Strip

by Catlyn Ladd

  “Desire.”

  “What kind of music do you like?”

  I list off a bunch of bands, mostly of the goth/industrial/dance variety. She nods.

  She writes down my name on her clipboard and then adds Sierra’s name underneath. “You’re up after Heaven.”

  “Who’s Heaven?” I ask.

  “Her.” She points at the girl with the long brown hair on stage.

  “Okay.” Still I feel no nervousness, only the tightness of excitement. I see the bills appearing along the stage as Heaven dances. “I’m gonna sit and watch.”

  Sierra shrugs and leaves me at a table, making her way to the bar where she greets the men there more extensively with hugs and smiles.

  I watch Heaven dance. The music is heavy and fast but she moves slowly, her hips keeping the beat while the rest of her moves languidly. She is petals floating on a fast-moving stream. One part of her always keeps the beat: a tapping toe, snapping fingers, pulsing posterior. I see how she uses the music to create a sensual counterpoint of stillness against movement.

  I look at her body with a critical eye. She is not perfect like in a magazine, I see with relief. A bit of cellulite on her ass that dimples when she flexes, and she’s a bit thick through the waist. Her breasts hang heavy and full. I think that she’s gorgeous but she is not airbrushed. She just looks like a young, human female. Judging by the bills bulging in her underwear—T-bar, I correct myself—the men think she’s hot, too.

  I can do this, I think and feel a thrill of elation. As Heaven’s second song winds down I go backstage and step into the shadowed recess between the curtain and the stage. I feel my heartbeat pulsing in my chest. My skin begins to tingle.

  “Good luck, new girl,” Heaven says, breezing past me in a cloud of floral scent.

  I recognize the song immediately and let the music build toward the opening crescendo before stepping out, taking a cue from Heaven and moving slowly, only my footsteps in time with the beat. I want to unleash every part of my body, but I keep myself in check, knowing that if I let the music take me I will only be frenetic, not sexy. This is not a dance club. This is a strip joint. And I am a stripper.

  Three men sit along the stage and four more watch from the first row of tables. I ignore them for the moment, facing the mirrored wall at the back of the stage, admiring the way the black lights make the white dress glow, lighting my skin with purple. My blond hair, hanging in curls past my shoulders, catches the overhead lights in staccato pulses of red and green.

  Slowly, only my head moving to the music, I lean forward toward the glass and my reflection. I am doubled, Desire times two. The short dress rides up on my thighs, revealing the thin strip of black fabric hiding my vulva. I smile and the girl in the mirror smiles back, all red lips and tumbling curls. It feels taboo, forbidden, exciting.

  I turn my back on the mirror and slide down it, keeping my feet flat on the floor and my knees together. When my butt hits the stage, I pop my knees apart, flashing that thin strip of fabric. Dollars appear on the tip rail.

  I lean forward into a crawl and slink toward the first customer. He tips his head back to see me more clearly, the bill of his baseball cap shadowing his face. All I can see is the glitter of his eyes.

  “Now on stage one!” The DJ’s voice booms through the sound system. “Desire.” She draws my name out into a hiss. “Auditioning right now, she’s never danced before! Come see her naked for the very first time.”

  I feel a twinge of irritation at the attention called to this being my first time on stage. It makes me more nervous. But two of the men sitting at tables get up and take seats at the stage. Apparently watching a woman take her clothes off “for the very first time” has appeal. I flash on the references to “fresh meat.” Men seeing a woman naked for the first time is analogous to the value placed on female virginity. In our puritanical culture, sexuality pollutes a woman and we love nothing so much as to see her dirtied.

  These thoughts do not show on my face. I smile slightly at the man in the baseball cap and put my knees on the padded tip rail, stretching my arms over my head. Slowly I run the zipper on the front of the dress down, revealing the bikini top I wear underneath. His eyes skim down my body hungrily. Mimicking what I had watched Heaven do, I pull out the strap of my G-string. He places the dollar into the strap, careful not to touch my skin. This club is strictly no touching and he knows the rules.

  “Thank you,” I mouth at him and move along the tip rail to the next customer, still on hands and knees. I stretch out on my back in front of him, feet on the floor. From this new vantage point I see up past the lights into rafters. The dropped ceiling stops at the stage, and the lights are fixed to metal girders attached to the roof. The pole on the stage rises past the sight line of someone sitting in the first row and is also attached to the roof beams. The wall above the mirrors along the back of the stage is painted black and so are the rafters and ceiling beyond so it all just looks like shadow. But from stage I can see it all. This place is illusion and I wonder if I will become unreal.

  I gyrate my hips slowly and the customer watches my belly undulate. “You’re beautiful,” he says, and I hold out the strap for his dollar.

  The first song blends into the second. It’s time to take my top off. I stand, back to the audience, facing myself in the mirrors. The black lights that line the tip rail glow purple on the long stretch of my legs, and the lights above flash off my hair and skin. I reach up and slowly pull the tie of my bikini top. The men shift forward in their seats. I let the top drop, keeping one arm across my breasts. This is not due to anxiety; I’m only heightening the anticipation. It works: more money appears on the stage.

  I pivot suddenly and lift my arms over my head. Now I’m wearing only the G-string and shoes. And the pasties, of course.

  Being (mostly) naked does not feel particularly strange to me. I love being naked. Making money off of it seems ludicrously easy.

  I slink along the rail in time to the beat, bending over, preening, bouncing my breasts, taking the money. It’s exciting and I let the beat take me, actually dancing for a moment. More money appears.

  At the end of the set, my underwear bulges with dollars. As the music ends and the DJ’s voice announces the next dancer, I pick up my discarded clothes and push back through the curtain into the dressing room.

  “How’d it go?” Sierra asks.

  “Fine,” I say, retying my top and setting the pile of money carefully before my things.

  “How much did you make?”

  “Um … maybe $20? I lost count.” I begin to straighten the money.

  “Make sure all the bills face the same way,” Sierra instructs.

  “Okay. Why?” I ask.

  “The club will buy back the ones at the end of the night, but they all have to be faced the same way.”

  “Oh.” I start organizing the bills and she reaches to help. I have made $22 my first set. I quickly calculate that two sets an hour equal about $40 an hour, vastly more money than most other jobs.

  I make enough on stage that first night to buy my first pair of big girl shoes. I choose studded heels in soft black leather with straps that crisscross over the top of my foot. The bottom two inches of the heels are metal that catches the lights of the stage, winking dangerously.

  I pick up three shifts a week, on average making $150 a night. I begin conducting all my transactions in cash. When I switch clubs a year and a half later, after graduating from college, the money more than doubles. I don’t feel unreal at all.

  Chapter Two

  Stripper Barbie

  I am plastic, fantastic porn. I lie on my back in the middle of the stage, watching myself in the mirror on the ceiling. I have no idea why there’s a mirror on the ceiling; it’s recessed behind the stage lights, out of the sight line of people sitting at the stage. I am a voyeur, spying on myself.

  On my back my hipbones jut, pulling taut the fabric of my red T-bar, creating a seductive cave of shadow over m
y pubis. Like so many things in this business, one can almost see the forbidden. The T-bar is much smaller than the bikini I wear in the sun, and thus my crotch and breasts glow paler than my golden skin.

  “You’re beautiful,” the man sitting at stage says.

  “Thank you,” I reply.

  It’s rote now, this acknowledgment of admiration. I hardly notice.

  Girls in American society suffer a frightening loss of self-esteem at puberty, and I had been no different. It didn’t help that I lived in a small town with small minds. In middle school I became the target of intense bullying. It got so bad that my parents moved temporarily so that I could change schools. The hit on my self-worth felt permanent.

  In the mirror I watch the lights play across my body: red, blue, a pulse of green. My blond hair, splayed out in curls on the black Formica of the stage, looks serpentine, Medusa-like.

  High school and college helped tremendously. I had a series of friends and romantic partners who helped me repair myself, rebuild. Stripping completed that process.

  Real women who strip are not what is found on television or in the movies. Over the course of my career, I worked with women of all shapes and sizes and colors. Girls with bad skin perfected makeup to rival Hollywood artists. Girls with stretch marks wore G-strings that came up higher, hiding the imperfection. We employed numerous tricks to conform to the ideal beauty standards, but the veneration of countless customers is what really did the trick for me. The flashing lights of the stage did not entirely hide imperfections of the skin, thick thighs, boney feet. The customers who plied us with cash and compliments recognized our humanity and adored us anyway.

  I worked with two women, Celeste and Trinity, who had very similar body types. Both were white, thin, and small breasted. Celeste was a brunette and Trinity a blond, but otherwise they looked quite a bit alike. Trinity had a son and the impact that the pregnancy had on her body caused her no small amount of anxiety. She worried about her small breasts: that they weren’t good enough. The stretch marks on her belly did not tan to the same golden as the rest of her skin.

  Celeste had no such anxieties. She loved referring to her “mosquito bites” and would pinch her nipples to make them stand up proudly. She had stretch marks along her thighs, caused by a sudden growth spurt during puberty, and she joked about having them tattooed in, like tiger stripes.

  These two girls were equally popular. They both had regulars and made good money. But Trinity had low self-esteem while Celeste did not.

  Trinity and I share a regular so the two of us often find ourselves together. Our regular, a mild-mannered bachelor for life, brings us dinner every Wednesday and the conversation often strays into the personal. Trinity confides in the two of us that another of her regulars had offered to pay for breast augmentation.

  “What?” I exclaim. “You can’t do that!” The idea of a man paying to alter my body horrifies me on a visceral level. It feels like ownership, invasive and controlling.

  “You’re perfect the way you are,” Paul agrees without hesitation. “Big boobs aren’t everything.”

  Trinity looks taken aback. She’s expecting us to congratulate her, to be pleased that one of her regulars cared for her enough to drop this kind of cash for her happiness.

  “I’ve always wanted bigger boobs,” she explains. “I don’t feel like a woman. I feel like a little girl.”

  “Um, I think you’re all woman,” Paul offers.

  “Look at Celeste,” I venture. “I don’t think she feels like a little girl.” I point to the stage where Celeste lay on her back with her legs wrapped around a customer’s shoulders, her crotch, covered in a thin layer of tropical fabric that glowed in the black lights, inches from his face. He says something, grinning, and she laughs, her head thrown back.

  “She hasn’t had a kid,” Trinity retorts.

  “So?” I shoot back. “The only reason anyone knows that you have a kid is because you tell everyone!”

  She looks at me, solemn. “You wouldn’t understand.” Her gaze drops to my chest, the swelling rise of my breasts under a black bikini top.

  “It’s not like I’m huge!” I retort.

  “But your clothes fit.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  She gestures at her own flat chest. “Everything just hangs on me.”

  “So what?” I can’t seem to say anything else. I just cannot understand. “You always look adorable. Athletic.”

  She crosses her arms self-consciously. “I’m getting them.”

  Paul and I look at one another helplessly.

  “They’re gonna look fake,” I say.

  “I don’t care,” she replies.

  Strippers can spot fake tits at 500 yards. I only met one pair of boobs that I didn’t know were fake. Tiana worked with me for a couple of years. A big-boned blond Russian, she sported huge swelling breasts that bounced becomingly on stage. They moved naturally with her body, including the big test: when she lay on her back, they fell normally to the sides.

  One day she let slip that she had augmented them before coming to the United States. “What?” I exclaimed, disbelieving. “No way.”

  “Feel.” She placed my hand on her left breast.

  I squeezed carefully, feeling just the resistance of flesh. Fake usually feels too firm, sometimes even hard. It’s often possible to feel the implant itself if it has been inserted over the muscle. Implants inserted behind the muscle are better but more expensive. And they still usually feel rigid.

  “Amazing,” I said appreciatively.

  “Expensive,” she grinned.

  Now, I ask Trinity, “Are you going over the muscle or behind?”

  “My regular is putting up $3000. But I’m gonna pay the extra two grand and have the implants put behind the muscle.”

  “Longer recovery time,” I say. Paul’s head turns between the two of us like in a tennis match. I want to laugh but don’t.

  “I’ll be out a month.”

  “I wish you could just be happy with who you are,” I say. Paul nods in agreement.

  “I will be,” Trinity says.

  I throw up my hands.

  She’s out for a month. When she returns, her tank top fits much differently. Her new breasts look good: no scarring, perfectly symmetrical placement, big but she didn’t overdo it. To a trained eye they’re obviously fake but they look nice, overall. Paul tells her that she looks beautiful and she beams with pleasure.

  In the dressing room I ask her about the procedure.

  “Oh, my god!” she exclaims dramatically. “It hurt so bad for the first three days! I thought I had made a huge mistake.”

  “Didn’t you have painkillers?”

  “Yes, but it still hurt. And everything was bruised and horrible looking. But then it all started to heal. And now I love them!” She laughs.

  Over the next few days I watch as her confidence blossoms. She has always been an outgoing and ebullient girl but now she positively radiates. Her mood translates into tips and her income soars.

  All I feel is conflict: I can’t argue with the results. She’s happy, confident. She thinks that she’s making more money because of the implants, but I suspect that it’s because of her newfound confidence in herself.

  Why must a woman’s sense of her own value be so deeply tied to her physical appearance? Specifically, why does our culture sexualize breasts to the point that augmentation is the most common invasive cosmetic procedure in this country? Our culture sexualizes breasts, which makes men focus on them, which makes women obsess over them, which creates an industry that profits off of women’s insecurity, which drives our national obsession. It’s a horribly vicious cycle.

  It’s also not uncommon to have customers offer to pay for various augmentations. It’s a way to establish ownership over a woman’s body, to make her conform to a fantasy. To a woman with low self-esteem the temptation to “correct” perceived imperfections can be almost impossible to ignore.

 
; For me, the adulation far outweighed the criticism. Supportive friends and thoughtful lovers started my healing process. A parade of strangers worshipping at my feet finished the process. I never augmented my body to get more acclaim. I found myself. Trinity lost part of herself.

  Chapter Three

  A Bad Night

  My schedule has become almost completely nocturnal. I’m in the last stages of completion of my master’s thesis on vampires as religious archetypes, so I suppose it’s fitting. On the nights that I don’t work I sit in front of my computer, open books scattered across my desk and the floor, writing sometimes until dawn streaks the sky. I’m getting enough sleep, but my stress level is high and I’m probably drinking a little too much. The only exercise I get is at work and my skin has become so pale it’s translucent.

  I arrive for work later than normal and I haven’t done my hair. I leave my curling iron on and check in for my first dance with my hair piled on top of my head in an unruly mop. The general manager comes over to my stage and tells me to tidy up my appearance.

  “I know,” I snap at him. “I’m just running a little late today.”

  He glowers at my sharp response. I haven’t been working in this club very long and I haven’t earned the right to talk back.

  “There’s no one in the club anyway,” I point out.

  He points a stubby finger at me. “Get your shit together, girl,” he says, and stomps off.

  I get off stage without making a single dollar. Like I said, the club is dead this early. There’s only one stage open and the regulars sit at the bar, eyeballing me for free. The tables on the floor are empty.

  I sit down at the counter in the dressing room and go to work on my hair. It gets frizzy in this climate and I tame it into ringlets. Twenty minutes later I’m looking more or less like myself.

  When I return to stage there’s a single customer sitting at the end with his back to the bar. He’s an old dude in a sweat-stained tank top and gym shorts. He looks like he just crawled out of a culvert, but the club is in an area where sometimes millionaires look like gutter trash. I slink toward him.