by Unknown
I reddened. “Yeah, at Deja Vu.”
“I own that club, too,” he said. That explained the familiar decor. It occurred to me that this man was the primary beneficiary of all the outrageous house fees I’d paid. He was probably disgustingly rich, with a zero-depth pool and a home gym and all that MTV Cribs shit. I wanted to punch him, or better yet, force him to spend the evening naked and groveling for tips.
“Cool,” I lied. “I love the Vu.”
“This place works the same way,” the owner said. “Twenty for dances, sixty for beds. Good luck tonight.”
“I appreciate it,” I said. Nearby, a waitress in the requisite miniskirt and sneakers leaned over a steam tray and doled out hot dogs with tongs.
As the clock neared seven, more strippers emerged from the dressing room in their sparkling tatters and towering footwear. While there were a few standard-issue photo negatives (platinum blondes with deep tans, steeped in body), most of the girls were tattooed punk chicks, sepulchral Goths with fishhook piercings, fat cheerleaders and assorted misfits straight out of the “Alternative Lifestyles” column in the local weekly. Refreshing.
One of the girls introduced herself to me immediately, and revealed that it was her first night at Dreamgirls. Leela was eighteen years old, wearing a steel bull ring through her septum and tangled hair extensions. Her lips were painted as black as freshly laid asphalt.
“I just got a drum kit,” she told me. “I’m so excited! Me and my friends are going to start a punk band.”
“I play bass,” I said, feeling hopelessly square in my blonde wig.
“We should jam sometime!” Leela exclaimed.
“I’m twenty-five,” I said. “I’m old enough to be your math tutor.”
Leela’s mouth formed a black-lipsticked O. “You don’t look that old!”
“I guess I’m well preserved,” I said.
Since the stage was still vacant, Leela and I went up to practice pole tricks. She was as nimble as the howler monkeys at the Como Zoo; I was my usual unwieldy self.
“This one is easy,” Leela said breathlessly, showing me a rapid inverted maneuver. “Try it.”
I tried, and wound up tangled on the floor. “Not a chance, honey. I’ve never been much of a pole-lympian.” A special pole-lympian, perhaps.
“But it’s easy!” Leela insisted, clinging to the pole somewhere above my head. She flipped upside down, exposing the rows of infinitesimal braids that attached her hair extensions to her scalp.
“Must be my rheumatoid arthritis acting up,” I said.
A cute Asian girl strolled up to me with a broad, menacing smile on her face and next to nothing on her little brown body. She had eschewed the usual stilettos in favor of well-worn sandals, but somehow this bohemian faux pas worked in her favor. She seized my tits and squeezed them approvingly. Then I felt her hand slip down the front of my thong along with something cool and papery. She pressed a dollar bill against my pussy, withdrew her now-empty hand, giggled at her own audacity and walked away without saying a word.
“Thanks for the dollar,” I called after her.
“See, you’re not that bad,” Leela said. “Nikita likes you.”
The stage rotation began. I had requested Aerosmith from the DJ, and to my delight, he chose the song “Pink” from their extensive catalog. “Pink,” in my opinion, is one of the most appropriate songs for a girl working without pants. After all, isn’t pink what it’s all about at the juice bars? I stripped down to my birthday suit, lay down onstage and spread like Hellmann’s. My pussy isn’t a tucked, tidy clover like some girls have; in fact, it’s not even pink. I have a dark, sinister-looking taco lengua, more bruised than blushing. But I learned early on that no one cares what you’ve got between your legs. Sloppy, tight, pierced, shaved, underaged or “distinguished,” it’s still pussy and it’s worth its depth in molten gold when you’re a stripper.
Onstage acrobatics notwithstanding, the room was positively dead. The crowd was sparse for any night, let alone a Friday. Deja Vu was packed wall-to-wall with drunk collegiate types on weekends; it seemed strange that a club that was nearly identical couldn’t seem to attract customers. And yet I could see why people avoided Dreamgirls. It was more like Night Terror Girls, a colossal dump, a sick building. Money had obviously been poured into the club, but there was an unmistakable vibe of creeping disrepair. Even the paid feature dancer, an enamel-hard blonde in pleather chaps, puckered miserably in a corner. The innately depressing presence of processed meat didn’t help matters.
After an hour or two, I couldn’t seem to get any lap dances, so I sat down with Leela to watch the stage show for a while. One of the dancers had an ornate tattoo inked across the back of her shoulders that read “Lost Girl.” I’d seen a lot of body art in my time stripping, everything from wicked pixies to cannabis leaves to blurred, brutal prison tattoos of boyfriends’ names. But I’d never seen anything quite so striking as “Lost Girl.” It was like a life story in two words.
The lost girl led the pack when we took the stage en masse for the standard bachelor hazing. We formed the usual staggered V, and the bored bachelor assumed the position. (I happily noted that Dreamgirls didn’t use “We Want Some Pussy” as the accompaniment for this ritual, though the DJ had selected a suitably vulgar porn-rap classic.) Leela climbed the pole and straddled the bachelor’s face, legs outstretched. She was setting herself up for a “teeter-totter,” a popular bachelor-torturing move in which two girls face each other on the pole and hump the guy’s face in a rhythmic seesaw motion.
She gestured to me. “C’mon, Cherish, do a teeter-totter with me!”
I groaned and sat down on the stage. “I’ll pass.” I was in a stormy mood. At this point, I’d barely cleared my house fee and my drink hustle was nil.
Someone else seized the teeter-totter opportunity, and she and Leela merrily bobbed back and forth in the face of ennui.
If Schieks, with its crystal and Cristal, was cinematic, then Dreamgirls was cinema verité. Every little girl in the place was wearing a frown. I gave a few lap dances, but the customers were reluctant to part with their money. (I should have known a bunch of hot dog freeloaders would be loathe to spend their unemployment checks on prick-teasers.) I sat with a stoic Sudanese man for a while, but he was more interested in pawing my breasts and asking me to fuck him than paying for any legal favors.
“Outside?” he asked like a skipping record. “How much to sex me outside?”
“Sorry, I don’t do that,” I said, an apologetic-yet-murderous smile pasted on my face. I used a syrupy, pedantic tone of voice whenever I chastised foreigners for soliciting sex. It happened at least three times nightly, so I was accustomed to it.
“Whyyyy?” he asked. (An agonized “why” was always phase two of the “Clever Foreigner Sex Push.”)
“Because it’s illegal, and because I don’t want to,” I replied, knowing he’d offer me $100 next.
“Oh, come on. Hundred dollar,” he insisted. Phase three, dead on as always.
“No,” I said. “Sorry.” I disengaged myself and walked away. My feet throbbed like the graphic in an aspirin commercial. There was no Jacuzzi at Dreamgirls, though, so I had nowhere to soak my dogs. I thought I might be able to find an unoccupied toilet, but the lone commode I’d seen looked rather unappealing.
“How’s your night going?” Leela asked me glumly.
“Horrendous,” I said. “How about you?”
“I’ve only gotten one dance,” she said, her pierced lower lip drooping in defeat. “This place sucks.”
“I wonder if it’s always this bad?” I asked.
“I heard it was,” Leela said. “I only came here because I got fired from Choice.”
“How did that happen?” Getting fired from a nudie bar requires an act of theft or homicide, so I was curious how a cheerful peewee like Leela had gotten herself shitcanned.
“Some girl lied and said I punched her in the face,” Leela said disdainfully.
“Oh yeah,” Leela brightened. “I did all right there. Once I gave thirty consecutive lap dances to a major league hockey player. My wig fell off during the seventeenth dance, and he was like, ‘Keep going! I don’t care!’ It was the most money I ever made in one night.”
“I keep hearing about strippers having encounters with athletes,” I mused.
“It’ll happen to you eventually, if you stick around,” Leela said.*
By four a.m., the club was empty and the dressing room was packed with dejected girls with swollen feet. There was that usual bracing aura after a long weekend night fueled by Red Bull and blow: people talking too loud, girls flinging eyeliner pencils at each other, florid declarations of lust/rage/poverty.
One dancer caught my attention. She was one of the skinniest people I’d ever seen, but it wasn’t a privileged kind of skinny. Her acne-ravaged face had been troweled over with Pan-Cake makeup; her hairpiece was a dull Daniel Boone pelt. She stood in the middle of the dressing room, frankly naked. Her breasts reminded me of the slack teats I’d gawked at in National Geographic as a kid.
“You always think you’re gonna love your kid’s dad forevvver,” she drawled. “’Cause that’s your baby’s daaaddy. You kin’t let go, no matter how hard you try.”
“It’s true,” a girl said. “But I don’t want nothing else from Bill but forty dollars a week.”
“Your baby’s daaaddy,” the skinny one repeated, smiling broadly at some private remembrance. “You think it’s gonna be forever, but it ain’t.”
The dancers filed downstairs. The closing procedure was the same as at Deja Vu (a brief pep talk, followed by payout) but with an intriguing twist: The manager was a raving, racist wingnut on the brink of cardiac arrest.
“You stupid broke-ass bitches!” he shouted as we sat motionless on the soiled couches. “Stupid fat sluts! No wonder we can’t get any people in this bitch!”*
At that moment, several black girls crept down from the dressing room. “Well, well,” the manager sputtered, noticing them. “If it isn’t the three little niggers! How much did you bitches make off the homos tonight?”
The girls rolled their eyes in disgust and joined the rest of the dancers on the soiled couches.
“I watch you drunk bitches,” the manager warned. “I see you sneaking booze and drugs. Treena.” He pointed at a girl who I assumed was Treena. She giggled, seemingly unfazed by his vitriol. I sensed that hate speech was a nightly tradition at Dreamgirls.
“I’d better see every girl sitting with a homo next time,” the manager continued. “I’d better not see any of you up in the dressing room, sitting on your fat asses and drinking and complaining about how you can’t make any money.”
The girls nodded. I wondered why the obviously hetero patrons of the club had been dubbed “homos” by the manager, but I decided it was best not to ask.
“All right, let’s get this over with,” the manager concluded, and sat down to collect his take as the chastised girls dutifully formed a single-file line, cash in hand.
When it was my turn to pay the house, I approached the manager with trepidation. Shockingly, he was the very picture of gentility, smiling at me like a kindly uncle.
“Are you going to work with us again, sweetheart?” he asked, palming the skimpy five-dollar tip I was loathe to part with but scared to withhold.
“I think so,” I fibbed, desperate to leave as quickly as possible.
“Well,” he said, “we’d love to have you back.”
Hot dog!
* * *
The Ten Worst Songs to Strip To
1. That Midnight Oil song about aborigines.
2. “Friday I’m in Love” by the Cure. Robert Smith’s maudlin gasping is ideal for weekends spent sobbing outside your ex-husband’s duplex, but utterly destructive to a hot stage set.
3. “Hey Ya” by Outkast. This is a song everyone loves (’cause it’s admittedly super sick), but the average stripper needs to toot an eightball to keep up with those psycho beats. Besides, no one wants to be reminded of marital strife while your ass is in their face.
4. “Ice Ice Baby” by Vanilla Ice. Widely used as “punishment” by passive-aggressive DJs who are irritated with a specific stripper for undertipping.
5. “Girls” by the Beastie Boys. While this is a popular juke selection with the leering, cunt-hating jamoches who frequent strip clubs, those xylophones inevitably kill the mood.
6. Anything by Britney Spears. Chances are, you’ll piss off a veteran stripper at your club who staked a permanent claim on the Britney catalog back in 1998, and who has tightly choreographed stage sets for every Britney song (even “Don’t Let Me Be the Last to Know”). Admit defeat.
7. Any Eminem song about matricide, Quaaludes or fatherhood.
8. “Elenore” by the Turtles. I know you adore this twee follow-up hit from those sixties Los Angeles scenesters, but resist!
9. “Hotel California” by the crappy post-country incarnation of the Eagles. You’ll make everyone angry. All strippers hate Joe Walsh; I don’t know why.
10. “The More You Ignore Me, The Closer I Get” by Morrissey. Encourages stalkers, and the last thing you want is Freddy the Reg showing up at your day job with a bundle of dyed carnations and a loaded .45.
* * *
Rawhide
At the close of August, Jonny and I fueled up the Pussy Wagon (so named because I’d paid for it with miles of horizontal smiles) and hauled ass out West. It was our first road trip as a couple, and it was just as idyllic and color-saturated as I’d imagined; all quirky landmarks and gunfight reenactments and sunsets pooling like abandoned Creamsicles on the rugged horizon. We went to the night rodeo in Cody, Wyoming, where an incongruous Brazilian clown made me think of Joni, the pregnant maid. We chowed on “prairie oysters,” otherwise known as deep-fried bull testicles, in a cowboy bar (I snapped photos of Jonny gamely choking down the balls while the windburnt locals looked on in rheumy-eyed amusement). We went to every monument, museum and buckskin-laden gift shop we could fingerpoint in the Frommer’s. We drove to Yellowstone, Medicine Wheel and Mount Rushmore.
I had a predictable epiphany out West as well. (Who could avoid an epiphany when surrounded by awe-inspiring vistas and $4.95 prime rib specials?) Anyway, I realized that it wasn’t stripping that had made me feel uneasy of late. Sure, Deja Vu was a depressing, poorly managed, black, black suckhole, but what had genuinely bummed me out was the fact that I’d failed. Flunked. I’d been a sorry excuse for a stripper, two thousand light-years from the self-possessed, pole-polishing goddess I’d envisioned myself becoming. I’d earned shit because I’d felt like shit. I’d hauled years of geek-damage and self-loathing around that club like a dromedary’s hump; no wonder guys waved me away like a stink. Most egregious of all, I’d allowed myself to be totally exploited by customers because I couldn’t imagine why anyone would want me otherwise. I’d offered my ass up at a discount. In marketing parlance, I’d never created a demand.
Meanwhile, my new gig at the agency had netted me nothing but a nickel-and-dime raise and a nascent peptic ulcer that made me bleed from my ass. I’d never been an organized person, so what had compelled me to accept a promotion that involved creating order from other people’s chaos? I suspected that I’d quit the wrong job, and I told Jonny so as I cruised through the Bighorn Mountains at a joyfully idiotic seventy miles per hour.
“I think you’re right,” Jonny said, surprising me. “You don’t seem to be through with stripping, really.”
“I’m through with stripping,” I said. “Stripping isn’t through with me. You know how I inexplicably did that Dreamgirls thing last month? What was that? Why can’t I stop taking my clothes off in dive clubs? There must be a reason.”
“Are you thinking about ‘going pro’?” Jonny asked. “Like, quitting your day job and stripping full-time at a new club?”
“I know it sounds lik
e madness,” I said. “But the agency is driving me batshit, and I haven’t wrung nearly enough money out of the sex industry.”
“Then do it,” Jonny said. “Quit.”
“I’ve never not had a real job,” I mused, gripping the steering wheel as we roared past a runaway truck lane.
I was aware that my family and friends saw my job at the advertising agency as a plum gig. After all, I was lucky to be working in a progressive environment where creative trendoids vastly outnumbered bean counters. (Never mind the fact that my job accounted to being a human sorting mechanism, or that a “forthcoming” raise had been delayed for months.) My modicum of success at the agency meant nothing to me; it wasn’t an indicator of my worth as a person. Whereas a single good night of stripping could elevate my sense of self to Kilimanjaro altitudes. That was real approval, the assurance that Me the Brand was fit for sale. No middle manager could accurately put a price on my intellect or work ethic, but I knew precisely how much my body was worth per pound on any given night in the all-girl charcuterie. This concrete information was reassuring, much more so than the bogus corporate praise I’d garnered in the past.
I left my job at the agency almost instantly upon returning from the trip. Quitting turned out to be a tepid 2.5 on the dropped-bombshell impact scale. My boss was fairly nonchalant about the announcement, imperceptibly pursing her flawlessly lipsticked puss (Don’t mess your MAC Spice, honey). “I sensed you weren’t happy with the position,” she sighed as I stood red-faced in her immaculate, suburban-Zen cubicle. “Good luck.”
A farewell ice-cream social was hastily arranged. (All I remember about it was that all the guys gorged themselves on chocolate-chocolate chip while my female coworkers nibbled cautiously on lemon sorbet.) I lied my way through the exit interview (“I’m going to herbal cosmetology school!”) and was presently released from my duties with naught but a song in my heart and a knapsack full of stolen office supplies.