Spent

by Antonia Crane

  “Well, luckily, I showed up for work today,” I said. He handed me two hundred dollars and gave me a card with his phone number and email address.

  “I mean, outside of here,” he said.

  Oh shit, I thought. This would mean more than a handjob. This would mean crossing another line. I was supposed to be stronger than that. I was supposed to be a role model. My managers at the Polk Inn would call this “acting out.”

  That was a lot of money, I reasoned. I could just meet Rob for dinner. Lots of girls met regulars outside of the club. I gave him my number.

  “I know a great place for dinner. Call me.” When he called, a couple of days later, I’d already forgotten about him.

  “Do you like sushi?” he asked.

  “Love it,” I said.

  “What kind of music do you listen to?” he asked.

  “PJ Harvey, Tricky. Nick Cave,” I offered. Was this an invitation for a rock concert or a blowjob? I started to wish I hadn’t given him my phone number. I’ve never met a client for dinner. Why am I going to now? The silence was sticky and my right hand was trembling as I turned on the stove to heat water in my red teapot.

  “They have terrific tuna tartare at Asia de Cuba. Meet me there Friday at six,” he said. I hoped he didn’t think this was a freebie. Guys always think dancers will date them for free. I’ll talk to a guy in the club for a half hour and suddenly I’m their girlfriend. Sometimes they’ll send flowers to the club with notes like, “Don’t forget to call me, Stevie.”

  “What time?” I said.

  “Will you do full service?” he asked. I was quiet for a moment in my red kitchen with its silky blue curtains. The silver teakettle I purchased at a junk shop in the Mission whistled. My black and white tile floor was dusty. I wiped a drop of goop, probably honey, off the floor with a sponge. What was the question again? Right. Would I fuck him for money? It would be more than I was making in the club and it would take less time. Should I be talking about this on the phone? Was he a cop?

  “Okay,” I said. I poured hot water into my favorite red mug, watched the bergamot tea bag steam, and felt the warmth of it on my face. “Yeah.” Just like that.

  “How much?” he asked.

  Start high, I thought.

  “A thousand, I guess,” I said, taking a stab in the dark.

  “I was hoping for eight hundred, but I won’t haggle with you.”

  If dinner was a hundred fifty bucks, eight seemed fair.

  “Okay, eight,” I said and wondered if I would be expected to do oral. If so, for how long? How many positions would be expected for eight hundred dollars and whom could I ask? No one. I was too ashamed to ask anyone. Would he have condoms?

  The night I met Rob for our eight hundred dollar date, I had been hanging out at my new AA sponsor’s house in Noe Valley. I missed Jessa, who I hadn’t heard from since she swallowed a bunch of pills and took off to Morocco. I wondered how she was doing and worried about her, too. I even prayed a couple of times. When I mentioned stripping to my new sponsor, she tightened her hands around a mug of coffee, slid it closer to her chest and said, “You owe all of the wives and girlfriends amends for helping their men cheat.” I didn’t mention my plans to meet Rob. I was going from stripper to hooker without much hesitation, and my secret scratched at my insides during the cab ride towards the hotel.

  It was a cold San Francisco night, and the fog unraveled like a soft ribbon over prim Victorian homes. Inside the lobby, there was a giant fireplace and a hot pink chair that looked like a prop from the set of Alice in Wonderland. There were digital interactive portraits on the walls that blinked and changed expressions when you looked at them for more than a half-second. I recognized Rob at the bar. He was sipping an orange cocktail and pointed to a glass of water in front of him. “This is for you.” I gave him a we-are-not-total-strangers kiss and sat down beside him on a wooden stool.

  “We’re on a waiting list for a table,” he said and glanced at an expensive watch. I didn’t know what to wear for a paid date. There’s no brochure to consult. I didn’t want to look cheap, so I chose a coffee brown top that hugged my cleavage and black cigarette pants. I should have worn a dress, gone for a more professional appeal. I regretted carrying my big bottle of water into the hotel. I set it on the floor.

  “You look sweet,” Rob said. Three pretty girls stood nearby in skirts scrolling through their cell phones. I reminded myself that I wanted one.

  A few sips of sparkling water later, my head started to float above my body, and I felt warm and syrupy. The glass in my hand tipped sideways, spilling some water on the bar. I laughed and reached for napkins. “What did you tip that bartender?” I said. I moved off the stool and grabbed the bar. The music pulsed, and I shivered from a sudden chill. The bartender was at the other end with his back to me, talking to a girl in a black tube dress.

  Rob’s grin became long rabbit teeth encased in wax. His lips were wet with words that made no sense. Conversations garbled around me, and the music circled my face like smoke. I thought about yelling, but no sound came out. The girls chatting nearby turned into mannequin-goblins.

  “I want to make you do things,” Rob said. His words came from land, but I was underwater. His eyes were white glossy eggs. There was a terrible cackle.

  “Bathroom. Be right back,” I said. The digital portraits mocked me all the way to the lobby. My legs went rubber, and my feet were full of helium. The scenery blurred: fuzzy, swimming bodies in a Roadrunner cartoon. I found the restroom and lunged towards the mirror. My pupils pulsed from small to large like they had acquired a heartbeat in my absence.

  My head was intact. I touched my neck to make sure, then placed my palms on the cold walls. In the mirror, my cheeks drooped.

  In the mirror, I whispered, “You will eat. You will act normal. You will take his money. When this is over, you will buy a cell phone.”

  I walked back to the bar where Rob waited.

  “Hey, cutie. Our table’s ready.”

  “Great,” I said. Motherfucker, I thought.

  The waiter pulled my chair out, and I sank down. I flirted and giggled on cue and asked Rob, “Is that Polo by Ralph Lauren you’re wearing?” I devoured crab cakes and quesadillas and lettuce leaves doused in citrus oil. “You’ve got a great appetite down here. I hope you do upstairs,” he said. The waiter appeared with ice water in a dainty glass.

  “Can I have a large bottle of carbonated water instead?” I decided the waiter and I had a telepathic understanding. I winked at him. He knew what was happening and was waiting for my signal to call the cops. Undercover vice would arrive and haul Rob off in handcuffs. He would be the one trapped. The waiter and I would instantly fall in love and would leave this hotel and decorate our flat with hot pink love seats and ivory curtain sets from Bed Bath & Beyond.

  We skipped dessert, and Rob paid the bill. He led me into an elevator. It stopped at the eleventh floor, but no one noticed us, and no cops came.

  In his suite, everything was virginal: white comforter, white curtains, white walls and candles. I watched him undress. Rob was pushing three hundred pounds. In more svelte years he’d been a football player. Rolls of fat spilled out of his waist now: years of tacos and crème brûlée at the executive desk of his fashionable magazine empire. He unbuttoned his shirt with thick fingers. I smelled pork and garlic. He was a powerful man. I thought of my AA sponsor. Which lie did Rob tell his wife? Was he in Chicago giving a talk or at the gym with his trainer? He took stiff bills from his wallet and placed them under a metal lamp, then laid down on the white bed.

  “Join me?”

  I took off my clothes and climbed on top of him. We were in golden candlelight, and the quiet room was dim and holy. I used my teeth to rip open a condom and studied it. I found his cock under soft flesh and slid the condom in place. His smile was greasy, and the room smelled like jasmine. I felt
numb, as if he was fucking a postcard of my pussy. The white sheets got wrinkled and he finished.

  I stood up, took the money and my clothes, and walked into the bathroom, a small box with sharp white angles. I counted eight hundred bucks and threw up in the toilet, coughing to hide the sound. I wiped my mouth and slipped the bills into my jacket pocket. I tore the ribbon from the tiny soap and washed my hands with lavender suds. I got dressed then waved goodbye from the door. He was snoring.

  Outside, heavy mist dropped onto my bare shoulders. I hailed cab after cab until finally one stopped. I rolled down the window and inhaled the cold air, letting the cold wind smack my face. I was ashamed. I’d have to change my sobriety date if I told my sponsor. I watched two men in front of a liquor store carrying someone strapped to a gurney. I dug my fingernails into my thigh until they left a set of white, crescent moon marks.

  25

  After the incident with Armando, I was amazed that my manager gave me permission to take the clients on an outing to Muir Woods. We traveled across the Golden Gate Bridge in the company van one clear sunny day to breathe in the fresh forest air. The mood was good, the bus alive with laughter, a few clients performed party pieces—one sang a song, another recited a poem, they told jokes and even played Charades, as much as as they could while buckled in. None of these people were interested in the other me. Dances, handjobs, and tricks were not on the agenda, and the clubs were a million miles away—I was determined for us all to have a memorable day. We did.

  I panicked, running around the place like a mad woman, screaming their names. I’d round up a couple of them and go look for more, come back to the bus, and the first ones would be gone again. Finally I locked them into the bus one by one, from which they shouted names out the windows and pointed me this way and that, adding to the general confusion. It took two and a half hours to round them all up.

  I drove back to Larkin Street a lighter shade of green than that morning. It was quiet in the back, where they sat with their unopened sack lunches on their laps.

  I was livid again, still livid, but at myself, always at myself, for not having hacked my way to an alternative existence, for not having the guts, for not having the luck. I’ll go back to school and finish my degree, I thought. That’ll be my ticket out. Has to be. Will it be my ticket out? I knew strippers with degrees. Hell, I knew one stripper with a Ph D. It will be different for me, I thought, a one-way ticket.

  The problem—well, problem number one—was that I owed Mills College seven thousand, eight hundred bucks from years earlier when I’d dropped out of school to pursue my meth habit. I spend money like a wino on payday. I’m organically irresponsible and impulsive, and stripper money had a different texture. It slipped through my hands like sugar. I spent it faster than I made it. My work ethic lacked luster. I’d wait until I was flat broke to go into work because I liked the desperate pressure of hustling. The more afraid I was, the faster I hustled. Sink or Swim. I knew I couldn’t save money on my own and I needed help. I called an accountant friend, Megan.

  “Can I hire you to help me save money?” I asked her.

  For the next year, Megan showed up at every club I worked about 1:00 a.m. to collect a stack of dough, about three hundred bucks, that she invested into a mutual fund I didn’t have access to. Within a year, I’d saved more than enough cash to pay the Mills bill. I even went back and graduated, but the more I wanted to build a life that didn’t involve handjobs or stripping, the more alluring was the pull to do exactly that.

  Mom left so many voicemails. They all said the same thing: “I’m so proud of you, that you’re finally doing something that makes a difference. Call me when you can.”

  Part 4

  “Ba-na-na yellow.”

  26

  Two years passed like this, living somewhere between stripper and social worker, when I met Ian.

  Ian was an olive-skinned, tattooed hairdresser who worked at the beauty salon where I’d made an appointment to get hair extensions. I figured he was queer—like everyone else who worked there—so, when he asked me out, I laughed in his face and went back to my magazine. I figured one of the girls had put him up to it. He came back again, caught my eye in the mirror and said, “Seriously, what do you say?” Offers weren’t exactly pouring in. The only men I spoke to were customers in the strip club and clients at the Polk Inn. In my mind, men weren’t for dating, they were for money. Boys were drug addicts for whom I doled out HIV and psych meds. If I wasn’t dating anyone at all, male or female, didn’t that make me simply available?—Okay, why not? I thought.

  “Sure,” I mumbled while Sparrow tugged at my tangled weave.

  It was just dinner. And dinner didn’t hurt, much, though I spent most of it with my arms crossed, wondering what the hell I was doing. I’d forgotten how to begin with a guy. When he dropped me off where my motorcycle was parked outside his house, I got flustered when he leaned across and kissed me. He didn’t have the over-cologned, under showered customer smell. He had ample soft lips and smooth skin that smelled like donuts and weed. I jerked back, afraid I’d be repulsed, afraid I would throw up in his lap, but that’s not what happened. The kiss lingered through several Massive Attack and Radiohead songs on a mixed CD. Cars honked and were forced to weave around us. I hadn’t enjoyed a kiss this much in a very long time, maybe ever.

  Ian was smart and poetic in a way that made perfect sense to me. He played the harmonica and wrote lyrics about smoking and pot saving the world from corporate greed.

  “Do you want to come upstairs and see my shoe collection?” he asked.

  I followed him upstairs to his room where he kept his bong and we fucked until I was sore and it was morning. Six months later he was my boyfriend, a year after that I moved in with him. On one of those days, I realized I was falling in love.

  Then one day, on the way out the house, Ian just announced, “I’m moving to L.A. with my band.”

  Hating L.A. was in my Northern California DNA. We even had a burl plaque that hung on our living room wall that read, “We Don’t Give a Damn How it’s Done in L.A.”

  “You go there, it’s without me,” I said. He grabbed his black bike messenger bag and hoisted the strap across his chest. Smoothed out his black Dickies.

  “Move into the band house with us,” he said. I pictured moving into a communal hippie house with dirty floors and full ashtrays; the smell of stale bong soaking into my clothes; nonstop rap music. “L.A. wouldn’t be bad for you.”

  “No way.”

  He shook his head, gave me a limp hug, and walked out my front door.

  Maybe he was right. Maybe I could find another nonprofit organization to work for and never strip again.

  We broke up when he moved, but it didn’t stick. I didn’t know how to stay broken up, especially from Ian, so I gave my two weeks at the Polk Inn and decided I’d find another halfway house to work for. L.A. was teaming with them. I packed up my two bedroom Victorian apartment on Folsom Street, shoved everything into a U-Haul, and drove off to L.A. He moved out of the band house and we hunted for an apartment together.

  Our dinky shitbox was right off Sunset, walking distance from a cathouse called Paris Nudes that I hoped I could stay away from. Our apartment building was neon green and had a concrete balcony where Ian kept his bong. It had a view of our parking lot. I woke up to the sound of Russian immigrant senior citizens hocking loogies out the window. If I looked out I could catch a spit tail freefalling like a sparkler, landing on my motorcycle. When I saw them in the street they glared at me like I was smoking crack with their Babushka. I turned away, afraid they’d spit at me if I stared too long.

  I’d come to L.A. hoping to quit dancing and start fresh. I missed my old life, the quick access to cash, and the feeling of being desired. Without it, I felt ugly, useless, and numb. I’d been stripping so long, it had become innate.

  I dreamed about stripping: I was i
n a stadium in front of thousands of men, like at a Mötley Crüe concert. Instead of the band playing, there I was, topless. Swinging from poles that reached the stars. I came to, angry and full of dread. I didn’t belong in L.A. I missed stripping.

  My chubby thighs stuck together in the demonic August heat. I pestered everyone I knew in an effort to find a job that wasn’t stripping, but none of my leads returned my calls. It was weeks before I landed a job cleaning houses, cash in hand, but it wasn’t enough. I’d have to find something else, learn something new. I was persistent, open to anything. I hoped I could reinvent myself overnight but, even though I had a degree from Mills College and some solid direct service counseling under my belt, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was nothing but a thirty-something ex-stripper with no kids and no husband, desperate for a gig.

  The motorcycle couldn’t always get me to the houses I cleaned—though occasional, it does rain in L.A.—so I parked it in the garage and bought a bullethole-ridden, crap brown 1978 Disco Nova from a guy named Clyde at Rent-A-Wreck for three hundred bucks. I’d heard about a job in the valley testing porn stars for HIV, but I had to learn to draw blood to do it, so I signed up for the required course. A skinny blonde taught me how to tie a tourniquet and locate veins. It wasn’t stripping but it was still working with sex workers. I studied plasma, platelets, and cells. I administered the HIV tests that allowed porn stars to stay on the payroll—in this job I could keep helping people and be surrounded by sex workers without needing to be naked. At least it wasn’t Paris Nudes.

  I named my crap brown nova Cricket, for the clicking noise. Her AM radio played two radio stations: Christian talk shows and oldies, so I chose Frank Sinatra. When that faded, I listened to murmurs about sin and redemption on the fifty-minute drive from Hollywood to the HIV clinic. The sun baked my arms by 8:00 a.m., so I arrived wilted and sweaty in maroon scrubs. I made small talk with clients while I searched their forearms for juicy veins; spun their purplish blood and siphoned their piss while they told me about their kids, spouses, and upcoming scenes.