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Bordello
Rooms
a collaboration
by Jay Adler, with photography by Julia Dean
THE WAY I DO IT is I stand in the middle.
I’ve done it all over the world. I stand surrounded by an historic environ, and I conjure. I go to the museums. I eat
in the restaurants. I sit in the squares and inhale the daily life. I seek the splendor of nature. But my true destination,
in all my travels, is the past. I seek the literary Paris of the twenties in the old-world cobblestones, or the French Revolution,
layers deeper. In Saint-Remy-de-Provence, I follow the path of Van Gogh’s painting, and again, though they were hidden
from him, the ruins of ancient Glanum many levels below.
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I imagine, thirty years later, the youthful death fortune withheld from me in the Mekong Delta. I follow the flight
of Depression migrants along Route 66. And I make pilgrimage, after his death, to the Ukrainian shtetl of my father’s
birth, near the medieval city of Kaminets-Podolsk. There is even a photo by Julia (my significant other, or SO, we call her.
I’m her SOB) entitled “Capturing Jay’s Imagination.”
It was our first night in Vienna, and we were walking without guidance
when we stumbled upon the Hofburg Palace, on the entrance, in fact, to what had been the private apartments of the royal family
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Immediately, my imagination set to work, summoning the horse-drawn carriages that once swept into the outdoor entrance
rotunda to deposit their royal Ärsche home. No sooner had I voiced this imagining to Julia, when I was forced back
by those nearly selfsame carriages (though Julia stood ground with her camera) delivering more modern derrieres to what turned
out to be a charity event.
If only for an instant, in ignorance of the details, I had made it so. I had paddled back against the current of
loss.
THIS TIME I’m in the desert, gazing at the landscape as the dogs chase rabbits and roadrunners around
me. My back is turned to Highway 80, to RVs and the other signs of post-nineteenth-century life, though they are not plentiful.
Before me, almost all round me, is an empty, sweeping, sometimes rolling desert expanse ringed by a moonscape of mountains.
It startles me with its beauty. I hadn’t expected it. I’m only a mile from Tombstone.
It is easy enough to see Doc Holiday or the Clantons, ghost-like, riding
their horses through the brush, over the shallow gullies. Like a slow superimposition in a film, I can draw out of the atmosphere
Wyatt Earp and Josie Marcus—the Jewish prostitute who was his third and final wife for over forty years—talking
by a bush as he woos her away from Sheriff Johnny Behan. What I imagine once more, probably more miraculously than anything
else, is the notion that these people and the moments of their lives—because they have become so legendary—continue
to occupy some alternate dimension of the coordinates that surround me. As if every period of time—every instant—continues
to occur in some fractional off-frame, a parallel universe just a little, invisibly, dimensionally beyond sensory apprehension.
Until I conjure. And then I envisage that Earp and Marcus, in clandestine conversation in the desert in 1881, are an event
somehow more concrete than my own occupation of this space, standing here in all my mundaneness in 2008, an experience the
ephemeralness of which I exhale with every breath.
The famous line from John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is “When the legend
becomes fact, print the legend.” Though there are disputes about many of the “facts” of Earp’s life,
there is little, really, about the genuinely legendary nature of it. Testimonies to his fearlessness and strength of character,
by men nearly his equal in legend, like Bat Masterson, are many. Of the seven men who stood their ground during the gunfight
at the OK Corral (really two lots down the street, but legends are created of words, and “two lots down from”
doesn’t work) the fact that three died, three were wounded, and only Earp emerged unscathed is firmly established. And
we must concede the force and will of the man who led what is known as the three week “Earp Vendetta Ride,” in
pursuit of the men who murdered his brother Morgan five months after the gunfight at the OK Corral, leaving anywhere from
five to fifteen men dead.The town lives up to its legend, too. It was named by the silver miner Ed Schieffelin, who was
told by soldiers at the nearby fort that the only stone he’d find in Apache country was his tombstone. It had—still
has—the most compellingly named newspaper in journalism: The Tombstone Epitaph. (Every tombstone needs one, said its
founder, John Clum.) Of those buried on Boot Hill, by far the largest number were shot or murdered in some other way. Many
are of unknown identity. More than a few were killed by Apaches, as Tombstone is in Apache country, in what is now known as
Cochise County. Some were hanged or lynched. Of one, it says on his grave marker: Here Lies George Johnson Hanged By Mistake 1882 He Was Right We Was Wrong But We Strung Him Up And Now He’s Gone. By
my rough count, in just the years 1881-1882 (the gunfight at the OK Corral took place on October 26, 1881; Morgan Earp was
murdered March 18, 1882), about 40 people were killed in a town of roughly 5000, nearly one every two weeks.
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Earp was one of the few of his stature to die of old age, at 80 in Los Angeles in 1929. Silent film cowboy Tom Mix
wept at his grave. Doc Holiday died of tuberculosis at 36. Big Nosed Kate, Doc Holiday’s lover, lived to 90. Hungarian
by birth, she was the daughter of the physician to the Emperor Maximilian of Mexico, who was deposed three years after her
family’s arrival. A long, sordid journey and tale took her from that life to Tombstone. When she died in 1940,
it was in the Arizona Pioneers Home, which was founded to offer
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a refuge to the aging pioneers of the Arizona Territory. What the
legends and the movies don’t tell us is that the “pioneers” were not simply
agents of their personal destinies, for good or not so. The Clantons and the
Earps represented interests who were vying for control of the land and its mineral
wealth: the Clantons, post-Reconstruction Southern Democratic forces; the Earps, Eastern Republican businessmen.
It was Josie Earp who lived the longest, dying in 1944, just two years
before John Ford’s My Darling Clementine
was released and only eleven years before the television show—about what
seemed so remote a past—that I watched as a child.
But even these words, fairly plain, tend to build a monument. A
monument, too, is The Birdcage Theater, the only wholly intact original
structure of Tombstone from those early days. For nine years, the theater, bar,
gambling house, and bordello was open twenty-four hours a day. All of the
famous were regulars, and Russian Bill, supposedly of royalty, who attended
every night for two years until he tried to earn his unwarranted reputation as
a bad guy by stealing a horse, for which he was hanged. And “Curly” Bill
Brosius, who got shaves in a corner room with windows on the show, and was
later killed by Wyatt Earp during the Vendetta Ride. Greats performed there: Eddie
Foy of later Vaudeville fame, Lilly Langtry, Bernhardt. (How worlds collide.) A
poker game ran non-stop downstairs from opening to closing day, right outside
the prostitute’s “crib” where Josie would receive Wyatt.
Now a museum of its past and of its former patrons, I arrive by
serendipity just before twilight, the final—and only—patron during my visit. I
have the building to myself. To stand in the middle. To perform my magic. When
new owners took possession in 1934 and opened the theater for the first time
since its closing in 1889, they found much of it and its contents undisturbed.
Photos, guns, knives, paraphernalia, and old newspaper clips encircle me. The
faro table where Doc Holiday played and sometimes dealt. The grand piano just
feet away, and the space between in which Holiday and Johnny Ringo held
opposing ends of a bandana and drunkenly shot at each other, missing. The craps
table. The stage. The twenty-six people killed there.
Just before she left me to myself, the guide who escorted me in drew my
attention to the “birdcages” that ring the main room along the ceiling.
“Those aren’t theater boxes” she told me. “They’re bordello rooms. Even
the wall paper, what’s left of it, is the original.”
For twenty dollars for the night, a man got a bottle and a woman. Maybe ten feet above the action
of the gambling tables and the stage, he could drink and watch the activities, then without diffidence draw the curtain. An
act that intimate in a place that public, separated by only a curtain. So near in space, so far in nature. Like two events,
two people, in the same space one hundred and twenty six years apart.
So I have all the elements. It isn’t hard to see the crowded room. The cards. The dice. The theatrics on stage,
the drama on the floor. Shots being poured. The shot ringing out. A shout. The general honky-tonk and the orgasmic grunts
of hungry men from the cribs above. I can think it’s all there in the space around me, an atomic vibration apart from
the world I inhabit, events made material and permanent by the words that continually inscribe them. And then I think, no,
it is all long gone, the players forever emptied from that space. One man strikes it rich, another is murdered, a woman does
what she must to survive. Some of it is remembered and talked about, some of it is not.
HUMAN TIME is not a compiling of moments, layer upon layer, like old newspapers. It is a fuse, burning up
our moments as we live them, leaving behind its historical ash, but moving only forward, from opening to closing night, to
another actor and another dusty wind, to me standing one day in the shadows, and beyond.
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