by Unknown
“Thank you, Cherish,” the DJ said drily.
When my trusty Rainbow cab finally dropped me off at home, the sky was a buttery color. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to sleep at all before my alarm went off at 7:00 for work.
“Morning, baby doll,” Jonny murmured sleepily as I crept into the bedroom like a thief.
“Hi,” I whispered. “I missed you so much tonight.”
“How did you do?” Jonny asked, rolling over onto his back.
“I made a lot of money. A lot. More than I’ve ever made,” I said, releasing my death grip on the Lunch Box of Ill-Gotten Gains.
“What did you do?” Jonny asked, interested. Shocker: I could hear a grin in his voice. The insane thing about Jonny is that he always understood why shit happened. He treated my shifts at the club like any night of wholesome (albeit kinky) hard labor, and never imparted them with any unnecessary emotional meaning. The proverbial green-eyed monster never made an appearance in our relationship. Jonny’s trust in me extended beyond the superficial, mechanical actions of my body; he never doubted my extreme devotion to him or the pyrotechnics he still managed to inspire in my tired loins at five a.m. I didn’t know a single stripper who was lucky enough to have such an honorable dude.
“It’s so nasty,” I said, crawling into bed. “You really want to know?”
“Yes,” Jonny said.
I told him the entire story about the Russian. “I mean, is that cool? Does that freak you out?”
“No,” Jonny said, wrapping his arms around me. “In fact, I’ll probably masturbate to that image for weeks. You are one dirty bird, darling.”
“I’ll never do that again,” I said truthfully. “I know it went way too far.”
“Well, you don’t have to do it again,” Jonny said. “But you did it this time, and you shouldn’t feel ashamed about it.”
I relaxed in the darkness. “Okay. I promise not to enter a shame spiral.”
“Were you afraid you’d get caught?” Jonny asked.
“Sort of,” I said. “I mean, we’re not supposed to be totally nude anywhere but onstage. Nudity with contact is verboten. And I mean…well, I could have gotten fired for a lot of things. I…”
“My girl breaks all the rules,” Jonny mumbled, falling asleep again.
* * *
The Ten Worst Stripper Names
1. Edwidge
2. Chlamydia
3. Your sister’s name
4. Fatwa
5. Junqui
6. Britney, Brittanee, Britni, Brittanie, etc.
7. Zqwzybrk (pronounced “Britney”)
8. Placenta
9. Dysplasia
10. Stayfree
* * *
The Girl from
Ipanema
At three o’clock in the morning one Thursday, I found myself soaking my feet in the polluted Jacuzzi with a Brazilian girl named Joni. She was wearing a cheap Swiss maid costume that, paired with her Brazilian accent, was endearingly ridiculous. Joni had the kind of thick, unyielding body that looked like it had been carved from a single cord of wood. She wasn’t thin, but she was monument-solid in an attractive way.
“I was supposed to be a clown,” she announced as the water rose past our ankles. “My father is a clown. Everyone is my family does clowning.”
“Stripping is kind of like being a clown,” I offered. “I was just onstage in VIP, and these guys weren’t tipping, so I started dancing the Robot. Then one of them put a Sacagawea dollar coin on the tip rail and I pretended to put it in my butt.”
Joni smiled and shook her head. “No, being a clown is very noble. You can perform for people who have cancer and things.”
“Having cancer is bad enough,” I said. “But cancer and things? That’s when I question the existence of God.”
“Would you like a bonbon, Cherish?” Joni asked me suddenly. “I am pregnant and I am craving chocolate all the time. They are Ferrero Rocher.” She pronounced Ferrero Rocher in such an intoxicating way, like the name of a charismatic dictator; I couldn’t possibly decline.
“Thanks,” I said, accepting the warm, malformed truffle from the pocket of her apron.
“I don’t think I’ll have the baby,” Joni sighed. “I’m only eighteen and I don’t have, you know, an American diploma.” I noticed she wore a thick gold ring on her finger that said JESUS in block script.
“Tough decision,” I said. “I’m twenty-five, and I’m still scared of babies.”
“I’m scared of abortion,” Joni said. “Do you know who is lucky? My cousin. She is marrying a man who looks exactly like Seann William Scott from the movie American Pie2. He is very cute. They are going to have a baby.”
“I’m sure you’ll have your own baby someday,” I offered.
“I hope so,” Joni said. She slipped farther into the Jacuzzi, and the water burbled around the frilly hem of her Heidi costume. The last thing she cared about was a wet dress.
Downstairs, I attempted to get a few more dances before closing. Unfortunately, the Alpha-Strippers had decided to work on this particular evening. The Alpha-Strippers were a group of pompous, seldom-seen, surgically enhanced borgs, so nicknamed because of their undeniable earning power. The Alphas only needed to work one day a week to maintain their fortunes, and they seemed to always arrive en masse, phony breasts spilling cockeyed out of overpriced costumes, Vuitton handbags swinging. They clustered around the bar and cooed half-jokingly about which one of them would fuck the DJ that night. I wasn’t going to make any money with all that premium poontang hovering around.
Dejected, I went back upstairs to sulk by the hot tub. But all that remained of Joni was her tracks, dainty wet footprints fading on the tile floor.
Good-bye, Yellow Brick Road
By July, I was working sixty hours a week at the agency, doggedly trying to amass credit in the straight world. I almost believed I could abandon the disorderly chrysalis of my early twenties and emerge a sticky butterfly with a crash-proof flight plan. No dice; I was flailing. I was mistake-prone to begin with, and sleep deprivation didn’t exactly complement my work performance. I kept a dilapidated pile of file folders on my desk in an attempt to look like I had a system, but the important documents I was meant to organize were as scrambled as my synapses. My paper trail had expanded into a four-lane highway, and I was royally fucked.
“You’ll figure it out,” my boss insisted when I approached her and voiced my concerns. “It’s really not that hard to be a project manager.”
Perhaps not for normal, hardworking folks, the kind who don’t flash their genitals for pocket change. I, however, was overwhelmed by responsibility. Meanwhile, I couldn’t stop thinking about stripping. Whenever I closed my eyes, I saw that familiar dizzying image of the eternal army of strippers traipsing down the spiral staircase, ghostly blondes, spectral redheads, grim and efficient in their descent to nowhere. Where were they going? Hell? Dillard’s? The welfare office?
“You’re lacking amino acids,” Jonny declared when I told him that I couldn’t concentrate at work. So we went to one of those musclehead health emporiums where they stock legal steroids by the bucket, and bought some L-tyrosine and ginseng supplements. I even popped some OTC trucker speed, hoping I’d turn into one of those hyperorganized junkies who can’t stop cleaning. Nothing worked. I realized that I had to buckle down. Grow up. Put my aquiline nose to the corporate grindstone. Quit stripping, at least for the time being.
Like the craven wuss I am, I feared being sighted by the Mustaches when I hauled my stripperly belongings out of Big Pink. I crept into the building during the Saturday afternoon shift and hoped no one would notice me dumping out my locker into an army-surplus backpack. As I crossed the main floor to the elevator, I noticed that a weird, David Lynch-ian atmosphere pervaded the day shift. A walleyed girl in a red bridesmaid dress paced around onstage to jazz music while a deaf customer sat nearby and held up a sign that said TAKE OFF YR PANTY. The day manager, a ginger-haired linebacker of
a woman, eyed me suspiciously but didn’t say a word.
Once upstairs in the dressing room, I jimmied my locker open and grimaced at the junk I had amassed over a few months. The locker contained:
One bottle of Wet ’n’ Wild nail lacquer in Ruby Begonia (dark polish colors are ideal for lazy girls and Goths; they can be applied in endless sloppy coats, and cover hangnails and other neurotic excorciations).
A brush with a Tribble-esque pouf of blonde wig hair ensnared in its bristles.
Two black thongs in need of washing (and, possibly, disposal in a sealed biohazard receptacle).
A carelessly opened package of bone-dry Huggies wipes.
A pair of new-ish platforms that were retired when they battered my feet into a veritable Badlands of red and purple blisters.
Assorted soiled dancewear items, one of them bearing a mysterious cloudy stain. (Russian dressing? Hyuk!)
An extremely offensive foot funk, kind of like aged Camembert crossed with mink urea.
I threw on my backpack and hopped into the groaning elevator, riding downstairs with a pair of mute newbies in matching fluorescent coochie-cutters. They stared at me hollowly like the butchered twin girls in The Shining. I smiled at them, relieved to be escaping from the killing floor of Big Pink.
Jonny greeted me outside and we high-fived like accomplices in a jailbreak. Just then, one of my sky-high platform shoes fell out of my backpack onto the sidewalk as a couple walked past us arm-in-arm. The female half of the couple paused, looked at the fallen shoe, glanced up at the neon Deja Vu signage, then stared at me witheringly. She might as well have hissed Stripper! and lobbed a rock at my head. I grinned back sheepishly. Now that I was temporarily out of the game, I felt wholesome. Reconstructed. Like my forehead had been anointed with chrism, albeit briefly, and I had earned my wings (noble, seraphic wings, not the sparkling, marabou-trimmed kind that strippers named Angel sometimes wear).
“I think you were just outed,” Jonny commented, picking the shoe up off the sidewalk and stuffing it back into my gaping bag.
“No one must know of the stripping!” I shouted jokingly, but my declaration had the acrid undertaste of truth. I hadn’t told my family or even the lion’s share of my friends about my buck-naked misadventure. I had a feeling it wasn’t over yet.
Burnt Wienie Sandwich
August in Minneapolis: tattooed skin, outboard motors and summer hours. The city perspires Grain Belt beer, and its pale, bloated denizens bike shirtless and float like Wonder Bread on the lake off Hidden Beach. I found these civilian displays of nudity endearing, especially after months spent watching trim, tanned mutants dropping their panties for spare change.
Now that I had officially dropped my gig at Deja Vu, I was experiencing the sort of flat emotional state that serves as the perfect canvas for adventure. I decided to seize the malaise, so to speak, and work at an unfamiliar strip club for one night only. I figured I’d make a little mad money, get my rocks off and satisfy my anthropological yearnings. I wouldn’t be satisfied until I’d investigated every local strip club from deep inside.
It was a Friday evening, and I had just gotten off work. I headed on foot from the agency to the warehouse district, carrying a Lund’s grocery bag stuffed with costumes. There were a handful of clubs in the area (Deja Vu, Choice, Dreamgirls, 418 and Augie’s) but Dreamgirls intrigued me the most. The club was housed in a mostly abandoned building with a peeling black facade and an inexplicable mural of King Kong on the exposed wall. The lighted sign was a lewd Atlantic City relic shaped like an ejaculatory fountain flanked by palms, and the entrance was marked with a blue awning lined with chaser bulbs that had lost the thrill of the chase. From the outside, the place looked like a run-down jack shack*, a dollhouse so condemned I could already smell the dynamite. So of course, being a glutton for the grotesque, I felt compelled to take a peek.
As I approached the club, I saw that the facade of the building was obscured by scaffolding due to the construction of a new light-rail station. As a conciliatory measure toward inconvenienced customers, they had posted a large banner: DREAMGIRLS ‘LIGHT RAIL INCONVENIENCE PARTY.’ FREE COVER, FREE HOT DOGS, BEAUTIFUL LADIES. (You mean I’m going to be billed beneath the hot dogs? I’m in!)
Weiners notwithstanding, I knew the “free cover” part of the bargain was potentially lucrative. There were bound to be loads of turgid tightwads at the club if the entry fee was waived, and a Friday was likely to be busy anyway. My decision was made. I edged past the scaffolding and into Dreamgirls.
Inside, a girl wearing a Hustler half-shirt and a dour expression was inflating balloons with a helium tank. Dreamgirls was a fully nude, nonalcoholic club, with standard dancing upstairs and a peep show called the Annex in the basement. From the front door, though, all I could see was a cramped vestibule and a bobbing murder of black balloons.
“Here to work tonight?” the doorman asked immediately, noticing my bag of costumes and synthetic hair.
“Can I?” I asked. “I’ve never worked here before.”
“No problem,” he said. “Just let me see some identification.” I handed over my nearly expired driver’s license (me exactly four years earlier, a fresh-faced college student ideologically opposed to the sex industry).
“Looks good,” he said. “You can change upstairs.”
The locker room was Mildew Fest Midwest, with broken lockers hanging agape to reveal costumes, cosmetics organizers and damp towels. Still, there was plenty of counter space to stake out, which I appreciated. I pulled out my wig and began detangling it with my fingers. Since the day shift was still winding down and night girls are customarily late for work, the dressing room was empty.
Two cheerful day girls came in and introduced themselves. Their names were Zoey and Frankie. Zoey wore a red Farrah wig (“I’ve got a blue mohawk underneath,” she confessed). Frankie was a gangly sweetheart with Becky Thatcher freckles and dear skinny legs.
“Get dressed and we’ll show you around,” Frankie offered.
“You’re hot. We like you,” Zoey elaborated.
I kicked off my clogs, apologized for my chronic foot stink and quickly changed into my zebra-print slip dress, pink platform shoes and mangled wig.
“Want to see the Annex?” Zoey asked me. I did.
The Annex operated independently of the action upstairs. As the three of us rode the wheezing elevator down to the bowels of the club, Frankie and Zoey explained the concept: The Annex consisted of one-on-one erotic booth shows, where customers could jerk off behind Plexiglas while interacting with their stripper of choice. Frankie and Zoey told me they worked in the Annex frequently.
“What do you do in there?” I asked.
“Well, I usually just get naked and masturbate. I won’t finger myself if I think it’s a cop, though. It’s illegal to stick anything in there,” Zoey said.
“Zoey and I did a girl-girl show earlier today,” Frankie offered. “It was really hard not to laugh, because the guy had an enormous cock.” She spanned her hands wide, indicating a purple monster. “I mean, it was huge!”
“We pretended to go down on each other,” Zoey said, flicking her tongue to illustrate. “It was weird.”
“I was all like, ‘Oh, mister, your cock is so big!’” Frankie said. “We were dying.”
“He squirted cum all over the glass, and I was like, I can’t look!” Zoey marveled. “We both closed our eyes.”
The girls showed me the themed booths, which included a mock dungeon with hanging chains and a “Water Fantasy” booth complete with working shower. (For some reason, I found it amusing that there was a cake of soap and a nearly depleted bottle of Herbal Essences on the floor; what commitment to realism!) Frankie explained that the private shows cost a minimum of ten dollars, and that the girl could charge whatever she wanted in addition.
“Can I just work down here all night?” I asked. The prospect was so foul I couldn’t resist. I’d gone over the edge in my quest to see how the naked half li
ved.
“Well, usually we snag guys upstairs and bring them down here if they want a private show,” Frankie explained.
“How is it upstairs, anyway?” I asked.
“Sometimes it’s busy, sometimes it’s not.” Zoey shrugged. “I’m not making much lately.”
I had high hopes for tonight’s head count; after all, who could resist free hot dogs? Surely Dreamgirls would be overrun by wealthy, monocle-twirling dukes pressing rare Tahitian pearls into our palms. This was bound to be the classiest night of adult entertainment Minneapolis had ever seen, and I was determined to attend the ball. I excused myself politely, and rode back up to the first floor. The smell of salted meat drifted down the elevator shaft: The hot dogs had entered the building.
My first glance of the club’s main room was disorienting. Dreamgirls was like Deja Vu’s dimmer fraternal twin, right down to the pattern on the carpet and the layout of the stage. Mirrored ceilings created the illusion of Bosch-like orgiastic chaos in a relatively small room. Fat dark couches lined the walls like biopsied moles. I shivered in my sheer dress; the air conditioning was evidently set to zero degrees Kelvin.
An older man sauntered over and eyed me from head to toe. “God bless America!” he declared appreciatively.
“Hi,” I said, smiling. “I’m Cherish.”
“How about a bed dance?” he asked, throwing his arm around my shoulders.
“Absolutely!” I said, steeling myself for a nine-minute cock tease. On one hand, bed dances made me want to retch. On the other hand, sixty clams could buy a lot of Zappa records and vodka Cokes.
He laughed. “I’m kidding. I’m the owner. Have you ever danced before?”