“Oh, it’s easy,” he said, coming over to show me. I looked up at him and smiled. This was what I wanted as a kid. Him showing me how to do things. “What song do you want?” he asked.
“Uh,” I said, drawing it out as I flipped through the records until I saw Def Leppard. “How about ‘Let’s Get Rocked’?”
He nodded and smiled. “Good choice,” he said. We went back to pool, and he surprised me by knowing the lyrics. We were singing and laughing, and I think he was surprised that he was actually having fun.
The next day he took me out on his boat to go waterskiing. He brought a friend with him, because you need a spotter and a driver. I picked it up pretty quickly, mainly because I was determined to impress him. I got up on the third try and as I held on, I could just see him thinking, Oh, maybe she is mine.
Other times we went out on the water, just me and him. He’d drink his Coors Light, and we got to a point where the awkwardness was almost gone. It was the same the following summer, when I was sixteen. When we were in his element—at a pool table or on the boat—he could just be quiet with me. I was just happy to be there.
It was around this time that Susan became the first I told about hating the name Stephanie. There are lots of stories about why I call myself Stormy, but the truth is that while Stephanie is a lovely name, it never suited me. First off, my mother gave it to me, and I didn’t want anything from her. And I read a lot of books about Native Americans because of my dad’s Cherokee heritage. In those stories, names reflected both character and destiny. I couldn’t rule the world with a name like Stephanie. But Stormy … that made more sense.
But then my dad and Susan split up, and with her went the person making him hang out with me. I only saw him one more time. At the end of junior year, I was sitting in class when a voice came over the loudspeaker: “Please send Stephanie down to the office. Her dad is here to pick her up.”
My best friend, Elizabeth, was in that class, and as I picked up my books she stage-whispered, “Who?”
I figured it had to be my stepdad, but he had never come to check me out of school. Mr. Kelley would never call himself my father, so the office lady must have seen a big guy and assumed. I walked quickly, worried something was wrong with my mom or my horse.
And there he was. My father, standing completely out of context in my school. I didn’t know he even knew where I went to school.
“Is everything okay?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “I just wanted to see you.”
“Does Mom know you’re here?”
“Yeah, I just let her know,” he said, the slightest grimace crossing his face. I could guess how the call went. I was surprised the school even let him take me, because he wasn’t on any kind of form they had. We walked outside, and I saw he had his truck hooked up to his boat, full of stuff. It was just like all the moves we did when I was a kid.
“Me and Susan split up,” he said.
“I kinda heard,” I said.
“Yeah, we sold the house,” he said. “I’m on my way to California.”
“Oh.”
“I just thought I’d take you shopping,” he said, getting out his keys.
“For what?” I asked.
“How do you feel about getting a car today?”
Pretty good, actually. We hit a used-car lot and he told me I could have eight grand to spend on any car I wanted. That feels like twenty thousand these days. He told me to pick out whatever I wanted. He paid cash for a Toyota Celica that seemed pretty brand-new to me. It was dark teal, but the coolest thing about it was it had the flip-up headlights. He paid for a year of insurance on it and took me to dinner. At the restaurant, I mostly talked about how I couldn’t believe I had a new car. When it was over, he got in his car and left.
I never saw him again.
I still can’t figure out why he just handed me a car free and clear. It was nowhere near my birthday or graduation. Maybe it was just a final gift, so he could leave me again with a clear conscience. Eight grand to just be done with me.
*
This will shock you, but things weren’t working out between my mom and Mr. Kelley. I know, right? We were pulling for those two kids, weren’t we? Their arguments were getting increasingly frequent, and when they went at it while I was home, I just went to my room and put on my headphones. If they screamed louder, I just turned the volume up. I never got in the middle of it, and Mr. Kelley never would have hurt me.
One of the final straws was when he got out a shotgun in the house. I was on my bed, and my mom’s bedroom shared a wall with mine. He shot a hole through it and the buckshot tore through my closet, ruining all my clothes. If I had been standing up, I would have been shot.
After the initial “what the fuck?” shock, I said to myself: It might be time to get out of here. There was one more huge fight, where they were both breaking things. We already didn’t have anything, so I called Michael, the boy who’d broken up with me on Valentine’s Day in the seventh grade. He lived around the corner and his dad was a police officer. I tried to get them to come over and help me, but they wouldn’t. The neighborhood had disintegrated to such a point that this wasn’t worth getting involved in.
Finally, Mr. Kelley left. I hear he’s sober now, and I hope he’s doing great. I don’t blame him for leaving my mother. It was time for me to get out of Dodge, too.
The Christmas Tree Incident has become famous among my friends, because they had to witness it. The Christmas tree was still up in our front room, though it was January. On a Friday, my friend Anna was over to watch Late Night with Conan O’Brien with our respective boyfriends. Hers was a nice guy. And mine was Andy, who was not. At twenty years old, Andy was three years older than me and already out of school. He had long dark hair shaved on one side, ice-blue eyes, a really big penis, and a dark soul. Never toward me, but he had demons. He was super into guns and tried to be a marine to make his family proud, but he couldn’t hack it. He came home and their disappointment weighed heavy on him.
My mom was in her bedroom, and the house was quiet except for Conan. Suddenly we heard this bloodcurdling scream. It scared the shit out of us, but before we could react there was a rush of feet stomping. It was my mother running, still screaming, down the hall in her forest-green silk nightgown. She passed in front of us, jumped up on a chair—and proceeded to rip off her nightgown like the Hulk.
No underwear. None. She stood naked for one second, lost her balance, and fell back into the Christmas tree.
I moved out the next morning.
Andy and I got an apartment together for $335 a month on LSU’s campus. Andy had money from his job delivering pizza, and he had three thousand dollars in the bank from some relative dying. I kept going to high school like normal and kept up with my routine of visiting my horse, Jade, every day.
We had no furniture, unless you count a mattress on the floor and some plastic shelves for Andy’s CDs. He loved music, though he didn’t play, and had an encyclopedic knowledge of metal and hard rock. He turned me on to all the music I still listen to today: Metallica, Mötley Crüe, Ratt, Skid Row, and Poison. We would go to allages shows in fields to watch local bands like Acid Bath, who were my favorite. They had a song called “Bleed Me an Ocean,” a line of which I still want to get tattooed on my body: “Just like a raindrop, I was born, baby, to fall.” Around when I moved in with Andy that January of my senior year, Acid Bath came to an end when the bass player, Audie Pitre, and his parents were killed, hit head-on by a drunk driver over on Highway 24.
At one of those rock concerts in a field, our first weekend living together, most of the people there were around Andy’s age. We were all hanging out when someone pulled up in a brand-new purple Camaro. This pretty girl got out and she was a magnet for people. Everyone wanted to know how a nineteen-year-old had a Camaro, which was like a Ferrari in 1997 Baton Rouge.
“Look at my new car,” she said, as if everyone wasn’t.
“Did you get this for graduat
ion?” I asked.
She laughed. “No, I graduated two years ago,” she said. “I bought this.”
“You did?” I said. “What do you do?”
“I’m a dancer,” she said.
I was studying ballet in high school and I was on the dance team, so I was thinking Nutcracker. “Oh, what kind of dancing do you do?”
She looked around at the people gathered, with an expression that said, What’s with this fucking chick? “Uh, I work at Cinnamon’s,” she said.
Cinnamon’s was a strip club, and the only reason I knew about it was because they had TV commercials. “Oh,” I said. “Oh. Ohhhhhh.”
And before I could say anything else stupid, she said, “Yeah, if you guys are ever driving by, you should stop in and I’ll buy you all a drink.”
At the time there was a brief window when if you were eighteen you could drink in bars, thanks to the Louisiana Supreme Court finding that a drinking age of twenty-one amounted to age discrimination. But I was not even eighteen yet—I was a seventeen-year-old high schooler. So I didn’t think I’d be taking her up on the offer anytime soon.
I was wrong. Two weeks later, Andy and I were driving out by Prairieville on a Tuesday night. We had two of his friends in the back, and we drove by Cinnamon’s. “Oh, my God, that’s where that girl works,” I said. “Amy the Camaro girl.”
“You know somebody who works there?” one of the guys in the back said in this voice of excited disbelief.
“Yeah, she said we should stop in.”
Andy did a movie-worthy U-turn and we drove into the gravel parking lot.
Now, there are gentlemen’s clubs, then there are strip clubs, and then there are titty bars. Cinnamon’s was a titty bar. Basically, a trailer. It wasn’t even nice enough to be in Baton Rouge—it was across the bridge in Prairieville.
I panicked when I saw there was a bouncer checking IDs. The three guys were all over eighteen, so they got in just fine. When it was my turn, I reached into my purse, stalling by fumbling for my wallet. “Oh, yeah, lemme…,” I said. I had it in my hand, and a little voice in my head said to do something.
“Hey, is Amy working tonight?” I said her name like it was a magical spell. And it worked.
“Yeah,” he said, softening. “You’re friends with Amy?”
“She invited us.”
“Why didn’t you say something? Come on in!”
He never checked my ID. It was in my hand and he never reached for it. I crossed the threshold of Cinnamon’s and saw that our arrival had more than doubled the number of customers there. Tuesday nights were slow, I guessed. There was a guy playing video poker, and the ceiling was so low, you could reach your hand up to touch it.
Amy came out like we were old pals and bought us drinks. The guys couldn’t believe their luck. Amy called over to the dancers, “Come meet my friends!”
The girls started coming over, bored and looking for something new to talk about. A range of ages from twenties to thirties, they were all talking to me at once.
“You’re so pretty. You should do a guest set.”
“Have you ever danced before?”
“Where do you dance?”
“I’m still in school,” I said.
Only later did I realize everyone thought I meant LSU.
“We’re just going to borrow her,” Amy said to Andy.
They spirited me into the dressing room, a long rectangle with a table and chairs. It was very smoky and dirty, with two steps that went up the back to the DJ booth, which you walked through to get up to a stage that was the size of a queen-size bed. The girls began to play dress-up with me. I was Cinderella, with the bluebirds and mice making my dress and fairy godmothers making me feel special.
They muttered and cooed over their project. “Try this on,” a blonde said, handing me a bustier. Another girl said they were going to just do a little something with my eyebrows, and they all nodded. One girl got to plucking, and it hurt so much, but I’m thankful for it now. You should have seen those brows. I’d never groomed them, because my mother didn’t teach me any of that stuff. They did my makeup and did what they could with my brown hair, which I’d always just worn long and flat.
“What’s your name?” Amy asked me.
“Stormy,” I said, looking at my transformation in the mirror. I smiled. Stormy.
My fairy godmothers talked me into doing a guest set. “It’s two songs,” said Amy. “The first is up-tempo and dressed, the second is slower and more sensual as you go topless.”
I told the DJ that I would start with “Looks That Kill” by Mötley Crüe and then do “Love You to Death” by Type O Negative. He turned to a virtual wall of CDs behind him, at least four hundred, and immediately grabbed what he needed.
“I’m Dalton,” he said. “I’ll announce you, so what’s your name?”
“Stormy.”
“You want that to be your stage name?”
“Well, my real name is Stephanie, but—”
“Stephanie Stormy,” he said. “Got it.”
“Wait…”
It was too late. The music started and “Stephanie Stormy” took the stage. I was already a dancer, so I was comfortable doing that and knew how to do little movements that would look pretty. The girls were so supportive and were cheering me on and tipping me through my first song. A few more guys had come in and had a look of “We’re gonna see new titties!” The bartender came from behind the bar and tipped me, and so did the bouncer. Andy looked very proud.
The second song started and I thought, Here we go. I took my top off and no one laughed. Hunh. Cinnamon, the owner, came out of the office to watch. She was so beautiful, like a young Madeleine Stowe, with long, long dark hair. When the song was over I did a quick bow and discreetly tried to pick up all the dollar bills. I made eighty-five dollars, more money in those two songs than I made answering phones all week at the barn.
The girls ran backstage to hug me, and Cinnamon came in, too.
“Do you want a job?” she asked.
“I have school, so I can’t work during the week,” I said.
“Well, can you do Friday and Saturday nights?”
Eighty-five dollars in nine minutes. “Yeah,” I said.
TWO
The first rule of Cinnamon’s—the only rule, really—was that you could not be topless on the floor. As the Louisiana State Legislature dictated, “Entertainers whose breasts or buttocks are exposed to view shall perform only upon a stage at least eighteen inches above the immediate floor.…” No woman’s feet shall touch earth if she is showing her boobs for dollars. Amen.
At many clubs, if a customer requests a private dance, you could raise your hand straight high in the air and a bouncer would bring over a little box for you to stand on. But Cinnamon’s was so small that they didn’t even have room for boxes. If you wanted to give somebody a dance, you took them in the back room where they had a mini stage set up. There was a squiggly curve we could stand on next to each other, and the guys sat on rolling chairs.
My first Friday night at Cinnamon’s I heard this rule about ten times in the first ten minutes I was there. “It’s the easiest way for cops to bust up the place,” said Cinnamon.
“I get it,” I said. “The floor is lava.”
“Lava,” she said. “If you do a dance, you absolutely have to put your dress back on before you get down.”
I didn’t have good dancing clothes, so I had bought a dress cheap from the club. It was red velvet, and I paired it with white heels from home. It didn’t take long before a guy asked for a dance. He was okay looking, a skinny guy with brown hair. I led him to the back room and tried to look like I knew what I was doing.
I took the spot right next to Tracy, who was this total biker chick. She was the wife of one of the Banditos, a local motorcycle club. She’d been a stripper all her life, pretty but ridden hard and put away wet. Beef jerky in a slingshot G-string that went up top on her shoulders, always accessorized with thigh-
high leather biker boots.
We were about three feet apart, and she had just started a dance for this shifty-looking bald guy. I started dancing for my guy, which was awkward enough my first time, but I was also watching her, sneaking looks to get a sense of what I should be doing.
I took off my dress, and the guy seemed so into it. Good start, but now what? What do I do with the dress? I didn’t want to throw it on the floor, so I wrapped it around my guy’s shoulders and played with it like a sexy scarf.
Right next to me, Tracy turned her back on the guy and bent over so he could see her ass. Noted, I thought. I’ll do that near the end. I had just returned my focus to my guy when all hell broke loose right next to me.
As Tracy bent over, her tampon string was sticking out of her G-string. Now, I have seen this happen twice my entire stripping career. But it was so much worse than that. The guy had tried to light the string with a cigarette lighter. Tracy saw it between her legs, and in one swift move of superhuman strength, she pulled her boot right off by the heel and repeatedly swung it down on her guy to beat the shit out of him.
“What the fuck?” I screamed, trying not to get hit.
My guy ran past me out of the club, a horny Wile E. Coyote escaping with my dress still on his shoulders. I had no dress, only a G-string, and I was three feet away from Tracy pummeling the fuck out of this guy. And the ground was lava.
Do you think Cinnamon’s had security cameras? No, they had a video baby monitor that the bartender would periodically check. It took the bartender, who was also the bouncer that night, a couple of minutes before he came in to pull Tracy off the guy.
“I’m sorry, I thought she was a firecracker!” the guy yelled as he was thrown out the door onto the gravel.
“Tracy, you can’t do that,” said the bartender.
“He lit my vagina on fire!” she yelled. “Kitty had a tail and he lit it!”
Meanwhile, I was still standing on the squiggle stage, covering my breasts like this scaredy cat.
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