Review of The Champagne Smile, by Inez Marrasso.

When you pick up a book with a pretty girl on the cover, you might make certain assumptions about its content, you might weigh the pages in you hands and read the snappy blurb and think that a prose poetry novel about an ageing stripper might be just the sort of titillating entertainment that would lift the clouds of an empty weekend.

The Champagne smile is a heavy book. It is not a cloud breaker, it is a rain maker. I found myself reading slower and slower with each chapter, feeling myself being dragged unwillingly into the torture chamber of this poet's mind. I cannot say how much of this book is autobiographical, but there are too many venomous wounds held open by her ink stained fingers for me to believe that this is a work of pure, imaginative fiction. I could only compare Marrasso's book to Dorothy Porter's verse novel 'The Monkey's Mask', or even Charles Bukowski, as poets describing the ever widening downward spirals of alcoholism and degradation, and those comparisons are intended as a compliment. Inez Marrasso writes about a life behind the curtain and on the stage, but the lighting is not flattering and the curtains are stained with cum and beer and the thick chemical smoke of the strip club is enough to make you choke.

I remember the first time I ever went to a strip club, on Hindley Street, perhaps even the club described by Marrasso. I was about nineteen or twenty. A girl caught my eye, I had a couple drinks and ordered a lap dance. As she sat on the edge of my table, waiting for the next song to come on, I asked her how she got into stripping. She told me that she was a mother, studying at uni, stripping to pay the bills. It might have been a line, a throwaway lie with enough truth in it to satisfy the casual customer, but it had enough truth also, to be true. I bring this up because in remembering this event, I realise that it immediately humanised the woman before me. She was not a naked prop to support my young and eager fantasies, she was a woman, working in a job.

This book is about a working woman, Jagger, and sometimes the job is dangerous, sometimes delightful, but the big picture is that the work is a quest in darkness for a sense of self and real identity that could not be found in married life, nor in corporate professional employment. Neitzche declared he would not believe in a god who did not dance, and Marrasso mirrors the sentiment:

Show me a God who dances, I say.

Better to be thirty eight years old, living bold than sliding

towards a finale of board games.

But this book is not a divinity tale, not a straight line morality fable tale of a woman falling into the hole she digs for herself. It is the tragic story of the men and women living in the same darkness, like Frank, the soldier sent off to Afghanistan who is as human as the protagonist and his lonely striving to become worthy of love are as important to the narrative as wine is to the drinker.

Frank gives me his army dog-tag, places it around my neck

'It would turn me on if you wore it against your skin.'

He lingers, 'Please, Jagger, just one kiss?'

It is all I have one as the cold metal dangles over my nipples.

This chain should make me bulletproof, but it sends stiff chills,

is as breathless as a noose.

He says, 'I wanna taste life from your lips, no gift would be

greater than this.'

Frank looks deep in some memory he hasn't had,

mouth gapes wide like a venus fly trap.

I could've been anyone

*

The Scarlet Lounge unlocks itself to thousands of men like

Frank,

who share their wounds with girls but don't care what they

think.

As long as the drinks are cold, they tell a truth from lies they

dare not speak to naked nuns with open legs and closed

mouths,

through vows to silent sins held in the silhouette of time

*

This book is filled and spills over with the stories of the men she dances for, of their hopeless hope and naïve romantic notions of her virtue, when for her Every day dignity changes shape. This book however is not a sappy tear stained moan about lost young men, this book does not linger for long over such romantic notions. It runs head first through the gauntlet of jackal faced liars who come hunting with fistfuls of money and promises like honey, while their fingers, uninvited, probe assholes and cunts and grab flesh as if they owned it, as if every stripper were a whore, as if whore were another word for slave, as if slave were another word for meat.

I used to date a girl who worked as an escort. A client bit one of her nipples off, and that was just the part of the story she was comfortable telling me. There were worse violations that left invisible scars, and the money she earned was hardly enough recompense for the kinds of rape that police consider unworthy of prosecution. Her champagne smile could be no better described than by a book such as this, a difficult book, a hard book, a rain maker and a heart breaker.

A book like this is beautiful in its ugliness. I believe in rough cut diamonds. I believe in the dignity to be found in hard work, and I think that sex work of any kind is some of the hardest to be found on this planet. This novel, for that is what it, reminds us of the common humanity and desperate loneliness found in both men and women. In the suicides it describes, in the mutilations, in love and friendship and sisterly solidarity, this story, like its protagonist, is unashamed, it is a hard-won trophy, and its author has worked hard to carve truth from illusion and make her poetry both sensual to read, and surreal to experience. Each poem, two pages in length, is as dense as the chapter of a book, the language and rhythms and rhymes falling into and out of syncopation. It makes me want to drink, and makes me glad that I have stopped all that in my life. I am thankful for my sobriety, yet sympathetic with the struggles of this character, which though extreme, are also common, in her quest 'to reconcile the two halves of a whole life', 'And a black unicorn stands by her side, ready for the ride.'

It's not an easy read, but the truth very rarely is.

*

Inez Marrasso's book, The Champagne Smile, can be purchased through her website

https://www.inezmarrasso.com.au

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Dorothy Porter - Monkey's Mask

https://www.panmacmillan.com.au/9780330362429

Charles Bukowski

https://bukowski.net/