Content area
Full Text
D. Keith Mano appears to be one of the world's great authorities on topless dancers. For a decade the novelist, who also has been a columnist for such diverse publications as Playboy and National Review, frequented topless bars in New York and across the nation, interviewing dancers, bar owners, bouncers and bartenders in 25 cities.
He found that the dancers and customers have interlocking needs, that prostitution is virtually never part of the relationship and that the dancers who make the most money are the best talkers, not necessarily the best dancers or best lookers.
He even did a lot of writing in the bars. The white noise of the music blanketing all other sounds helped in his concentration, as did looking up occasionally to dislodge his mind from whatever rut it had slipped into. "Nothing frees your unconscious mind, for a man I mean, like the sight of the naked female form," he said.
Mano is a writer above all. He bought time to write his seven previous novels by doing nonfiction pieces. And what pieces: firewalking, getting tattooed, selling blood with winos, attending radical demonstrations. He lived as a transvestite for Playboy, wearing lipstick and pantyhose.
He's a churchgoing Christian who long ago ditched his Episcopalian upbringing, which he found excessively liberal and permissive, for the comforting traditionalism of the Christian Orthodox Church. He's 49 and a New Yorker who (and here he becomes boringly usual for so many New Yorkers) thinks there's no reason ever to live anywhere else, having said that if the Pyramids are worth seeing, they'll come to New York.
He didn't intend to turn the topless-bar knowledge he gained into a novel, at first. He was planning an article for Playboy, but Playboy at the time regarded topless as a blue-collar kind of sexuality, not its high-rent style. Mano, author of seven previous novels that gained great reviews and almost no sales, decided to turn what he found into "Topless," (Random House; $18) a thriller...