Hustlers & Slags

by:
Jonathan ‘Cao Cao’ Kos-Read

A hustler sings for a fat producer.

The slags all look up from their cell phones, do the god-what-a-whore look then go back to pretending they have people calling them.

I’m at a party organized by my agent. We are in a Babyface karaoke room. My agent is pimping her actors to the director of this big thirty episode action series that starts shooting next month.

I don’t go to these parties very often. First, I’m married so there’s no point hitting on anybody, second, I don’t need to because my deals get done (usually) in a more civilized way, and third well, people don’t invite me.

So I get to sit there and be very anthropological about it. Here is my little science report from the showbiz gutter.

THE SCENE
The room itself is about ten feet square, full of smoke and gold paint. A huge U-shaped couch curls around three walls. The third holds an enormous TV on which “karaoke-video-people” run along beaches, glance at each-other in castles and long soft shots of candles serve as the backdrop to the inexorable yellow tide that sweeps along the lyrics. Above us is a ten foot wide chandelier.

The room is packed – probably fifty people crammed into this little space. Everybody is either extremely beautiful or ugly. The ugly people sit on the couches while the beautiful people sing or snuggle up against them. They people break down into these types.

1) Hustlers
2) Slags
3) Powerful Guys
4) Everybody Else

They all have different goals, all in opposition.

THE DIRECTOR
The director is the only Chinese person I’ve ever met who has an afro and (I know this sounds like I’m making it up) he has decided that, well, that just isn’t enough, doesn’t distinguish him from the pack with sufficient élan, so he has dyed it blonde. And he sits there, under this bushy halo, in one corner of the karaoke room, a little gay Chinese kid on one side and an older, more butch Uyghur gayboy on his left.

A never ending procession of beautiful and powerful people come and worship him for the opportunity to be in his show. Most directors I know are like this. You sort of have to be to succeed. Without megalomania, the job wears you down.

He wants to be treated like a God. He is succeeding.

THE PRODUCERS
The producers do nothing. They sit there like blobs while the girls slither all over them. Most of them are ugly or fat – a cliché but a reality. In fact it is probably why they became producers. It was the rocket fuel in their veins that drove them so hard to succeed. When they were young, women were disgusted by them. That’s hard on the soul. And when you look disgusting, there’s only one way into a woman’s heart.

They want women. They are succeeding.

THE HUSTLERS
What can I write that hasn’t been written before? Do these girls fuck the producers? They do. Do they fuck the directors? They do. Are they facing, for the first time in their lives, proof that they are nothing special, that their beauty is common? They are. “How can they sell themselves like that?!” it is asked. “How can they be exploited like that?!” It’s all been said before. What can I add?

To be honest, nothing. It’s just like you think it is. These impossibly beautiful, perky talented girls get up one by one, belt out a song for all their little twenty two year old hearts are worth, then sit down again with a Powerful Guy. They pour his drink. Laugh. And out of the corners of their eyes, watch the next impossibly beautiful girl get up and sing, then the next, then the next.

They want to be stars. All but one will fail.

THE AGENT
She is the ultimate hustler. She’ll make fifty thousand RMB on every actor and actress she gets into every show. With ten or twenty actors on her roster, that adds up to a chunk of change over a year’s worth of shows.

She is this weird person. Ten years ago she was this mole-like intellectual, a writer of biographies and movie reviews. Then one day her husband got sick and she had to become rich to pay the bills. She stepped out into the world, became an agent, built up a business. Now she peers out at the room from behind her coke bottle glasses. She has arranged it all: the room, the booze, the girls. And she stands alone, this short, forty year old woman in her frumpy terribly chosen “young girl” dress. The lights of the karaoke flash around her. She’s like a scientist in a whorehouse.

She needs to be rich. She is succeeding.

THE SLAGS
Actress years are like dog years. So if an actress is thirty four in the real world, this means she’s about fifty in dog years – so around the couches sit these old clapped out hags in their mid thirties, their hair pulled back in a tight poor man’s face lift, the crow’s feet starting to claw their way out from their hard eyes and frowning mouths.

You really can’t imagine what their lives used to be like. From the time they were thirteen, guys are buying them cars and even houses. They were loved and worshiped. Why, you ask, would somebody do that? I mean there are lots of beautiful girls in the world, even lots of beautiful hookers. Why spend three million rmb buying some little chickypoo actress a house when you could have a model for the price of a few dinners. The answer is: guys compete. “Damn this bitch I’m fuckin’ is fine,” pales in importance to: “Damn I’m so cool cuz all my rich friends know I’m fuckin’ this famous actress – more famous than the ones they’re fuckin.”

So for a few years those few lucky actresses have it good. But they make a mistake. They think it’ll go on forever. But obviously it doesn’t and these slags are the proof. The sit, ignored on the side, staring into their cell phones, hating the hustlers and loathing themselves.

I even know some of the slags. One of them is an actress I did a show with six years ago. Back then she was a hustler. She walked in and we did the, “Hey!” “Hey!” kissy face, but then she sat down next to me. When I showed her pictures of my daughter she cried.

She left twenty minutes later.

The slags want to hide their bitterness. They are failing.

IN SUMMATION
The only girl in the whole place who actually looks mildly happy is one I run into when I go out to pee. She’s just sitting there by the bar kind of bored but basically not desperately hustling or face stretched back in a horrible mask of hidden unhappiness.

“Are you having fun?” I ask.

“Not really,” she says, “It’s kind of boring.”

We kibbitz for a little while. She’s only here because she got caught up in the dragnet: “Hey, there’s a party! With some producers and directors! Do me a favor and round up some girls!”

“I saw you on TV, she says, “you and your wife.”

“Yeah, married for ten years.”

“Me too,” she says.

“What does your husband do?” I asked expecting ‘producer’ or at the very least ‘import-export’.

“He’s a scientist.”

And there it is right there: the key to happiness for an actress. She married a guy she loved. With a real job that doesn’t make him rich. One who appreciates her beauty as a gift, not as a cheap, shitty commodity. Tonight, I’ll go home to my wife and daughter. She’ll go home to her husband. Everybody else:

Blowjobs and misery.