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| Now that's a classic Ed Wood title. (Illustration from Spice 'N' Nice) |
NOTE: This article continues my coverage of Ed Wood's When the Topic is Sex (BearManor Media, 2021).
The article: "Freemont Street Flame." Also known as "Fremont Street Flame." Originally published in Spice 'N' Nice (Pendulum Publishing), vol. 2, no. 3, November/December 1971. No author credited.
Excerpt: "Give them a lot of suggestion and you're going to be in the top time for a long while to come. Put every thing on the table at once and the meal is all over. But serve it up gently and in smaller doses and you keep your audience on the edge of their seats. Anticipation can be the most enjoyable part of any affair. Sometimes even more of a pleasure than the final blow off which everybody knows is coming anyway."
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| Fremont Street in the 1970s. |
Reflections: Like "An Age of Hunchbacks," "Freemont Street Flame" is another article I was looking forward to mainly because of its title. In this case, it was because the title made it sound like one of Ed Wood's short stories. And, sure enough, the piece reads exactly like something from Blood Splatters Quickly or Angora Fever. It would have fit in beautifully in either one of those collections, although Blood Splatters Quickly already has a story about a stripper called Flame.
"Freemont Street Flame" technically qualifies as one of Eddie's nonfiction articles because it purports to be the testimony of a real-life Las Vegas stripper. But, really, this is a piece of short fiction written in the first person. File it alongside "Commentary: Article by 'T'" and "Greenwich Village Lure." All these articles came out in 1971, which can't be a coincidence. Eddie must've been going through a phase, like Picasso's Blue Period. The similarity between "Freemont Street Flame" and "Greenwich Village Lure" is especially striking, since they're both about strippers with colorful nicknames. And the narrators both describe their writing processes. Here's what "Flame" has to say about that:
Now you've got to excuse me if I don't put the words down too well here. I'm kind of new at this writing business. But when the publishers of Spice and Nice (this delightful magazine) asked me so sweetly if I would put a little bit down about myself on paper, I jumped at the chance. I guess every girl likes to say things about herself most of the time. Everybody is always saying that girls are always talking. Well this isn't really like talking I guess because I'm silent as I sit down at the typewriter. Only the words are racing through my mind. I'm not very fast on this damn machine either. But I guess I'll hack my way through what I have to say.
In reality, Ed Wood was famous for his lightning speed on the typewriter. It's a big part of why he was able to be so prolific, especially in the last decade of his life. I also like that he gets the title of the magazine slightly wrong. (It's Spice 'N' Nice, Eddie, not Spice and Nice.)
Honestly, these fake testimonials have been some of my favorite pieces in When the Topic is Sex, and "Freemont Street Flame" might be the best one yet. As with those other articles I mentioned, Eddie truly seems to love getting into character and writing from the perspective of a woman. I suppose it's a form of literary drag, a way of getting his male mind into a female body. And the narrator of "Freemont Street Flame" (we never learn her actual name) is the kind of woman Eddie loved: a fun-loving, uninhibited gal who speaks her mind. She even boldly slags New York City, saying it can't compete with Vegas in terms of entertainment: "They couldn't compare with the lowest club we have around here."
What makes this story extra fun—and makes "Fremont Street Flame" one of the longer pieces in When the Topic is Sex—is that, before she was a successful stripper on Las Vegas' second most famous street, our narrator danced in a "girlie show" run by her own parents (!) on the carnival circuit. So we get a whole section about carnivals, which is one of Ed Wood's favorite subjects. He wrote multiple novels about carnies, and they're among his best work as an author. He even claimed to have been a sideshow performer himself, though this may be more of Ed Wood's active imagination. He was obviously enamored of carny life, duping the rubes and staying one step ahead of the law, and wrote about it whenever he could. "Fremont Street Flame" is really a twofer: a carny story attached to a Vegas stripper story.
I personally have no emotional connection to Las Vegas, even though Elvis said you'll never be the same again after you see it. My parents took me there once on vacation, but I was a kid, and this was way before the town became a family-friendly tourist destination. At that time, there was little to nothing for a kid to do in Vegas. I just remember it being hot, blindingly bright in the daylight, and dirty. We went to a performance of the musical Ain't Misbehavin', and there were bugs crawling on our table. The gambling mecca obviously has a more important role in the Ed Wood mythos, since it's where Ed and Kathy were married. Kathy describes this in Nightmare of Ecstasy (1992):
We went to Las Vegas and got married between poker and craps and went on to Salt Lake City in a blizzard, eating canned sardines and crackers, living dangerously and crazy happily, missing cows, deer, rabbits on the road.
Ed's enthusiasm for the town is obvious in this article. Maybe Las Vegas is the purest manifestation of the dreams Ed had when he was growing up in Poughkeepsie—trashier, gaudier, and more exhilarating than even Hollywood could ever be.
P.S. When originally published in Spice 'N' Nice magazine in 1971, this article was clearly labeled "Freemont Street Flame." But in the body of the article itself, the name of the famous Las Vegas thoroughfare is correctly spelled as "Fremont." In this case, I think the booboo was the magazine's fault, not Eddie's.
Next: "Sex and the Twisted Beat" (1971)