“What are you doing?” the bartender asked.
“The guy took my dress,” I said, looking down at the lava floor.
“Oh, God, you can get down,” he said. “It’s not that serious. When there’s somebody getting killed, you can leave.”
“Good to know,” I said. Someone let me borrow a dress. And that, folks, was my first thirty minutes as a stripper.
I grew to love Tracy and every single girl who worked there. There were less than twenty total, about six girls working a night, which is nothing. You got to pick your own music, and to this day I will hear a song and my mind goes to seeing one girl dancing to it, all of her signature moves and favorite outfits.
Tracy only danced to Ozzy Osbourne’s “Crazy Train,” so you would hear it about twenty-five freaking times a night. She was all big and bad until her man would come in the club with all his bikers.
Then there was Amy, the one who I met at the concert. I think of her when I hear Heart’s “Magic Man.” She was this little tiny thing with a huge ass, and she would walk, not really dance. Her big move was to bend down so her hair fell forward, then arch her body to throw it back.
I can’t forget Mercedes in her white nighties, always dancing to Ratt. She was this tall, super-leggy blonde, and she barely fit on the stage. Her go-to was a vertical split, lifting her leg until her foot was flat on the ceiling. Then she’d start bumping the pole with her pussy. She wore classic nineties pumps, and she had to take one off as she raised her leg or she’d be too tall to do the trick. Mercedes had these great, natural boobs, but the main thing I remember is that she had found these baby ducks with no mom and was caring for them. She brought a little kiddie pool into the dressing room on weekends and there would be these brown ducklings wading around.
Billie was a fitness model who drove a white Chrysler 300, so I am pretty sure she had sugar daddies. She only came in to work for emergencies, usually two days before her rent was due. Then there was Venus, a lesbian who I thought was so hot. And Phoebe, tall and skinny with a pixie cut, hate-dancing to Lords of Acid’s “Pussy.” She’d hit her heels hard on the stage, but in the dressing room she was always crying, pleading with whoever was on the phone to let her see her kid. “You promised I could see him tomorrow” was the litany every weekend. He was about three, and she had to go to court to try to see him, but they used a solicitation charge against her. She danced with anger.
The oldest, Cheryl, was in her late forties and very pretty. She was a grandmother, which I couldn’t get my head around at the time. Now I feel like I am hurtling toward that age. She was older and made no secret that she’d had a rough life, but she was unfailingly kind. Her good soul shone through and made her beautiful.
These women raised me, doing the job my mother had bowed out of. Thanks to them, I learned I was putting in tampons wrong. They taught me how to shave my bikini line so it wouldn’t break out, and how to do makeup. I saw this weird little contraption on the dressing room table and blurted out, “What is that fucking thing?”
“It’s an eyelash curler,” said Cheryl.
“You’re supposed to curl your lashes?” I asked.
“Oh, sweetie,” said Mercedes.
“Raised by wolves,” sighed Cheryl, fixing her lipstick.
I grew up in a strip club, and like all the dancers, I called Cinnamon “Mom.” My grades never suffered, and no one from school ever knew except for my best friend, Elizabeth. My trainer, Nancy, had introduced me to her husband, Dr. Dan, at the LSU veterinary school just down the street from the barn. I started working there after school, and the highlight was caring for a foal. I applied to a veterinary school in Texas, and in the spring I was accepted with a scholarship. But I still worried about living expenses.
I was the baby at Cinnamon’s, though no one knew just how young. The weekend before my March 17 birthday in 1997, they got me a cake. HAPPY 19TH BIRTHDAY! it read. But it would be my eighteenth birthday, one of the worst days of my life.
*
There were subtle signs, then an avalanche. Around the time I moved in with Andy, I noticed that Jade seemed a little more timid about jumps. By then, we’d had each other seven years, so we could read each other. I became much more concerned in February, when she started a rapid decline. She had consistent diarrhea and seemed increasingly listless. I led her over to Dr. Dan at the veterinary office where I worked. He had always done checkups and let me work off the payments in the office, or simply didn’t charge us. He did a full workup on her and even tested her for toxins to make sure she hadn’t been poisoned. He wondered if maybe she had a heart murmur, and we took a wait-and-see approach.
Then she deteriorated quickly, and by the first week of March she was wasting away. Her hair became dull and she resembled the poor, pathetic horse she had been when I first got her. I knew she had been through a lot of abuse before I had her, but she was only twenty. The average lifespan of a horse is about twenty-eight, plus or minus a few years. But she had rapidly gone from doing these huge jumps to looking like she was near death.
The last day I rode her, I knew it was the end. Spring had come and an early run of warm weather had coaxed out all the yellow butterweeds and buttercups along the trail. That day with Jade there was a sudden cold snap, so it was surreal for it to be so cold yet still have wildflowers all over. I put Jade’s blanket on her to ride her—she was too thin to saddle her up, and this would keep her warm. We did a trail ride and I told her I loved her. I knew what I had to do, and afterward, I went to Dr. Dan.
“It’s not fair to her,” I told Dr. Dan. “She’s so miserable.”
“I know,” he said. “I agree.”
We decided to put her down, and the only time they could schedule it for was March 17, our shared birthday. I wanted to be there for it. I knew this would be bad. If you are picturing it like the gentle passing of a dog, nestled in a blanket, you’re wrong. Horses don’t curl up and die after they get a lethal injection. Their reaction is pretty violent, with the horse collapsing and sometimes rearing back.
All the vets came in to support us. I didn’t cry much because I had already said good-bye on the trail. They let me braid her forelock so they could give it to me after, and I talked to her as I separated and twisted the hair. I told her not to be scared.
And then she was gone.
They pulled her shoes to give me, everyone tearing up. They never sent me a bill or expected anything from me for the care and kindness. Because this was a veterinary school, I knew they were going to examine the body to learn what went wrong. A couple of weeks later I was at the barn, still working just to be around horses, when a few of the vets came over to me, seeming shell-shocked.
“Jade had been operating on one valve of her heart,” one told me.
“It had been dead for so long that her heart was a different color,” said the other. “We don’t understand how she was walking, much less jumping.” He went on to explain that what caused the sudden deterioration was that she stopped absorbing food from scarring in her stomach after years of parasites. She was just destroyed on the inside.
Jade came into my life when I needed her, and she left when I needed her to leave. I had an apartment and plans for school. I couldn’t afford her anymore, and at eighteen, I couldn’t be tethered to a horse. I had to move on, and she let me. I’ve had so many horses since Jade, but she was the best I ever had.
*
I graduated from Scotlandville Magnet High School with straight As and a goal of deferring college for a year. I was “taking a year off,” I told everyone. I wanted to continue working, build up savings, and then be able to focus on my studies when the time came. I taught summer camp at the equestrian center for five dollars an hour and continued dancing at Cinnamon’s for a lot more. I started dyeing my hair red and noticed that I made more money as a redhead than with my natural dark hair. I made $325 one night and thought I’d won the lottery. I actually went shopping for once, which I had trained myself not to do. I
was so proud of being self-sufficient that I put a bumper sticker on my Toyota Celica. It read, FOLLOW ME TO CINNAMON’S.
At the very end of August, I started having symptoms that felt like strep. My throat was on fire and I had a fever so high I was hallucinating. I didn’t want to go to the doctor because I didn’t have insurance and I knew it would be a fifty-dollar visit, plus whatever for the medicine. It was the weekend, and I was already out the money from missing some work at Cinnamon’s. Finally, my boyfriend Andy got so worried about me that he dragged me to a clinic on Sunday, August 31.
The doctor prescribed Cefalexin. Now, there’s nothing wrong with some cephalosporins among friends, but it turned out I was allergic. I took the first dose, not knowing it was a time bomb in my body. Andy went to work, delivering pizzas late into the night, while I lay on our mattress on the floor. By then we had an old TV, but no cable. It had rabbit ears, so it would randomly catch a signal every now and again. But I had it on for white noise.
The itch started in my left arm, but gradually it spread throughout my body, going deep, as if it was in my veins. I was also having trouble breathing, still feverish and now slipping in and out of sleep.
A little after eleven at night, the TV switched from dead air to picking up NBC. I was too weak to look up, but I could hear it. Princess Diana had been badly injured in a car crash in Paris. Soon, Brian Williams was flickering in and out of my subconscious, his updates playing out in my fever dream. The itching under my skin intensified to a point that I reached for a cassette case, shook out the tape and insert card, and broke it in half. I brought the sharp edge to my arm to cut at the itch. I scratched myself up, and the pain masked the itch for just a few moments.
I was still in and out at 1 A.M. when Brian Williams returned to my little fucked-up, feverish universe to tell me Diana was dead. Andy came home at about two in the morning and found me incoherent. He’d heard the news about Diana at work, but I was telling him about it as if the whole thing was my bad fever dream. Like my mind and the world had somehow become porous.
Andy knew that he needed to take me back to the doctor, but he didn’t have the money. This tells you how desperate he was: he called my mom.
“She’s really sick,” Andy said.
My mom said something to him, and before he could answer, she hung up on him. I asked him what she said, and he didn’t say.
Andy had guns—it was Andy and it was Louisiana—so the first thing he did Monday morning was sell one for cash to take me to the doctor. They diagnosed the allergic reaction, and with the wrong medicine leaving my system and the right one doing the job, I began to feel better right away. I still have light scars on my arms from the cassette case.
“Hey,” I said, sitting back at home later, able to eat the cold pizza he’d brought from work. “What did my mother say on the phone?”
“It doesn’t matter,” he said.
“What did she say?”
He sighed. “She said, ‘She abandoned me and I fucking hope she dies.’”
“Wow,” I said. “I abandoned her? I abandoned her?”
In March 2018, just days before my birthday, my mother and father each gave interviews to a Texas newspaper about me and President Trump. My mom told the reporter, who probably believed her, “My friends all say the same thing: ‘I can’t believe that is the same sweet child—you took such good care of her.’” My father professed to be worried I might come to harm for telling the truth about Trump’s attempts to silence me. “You start rattling the cage of powerful people, and you don’t know what might happen,” he said. Right below his quote, mind you, the newspaper provided a photograph of my home and detailed the neighborhood where I live. You know, just in case anyone wanted to kill me.
I was hurt by my mom’s revisionist history—at least my dad was honest in his interview about being MIA all my life—so I posted the article on the private Facebook account I keep for my friends and chosen family. Without much prompting, my childhood friends had a field day. Travis, the boy who moved in next door when I was six, was one of the first to chime in. “If they want to bring up old memories,” he wrote, “let’s ask them how many times your mom would leave you all alone?”
Another childhood friend recounted how my mom had told her parents she was dying of cancer and needed money. My friend said her parents noticed she didn’t die, but she did have a new car.
Renee, who I used to ride with as a kid, wrote, “Some of us KNEW your mother.”
My best friend from high school, Elizabeth, added: “I remember your mom very well. Who could forget the Christmas Tree Incident?”
“I feel like I owe every one of you an apology,” I wrote after reading all those reality-check hugs from lifelong friends. “And somehow a fruitcake seems appropriate too.”
*
“How many?” Cinnamon asked me.
“I’m up to three,” I said.
“Six a night,” she said.
“I know,” I said.
It was a house rule that the girls at Cinnamon’s had to sell a minimum of six drinks a night. You were supposed to hustle the guys and get them to buy you the twelve-dollar double, with the house getting six bucks and you getting the other half. They knew I didn’t drink, and they knew I was underage, but it didn’t matter. The bartender would secretly make mine a virgin, and the lie didn’t sit well with me. I felt guilty making a guy buy a twelve-dollar Sprite and telling him, “Oooh, I love vodka.”
Sometimes the guys would check, and if they caught you, they would get mad at you. I was already thinking long game, and that customer would then be someone who’d stand with his hands behind his back every time I danced. Worse, I just have a thing about liars, and I never wanted to be one.
This was bugging me more and more going into fall, and one October night a steady customer at the club got handsy with me. I batted him away and waved at the bouncer, thinking he would say something. Nothing. This jerk grabbed at me again. I yelled, this time so loud everyone heard me, which wasn’t hard in a trailer titty bar. I looked right at the bouncer, imploring him to do something. He bit his bottom lip and glanced at the office.
He was too good a customer. I had worked there for nine months, lying to men about my Sprites to make the club an extra thirty-six dollars a night, but they wouldn’t do anything to help me.
I got emotional and I went to the dressing room, stuffing all my things into a bag. I left Cinnamon’s and I never went back. I am sorry to say that I left in anger, because I loved all those girls so much. Of all the women I have worked with over the years, they are the ones I still think about.
Right away, I knew who to call: the Gold Club.
The Gold Club was the nicest gentlemen’s club in Baton Rouge. The guy on the phone said I could come in for an audition at two forty-five the next day, fifteen minutes before they opened. I met the managers, John and Larry, plus the floor guy, Casey.
The club was absolutely huge compared to Cinnamon’s, but the guys were very nice and put me at ease. John had to go up in the DJ booth to cue up my Mötley Crüe song because the DJ wasn’t even there yet. It was easier to do with nobody there, and I was confident I was a good dancer. That was always my saving grace: I could dance. I didn’t just wander around the stage and make my butt clap.
“Do you want to start tonight?” asked John.
“Oh, I am going out tonight,” I said. “I have plans.”
“Well, do you want to work for a few hours and kind of get to know everybody?”
Right there they gave me a locker and I worked from three to eight. I had been nervous about the place being so much bigger than Cinnamon’s, but I thought, Well, this isn’t too bad.
Um, Stormy, that’s because shit doesn’t happen until after that. The next time I came in, I worked a night shift and was overwhelmed. There were forty-five girls working when I was used to six or seven a night, and there were three real stages instead of one the size of a bed. Upstairs had real VIP rooms, and you didn�
��t have to sell drinks. If you wanted to do a private dance for someone in the back, you just had to raise your hand and the bouncer would run over with a box to stand on. Couldn’t forget, the floor was lava there, too!
If you walked in at ten, you were going in cold, trying to get the attention of guys when you were one of many to choose from. But that’s where the money was. There were three set shifts: three to eleven, eight thirty to two, and ten to two. Dancers had to pay a house fee for the two later shifts, with the last shift asking the highest house fee for the shortest time. A house fee is the “rent” you pay the club as a contractor occupying their space to offer your services. The same way hairstylists will often pay for their space at a salon. There was no fee if you came in at opening, because no girl wants to be there when it’s three guys.
I wanted to avoid the house fee but wanted to maximize profit, so for the first five months, I worked the three-to-eleven shift, clocking out just as many girls were getting there. Then I got smarter and I would work a double, starting at three in the afternoon and not leaving until two in the morning. I could skip the house fee, establish my guys, and stay with them when the later girls rolled in.
I was a machine and got up to working six nights a week, with at least five of them being doubles. If I wasn’t at work, I was spending money, and who wanted to do that? Plus, I truly loved dancing. I had regulars, and my favorite was Bear, this big huge guy who always wore Hawaiian shirts. His white hair and beard gave him the look of a polar bear. He was definitely a creature of habit, coming in every night at midnight after finishing his job as the nighttime manager of a Benny’s Car Wash, and taking his usual spot on the top ledge to stay the last couple of hours. Once I saw he came in every night, I always made a point of dancing for him. Bear was never a big spender. He would tip a five onstage, and he only got table dances if it was a two-for-one, which they did every hour. Table dances were only ten dollars, but he always gave a twenty, and he always closed the night out with me. That meant Bear was good for between twenty-five and fifty dollars a night.
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