The only thing I’d managed to accomplish was getting rejected by a guy with a mullet. The humiliation was unbearable, but at least I was in good company.
43
Strip club employees are a lovelorn lot. The dysfunctional lives that lead one to work in the sex industry don’t exactly make for psyches that are able to maintain healthy romantic relationships. I’d heard it all behind my register. Love triangles? Shoot, I saw some love octagons going on. Restraining orders? Common. Jealousy ran amuck. Cheating was de rigeur. I couldn’t think of a single soul that I worked with who was in a happy relationship. Compared to my coworkers, my dating angst was nothing; a sneeze next to full blown syphilis and at least I didn’t have it as bad as the DJ.
He’d offered to make me a mix cd. There was a new mix of The Outfield’s “Your Love” that I liked and some interesting techno that had kind of grown on me lately even though that had never been my thing and Paulie Black liked to share songs. He was a sweet guy. Some of the cocktail waitresses had tried to set us up, but the only thing we had in common was a broken heart. Paulie was a B-Boy. Although he was Jewish, he identified more with hip hop culture. He wore a sideways baseball cap and ropes of silver chains around his neck. His upper arms were encircled with tribal tattoos and a Chinese character of lord knows what slashed blue ink on the back of his shaved neck. Lately he’d been spinning some heavy Limp Bizkit. He played “Nookie” four times during one shift and Brent had to threaten him.
“Play some LL for God’s sakes. If I hear this shit one more time I’m breaking the record,” Brent’d vowed.
But it was a different night, Brent was off and Paulie had just played it again when I stepped up into the DJ booth to pick up my cd.
“You should try Hole’s ‘Violet,’” I said.
“Yeah, that’s kinda like the girl version of this,” he agreed.
“If I were gonna strip I think that would be my song,” I decided.
“Nah, it’s too angry,” he said, “You’re too innocent to be that angry.”
“And this isn’t? You can take that cookie and stick it up your ass isn’t angry?” I laughed.
“I only play it when Nixon’s on stage anyway,” Paulie said.
“Yeah, she doesn’t care what’s on.”
He handed me my cd.
“So why Limp Bizkit, Paulie?” I had to ask.
“Fucking whore.”
“Which one?”
Paulie laughed without a smile.
“Stripper break your heart?” I asked.
“You don’t even want to know.”
“Yes I do. A guy with a mullet just told me I didn’t have the body type that he preferred. Make me feel better.”
“That’s harsh yo. There’s nothing wrong with your body. Lots of guys like their girls a little thick.”
“Umm, thanks? I think.”
“Fucking bitch!” He punched his palm.
“You remember Passion? Hot little blonde?” he asked.
“Vaguely.”
“She never wanted to come to work. She called in constantly. Lazy ho. So she moved in with me.”
“Ok and?”
Paulie had it bad for Passion. She was the typical damsel in distress. Just out of an abusive relationship, she was trying to quit coke and then trying to quit the downers she took to quit the coke. She needed a place to stay because her roommate was a drug dealer. They were getting evicted. It was a mess. Paulie said she could move in with him and he’d take care of her.
“I woulda done anything for that bitch,” he said, “We used to fuck til the sun came up. We fucked so much the skin rubbed off my dick. She fucking chafed my dick. You ever hear of that?”
I had not.
Paulie paid the bills. He bought her a car. He got rims on the car that he bought for her.
“I ran up my credit cards letting her go shopping, taking her to eat at Olive Garden. Whatever she wanted,” he said, “So one day we was out with my boy Shawn yo and I notice Shawn is looking at her strange the whole time like something ain’t right yo. Something is up and I’m thinking my boy is trying to get up on my girl so the next day I call him up and I’m like, dude what’s up with you and Passion?”
“Wait Paulie, I have to stop you. Passion was her real name?”
“No. Her real name was Jen. She just liked Passion better so everybody called her that.”
I nodded that I understood and Paulie continued.
“So Shawn was like no man, it’s not like that at all. I’m gonna play ‘Smack My Bitch Up’ next because this shit is pissing me off just thinking about it.”
“Go for it,” I said.
He cued up Prodigy.
“So Shawn is all like dude, your girl looked so familiar to me, it was bugging me all night and I couldn’t remember where I saw her from. And Shawn loves porn, ok. He has this huge collection of nasty movies at his house. VHS, DVD, shit on his computer. You name it. I’m surprised he hasn’t chafed the skin off his own dick by now. I’m not kidding you. He’s like addicted to the shit. So he goes, Paulie man, I looked through my collection and I swear I knew what was coming at that point. I knew he was gonna tell me my girl was in a movie and I was like, ok I can deal. We all have shit we regret in our pasts right?”
“Right,” I said, nodding again.
“But Shawn was like, Paulie, you gotta come over.”
Reluctantly, Paulie went, explaining to Shawn that he didn’t mind if Passion had been in a movie once a long time ago. It wasn’t a big deal. He believed she’d changed, but Shawn insisted that it was worse than that. Way worse. I wondered, as Paulie recounted the story, what could be worse?
“The bitch was a star,” Paulie said, “But not like a glamorous one. She was known in the porn world I mean. She had a speciality.”
“Oh God,” I said, “What?”
“Trains,” he said with a terrible, shuddering sigh. His shoulders sagged and he stopped talking and stared at his Adidas.
Huh? Trains? As in choo-choo? What on earth could that mean?
“Like locomotives?” I asked.
“You know, she had a bunch of dudes running trains on her.”
“Nope, still don’t get it.”
“GANG BANGS!”
Ohhh. Trains, ok. A pornographic metaphor.
“The whore did gang bang movies. It was awful. She fucked like fifteen dudes at a time, all of them busting nuts all over her while one is fucking her pussy and the other in her ass. Dicks in her mouth, guys jacking off everywhere. It’s disgusting.”
“Oh my God, I can’t even imagine,” I said and I couldn’t.
I hadn’t even had sex with fifteen people in my entire life, much less at one time. The potential for disease was staggering.
“And the worse part yo? None of the dudes wore a rubber! All I could think of was that my girl was covered with AIDS and Gonorrhea and Chlamydia and shit and she was letting them degrade her so bad. One time I was in the hood and I saw this poor mangy assed pit bull bitch and all of these male dogs were getting up on her and humping her and I thought my girl is that stray dog and I knew I could never touch her again. I went home and I said Boo, you have to move out.”
“Wow,” I said, “Just wow. I don’t have words, Paulie.”
“I did the right thing, right?” he asked.
“I think so. I would’ve done the same thing. And you should get tested, you know.”
“I did. I’m ok, but damn, I thought I was gonna marry this girl.”
“I know how it feels. I thought I was going to marry someone once too.”
“How did you get over it?” he asked.
“I didn’t.”
Paulie gave me a hug.
“You should play that LL Cool J song. I just saw Mr. Haines come in,” I said.
“Fuck him.”
I gave Paulie my best reproachful look.
“A guy with a mullet called you fat? Really?” Paulie asked.
Paulie played “I Need Love.�
�
“That’s not the LL song I was talking about,” I said.
“Sometimes I get sick of listening to all these songs about ass. Sometimes I want a nice slow jam,” he said.
“I hear you,” I said.
I went back to my post. I didn’t want to piss off Mr. Haines because he’d been unpredictable lately.
Having had a lot of jobs in my time, I’ve naturally had a lot of bosses to go along with those jobs. I’d seen just about everything. Some supervisors were natural leaders, inspiring their employees to succeed. Others were intimidating, sarcastic and condescending, so we hated them. Some bosses were indifferent and ineffective, creating practical anarchy in the workplace. Good bosses are rare. Mr. Haines wasn’t a good boss and his biggest flaw was his inconsistency. You never knew what kind of a mood he’d be in from day to day or even hour to hour and God help you if you got on his bad side after he’d downed a few Scotches in the champagne room. Sometimes Mr. Haines acted like your best friend, wrapping his arms around your shoulders, calling you sweetheart. He might buy everyone on shift an extra round of drinks, order pizzas for the staff or hand out big tips for bonuses. More often though, Mr. Haines ruled with shouted threats. He called meetings to berate his employees for seemingly insignificant infractions, conducted mass firings and rehirings, vowing to finally clean the place up. What really made us hate him though was the way he used the club like his own personal brothel. Sure, he’d bought the Kittikat for fun, not a real investment. He wanted to say he owned a strip club. He wanted a flock of pretty young things to kiss his ass like a king and he wanted to hand pick his own concubines (and baby mamas as luck would have it). It’s hard to respect your boss when you see him sloppy drunk, slumped across a sticky, Champagne Room loveseat with his belt flung open, while a nineteen year old lets him gawk at her freshly bleached, piglet pink asshole.
So far, I’d kept off his radar by avoiding him as much as possible. At one point, I liked to think it was because he knew my parents, but nepotism hadn’t gotten Brent very far. Mr. Haines regularly ripped Brent a new one. I saw them yelling and waving their arms at one another back in the office on numerous occasions as I made my way to the locker room to let Velouria do my hair and makeup. I’m not sure what happened, but my parents had recently stopped going out with him as often as they used to anyway. They probably got involved in some kind of murky deal with him and Mohammed. Everyone likely lost money and probably one of them blamed the other for the mess, but like I said, I didn’t know for sure. Who knows what could’ve caused the sudden distance? Maybe they all just got sick of each other.
I stayed low-key. I followed all the rules and I didn’t start trouble, unless you consider the night I threw the champagne in Adam’s face trouble, which I do not, because that was just necessary. And since I Brent so little attention to myself and since I was fairly diligent about the small amount of work I had to, I assumed I was safe and I was. For the time being.
SONG THREE
TOTALLY NUDE
44
Twenty pounds up, the clothes I’d splurged on just a couple months earlier didn’t fit. I don’t even want to talk about what I now looked like trying to jam myself into those damned leather pants. It was diet time. The endless party that had been going on in my mouth needed to cease immediately.
I’d never been on a diet in my life. Never. Up until the past year I’d taken for granted that I would always be thin, but stress, SSRIs and probably age caught up to me and the pounds kept piling on. Skinny was a distant memory and I was too chunked out to even work day shift at this point. Not that I’d considered dancing, because I hadn’t, not exactly, but I had begun to assess my weight based on the simple equation that management used to qualify strippers. A five foot tall girl could, in theory at least, weigh no more than one hundred pounds per the unwritten Kittikat handbook. For every inch above five feet simply add five pounds. It got more complicated because a certain amount of additional weight was permitted for girls with breast implants and it went according to the volume in cubic centimeters their saline implants held, but that was getting into heavy math and remember, I dropped out after tenth grade when I was still struggling through remedial middle school arithmetic. Let’s keep it easy - at five feet six, I’d hypothetically be allowed to weigh one hundred and thirty pounds and not a Thin Mint over. Let’s just finish that sleeve of Girl Scout cookies in silence and not discuss how much over that I was. Suffice to say, I wouldn’t be hired. Girls who pushed the limits of the club’s weight requirement generally worked dayshift unless they were spectacularly hot or unusually talented on the pole. Brent and Chris always kept one or two of the more buxom dancers on nights for chubby chasers and black dudes because you have to please your customers, and of course there were some skinny day-shifters but they worked the lunch crowd not because of their bodies but because they were ugly. Bad skin plastered over with foundation. Gapped teeth. Noses bigger than the dainty Peter Pan points that someone decided were the standard of rhinoplastic perfection. That sort of thing. Guys who frequent strip clubs daily for a free buffet generally don’t give a crap if the naked girl on top of them has a receding chin, a couple old pock marks and a broken nose. So yes, a few deviations from the rules were permitted, but no dancer was supposed to be exempt from the required weekly weigh-ins.
Every Monday, one by one the dancers were supposed step onto the scale, an antique looking contraption of the clanging, cold metal variety you remember from your elementary school nurse’s office. Funny though, I never saw a girl turned away because she was too heavy. I can’t say exactly why that was, but a few times I saw Brent knock the weights around on the balance. He’d kick the scale with his loafer and cuss at it and motion for the next girl to step up, saying it was an old piece of crap and didn’t work right and he’d get a new digital one here shortly, which he never did, but he never sent a girl home for weighing too much. On more than one occasion, Brent conveniently “forgot” the weigh-in all together.
Still, the threat of exceeding the maximum weight requirement, the humiliation of potential termination or worse, the shame of being the fattest girl in line at Feature, combined with the prestige of being the slimmest, was plenty to keep our dancers on permanent diets. In an atmosphere rife with weight anxiety and surrounded by girls, most of them prettier than me, who locked themselves into a state of perpetual starvation, my first reaction had been to rebel. I fought back with cheese. I resisted with Buffalo wings and pizza greasy with sweet Italian sausage and mushrooms and though I held my own against sashimi and seaweed salad, eventually I too crumbled and started tossing back cans of Slimfast. Hey, the Dark Chocolate Royale one is pretty good.
And also Big Mack. On my first day at work, Big Mack had promised that he could get me fit in thirty days or some such nonsense. A month though was way too long and in the span of a month that would mean PMS and without my medicinal Haagen Dazs to soothe me through headaches, cramps and bloating, I might end up on the six ‘o’ clock news. But now Big Mack, who moonlighted as a personal trainer you may recall, had come up with a new diet that promised dramatic results fast and almost the entire entertainment staff was on it. Low carb. High protein. Eat a bunch of chemicals and powders instead of actual food. I don’t know what it was, but I was willing to try it because I was impatient.
I’m pathologically impatient. I’m so impatient that it’s pretty much a disorder and when confronted with caloric restriction, my impatience intensifies ridiculously. Here is a picture of how impatient I am. On the first day that I decided to go on a diet to lose the weight I’d gained, which was all Evan’s fault and caused a guy with a mullet to reject me, I got up and had for breakfast one can of Slimfast. I then went and weighed myself. No weight lost. I weighed myself every hour until lunch when I had another Slimfast. If I skipped a good breakfast and sacrificed a buttery waffle and some salty, crisp bacon dragged through puddles of warm blueberry compote then, as I see it, by God I should lose a pound or two by noon. I
feel the same way about exercise. If I’m going to pant and sweat doing something physical and painful instead of enjoying myself in bed reading Bridget Jones, I demand to lose a dress size by the time it’s all over. I believe that’s only fair. That said, the Slimfast didn’t work out. I couldn’t even make it to the sensible dinner, so I went to Big Mack who handed me a Xerox of his diet plan, which basically said to eat a bunch of chicken and eggs and protein powder and not much else except maybe some salad with vinegar. After three days I’d lost, and I can hardly believe this myself, three pounds. Three pounds isn’t much. I mean, that could probably equal a good poop, but when it comes to weight loss, I’ll take what I can get.
Big Mack’s diet was all the rage. The locker room fridge overflowed with half-drunk protein shakes in paper to-go cups snatched from the bar and prepackaged salads from Publix. Naked women strolled from the lockers to the showers to the break room sofa chewing on hard boiled eggs and when Feature cued up and we heard the too familiar question “Y’all Ready for This?” the dancers would hurry to pull on their spandex gowns, cramming sometimes two eggs at a time into their mouths without smearing their lipstick. After they’d all filed on stage, the break room floor would be littered with a sulfuric confetti of whites and yolks. Velouria hated sweeping it up.
While all the other dancers followed Big Mack’s diet to the letter, Chanel took it a step further. That bitch always had to outdo everyone, so while her co-workers dutifully balanced their eggs and meat with leafy greens and chalky shakes, Chanel decided she’d eat nothing but whole chickens. She could eat as many as three in a night, and that was just between the hours of seven in the evening and two in the morning when she worked. Being Kittikat royalty, she’d send the valet parkers, miniature Central American teenagers who barely spoke a word of English and who were all too happy to run anywhere for a pretty chica, across the street to Publix to get her a hot pollo from the deli when she got hungry. Too often I’d go on break to hang out with Velouria and find Chanel had overtaken the break room table, spreading her rotisserie carnage across the peeling veneer. She’d eat it naked, with her bare hands, sucking the fatty chicken juice from her fingers, ripping the legs from the thigh joints and stripping every shred of flesh and skin from the carcass. Piranhas couldn’t have done a better job. I’d seen my parents’ dogs hunched snarling over a meal, guarding their food from the other with their ears laid back and their eyes narrowed in threat and I always thought of this when I saw Chanel attack a roasted fowl. She was all carnivore, all predator. There are men who probably would’ve paid a fortune to watch a gorgeous, unclothed woman (and gorgeous she truly was) obliterate a chicken like that. There are men with fetishes for that sort of thing and if Chanel could have found one, I have no doubt she would’ve gladly let him watch for the right price. She would have let someone watch her take a shit if they paid her. She was shameless when it came to money. In a way all strippers are. It’s the given nature of the profession, but as with everything else, Chanel could outshine her peers in money-grubbing too. I didn’t know anyone else who’d killed her sugar daddy.
Amateur Night at the Bubblegum Kittikat Page 28