no more mirrors, no more smoke

So it's been almost a month now that I've had this sore throat. In that time I've danced four shifts. I caught the cold, or imbibed the allergin or whatever, on a Friday, which I know because the Historian and I had a date.

Our dates are always for Friday. We sat together through the tail of the afternoon and into the evening and the night. Thew range of our topics of common interest is brief. A few hours in I started to notice the burning in the back of my throat, and by the time he left and I could get back to the dressing room my nose was just beginning to run full force.

It was a nasty, salty, rough, wet cold and it lingered. The coughing didn't really set in til the fourth or fifth day, and then refused to go as whatever it was colonized my respiratory system with terrific efficiency. On day six I felt a little better so I went to work and that night I coughed myself awake all night. And every night I've worked since has been the same.

The problem is my smoking. Obviously. When I dance, I smoke. And when I'm smoking, I fucking smoke. Chain-smoking, really, and if I don't know where my next cigarette is coming from, I get a little wiggy.

I'm killing myself. Sure thing. Every smoker knows this. You can't avoid knowing it. But it doesn't even matter, and that's how come tobacco companies can print right there on the box that this is going to turn your lungs to tar and pound on your heart like a ballpeen hammer on a little rubber ball and your babies will be born stupid and ugly with two heads and forked tongues and we still don't even fucking care. We're still ripping at those little pull-tabs, peeling the wrapping back and, cursing if your fingernails slip because the body wants the nicotine now, not three second from now now now nownow now NOW.

Outside of the club, I don't think about smoking. A pack of Camels sits in my backpack all week long, forgotten. I don't need them at home anymore, in my daily rounds, than I need six-inch stilletto heels.

I've made dancing poisonous to myself is the thing, I guess. Like I don't want it to be too sustainable. I've built in a kind of a kill switch, so that I don't think I'm going to be one of those girls who strips into her forties, much as I admire them.

When I didn't know anything about dancing, I thought a forty-year old stripper was the last word in sad, and I think most people who don't know much about dancing assume this, too. But the woman who's dancing at that age is a rare and finely-honed machine. The ones I've known have been almost universally shrewd, savvy, and hotter than shit. They have to smoke the competition, and they usually do. They've got an intensity, too, each one with her own version of the eight-mile stare because they've seen a lot of shit. In this particular little crevice of human culture and behavior here at this intersection of sex and commerce, they are the only experts.

I don't think I'll make it. I think I'll be out of the game long, long before I reach that level. Or so I say right now. We'll see. But right now no way, and hopefully not in two weeks when the rent is due, either. For now I've got to find another way to pay the rent. I need out and away from the club for a little bit. It's hard to breathe in there.

dirty talk

"Just take a deep breath. Relax. Shhhh."

We are back in the Champagne Room and you have me on your lap, my head clamped into your shoulder in a manner intended to be comforting.

I am not, in point of fact, sad. I am not relaxed either, although as requested I do take a deep breath and let it out slow. Inevitably, physiologically, this does cause my heart rate to lower and my muscle tension to soften. I do not like this at all. In this close proximity to a stranger's armpit, in this near darkness, I would prefer to retain a bit of tension.

"There you go," you say. "You needed that, didn't you? Just imagine we're alone, somewhere far away from here. Imagine we're in bed together, OK? Just us, just laying together. Are you imagining that?"

It hard not to. You are holding my head and whispering into my ear, and the music is not loud enough back here which is something I've started to hate about the Champagne Room because you have to talk and these days I am sick of talking.

In my imagination, we are underneath a sweaty wool blanket and everything smell like beer and farts. Your hairy belly threatens to pour over me like one of those smotheration dreams where I am drowning, sinking, muffled in impenetrable, unrelenting softness and I throw my arms out and kick and wake up thrashing in my sheets.

"Just be yourself," you say.

I am being my self. Which is to say, I am being a stripper, which is what I am. As a stripper, I am giving you what you want, which is my body to hold and my hair to stroke, my ear to whisper into and an imaginary construct of an ego that you can comfort for its imaginary sadness. For my tragic childhood, my crushed dreams and abusive skinhead boyfriends and pill addictions and whatever else you are making up for me in there.

Go ahead: This imaginary personality is safe to toy with and torment however you like, unlike my actual self, which is not a toy. This is as real as you and I will ever get.

"Talk to me," you say. "Tell me what you want me to do to you."

Which, lucky for both of us, turns out to mean "listen to me tell you what I want to do to you" and you describe for me all the delights you will bring to my body and how happy I will be.

Sure. Sure. I wish I had a cigarette. I want a cigarette so bad, but you don't smoke and besides you are still holding my head and your breath on my ear is unpleasantly moist and warm. I bet if I said I was going to the bathroom somebody in the dressing room would give me drag. It's a slow night. Everybody's back there smoking and cussing and reading Texas Adult Guide to see if we recognize any of the girls in the escort agency ads.

"Don't be afraid," you say.

I'm not afraid.

"Look at me."

You release my head and I straighten up. My neck is getting stiff. I look at you. You are a bald, fat guy. You are somewhere in your late thirties, I'm guessing. You have glasses. And a tiny, beaky nose, like a little owl. Your eyes are pleading with me. You are sad and afraid, but I don't have any answers for you. Sorry. I only know what works for me and you and I are pretty different.

"You need this, don't you?" you ask.

Our hour is almost over. In a few minutes the waitress will come and kick us out and I will go back in the dressing room and smoke a cigarette and you will go god knows where. Home to a good apartment in a nice part of town where you live with ghosts and imaginary people and ghosts of imaginary people, which is what I'll be when you remember me, after you're done with me, if you remember me.

"You needed this. You know you can always be yourself with me," you say. "You know you can tell me anything. I like you just the way you are."

any other name

I haven't worked in a week. I have a sore throat that won't go away. It's never bad enough to see a doctor, and never good enough to make intimate conversation at a high yell over bar music in a smoky room for eight hours.

Last time I worked, I sat with Mr. K. He asked me if I'd seen Rose, his other long-time favorite. He hadn't heard from her in more than a month and wondered if she was OK.

I saw her a few weeks ago. We were back in the dressing room and she was looking at herself in the mirror, pulling her dress flat and turning sideways to see if her belly was sticking out. It wasn't. She is built slim and strong and fine all over, like a British racecar. Her abortion was on Tuesday, she said. She looked tired without her make-up on, but generally OK.

I told Mr. K. I had seen her. She seemed fine, busy.

Good, he said. He had hoped she was just busy. He hoped nothing bad had happened. Last time he'd seen her it had been such good news.

I remember that. A couple of months ago she got engaged to her out-of-town boyfriend, and making plans to move out of state. She would have told K. this. He knows she has a boyfriend. He comes in twice a month like clockwork like he has for years and spends several hundred dollars on whichever of us happens to be there. Whatever illusions he has about dating the girls, he keeps to himself.

So I say, yeah, great news. She seems really happy. I'm sure she just has a lot going on.

Rose was putting lotion on her face when she told me about the abortion. She was brief and matter-of-fact. Maybe I was supposed to ask more questions. The dressing room is not a tearful-hugs-sisterhood rah-rah-girlfriends kind of place. It's a zone of suspended emotion, mostly. It's where you go to get out of the whole chatty, google-eyed gushing sex kitten thing that you do out on the floor all the time. Even the girls on their cellphones breaking up with their boyfriends every day during shift change sound clinical and practiced. The only real raw emotion there is from girls who aren't making money, crouched by their lockers hissing curses into little piles of singles.

Rose and I sat in front of the mirror and put our powder on. It seemed quiet, although it never actually is, with the stage music piped back here and the DJ on the mic hawking five-dollar you-call-em shots. Some people would be saying things right now, because some people show how much they care by saying things. Some people would want to know if she was still with her boyfriend and what does he think and are you OK and where are you getting it done? And maybe those people would be better than me in situations like this. I tend to try to show how much I care by saying as little as possible.

I wish I could let her know just by the quality of the silence that if she needs anything from me it's hers. We're not best friends or anything. Sometimes we sell dances together. Men like to see us entertwined, her slim frame and and spectacular breasts, my pale skin and substantial hips. I love the warmth of her skin and the light gold freckles she's powdering over now so meticulously.

On the floor, she is silly and bewitching, daffy smile and clownish gestures set off against the essential elegance of her -- her classical face, that serious lode of smoky black hair. She seduces me again and again, like she seduces everyone. I love Rose. But of course, there is no Rose. I don't really know this girl next to me, the girl who's legal name is in my phone. If I knew her, I would say more.

We lean into the mirror, examining the specimens of ourselves. We are the same age, born within a month we once discovered. We both have to put the powder on just so, so it covers up the tiny, forming lines without caking up in them and catching the shadows on our foreheads and the corners of our eyes in ways that make us look a million years older than we are.

Are you OK? I ask this finally, and our eyes meet in the mirror. The lights make our skin look green. I'm OK, she says. I'm not going to do a big stage show tonight. I'm just going to take it easy.

She's a pole-trick girl, the best in the club by far. She is an acrobat up there, slowly winding down upside down fixed in a blue spotlight.

OK, I say. Take care of yourself. Let me know if you need anything.

In the mirror, she makes an exaggerated mascara-drying blink. OK, she says. Thanks.

I tell Mr. K that Rose is fine, that he should call her. She and I were just talking about him the last time we saw each other, and she misses him and she would really love to see him. I hope he calls her. He is pleasant and gentle, and she could probably use the money.

twelve

So you might have heard about this. An all-nude club in Dallas employed a twelve-year-old runaway as a dancer for about two weeks last November. The story was in the Dallas Morning News, and all over the internet, for those of us who follow adult biz news.

The girl told police she was given shelter by a 27-year-old dancer and her boyfriend. Dancer and boyfriend took the 12-year-old to Diamonds Cabaret, where she told managers she was 19. She got the job despite having no I.D. and despite claiming to have forgotten the year she was born. On her first day she made $100.

That's not a lot of money for a stripper, but it is a lot for a 12-year-old. Her mother told reporters that the girl had "the body of a 20-year-old."

I don't know what was going on at that little girl's house, or why she ran away. Everything in the world seems wrong with a sixth-grader naked in a Dallas strip club, but I can't tell you for sure that she was worse off there than at home. I mean, I sure hope so.

I think about myself at twelve, with breasts like lumps of unkneaded dough, puffy child's face and birds-nest hair. Paisley jumpsuits and neon socks. (It was the 80's.) I think of how I barely knew my body. It was unmapped terrain, a vast continent I had not begun to push into.

That year, sixth-grade, I had a fierce, sudden desire to shove my classmate David Wilkiss into a corner by the gym doors and kiss him on the mouth. Later, I thought about that urge and felt sick. Grown men were out of my stratosphere. My prinicipal stopped me in the hall one day to give me a compliment about something or other and I burst into tears because he was so tall I had to crane my neck up to see his face, and that made me scared.

I would not even start masturbating for another year. The first time I found one of my father's magazines on top of the bathroom cabinet I read it cover for cover and then went out and hid in the wood behind the house for the rest of the day, grieving for the weakness of humanity and the evils of the flesh.

I do not know if that 12-year-old in Dallas was anything like my 12-year-old self. Some of my friends by 12 were having sex, doing drugs, going to nightclubs with grown men and women. I can't say for sure if they were a different kind of 12-year-old than me, matured somehow by experience, or if they merely carried the magic thinking and fuzzy logic of childhood into a strange, grown-up world.

I don't know what that girl had seen or felt or thought or done before she ran away. I know a lot more about what her life was like after. I can say for sure that the club was dark, and that it smelled of damp carpet and upholstery saturated with 15 years-worth of cigarette smoke and sour bodily excretions, and blizted over with a hundred cheap body sprays scented like would-be flowers and would-be musk. I know that the customers sat against the wall heavy-lidded, impassive, impenetrable. I know the other girls walked past her in a sweep of sheer fabric and high-heels and straight-ahead stares.

I hope she wasn't scared. The adult world is scary enough when you're a kid -- with its rules you didn't make, its ambiguous impulses -- scary enough even with all your clothes on. Strip clubs are pretty rotten places to be scared. There is less sympathy than irritation. Less pity than unwillingness to see. No one will sit you down, cover your poor nakedness with blanket, give you something to eat and drink, protect you like children need and deserve to be protected. reassure you of the decency of the world and most of the people in it. Make anybody uncomfortable with your big eyes and your unripe legs and your basic ignorance about the world and they will stare right through you as though they could erase you with an act of will. So I hope she wasn't scared.

I was scared the first time I danced, at almost twice her age. I was scared to death. After my first day I went home and cried for no reason I could have explained to anybody. The weakness of humanity again, maybe, and this time I was a part of what I grieved for.

If being naked in a dark room full of ambiguous strangers was anything near as scary for her at 12 as it was for me at 23, then I don't know what was happening to her at home. Because somehow or other, she preferred the club. A hundred dollars is a lot of money when you're twelve. Jobs of any kind are pretty hard to get.I hope she's better off wherever she is now. I hope she'll grow up big and strong and well-adjusted. I hope stripping wasn't the best option she had. If it was, then all us who made the rules of this game, all of us who could extend our sympathy and do not, all of us who could help and instead pretend not to see, all of us are truly going to hell.

mad money

Every night is a good night now. I was sick of bad nights. I drive to work and tell myself I am beautiful. At the last stoplight before I merge onto the highway, I check my lipstick in the mirror. I am hot. I look good. Making money is easy.

I check myself again when I hit the sludgy traffic slow-down coming out of downtown at rush hour. I am hot. Hot. Hotter than a fast check. Money will fall on me from sky. Money, money. Money. It doesn't matter if I believe it. It doesn't matter what I beleive. I say it and I make it true.

I have good nights now, and better nights. Men flag me down, buy me drinks, take me to couches, unbuckle my shoes and kiss my stockinged legs. They hand me bill after bill. Yes, money falls from the sky. Other girls sit in the dressing room and frown at themselves in the mirror.

Hot as a two dollar whore on the fourth of July. Hotter than a stolen tamale in a Laredo parking lot. So hot I make the hens lay hard-boiled eggs.

On Monday I saw the doctor and I asked him please to give me more meds. That's fine, he said. He doubled my dose, and I got a little bounce for a few days. I saw we were in the middle of spring, and the oak leaves are big and soft and light, bright green. I saw the light come in the windows like a gentle hand.

I don't really feel beautiful. But it doesn't matter how I feel. Men give me money anyway. They stand by the bar and wait for me to pass so they can grab my hand. My skin is a marvel, my hair is a haven. My ass mints money.

Hotter than a red-assed bee, folks. Hot. So hot I might just burn.

C. isn't interested in me anymore. Not at the moment, anyway. He might be again, one day, later. At the moment he walks around me in the house. We sit together at the table, having dinner and later on the couch, watching TV, not saying anything. He doesn't reach for me, doesn't touch me, or look at me. We've been together five years. I didn't think we would get bored with each other. I'm not bored. But maybe this is what happens.

I find his porn on my computer. I learn that these days he is interested in sweet-faced teen girls taking big dicks. I suspend judgement. Suspending. Suspended.

He still paints me sometimes, after work, and I am tired, but I let him do it because I'm glad he's looking at me. The paintings are strange and terrible. Me, as a mermaid, waist-deep in swampy water, with a wry mouth and one hollow cycloptic eye. Naked on the couch, plucked-chicken skin and make-up streaked from the shower, but he asks me not to wash it off. Smeared lipstick and a raccoon mask of mascara, like a used whore. My body, stretched, limbs disarticulated, a beat-up doll. He paints me melting into surfaces, disintegrating, dissolving, coming apart at the seams.

What have you done to me, darling? What are you doing? Does love always take us apart?

Sometimes I fall asleep while he paints and he paints me sleeping, passed out, dead. I wake up at strange hours and find my way to the bed. I curl into his warmth. He is gone when I wake up.

I live through the afternoon. I put myself together. I do my hair, my face, get in the car. I check my lipstick in the mirror. Hot, baby. Hot.

the wild one

He looks just like a regular guy, and talks like one, too. Glasses, shaved head. Overweight. He comes all the way from the back of the club to tip me on the front stage. It's my first stage set of the night, and I am getting tipped a lot. Later, for my third stage set, I will be tired, and will look tired, and will probably not be tipped at all. But fresh out of the dressing room, with my hair curled just so and a fresh coat of lip gloss, I am a hot commodity.

Shaved Head Glasses Overweight Guy tips me twice, then three times. He is smitten. He will be easy, so when I get off stage I go to him first. This is a Friday afternoon, after work. He is tired. I rub his shoulders. Then we dance a long time. I straddle his lap and he puts his hands around my throat. Not lightly, either. I feel each joint of each finger press into my skin. My throat constricts just a little. But I can see his eyes and I am not afraid.

After a few seconds, I sweep my neck in a circle and toss my hair. He lets me go. I turn my back to him and drape myself over his lap, head on his shoulder. He takes a fistful of my hair and pulls my ear to his mouth. "I'd like to have you on a leash," he says. "I'd like to make you crawl to me." I turn my head so I can see his eyes again. I'm still not afraid. Some people look at me and my guts knot instantly, but here I am and the skin of my stomach is smooth as a pond on a windless day. He lets go of my hair.

He keeps spending money, and I keep dancing. You want to know something? The really scary guys hardly ever spend money like this. The really scary guys sit in the corner like fly-fishermen and wait for you swim past their tables and sit on the arm of their chairs so they dart their thumbs up your panties -- strike -- before they tell you they don't want a dance. The really scary men don't like to pay, don't want to give anything back for what they get. They sit in the corner and wait to take, and take, and take, whatever little scraps of forced or stolen pleasure they can get, because deep down they think life owes them something and they're going to take it from this stripper's hide.

There are men who will hurt you, who feel entitled to hurt you. This guy isn't one of them. He is an odd one, though. I clamber up his chair and slide down his body until I'm kneeling on the floor in front of him. He leans forward, puts his arms around me. "Don't be scared," he whispers. "It's going to be OK."

I squirm till I can see his face again, and see that I'm still safe. I wonder what game we're playing now. There is some drama in his head, and I am acting in it, in a role I'll probably never know anything about. I smile at him, my kabuki face, which is whatever expression you want it to be. The blankest screen imaginable for the projection of whatever fantasy you like.

He puts his hands around my throat again. We look at each other. I wonder what he's seeing. "You're a wild one," he says. "You ought to be chained up."

I growl.

He smiles.

frendz

I haven't made a friend, a real one, in six or seven years. I like to keep the old ones. I'm conservative with my love.

I have some professional associations through Dayjob Project who are friendly and fun. I get along with a lot of the girls at the club. I get along just great with mostly everyone, in fact. I just have trouble making the leap from friendly association to actual friendship. I am a shy person and I tend to like other shy people. Hardcore extroverts often strike me as slightly predatory.

I was telling this to my friend Scarlett one afternoon last month as I waxed her armpits in my small kitchen so she could apply to dance at Sugar's and make the money to go south for the rest of the winter. "I don't know how to meet the right people," I was saying, pulling taught the tender, buttercream skin between shoulder and breast and preparing to rip a Band-aid-sized plot of dark curly hairs out by their gnarly roots. "Making friends is so much harder than dating." My point being, I think, that you can't fall back on fuckability when you're making friends. You have to like the other person, and they have to like you.

Scarlett bites her lip, eyes watering. I've never waxed my own or anyone else's armpits before, but Scarlett needs quick cash so she can go down and scout beach-front real estate in Bocas del Toro. She could have shaved, of course, but I'm overjoyed to do it because these are the offices of love.

My friends move around a lot because they are restless people and superheros. I wouldn't expect any less of them, but sometimes I am lonely. Periodically I tell myself I ought to make new friends, and that urge lasts until the next time I remember that I don't like most people enough to depilate their pubic regions, to hurt them sweetly in their quests to be beautiful and prosper. And if I don't love them that much, we've probably both got something better to do with our time. This has been the state of affairs for years.

So it's been overwhelming in the last two weeks how all these neat women have appeared under my nose and wanted to have margaritas with me or take me to Dim Sum. The oddest was a woman I know through the dayjob, my age, clever and beautiful, ultra-professional and buttoned-down. She asked me to coffee and then back to her apartment, where we took our shoes off and smoked weed and ate an apple. I had the kind of butterflies in my stomach that most people seem to have on dates, cause I really like her and I wanted her to like me back so bad. Yeah, you heard it here first -- I'm scared of girls when they are pretty and cool. I feel all sweaty-palmed and sticky and clumsy, like the most clueless 14-year-old boy who ever lived.

I came home and fell asleep on the couch instantly, because the pressure of it all was completely exhausting, plus I was still residually high. Then my other new friend Erin called and asked me out for drinks. So, it's official, I have a social life. I don't know when I'll get my blogging done.