The Last Temptation of Dougie

Tif had spent the past hour sticking Dougie with safety pins. She attached a dollar bill to each pin after it was inserted, just by the dollar's edge, to make it easy to rip off. "There are 20 bills left," Tif reported. "We've done 80, bro. We've done this in, like, under an hour."

"Yeaaaaaaaah!" he yelled as Tif shoved a pin in his back. The rows of dollar bills pinned to his arms fluttered like feathers. As Tif poked him again, he made noises like someone smelling month-old cottage cheese. "I gotta be like Yoda's Dalai Lama," he said to himself.

Bill Sundahl, also known as Roach, wandered downstairs from the bar. Sundahl organizes the Donkey Show, a collection of bands, comic acts and performance artists that he books at local bars. Dougie's dollar-bill escapade was part of the 13th Donkey Show. His act was to follow the blues-meets-hardcore band the Lucky Graves.

"This is the most fucked-up thing we've ever had at the Donkey Show," Sundahl announced.

Dougie looked up at him. "You're letting us be who we are. There's no other way to live."

When the piercing was over, Dougie gave Tif a short, ginger hug. "I just got 100 piercings in an hour," he proclaimed, standing in front of a mirror. He strutted upstairs to show off. But the person he wanted to show off for the most wasn't there. Dougie's other half, Sunshine, was missing.

Frequenters of house-music nights at the old Kabal remember her for her grand entrances. Rashawn Aiono, aka Sunshine, towered over Dougie in his usual clashing plaids. She often wore nothing but garters and underwear, sky-high platform boots and electrical-tape X's over her nipples. Sometimes she'd show up dressed as a kinky secretary: a black pencil skirt and a white blouse over her ski-jump curves, patent-leather platform sandals, a jet-black wig with bangs, black-rimmed glasses and sparkly red lipstick.

Sunshine had modeled in the 18th Street Fashion Show, strutting along an outdoor catwalk in a bra, underwear, and platform boots and covered in glued-on plastic flowers. Dougie cheered her on from the sidewalk. Sunshine's features are striking. She has mocha-toned skin, high cheekbones, silvery blue eyes and a fierce mouth that breaks into a disarming, crooked-toothed smile.

Sunshine and Dougie were known for outlandish behavior. Dougie wasn't shy about whipping it out on the dance floor or slapping his penis on the car windows of couples leaving the club. Sunshine honked women's breasts like a grocery shopper testing produce. The couple went to clubs to shop for female partners interested in following them back to their downtown apartment. Each was the other's ultimate accessory.

Dougie and Sunshine met on Kabal's dance floor on the club's final 18-and-older night. Sunshine was 19 and Dougie, 25. Sunshine was new to the party scene. She was raised in a conservative home in Independence by her mother and a community of Mormons from Samoa. In her teens, she wore the bright colors and plastic jewelry of a raver, despite never having touched club drugs or even attending a rave. Dougie, meanwhile, bragged about having spent his teenage years with an S&M fetish troupe in his hometown of Atlanta before coming here to attend the Kansas City Art Institute. (For financial reasons, he ended up at Johnson County Community College instead.)

The night they met at Kabal, Dougie and Sunshine tried to see who could dance longer. Each claims to have won.

For three years, they were inseparable, eventually moving into an apartment at 910 Pennsylvania with a view of the Kansas City skyline. They carried on a polyamorous relationship, free to pull third and even fourth parties into their bed. "Cheating" was defined only as getting it on without inviting the other. Sometimes Sunshine surprised Dougie at his job, wearing a mustache and dressed as a man. They had terminology for their jealousy-free relationship, telling people that they were "from the future" or calling themselves "riders of the underground soul train."

"That couple is the most eccentric, exhibitionist, outright out-there couple I've ever met in my life," says Joe Jackson, a party promoter who frequently ran into Sunshine and Dougie at clubs. "I don't see how any other people could tolerate what they tolerate from one another."

Dougie could, at least. But by the end of three years, Sunshine was outgrowing her sidekick role. Spending her late teens and early 20s with the same person became stifling. She felt herself becoming resentful of Dougie. It was time to discover a Sunshine without Dougie.

"I bother her," Dougie admitted before his dollar-bill performance at the Hurricane. "Most women love it if a man can't keep his hands off of her. She hates it."

He stepped up to the bar and ordered a shot of Patron. "And lime juice, bitches, lime juice!" The bartender didn't charge him but watched in amusement as Dougie took the shot, bit the lime and squeezed the remaining juice over his tiny red wounds.

"Are those pinned to your body?" a woman asked. Others pointed and took pictures with their camera phones.

"One hundred," Dougie answered.