by Mia Miles
“I don’t have a stage name. I’ve never done this before,” she answered bashfully.
I adjusted myself in my pants. Those were the words every man wanted to hear from a girl. Professionally those words were a red flag, but personally they drew me in. I wanted to see what this pretty little tart could do before I told her no and sent her packing.
My office was only for the first part of the interview process. I usually talked the girls up a little bit and tried to get a feel for who they were. I wanted to know if they were going to fit in or be problematic with my other girls. I didn’t do that with Missy. I wasn’t planning on keeping her around. I just wanted to get a look at her.
I had my iPod plugged into a speaker set on my desk. I reached over and hit play to start some music for her to dance to. The rhythmic bass in the little desktop speakers didn’t quite drown out the PA system in the main room, but it gave her a little something to work with, not that I expected much from her. She stood stiffly and looked like me with wide, scared eyes.
Her inexperience showed all over her face. She was probably the type who made sure her blinds were closed before she got ready for bed. She probably slept in a full nightgown with a high neck to keep herself perfectly hidden. She was so virginal and puritan, I didn’t expect much more from her than I was already seeing.
“Go ahead and show me how you dance,” I urged her, sitting back in my chair. I had one hand down on my lap, cupping the growing bulge in my pants. My other arm rested on the arm of the chair, holding my chin in my hand.
“Shouldn’t I have a pole or something?” she asked nervously, glancing around the room.
Her nervousness was heartbreaking. “Just show me what you can do first. It’s not all pole dancing out there. I want to see how you handle your body.” I wanted to handle her body. I wanted to see what she was trying to hide under those clothes. I stroked myself through my pants, thinking about what I could do to a girl like Missy.
I reached over and skipped to the next song on my playlist. The energy suddenly picked up. It was a much fiercer dance number than the previous song. I watched as her hips started to sway slowly to the beat. I told myself she needed to warm up and reminded myself to be patient with her. After all, she did say it was her first time.
Once she found her groove, she started moving her body like she was begging me to touch her, like she was inviting someone to join her or take her right there in the office. The other someone in the room was me, and I was having a very hard time staying on my side of the desk. I didn’t touch my girls. It was part of being careful and keeping work clean.
But Missy wasn’t one of my girls.
She pressed herself against the desk and started working her hips like she was trying to grind on someone behind her. I watched in awe as this unlikely little thing moved her body like the pros out there on the stage.
I stopped the music and she stood up straight, pushing her strawberry curls out of her face.
“Why’d you stop it?” she asked, out of breath.
“I think I’ve seen enough,” I told her. I couldn’t even imagine what she would have been like on the pole. She would have blown everyone away. Hell, she could have probably pulled more money than the other girls without even using the pole. There were girls out there who didn’t use it much, but I was sure if she touched it, the world itself would have had an erection.
I sure as hell had one. I hunched over the desk and thanked her for coming in.
“I thought I did pretty well,” she argued.
“Yeah, I’m sorry I put you through that. I really shouldn’t have, but I think I’ve got enough girls now,” I lied. I didn’t have any new girls. I was going to have to choose from a far less qualified but more experienced batch simply to keep from having the cops on me for an underage dancer. Even if I accepted that she was of age, she didn’t look it, and appearances were everything. A young dancer would have certainly brought in some business, though probably the wrong kind.
“Okay,” she said quietly, lowering her head.
“Thank you for coming in,” I told her as she turned and walked away. I wanted to get her number to call her for myself, but I told myself to let her go. Like so many others, she was bound to find her way.
I heard all manner of sad sob stories from girls who came through my office, but Missy was possibly the saddest of all, and she hadn’t told me anything about herself other than her name. She crumbled as she walked away. All the wind had been pulled from her sails.
I sighed. I wanted to help her, but the club wasn’t the place for her. I couldn’t help girls who couldn’t help me. I tried to tell myself she was just another lost soul.
“Alright, work,” I told myself out loud in my office, forcing my attention back to the interviews. I didn’t have time to let every single girl get on the stage, and I was doing these interviews during business hours instead of the middle of the afternoon. As long as I was there, I was going to see my prospective dancers. I was working my remaining girls to death to cover for the three I’d let go.
I adjusted myself for the next girl and called her in. I saw several more before calling it a night on the interviews. I told the remaining girls that I had already hired the girls I needed. It was such an easy lie to use. Most of them didn’t even question it. They simply sighed or rolled their eyes and wandered on down to the next place.
That was fine by me. I had a stack of papers and a nice collection of photos in my phone to go with them. I figured that when I went back through that stack, I was bound to find my new girls. I closed my door and sat back down behind my desk. I was underwhelmed by the selection and overwhelmed by the sheer number of girls I was about to dig back through.
Chapter Two
Missy
I walked out of The Bare Cut strip club and crossed the parking lot. It was as dead outside was it had been inside. The so-called ‘gentlemen’s club’ was in a seedy, rundown section of town, but I had heard on the street that a lot of money passed through it. Some of the girls made bank night after night.
I saw the ad in the local independent newspaper. The ad requested girls who were a cut above the rest and not afraid to bare it all. I had never done anything like that, but I had run out of options. Stripping was my last stop. There was nowhere left to go.
When I had left my parents’ house, I went to Eddie’s house first, but the windows were dark and there were no cars in the driveway. I peeked in and saw an empty house. I wondered how he’d picked up his family and relocated so quickly, but it wasn’t important. What mattered was that he was gone. He probably wasn’t leaving his wife. He’d probably taken her with him.
With what money I had in my checking account, I checked into a cheap hotel room. I didn’t need anything fancy or expensive, just a bed and a shower. Carpet and wallpaper leftover from the age of disco didn’t hurt either. The musty room featured stained curtains, a dirty window that could only barely be seen through, and an air conditioner in the wall that clanged and knocked whenever it came on.
It was a roof over my head, and it was incredibly orange, which was better than the world outside. The city was just different shades of gray smudged together like a charcoal drawing. At night, it lit up with old yellow-brown street lights that merely emphasized the pools of darkness between them. Still, it was color.
From my 1970’s hotel room, I had attempted to find a job. I had a handful of marketable office and people skills. I was a Harvard undergrad studying business and economics. All of the opportunities in the city should have been open to me, but there was one problem: My dad knew every major businessman in the city.
He had gone ahead and taken the liberty of making sure there were no job opportunities available to me because I was pregnant out of wedlock. I had even been turned away by a few receptionists before even speaking to anyone because they simply knew who I was thanks to my dad. I was beginning to see the downside of being the daughter of a successful, wealthy, and powerful man like my father. He
had everyone’s strings in his hand and could easily pull them, one by one.
I had taken dance classes back in high school. It wasn’t ballet or anything like that. My parents knew I never would have gone for anything that artsy. I learned real dances, like the waltz, tango, salsa, and dances like that. I learned how to move my body and use it to express myself. We had even focused on some popular dances, and not just traditional or formal dance styles. I knew how to handle myself enough to dance on the stage at a strip joint.
I figured I only had a few months to dance before the baby started to show, so I was going to work and save up enough money to get back on my feet by the time I started showing. At that time, I was probably going to have to figure something else out, but I was going to work on that while I was dancing. I had to take it one step at a time.
Before going in to get an interview, I got some bad news from the hotel manager. My account had been frozen. I had no money to continue paying for the room. On my way out to The Bare Cut, I had to pack all of my things up and carry them with me. I had left my pack outside the office before going in to see the sleazy owner.
I couldn’t believe he hadn’t given me the job after the way he had watched me. I saw the hunger in his eyes. He stared at me with his gray eyes and his shiny black hair slicked back. He scrutinized my every move from his leather desk chair. He’d kept one hand under the desk the whole time. I was sure he’d been touching himself while I stood in front of him.
His office was dark. There was one hard white light on his desk, but everything else was black, and not the black of my parents’ living room. Their black created a contrast to show just how sterile everything was. The black of his office emphasized the dead-end feel of his establishment. The place was as seedy as the world outside.
It hadn’t been much of an interview either. He didn’t ask me about myself other than to get my name. He hadn’t even introduced himself to me. It was like I was supposed to accept that he was who he said he was just because he sat behind the desk with a perverse hunger in his eyes.
I didn’t get a look at him from the waist down, which was probably a good thing, but I saw a few pieces of ink on his forearms. His vest looked like a biker vest with patches on it. The one patch I could read said Cutter, so I figured that was his name, or at least what the gang called him.
After I walked out of his office, I cried.
I sat down on the curb at the edge of the parking lot and cried. Everything came crashing down on me at once. I had lost my virginity to a man who more than likely never cared about me at all. I was preparing to have a baby instead of starting my senior year of college. I had been kicked out of my house. I couldn’t find a job. I’d lost the one place I had to stay.
I was alone, and I was at the end of my rope. There was only one option left that I could see, and I didn’t want to take it. I didn’t want to sell my body to make ends meet. I’d heard stories about women getting stuck on the streets that way. It seemed like the way to make a good bit of money at first, but the story always seemed to go the same way. Once they started, they found it harder and harder to get back above it. That wasn’t going to be me.
I felt like there was a time limit on anything I was going to do. I had a baby on the way, and I didn’t foresee myself continuing to work immediately after it was born. It. I wasn’t even far enough along to know my baby’s gender. I was having to call my unborn child it.
I wept in the dirty, oil-stained parking lot under an old yellow streetlight. It was the first time I had cried since the whole thing began. I never cried; it was a sign of weakness in our home, and my dad insisted he wasn’t going to raise a weak daughter. Well, I wasn’t home anymore. A nice private cry in the parking lot of a strip joint wasn’t going to upset anyone who wasn’t there to see it.
The world was not what I had expected. Leaving my parents’ house, I had strange, romanticized notions of what the streets were like. There was always a way to make a buck. People who were down on their luck would stick together and help each other out. The people were colorful even if nothing else was.
But that wasn’t what I had encountered at all. Everyone I had met was out for themselves. They had no time to worry about anyone else while they were trying to get off the streets. There was always a way to make a buck; it was called prostitution. It was the lowest of the low, the most desperate act, and it was illegal. I wasn’t about to have my baby behind bars. Most of the people I had met were not colorful. They were as gray and dirty as the city streets they walked.
I figured I had hit rock bottom. I cried because I didn’t know what else to do. I could have gone home, but my dad would have shipped me off to family in Washington to have an abortion. At the end of summer, I would have returned to college as if nothing had happened, and I would have been expected to carry on like normal. Except I would have known what had happened, and I would have carried that guilt and shame with me without being able to divulge my truth to anyone.
I wanted to scream. I wanted to get up and run away, but there was nowhere else to go. I just sat there and waited. I didn’t really know what I was waiting for. A miracle, maybe.
In all the time I sat out there crying into my hands, not a single person walked by. No cars drove by. It was almost silent other than the far-off sounds of traffic, the interstate highway that cut through downtown, and the occasional siren. But all the city sounds were off in the distance. Nothing was going on where I was. I was at the end of everything. There was nothing beyond where I sat.
It was a horrible feeling. Nothing in my colorful, hopeful life had prepared me for this. I looked around me at empty parking garages, abandoned cars, and deserted gray streets. It was surreal. I tried to tell myself that if I was sitting in the empty parking lot of a strip club, I was better off than the girls inside trying to perform for an empty room. At least I wasn’t stuck having to work for nothing. I still had the opportunity to get off my ass and try to find another job.
Who was I kidding? I couldn’t even get a job dancing. I pulled my knees up to my chest and wrapped my arms around my legs. I buried my face between my knees and sobbed.
I did one thing wrong, one thing, and my whole life was ruined. I was supposed to be finishing school, dammit! I was supposed to be getting ready to go out into the world and pave my own way through it, not crying my eyes out in front of a strip club. And I certainly wasn’t supposed to be pregnant and alone.
Chapter Three
Cutter
After going back through the girls I had interviewed, I found a couple that had done alright. Well, they did well enough for me to convince myself to call them back in for a test run on the stage, to see how much work they needed to do before they were ready to go on. I looked back over my roster and plugged their names in where the others had been. I still needed one more girl. I glanced at the stack of girls’ names on my desk. There was no way in hell I was going to hire any of them. I really needed that last girl to fill things in, but I figured I’d be able to make it work without her. I had to, until I could find a replacement for that last slot.
My neck and shoulders were stiff from sitting and talking to these girls all evening. Normally, I loved my job, but lately it was starting to seem like we’d used up all the talent the city had to offer. That was pretty impressive, but it also sucked.
I grabbed my cigarettes and stood up from my desk. I fished one out and let it dangle from my lips as I walked out through the bar. There were absolutely no patrons. A couple of my girls – Jasmine and Candy – lazily twirled their bodies around two of the three poles on the stage. They almost looked like they were practicing, but I could see in their faces they were just killing time. Lex leaned her elbows on the bar, staring off in the direction of the stage. Knowing her, she probably didn’t even see the girls on the poles.
I sighed. “Chin up, ladies, it’s still early.” It was early, but some nights were just slow. I couldn’t help but feel like my recent string of bad luck had something to do w
ith it. I was about to turn all of that around. Once I was able to give my ladies a bit of a break, I was sure we were going to start packing the house every night.
I stepped outside to the abandoned parking lot surrounding joint and lit my cigarette just outside the front door. The summer night air was heavy with the fumes of the city around me. It was the perfect night for a few smokes, a few drinks, and some bad decisions that hopefully led to good times with few incriminating memories.
I was in a bind. We were in a bind. My girls were getting tired, and many of my regulars didn’t seem pleased that I had to let some of their favorites go. If I hadn’t, they wouldn’t have had a place to go to watch girls strip and dance for them. What were they supposed to do, go home and let their wives do it? If their wives and girlfriends had done it in the first place, I never would have been in business.
I listened to the paper on my cigarette crackle slightly as I took another long drag. The air was that heavy and still. I could hear the small sounds close by, not only the noise of the city streets. All of those sounds were far off in the distance; background noise.