Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for BrickHouse Books in Baltimore. His latest poetry collection, A Magician Among the Spirits, poems about Harry Houdini, is a 2022 Blue Light Press Poetry winner and has just been published.A collection of flash fiction, Presto!, will be published in 2023 by Bamboo Dart Press. Another poetry collection entitled Transcendence has also just been published by BlazeVOX Books.

The Divine Doda

I was a freshman at San Francisco State,
come to California from a farm in Iowa,
when some friends took me to the Condor Club
in North Beach, corner of Broadway and Columbus.
I mean, I was a real hayseed hick,
a wide-eyed teenager full of hormones.

The drinking age was 21, but even though
I flashed my fake ID, 
a government driver’s license my roommate sold me,
I wasn’t there to drink beer. 

Carol Doda’d already danced topless
the summer before, wearing a “monokini,”
the first girl ever to do so,
starting a trend that swept the nation.

I’m not sure if she’d had her breasts enhanced
with silicone injections by then or not,
ballooning from size 34 to size 44,
but she did descend from a hole in the ceiling
atop a grand piano lowered by hydraulic motors,
go-go dancing The Swim, her impressive breasts 
shaking as she mimicked the crawl.
She also did the Twist, the Frug, the Watusi.
I was mesmerized. I could hardly breathe.

An American cultural icon, a few years later
the Divine Doda’d appear as Sally Silicone
in Nicholson’s Head, featuring the Monkees,
but I can still see the illuminated sign
in front of the Condor, a cartoon Carol
with red flashing lights for her nipples.

I’d returned to Iowa years before,
selling insurance in Des Moines,
closing in on my retirement,
when I read about her death, kidney failure 
at St. Luke’s Hospital in San Francisco.
She’d retired from stripping decades before,
owned a lingerie shop on Union Street, near Laguna.

I’d been married and divorced twice,
fathered three kids, had a couple of grandsons,
but I’d never felt old until I read that obituary. 

The Collector

On Etsy, two original vintage prints
of Jackie Miller in pasties, thirty-five bucks,
4X5 photos by Irving Klaw,
Jackie in fishnet panties,
roll-top stockings, dangling earring,
strappy fetish heels. Portraits of cats
on the wall in the background. A steal!

I already own a copy of Jackie Miller Recollection,
over three hundred pages of photographs,
the 5’ 11” redheaded bombshell pinup and fetish model
throughout her career spanning the Fifties and Sixties,
images from some of the greatest cheesecake photographers,
Harry Amdur, Bunny Yeager, Allen Cobert, Jack Bradley, 
Irving Klaw, Leonard Burtman, Sam Menning – all the greats;
I own a copy of the digest-sized Fantastique, too,
saucy Jackie pouting at the camera, fishnet stockings,
laced boots just shy of her knee, gloves up to her elbows.

For fourteen euros, there’s a vintage BDSM pic,
rear view of Jackie got up as a racy maid,
always comfortable with a whip in her hand.
These are rare and valuable! Remember,
Irving Klaw and his sister Paula had to destroy
most of their original photos, 
after the Kefauver Hearings.

I remember seeing Jackie in Olga’s House of Shame,
Madame Olga’s Massage Parlor, The Sexploiters,
those tawdry Sixties soft-core shorts. 

If I hang onto these, they could fund my retirement, 
if Jackie enjoys the same revival Bettie Page did.
Too bad they’re all black and white:
I’m sure Jackie’d radiate in color.