladium, a Friday afternoon in Lawrence. Jericho sits with Persephone inside an all-American burger joint, quietly perturbed by the constant interruptions of a bubbly waitress, and mounts a staid but scathing commentary on some of his former partners. He announces with satisfaction that Miss Saphron won’t be performing at Fetish A Go-Go (she doesn’t) and later reveals that she will soon make her Contra Naturam scriptwriting debut. He does not mention that Gunner will be at the Palladium with his Sensation Station, nor does he mention that Gunner has decided (because of some “business” differences) not to perform onstage with Contra Naturam anymore and to focus solely on the station. (“That’s what I love,” he says.)
Instead, Jericho says the troupe has hired three new members. And because there is this fetish show tomorrow that is not his, which will feature at least one idea he claims as his own, it is difficult not to think and speak competitively at this hour.
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“The people that are doing the shows in Kansas City are either people who wouldn’t be considered by us, or were considered by us and let down, or were fired,” he says, meaning both the Palladium event and the once-a-month Submission performances at Davey’s. “It’s almost like Coca-Cola versus Big K, you know? In the personal, behind-the-scenes life, though, it is getting a little bit aggressive. People are starting to get nasty, and professionally that just pisses me off…. It hurts to think that these people once were close to me and had faith in me, and I had faith in them.”
He has nasty things to say, too, of course, but then why focus just on the negative when good news is afoot? When some old-fashioned predictability has returned to the troublesome politics of fetishism? When the old familiar foe has surfaced, finally. Thank God for Ray Parker.
Because all of this behind-the-scenes nastiness can have a corroding effect, what is better for setting the world straight than the rantings of a man offended to his very soul by the presence of Contra Naturam?
On July 15, Parker’s protest landed in the Lawrence Journal-World. “In Lawrence, students and other perverts enjoyed the ‘entertainment’ of a sado-masochistic whipping on a cross, a gross debasement of Christianity, by the fetish group Contra Naturam, at The Bottleneck,” he wrote. “The live pornographic act promotes unlimited amoral perverted sex. Sometimes the troupe of filthy perverts mingles and interacts with the audience. Nearing the bottom of the slippery slope at our universities, are we?”
Several days later, Jericho’s response showed up in the paper. “Our Fetish Nights celebrate eroticism, imagination and deviance among consenting adults,” he wrote. “The sadomasochistic lifestyle is as valid, empowering, legitimate and worthy of tolerance as any other lifestyle: gay, lesbian, straight, Christian, atheist, and so on. Contra Naturam entertains and performs and offers a haven for people of alternative lifestyles to express themselves in a safe environment. Everything that takes place there is seen and participated in by consenting adults. You don’t understand, Mr. Parker. Fine. Don’t come. Those who do, will.”
And then, just a few days later, Parker responded, marking the third time in less than a month that Contra Naturam appeared in the newspaper, unpaid advertising for its next show on September 13. “Their troupe does, in fact, defame Christianity, as Jericho also portrays a clergyman who advocates immoral sex,” Parker wrote. “As to his claim that their act is not pornographic, he might want to explain further to Lawrence parents why the troupe should continue to portray a baby being raped by parents and then beaten, for the sensual gratification of the audience.”
Jericho explains that the scene in question featured Ion portraying a child in the throes of a nightmare, an “age play” act not meant to represent child rape or pedophilia. “It was innocent, I swear,” he says, laughing. “I didn’t mean it like that. Damn you, Ray Parker!”
For Jericho, who imagines that someday his performances will draw picketers outside the venues, this is not only a battle worth fighting but also worth preserving, coddling and manipulating for every last drop of attention.
Why? To advance the scene. To define his group. But also because he knows what it feels like to be a rock star, and it feels good, so there’s a natural urge to replicate that feeling.
And because people like Parker don’t know that feeling, Jericho submits a story he says occurred back in March, when he still drove his cab and picked up a fare, a pretty young blonde, probably nineteen years old, a college girl. Along the way, they talked about shows in Lawrence, and she mentioned that she’d recently attended a fetish show at the Bottleneck. Jericho, keeping his cool, asked how it went, and the girl explained that she had to leave early because a prude friend had gotten upset over a lesbian scene, but that she liked what she saw, especially from this one guy onstage with a freaky little haircut (the same freaky haircut that Jericho had, at that moment, combed back into obedience).
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Like two mohawks? Jericho offered, and the girl seemed genuinely shocked, like he’d read her mind. Yeah! she said, then confessed how she wanted to jump the performer’s bones at the show.
Jericho, meanwhile, stifled a laugh, waiting for his moment. Just as the cab arrived at the girl’s destination, he made his move, turning on the interior light, removing his glasses and reeling around to greet his biggest fan with that impish grin. Then something amazing happened. First, the girl shrieked, but then, in a matter of seconds, she grabbed his face with both hands, planted a massive kiss on his mouth, leaped from the cab and vanished, leaving in her place a tale as outrageous as any vitriol Ray Parker could muster.
