Grace Undressed

2011-07-16T09:32:00.000-07:00

Carrying boxes across the yard; sweat crawling into my eyes. I always seem to end up moving in the summer. Just a few more rounds of sweeping and sorting and throwing away.

I put aside some things I think the little girls next door might like: an empty china salt-cellar shaped like a dancing pig, a small stuffed donkey, a rubber frog, a lizard carved out of wood. Things just pile up on you if you live in a place too long, things you never wanted. Things people give you, or leave with you, things you just find somewhere and hang onto for no reason.

I take the little box of things across the yard to the neighbors' house and knock on the door. Mary waves me in from the kitchen. The girls are falling all over the floor in their little flowered dresses and I sit down with my back against the cabinets to show them what I brought. I give Sophie, the oldest, the china pig. She holds it against her chest and then runs off. Penny and I play with the rubber frog.

"We can't believe you're leaving," Mary says. "I don't think the girls even know what that means. You've been here their whole lives."

"Sophie wasn't even born yet. I remember you out in the yard, pregnant as the day is long."

"I was up on my porch drinking red wine and thinking, do I really want to have a kid?"

Mary's hair is long and dark, with lovely lines of gray. She was 43 when Sophie was born and had lived a rich life. I like to think of this. When I was living on my own in the leaky west side of the house I used to watch their lit windows at night, catching glimpses of the children's round, smooth heads at the dinner table, what seemed to me like the perfect rhythm of life contained and safe.

Sophie comes back in the kitchen with a small stuffed cat. "This is for you," she says. "This is your goodbye present."

I hold the bubble of a laugh in my throat. A gift for me when I am getting rid of things -- please god, no more things to remind me of people I won't see again -- but of course I take it. I say thank you, and the bubble of laughing turns into crying. I knew it would.

Mary sees my face knot up. "Look girls," she says. "Our neighbor is leaving." She sits down on the floor next to me. Penny crawls into my lap.

When we moved off the farm when I was twelve I felt like this, like I'd never really loved anything or anyone enough. There are the people you say goodbye to and the people who you never say goodbye to, who were part of your life and never even knew it.

"You're going good places," Mary says. "I'm almost jealous in a way. I've been watching you pack, thinking about the last time I packed up and left a place. It's great to see people move on when they're moving on to something good."

I think so, too, and I'm not unhappy, just sad.

So goodbye, people I never knew, you intimate, reoccurring strangers. We went to the same bars and the same coffee houses and the same shows, we rode the bus together and watched each other get older, never speaking. You cut your hair and you look like a lawyer now, and you, you still walk around with your hands in your pockets, getting wilder and wilder.

Goodbye to things that never happened. Goodbye, nostalgia for a perfect future imagined in the past. Sometimes I still catch a whiff of you, unplaceable and unmistakable, like a perfume bringing back the skin of someone whose face you don't remember.

Goodbye, mistakes I never fixed, quarrels I never righted, opportunities I never exploited, places I never went. Some failure is to be expected.

I don't stay too long. You can't sit on the floor in someone else's kitchen and cry too long, and besides there's the last rounds of packing left to do. I stand up and lift the girls up in the air one at a time and hug and kiss them and say goodbye forever to the idea that they are somehow mine, my secret, imaginary daughters. I say goodbye to their first days of schools and their first loves and everything of theirs I'll never know about.

I know that when the last boxes are in the truck and the door is locked for the last time with the key left underneath the mat, I know the road will wind out as smooth as thread off a spool and the crest of every hill will open up the sky into endless horizons. It's time, anyway. It's been too long since I left everything behind. Which you can never do, of course, but you can try.

dream

2011-06-09T22:01:00.000-07:00

My lover is the owner of a huge hotel, but it is more like a fortress, full of tracking devices and booby traps. I admire how perfectly he controls his environment, how imperviously he is defended, until it is time for me to go and then he traps me between two walls and slits the vein in my throat.

I see him come toward me with the blade in his hand, small and serated like a steak knife. I know it will hurt, and it does. My throat ticks blood.

We have a long conversation while I bleed. We laugh a lot, and sometimes I forget I am dying, but my eyes keep trying to close.

He tells me I should call a doctor.

I know. I know. I try to think how I will get up. I don't know where to find a phone.

I ask him to hold me. He does. His shoulders are broad and for a second I feel safe and warm but then he pushes me away. I don't trust you, he says. You tried to leave me. I can never love you now.

I tell him I'm sorry. I am so tired now. I ask him again to hold me.

I can't, he says. You're covered in blood.

2011-05-26T17:59:00.001-07:00

Dreaming about tornadoes, I wake up and think: I ought to tell you that I love you now because the world is ending but the world is always ending. Tornadoes are everywhere. I grew up in tornado country and I know about bruise-colored clouds with funnels hanging down like dirty little fingers poking out of the sky. I dream about them more and more.

They are the perfect food for nightmares, so violent and fickle and specific. What other disaster picks its victims up with such malicious delicacy? They'll rip your neighbor's bedroom out of the ground and spread it over the next two counties and leave your kitchen immaculate, with the cat food in the bowl and the teaspoon in your favorite coffee cup. In the nightmares I'm always doing something else that seems important -- packing to leave town, arguing with a friend -- but once I see the tornado there's only the tornado. It's far away and then it's close and then it swoops down and slaps the glass out of the window like a hand to a face.

Wheatsville, yesterday, lunchtime, eating quinoa salad and hippie rootbeer outside on a bench. Two women are crossing the parking lot, bare legs shimmering under their skirts in heat of the first really hot day of summer and then there's that funny moment when you see that the stranger you're staring at is someone you know. I stand up and say Amy Jean's name and she and her friend walk over and that's also someone I know. Her name is Callie. The three of us lifted weights together for a while one summer.

I hug Amy Jean and Callie hugs me and everybody sits down. Amy Jean is at that point in being in love with someone wonderful and amazing where it's all she can really talk about, so we talk about it for a while. "It's crazy," says Amy Jean, who two years ago was getting divorced and buying a house and losing her stepfather to cancer. "I mean, I totally would have told you before that I knew what love was. I really thought I did, and this is just so much more incredible than I ever thought anything would have ever felt." They're moving to South America at the end of the summer.

This makes me hurt and smile because this is what you say when you're really in love, every time you're ever in love. It's always the first and the best and the last and the always. It is the best, always. It's supposed to be.

"I mean, I did tons of drugs in art school and none of them ever made me feel this good," Amy Jean says. "I feel totally not afraid and totally sane. Like really not afraid of anything. Like anything could happen, and I would still be good."

I say I remember that feeling, when C. and I were first together. "I remember thinking -- it was weird -- but that anything could happen. If he left me, even, I would be fine. I was that much better for ever having been in love like that. Before that being in love was always something really desperate and scary."

"Are you still together now?" Callie asks.

"Yeah." I've decided to keep the answers to these questions simple. I don't know if I'm being avoidant or polite or both.

"How long?"

"Almost eight years, I guess. Yeah."

"Are you still in love like that? I'm sorry, I guess it's a weird question. I just wonder lately if that's even possible. I don't know if you know, but my husband is leaving me."

Now I remember, yes, her hug was a little longer and tighter than I would have expect, a little skin-hungry. I say I'm sorry, which is still, after all these years, the only thing I know how to say.

"He left me for one of his students," Callie says. "One of his former students. She's twenty-two. I know, it's really bad. I'm that person. I never thought I'd be that person. My life is this dumb cliche."

I get that too. If love makes everything always new, heartbreaks make everything stupidly the same, even the fiercest of them, sucking the color and the shading out of everything. I am a stick figure, you are a stick figure and here we go its this bullshit again.

"I have times when I feel really good," Callie says. "Sometimes, like today, I think it's totally going to be OK and I'll find someone else and it will feel really good and this will be over."

"It will be like that," Amy Jean says, still lit up inside with new-love-true-love oozing over and she reaches across the table and touches Callie's hand. "It totally will be. You're going to find someone great and you're going to feel amazing."

Callie looks at Amy Jean and then at me.

"Well, I mean," I say. "It isn't like that all the time. It doesn't stay like that forever. But it's not like somebody pulls a plug in a bathtub and it all drains away either, you know? It has its cycles. It dies back for a little bit. You can have a bad season, a few bad seasons. But hopefully there's something under there, like a good roots system, and it comes back over and over and actually it is pretty amazing. Yeah."

Amy Jean is nodding and smiling and drifting away. You can't really hear this kind of thing when you're in love and everything is new. You're not supposed to. All that oxytocin is wiping your brain clean like a wet cloth on a chalkboard so you can bond and have tons of sex and raise babies. She excuses herself and goes into the store and Callie and I sit on the bench a while longer watching the parking lot shimmer like it's all a mirage or else something projected on a sheet that any second could be whisked away to show us what's behind.

"It's been hard, honestly" Callie says. "It's been really hard. Some days I feel alright, but other days are just, whatever. What kills me is thinking, you know, we are still actually married. I am his wife. I don't even know where he's staying. He's with her, wherever they are. Driving around inmy car, that I paid for."

"That is really awful."

"I am so sad."

"You have a right."

We sit for a bit and then I start telling her about this book I was reading on shamanism, this part about initiations. There was one initiation ritual -- I want to say it's Siberian or Inuit, somewhere really cold -- where they take you out and strip your clothes off and leave you in the snow to die. What they tell you is that demons are coming to eat all the flesh off your bones. And they make a prayer for you that all the demons come and every part of you gets eaten. You freeze almost to death and then they come back and get you and thaw you out and if you make it back you come back with all these powers but only over the demons that ate you. Because you can't heal any pain you haven't felt.

"That makes sense," Callie says.

Amy Jean comes back outside and we talk for a while about something else. Everybody stands up to go.

"Hey," Amy Jean says. "I heard you were moving. I completely forgot."

"I am moving."

"When?"

"A few weeks. I'm feeling good about it. This town and I are in a dry season."

"It's beautiful there, right?"

"It is. The river is about five minutes from my new house."

We all hug goodbye for who knows how long and we all promise that they will come to see me and we will go rafting. I hope it works out.

2011-04-29T13:44:00.001-07:00

I get home from work in the afternoon and open my door the sound of a power drill. The house was foreclosed on in the earlier part of the year, and it's been sold twice since then, disturbing my quasi-legal squatting arrangement in the west unit, considered uninhabitable due to the leak in the roof, the holes in the floor, and the mold. Somehow I lived there for two years; it went by very fast.

So now I am living in the east side of the house with C. again. We are wary but friendly, two refugees crowded into the same tent. All the other tenants are leaving, one by one. The vegetable garden we all shared at the front of the house is torn up. The new owner wants xeroscaping. She's making improvements. No one could blame her. The place needs improving.

She hired a guy named Luis to rip down the walls in the ceilings in the west unit and make it all new again. He's been at it ten hours a day for the last few weeks, the hardest working guy in show business. I always wave at him when I go past. I wave at him today.

"Almost done," he says. "You want to see?"

You always want to see the place where you used to live. We go inside and walk through the rooms, looking at the smooth planes of fresh plaster, the shining white paint and dove-gray trim. For a second I feel like I'm dreaming. Everything is familiar and everything is different. A place I used to live, a long time ago.

"Wow. It looks amazing. Good job."

Luis wipes his forehead with the back of his arm. "It was a lot of work," he says.

"I bet."

For a minute when the house went on the market I thought maybe I should try to find a way to buy it. Then I thought, right. Buy this place I've been trying to get free of for the last god knows how many years. Buy this leaking roof and these mold-infested walls, this compromise, and spend the rest of my life trying to make it into something that I want. But that's not how the wind is blowing.

We go out on the porch. The yard out here used to be a wild place, a tangle of knotty shrubs and flowering weeks just barely pushed back enough for a few rows of chard and tomatoes and basil and sunflowers. It's all plowed down to the roots now and there's nothing wild about it anymore.

"Is she going to have you do the outside next?" I ask.

Luis shakes his head. I like his face. All the lines in it go up. "After I finish in there, I'm going home for a while. My son is getting married at the end of the month, back in Mexico."

"Congratulations."

"And my other son is graduating from college."

"Hey, that's great. Congratulations again."

"I have good kids," he says. "My son that's getting married, he's a lawyer."

"Wow. You must be proud."

"All good kids. All my kids go to college. Except for my daughter." He squints out over the yard, into the sun. "My daughter was in college, but she throws it all away to get married. I told her not to do it."

"Well, there's always time, right? She'll be OK."

"I think so. I think so. But I always tell her, you've got to do your school. Because for a woman, I think it is a lot harder. Do you know what I mean?" He looks at me earnestly. He has the kind of eyes that look like they're really looking at you. I nod. "Because you and me can do the same job," he says. "And I'm always going to get paid more for it. So I think it is harder to be a woman. I think a woman has to try a lot harder."

"I know what you're saying."

"What about you? Are you in school?"

"I'm going back."

"Congratulations," he says. "So we are both doing good."

We shake hands.

I unlock the door into C.'s place, our place. I am doing homework when he gets home. After a while I look out the window. There's an unfamiliar quality to the light, and then I see the storm cloud, colored orange by the end-of-day light.

"Baby, look."

It hasn't rained this spring at all. It hasn't rained since anybody can remember when. We are staring down the barrel of a 50-year drought and it's so hot already. It's so hot, and it's not even May yet.

C. and I go outside walk down to the end of the street where we can see it better. It is enormous, roiling, and coming fast. Other neighbors are already on the corner, staring up. I recognize the girl from across the alley. "You heard the governor prayed for rain this weekend, right?" she says.

"Sweet Baby Jesus," C. says. "Who did he pray to?"

"I guess we'll find out." The neighbor girl shivers and wraps her arms around herself. "We ought to get inside before that hits us," she says.

We go back to the house and I go back to doing my homework. Once in a while I reach up and turn down the buzzing SC unit to see if I'll hear rain, but I don't. Later I lie in bed, fantasizing about water from the sky, running off the eaves and filling the creeks. I dream of mud puddles and dams over-flowing, but it's no good. In the morning when we wake up the ground is dry as a bone and it's a beautiful day, not a cloud in the sky.

2011-04-29T13:39:00.000-07:00

dream

2011-04-21T11:08:00.001-07:00

In a kind of hotel room with my parents. My father is telling a joke. Earlier we were going for a walk next to cliffs made of sand. The joke my father is telling is, It's like rape or bad weather, you can't do anything about it, so you might as well lay back and enjoy it.

Stop saying that, Dad. That's not funny. Stop it.

What are you, the word police around here? It's a joke.

It's not funny.

My father turns around and starts telling the joke to my mother. She starts laughing. I pick up everything I know will smash and throw it at the wall --

It's a joke, my mother says. It's just a joke. All you have to do is laugh. It's easy, see? Watch.

But it's not funny. It's not funny, right? It isn't.

--tea cups, cocktail glasses, framed photographs. The last thing I throw is myself out the door.

This is one of those weird dream hotels: hallways of hallways, rooms spilling into other rooms. I hear their voices everywhere. Punch and fucking Judy. Staircases that don't go up or down, just around and around. I run, ripping open door after door after door looking for one, just one, one goddamn door without you behind it.

2011-04-17T11:53:00.000-07:00

dream

2011-04-03T11:53:00.000-07:00

I am looking at myself in the mirror and my skin is cracking like the bottom of a dried-up river bed. A tag of it is loose on my cheekbone, peeling up, and I take hold of the edge of it and pull and a piece the size of a silver dollar comes away in my hand. I see other tags of skin sticking up and I keep grabbing them and peeling. I peel too much and I start to bleed but I think this is not a bad thing.

2011-04-03T10:45:00.000-07:00

Sitting out on my stump in the graveyard, holding my ankle in my hand and crying a little bit. I sprained my ankle last summer around the same time that I broke my heart; they both took longer to heal than I expected, and I wondered if this was because I am older than I used to be. Sometimes it still aches, or I imagine that it does. It's hard to tell.

I press my thumb now into the spot where the fibula articulates with the talus. There ought to be a tendon there, but I seem to feel only a crescent-shaped empty space, as if the long bone of the leg had never really touched down into its nest again. I think there is a word for an indentation of this shape and I chew through my mind after it for a while. Sulcus? I think I used to know.

The pressing in hurts and the emptiness scares me and I start to tear over. It's easy to cry because I am a little bit drunk. Before I came out to the graveyard I went to lunch with Sammie out at the lake. Sammie drank lemon soda because he had to go back to work and I drank Riesling because I didn't.

Sammie had been calling me for a couple of weeks and I'd been letting his calls go because social graces are always the first thing I let lapse when I feel stretched thin. When I finally answered last week he told me he'd bought a new watch.

"Neat," I said.

"It is neat," Sammie said. "But was really neat was the girl who sold it to me. She had such pretty eyes and such pretty hair and she was so nice. And she gave me her card and told me if I had any questions about the watch I should call her. Do you think I should call her?"

"Do you have any questions about the watch?"

"Not really."

"Can you make one up?"

"That sounds complicated. Can't I just ask her out? I mean, the worst thing that can happen is she says no, right?"

"Sure."

"You don't think that would be creepy?"

"No. It would only be creepy if you were a creepy guy, and you're not. Just be casual about it and be prepared to take it gracefully if she says no."

"OK."

Sammie was a customer of mine when I was a dancer. He used to get panic attacks when he thought about talking to pretty girls. Sammie's parents got divorced when he was three and his mother spent the next seven years dying painfully of cancer and he has been in therapy since basically ever. Paying naked women to talk to him and knowing they would never leave as long as he kept paying them fit into Sammie's schema of life quite well. He used to buy out my whole evenings and I could pay a months rent and bills with what I'd make. I'd feel bad sometimes, but Sammie comes from money and will always come from money and money is not one of the things he has to worry about in this lifetime.

We quit going to club around the same time. It didn't work for either of us anymore. We kept in touch, maybe because he really did just finally spend enough to buy a claim on my affections. We ended up knowing a lot about each other, things we can't talk about with too many other people.

Today he called me up and said he asked the girl at the jewelry store out and the girl said no. I still think this is progress, and I said so.

"Did I tell you I bought a new car?" Sammie said. "It's the kind of car that really needs a girl in it. Can I come and take you for a ride?"

I say OK and twenty minutes later Sammie is there in his new car. I know jack-all about cars, but I know this is a beauty. It's a Mercedes with a bunch of letters in its name, tiny and sleek and low to the ground, and I feel a wash of self-consciousness just walking out to the curb. "Way to set my neighborhood on its ear, Sammie," I say. "They all thought I was a really nice girl."

"I know. Isn't it great?"

Then Sammie makes the car go around curves and corners fast all the way to the restaurant and I cling to the inside of the passenger door and scream and Sammie says, "This, this, is how this car is meant to be driven."

Over lunch, over wine and lemon soda, he asks me how things went in San Francisco and I say, "Fine. Well. Kind of underwhelming, really. I don't think they were very impressed with me and I wasn't very impressed with them either, to be honest. I don't think we found each other, uh, relevant."

"That's fine," he says. "It's the wrong place for you anyway. You know it's really cold and gray there all the time, right?"

"I know. But they have such good Thai food. Anyway, I already got accepted to the other place."

"Well, that's great then. Are you happy?"

"Mostly."

"Your heart's not still broken, is it?" This in reference to a conversation we had on the phone some months ago, when it still was.

"No. I don't think so. Just, you know, big changes. New city. New, uh, course of inquiry, or whatever. Whenever you're about to move on from something, you wonder if you did it right, right? If you made the right decisions. If you got everything out of it that you could have. If you really sucked it dry, you know? Or if you're leaving meat on the bones."

"Huh. Well, I don't think you need to reproach yourself too much. You've done about as much living as anyone I know."

In the final analysis, I think so too. But everybody's got unlived parts of themselves, and those are the dangerous parts. Those are the parts you go projecting onto other people and then grasping after, thinking you'll be whole.

"Yeah. Hey, listen, I'm going to have another glass of wine and then I'm going to burst into tears, OK?"

And I do. And Sammie is so good about it, so good and nice. He doesn't look around to see if anyone else is looking at us. He sits with me and after a little while he reaches across the table and squeezes my wrist, but only very gentle and not for too long because he would never want to do anything, you know, creepy.

After I sprained I had to walk carefully. I found out I'd been bearing my weight too far to the outside of the foot, stretching the ligament out imperceptibly, constantly, til it give way under no provocation at all, really, the slightest shift of weight.

Injuries are the best teachers. Some teacher of mine told me that years ago, when I was in the hospital. It was golden to me at the time. In the cemetery later, afternoon-drunk, wine-drunk, the drunk of easy tears, I sit on my stump holding my ankle, pressing into the healed spot, wondering if there's supposed to be something there or if it's OK that there's an empty space.

2011-03-09T17:27:00.000-08:00

San Francisco tomorrow for grad school interview. Bought a dress to wear. Gray silk, very pretty. Was supposed to have lunch with the engineer today but he bailed on me by text right before. I was at work, giving the sink a final wipe-down with dilute bleach, last thing I do before I go home for the day, when my phone buzzed in my pocket.

Working. Can't do lunch. Can leave early and meet your somewhere though.

He wants to give me money. He brought it up when I told him last week I was going. For traveling he said. Spending money.

I pretend I don't know this. Pretty busy this afternoon. See you when I get back, OK?

Want to give you some cash.

That's so sweet. I don't need a thing, tho. See you when I get back?

My next text back to him is going to say, I'm not your fucking daughter. I don't know why this money thing is so loaded for me, if it's just compulsive self-sufficiency or what. I wish we could just hang out.

Last time we had lunch he felt me up over coffee, grabbed my knees and spun me to face him across the corner of the table. He said, "You don't wear a skirt for me for a year and now you have to go and ruin it with tights? That depresses me." His thumbnail found a rib in my tights and traced it up the inside of my thigh.

"How's Beth?"

Beth is his new girlfriend. The three of volunteered at a shelter for stay dogs over Christmas. She seems nice.

He straightened slightly, kept hold of my legs. "She's fine. We're not seeing much of each other, actually."

"Really? Why?"

He shrugs. "I don't know. She wants to - whatever you say. Take it to the next phase. I try to tell her I'm too messed up to be in a serious relationship. I can't make anybody else happy if I don't know how to be happy myself, right?"

I nod, because this sounds like a sensible thing to say, but I've heard from him it a million times now and I don't nod as much as I used to. This is a re-occurring theme of his, this not being happy, not knowing how. It comes up at every turn, like his bitterness against his mother, like his chronic pain and the shifting roster of pharmaceuticals with which he attempts to manage it.

"You don't feel happy when the two of you hang out?"

"No. I mean, I like her. But I don't feel anything lately, about anything. I don't even care about sex anymore. It's like I'm watching myself all the time."

"Huh. Well. She really seems to like you."

After I say this I wonder if I mean it or if I just think it's a nice thing to say. He is not an easy man to like -- exacting, tactless, with a spiteful sense of humor and a childish pleasure in being difficult. He is also, in the long-run, a very good and loyal friend but to notice this you have to watch the things he does and ignore the things he says, and this can be trying.

We went to dinner after we left the shelter, he and Beth and I. I watched him pick her apart until she finally slumped forward over the table, burying her face in her hands while I compulsively read the menu over and over and over like I was ten years old having dinner with my parents. When I couldn't stand it anymore I got up and went to the bathroom. Beth came in while I was washing my hands and something about the way her eyes met mine in the mirror made me say, "You know, Maurie's bite is really a lot worse than his bark."

"I know." She tossed her head, leaned forward toward the mirror and seemed to be examining her nose. "How long have you two known each other, anyway?"

"Gosh. Uh. A few years, I guess. It doesn't seem that long, but it is."

"Uh huh. So how did you meet?"

"In a yoga class." As far as I know, this is still the cover story.

"Oh, right. He told me that."

Good. Great. "Yeah, we just kind of hit it off."

Her eyes meet mine in the mirror again. I think I see a tinge of disbelief. "You guys seem close."

"Yeah, well. He's a great guy. A good friend. We have a lot in common, I guess."

"Really." I think she wants to ask me, like what? But I dry my hands off and pick my purse up off the counter.

"See you."

"See you."

She has a right to her suspicions. In truth, it is actually all far more sordid than she probably imagines. Her boyfriend met me like most men meet me, by paying me to take my clothes off. The road from there to here was long and winding, checkered with permutations of loneliness and companionship and affection and hostility, the undue influences of money and sex, the fear of death, and the milk of human kindness. And now we are friends. What the things are exactly that we have in common I couldn't tell you, but we are mutually concerned with one another's well-being, and if there's more to being someone's friend please tell me what it is.

So she is right to think it's fishy but at the same time if there's anyone whose legs her boyfriend could be groping under a table over lunch she'd might well want it to be me because the reason he likes me is that he can't make me cry and the reason he can't make me cry is because we are not and have not been and will not ever be in love.

I wish he'd let the money thing go, though. My phone buzzes in my pocket again and I don't look at it because I don't want to know what it says. I finish wiping out the sink and throw the dishcloth in the hamper. My coat is by the door. San Francisco in the morning and a gray dress to wear.

2011-02-25T10:48:00.000-08:00

dream

2011-02-22T11:16:00.000-08:00

I am on the bus and I see I have missed my stop. We are way out in nowhere country, gray sky and grass the color of dirty water. I decide to stay on the bus until it turns around and comes back. I am angry because I will be late.

My mother is in my bedroom, going through my dresser drawers. What's this? she says. What's this? What's this? My dancer clothes spill out of her hands and make a history. Fishnets, sequins, fringes. Garterbelts. Stockings soft as whispers. Silk nightgowns.

I'm sorry, I say. I'm sorry. I just thought they were pretty, that's all.

She screams at me and her voice is a terrible wind and my father is there and his voice is also a terrible wind. They will destroy me, so I fight them like gods always have to be fought, with everything, for your life. I scream back at them, You should be proud of me. I was never afraid. You talk about compassion and loving your neighbor and looking for God in everyone, but I lived it and I never shut my eyes to anyway, not once, I never turned away and the winds rip my words out of my mouth.

Back on the bus. We stop in a kind of junk yard. I tell the driver I missed my stop. I'm waiting to go round again. He says this bus only goes one way. I have to get off now.

In the junkyard there is a shelter built out of wrecked things. Most of it is underground. I go inside. Two children are playing on a dirt floor. They stop and look up at me with eyes the color of mirrors. I ask them if they are happy. They say they are.

2011-02-21T15:15:00.000-08:00

Lunch with Caroline, my old boss. We settle in and I ask about her kids and then after they bring us drinks I ask her how things are at the studio. She shrugs. "Drama," she says.

"More trouble with the police?"

"No. No more police. But it got broken into. Well, not really broken in. I gave this guy a key, this guy I was dating for a little while. When we broke up I didn't think to get the key back and he broke in and stole my laptop and tore up all my lingerie."

"Jesus. Are you serious?"

She nods. "You remember that kimono you liked?"

"The blue one? With the cranes?"

"No, the black. With the little red flowers. He tore it right up to the hip. What a freak, right?"

"Seriously."

"So I changed all the locks. I think he was stealing money from me, too. Anyway, other than that things are good. What are you doing now?"

I tell her I'm working and going to school, and she says, "You're so industrious. Not me. I'm not what you'd call motivated."

"That crazy. You work all the time." She is always changing her website, tinkering with her advertising, maximizing profit margins, justifying charging the highest rates in town and flipping the bird to the hobbyists in the adult review boards.

"Well, it's different when you're making a lot of money. I don't think I'd roll over in bed for ten dollars an hour. I don't know what I'd do if I couldn't do this. I've had tons of other jobs and I always end up quitting."

"Well, I know what you mean. I mean, I do miss it."

"The money?"

"Sort of. I do OK right now, though. But being able to, you know, turn my body into money whenever I felt like it. It was like a super power. Do you know I mean?"

"Yeah. Like, you can wake up in the morning with nothing by the time you go to bed you'll have a grand in the bank."

"Yeah."

Because you can lose it all, over and over again, and make it all back, and you're never stuck in one place. You never have to keep your mouth shut and do what you're told, never have to be anybody's idea of a good sport, a sweet girl, a little trooper, not ever again, not for more than a few hours, anyway.

"It's not just the money, though. I mean, I really miss it."

"The clients?"

"I mean, not specifically, really. But yeah. I don't know if I was really helping people or whatever, but I did feel like I was making connections with people. They come in and really show themselves to you and talk about stuff they can't really talk about with anyone in their lives, and I would hear them and not judge them. And that means something, you know? People don't have that many chances to talk about that stuff and be heard and not be judged."

"Well, I do think that helps people," Caroline says. She would say this, of course. This is exactly the kind of service she advertises, with some more stuff about goddess energies and ecstatic bliss states, but in the end it really all boils down to this."

"I think so, too."

I miss feeling so close to the raw nerve centers of things. I am not very social, and small talk makes me tired. If I'm going to engage with someone, it might as well be real. People are never casual or superficial when it comes to their sexuality, not really, or if they are that in and of itself is fascinating.

And then, there was a kind of grace in being a fallen woman in my own mind. A set of questions I didn't have to ask myself anymore. Like, Am I normal and Would people like me if they really knew everything about me? because No and Not all of them, probably.

I remember back in high school after some new bout of experimenting how I'd curl into myself thinking, "Oh God now I've really done it, really gone too far." Feeling terrible, and also relieved of the awful weight of being good.

I put my spoon down on the table harder than I mean to. Throw it, really. I say, "I work in a bakery and teach yoga to children. How fucking wholesome is that? I don't have any secrets anymore."

I'm shouting, but in a normal tone of voice, because you never know who's listening. Caroline chews a bite of food and swallows, staring at me the whole time with her habitual expression of mild surprise. "Well," she says. "You know you can always come back and work for me. I'd love to have you back. My little strawberry blonde."

I knew she'd ask me if I brought it up. I didn't know what I'd say. I still don't. I spread my hands and shrug.

She's warming to the idea now. "It'd be so easy, love. You wouldn't have to lift a hand. Someone would take all your calls and make all your bookings for you and all you'd have to do is show up and do what you do."

"I don't know. I don't even know if this make sense. It's just this weird feeling, missing it. I wonder if I'm -- I don't know --addicted or something."

"Well, how long has it been? Six months?"

"Six or seven. Maybe eight."

"You're not addicted, honey. Me, I'm addicted. I told you, I couldn't do anything else. I mean, I've even been thinking -- " she leans forward and lowers her voice even further, "--I've even been thinking about doing full service. And you know I've never done that, never offered that. But I feel like if I'm going to have the kinds of experiences I've been having with men -- I mean, if men are just going to drain me dry anyway, at least I could be getting paid for it. Know what I mean?"

I nod.

"Anyway, you should really come back. I mean, you can't pay for school working at a bakery, can you? I can have clients for you right away. Tonight if you wanted."

I'd never work for Caroline again. She's careless. She makes enemies who call the cops, and she gives keys to the studio to sketchy guys who rip up lingerie.

"I don't know. I'll think about it. I'm tempted. But."

She pouts. "I don't think you're tempted at all."

"I'll think about it. Really."

"Well. I'm a bad friend, aren't I? Here you're telling me you think you're addicted and all I want to do is seduce you back."

"It's OK. I like being seduced by you."

And I let her pay for lunch, because she can turn her body into money any time, and I can't anymore.

2011-02-02T13:02:00.000-08:00

Coming home on the bus, twilight. It is cold and has been getting colder all day and then I see a bear, standing at a trashcan by the bus-stop near the highway, not too far from the bar that used to be the Crazy Lady when I danced there a million years ago but is now the town's only all-Spanish strip club, Chicas Bonitas.

Of course it cannot be a bear, but I have been reading Arnold Mindell and trying to practice what he calls the second attention. So I watch the cannot-be-a bear rummage through the trash can until the bus pulls up and then it turns around and turns into a woman who gets on the bus and sits down next to me. "Hey, honey," she says. "What're you reading?"

I close my book so she can see the cover: Essentials of Statistics for the Behavioral Sciences.

"Is it any good?" she asks.

I say it is pretty good.

"You must be in college."

"I am."

"Smart girl. I got a degree, too, you know. Course, I'm flying a sign now. Lookit me." She laughs.

"What did you study?"

"English. Literature. I was a school teacher. In South Florida. Course I wish I was there today."

We nod knowingly at each other and pantomime shivering, rubbing our arms with our hands. Her knuckles are red and chapped and so are mine. Lately I have been noticing my age is showing up faster in my hands than in my face.

"I liked to party, though," she says. Her eyes drift. "That was always my problem. I was good-looking, though. You know. You know, girl." She nudges me. "I got caught with a kilo of coke."

"Oh. Wow." I look at her, trying to see the good-looking, partying, South Florida school-teacher. Her skin is blown and sun-baked to a desert brown. Her hair, dyed blonde at some point, looks harsh as a bristle brush. Her eyes are the color of amber, and then they catch my own with a spark and I see it. I see her on beach in a white dress where waves like champagne bubbles lick her feet and the wind tosses her hair out behind her.

The air around her is stale and rich with booze and cigarettes and her own ripe flesh. I don't mind it. "Did you go to prison?" I want to know.

She laughs. "Hell, yeah. In Florida. South Florida. I do OK, though. I still got it. My last boyfriend was seventeen years younger than me, you believe that? He was a deejay. At a titty bar I was working at."

She straightens, looks at me. I wasn't a dancer," she says. "I was a cocktail waitress." He face relaxes back into a grin. "Still, though, you know. You know. I'm telling you, girl, I got it. Been there, done that. I been there and done that, girl."

I nod, reach up and pull the cord that tells the driver to stop.

"You getting off? This your stop?" She looks out the window and something, I don't know what, clicks together in her brain. She puts her hand on my arm, protectively. "Hey, honey. You're not staying there behind the Shell station are you? That's a...bad place."

I promise her I'm not. She strokes my arm. He eyes clear, then cloud again. "That's right. Smart girl. College girl. I must stink like beer, girl. Sorry."

The bus stops. I stand up and put my bag over my shoulder. I tell her my name. She tells me hers. We shake hands. "Hey, honey," she says. "Hey, babe, do you have a dollar?"

I put my hand in my pocket. There is one dollar in there, exactly. Love is going to cost me something yet again, but this time only a dollar. I find it by feel and give it to her and get off the bus in the dark.

2011-01-18T17:25:00.000-08:00

School today; homework for Tuesday. I have to start keeping a calendar again, so I can write down things like, homework on Tuesday.

Luckily it's one of those 18 month cameras, so you can just rip out everything up to January and pretend it never happened. I got this calendar when I was taking bookings for my friend Caroline. So the first few weeks of the calendar is just names and phone numbers and lengths of time. Then I stopped, and after that there's just blank pages, weeks and weeks and weeks. Stuff happened in those weeks. But it was the same stuff every week, day after day, week after week, easy. Then it says GRE and some dates.

I never write down anything interesting, or I try not to. They're secret, squirrelly times, the times when I'm trying not to write things down. It's a hard behavior to arrest. A compulsive spilling out. Little lists. A line of words in a row that seems to make some kind of perfect of sense. Loopy things. To the extent possible I try to contain it to the little book I leave snugged in the bottom of my purse with the rubber band around it like a straight jacket. Sometimes it escapes onto the backs of envelopes. Lists. Things I can't forget. Things I ought to do. Lists of other lists.

Old memory: my brother holding a sheet of my own handwriting in my face. I see it, my loops and squawls. What is this, why do you do this, why are you always making lists. Snatching at it. oh my god, my lists. don't. don't you get it, this is how i keep the world in order. you don't know it but the only reason you are not flying off the face of the planet right now is that i have you on a list that says you can stay.

Letter: Can I call you "whore"?

2010-08-20T09:15:00.000-07:00

Dear Grace,

I noticed you use the term "whore" to refer to yourself. So I find myself wanting to use the term, but I wonder if I'm prohibited. Much like Dr. Laura caused a public out roar by using the "N" word in her radio show.

Can "whore" be used as a term of endearment by someone who isn't one? On this season's True Blood, Lafayette has started calling his cousin, Tara, "Hookah", but he does it in a way the conveys his deep love and respect for her. Maybe he gets away with it because he's black and can use words a middle aged white guy can't.

S.

Dear S.,

Speaking only for myself, I wouldn't like it one little bit if you called me a whore. While I would know you weren't trying to insult me, it would strike me as clumsy and tasteless.

My sex-worker friends and I don't call each other "whore." I know there are circles of friends in which that is totally cool, and that is fine by me. Friendships have their own cultures. If you are in a circle where it is cool to call each other "whore", you will know it. But if you have to ask, the answer is probably not only no, but fuck no.

See, whore, like nigger, is not a factual description. It is not a term of endearment. It is, in point of fact, an insult, loaded with layers of hostility and hegemonic oppression. When I invoke that word, I am dealing in some way with my ambivalence about the role and towards myself in the role. This is a minefield into which you would be a fool to tiptoe.

You cannot know where my head is at when I say the word "whore." You have no context for knowing. You don't know what it feels like to perform a sex act for money, or what it feels like to be insulted by daylight for the same things for which you are sought out at night, what it feels like to be handcuffed on the hood of a police car for doing work you choose and do well and which harms no one, what it feels like to be on the receiving end of a culture's desire and self-loathing and ambivalence around its sexuality. You don't know what it's like to be a whore. Maybe you think you can imagine, but you don't know it in your bones.

From time to time a subculture may choose to take in a word that has been used as a tool of alienation and oppression, a word that expresses not only "otherness" but the wrongness and dirtiness of that otherness. We may adopt it to claim it's power, play with it and bat it around to rob it of its sting, alchemize it through our experience into a term of inclusion and acceptance. But once we have done this, we can't help thinking of the word as ours. When you say it, it means something different, because you are speaking a different language.

Unfair? Sorry.

I know it's probably meant in a friendly spirit. You want me to know that you don't see me as different, or that you feel like the difference is casual enough to kid around about. But we are different. And maybe I'm the one to whom the difference isn't casual.

Sometimes the most genuine show of friendship is to admit what you don't know about someone, show them respect, and give them some space. See, for camaraderie to work, you have to be someone's comrade. And if you were really my comrade, you would already know that I don't like to be called "whore."

Love and Friendship,
Grace

deathbed confessions

2010-01-12T13:02:00.000-08:00

Here are the responses -- mine and those of the friends who were good enough to join me -- to my Facebook Writing Assignment, "Deathbed Confession."

Wool on the Barbed Wire
by Grace

You look familiar. You're not mine by blood. I never had my own children. Are you brother's daughter, my little string bean? My brother's daugter's daughter? It doesn't matter. I always thought blood-ties were over-rated anyway. It's nice of you to sit with me. That's enough to make you mine.

I want to tell you that I was born in the country, that I always thought of myself as a good, shy girl. Even when I was naked in nightclubs hustling strangers for cash, even when men shouted at me over the music, "What, YOU? Shy?"

Yes, I was always shy. I was born that way. I stayed that way my whole life. I learned to act in whatever way the circumstances demanded of me but I was always the person I was born to be. That's the first thing I want you to know.

When I was still young I left home and moved to the city. I learned how to make men fall in love with me so I could eat -- sometimes for a long time, sometimes just for the length of a song. I can't teach you how to do it. It's like learning to fly in dreams. You keep falling until you learn how to fall without hitting the ground.

Sometimes I fell in love, too, and when I did I always left part of myself behind, the way a sheep leaves it's wool on the barbed wire as it squeezes through. I was warned that this was a bad idea, and one day there would nothing left of me. This turned out to be incorrect. What's left of me is here in this bed, dying. The things I left behind me, whether they were found and kept and woven into something warm or whether they just blew away like dust, that's what will remain of me when I am dead.

All my life I had a dream. I called it by the names of cities and ambitions and lovers. I followed it down halls and towards horizons. It had a voice like a beautiful girl. It sang me to sleep in cold rooms at dawn.

Sometimes I thought my dream was called "being free." Other times I thought it's name was "being safe." Some days to stop it's piping voice I told myself there was no freedom and no safety, but it kept singing.

I never reached it. I never held it in my hand. I was always behind, following and now I know if I'd caught it would have stopped singing. It still sings, and so I still have something to follow.

Listen. If my advice means anything to you, I'd say don't avoid pain. Pain taught me some of my best lessons. Don't fall in love with pain either. After all, it's just a sensation. You could probably learn as much from joy or love, and if you're still listening I suggest you learn how. That's what I plan on doing, next time round.

The Magical Aura of Things I've Seen Firsthand
by S.

I guess it’s time for me to pass any final words on to you all. Since our family tree seems to be of the bonsai variety, it’s worth an attempt to preserve our dwindling family’s collective wisdom. Unfortunately, I can barely tell you anything about my ancestors and I suspect your generation will fare no better. Although I’m inclined to tell you about walking uphill both ways to school in the snow and my $1.60/hr first job, I suspect the world you’re inheriting will be much worse than anything I can exaggerate about surviving. When I was your age, a gallon of leaded gas was 74 cents, I could see two movies at the drive-in for $1 and my first apartment was $120/month. You’ll likely run out of gas, water, food, jobs and affordable places to live. We chose to mortgage your generation to maintain ours for longer than it made sense and I’m truly sorry for that.

Way back in 2009, I saw a movie about a man who lived for 15,000 years. He had witnessed many pivotal historical events and had over 20 degrees. Still, he found that he had little wisdom to pass on to the folks he was leaving behind. This seemed quite strange to me at first, but he explained that his educational degrees were often worthless 10 years after he earned them. It was impossible for any person to maintain his knowledge in a wide variety of subjects as the rate of change had been geometric for way too many decades. Keep in mind that every couple of years, mankind produces more data than the sum total of the previous 5000 years. There is little I can teach you that will be relevant next year, much less in twenty. No doubt, our greatest technical thinkers of today will all seem quaint and even naive, perhaps even in their own lifetimes. Brace yourself to never stop learning. It’s the only way you’ll survive.

Similarly, historical events are molded after the fact to make the memories more precious or otherwise marketable to the masses. The real stories are seldom as interesting or profound and who am I to try and deflate the magical aura of things I’ve seen firsthand. Go create your own history.

Better and Better
by some guy on Facebook

I know now, during my life, that I was always changing how I remembered who I was and what I accomplished in the past. Consequently seemed things just kept getting better and better for me until this dying part came up.

The Sunshine of Your Understanding
Anonymous

To my two glorious daughters:

Well, it's that time, I guess. The sand has almost passed through the hourglass. The candle is burning to a nub and is nearly quenched. The cereal box is starting to pour out just that sugary powder. The metaphors are becoming painfully strained. And girls, I don't need to tell you, this cancer is out of control. I'm in terrible pain. My only consolation these days is popsicles and palliative care. And your visits too, of course, my angels; that is, when I'm awake for them. I always rather preferred a bottle of Pinot Noir, but holy shit, I'm in the major leagues now, let's give it up for these narcotics...

Now is the time for simplicity. Now is the time for coming clean. Now is the time for you to know what you should know about your Dad.

Two things you already know: that I've loved you with all my heart, every day, and that you've always made me proud. Yes, these things you know, because I told you as often as possible, in my own bashful way. What you ceased believing at some point, and what your mother and I succeeded at (re-)convincing you of only after great effort -- is that you were, both of you, conceived in love, despite our divorce when you were at the tender ages of 14 and 10. You went through some years of shock and anger, but by the time you went off to college, you seemed to have cast aside the indignity of seeing your parents go their separate ways. At one time I thought we would never be forgiven. Now I bask in the sunshine of your understanding.

In the haze of my recollections, I die with no need to make apologies for my life. I enjoyed, often intensely, some of its thrills (love, sex, artistic accomplishment, sport), and also experienced some of its agonies (unexpected death, personal rejection, artistic blockage, loss of love). I regret not having taken more risks -- not because I wanted to "make my mark," but simply because the unlived life is not worth examining.

I helped when my help seemed useful. I acknolwedged my good fortune and gave to others, anonymously more often than not; whether or not I was generous in the big picture, who can say? But I gave. I avoided conflict, maybe too much in some people's opinion, but always in the spirit of "Live and let live." I managed my addictions with such care and dedication that you probably didn't even know them as such. But addictions they were -- private addictions for a (mostly) private man. In the big scheme of things, barely noteworthy.

Epitaphs are for egoists. I have no delusions about my mortality or my insignificance. You are mine, and I am yours. Enjoy this life, obey your spirit, and be grateful for your life in whatever way you see fit. That's all that matters. I will love you always.

Dad

Like Gold
Anonymous Internet Friend
This is my confession. I was always a lonely person, desperate for affection. When I was young, I got married to a girl that I found broken and vulnerable, and I sucked her in with half-truths and outright lies, just so I wouldn't be alone. But I treated her like gold, for all that, as I always treated anyone who showed me kindness.

Eventually, she left me. And she did terrible, terrible things to me when she did.

And then I met my second wife. I told her the truth about who I was, and she liked me anyhow, and I wooed her with dedication and an unswerving will that has seen me through all the bad times, and gotten me many things that I wanted in life.

But I didn't love her, even though I told her I did. I just didn't want to be alone.

It only occurred to me some years later that, at some point, I had fallen in love with her. I even knew when it clinched home. She'd had an epileptic seizure, about two years into our relationship. I remember finding her on the floor. Her breathing was so shallow that I thought she was dead.

It felt like my world was ending.

And that, I think, is when my love for her turned like the tumblers in a lock and clicked into place.

I never told her. I never will.

Good Songs on the Tongue
by Vader on Ice

I know you people. Your names are like good songs on the tongue. The doctor said… Well… I told the doctor to fuck himself. I been telling people that forever. People not in the room. Some in the dirt. Some sailing. Some looking into someone else’s eyes. I’ll tell you a trick. Anyone who says they know what you need is selling you a lie. All you ever need is a moment. In a storm, you need…

Your mothers and fathers were good. I maybe made them too hard. That’s why they cry at some movies. They only feel in the dark. They are blind and dumb in the heart. I always said I’d do it different than my old man. First thing I did was put his name on the boy. Like he did with me.

So. It’s very important you listen to me when I tell you to forget everything I ever told you. I’m the guy whose favorite song is from Hootie. I know you don’t know who that is. Was it great music? A lot of people hated them because a lot of people liked them. Do I remember the words?

Yes.

Let her cry. Let the tears roll down her face. And if the sun comes up tomorrow…

embarcadero

2009-07-06T13:23:00.000-07:00

After some soul-searching, this is the future of Grace Undressed:

This blog will remain at this site indefinitely, accessible to anyone. I also have a new blog, where I will be doing most of my writing from now on. Not saying I won't pop up here once in a while, but my life is weirder and darker than before, and requires a greater degree of privacy, in keeping with which, the new blog will be members only, available by subscription.

I commit to posting on the new blog no less than once a week, for not less than one year. I haven't got the ghost of an idea what I'll be doing a year from now -- my life now is a maze of temporary solutions -- but you will know as soon as I do.

General Public: A subscription is $25 -- the price of one lap-dance and one drink, or about what you would pay for a hardback copy of my book if I wrote a book, only this is more fun because I don't know the ending any better than you do. You can subscribe by making a donation to my PayPal account -- bright yellow button located over there in the side bar.

IMPORTANT: An invitation will be sent to the address registered with your PayPal account. So, if this address is not correct, please include the correct address in the message PayPal allows you to send with your donation.

Facebook Friends: Subscriptions are available to my imaginary friends at a reduced fee of $15 -- the paperback price.

Students, Artists, Sex-workers, and Sweet Young Things: It wouldn't be a party without you, so a number of slots are reserved with you guys in mind. Give what you can and/or write to me at graceundressed at g mail d0t c0m and tell me why you want to read. It will help if you a) have been a regular commenter in the past b) have a kick-ass blog of your own and/or c) spell and punctuate your e-mail carefully.

I hope to see you at the party. To those of you who cannot or choose not to subscribe, it has been great having you along and I wish you all the best. Maybe I'll publish a book one day and we can catch up then.

Peace. Namaste.

Grace

no experience necessary

2009-06-19T14:57:00.000-07:00

"What clubs did you dance in?" Tom wants to know. Just small talk, before the dancing starts.

Tom is some kind of attorney. He got divorced two years ago and has lived in this apartment ever since, which is weird because it doesn't look like anybody really lives here. There's a couch and a coffee table and a big TV and that's pretty much it. Nothing on the walls. No smell. This whole place is as bare of personality as a nice hotel.

"A few," I say. "But I started at the Crazy Lady."

I always milk this line for laughs. The Crazy Lady was a dump, a dive, squeezed into a little strip along the access road, between a porn store and a discount coffin outlet.

"No shit?" Tom says. "I used to go there in college. Wow. The Crazy Lady. I should have met you back then."

Yeah. Except back then there was no me. Back then there was only a scrawny stripper named Jordan in a ratty wig and before that there was nothing -- a tired teenage waitress on the late-late shift at a diner by the highway. Everything else sitting on this couch tonight, the long red hair and the gym body and the glossy lips -- all this I made up in the meanwhile.

My first day of dancing I walked out of the dressing room with my wig pinned down to my head with bobby pins. I'd filled out a W-9 in the office with the lady manager, who inspected my thong to make sure it was "legal" -- i.e. not transparent or break-away. And then she'd turned me loose.

There were only three or four men in the club, and they were all sitting with girls already. All except for one guy, about my age. Curly hair, I think. I walked up and stuck out my hand and said my name and then my mind went blank. Until this very moment in time I had had approximately three modes of social behavior: invisibility, impassioned earnestness, and -- method of choice with possibly attractive members of the opposite sex -- weird sarcasm. None of which was going to get me anywhere.

So I sat next to this young guy, this boy, although he hadn't exactly asked me to. I must have asked some questions, must have tried to make what I thought was small-talk. I guess I asked him if he went to the university; campus was just across the highway. I remember he said yes. I told him I went there, too. I wanted him to know that I was smart, that I could be anywhere I wanted right then, and I was there because I wanted to be. Not nervous. Not desperate.

I thought I saw him eyeing me, weighing me -- judging, and discarding. It didn't occur to me that he might be uncomfortable, embarrassed, or shy. In my panic, it was all, all about me. I saw his mouth turn thin and smug. I wanted to wipe that look off. I cared, suddenly, what he thought, this absolute stranger whom I would never know. I wanted to change his mind. I wanted to make him want me, make him know he was fucking lucky to have me sitting there, jumping to take my dress off for the low, low price of $20.

We ran out of things to say. There was an awful little pause. I asked him if he wanted a lapdance just to put and end to it. He looked at me sideways. "I think I'll pass," he said.

"OK."

I got up. The club was so small. There was nowhere to go but back in the dressing room, so I went. The "dressing room" was really just a short, cramped hallway behind the stage with a row of decrepit high-school gym lockers pushed up against one wall, covered in graffiti and torn, glittery stickers that said "99% Angel" and "Princess" and "Boys Suck." It smelled like mildew and cheap make-up and it was always cold. In those first weeks, I spent a lot of time back there.

I didn't give my first dance until the end of that first day, and I was so desperate by then to be giving one that I barely remember it. His name was Neil and he was pretty fat. When I was dancing at the Crazy Lady, I used to say a good day was a day when I didn't remember any of their faces.

The men there on the dayshift were guys who didn't have anywhere else to be. They were plumbers and electricians stopping in between jobs, day laborers who didn't get hired that day, retired guys living on fixed incomes. They didn't have much money, and all any of us girls wanted was to take that little bit away. Relations between the dancers and the customers were tense at best.

We knew they would give us the money, sooner or later -- not because they like us, but because we are the only option they've got. They knew if they waited till we were desperate we would beg the DJ to run a 2-4-1 special. Resentment and discontent hung in the air there like a smell. I taught myself a basic hustle of big eyes and persistance, my face wiped blank like a slate. Smile, nod, play dumb but not too dumb: a bubble-gum naivete -- just smart enough to understand your jokes. Like me. Please like me. Feel sorry for me. Give me your cash.

The guy in the suit who walked in that one summer afternoon stuck out like a sore thumb. Aaron. He said his name was Aaron, and he said he only stopped in because the club is right off the access road to the highway and it's rush hour and traffic is standing still.

Sure. Whatever. I don't care. I just hope he brought some money with him, because it's getting boring sitting back in the dressing room watching little blond Celeste dreamily run her hair-dryer up and down her white arms and legs.

He is tall and thin, and going bald, not in a bad way. He has a nice smile. He does not seem to be angry at me for having breasts and charging money to look at them. When I ask him to dance he says yes right away.

I dance. In the dark, I look pretty. They always keep this club so dark, and my pale skin glows in the blacklights. Even my wig looks great, if you don't look too close. I have just learned how to glue false eyelashes to my upper lids. I made $42 on my first day, and I went to the dollar store and bought lipstick.

After the dance, Aaron keeps talking. I like him. He's funny, and smart. He also gives me $20 to sit with him while he talks. I like him even more. He starts telling me about himself -- his job, which sounds impressive. His house. The trips he's taken. I understand that this man in his suit is trying to impress me. Behind my stripper smile, I am really smiling.

I have an imperfect but solid understanding that this is probably not real. When he starts asking me out, I smile and shake my head. Bubblegum. Big eyes. I say, "You don't even know me."

He is leaning forward. His body is taught as a wire. "Listen," he says. "I'm a really great guy. I swear. I wrote a book about bicycling in Mexico. I'm awesome. You owe it to yourself." He's funny. I laugh. It feels -- interesting. I have a sense of having been handed a kind of power, but I have no idea what to do with it. It's not really real. It feels kind of real, though.

I remember him saying, "Please." I remember him pulling a pen out of his pocket and writing his name down, first and last. "Please, I have to go. What can I say or do in the next five minutes to convince you to come with me? Listen, I'm going down to the coast. I have a boat down there, a little sailboat. I want you to come sailing with me this weekend. Please."

I keep shaking my head. I run out of things to say. Finally, I take the napkin. I tell him I'll call. I feel guilty. My palms are sweating. At this point in my life, I have done very little lying.

"You will? No, you won't. Will you? Jesus."

He does leave, finally. I take the napkin back to the dressing room and tuck it into the front pocket of my backpack. Later I take it out and read his name to myself silently, first and last. It is a beautiful, alliterative name.

I see myself sitting at the prow of a little sailboat, dangling my feet down so the spray of each wave as we crest it slaps up the inside of my thighs. When I was small, my family had a little boat like this. We took it out in the summers, and had sandwiches with pimento cheese spread. Big motorboats would go by us, throwing up huge wakes that made our tiny boat rock and yaw.

But I am not ten and these are not the yellow-green waters of the Chesapeake. This is the gulf, and the waters are blue as steel. I hear seabirds and cracking canvas. My arms smell like sunlight and salt. At this time in my life, I do not even own a bathing suit; if I want to swim I wear cut-offs and a man's undershirt. They'll kick you out of the city pools like that, so I go to the greenbelt and wade down the muddy banks to swim. On the deck of Aaron's boat, my bathing suit is two-piece, yellow with white polka dots.

Aaron is on the boat somewhere behind me, at the rudder, but I do not see him. Later I will go back and he will be there. My mind never goes any farther than this.

"Are you ready to dance?" Tom asks.

"Born ready." I put the music on, stand up and put my hands on his shoulders. I start to sway. I start to pull my shirt over my head, and teasingly turn away just at the moment when my breasts would pop out.

"Wow," Tom says. "You're great. I wish I would have met you at the Crazy Lady. We should have met then."

I laugh and finish taking off my shirt, toss it at him. Sure. We should have met years ago, when I was young. You were married then, of course, and I wouldn't have left a club with a customer to save my life, but if this is your dream I'll dream it with you: We would have been the ones to save each other and neither of us would be here now, in this barren room that still smells like paint making this transaction of skin for cash, survival for survival.

Sure, baby. Sure.

not now, but soon

2009-06-05T19:09:00.000-07:00

Jim found my blog and read the last post. He e-mailed me and we had one of those largely pointless exchanges singular to people who spend too much time online.

But my very real chagrin -- because nobody should have to read another person's uncensored opinion about themselves, ever -- was squelched for good around the time he envinced to be shocked (but shocked!) that I would publish something as private and personal as our lunchtime conversation online. Given that the culture of review-posters more or less revolves around the online airing of intensely private moments -- who does what and for how much and will she take the condom off -- this seems just a little rich.

So, Jim, this is what it's like to be reviewed. I don't blame you if you don't like it. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't either.

Enough of that. But it is a good reminder that times have changed and the days are over when I can blithely talk a ton of shit about whoever I choose (names and identities properly obfuscated) with the security that no one is really listening. It's been a year since the Boing-Boing folks showed up, and once I got over the initial shock, it has been a hell of a party.

Still, times have changed. Blogging has been a lot like dancing in a certain way, with the mirror-twin pleasures of exposure and anonymity. The perfect drug for shy exhibitionists like me -- naked on a lighted stage in front of a house of strangers, and no one knows my name, or anything about me, really, except what I choose to show.

But the island of my privacy is getting a little smaller all the time. If you've been reading for a while, you know I don't post as much as I used to. I have to think harder before I do, every time. For months, I've been thinking about quitting. I went out and bought myself a journal, the real kind, with covers. It's good, but it's not the same. I've thought about running away and starting a new blog, but I'd miss your tiny voices, my old imaginary friends.

So I don't know what I'm going to do, but something's going to have to change. Maybe not quite, quite yet. But soon.

the hobbyist

2009-06-01T17:10:00.001-07:00

There is something preposterous about Jim and at the same time something mysterious.

Jim was a customer of mine. Sort of. Not a great one. He never bought many dances, and he talks a lot -- softly, quickly, continuously. There never is a good moment to get up and walk away. You just have to get up and go. Then again, the things he says are fascinating, whether they are true or not. Some of them seem like they could not possibly be. Others I know for myself are fact.

I used to ask him to tip me for my time. "Oh my God," I would say. "I could just sit here and listen to you talk all night." (True.) "I've totally lost track of time." (Not true. I am a cyborg with a digital time-keeping device implanted in my lower left eyescreen. I know exactly what time it is all the time and every ten minutes an alarm goes off that says you owe me money.) "I could have made a hundred dollars by now if I was working!"

Gee whiz mister, and he would reach deep into his pocket and pull out a money clip stuffed with cash -- now who on earth carries a money clip stuffed with high-denomination bills? I have to think that the bottom 3/4 of it is all ones with just some Bens and Grants and Andies dressing up the outside -- but he peels off $100 and gives it to me. And I open up my eyes like tin cups, Gee thanks mister.

A friend who works at another club he frequents told him I was dancing privately now. He e-mailed me. We agreed to go to lunch. I did not think Jim would probably be very interested in getting private dances from me. Jim's extracurriculars are at another level. He is what you call a hobbyist, one of those men for whom paying for sex is not only an expediency but a lifetsyle and an all-consuming passion. They hang out in the Locker Room forum on ASPD and coin the acronyms -- DFK, GFE, DATY -- that make some of my favorite sex acts sound like something being traded on the NYSE. They have elaborate personal scoring systems for the women they pay for sex, based on their age, their looks, whether they are pro or non-pro. They have ATF's. They have types.

Jim's type is young. Not dancers -- waitresses. New waitresses, green but not innocent, knocked around a little bit already but still fool-hardy. He takes them out to lunch and opens the door for them. He treats them to the hair salon and the nail salon and Nordstrom's for a pretty dress and a pair of shoes and then to a comedy club downtown and then back to a hotel room where they fuck, for about the price she would have made in tips that day if it had been an average-good day.

Jim tells me all this over lunch, explicitly. Some of it I knew or guessed before. He describes his last girl for me, tells me her name and I remember her: a pugnacious little cocktail waitress with glossy, dark corkscrew curls and pale, slender arms and legs. She was 20. Jim says she used to meet him at the club and leave with him, ditching her car in the parking lot so her boyfriend would think she was at work.

He says she's a dancer now, but not doing well. She called him up a few nights ago, panicked, begging for money. He met up with her and gave her a few hundred bucks. "I told her she shouldn't have started dancing," he said. "She's the kind of girl you want when you can't have her."

As always, I am appalled and transfixed. I feel like I'm talking to an invented character. He can't be real. Maybe he is a woman. Maybe he is a pathological liar. Maybe he is a kingpin of the underground. I just don't know. And always so open with me, I don't know if he is confessing, or oblivious, or truly, gloriously unashamed.

"I like girls who've never been anywhere or done anything," he told me once. "They're easier to impress." And another time: "I want someone I can't picture myself with in real life." And again, "I don't want someone who might make me feel insecure. You know us men, our fragile egos."

I can't say I've known a lot of men with egos quite this fragile, or haven't known them well. I try to be a little careful with the kind of men I know.

He says things like that, us men. He speaks for all men everywhere. He speaks for men everywhere now when he tells me that I'll never make a living doing what I'm doing, just dancing. "You know guys are going to be disappointed when they find out there's no desert menu," he says.

"Everybody knows that up front," I tell him. "I make it really clear. The only guys who do business with me are the ones who want what I offer."

He shakes his head. He tells me it will never work, and when that doesn't get me, he leans across the table, whispering, covering my hand with his: "Listen, honey, it's not safe. Sooner or later you're going to get raped. It happens to all the girls. Can't you just work for an agency? At least you'd have somebody looking out for you."

I am pretty confident there is no agency out there that would screen as obsessively as I do, that would look out for me as well as I look out for me. With all that, I know there is a non-zero chance that something bad will happen to me, but that's true every time you leave the house. Or even if you don't leave.

Besides, I can't really work for an agency because I don't do sex.

"I can't work for an agency. I don't have sex."

"I know, honey, I know. Say anything you want, but sooner or later some guy is going to make up his mind he's getting laid and he's going to get laid, understand? It always happens. Listen to me. I used to be part owner of an agency in Houston, and it happened to one of our girls, and it was a guy we all knew, a guy who was part of the community. It happens, you know. Guys are guys."

Which is not a particularly great argument for agencies and the screenings that they do, or for references, or for the so-called community, or for Jim. I don't know what to say. I'm still deep in the empathy-space I go into when I'm working, even though it is perfectly obvious to both of us by now that we are not doing business together.

I'll think about this story later and I'll want to say, Fuck you. Fuck your part-time pimping and fuck you for getting your girl raped. You are a lousy pimp, maybe lousier than most pimps, because you're really a mortgage broker or something and it's only a hobby to you so you don't even give the fuck you would give if it was your livelihood.

I shrug, fork up a cluster of salad. I tell him I feel about as safe as I've ever felt.

"But, sweetie, can't you at least go to a modeling studio or something? Somewhere you'd be safe. Somewhere somebody would look after you. I'm just worried about you, OK? You're a fantastic woman and I would really hate to hear that you got hurt."

I think of the modeling studios you drive past as you leave town: Mardi Gras, Ramses, Foxxies, The Doll House. Weird little storefronts tucked into shady little strip malls, next to porn stores and sex shops and the cheaper kind of nail salons. I've never been inside of one, but I imagine it's a lot like the lower-end clubs I've worked in -- the Crazy Lady or the Glass Slipper in Boston. It's small. The carpet is damp and smells damp, so at the end of the day you need a thirty-minute shower just to get the smell off you. People come and go in dark hallways lit with black-lights to make your white G-string glow like some kind of underwater fish. It feels like 1 a.m. at every time of day and it's always hovering over you, the silent pressure of everyone else is doing it and if you want to make money you will too.

"Nah," I say. "I think I'm pretty happy with the way things are going."

He throws his hands up in a heavens-what-will-we-ever-do-with-you gesture. "I guess you know best," he says.

I sneak a look at him over my next tine of salad, sopping with thin vinagrette. This is not really a very nice restaurant. I don't care if the menu is in French.

I would not have sex with Jim for any amount of money the two of us could ever agree on. Not just because he's ugly. I stopped looking at people's outsides a long time ago. It doesn't make sense when you're a dancer. What people looks like doesn't matter. What matters is if they will look in your eyes and listen when you say no and touch you like they would like to be touched instead of fondling you and rolling you around like a melon at fruit stall.

It's not just because Jim's skin looks like the top of my kombucha jar. I'm not that shallow. Or maybe I am. And if I am, well, then I wouldn't make a very good escort, even if I wanted to. God knows I haven't got any moral or ethical dilemma with it. The two main components of escorting -- money and sex -- are both things I like a lot. But goddamn if I'm not just picky.

After lunch Jim walks me to my car. "You know," he says on the way, "I've always thought you were one of the bravest women I ever knew."

Huh?

He makes a fluttery gesture with his hand over his belly. "You know. The scar."

Oh. That. I don't even think about it anymore.

"You never covered it up. You were just out with it. And all the other girls worrying about how to pay for their boob jobs."

Smile. Laugh. Shrug. Hug. I don't have anything left to say.

One time he told me he'd never ask a woman to sleep with him if he didn't know she'd say yes. "I don't want to be shot down," he said. "Men hate to be shot down."

Everybody hates to be shot down, not just men. He comes close though, as he's hugging me goodbye. "If you ever want to do the professional girlfriend thing, you know who to call first," he says. "When you're ready for somebody to take care of you."

End hug. Disengage. Smile again. Still deep in empathy space, although we no-sale'd so long ago I couldn't even find you the receipt. So maybe the empathy thing is not something I do for the customers. Maybe it's something I do for myself.

I roll the window down to wave as I pull out of the parking lot and then he's gone except for the smell of his cologne which will make it with me all the way home.

rough

2009-05-15T09:32:00.000-07:00

I hate my haircut. I really hate it.

I'm just going to thin it out a little for summer, the stylist said. I said, OK, not too much though.

She holds the mirror up so I can see the back of my head and it is -- yes, it is thin. Little rat-tails hanging down my back. Well, it's too late. She can't put any back.

I get home and the boy at my house tells me I look like Aileen Wuornos. Aileen Wuornos, if you don't know, was a north Florida roadside prostitute -- abused child, unwed mother, teenage runaway. We just watched a documentary about her. Sad life. According to her court testimoney, she was raped by at least one john, sadistically -- afterwards, she said, he poured rubbing alcohol on her vagina and her anus, to make it hurt more. She shot him dead.

She went on to shoot six more johns, all of whom, she says, were trying to rape her. But you have to think that after so much hurting by so many, the lines got blurry in her mind about who was trying to hurt her and who wasn't, necessarily. She was put to death by lethal injection in 2002, but not before the police made a deal with the productions companies and there were a couple of movies about it and everybody made a lot of money.

Anyway, she's dead now.

"Just, you know, how it's kind of thin at the bottom and poufy on top," says the boy. It's a spectacularly cruel comparison, and I don't think the boy means to be this cruel. I don't know what he means. I look in the mirror. Thin little rat-tails and poufy bangs. It's supposed to be trendy. This is what I get for letting a hipster stylist cut my hair when I am not really a hipster. North Florida psychotic roadside prostitute death-row hair.

My hair is one thing about me I've always thought was beautiful. It's the color of lightly tarnished copper and it's shiny and thick. When I was fifteen it was down to my waist. I let it hang in my face -- a curtain of lovely between the world and my ugly mug. That year somebody took a picture of me. I hated having my picture taken, anyway. The picture came back and it was so fucking hideous. Thick stripes of hair and a thin strip of face in between: Wednesday Adams scowl and big purple circles around my eyes like somebody punched me twice. I demanded my mother cut my hair off, all of it. She did. I mourned. Not pretty anymore.

A few years later, I'd learned to give myself bangs by pulling my hair to the front, twisting it into a spiral and snipping it off with table scissors. I was 19 and proud of being rough. My everyday uniform was wifebeater undershirts and jeans rolled up to mid-calf. I flicked my cigarette ash into the cuffs. Burn marks from working as a grill cook latticed up my arms and made me feel hard and good.

But that was ten years ago and today I'm meeting a new dancing client. On the drive to the coffee shop I keep checking my hair in the rearview mirror. Sometimes it looks OK and sometimes it really doesn't. Also, I've got band-aids on both elbows from where I flew ass-over-handlebars off my bike Saturday while attempting to drink lemonade and ride downhill. It was a good fall; I covered my face and took it all on my forearms, leaving big smears of DNA on the pavement. At least I didn't hurt the moneymaker. But I've also got a spray of dime-sized purple bruises on my thigh where it hit the asphalt. They look like they could be finger marks, which is bad; customers wonder if you're getting punched up at home. I look in the rearview mirror again. I feel rough, and today it doesn't make me feel good.

This business is all about looking good, and not just good, but expensive. Like a luxury product, like someone who can set their price and stick to it, someone who can say "Don't touch me there" and mean it. Desirable. Professional. Sought after. In control. You can't look desperate. You can't look second-best.

I could cancel, but dudes get cagey when you do that and sometimes that's the last you hear from them. Unless your leg is in a cast, it's better to just play through. I get to the coffee shop early, order my latte and sit down with my book. Over the top of Mandy Aftel's Essence and Alchemy, I scout each man who comes through the door. I think it's the guy in the plaid shirt with the blue eyes. He pays for his iced tea and meets my eyes. Smiles, walks towards me. Yes. OK. I stick out my hand.

sweat

2009-05-04T12:53:00.000-07:00

I went away for a week last month, north and north and farther north. I took a plane and then a train and then the venerable Sixty of Sixty's Place met me at the station and delivered me the last leg of my journey, into the mountains.

Sixty is not sixty and he does not have hair growing out of his ears, so I lose a bet with myself and must now buy myself dinner. Indeed, he is charming and witty and literate, as any reader of his blog might expect him to be. He is also sweet, which one might not expect. And, I suspect, sensitive, though I didn't get a chance to pinch him, so I can't say for sure.

A scheme had been floated to have lunch at Sixty's beloved Club M. and take a tour of the local beauties there, but at the last minute we didn't go. I think he got shy on me. We also didn't go panty-shopping at the outlet mall. Instead we spent a couple of hours of a perfect, golden afternoon drinking wine in the bar of an empty restaurant.

He dropped me off at the yoga institute, where I spent the first day being cynical and exasperated, and the second day alternately crying my eyes out -- the good kind -- and sweating my ass off in the darkness of the cedar-scented sauna, til all the water drained out of me and I was empty as a shell.

It was good. Then I went around writing down interesting things people said in a notebook, which I lost on the train home.

I remember writing down: Cultivate the space between thoughts.

And: Brahman, Vishnu, Shiva: create, sustain, destroy.

And: Resist the urge to make life a story. Life is not a story.

And: Learn to discriminate purusha from prakrti. You are not your possessions. Your are not your name. Your are not your body. Your are not your recollections of the past or your fantasies of the future. You are not your discomfort or your disease. You are not your impulses or your lusts. These things are ripples on a pond. You are.

I'm sorry I lost my notebook. I think there were other good things in there. Hopefully they made some impression on me somewhere.

In the train station, waiting: two women in the bathroom, standing by the sink.

"I didn't know you were J.R.'s girlfriend," says the one with the sunglasses and the full-sleeve tattoos. "I used to get all my shit from J.R. But he don't return my calls no more."

"He got a new phone," says the tall girl with the pink bandana. "You should call him again."

"Yeah, cause I been getting all my stuff from Donald. And, you know -- rip-off."

"Yeah. Did you know he got robbed? Him and his girlfriend. All their stuff, and their money, and their T.V. It was somebody that knew them, too."

"Now, that is just messed up."

"Yeah, but you know we all been there. I know I've been, just, going crazy thinking, what am I going to do, cause I've got to have my medication, and I don't know what I'd do for it."

"Yeah."

The world goes on singing a song that sounds an awful lot like a story sometimes. The train is late and we all sit outside on the curb by the tracks in the early spring afternoon light, like a row of blackbirds. Finally it comes.

I love the way trains slice through the landscape like a slow knife through butter. Trains go behind the backs of things. We see the hidden faces of the towns, the backs of people's houses, where the trash cans are. We pass a prison yard with razor wire.

We go through woods that are barely beginning to green, the first hint of buds on trees looks like a layer of frost. Locals tell me it's been a slow spring. I miss slow springs. In Texas, spring comes so fast. On Sunday you see little bright green buds, and by Friday they are full-blown leaves. If you have a deadline the week that spring comes, you can miss it.

For a while, we run neck-and-neck with a little river. It is not a sunny day, but the water is full of lights. I try to see these things like I have never seen anything before. I try to cultivate the space between thoughts. I try not to make a story. I feel alive, a little more than when I left home, and that's a lot.

Shanti.

Shanti.

Shanti.

Om.

be my imaginary friend!

2009-04-28T13:32:00.000-07:00

For the truly insatiable, I now exist as a unit of social media on Facebook (Grace Fuller) and Twitter (graceundressed), even though I don't really understand what Twitter is for. If you're into these things, come find me!

Ed: To those who have expressed concern, no I am not giving up blogging in favor of tweeting. Just, this way I get to spy on your lives like you get to spy on mine. :)

in like a lion

2009-04-16T12:45:00.000-07:00

I remember this:

March 9, 2009.

Driving across the high and lonely West Texas plains in Jeff's Escalade, the fine gray rain turns into stinging gray ice. I cut our speed, although it's hard to make yourself go slow on these long roads that stretch on for hours between nothing and nothing. The broken yellow dividing lines tick off the seconds. Outside, the world aches with cold -- smoky lilac sky and miles and miles of winter-worn prairie grass frozen in mid-wave, the color of dishwater. Inside the car everything feels warm and safe, as though the outside were just a movie. That's why you have a big box of an automobile like this, I guess.

In the passenger seat, Jeff taps fretfully at his laptop and curses because he can't get a signal. Like there was any ghost of a chance of a signal out here in the million miles between Amarillo and Odessa, even without the weather turning nasty. Once upon a time Jeff was born in the country like me, but he's a city boy now through and through and he wants what he wants when he wants it with no interference from natural law.

The roads are getting slippery, but my feet feel sure and my legs are strong. I will take us through the storm. Like the car, I was made for this.

Last night, in the hotel, Jeff asked me to run a bath instead of a shower. I filled the tub and added bubbles from the hotel's fancy soap. We undressed and got in together. I leaned back on my side of the tub and let the hot water soak out the day's long drive. Jeff sat forward, reached for me, took hold of me, pulled me towards him. I made my body hard, a pillowcase full of coat-hangers.

"Don't worry," he said. "You're virginity is safe with me. Unfortunately. I haven't had anything like an erection in almost four years."

I made my body soft. He pulled my back tight against his chest, wrapped his arms around me underneath my breasts. I listen to his breathing as it slows. I do what I learned to do when I was dancing: I take pleasure in the pleasure that he takes in me. It works. Too well, maybe. I get lost inside the roles I play for other people, though never quite lost enough. In the end I always have to be myself; in the end, I always have to disappoint.

My legs are strong. I take us through the storm. The ice is picking up as we hit the wind-farms in Culbertson County. I've always loved driving through them, valleys of skyscraper-high turbines that remind me of giant electric fans. Like the fan my mother used to put next to my bed on summer nights and I'd put myself to sleep humming into it and listening to the spinning blades shake my voice to pieces.

A layer of ice must have built up on the turbines. They are still, all of them. Every giant fan frozen in it's flight against the purple sky. Everything is so still. Everything is so quiet.

In the bath, I made my body soft. I slowed my breathing to match Jeff's breathing. I took pleasure in the pleasure that I gave, though even at the time maybe I knew I was giving up too much, and I wouldn't be able to give that much much longer.

Jeff cleared his throat. "Once upon a time, in the jungle, there was a small monkey," he said.

He paused. With my eyes closed, I heard the vibration of his voice inside his body. I heard his voice inside my ear. I nodded my head against his shoulder: Go on.

Jeff is not really a mean guy. He's a kind guy and a funny guy, but his pain makes him fret, and the more he frets the worse it hurts. I watch his anger tick upwards, and that's when he starts to get mean about little things. I grew up this way. My method for dealing with unpredictable adults is all mapped out: Smile. Be cheerful. Act cute. Stay out of reach.

"The monkey thought of himself as a real playboy," Jeff said. "And he went all over the jungle asking the different female animals to have sex with him. And the female lion said no, and the female rhinoceros said no, and on and on. But finally the female elephant felt sorry for him, and she said yes."

Jeff is a large man. His chest is warm and solid against my back and for the moment it feels strong, like something I can rest against. It feels good to rest against another person's body. I nodded my head again. When I took this job I wanted something stable, something I could count on. Money I didn't have to hustle for, that I could get just for showing up to a certain place and doing a certain task, like regular people do. It has not worked out just like that.

"So the little monkey is going to town on the female elephant, and just then a coconut falls off a tree and it lands on the elephant's head. And the female elephant says, 'Ouch'."

Jeff is smiling. With my back turned and my eyes closed, I hear him smiling. Like everybody smiles right before they spill the joke, when they know the punch-line and you don't, yet. Jeff tightens his arms around me and kisses my cheek.

"And the monkey said, 'Suffer, bitch.'"

small things

2009-04-10T08:40:00.000-07:00

Scarlett glared angrily down at her pho and jabbed at the floating raft of noodles with her spoon. "I don't know why you don't just quit," she said.

I'd been telling her the things I don't like about my job. Small things, or they seem like small things.

On Monday, Jeff scolded me for unspecified "unprofessional behavior." I don't really know what I did wrong. I think I didn't do anything wrong. I think he was just in pain that morning and needed someone to take it out on. Or maybe I really am stupid in some way I don't even understand. When I left the house that afternoon I cried. That made me feel even stupider.

Last week he promised me $50 if I got exterminators out to the house to trap the raccoon in the attic by the end of the day. I did. He didn't give me my $50. He laughed when I asked for it. I didn't say anything else. I don't know why.

On Wednesday he asked me in the shower if I liked anal sex. I shook my head. What I meant was, stop. Please stop. "Well, what kind of sex do you like?" he wanted to know.

"Uh. That's private."

"Oh."

Small things, really. Aren't they? I don't know anymore. So I tell them to Scarlett and watch to see what happens. Sometimes I can't get angry. Scarlett doesn't have that problem. Together, we are like one normal person.

"He's a dick," she said. "Your boss is a dick. You know, just because somebody is disabled doesn't make them a nice person."

I don't know if Jeff is or isn't a nice person. I don't know if anyone is a nice person, really, or what that means. I know he hasn't been very nice to me lately. And I know I can't seem to get upset the way I should, which really is the scary part. I can't seem to stick up for myself. I can't seem to put my foot down. I don't know why. Maybe compassion really lays me open too wide.

Scarlett bangs her spoon down on the table so loud it makes the little waitress look at us. "I just don't like to think about anybody treating you like this," she says. My sweet mosquito. My little flame. "He's testing you, and he's not going to stop. Believe me, he won't stop. I know men like this. I knew men like this before I ever should have known men like this, and he will not stop. I don't want to be sitting here when you tell me what he did next."

I see water in her eyes and I know it stings. Her anger heats me, feeds me. Makes me feel like I know what to do. I don't know what to do. I don't know why I'm not angry myself. The things I've told her aren't even the real reasons I want to quit.

The real reason I want to quit is because I hate his soap, the transparent, light violet slime I wash him with every morning. The bottle says "Lavender" something; the smell is camphorous and sneezy with notes of tar. Somehow it fills every cubic inch of that big, empty house and hits me every morning when I open the door. It clings underneath my fingernails, so the days I go there I smell it on me for the rest of the day.

In desperation, I dig a sample of Chanel Allure Sensuelle out of the back of a drawer and start spritzing it on me on every morning before I leave on that long drive out to the hills. That way I smell like full-blown, heavy roses, syrupy vanilla and dirty, dark amber/pathouli funk. Expensive slut. I tilt my head down to my shoulder during the morning just so I can smell it.

I feel so sorry for Jeff. I'm so sorry he's in pain. I'm sorry he is so alone, sorry he has no one to love him. I'm sorry he's so angry and so sad that he has to yell at the girl who comes to give him his showers in the morning. I'm sorry that's the only power he feels like he has left.

I wish I could help more. I've done a few small things. I got the raccoon out of the attic. I think I've done all I can do. I wish it were more. But I've got to leave while I can, before he takes more from me than I want to give while I watch myself give too much and can't say no because I'm programmed to want to please the sick and ease the hurting. Because I'm helpless in the face of a certain kind of anger and a certain kind of pain.

Last night I had a premonition that I would go to work again this morning. I got there and opened the door and the smell of artificial lavender hit me in the chest like an icy, dirty wave. I knew I wouldn't be back again tomorrow.

dream

2009-03-28T10:42:00.000-07:00

There will not be any peaches this year. The Japanese beetles have got at them again, whole orchard is full of their metallic buzzing and strange smell like honey and rot. My mother is speaking to me, yelling. I don't understand the words but in the roar of her voice I hear I am a terrible daughter. I don't care about my family. I don't care about anyone but myself.

So soon. Just minutes ago, just now, the peaches were little green bumps like fuzzy christmas lights, now swollen sweet, too ripe to touch and too ripe not to rot. Rain of rotten fruit and the ground is slippery under foot. My teeth are rotten in my head. They shift against the muscle of my tongue, I feel them move. They are hollow as the dead bodies of bugs, fragile shells.

I have to get help. I have to hold still. If I do not move my mouth at all, if I do not open my mouth to speak. If I hold my lips and tongue quite still, and breathe shallowly. I will go somewhere. I will find someone who can help me, a man in a white coat will glue my teeth back into place and they will not fall into my hands with a rattle, pearl-white and empty as husks.

My mother raging over me. She floats above the ground. Tall, taller than me, as she is in life still. Her hair long again, because I am a child. She flies towards me and hovers in the air. I am a bad child. I do not love my family. I do not love anyone but myself. There will not be any peaches this year. The peaches are all rotten and the bugs are in them, tunneling.

I will find someone to glue my teeth together. They will not fall, if I am careful. If I am careful, and I do not move my mouth at all, I will not move at all and it will not be too late.

The escape artist

2009-03-04T17:54:00.000-08:00

Jeff clears his throat. "I like your breasts," he says. I am surprised. Not because this is a particularly perverted thing for him to say. We are, after all, buck naked, both of us, in the shower. But Jeff is one to maintain a certain professional distance. He is, after all, my boss. I have had this job for four days.

Jeff has some sort of condition. Medical professionals do not really know much about it or what to do about it, but one thing they know is that it does not usually hurt this much. Jeff hurts a lot. He is on pain-killers pretty much all of the time. I remember being on round-the-clock pain meds. Mornings are very bad, because the meds wear off through the night and you wake up hurting. Hurting is what wakes you up.

So I am there in the mornings. I make the long drive out to the ritzy address in the hills, park in his garage and punch in the code for his door. He is not talkative, especially if he had a bad night. Last night was a bad night. Jeff does not get out of bed when I let myself in the door. I go upstairs and he is naked under the sheets. He opens one eye. "Don't get too turned on," he says.

I laugh and go into the bathroom to undress. In a minute I hear the bed creak, and he joins me. He wraps his arms around me from behind and we rock gently side to side. Ostensibly, I'm here to help him bath and shave and dress, and to call the cable company and the pest exterminators and answer the phone, to look for the things he loses, to do a little yoga with him if he feels well enough, and make lunch and go home. But really, I'm here to touch him and for him to touch because it is touch, skin on skin, that seems to make the pain clear for a little while at a time.

In the shower, I adjust the water a little colder than I like it; luke-warm water is what he likes best. I squeeze a blob of shower gel into my palm and make a lather. I wash him from head to toe. He closes his eyes and lets the water run over his face. "May I touch you?" he asks. He always asks first, which I like. I say yes, and he wraps his arms around my waist. He rests his head between my breasts as I wash his hair, which is coarse and beautiful and thick as bristles on a brush. Today I shave the back of his neck and make the hairline particularly sharp and fine because he has a meeting in the afternoon. Then I shave his arms because tomorrow he's going to the hospital and he doesn't want the IV tape to hurt when they rip it off.

I rinse the soap away and turn off the water. His arms still wrapped around me, he kisses me between the breasts without opening his eyes. He turns his face into my flesh as if there were a place there that he could hide.

I got the job through an ad. That ad just said "assistant" but it was listed in the adult personals. "I'm looking for someone to help me shower and get dressed in the mornings," Jeff said in his e-mail. "It's humiliating enough being stripped down and hauled around like a side of beef. Maybe if a pretty, naked girl was doing it, it wouldn't be so bad."

Made sense to me, although when I try to explain it to my friend Nancy, herself an ex-stripper, the look she gives me says I won't be talking much about the job with anyone.

I notice that when Jeff hurts more, he wants more touch. He distracts himself by flirting, by making dirty jokes, by reaching out to pat my leg, to tuck the hair behind my ear. I don't mind. It makes sense to me. When he's hurting really bad, he just disappears. It looks like he's there, but he's not. It's a good trick. My mother could do it, too. Sitting around the house between chemo treatments with her flower catalogues in her lap and her eyes fixed no place.

I'd go up to her and shake her, saying "Mom. Mom. Mom." Til her eyes came back to me. It never occurred to me she might be happier where she was, with the tulips and the climbing roses, the gladioli and crocuses and lilies of the valley. I wanted her back with me.

Jeff opens his eyes. "Did you wash my hair yet?"

"Yes."

"OK."

I don't let myself think too much about how much Jeff hurts. I don't think that's my job. I am here to carry on, to make things normal. I am here to hold the space, and the space I hold is that everything is OK, that the pain and the fear and the isolation are just facts about a person about whom there are many other facts.

The next day I drive Jeff to the hospital and we wait in the lobby together. He whispers in my ear, "Please don't laugh when they ask if you're my daughter."

The nurse with the clipboard comes to the door. "You can bring your wife back with you," she says.

He winks at me.

I don't think about how much Jeff hurts. I squeeze his pain into a little ball in my mind and flick it away with my fingers. Sometimes it comes back, though. If I'm alone too long in the evenings, like I sometimes am. Like I am tonight. If I am alone too long, sitting still. Pain, amorphous and un-localized; pain that is not really pain but the idea of pain, which is also painful. I have to get up and move. When I am moving it is not pain, just sensation. Sensation is not good or bad.

The yoga I was trained in -- firm, stoic, alignment-based Iyengar -- does not quite cut it anymore. I have to flow the feeling up and down my limbs and through my joints. I have to make it move like water. I have to dance. At the moment there is no one to dance for, so I dance alone in my room.

koan

2009-02-16T13:18:00.000-08:00

"This one? Do you feel it?"

His hand hovers above the needle freshly planted in the base of my thumb.

"A little."

His fingers make a delicate adjustment and my arm jumps with feeling. Not a stab or a prick. More like a small electric shock, a leap of awareness.

"Yes, I feel it now."

Toby, my acupuncturist. He soothes me. His big ears and soft chin; his quiet, steady hands. His touch is comforting and dispassionate. He sinks every needle just where it should go. This is what it's like to be taken care of.

He asked me how I felt today. I told him I felt heavy, sad. He nodded and made a note in his chart. He treats me for the excess of water in my constitution, and my deficient stomach chi. He says it is normal for people with too much water to feel sad. I like thinking of it this way. It's just water pulling me all the time towards the ground. Drain the water and I'll be light again.

"Here?" He touches me lightly just where the bottom of my sternum dives down between my ribs. Holy. My face contorts to a sob like someone pulled shut the drawstring of a purse. "Ah," he says softly. He pulls his hand away. "Take a breath."

I take a breath. I talk to myself like I talk to the beginning yoga students in my Wednesday night class. Breath in: let the heart be lifted. The very tip of the needle feels like a flaming arrow hitting bullseye. I sob, out loud this time. He pulls back. Touches again with the pad of his fingertip. It feels so deep, this hole, a fontanelle above my heart.

I met with a long-time submissive client the other night. Dinner was alright, but back in the room the scene went south fast. I had tried beforehand to talk about limits, but you don't always know them til you reach them and when we hit a snag he snapped. It was so sudden. I had no moment to prepare. He frightened me. I put my hand over my face. He sat down at my feet again but by then I was crying. He took his shirt off and gave it to me. He put his head on my lap. I told him things I never meant to tell him. He said, "This will make us closer." I cried harder. He stayed with me till I was done and then he called me a taxi.

Closer. Maybe. Until you're bored with being close and then we won't be close any more and I won't care because we were never close. Sometimes it's hard to figure out who's making the rules. It feels like the money, at least, should make you think you're worth something to someone and sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn't. But these thoughts are attachment thoughts and attachment is the root of suffering. If you love a certain cup, drink from it as if it were already broken. I think that's how the koan goes. With every sip you will treasure the reunion with the thing that was lost.

Toby taps with his fintertip again, so soft, and he is putting his finger right into the red. My heart will not break. My heart is already broken. The hurt moves outward like the ripple of a rock dropped in a pond. He withdraws. "OK," he says. "Not today."

I am not a prisoner underground. I am a seed, sleeping in the earth under these soft, cold, February rains.

cleaning out

2009-02-10T10:51:00.000-08:00

I was cleaning out the top lefthand drawer of my dresser the other day, the one where I keep all the junk -- the box of broken jewelry, my will, a copy of my mother's Do Not Resuscitate order. All the way at the back is where I keep photographs I don't want to look at but can't throw away. Me on Halloween when I am 22, with tinfoil antenna and fake blood coming out of my nose. My lover the alcoholic mailman back when he was still handsome, giving the camera his best bad-boy glare. Me and Terry.

I sat down with this one to look at it for a while. I forgot this picture was ever taken, but now I remember everything. It was little Celeste who took it, the fragile blonde Italian girl with the child's body and the husband stationed in Iraq. Out in the tiny, smelly lobby of the Crazy Lady, by the fake palm tree.

Terry was the guy someone who's never been to a strip club imagines when they imagine a Strip Club Customer. He was short and dumpy, with Coke-bottle glasses. A comb-over and dandruff in a cheap golf shirt. He was a club regular, had been for years. He was not the first customer I danced for, but he was one of the first and after that he would come in and sit with me nearly every day.

"Can you sit on my lap?" he would ask.

"I'd love to," I lied. "I'm sorry. I'm not allowed." This was technically true. It was one of the rules the redheaded lady manager taught me my first day. She also taught me how to loop a rubberband across the arch of my stripper shoe and around the heel so I could strap my money there. And then you just walk around and make money and walk around and make money, she said. And she turned me loose.

Terry would look around. "Go ahead," he would say. "You can sit on my lap. All the girls are doing it. Celeste does it."

It was true. All the girls did it. I don't know why I clung to that rule like it was the spar that would keep me afloat.

"I'm sorry. I can't."

Terry would make me wait until the DJ called 2-4-1 dance specials and then he would buy two and give me $20 dollars. On the dayshift, and the Crazy Lady when I was brand new, that was enough to keep me hanging around. I wanted him to give me more but I didn't know how to ask.

When I started dancing I always danced with my eyes closed so I couldn't see their faces. So many people asked me why I closed my eyes, I started to open them. I pretended to look into their faces while really I let my gaze slide out of focus till I was seeing myself in the mirror over their shoulders. I was astonished one day by the sight of my breasts. So pretty. Like apples.

Terry had three little dogs. Some lapdog variety. Terriers, maybe. He talked about them all the time. I learned their names so I could ask after them every day, but of course I forgot them a long, long time ago. "You know why I love dogs?" he asked me one day.

"Why?" By this time I was sitting on his lap. All the girls did it, even Celeste.

"Because they're grateful. You give them just a little bit of food and and a treat now and then and they love you for it."

It startled me that he would tell me what he seemed to be telling me so bluntly. Maybe he didn't mean to be so blunt.

One day Terry brought a camera to the club and asked if he could take my picture. I knew it was a bad idea, and still I watched myself agree the way I was learning to watch myself agree to things. The way I agreed when I turned around one day during a dance and saw my customer jerking off into a cocktail napkin and we locked eyes a long second and then he held up his hand in a little gesture that said, don't stop and don't say anything, and I nodded and I turned back around.

Out in the lobby Terry put his arm around my waist. I had to stoop down a few inches to put my cheek next to his. I smiled, big. Celeste snapped the shot and there it was for all eternity. Then I took one of Terry and Celeste. Then Terry took one of Celeste and me. I wish I still had that one. Celeste was quiet and gentle, never mean to me even though before I started working she was the only girl on the dayshift who ever made real money.

The day the other girls were talking about beating me up back in the dressing room, Celeste brushed up against me. "Don't worry," she breathed in my ear. "It doesn't mean anything. You go home from this place at the end of the day with your money and so fuck all these bitches, alright?"

Terry brought the picture for me to see and I must have said something nice while I pretended to look at it. I hated it right away, like I've always hated pictures of myself, only more. I stuck it in my backpack and then brought it home and shoved it in the back of this drawer. I didn't throw it away. It's hard to throw away a photograph. Something about them -- the glossiness, the precise corners, the officialness -- demands they be kept.

And so I see myself finally. I see that I was tall, and sturdy like a young tree. I see I was so thin back then that Terry's short thick arms wrap all the way around me nearly to the elbow. I see my breasts really were like apples. I see I was smiling. It is my real smile, my goofy big-teeth smile, the only smile I had back then. I look happy and maybe I was.

Terry is smiling, too, and he's just a guy. Just a regular, ordinary guy.

I'm surprised I kept this picture. When I first saw it I couldn't wait to rip it in half, but then I never did. There's nothing here to hate. I put it back in the drawer, at the back, with the others. I don't know why I'm keeping it, but I can't think of any reason to throw it away.

system of touch

2009-01-04T13:47:00.001-08:00

The first thing he said was, "I can't do this." He fidgeted with the stem of his wineglass. "I'm just going to buy you a drink and go home. I'm really not interested."

Mike was from out of town. He answered an ad I placed that offered "private dancing." Private dancing might mean almost anything you can imagine, but I sent a detailed message to everyone that contacted me. The message said, you will meet me first in a public place so I can decide if you're a safety risk. You will pay me by the hour, up front. You will not touch my pussy. You will not touch my boobs. This weeded out nearly everyone, as it was meant to. Weeding out non-starters is part of why I decided to go the private dancing route in the first place.

Mike didn't mind the no-touching rule but his e-mails to me sounded nervous, spooked. I half expected him not to show up to the bar where we agreed to meet, but I do my make-up and curl my hair as though everything were going to go according to plan. I put on an office-appropriate skirt and an angora sweater over my bad-girl lingerie and take a taxi downtown.

I'm inside the bar before it occurs to me that this part might not be easy. Usually, if I'm meeting up with a stranger for the first time, I just look for the person who looks like they might be looking for someone. The bar is not busy, but there are several men here who might be Mike. Men in suits, with end-of-the-day faces. They are all looking for someone. I take a seat where I can see the door and order a martini. The third time the guy to the left of me catches my eye I stick out my hand. "Are you Mike?"

"Sorry. Not me." We scan each other. "Meeting someone?" he asks.

"Yes."

"Blind date kind of thing?"

"Yeah."

I over my shoulder at the room. Men. Eyes looking and looking away. The guy to my left leans in again, starts to say something else. The waitress is bringing a menu to a man with glasses. I look at him. He looks away. I look away. I look back. He nods, finally and gives me a small reluctant wave. He's been sitting there a few minutes. Long enough for the waitress to bring him a glass of wine. I wonder how many times he looked at me and away from me before he met my eyes.

I get my coat off the back of the barstool and walk over, martini glass in hand. I keep telling myself this is hilarious, because that's how I deal with nerves. And then I sit down and he tells me he can't do this.

I know more is coming. We are not nearly done here. As soon as I see how nervous he is, I am not nervous any more. I look at him while he looks at the inside rim of his glass like something is written there. He is a small, neat man, bullet-headed, with a crew cut and black-frame glasses that would make him at home any time in the last fifty years. All the lines in his face turn down, but it isn't an unfriendly face.

He starts talking, still looking into his glass. He tells me he is married. His wife is "gorgeous" he says, and he loves her, but she has lost interest in sex now that they are both in their fifties. He has not. He misses sex, and not just sex but physical intimacy all together. "Sometimes I go to hug her -- all I want is just to hug her, just hold her and feel her against me, and I get--" he mimes a condescending pat on the shoulder "--dismissed."

I hear this story all the time. It always makes me sad. There are many kinds of loneliness, but the loneliness of the body is a fierce kind. I remember a night years and years ago when I couldn't sleep for aching, getting up and looking all over the house for something I could put in bed with me to make me feel like somebody was there.

"She keeps telling me sex over-rated," he says. "How is that supposed to make me feel?"

Bad. It's supposed to make you feel bad. Like a pervert. Like you should be embarrassed to even mention that you have desires. That's how it's supposed to make you feel. Or if it's not meant to make you feel that way, it might as well be.

He tells me about the strip clubs. The massage parlours, like the one on the edge of town back home where he goes sometimes after work, for a happy ending from somebody who'll "break the rules" in exchange for a nice tip. He looks at ads like mine, and he writes to women like me, but he's never gone through with it and he can't go through with it now.

"Don't be offended," he says. "I'm not looking for someone so young. Forties -- thirty would be the youngest. I'm not trying to re-live my youth. I don't want some perfect, model-looking girl. I want a real woman. I miss that so much, the feel of a woman, just seeing and touching."

He finishes. I lean in. I tell him that I understand. I tell him touch is a basic need, not just for us, for humans, but for every mammal. I tell him it's OK to want to look and touch. Everybody wants to look and touch. I tell him sex isn't over-rated. I tell him how much I love to dance, how much I love the sensuality of it, sharing it. I don't tell him that I know what it's like to be ashamed, to feel like a freak and a bad person for wanting what you can't beleive everybody else doesn't also want. I don't tell him that, but I tell him I understand. I tell him again that I understand. I ask him if he's ready.

He says yes, although he hasn't touched his food, hasn't even picked up his fork. He asks the waitress for the check.

***
It's a very nice room in a very nice hotel, but it doesn't have a good place for lapdances, just a big, stiff armchair in the corner next to a floor lamp. I turn off the fluorescent overhead light. I put music on: slow songs, mostly. It is still a hotel room. It is still frighteningly quiet. No flashing lights, no pounding bass or DJ hawking drink specials, no waitress coming by to ask us if we want a shot. Nobody but the two of us. This is not a party. This is fucking serious.

He sits in the chair. I kneel down on the floor in front of him and rest my arms on his thighs. "You're really quite beautiful," he says, looking down at me. He says it with an odd inflection, like he is contradicting what he would have thought was true.

In the end, I undress too quickly, like I did when I was new. He keeps brushing my hair out of my face but he won't meet my eyes. We don't look at each other. No ones says anything else. Everything is much too real. The CD runs out.

He asks if we can lie down on the bed, and I think it over and decide it's OK. He asks if he can undress and I ask him not to. For what seems like hours he touches my legs and back and belly. He is tender and thorough and I imagine he would be a decent lover. Finally he lies next to me and we do look each other in the eyes. I run my hands softly over his chest and he cries out in pain.

I always wondered if I could be a whore. Now I think I could be. Lying here looking at each other is so intimate, I don't think fucking could be much more so. And it doesn't hurt at all. I don't feel shame. I'm not afraid. I feel quiet, gentle.

***

Around midnight he says he needs to go to sleep. I get dressed, sitting on the edge of the bed so he can watch me, and then het gets up and finds his wallet, hands me an amount of money that would have been a month's salary back when I was washing dishes at the diner by the highway.

After the money changes hands, things seem to get quite cold for a moment, and I make a mental note that in the future I will always ask for money in advance to prevent this. But by the time I have my shoes and purse, he likes me again.

"Are you going to be OK?" he asks. "I hate to let you go like this." And again he says it with that odd inflection, like he's saying the opposite of what should be true. At the last minute I feel a real burst of affection for him. I lean over and give him a saucy kiss on the cheek. He looks surprised and not particularly pleased and that old joke runs through my head, You don't pay a whore to fuck you, you pay her to leave. So I leave.

I walk out past the front desk and wonder if they know what I am and what I'm doing here. Probably. I tuck the money down through the torn bottom of my coat pocket, into the lining, safe. Out in the street, even, hailing a cab, I feel like I'm trailing a vast silver comet's tail marking me out against the dark.

"Busy night tonight?" the cab driver wants to know when I get in. I squint at him, wondering what he means. He's just making conversation.

"Busy."

I reach down through the lining of my pocket so I can touch the money again. I still don't feel at all afraid.

still, still, still

2008-12-20T17:25:00.000-08:00

This morning I had breakfast at Scarlett's new house. She has taken to calling me up and inviting me over in the mornings. She knows I won't eat breakfast unless someone reminds me, and she knows that breakfast is one of the things that anchors me to the earth at times when I would like to float away.

I have not been writing much lately, but it's not because nothing is happening. On the contrary, lots of things are happening, good and bad. I'm just not writing about them right now. For months now -- every since Boing Boing, really -- I've felt like I only had one or two more entries left in me, but then I think of something else I want to say. I can only see ahead of me a little at a time, like driving at night when the headlights only light up the next few yards of road. But that's all you need to keep going.

Anyway, Scarlett feeds me breakfast and then her friend Jason calls to tell us there are twenty harpists playing in the rotunda of the capitol building and we need to get down there right away. So we get on our bikes and go.

The rotunda is full of people and even though everyone is trying to be quiet, any rustle or cough fills up the space with whispers and echoes of whispers. Twenty harps are in a circle in the middle of the rotunda, played by twenty girls of various sizes, wearing twenty red dresses. "Greensleeves" floats up and away to the roof of the building four stories up and people are crowded around all three balconies, listening, trying to be quiet enough.

The music seems to have no beginning and no end, delicate vibratos bleeding into and out of the endless echoes of the space. The smallest harpers are very small, six or seven maybe, and they are very serious. Their hands move like seaweed in a current. I shut my eyes.

Listening to music is never easy for me, requiring a certain kind of concentration I cannot maintain very long. There are too many voices in my head competing for a hearing. With my eyes shut, I try to force myself to follow the notes of this music that washes up and down like small, soft waves rising over my head. The song ends and we all clap and the clapping is so much louder than the music. Another song begins, notes hanging on the air, persisting when they should fade. Like bells. The tune is familiar but I cannot place it and then the words come to me. Still, still, still, I can hear the falling snow.

Honestly, I don't like Christmas music. This song is better than some of the others because you don't hear it as much, not as much, unlike, say, The Little Drummer Boy, which is like a nasty virus. You hear it once at the grocery store and its in your head all day. I'm so glad I'm leaving town tomorrow, getting away from the awful Christmasiness of everything.

And yet, it's pretty. It's a pretty song, and it's being played by little girls with hands like seaweed, and the words are about stillness, which there can never be too much of. I feel something rising like a bubble in my throat and then I lean over and kiss Scarlett on the cheek because it's a beautiful world after all and sometimes you have to kiss someone.

in the flesh

2008-12-03T16:48:00.001-08:00

I love to fly. I love the ritual of checking in, getting the boarding pass, going through the security line and the scanner and being released into the airport, which I can't help seeing as a place of temporarily relaxed responsibilities.

Airports are the only places one earth where I let myself stop at the newsstand and buy an armful of glossy magazines. The flight home to see my family is not as long as it seems, but it's one small airport to another and there is usually at least one long layover in Dallas or Houston, so it can take all day, a day I spend leafing voluptuously through pictures of luxury goods I will never own.

I don't go home often. My dad had hip surgery three weeks ago, which is why I'm going now. He turned seventy this year, my dad, his birthday ten days after mine. He is still built like a bull, a thick yoke of muscle and fat around his shoulders, legs like the girders of a bridge. But he is stiff. He can hardly move any more for pain, and spend the last year mostly sitting in his chair.

My brother's wife, the hospitalist, oversaw his recovery after the surgery. I called her a few days after the operation to ask how he was doing. She tsked down the phone line. "Your father is a terrible patient," she said. "He won't take his blood thinners and he won't let us draw his blood because he says he's afraid of needles. This morning he kicked the physical therapist out of the room. He keeps saying the surgery was a mistake because he's going to die any time anyway."

We agree that somebody should do something right away. Except. "Your mom won't say anything to him," she says. "And your brother won't either."

That leaves me.

I won't go to the ranch. My brother will pick me up at the airport and I'll stay at his house with him, his wife, and my niece. My mother will drive my father up to meet us tomorrow and we will go to his follow-up appointment with the doctor. I will work with my father to find a few simple yoga stretches that will help his hip regain mobility as it heals. I will do this because I wish I were a good daughter, and I hope this will make me one.

Suspended above a patchwork earth, I flip through pages of models walking on white-sand beaches in jewel-encrusted sandals and I learn that something called "the ethnic look" will be big this winter. We fly over trees that look like broccoli and mountains that look like rumpled sheets. We will never land. And then we land.

The last time my father hit me I was seventeen. I had been living and going to school in the city for nearly two years. My parents were coming to pick me up for a visit home. I don't remember what I said that set him off. Some stupid thing. I remember I was carrying my stuff in a milk-crate and I dropped it when he grabbed me by the back of my jeans. My things spilled across the neat-cut lawn in front of the dorm. My dad spun me around to face him and his closed fist struck once across my mouth and then the back of his hand on my cheekbone as it swung back, bam, BAM. In the parking lot. At school. My friends and teachers everywhere. No one seems to be seeing anything. We are invisible in our fucked-up-ness, like always. It's the perfect crime.

He jerks open the passenger door of the pickup and throws me inside, into my mother's lap. She doesn't say a word. The whole ride home, all two hours of it, she silently comforts and then restrains me as I alternate between crying and screaming. I tell my father I'll never forget this. I tell him someday he will be old and he will look to me, and I will care for him if I have to, but I will never love him, never forgive him, this is it. I tell him if I ever loved him, it is over. I say it like a curse and a vow. My dad stares straight ahead, like nothing is happening. It's my mother who finally tells me to shut up.

She doesn't remember this. Not any of it, apparently. Her memory, always selective, is becoming more so. I guess she has a right. I brought it up a few years ago, after it had finally dawned on me, in my 20's, that my father's manner of parenting was unusual, that most kids don't get spanked in the head with a fist.

I wondered what my mother would say about it now that we were both adults. I brought it up, of all times, in the basement of the church where my cousin was getting married, while she and I sat with our hand-work. I hoped there would be some explanation. There wasn't. She looked at me blankly, her hands loose around the sewing in her lap. "I'm sorry," she said. "I don't remember. You know I don't like to think about things like that."

She must have seen my disappointment because next she offered brightly, "Did I ever tell you how he tried to break my arm? We had some guests over and he thought I didn't get dinner ready in time. You wouldn't remember. You were tiny." She giggled softly.

I don't remember, but now I see it flash right in my face: my father's face twists in anger as my mother's face twists in pain. I don't want to see it. I grieve. I wanted to think he took it all out on me because I was strong, because I was the one who could take it just like a man. I do remember sitting at the top of the stairs, folding the hem of my nightgown in my hand like a letter, listening to their voices spiral up and up, my father in anger, my mother in pain. Saying to myself, if it gets any louder. If it gets any worse, any worse than this, I'll go down. I'll do something. Something, anything. I don't remember if I went down. I want to think I did. So now we both have things we'd rather not remember.

My mother looked down at the sewing in her lap. "Well, you two could never get along," she said. "You were a difficult child."

I guess. I know was a willful kid. No one could ever get my head. And I was tender; anyone could hurt me just like that. I hated working on the farm, too, and that was the kiss of death as far as me and my dad were concerned. He couldn't never stand a shirker and meanwhile all I wanted to do was grow up and move away and never again run alongside a hay trailer in the dust in the 100 degree weather and 80 percent humidity throwing up forty-pound bales while the sweat ran stinging into the scratches on my face and my arms. Not ever again.

My parents get to my brother's house in the evening. We go out for supper at one of those horrible family-restuarant chains in one of the endless strip malls out of which the city of my brother's choice seems to be entirely constructed. My father asks me about the project, and I tell him, but I must sound cocky because he cuts me off quickly. "You think you've got the world on a string," he says. "I know. I thought the same thing. Just don't forget you're half me. That means you're half stupid."

In the morning, I drive my father to the doctor's office and sit with him while the nurse comes in and takes his vital signs and then she walks him down the hall for an X-ray. Later the doctor comes in and together we stare at shadowy pictures of my father's bones inside his wounded flesh. The doctor is an Indian kid, barely my age. He is breezy. He says everything looks as good as can be expected, although that means nothing and everything could still go horribly wrong. Have a nice day. Dismissed.

Back at my brother's house I kneel down in front of my father's chair and take the weight of his leg in my arms, cradling it as I ask him to move it this way and that. His large muscles are strong, but the small rotators inside the hip joint are so stiff and weak with disuse that he can barely use them. These last years my father's body has become a cage, tightening on him bit by bit, shutting him in closer and closer. I remember when he could chase a run-away bull five times around the little seventy-acre farm we lived on then, barely losing breath. I remember my father as a hurricane, and now he is old.

Touching my father's body quickly makes me tired, makes me hurt in the small of my back like I've lifted something too heavy. Because I'm trained now to see pain, I see it in him everywhere. I see how he props himself up, forever falling both forward and backward, held up by nothing but will. Oh, Dad.

When my father was my age, his father killed himself. "Died of a broken heart" is what they told me when I was little, but I put the details together piece by piece, how my grandfather took his country doctor's little black bag out to the barn one afternoon, drew the careful overdose of morphine into a clean syringe, and died there in the sunlight and the hay.

He had been depressed for years, and there was no medication for him like there is for me, no 20 milligram tablet of complex molecules that make life livable. He self-medicated with single-malt scotch until they took his medical license away and then there was only the electro-shock therapy my Dad drove him to in the city once a week 80 miles on back roads through the dry country. My dad told me once that his father never remembered where they were going -- the electricity scrambled his brain too hard to make a memory of the pain -- but he remembered that he didn't want to go. My father took him anyway.

My father lives in pain, the bitterness in his head a slow feed into his blood. It will eat every cell in his body if he lets it, and he is letting it. If he were just the guy who used to hit me and yell at me and throw me out of the house at night like a Christmas puppy the family's gotten tired of, then I wouldn't care. then I would lock him in the closet with all the other scary things from childhood and I'd be free. But he's also the guy who taught me to swim and do my taxes. He's also the guy who wrote to me on my birthday and said, "You do things I would never be brave enough to do."

So I'm here holding my father's leg in my arms, aching with his lifetime of aches, whispering to his marrow, "Please don't die" and "Please just let me be."

Before my parents leave the city, my mother wants to go to the grocery store, and I go with her. Once she is back home at the back of the valley she may not see the inside of a grocery store for weeks. She buys big bags of beans, sacks of potatoes and rice. She asks me super-casually what I'm doing for Christmas and I tell her just as casually that I don't know. Nothing, probably.

"You're not thinking about coming to the ranch?"

"No."

Not since the Christmas Eve he took my bag out and threw it on the porch and said "I don't really care if I see you again or not." Anger lit my body like a flame then and I yelled without knowing what I was yelling, only seeing the fear in his face as he backed away down the steps of his own house and out into the yard, and liking it. Liking that he was weak now and I was strong.

Sooner or later I'll have to go back, and I will, but not this year. I don't know if my mother remembers that Christmas Eve battle or not. We don't mention it, like we don't mention so many things. Her forgetting accuses me of too much remembering. Her forgetting disappears me bit by bit. No wonder we don't know each other.

Pulling out of the parking lot she says, "You know your Dad really loves you a lot. He says you and your brother are the best thing he ever did with his life."

I nod. I feel as if this is supposed to mean more to me than it does. I know my father loves me. He's always loved me. But loving me never kept him from hurting me, so -- at least in that specific sense -- it doesn't matter if he loves me or not. I love him, too, for what it's worth.

I am beginning to realize that forgiveness is not a simple catharsis, one spasm that releases into peace. I forgave my father years ago, officially and full-heartedly, for everything he did -- everything he couldn't help but do, everything he could have helped but did anyway. But it seeps back up to the surface like one of those haunted bloodstains that marks the spot no matter how many times you scrub it away and it seems I will have to go on forgiving him for the rest of my life, which means, most likely, long after he is dead. He broke my heart a million times. I will wipe away a million layers of myself before it's gone.

The next morning I fly home. The plane is suspended from the sky by string. C. is waiting for me by the airport escalator as I come down. I watch him watching for me and when he sees me he lights up.

That night I can't sleep. At least, I think I'm not sleeping until I start up in the dark, groping wildly for the lamp. C. sits up beside me. "Baby?" he asks.

"Is it normal to think about killing your dad?"

He draws the back of his hand across his eyes. "You want to kill your dad?"

"Not now. When I was little."

"Oh." He lies back down. "Sweetie, every little kid wants to kill their dad sometimes. That's why there are myths about it."

"Oh."

I call my dad a few days later and ask him how he's doing. He says he feels better. He promises he's doing the excercises I showed him. He sounds a little brighter. I let myself feel hope. Maybe everything will be OK. Maybe the pain will go away now. Maybe there'll be one moment when we can just look at each other, one time before he dies.

At the end of the call I tell him I love him. I started doing this a few years ago. I know it makes him squirm. I don't care. Or maybe I do. Maybe I take pleasure in it, even. Maybe loving my father is my best revenge. The heart is a strange country.

There's an awkward pause, like there always is. I hear the strain. He has to think about it every time. And then he says, "I love you, too" all in one breath, like he's putting one burst of strength behind getting it out. And then he hangs up the phone, like he always does, fast.

undressed for the holidays

2008-11-28T15:25:00.000-08:00

First, let me introduce the newest product in the collection of the Museum of Temporary Gratifications: Pumpkin & Goat's Milk Face Mask. Pumpkin is full of wrinkle and blemish fighting and collagen-boosting ingredients like Vitamin A, Vitamin C, and zinc. Goat's milk plumps and hydrates. I use this one during break-outs and when I start fussing about the lines by my eyes. It leaves my face firm and smooth and dewy. Be warned however, that the Vitamin A (sold as retinol in many face products) is powerful, and this mask is best used just once or twice a week.

Second, I am pleased to announce the Museum's holiday sales bargain: totally free shipping on orders over $50! Load up for the new year on ridiculously well-made brownie mixes and lovingly crafted beauty products. Please order by December 15th to ensure delivery by Christmas.

Third, Jane of Lost in the Hostile City was kind enough to honor me with the Superior Scribbler Award, which I get to pass on to five other people. I love giving awards, so here goes.

The rules for this particular award:

1. Post the award on your blog.
2. Link me for giving it to you.
3. Link the originating post here.
4. Pass the award on to five more deserving people.
5. Post these rules for your recipients.

There are so many awesome blogs I've been reading lately. Fortunately Miss Jane already tagged Lux and Casey, but here goes:

1. Davka: Deer Girl Medicine I love this blog so much, I feel like I must have highlighted it before, but apparently not. She's amazing folks. Amazing voice, amazing stories.

2. I'm completely hooked on Letters from Johns, a blog where men (or, I suppose, women) post about their experiences as sexual consumers. Fascinating, eye-opening reading. Thanks to Susannah Breslin of Reverse Cowgirl for creating this site. I'd give Reverse Cowgirl it's own award, but Susannah Breslin is a rockstar and doesn't need my help.

3. Karmic Delusion, the blog about "Strippers, Prostitutes, Porn, and Buddhism." Finally.

4. Lauri Shaw of Servicing the Pole is posting an entire novel set in and around and among strippers and strip clubs and stripping, chapter by chapter. Good stuff. Check it out.

5. Panther in Pumps. Disturbing at times, but fierce and true.

bloom

2008-11-10T12:00:00.000-08:00

"This makes no sense to me," Scarlett says. She shoves the textbook across the table at me. "I mean, I'm reading it, but I'm not reading it."

I scan the paragraph she's pointing at. I can't say it makes a lot of sense to me either. It's written in this horrible textbook-ese, all these dry words not quite adding up to information about colonial assemblies in pre-revolutionary America. "I think it's just saying that -- fuck, I have no idea what it's saying."

Scarlett slumps down and rests her forehead on the table for a second. It's not really that bad, though. Actually, she's been happier lately than I've seen her in a long time. On Saturday, she moved into her new house. She borrowed truck from our friend Jessie's husband, and I went over to the place she'd been staying to help her get the heavy stuff. We moved the dresser and then the mattress, but the bed frame wouldn't go. It was too big. So we picked it up -- it was light -- and carried it. The new house is only blocks away, which is good, because I like having Scarlett in the neighborhood.

A few months ago she got hooked up with a doozy of a job, managing a small commercial kitchen, which is work she knows and is good at. Her bosses are already talking about a promotion and a raise. And now this history class at community college. If she proves to them that she's dyslexic she can take her classes self-paced, and maybe this time she can finish, but she has to get a certification of disability from a doctor on a list of doctors they gave her, and that could cost a few hundred dollars. There are other expenses, too -- unpaid traffic tickets, old warrants, defaulted credit cards. When you've been poor a long time your poverty starts to have this life of it's own, starts to grow and feed on itself. Getting out is not all at once. Getting out is tough.

Me, I need money too, like I always do. The project, the project, the project. In relative terms, it is almost done, which means it won't be done for months, and we'll get a little money by the end of the year, but not nearly enough. I don't really worry. The project has had it's own weird will to live this whole time, and one way or another it will get finished. But this month I had to dip into my own money to pay the project's bills. Just a couple of hundred dollars, but it scared me.

We've started talking about dancing again. So far, just talk. Niether of us is crazy about the idea, but we are both of us getting to the point where it no longer seems optional, if it ever was really optional. So, we talk. We compare notes. We've heard from this old friend or that one that this club is bad, and that club is bad also. We heard the good manager everyone liked at Sugar's is dead and we hear there is no money anywhere. But they always say that and the only way to find out is just to go. I tell Scarlett pick a day and we'll go together, and if there's no money, there's no money. We'll be the Cool Girls Club and hang out in the locker-room all day long.

Scarlett sighs. "I'd like to be feeling better when I go back," she says. "I want to go in feeling a little sassy, not all sad and used-up." Early in the fall some pretty boy blew through town and broke Scarlett's heart. Dancing with a broken heart is no fun. I'm not entirely sad to see it, though, because I remember a time when Scarlett wouldn't have unbent her heart to break.

I say maybe she'll find her sass again when she hits the stage. Maybe she'll find it because she has to. "Maybe," she says. She looks down, starts drawing her finger through a little pool of spilled coffee, making x's and swirls. "Do you ever feel like...you're done with dancing, but dancing isn't done with you? Do you know what I mean?"

I nod. Because yes, I know what she means.

"I think maybe," she says, picking her words out one by one, "Maybe, you have certain experiences when you're younger, so that, you know, you end up knowing things most people, maybe, wouldn't even want to know. But since you already do know, you think, I should learn from this. I should just go forward, because I can't go back. I can't not know."

I touch the back of her hand. My fingers are a telegraph. They say: Go on.

"I know I've put myself in a lot of bad places," she says. "I've done things that some of my friends don't even know why you would want to do. But, I..."

Yes. Go on. Yes.

"And then yesterday I started crying while I was in the kitchen, cutting up vegetables. I was just thinking, you know, I'm not ever going to have that. What they have, you know? That...I guess I mean innocence. I'm never going to be innocent."

I reach up and touch her soft cheek. She is crying just a little bit. I love my friend so much. She is one of the easiest people to love that I've ever known. I think it's because she loves you back so whole-heartedly, and because she understands how important it is to love your friends and to be loved.

Scarlett and I were waitresses together at the same little diner by the highway when I was nineteen and she was twenty-five. She was the new girl, and I trained her. One day she asked me what I was doing after work. It was fall, just turning cold. I said I was going home to bake a pie and warm the kitchen up. She said she'd come over.

We sat out on my big front porch with our coats on rolling cigarettes out of her pouch of Drum tobacco and she told me a lot about herself right away, like she knew it was a strange story and she wanted to get it all out of the way at once. I put that story away and some of it we've never talked about since, or only obliquely, like we're talking now. I don't know everything, but I know enough to admire the strength and will that hurled that small body forward through the maze of grim statistics that was her early life, enough to understand why anger was her only friend for so long.

When Scarlett and I were first friends, I was not talking to my family much at all. I must have told her this. I think I said something like, I don't know why I should feel disappointed; it's not like I've ever had any family other than the one I have, so I don't know where I got the idea that it was supposed to be something different; maybe from TV. And Scarlett said, "You don't always get all the love you need from the people that raise you. But if you're lucky other people can love you, later."

Scarlett and I have been mothering, sistering, brothering, cousining each other for most of a decade now. My wayward daughter. My wisest aunt. I love my friend so much.

On Saturday we carried the bedframe over to her new place down quiet streets through lemon sunlight and a rain of yellow leaves. Her new room is big and bright, with lots of windows. She bitches about the state of the bathroom and the color of the paint, but I think she's happy. She takes me outside to show me the garden which comes with the apartment.

The garden is beautiful -- a crumbling red brick wall and a little greenhouse with only a few panes broken. The remains of some flower beds, vanishing under weeds and drifts of leaves, but easily salvaged. In the far corner, a hot tub that just needs some of the copper replaced, and a trench dug to lay in the electrical lines. The sketchy outlines of what could be paradise. She stands there looking a little scared and a little lost. And innocent. As innocent as I've ever seen anyone look.

"It could really be nice out here if somebody took some trouble with it," she says, half-heartedly. Half a heart is better than no heart. "It could really be something. It could really bloom."

the anniversary

2008-11-09T21:40:00.001-08:00

November 9th is an anniversary of sorts for me. It's the day in 1997 when my friend Sara died of a blast to the head from her meth-head half-brother's shotgun, one night while she was napping on the couch in front of the TV. He killed himself right afterwards. Sometimes I think about their mother, how she must've woken up to the noise, gone into the living room and found she had no children.

I met Sara on the first day of high school. She moved to town from some other small town a few counties over. I remember the first time I saw her. It was early, early morning, before the first class started, before the building even opened. The sky was pearly and a girl I'd never seen before walked up to me with long hair blowing around her like Botticelli's Venus. She asked me how to get to the choir room. I didn't know, but I was in choir, too. We found the room together. Together, we learned to make pear notes. We loved each other right away and easily, like you can do at that age.

Sara dressed like everyday was Halloween, an excuse to decorate herself -- long black dresses, tattered cheerleader skirts, horns, gloves, veils. This was new to me. My only aim for my appearance had ever been to be invisible. I let her take me to the Salvation Army and dress me up like a young Jim Morrison, in silk shirts, velvet jackets, boots. Dykes, they would hiss sometimes when we walked down the hall together. Sara hugged my arm. "Don't worry," she whispered. "They don't even know what they're talking about."

We would lie in bed some afternoons and I would pull her long hair over me, a sheet of copper silk, like my mother's hair before chemo. Sometimes she would ask me to dress her, turn her back and let me do up the buttons. I would pull the fabric tight around her tiny waist, her small, perfect breasts, easing each button into its hole, watching the white curve of her spine disappear beneath her clothes.

We took turns planning the perfect suicide. I chose getting drunk in a snowstorm, passing out and freezing to death. That's stupid, Sara said. Everyone will think it's an accident. She said she would rig up a camera so that the noose, as it dropped, would trip the shutter. Everyone would see her face at the moment of decision.

We planned our funerals, too. I wanted an epic funeral procession, driving all night, through rain if possible, and throwing my body off a pier at dawn. Sara wanted crowds of people in elaborate costumes, Ozzy Osborne, drugs. But when it came it was nothing like that.

I was not at home when she died. I was at school in another city. My mother drove the two hours to see me, to tell me what had happened in person. She didn't know how to tell me on the phone. At first I didn't believe her. "You're lying", I said. "I'm not going back with you. Get out of here. Go away."

She said, "Baby, why would I come all this way to lie to you?" She held out her arms to me and I felt myself smash, like a glass dropped on the floor.

The last time I saw her was in the city park. I kissed her goodbye. One the drive back to school, the sky was purple with clouds. I stared at them and saw her lips, her hair, her lips. Two weeks later she was dead.

I went home for the funeral, which was cheap and stupid in every detail. A church that was four trailer homes in the shape of a cross. A preacher who remembered her only vaguely, as a little girl. Carnations, the flower for ugly prom dates. Gladioluses in horrible hunter's orange and a tape recording of organ music.

Afterwards Miss Bobbie stopped me, the lady who owned the antique store where Sara and I would go and try on hats after school. In a shocked whisper she told me she'd heard that they -- whoever they were, whoever it is who tidies up after a murder-suicide -- found jewelry with pentagrams Sara's bedroom, a copy of The Satanic Bible. I remembered her reading it out loud to me: "Man has always created his gods," in her steady, husky voice, "rather than his gods creating him." Miss Bobbie said she knew I was a good girl and she had known my grandmother and to remember that God sees everything and there will always be a judgement. "You don't know what you're talking about," I said. "I'm sorry, but you have no idea."

After the funeral, I went to my parents house for lunch. The first bites of food fell into my stomach like lumps of clay, and it felt like they would sit there forever, because my insides were not moving at all. Inside me everything was still as stone. I did not feel like flesh and blood anymore. I got up and went outside and my father yelled after me "You're excused." My mother followed me, asked me if I wanted a coat. I said no. I wanted to be cold. I walked out a long way into the middle of the pasture, the sea of bone-colored winter wheat. She didn't want to die. It was all just talk. She was more alive, more bright, more warm, than anyone in the world.

I knew her so well, or felt I did. I knew what she would say before she said, what she would do before it was done. I knew her better than I knew myself and loved her when I did not love myself at all. That she loved me too was almost the first I knew that there was anything in me to love. I held myself in the cold. Don't worry, chickadee. I'll never let you go. I will keep you. I know you so well. I know what you like, what you do, what you are. I will be you. I will make a place inside of me and you will live there. Nobody will take you from me while I live.

She didn't want to die. Those fantasies were only fantasies of leaving, escaping into the real world. Escape at any price, even if it meant you had to leave things behind, like your clothes, your body, your name, who you were. Out there we would have new clothes, new bodies, new names.

After the funeral, I went back to school in the city. To my complete surprise, life went on as usual. For a while I grieved every day and all day. After a while, only parts of every day. Then only some days.

It was a fairytale, of course, that dream of keeping her forever. Like love always is. I couldn't have kept her forever even if she'd lived. Especially if she lived. It was a promise made at the very, very end of childhood. I couldn't have made that promise if I'd been any older, wouldn't have believed so fiercely in the alchemy of love and grief that I could have transmuted, by will alone, her soul into my body.

Because it is true, I know only now, years later. She is still in me. If I forget it, it is because having her in me feels so natural now. Even in the mirror, I see how our features have grown alike. I see where and how my life would have been different if I had not been living it for both of us. Everyone who's ever touched me has touched her, too.

If she had lived we might not even know each other any more. Anything could have happened. And yet here she is -- I even see her face, her white face sitting underneath my heart, blurred a little as though through ice, but there.

I am so sorry, love. I didn't mean to take you prisoner. If there ever were a way to set you free, I'd do it, even if it meant I'd never see you again. But for now it's safest here, inside me where it's safe and warm, and we can keep each other company.

a good night for freaks

2008-11-05T11:23:00.000-08:00

C. was at school yesterday, Tuesday classes running well into the evening, and when he called at 8 p.m. it was to say he was going over to a friend's house to watch the results come in. So I was on my own, toggling back and forth between the CNN website and nytimes, watching the east coast hover between red and blue.

When Indiana and Florida got stuck too close to call, I went out and bought a bottle of cheap red wine at the big Eastside grocery store where all the checkers speak Spanish. I voted there, early, last week. I voted there in the last two elections, too, and voting there always gives me hope because the people in the line with me are people from my neighborhood, people who look like me. I can stand in the line and think, this is going somewhere.

I bike home with my bottle of red wine. I check the computer. Indiana and Florida still deadlocked, but CNN has just called Pennsylvania for Obama, and screaming and cheering errupts from backyards all around the block. Here and there, a bottle rocket goes off, pow.

Texas has been Bush country since 1994, you remember. For fourteen years we've seen whole swathes of citizenry edged closer and closer to the margins. Children dumped from the public insurance roles. Emergency rooms over-flowing night and day with sick people who can't afford to see a doctor until they are more or less dead. Kids whose sex education classes don't teach them about birth control, and if they get knocked up the doctors show them government-mandated bloody flashcards and tell them abortion could make them infertile, could give them cancer. No money for special education, no money for mental healthcare, and the jails and prisons overflowing with the illiterate, the sick, and the desperate.

I pour myself a glass of wine, and a second. In summer of 2000, my friends and I laughed at the idea that our governor would be elected president. "People are too smart," we said, and standing in line at the grocery store with my neighbors, I really thought that. But it turned out that a lot of the country, maybe half, didn't agree with us. I remember writing in my journal after the election, "This country is going to swing the the right so hard and fast we aren't even going to recognize it in a few years." I remember saying to friends that the best thing that could happen now would be if Bush fucked things up so hard five ways from Friday that it brought about a great populist revival. And in 2004 we tried again, but it didn't happen.

Tonight something is happening. I hear the yelling go up all around me and I hit "refresh" again and again to see the map turn blue. I am not an Obama fanatic. I don't even really like to call myself a Democrat or a liberal. I just want a president who might care about me and people like me. What everybody wants. But it feels like it's been somebody else's turn for a long time now. I want it to be our turn.

More wine. CNN calls Ohio, New Mexico, Colorado, sweeping towards the coast, and then all of a sudden it's over and everybody is saying Obama is the next president, it's popping up on every screen and the yelling outside is ecstatic, more fireworks. I don't want to be alone. I don't want to be inside. I hit the last slug of wine from the bottle, go outside and get on my bike. I head downtown, toward the bar district. It's dark and cloudy and then a pack of bikers swoop past me, going the other way, yelling. I yell back and then cars start honking. People are leaning out the windows of apartment buildings, shaking the Obama/Biden signs torn out of front lawns.

Then more bikes join me and as we turn onto Sixth Street it's a little parade of us, all hollering and throwing kisses. It's a regular Tuesday night down there, more or less. Drunks talking into their fists and a few packs of lonely dressed-up girls buying pizza from the street carts. They look startled, but some of them yell back and the bars open up their doors so the music can spill out into the street. We swoop west down the street, picking up up speed and sound, till there is yelling and honking all around us and then the corner outside the five-star Driscoll Hotel is packed with people screaming, running into the street to high-five people leaning out of cars. I pull my bike over and join the crowd on the sidewalk, waving at the cars like all of us are one big parade. Yelling from the balconies and yelling from the street and yelling from the cars, new cars, beat-up junkers, taxis, delivery vans, and these are all my neighbors, these people yelling. People who look like me.

About the time the police get there to control the scene, I push off. I am screamed hoarse. I don't even know if I feel happy. I think I might feel hopeful, but I don't want to be let down. I don't want us to let ourselves down. I want this to mean something. I've been in the streets before, but always to protest, never to celebrate.

On the corner at a red-light, a black woman in a heavy flannel waves and gives me the power fist. I wave back. She walks over and I see she is missing an eye, the lid pulled down smooth and stitched to the cheek. "Right on," she says, and I agree, "Right on." She asks me if I have a dollar. I have three quarters. I give them to her.

A block or two away from Sixth Street, it is just a regular Tuesday night, bone-quiet and a little cold. I realize how hard I'm sweating, how wet my shirt is. I pass the homeless shelter, people outside coughing and sorting through their stuff. I pass the corner with the crack dealers and the crack heads and the people hanging out for no reason, and they don't even look up as I go past. I want to whoop at them and tell them everything around us is changing and thing that were never possible before are possible now, for us, for our children, forever. I want to say something, but I don't. I know it's harder than that. I want to think that something is happening, but we don't know yet if anything will happen, if the yelling in the streets tonight will go anywhere, or mean anything or if it's just more yelling because people like to yell.

I don't know. We won't know for a long time. We just have to keep trying. The hardest part is now.

real red

2008-10-28T19:38:00.000-07:00

I find it's good for morale to get out of the house at least once a day. When you work from home on small projects that interest only yourself and a small band of other oddballs with whom you communicate mainly by text, it can get lonely. Lonely isn't the most familiar feeling to me. Usually the more alone I can be the better. But when I realize I've gotten to the end of another day without seeing another face or talking to anyone but myself, I do feel oddly unmoored, that old feeling of being separated from the world by a pane of thick glass.

So I make up reasons to go out. I seek out errands. The printer needs ink! Fantastic! Bikes away. Sometimes there are no errands. I still go out, to one of the handful of little cafes in the neighborhood. I sit and drink coffee and do the crossword puzzle. No one has to talk to me, I just like knowing there are other people around. I like it when the waitress comes by and asks if I want more coffee and I say yes, please, or no thanks, and she says, sure thing sweetie, OK honey, take care now.

Back when I was dancing, I saw plenty of people. And plenty of people saw me. I always had nice nails and got my eyebrows waxed once a week and my hair cut once a month. I dressed like it mattered how I looked, and that was an interesting discipline for me. Before that I'd worn the same uniform every day since freshman year of college: wife-beater undershirt, jeans, belt, and a sweater if it was cold. It's a style into which I am woefully prone to relapse. I'm already slipping comfortably into the role of local eccentric -- mismatched socks and ripped jeans and my hair in my face.

Poor hair. Hanging in my eyes in those little wisps my mom always said made me look "like a beggar." Brittle and breaking at the ends like a cheap wig. I bleached it too many times, stripping it to bring out the red. It looks brassy in the sun, yes, and cheap, and all the bad things they say about bleached red hair. But in the dark club under the pink and blue lights it was the red like a beacon that had men coming up to the stage -- certain men with their fists full of bills, fives and tens, not ones, whispering, "Are you a real redhead?"

And the answer was yes. The answer wasn't, "sort of". Sort of a redhead. Not as red as my mother, of course, not that wild carrot color, that unbelievable almost pink, but then I don't have her ice-gray eyes either. My eyes are darker and the red in my hair is darker, too. It hides under the nut brown and the copper and the mahogany. You'd have to take me outside and stand me in the sun and turn my hair over in your hand, and then you would see it, yes, red, like rubies and like fire.

But that wasn't the answer. The answer was "yes." Yes, I am a real redhead. And they would sigh -- I love redheads -- and it was couch time.

Before I started dancing, when I was only thinking about dancing, I worried more about my hair than anything else, more than I worried about the fact that I didn't know how to dance. My hair was short as a boy's, and I knew strippers didn't have short hair like boys. I danced in a wig until my own hair grew out to stripper-worthy lengths. I always thought when I was finished dancing I'd cut it all off. That's the way I thought when I was 22, 23, that my life would have lines in the sand like that. Long hair. Short hair. Dancing. Finished dancing. Real me. Stripper me. False self that I will wear like a shield and discard when I don't need it any more.

It hasn't worked out just like that. It turns out that your experiences make you, whether people are calling you by the name your parents gave you or by a name you gave yourself. I own it all, everything I ever did. The memories are mine. Not Grace's, but mine. It will never be finished. It will never be over, not while I'm alive. We don't finish things. There is no finishing.

I don't know if I'll dance again. I can't say. Till the day I lose my waistline or my teeth, I could always go back if I needed the money enough, or if I just felt like it. I don't know if I'll feel like it again. I know I don't feel like it now. At the moment, I want to be naked on a stage in a roomful strangers about as much as most people do, but that could change.

I've taken breaks before, often. I took my longest break after the car accident, when I broke my ribs and pelvis. I didn't dance for a year, and during that year I practiced yoga asana three hours a day and meditated every morning and every evening until the creator spoke to me through the lips of homeless people at the bus stop and I loved everyone in the world, including the most of the world that I had never met and never, ever would meet. That didn't last long after I started dancing again, but I hope I've kept a little of it. Nothing is finished.

I know when it's time to start dancing again because I dream about dancing. I dream about locker rooms, girls who are always kinder to me than dancers have time to be in real life. In the dreams there are bright lights and glamour, in the old sense of the word, too - glamour as something in your eyes so bright you cannot see. In the dreams it is a game. Put on the clothes, put on the shoes, and see who you turn into this time. There is fear, sometimes, but it is the fear of being at the top of a roller coaster, the fear you put on yourself for the pleasure of it. And there is the customer, the money, the blood-joy of the hunt.

I haven't dreamed about dancing since I stopped last spring. It could happen any night, but it hasn't happened yet. Instead I dream other things. I dream landscapes folding into other landscapes; I dream old friends back again, alive again; I dream colors ; I dream sex. I dream riddles I am still solving as I wake, clues fading in the light from the window in the morning.

Sometimes I do miss it. I miss the feeling of being beautiful that you mojo yourself into each night before you walk out on the floor. I miss the locker-room, the crudeness and the rawness of being back there, where anything goes and however crazy you feel you will never be the craziest one there. I miss the money. But I don't miss it enough. Not yet.

And if I forget what I look like, like I do forget, if I forget I have a body and a face, then the men at the corner remind me, like they did this morning as I biked past on my imaginary errands: Hey, mama, hey sexy, eh mami, you looking good, hey beautiful, you got a dollar?

Peace. Peace be with you.

And also with you.

six things you didn't know about me until now

2008-10-28T14:18:00.000-07:00

Thanks to the very lovely LiaStarLight for tagging me with the Six Random Things Meme, thus providing me with a ready-made quick and dirty blog entry to satisfy the masses (that's you) while I spend the rest of the week filing various pieces of paper with various people whose job is to make sure people like me file various pieces of paper. If I file all the papers correctly, I get a bag of money by the end of year.

So here you go. Six exclusive, previously unrevealed biographical factoids about yours truly.

1. My blood type is O negative, the universal donor. I have to admit I derive some small, obscure sense of pride from this, even though it wasn't my choice or doing.

2. My Myers-Briggs Type is INTJ, although very close to being INFJ. Though I know MBTI is debatably founded in pseudo-scientific bushwah, descriptions of those types do strike me as accurate.

3. My learning style is visual-kinesthetic. I am almost completely unable to decipher information presented auditorily, which probably explains why I suck at karaoke and struggled through lecture-format classes in school.

4. My first declared college major was chemical engineering.

5. I am a better shot with a shotgun than with a pistol. (But who isn't?)

6. As a kid, I wanted to grow up to be a journalist or a spy.

I am supposed to tag six other bloggers now, but I'd rather take volunteers than call people out. If you would like to pick up the meme now, just say so in the comments section and post a link to your blog. The first six people to pipe up will get linked from this post.

First up: The Crow! (I'm excited about this one...she's a smartie with an extremely random P.G. Woodehouse quote in her header.)

More brave volunteers:
Frank of Vader on Ice
Clever Monkey
Amy and the Fifth Beatle
Jody Ekert of Inside Out Australia

And as a final, special treat, six delightful random things from one of my favorite people on earth, my brilliant and talented friend Pamela at Pamela's Lounge, a blog created to house scraps of prose that drift loose while she writes her first book.

And now I have papers to file. I promise something more substantial by the end of the week.
XOXO,
Grace

bump

2008-10-21T09:44:00.001-07:00

Yesterday I sat in front of the computer for too long, staring at the typed notes and annotations, treatments and revisions, the blueprints of my project, my horrible two-headed baby that nobody loves but me. I stare at it too long, until I see it start to come apart, the overworked materials of it collapsing in front of me, criss-crossed with false starts and dead ends, the integrity of it's structure hopelessly compromised. I saw that I have spent two years of my life doing nothing, entertaining myself, a kid making mud pies. I saw it, finally, the nothing in the middle of it all, the emptiness of my whole enterprise.

I got up and went outside. I left the monstrous project squatting on the desk and walked out into the street where I could see the sky. Used to be I would have sat there at the desk, willing myself to start bleeding from somewhere. It took me a long time to see that my blood is not really going to fix things.

I unlocked my bike from the fence, feeling my pulse pick up as I began to pedal. The evening light was yellow, lying over the whole neighborhood like a veil, the old bungalows wrapped up in vines, the new condos, clean and cheap, the shells of still more condos, as progress marches relentless over us. Maybe that will all be ending now, as the banks all crash. Maybe the condos will stop and vines will grow over the raw steel and the scaffolding. The old houses already look like the holdouts of a lost civilization, and they are the happiest houses anyway.

One peeling cottage leans in on itself, molting its gingerbread, dwarved by pecan trees. In the yard a pregnant girl, belly huge and ripe, waters her garden. The amber-colored light thickens til it is like the light at the bottom of a green bottle. She stands there in her lawn, watering the green grass with her green hose and her dress is green, her skin is green, her hair is moss. She stands there, blossoming and bursting and burdened with possibility. I am in love with her as I ride past. I want to be the mosquito humming in her curtains all night long. And then I pass her with the breeze in my hair and she is behind me, gone.

Nothing is resolved since I left the house. I have no better idea than before how I will go forward or what I will do next. But I am happy. I coast down hills, picking up speed. I remark to myself because no one else is there, that if you could bottle this feeling and sell it --

And of course it does come in a bottle. Ten milligrams a day -- twenty for a tough bad week. My happiness is as natural as a perfect, white factory egg, but it doesn't feel like that. It feels like part of me, ordinary, unremarkable. Which is itself a kind of minor miracle. I remember being nineteen, first time in a therapist's office at Student Health Services. I was there because I needed help not killing myself. Not killing myself was something I'd been working on for years, but it was harder at some times than at others.

They gave me a test to take to see if I was depressed. I filled it out with great suspicion. Doesn't everyone have "persistant feelings of emptiness or worthlessness"? Come on. I can't be the only one to "cry for no reason" and "feel they are hurting or bothering others just by being around"? This is the human condition, no? This was life as I knew it, had known it, for almost as far back as I could think. If other people were filling this test out differently, they were kidding themselves. Is there anyone out there, really, who doesn't "think the world would be better off it they were dead"? Nobody can be that happy.

The psychiatrist at Student Health Services said I should think about medication, but I was unequivocally opposed. So instead we talked about my childhood, everything that ever made me feel like shit. Dug it all up and waded through it once a week for four weeks until my student benefits ran out. It might have helped. I didn't kill myself. Over the next few years I turned down anti-depressants repeatedly from doctors at the Student Center, and later at the People's Clinic. I didn't want to kill myself, but I thought pills were weak. I didn't want to medicate the darkness in me, I wanted to kill it. Pin it down and choke the life right out of it. Beat it to a bloody shit with my fists. Then and only then I would know that I did, in fact, deserve to keep living.

When I met C. and fell in love, then I knew what happiness was like. And it was so sweet, it was so good. When I started to feel sick again, I went to a doctor and I asked for medication right away. He gave it to me. The first weeks I felt sick and strange, like my head was a helium balloon that any second was going to lift right off my neck and float away. Then that went away, and everything was, for lack of a better word, normal. The kind of normal that other people know about, the normal kind of normal. The kind of normal where sometimes you are happy and other times you are sad, but then after a little while you are happy again. The kind of normal that is, in point of fact, amazing.

I coast home. My computer is waiting for me. Nothing is any better than it was, but everything is OK. At the beginning of the project I had the vision of how the final thing would be. Those visions are so beautiful, so strong. You fall in love with them, and thank God, because only love would get you through what happens next. You can't help but fail, finally, if your vision really was so perfect. You can't help but fall short. If you don't fail you didn't try hard enough. That's all.

masha's baby

2008-10-08T12:18:00.000-07:00

Amy Jean is steaming oysters in the kitchen. It is finally October, the brief prime season of oysters and other lovely things. The air is golden and almost cool enough to need a jacket. In a few weeks there will be frost at night, and the fat pecans will start to fall off the trees all over the neighborhood, some nights so heavy it may sound for a minute like hail and the nights will be crisp enough to crack.

Amy Jean's big wolfhound is scrabbling to reach under the kitchen door and pry it open to get outside. When the door won't open she looks up at us with a pitiful whine.

"Masha, where's your baby?" Amy Jean coos. "Where's your baby, Masha?"

Masha woofs and throws her shoulder frantically against the door.

"Masha! Down!"

Masha pretends to lie down, but cannot rest. With her front legs, she drags herself on her belly across the floor to Amy Jean's feet, little whimpers begging please, please, please and help help help.

"Masha, what's the matter?" Amy Jean teases. "Can't you find your baby?"

Masha leaps up, runs, and crashes into the door again. Amy Jean laughs and Masha throws her a bruised look over her shoulder. A missing baby is no laughing matter.

The things is, Masha has no baby. A week ago, she went into pseudocyesis, false pregnancy. All female dogs go through false pregnancies, but Masha's are severe. It's got her tits swollen and her head all turned around. She hunts all day for the babies her body tells her she should have and cries for them all night.

Amy Jean lifts the steamer of oysters out of pot in a wet cloud that smells like laundry and wine. Some people say that oysters smell like pussy, and to the degree that both smell like clean ocean, like salt water and abundant life, then yes. Amy pours white wine into the shallots simmering in the pan, so then there's vinegariness and butteriness and onion in the air, too, and the steam catches in our hair in tiny drops.

A year ago Amy Jean started to talk about having a baby. I was careful not to seem surprised. Amy Jean can have a baby if she wants. She has a real job these days, the kind with Opportunities for Advancement. She has a long-time boyfriend who would probably come around to the idea. She lives in a real house with real furniture. Babies, why not?

She wanted a baby a lot. A whole lot. I'd never seen anything exactly like it. She reminded me of someone terribly hungry, so close to real starvation that they can only think of food and everything in the world is either Food or Not Food and nothing else matters. But because things were not quite right and she was not making quite what she would like to be making at her job and because her boyfriend was not quite ready, she didn't have a baby. Then in June she found out she had cancer instead. The cancer is over now, but the irradiated iodine they killed it with is not good for fetuses and Amy Jean will not be having a baby for a while. Amy Jean is quite cautious. All my girlfriends are quite cautious, and none of us have babies.

"Masha, leave the door alone," Amy Jean says. Masha backs up reluctantly, turns toward the hallway and finally throws herself down on her side in an agony of grief. I rub the back of her neck with my toes. Poor Masha.

I don't think I've ever felt it, that particular hunger. If I had I would know it, right? When I was growing up I always insisted that I was never having babies. The older people would nod knowingly and pat my leg and say you feel like that now, but don't worry, when the time comes you'll want it, everyone does-- a prospect I found only slightly less terrifying than the threat that Jesus would be saving me, whether I wanted him to or not. I want no overwhelming desires, no mystical overthrows of my will, no terrible hunger like Masha's terrible hunger.

I like babies just fine, I swear I do. I love my niece. She makes hilarious faces and endearing noises programmed to make me feel pleasantly protective. She laughs when jiggled and jumps when I jump and registers no objection to being dressed as a woodland creature for her auntie's entertainment. So far, she is perfect.

She doesn't make me want to have a baby, though. Not this year, anyway, or the year after that, or probably even the year after that. I am very busy for the foreseeable future. And if it goes on like that, I will probably never have a baby, and that shouldn't be a tragedy. Shouldn't be. I think.

There's a morality story, though, for women like me, and it's about a woman who always thinks she'll have a baby later when she feels like it but then she wakes up one morning in her early forties and realizes that a baby is exactly the one things she wants more than anything in the world. She has the hunger in her, and it is too late to do anything about it. It is a terrible threat.

Choices are frightening things in themselves. Don't worry, say the grown-ups in my mind. You'll change your mind. Everyone does.

The steam has split the mouths of the oysters into little moues. We crack the open and set them on the plate. Amy Jean goes to the kitchen door, wiping her hands on her skirt.

"Masha, you want to go out? You want to go out and look for your baby?" Masha snaps alert, body electrified with purpose. Amy Jean opens the door and Masha bounds out, barking. She will call and sniff the bushes for an hour for a puppy she will never find.

Amy Jean pours two glasses of white wine. I pick up the platter of oysters, trembling to be swallowed, and carry them to the table.

street

2008-09-24T11:22:00.000-07:00

I am crossing the road, walking home from lunch with my boyfriend during his break from school. Lunchtime traffic runs steady through the arteries of the neighborhood, streets that are normally quiet. I wait for minutes before I can get across the main road onto my own street, and when I do get a break it is only a short one and I have to hoof it. The car in the far lane, a sleek late-model import, has to slow down for me a little. It flashes its headlights at me in what I assume is irritation, but I am safe already.

The car slows further and turns onto the side street with me, crowding me onto the curb. The driver is a man, alone. He is looking at me. I put my hands in my pockets, make my walk unfriendly. He pulls past me and away. Up ahead at the stop sign he pulls a U-turn and comes back, slows down again. His fingers lift from the steering wheel in a little wave. The car nudges towards me to an almost stop.

I make my face a mask of hostility. I meet his eyes, and my eyes say, No. Go away. He shows me his teeth in a smile. A man in the sagging of his middle years. Eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses do not look sinister, do not look like anything. Face so forgettable it hardly is a face, but I know it now and will know if I see it again.

I used not to know what this was, this kind of encounter. I thought prostitutes wore feather boas and boots and hung out on neon strips with rows of other hookers, smoking cigarettes. It never occurred to me that I'd be mistaken for one, a regular girl just trying to walk home from work in a sweaty T-shirt and jeans rolled up my calves. I didn't realize that most prostitutes look like regular girls, because they are regular girls, who will also have sex with you for money.

I don't know when I figured it out exactly. Some time after I'd seen how the mostly regular girls in their mostly regular clothes linger around certain corners not too far down the street I just crossed. Sometimes just one of them, or maybe two or three, but somehow always circulating alone, never seeming to have anything particular to do: waiting. Some time when I caught the expression on one of the almost faceless drivers of the anonymous cars -- some combination of hesitation and hope -- and I realized he was waiting on me. I was the one who was supposed to do or say the thing that would set this transaction in motion. Ah.

After a while I taught myself a kind of rolling swagger that I thought looked tough. I wore men's jackets and hoped I looked like a boy from behind. I made my face like stone -- I don't see you, you're not there -- and kept walking. And the cars would pull past me and drive away, fast. And my heart would slow down and I'd be left with just a little lingering lick of anger.

They're not bad men, probably, so I don't know why I dislike them like I do. I don't ignore them anymore. I wait for them to pull up by me so I can meet their eyes with my full coldness and my full contempt. They don't look like bad men. They just want their dicks sucked by a mostly regular girl walking down the street on a mostly regular day who for a sum of money will get into the car.

I don't know why I dislike them like I do, why I want my look to sting them, why I want to see their faces fall. They aren't hurting me. The girls up the street want their business, and that's fine with me. I just want to walk home from lunch in peace. But I do dislike them. I dislike their soft bodies inside the shells of their cars. I dislike the expectation on their faces.

This guy ducks his head a little to get a better look at me. I meet his eyes. Don't roll your window down. I'll spit on you. Is every woman a possible trick to you, or is it only in my part of town? His smile falters and he looks away. The car speeds up to the end of side street, turns out onto the main artery again. He's gone. Maybe he'll get his blowjob and maybe he won't. Better hurry. Lunchtime is almost over.

the rules for riding bikes

2008-09-16T14:25:00.001-07:00

So Ike ripped Houston a new one and here inland we got a run of sweet, cool weather. Sorry, Houston. Way to take one for the team. It'll get hot again, one more time. We all know this. Summer will give us one more run for its money, but it's days are numbered and it's like a different world now.

At the laundromat yesterday people were smiling and holding the doors for each other and a girl no higher than my waist with pink overalls and a long french braid watched me over the counter while I folded clothes and asked me if I was a teenager, and then how old I was and if I had any children and if I did have any children would they be boys or girls and what would their names be? I was loving her for her deep, old eyes and her shy, slow smile. When her mother came and took her hand and told her it was time to go we waved goodbye for a long time.

On Saturday C. and I had a fight, a big one. Over nothing, over whether it is OK for one of us to cross the road without the other while we are bicycling, and then we were out in the yard yelling at each other for all the neighbors to hear and then I got back on my bike and rode away. All day the edges of the hurricane system were blowing over us -- scraps of clouds going unnaturally fast, long banks of gray hanging in the sky like the bellies of pigs. We never got a drop of rain.

On Friday I fired Josh. He doesn't do the things he says he'll do any more. When he told me at the last minute that he couldn't make the job we'd scheduled I felt the second of total calm I feel before I get furious and then I fired him in three short sentences that ended with "fucking unacceptable" and hanging up the phone. I don't know that I've ever ended a conversation like that in my life, ever. Not with Josh, not even when we were sleeping together. Before C. I wasn't really one to fight with lovers. Fighting isn't worth it unless there's something serious at stake. Sleeping arrangements aren't that serious.

The project is serious. I've worked too hard to get tripped up by someone else's sloppiness, I don't care who it is. I don't know what the matter is with Josh. I don't know if he's doing coke again or if he just thinks he can't fired because we used to fuck. It doesn't really matter why. I'd drive myself crazy if I let myself care. I'll never understand him any better than I'll ever understand myself. I feel quite cold about it, and relieved to feel that way. Not everything can be my problem.

I fight with C. because I'm serious. Because I can't leave him, won't leave him. Because we love each other so much that we're stuck with each other and so we have to make it work. No picking up stakes and moving on and finding someone else who won't zoom through a yellow light ahead of me and leave me stuck. I fight about stupid things, because I'm still learning. And maybe because there's something in the air, some kind of hurricane mojo, the freakishness of waiting for something to hit you that never hits you, because the day before they were telling us to buy bottled water and hunker down and now it isn't even raining.

I rode my bike through the dark, headed nowhere, turning right and left at random. For a while I felt pleasantly disconnected and free, but then it caught up with me -- the anger and the boredom and the loneliness. And I thought, if I were a man I would go to a strip club now. And I thought, no wonder they are such depressing places to be.

I stopped at a bar in a neighborhood a long way from mine and I had a beer and then C. called my phone and I answered and he said, "I'm sorry. We'll figure it out. We'll make a list of rules for riding bikes. We're smart people and it can't be this hard."

I say I'm sorry, too and I'll be home soon and C. says to take my time. I try to take my time but I can't wait, so I slam my beer and coast home in a happy haze. C. meets me at the door and we lie in bed for a long time without talking. Over and over again I think I hear rain, but it's only wind. And when we wake up all the clouds are gone.

casual friday

2008-09-08T18:21:00.000-07:00

On Friday I went to a pool party. I didn't mean to go to a pool party. I meant to go out with my friend and colleague Corinne for end-of-the-week drinks. The last few weeks have been tough going for the project. A presentation week before last was received very badly. On Wednesday a major non-financial partner withdrew from the project completely. Apparently I have generated controversy. Apparently everyone thought I was a nice girl who would do something nice. The project is not nice. It was never trying to be nice. Nice? No. Not nice.

Corinne tried to save me, but even she agrees that the project is not very nice, and if nice is what her people were expecting there is no point in trying to make this partnership work anymore. "We can still be friends, right?" Corinne asks, via text. We can still be friends.

She calls me as I'm leaving my house to meet her downtown, and she says, "Let's not go out. Let's go to Dave's."

Dave is her boyfriend. He has a condo on the lake, with a hot-tub. Going there and drinking beer out of the fridge will be a million times better than going to some bar. I agree, change course. I am covered with sweat when I get there. Corinne hands me a beer, asks if I want to freshen up. I take my beer into the shower. Cold beer in my mouth. Hot water on my face. I am so tired.

The day before I ran into a friend in the grocery store and she asked how the project was going. I told her we'd hit some rough spots. She asked what kind and I tried to explain, but talking about it made me feel worse. She said, "Honey, everybody gets to this point. You get to a point where you think you can't go anymore, but you do, and that's what separates you from all the people who don't make it."

I say, maybe I am one of the people who doesn't make it. I have to think about that. I have to let myself contemplate that that could be the truth. I say,"Maybe I'll just say fuck it. Maybe I'm done." I want to pretend for a second that it could be that easy. As easy as that fantasy I used to have of just buying a bus ticket, leaving town, leave the whole mess. Let everybody else work it out. Fuck it. I'm done.

She said, "You'll pull through."

My heart goes bang, starts racing. Maybe I don't want to pull through. I pick up my basket, start backing away down the soap aisle. "I'm sorry. I have to go. I really can't talk about it."

"Call me," she yells after me. "I'll cook for you. You look like shit."

I turn the handle in the shower, cranking the hot water slowly over to cool. I've started seeing an acupuncturist. She says I have a heat imbalance -- too much yang energy, too much activity, masculinity. She tells me to spend time doing yin activities, soothing, passive, feminine. Like what, I ask her. Swim, she says. Go for a walk in the morning when it's cool. Sit still.

I let the cool water run over my face. I could stand here forever. But not really, because this is a stranger's house and my friend is waiting for me downstairs. I turn the water off. I towel myself off and leave my hair down so it can dry.

"Your hair's so long," Corinne says as I come downstairs. "You should wear it down more."

"Is Dave home?"

"He's out by the pool. He'll be out there all weekend. We can go in a little bit, but I'm warning you now, it's a sausage fest. You'll think you're in a frat house. Beer?"

Yes.

We sit on the couch and drink. Corinne says, "Look. Keep doing what you're doing. It's a good project. Now you don't have to worry about making us happy. You can do it your way and take as long as you want."

Yeah, it could go on forever. Just me and my project. Me and my fucking stupid fucking project.

Corinne says, "Let's go out to the pool."

We go out. It is a sausage fest. A bunch of guys. I forget how many because they all look alike to me. Eight? Ten? Throwing a football and splashing and shouting. Guys. Normal guys, who are like a weird foreign culture to me. I've never actually been to a frat party. But here I am and here they are, comporting themselves in their natural habitat. Corinne sit down and I take the deck chair next to her.

I am too tired to party. I lean back in the deck chair and keep drinking beer while the last of the sun dries the last of the water in my hair. Guys keep coming by and talking to me. Sometimes I open my eyes to see who it is and sometimes I don't. I can't keep their names straight anyway.

Some guy comes by and asks me about my job. I guess somebody told him about the project. I say yes, that is what I do. He says, "Wow. That's so great. Listen, I've been looking for someone..."

He tells me about the project he has in mind. I laugh. It's a funny idea. It's a silly idea. It's the kind of idea a guy like this would have. I tell him I love it, and it's brilliant, and it will make a million dollars and everyone will love it.

"So, how much?" he wants to know.

I shut my eyes and do a little math. I name a number, a ridiculous number.

"Done," he says. "Here, let me get your contact information."

"Sure."

"Honey," C. will say later, "Honey, I have a suspicion he was hitting on you."

"No shit. What difference does it make?"

C. will shrug and make a face. But that's all later. Meanwhile there's food on the grill and groups of people keep shifting and reshaping and going in and out of apartments. The last of the sun goes down and Corinne comes over and says, "Let's go inside."

Inside we start to talk about the project again, not what people think of it, but the real stuff of it, the parts I love, that keep me up at night, the stuff that makes us want to do the stuff we do, and suddenly I start to cry. For a while I can't stop. Strings of sobs like little implosions suck me in on myself, and in, and in. Corinne gets me water and sits by me quietly. She and I might be really good friends one day. I might pull myself together and get myself out of this. I might take the pool guy's project and we might make a million dollars. Stranger things have happened.

new stuff

2008-09-01T13:19:00.000-07:00

New additions to the Grace Undressed Souvenir Gift Shoppe!

Cayenne & Praline Brownie Mix: During my first winter in the Lonestar State, a room-mate introduced me to the joys of Abuelita's-brand hot chocolate, a variety popular in Mexico, which comes as a flat cake of sweetened dark chocolate, spiced with cinnamon. To this, she added a tiny pinch of cayenne pepper for surprisingly delicious treat that warmed our inside when the weather was nasty and gray. This brownie mix duplicates the joy of that lovingly doctored chocolate. It is spicy, with a mild heat that brings the best out of the deep, dark cacoa powder I use.

Cookie Scrub: I originally invented this recipe to deal with the razor bumps I used to get when I shaved my Area. (I was going to call it Pussy Scrub, but I didn't want to get slapped with Etsy's "mature" label.) The combination of exfoliants (ground oats, brown sugar) and moisturizers (cocoa butter, coconut oil) is a double whammy for preventing unsightly shaving-related rashes. It also works wonderfully well on the rest of me, including the gnarly patches of dry skin I get on my upper arms in the winter. I now pass on the secret of my velvety soft skin to you!

Letter Writing Service: A reader suggested this, and I am delighted to offer it. Writing letters is pretty much my favorite form of communication. (Talking on the phone makes me nervous and texting is for hipsters.) Writing to strangers about the topics of their choice sounds like as much fun as writing this blog, only more personal. My areas of interest and expertise include yoga, film, natural health, current events, history, knitting, crafts, and cultural studies of call kinds, to name a few. I stand ready to take on whatever you can throw at me, so bring it on!

For those who are not signed up with Etsy and do not wish to register for one more damn thing in their lives, you can "donate" the amount of your desired purchase, and leave me a note detailing your order. Please remember to include shipping.

dog days

2008-08-28T10:37:00.000-07:00

It's not how hot the summers are here as much as how long they go on. Temperatures started topping 100 degrees in May this year, and for a little while it's bracing. You think you'll fight it out, but by August you are desperate and the sun seems to hang smug and sullen at dead noon all day long. There's a vicious, personal quality to the heat of these late summer days, like summer has it's teeth in your neck and it's going to shake you till you're limp, wring the last bit of juiciness out of you before, if we're lucky, it dies in late October.

On Saturday I went to a house-warming party of sorts at Scarlett's new house. Lorna, the owner of the house, was there, and our friend Amy Jean. The three of us sat on the couch while Scarlett wrestled a rented snake down the drain of the bath-tub, which is clogged, and which Lorna, for reasons obscure, does not which to take up with the landlord. It was valiant effort, and she said she didn't need any help, which everybody knew wasn't true, but everybody for the moment wanted to sit down in the cool of the front room. After an uncomfortable while, Lorna quietly got her things together and fled the house. Amy Jean and I stayed.

Amy Jean and I are alike in small ways that surprise me. We are the same height, and built the same. We both pull our hair over our shoulders and play with the end like nervous children. We both look up the answers to our questions. Amy Jean has a way of never quite meeting your eyes or answering your questions, though what she says is always interesting, and I wonder if I am like that, too.

Amy Jean, like me, is interested in the body. Today she is telling me about the physiology of laughter. She tells me "grotesque laughter" is the term of art for the laughter you laugh when things are too horrible. She says the endorphins from laughter protect the brain from permanent damage by painful events.

In June Amy Jean was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. Doctors caught the cancer very early. They destroyed her thyroid with a radiated pill and now she will have to take hormones for the rest of her life, but she is alive and doing well. She laughed the day of the radiation and the day before and the day after. Come to think of it, I have never seen Amy Jean cry.

I have never seen my mother cry either. Cancer treatment was not as advanced in the 80's as it is now. The doctors at NIH put a scalpel up my mother's nose to cut out the lemon-sized tumor deep in her head, coring her brain like an apple. She survived. She would be different forever, in subtle ways, like someone with three quarters of a brain might be, but she lived and that was good.

After the surgery we went to see her in her room in the hospital. She laughed so hard while we were there that the hospital pudding went up into her recently-violated nasal cavities and came out her nose. I sat on her bed and laughed with her while my father wept and my brother was silent.

At first, Amy Jean did not want the radiation. She was going to cure herself with cabbage and kale and Good Thoughts, but she was very sick and everyone said she should act fast. Her long black hair has white hairs in it now. They look like stars in the sky at the North Pole at midnight. Everything about Amy Jean is so lovely and so cool. Her eyes are the color of beach glass, blue green and full of light.

Dog days. Last vicious days of summer. Spare us. I show Amy Jean the rash between my fingers. Tiny shoals of blisters that dry up and peel away just to bloom again on the next layer of skin below. "I thought it was poison ivy," I say. "But poison ivy wouldn't keep coming back like this."

She takes my hand in her cool hand and turns it over in the light. "It's eczema," she says. "I have it, too. Look."

She holds her hand next to mine, and sure enough it is the same. I notice how much alike our hands are. We have the same kind of skin.

Scarlett comes in the room with her hair in her face. She has lost her battle with the rented snake. She is angry at Lorna for leaving. She is angry. She is on the verge of tears. Scarlett cries often and easily, hot little floods of crying. Amy Jean and I let our coolness wash over her now. We tell her to stop with the snake and chalk it up to a valiant effort and call the landlord. Scarlett is afraid to make Lorna angry in case she loses the room in the house. We tell her everything will be OK, because everything always is OK, even when it isn't.

Maybe we're wrong. Maybe we should let her cry. Maybe we should cry with her and scream and smash glass and throw furniture. Maybe one of these teasing gray humid morning we've had all week will turn into a thunderstorm and crack the sky over the city and rain down a torrent that rips up all but the deepest roots while the rest sweeps into the river in a flood of trash, all the way down to the gulf and the ocean.

Maybe we should all be crying. Maybe it's the effort of not crying that is killing us. Maybe the tears are building in our blood until our bodies turn on us and kill us. Things are rough and only getting rougher, and the promise of relief is just enough to keep you here but not enough to cool your face. That's how you feel in Texas at the end of the summer.

junk hunting

2008-08-19T17:27:00.001-07:00

You know it's going to be a hot one when the cicadas get started before noon. Scarlett is back in Texas, home from New York on the advice of friends like me who said sometimes the smartest thing you can do is bail on a bad time. In the weeks since her return she's been abject and elated by turns, her bad days just bad enough to scare the people who know how bad things can get.

Twice a week she comes over and eats lunch with me, which is good for me because I am at the point of obsession with work that I will forget to eat if I'm not reminded, and good for her because twice a week she gets free food. For the first few weeks she surfed from couch to couch, but now she has a part-time job at a coffee shop and our friend Lorna cleared out her junk room to give her a place to stay. So, that's good.

This afternoon she comes over for lunch, and I know she's not happy almost before I hear her feet on the porch. She's sad, she says, because of all the boxes sitting packed in her room, and nothing to put them in. "I feel like I'm living in a fucking squat with my mattress on the floor," she says.

I listen for her breath and hear it where I knew I would, high and rapid in her chest, making her heart beat like a pair of desperate wings. Her voice shakes with the effort of containing herself.

We get on Craigslist and find someone who is giving away a futon frame. The post says it's out by the curb, free to the first person to roll up and take it away. Scarlett has borrowed her mother's car for the afternoon, so we drive over to the address in the listing, a blank little street in a treeless part of town. It's right in the hottest part of the day, and the air-conditioning doesn't work in the car, so we drive with the windows down and say as little as possible.

Last week I had to sit Scarlett down and say Listen. You can't come over to my house in the middle of the day and yell at me. I'm too busy and too tired and my patience is at too low an ebb.

And she said, but I'm not even mad at you.

And I said, but when you're mad, you're mad at everyone. You're an equal opportunity hater. I might not be the one you're yelling at, but I'm the one you're yelling at, so chill.

She did chill for a few days. Around me, anyway. And I let myself hope, again, that this meant she was feeling better and now everything was going to be OK. When you love someone, you have to hope for things like that.

I read the address out for her and sure enough the futon frame is still there by the curb. It's a nice one. Well-made, substantial. Too substantial. It is never going in the back seat of the car. We try for a bit anyway, putting the back seats down and trying to twist the frame this way and the other way. The sun is right overhead, dead hot and mercilessly bright. We give up and put the frame down by the curve, stand wiping our faces off in the alley with the tails of our t-shirts.

"Nope," Scarlett says tightly.

"Nope."

We get back in the car. "This is such shit," Scarlett says as we pull away. "I'm so sick of not having things I need."

Scarlett's never been good at hanging onto things. She loses apartments, jobs, lovers, friends, and she never takes it lightly, the way some people do who've been losing things so long they've got the knack of it. For Scarlett, it always seems to hurt.

"I guess it's back to the shake joint," she says now, knuckles white on the steering wheel. "That's what everybody keeps saying. 'Why don't you just dance?' Why does that always have to be the answer to everything?"

"It's not the answer," I say, carefully. "It's an option. It's quicker and easier than some of the other options."

"But it's not always easier."

"No. It's not always easier."

"I need glasses. I need my filling replaced. I have warrants. I don't know what else I can do."

I don't know either. It is convenient to walk off the street and get hired and make a few hundred dollars the same day. The convenience is undeniable. But.

"It's almost too convenient," Scarlett says, reading my mind. "It's like...this pretty little toy with sharp edges."

"It's a compromise. You have to understand the compromise before you make it."

"I don't think I'm very good at compromises."

It's true. She's not. Sometimes that's a good trait. Myself, I tend the other way. If my ends seem to be in sight, I will endure far more than there is any point in enduring. I've lived years of my life that way. Scarlett knows this. There's a reason we're friends.

"If you start dancing again, you should know exactly what you're doing it for," I offer. "Dancing for survival is the worst. That's when you really feel stuck. You have to have one thing in your life that you really love. At least one thing you care about so much that it makes everything worth it. You have one goal and every day you do one thing to meet that goal, and as long as you do that one thing you can feel OK."

Some of this I believe to be good advice and some of it I know is superstition, but I still believe it and it's all I've got so I hope it's something. She frowns like maybe she's listening. "Look," she says, suddenly excited.

"What?"

"A dresser!"

We pull over. There by the street, a five-drawer bureau stands next to a row of garbage cans. It's sadder than it looked at first. We walk around it, fingering the peeling veneer until a sheet if it pulls off in our hands.

"This is trash," Scarlett says. "Somebody is throwing this away for a reason."

We stand there for a second longer, trying to make the dresser into something it isn't, trying to make it into something somebody could use to make a life. The sun wants to melt us like wax.

"Oh, well," Scarlett says. "The last thing I need is another sad piece of trash in my room to look at every day when I wake up. Oh, well. Oh, well."

We get back in the car.

I tell her we'll figure it out. I don't know what I mean by this. I don't know what it is, even, let alone how we are going to figure it out. I just know that sooner or later things will be better and sooner, probably. Sooner than she thinks.

I've seen so many things slip through her hands. I've seen her start her life all over more than once, except you never really start your life over. Those cardboard boxes drift from house to house, from friends' garages, from the backs of cars, from rented storage rooms, and there never seems to a place to put everything away. I don't really know why. As old a friend as I am, I don't really understand why her life is made of the scraps of other people's lives. I don't know when she'll be happy, but I do hope it's soon. If you love someone, you have to have hope.

with the devil in the woods

2008-08-12T07:34:00.000-07:00

I've been trying to teach myself to sleep again; I seem to have lost the knack. I get tired, but when I lie down my eyes don't close. I practice breathing: in for four, out for four, hold out for two. It works like a charm, but only if you remember to do it, and keep doing it. My mind tends to skip off like a stone. I have a lot to think about.

One day a while ago, I get a text from the Satanist. "Want to go for a walk?" Sounds fun, so I bike over to his house in the late afternoon. I think we'll stroll around the block a couple of times and call it a night, but he's got these graphite walking sticks and headlamps and we are going for a Walk.

We cut through the neighborhood a long way, and onto the municipal hiking trail and across the river. We get into the trees and the sun goes down and it is quite dark. I don't remember what we talk about. My mind keeps wandering and I am probably not saying much, but I'm having a nice time. It comes out of the blue when the Satanist tells me he fantasizes about fucking me in front of my boyfriend. He says it so casually it takes me a second to think about it, and then I say, "Yuck."

"What?"

"Yuck."

I want this line of conversation to end, and I don't want to return to it. I don't want to be riding the brakes on sexual tension all evening, and especially not out here in the dark, in the woods. I'm not scared, but it sounds like hard work, and if I'm going to work I want to get paid.

Everything changes after this and it keeps getting darker, because that's what happens at night.

"Where are we?" he asks, after a while.

"What?"

"You were leading."

"I was?"

"I'm following you."

"Oh."

So now we are lost, but I can still see the lights from downtown and we keep heading towards them. We cross a bridge to the right side of the river again, but once we're on the bank nothing looks right. We're by a busy road that I ought to know but I don't see any signs, and I could swear there was no road here. I must have been here in the daylight a thousand times, but it doesn't feel like it. To my right I see downtown, closer and brighter than before. So that's good. To my left I see a stretch of dark highway and lights and cars that could be anywhere, any city, any time. The Satanist points left. "This way," he says.

When I look left I don't know where I am. I feel dizzy, like the sky is pressing down on the top of my head and my knees are going soft. I point to the right, towards beautiful, glowing, comforting downtown. Once we get there there'll be other people and all the streets will have names. We'll know exactly where we are and his house is just a stone's throw away. We'll say goodbye on his front porch and I'll get on my bike and ride home and everything will be OK. "This way," I say.

He grabs my hand. I pull back. We look at each other the best we can. It is dark now, completely dark, and the only lights are cars on the road zooming past, too bright and then gone again. "You're being weird," he says. "You've been somewhere else all night."

I start to nod. This is true. I've been somewhere else for weeks, actually. But he's not done. He's raising his voice, and this is the first time I realize that we are actually fighting.

"You're in fucking space and I don't even want to be around you right now but I can't get away from you."

I feel a sweet relief. If what we both want is to get away from each other then it's easy. I point back to the right again. "I'll go that way."

"Fine," he says. "Give me my shit." He snatches the walking stick out of my hand, and the lamp. He's angry and rough and it's the first time I really feel scared of him. I feel like a big dog just snarled at me. I'm glad I'm going my way, not further into the dark with him. I turn around and don't look back.

That was weeks ago. We haven't talked again, and I don't know if we will. I don't think about it much. I have a lot on my mind. I still can't sleep.

the lunch meeting

2008-08-10T09:13:00.001-07:00

A few weeks ago I was offered a short-term consulting contract in an area not unrelated to my current pursuits. The woman who offered me the contract is a contact I know through the dayjob. The only job, now, I guess. The Job.

I respect her enormously. She is not much older than me, and she has a very difficult job. She is ambitious and straight-forward and concerned for the welfare of mankind, and I am flattered that she wants my two cents. On Monday we meet for lunch. I have a stack of papers, two notebooks and a clipboard.

She arrives 20 minutes late and frazzled. Hard week, she says. Crunch time. We exchange expressions of sympathy.

I circle things and underline things and ask questions.How about this? I say. And, Let's be specific. Can we say this?

I notice she isn't eating, hasn't touched a thing, and then abruptly, she pushes her plate away. "Let's go my house," she says.

I say yes, although this is not a particularly good idea. I haven't been sleeping well, and I am running on coffee and enthusiasm purely. On her sofa, my thoughts, so carefully arranged, begin to unravel. We are no longer talking about the particular job I am here to do, but about the nature of the work itself, and the nature of things in general.

"It's hard," she says. "It's hard to get taken seriously. Don't you think? When you're younger than everyone else and you're a girl, and people think you're attractive? It's awkward. It's weird. Doesn't it bother you?"

It probably used to. A lot of things used to bother me about the way I might look to other people. Being young and a girl was part of it. I didn't worry about being attractive that much, I guess, because I didn't think I was. I worried more about my scruffiness, my way of always looking like I just rolled out bed, after sleeping in my clothes. I worried somebody important would look down and see the heels of my shoes held together with duct tape and upholstery nails and know I was a fraud.

"You must know what I mean," she says.

I nod. Maybe it was stripping that cured me of that particular strain of self-consciousness. At the club, it mattered what I looked like, so I learned to put on make-up. I grew my hair long and learned to curl it in big, loose waves like a centerfold. I learned to know which looks from men meant they thought I was pretty, and which looks meant they thought I was pretty but not pretty enough, and which looks meant I was an ugly cow they wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole. I learned that their opinions were worth exactly what I could extract out of their wallet, and no more.

When I do the work I do now, I have no age and no gender. I want to look whichever way will get me in the door fastest, which generally means neat, demure, and slightly frumpy -- a look I call Sunday School Teacher Applies for a Bank Loan. As long as I get where I want to go, people are free to think I'm pretty, or not, or smart, or not, and if they under-estimate me, well, that's not necessarily to my disadvantage. Age and sex are just masks, anyway. Not masks we get to choose, but still, masks.

"I pretend I'm a forty-year-old dude and I'm just tricking them into thinking I'm a 28-year-old woman," I tell her. "Then I feel sneaky and smart."

She laughs, which is good. I want her to laugh. It's nice that she likes me.

"You want to get high?" she asks.

"Sure."

It's a bad idea, and I know it. I'm so tired, my thoughts are held together with string. Seven seconds and the THC hits my brain, things start to unravel. I tap on my clipboard with the butt of my pen and we try again. It's useless. The problems we are supposed to solve start spiraling outward. The solutions retreat. Before I know it she is telling me the plot to The Golden Compass and we are talking about organizations of people as living bodies, with individuals as their genetic material. Then I am explaining the multiple-mutation theory of inherited cancer susceptibility -- a gene has to mutate a number of times before it becomes cancerous, but you can inherit an already mutated gene that is like a tiny ticking bomb, so that only a single mutation is required, just one, and then: oncosis.

"Oh my god," she says. "My boyfriend is a cancerous gene. He's mutated too many times, I think. He's broken."

I know her boyfriend. He is a charming drunk who goes home with the hottest girl from every party. I respect him tremendously as a professional in this field that we are all in. As a person, less.

I excuse myself and go to the bathroom and when I come back she is crying. She takes her glasses off and wipe at the tears with her fingers. "I'm leaving him," she says. "He'll never be OK. I thought I could fix him, but I can't."

I nod. I have had my own share of unfixable men. I am myself a pre-cancerous gene, probably. Too many more divisions and my structure might begin too change. But all cells are pre-cancerous, I guess. Given enough time, enough adverse events.

"I'm proud in a way, I guess," she says. "I held everything together with hope for years, but I don't have any hope any more. I really thought I could help."

She bows her head. Later I will wonder why I didn't just hug her. It's not like I'm averse to hugging. Hugs are cool. But for tears I hold still, like I would hold still for a hummingbird. It doesn't seem to me that grief always needs to be comforted. So often the pro forma gestures of comfort seem like the would-be comforter's own discomfort. Here, pat-pat, everything's fine, stop crying, please stop. And then the crying person is suposed to say, yes, OK, thank you, I feel better now. And stop.

Other people's crying doesn't bother me. The tears we weep from grief and joy are chemically distinct from the tears we cry when we get dust in our eyes -- they have stress hormones in them, and endorphins, and birthing hormones and orgasm hormones and falling-in-love hormones. Which is to say what everybody already knows, that crying is how we squeeze the pain out, deliver ourselves, and gain release.

I hate to see people get hurt, but I think I might like seeing people cry. Crying has always been hard for me. When I was sixteen or seventeen I learned to induce tears by inflicting pain on myself. It was an accidental discovery, a blind instinct. In certain states of unbearable feeling I found out I could cut my thigh with the tips of a pair of nail scissors. The pain alone didn't bring the tears on; it was the sight of the blood that never failed to shock me, and then I would cry. I would be wracked with crying, and afterwards I would feel dreamy and sweet and usually fall asleep. You can still see the scars. When I started dancing I was afraid people would ask me about them, but no one ever did.

Sometimes the best comforter is to see the pain and know it's there, that bright streak of blood that says, yes, you are hurt. Some hopes have to die. Sometimes the structure of our hope becomes malignant, and it had better die than keep dividing.

I try to hold the space. I sit quietly and give her all of my attention. She cries and cries, and then she takes a long breath as the endorphins kick in and do their work, and I see her shoulders settle down, I see her chest rise and her belly soften and then she smiles.

I don't leave right away, but I put my stack of papers and my two notebooks and my clipboard back in my bag. We go onto the patio. She shows me her plants, names them for me. We take her dog outside and throw a ball. But I don't stay too long, because people who have cried need their rest.

I worry she'll feel self-conscious about it later, so I'm happy when I get an e-mail that says, "Sorry we didn't get more done. Next time. I had a good time, though."

I had a good time, too.

bake sale

2008-08-01T06:05:00.000-07:00

Ok, this is it -- the closest thing to a virtual lap-dance that I can devise for you. After extensive taste-testing with my friends and loved ones, I have discovered The One True Perfect Brownie recipe. (And its companion, the One True Perfect Blondie Recipe.) I now make the baking mix available to you online through my Etsy store.

These are seriously, truly delicious. I've been taking them everywhere I go for the last month and no one has failed to freak out over their dense flavor and preternatural gooiness. The chocolate brownie is dark, intense chocolate and the blondie is an incredible butterscotch flavor.

All proceeds go toward my basic expenses so I can keep working on the dayjob for another month or two and not have to look for honest work. If there is anything left over after my basic expenses are covered, I will pay off the hospital in Colorado where they cut my tummy open last summer. (Insurance took care of most of the costs, but alas, not all.)

Mention the blog at checkout for $2 off purchase price.

XOXO,
Grace

history

2008-07-24T07:57:00.001-07:00

Outside the window of the truck the night goes by in a flat plane of blue-black. Inside, the GPS unit lights the curve of Josh's cheekbone, a green crescent. The GPS says four hours to our motel room in the middle of Ass Nowhere Texas, where we can sleep until almost sun-up. Tomorrow will be a long, hard day.

Josh and I have history. We worked together on a different job one summer a long time ago, when I was twenty and he was 26 or so. I'd been there longer, which technically made me his supervisor. The job ended at the end of the summer, but we stayed in touch. The day after Halloween we kissed. By Thanksgiving we were lovers, although I had a boyfriend already, a sweet Catholic kid who cried and swore suicide any time I broached the possibility of breaking up.

Josh pulls the truck over at a gas station in the middle of darkness. We are nowhere near anything. I'm surprised the gas station is open, but it's not as late as it feels. Inside I pay for a tank of gas and a six-pack of Coors. Back in the cab I pop a cap. It's hot, even with the sun down. Sweat pricks along my hairline and my upper lip. The beer is just cool enough.

Josh and I haven't worked together since that first job. I didn't even know he was still in town til January, when I got stumped by a technical question in the Dayjob Project and sent a message to his old e-mail address. I didn't exactly expect to hear back.

Last I knew he was living in New York. He had called me three or four years ago, to ask if I'd been tested for AIDS lately. "I'm getting tested," he said. "The Health Department called and told me one of my previous partners tested HIV positive. I was hoping it was you, cause we always used condoms. I thought maybe you'd become some kind of junkie whore by now."

"Sorry. Can't help you."

"I'll be in Amarillo next month," he said. That's a really long way from here.

I asked him to call me back when he got the test results. He did. The test was negative. Congratulations, I said. We rang off. That was it.

But he did e-mail me back in January. "I'm in Texas again," he wrote back. "Call me. I'll help you any way I can."

We met for coffee. I saw him the second he walked in, and then he took his sunglasses off and I felt a pang, because he looked older, which he was. I am, too. He never was a handsome man, with that sullen, feral face and cheap swagger like a drugstore cowboy -- jaw a little too thick and mouth a little too tender, as though any second it might quiver like a child's.

I told him what I was doing and he offered himself to me, to work for free, even though he was busy. He's some kind of contractor now, working in the dirt and making all kinds of money. Guy knows how to hustle. I always liked that.

I said, "Are you sure?"

He said, "Sure I'm sure. I want to do it. You can make it up to me later, when you're big-time."

I was glad. When it comes to work, I trust him absolutely. He's good at what he does. So last week I called him up and he said yes and I told him what the score was: we leave at night, wake up at dawn, work an 18-hour day, drive home. And I needed him to drive. He said, "Kick me in the balls why don't you, while you're at it." But I knew he'd come.

The beer is just cool enough and the night goes past the window mile after mile of it, and it feels like we've been driving for days. The air inside the cab is soft with a humidity that the truck's old A/C barely dents and I can smell his sweat. He was the first man I ever loved to fuck. I remember it so well, in memories as precise and precious as souvenir postcards -- his hands around my waist, his sneer of concentration, his body between my legs like a furious machine. I could put my hand across the cab of the truck and it would be like eight years had never happened.

I shake my head to clear it and take another sip of beer. "Pass me one of those, would you?" he says.

I take a look at him and decide that it's OK, he's a big guy. One beer is OK. Or maybe not, but we've always brought out the stupid country kid in each other, the dumb and bored and desperate part that just wants to get fucked up and ruin something.

So much history. Before we ever met we had a history -- the history of Sunday mornings in little country churches in the summer, tiny wooden buildings with no air-conditioning so the sweat weeps down the backs of your knees and the crease of your neck, and someone saying something that's supposed to be important, but the words buzz around your heads like flies and out the open window. You smell the fields, hot dust and drying hay. Those who take pleasure in unrighteousness will be damned, and your ears prick then and you squirm your sweating thighs against the hard pew and you know they're talking now about you and all those unspeakable, exciting things you do, and want to do.

The history of bus-stops outside trailer parks, going to school every day in the wrong clothes, trying to make the walk to the cafeteria take all lunch period so you won't have to talk to anyone, so no one can look at you and there will be no name-calling, no shoving. A history of dads with angry hands, with hands like knots of oak, a history of lying in bed telling yourself you're the best, the best ever, you are fortune's only child and they are all fucking losers, all of them, you are getting out of here and you will show everyone you are the best, the best, the best. Because this is the only way you can go to sleep at night and the only way you can stand to wake up again.

I spent Christmas alone the day that I was 20, and I remember nothing about the day except gray light through the windoe and the absolute peace of absolute solitude, so light and free, like I could float away. Three days later, Josh and I caught the train to El Paso in the middle of an ice storm. We crossed the border in Juarez and spent the day drinking 25 cent beers, and the night in the Hotel Rio where for hours we lay awake and listened to women and children crying and laughing through the wooden walls. We took the bus down to Chihuahua and then the train again -- Divisidero, Bahuichivo, Creel. We were headed to the beach, La Paz, for New Years, but then some bad things happened. I fell off a horse and hit my head hard enough to forget where I was for thirty minutes, and spent the night drinking Mexican Benedryl in our bed in the hostel, praying that it would keep my brain from swelling up, praying that I would not die in this strange country with this strange man, so far from home and from anyone who loved me. Two days later we read the map wrong, got off the train at the wrong stop, and spent a lost few days hitch-hiking between tiny mountain towns with our high-school Spanish, two dumb-ass gringos on a half-doomed vision quests.

I pop the tab on another beer with a gentle hiss and hand it to him. "Beautiful," he says. "We should have gotten married."

That was never close to happening. I always knew when we got back to the border it was over. I figured he knew it, too. Once, as the bus drew back towards Juarez, I tried to bring it up. It was dark, like this, and we were almost sleeping. I turned my head towards him on the seat and he was watching me, his face inches from my face. He smiled at me, mouth drawn up sweet and wry. He said, "Your hair smells like cotton candy."

I said, "When we get back to town, it won't be like this. I still have a boyfriend. Of course. You know."

His face changed so fast it took my breath away. He looked at me with what seemed like the purest hate, eyes like two wide black holes. "Why did you say that?" His voice was a low hiss. "Everything was perfect for a minute and you ruined it. Why did you have to say anything?"

"I'm sorry," I said. I felt awful, and alone, the ruiner of perfect things. "Just stay with me to the border and you can leave. I can get the rest of the way by myself."

"What are you, retarded? Don't even say anything else, OK? Just shut up. Shut the fuck up."

Silence. Our history is the history of loneliness.

We got over it. By the time we crossed into El Paso we were compadres again. And for a few weeks after that everything was like it had been. We drove around in his truck, made up reasons to get out of the city and onto the back roads, like motion was our natural element.

But finally we stopped. Nothing happened. I just stopped calling him. We had plans to go to Galveston for Mardi Gras, but I never called. He left one message on my answering machine, annoyed and bitter and final. I wouldn't hear from again till he called me from New York.

I stayed absent-mindedly with the Catholic boy for another year. Josh turned out to be the first of the long, long line of boys I cheated with. It was like something had snapped in me, some component in the mechanism of my self-control. I lived in a universe of suspended consequences, until in the end I broke up with that sweet boy anyway, and told him everything, and saw his face smash like an egg.

History is collective. You have to share it with someone, or it's just a story. And that feeling, when someone knows your history, really knows it, that sense of being so instantly and so deeply recognized, is a lot like love, or maybe it is some kind of love.

That first time we kissed, I remember that as clear as anything I ever have remembered. Late on rainy afternoon, sitting on the bed in the bedroom that was also his kitchen, my cheek pressed against the window and the coolness of the drops running down. It was fall and in my memory everything smells like dark, wet leaves. His hand at my waist and his face so close to mine, I feel the heat from him, I smell him, and he says, "Let's just kiss. That's all I want. Just kiss me. Please. One time."

Liar. His lips tasted like salt.

Our history was the history of flight, from home and everything that felt like home. The history of love and hate and love that feels like hate, and pain squeezed down inside so tightly and so long that it becomes a diamond, hard and bright.

I could have left that Catholic boy for you. In the end I left him anyway, and in the end he didn't kill himself. It all still would have ended like it did. It never would have ended any other way. But I could reach my hand across the cab tonight, snake down between your thighs and it would be like eight years never happened, and like you never left and like I never found a better man, a man who is not a game I could never win.

I had to leave you to keep you. You know that.

We roll into the tiny town in the middle of nowhere, a little cluster of lights in the darkness. We pull into that motel parking lot. You kill the engine and for a second the silence is fierce, but I already know what will happen, which is nothing. We'll take turns undressing in the bathroom and lie down in the separate beds, turn the lights out and turn our backs on each other like two nuns. Our self-control is excellent these days. Congratulations.

You might as well be inside of me. You're in my skin as much as you ever were. For two or three mornings I will wake up twisted in my sheets and sick to the stomach, wanting your body like a drug. I will scrub you off my skin for days, the way I used to do.

Sun in cancer, moon in scorpio

2008-07-21T09:53:00.000-07:00

It's m'birthday! My mom sent me this card, with a note that said, "This looks like your smile."

I am 28. If I were a Vulcan, I would have to mate, but instead I will celebrate the growing influence of Saturn by distributing prizes. I was recently given the Arte Y Pico Blogging Award, which looks like this:

The significance of the award isn't clear to me, except that (a) it was very nice of fellow Austinite mapelba , a fine writer in her own right, to give me an award, and (b) I am now empowered to give awards to other people and how fun is that? So, without further ado:

River City Kitty. Duh. As far as I'm concerned, this is where stripper blogging started, and it's still the premier online repository of photographs of weird-ass signs in strip-club dressing rooms.

Hobostripper. Double duh -- an unbeatable one-two punch of down-to-earth sultriness and over-the-top stripping stories worthy of passing into the cannon of club legends, alongside Girl Who Went Into Labor Onstage and Customer Who Named Stripper As Life Insurance Beneficiary and Died. If I were a junior executive passing through the midwest on an expense account, this van-dwelling siren is the one I'd pay by the hour to pet my hair and make me feel like a human-being.

Star Light Ministries. Among strippers I know, the mere mention of a "Christian outreach organization targeting exotic dancers" is enough to make us shit and run. The last thing I want when I'm naked and tired is to be judged by a fully clothed person waving a heavy-looking book. Lia Scholl of Star Light Ministries is a whole different breed, however. Her ministry emphasizes understanding and acceptance of exotic dancers as they are, an approach that demands at least as much change and growth from missionaries as it does from the natives Her post on "How to Pray for Women Who Are Exotic Dancers" is how I'd like to be prayed for by anyone who is thataway inclined. In fact, if you want to celebrate my birthday with me, maybe you could make a donation here to support her outreach efforts.

Boomtown Boudoir. This sometime fellow stripper ostensibly writes semi-autobiographically about perfume. In actuality, her blog is about everything that smell invokes -- sensuality, nostalgia, and gut-level experience. Somehow her writing manages to be about what it is like to be a girl, or at least to be the certain kind of girl that she is. I can't get enough and only wish that she would write more often.

Lord of the Barnyard. This one epitomizes everything I've ever liked about well-educated farm boys. Factual and tender, he writes about weather in a way that expresses hope and frustration and relief and despair with elegant economy. I guess the farm blog is dead and he lives in town these days. Still one to watch.

So there you have it. I would like to give out more awards to the many awesome bloggers out there, but I am limited to five. Now, if someone else will hurry up and give me an award, the distribution of favors can continue. (My foot is tapping.)

how it ought to be

2008-07-08T08:35:00.000-07:00

Mei the waitress has been at the club for 15 years. She is fifty, plain-faced and shrewd, with a me-love-you-long-time accent that 15 years in a titty bar have barely touched. She has a million regulars and probably makes as much money as anyone there. She is funny, too; her occasional dark asides can make me spit a drink, but it takes a long time for her to warm up to you. She sees so many dancers come and go.

One of my last nights waitressing, Mei and I are perched on an empty side stage looking over our shoulders at an empty club.

"Bad night tonight, baby," she says.

"Tell me about it."

"Even last year was not this bad. Last year, on a Thursday night we have customer at every table. Every table, baby."

"Things are tough all over, huh?"

"Bad time," she agrees. "We not going to make no money tonight. You should have keep dancing. Me, if i could dance right now, I do it."

She throws her hands in the air and does a little boob shimmy in my direction. I crack up.

She's not done with me, though. "Baby, why you stop dancing? You don't need money no more?"

"Something like that." I don't like this question. I don't like it from civilians, who like to assume that I've stopped dancing because I finally acknowledge that dancing was evil all along. I like it at work even less. But Mei is cool, so I clear my throat and give it a shot. "You know, my boyfriend's tuition is saved up, so I don't have that pressure anymore. I want to do other things. I guess I'm just done for a while, you know?"

Her eyes narrow. "You pay for boyfriend's school?"

Shit. "Um, yes."

She starts shaking her head, goes on shaking it. "Bad idea. Bad idea, baby. He get through school, he going to leave you. I know. I see it, so many times. Girl is helping man and man is just take, take, taking. Men don't care. They don't care about you."

"Well, uh, I've known C. for a while. We've been together for five years. I really trust him. He's a good guy."

She's still shaking her head. "Yeah, you say that. You think that now. Maybe you right. Maybe you will be lucky. Me, I have never been lucky, so now I don't trust no-one. I don't trust no man no more."

"Well, you can't be too be careful. But this guy is a good guy."

"OK," she says. "OK, you say so." She looks over the club and then back at me. "But you never know. It happen when you least expect it. He leave you, baby. I say this because I care. He leave you with nothing."

People say this kind of thing to me all the time. And other things. I've been told that I lack self-respect. People who don't know either of have called my boyfriend a pimp. I guess because I'm a girl and he's a boy, and probably because I'm a stripper.

I get it. I know where it's coming from. When you trade in affection as a commodity, your ideas shift. You see how money can tie a person to another person, how it creates complacency. You see how you can put a dollar value on every gesture, and how money can stand in for gratitude, for admiration, for approval, for joy, for love.

You can think that someone who isn't paying you doesn't really love you. You can think that giving something away means you must be one of those losers who has to pay for love.

I think this way only at my worst, my most frightened and desperate. And then I think: you don't deserve this. It will be taken from you. You are not loved. You never have been loved. Tricked again, stupid. He will use you up and leave you dry as a husk. He will leave you with nothing. He will leave you.

When I am well, medicated, rested, stable, I don't believe these things. I think: You love him. He loves you. You are lucky. You are a good judge of character. He will never let you down. He would rather die; you see it in the set of his shoulders, the set of his lips. You will never let him down, either. You would rather die, too. You will have a long and wonderful life together, with many adventures, and one of you will be next to the bed when the other one dies, telling them it's OK, go ahead, go, I'll catch up with you later.

This is not to say that we don't have our differences:

C. is optimistic to the point of insouciance. I am apprehensive to the point of madness. When I am in the grip of my worry and I look over and see him smiling, I think he doesn't care. I want to yell at him until he cares.

When I met him he lived in someone's basement and owned two pairs of jeans and several thousand dollars worth of musical equipment. He was the happiest person I had ever met. He has that rare quality -- yogis would call it santosha -- where whatever he has at the moment is always enough. He has never had a bank account.

I opened a bank account when I was eleven, after I made my first serious money selling my bottle-raised show-lamb to slaughter. I've always been a hustler. All the worry about having things, nice things, enough of things, those are all my worries. I am a predator. I love the chase. I love the kill. And I am afraid. I am so afraid of running out, so afraid of dying.

Be calm, C says. And I say, You don't care. You don't care about me. You don't care about anything.

We have argued and given up and tried again, and in the end we have compromised for each other like neither of us has ever compromised for anyone else.

But then the questions. I hear my own answers and I know how ignorant they sound-- I love him. He loves me -- like I don't even know that people who say "I love you" are fucking over the people they say it to left and right all over the world right now.

I know that. I do. It's just that I think I'm different. I am sheepish, but I can't budge. I wonder if other people are asked to explain their love as much as I am.

On a night like any other night, I am talking to a guy like every other guy. We are negotiating a business transaction.

"So," he says. "Married?"

"Silly. No one in here is married."

"Engaged?"

"Why, are you proposing?"

"You have a boyfriend though. Every girl in here has a boyfriend."

Shrug. "No one serious." I lie without a second thought. Not because I don't care about my boyfriend, lying in bed at home waiting to hear me pull into the driveway. Because I don't care about this guy. In fifteen minutes his face will be a blur. By the end of the night I won't remember his name.

"That's good," he says, approving of me. "I hate to think of all the girls here...supporting some man."

"Uh-huh."

"If you were mine, I'd take care of you. You'd never have to work in here again. You could just stay home and take care of me."

Oh. Joy.

"A woman ought to be at home," he says. "A woman ought to have a man to look after her. I think that's right. I think that's how it ought to be."

uncharted seas

2008-07-06T08:05:00.000-07:00

C. doesn't bat an eyelash when I quit my third job in two months. I tell him, I tell myself, I'll find another job, pronto. Piece of cake. Nothing to worry about. And oddly, I don't worry.

Together, we went online and applied for a Pell Grant to pay the rest of his tuition, which would mean I could take the fat bankroll I've saved for that purpose and buy groceries. The application is so easy I'm shocked it took us this long. That was just two weeks ago and his college already contacted him and told him he should have money by the end of the month.

One morning I sit down and invent a resume that says I am bright shining star of the food service industry and the best damn waitress and/or cocktail server your upscale establishment could desire, and then I go downtown and paper all the nice restaurants and hotel bars. One bar manager tells me to come back after the 4th of July. Everyone else says they'll call me. I'm waiting.

Late one afternoon my phone rings with an out-of-town area code and I pick it up and the guy who introduced himself is the public face of the biggest and most elusive of the institutions whom I have contacted on behalf of Dayjob Project and importunately demanded money. I have been in and out of touch with this man for a year. He has requested documents. I have sent them. I have waited. I have called. I have talked to secretaries and interns. I have waited. I have called again. I have left messages. Now he is on the phone with me and he's using words like "awesome" and "perfect." He's telling me my project is great, and needs to be done, and he's saying "I think we have everything we need to move forward" and he's telling me about the Process. The Process is long, and involves a lot of other people doing things, while I just sit tight on my little ass and wait for a decision. This will take until, oh, say November.

At which time they might or might not send me what I've always wanted: a big bag of money.

A big bag of money means the project can go on. If there is no money, I do not know what I will do. I don't seem to be worried. The project will go on, or maybe it won't. But probably it will. It has momentum, now. A lot of people want to see it happen. I myself will go on, regardless. I always go on.

I find I'm not scared, not at all. This little boat is on the ocean now and the only thing to do is make for the far shore. There is no point in thinking about how deep the water is, or what might be down there. The water is deep and the monsters are down there whether you think about it or not.

I only worry because I am not alone. If it were just me I would have quit dancing a long time ago. I would sleep in someone's garage and live on tortillas like I did when I was twenty, and it would be OK. But C. didn't ask for anything of this, and he trusts me, and I don't want to let him down.

I tell him that we're going to be poor for a while. I tell him I'll do my best, but times are tight. Like he doesn't know already. He does the shopping; he knows the grocery budget is half what it was at the beginning of the year. But I want to know that he knows. I want him to tell me it's OK. I want that so much.

"So you get it, right?" I want to know. We are in the car on the way home from somewhere. C. is driving. I am talking. "You don't mind that we're going to be poor?"

We pull up at a red light, which is good because he can take his eyes off the road and look at me. "How poor?"

"Poor."

"Poor like 'I might have to drop out of school and sell a kidney so we can afford medicine' kind of poor?"

"Poor like 'we might have to eat a lot of beans' kind of poor."

The light turns green. He turns his eyes back to the road. Quietness. He smiles. He reaches over and gently squeezes my thigh.

"Baby, baby, baby," he says. "Baby, you know I love beans."

ask an angry man-hating burnout retired stripper

2008-07-01T10:20:00.000-07:00

Dear Grace,

Are there many customers who don't seem creepy?

I've only been to a strip club once. There were some things I liked about the experience, I'd like to go again, but if I'm going to be perceived as creepy, or if the experience is negative for them- I don't want that.

Are there 'good' clients, and if so, what does it take to be one?

Mitch

Dear Mitch,

Excellent question. Yes, there are many, many pleasant, congenial, non-creepy strip-club customers. I could roughly break it down like this: 25% of guys were super-nice; 25% were various degrees of pain in the ass; 50% were pretty neutral. So, pretty much your normal bell curve.

How to be a good customer? I'm so glad you asked.

First of all, you should be prepared to have a good time. As an entertainer, my job is to facilitate that good time, but it helps if you give me something to work with. For one thing, if you do not feel like going to a strip club, please don't go. It is no fun as a dancer to run across someone who hates strip clubs, hates strippers, and is only there because he is afraid his friends will think he is a big old homo if he says no. You are not going to have fun. I am not going to have fun with you. You are going to open your big mouth and say something mean to me and I am going to give you a weird look and leave and you are going to be ever-more convinced that strippers are gold-digging harpies, while I am going to be ever more convinced that you are an asshole. So, just don't come.

If you DO want to go to a strip club, go ahead and go. Go ahead and check your judgements about sex and money and who is exploiting who at the door and just relax. It is OK to want to look at girls naked, and the girls at strip clubs are there for that exact purpose. If you were not there, they would be getting naked on stage for nothing. You are in one of the very few places in our culture where it is OK to start a conversation with a girl by telling her you love her ass. Enjoy!!

Secondly -- and this is very important -- you must choose your dancer well. Look for a Happy Dancer -- one who is standing up relatively straight, making eye contact, and smiling. This girl is having a good time, or is at least willing to evince good-will. Avoid Crazy Dancers, Sad Dancers, and Angry Dancers. They are not smiling, and often slouch. They will not make eye contact with you, or will lock eyes and refuse to let go. Basically, they will give you a weird feeling when you interact with them. When this happens, throw 'er back. (If you cannot tell a Happy Dancer from an Angry Dancer, you need practice. You should go to strip clubs more often.)

When you turn a girl loose, do it promptly, without wasting a lot of her time, because time is money to dancers. Do it politely, too, the way you would appreciate having it done to you. Tell her you are not interested in getting any dances at the moment, but you will let her know if you change your mind. Be courteous.

As long as you follow this formula of promptness plus tact, you are totally at liberty to refuse the advances of any dancer. However, you should be prepared to buy dances from a dancer who takes your fancy. It is NOT appreciated when customers claim to be in the club "just for a drink" or "just to watch the game." This is a lie, and we know it. Cover charge to the club is $10, and the drink prices are a gouge. You did not "just happen to stop in." You are here to peripherally ogle us while we work, and we hate you. You know it, and you don't care. You want to look at us naked anyway. There is nothing creepier than being ogled by someone who knows you hate it and does it anyway. If looks could kill, you are dead.

Also, do not come in with the plan of talking a dancer into going home with you so you can get her services for free. I can't say this will never work. I can only say that I have never, ever seen it work, and the shit talked about these guys amongst ourselves should make their ears burst into flames. Of course, you would never do this, but I state it for the record.

Now, assuming you have found a Happy Dancer whose looks and personality are to your liking, it is time to ask her if she would like to dance for you. Depending on the club you are at, there may be a variety of services for purchase, and a range of prices. Ask her to explain, if you are interested.

Different clubs have different rules, which may vary widely from the actual laws regulating clubs, and even from the rules at other clubs in the same city, let alone state to state. If you are unsure of the rules -- i.e. how much you get to touch her and where -- ask her. Different dancers also have different limits. Just because Chantal let you touch her wherever does not mean Crystal will be OK with it. When in doubt, err on the side of caution. You might not get to squeeze as much jellyroll this way, but you will not end up being the guy all the dancers talk about back in the dressing room for being such a gropy, annoying clueless butt-plug. Some guys don't care, but you do, or you wouldn't have asked the original question.

After the dance(s), thank her and pay her what you owe her, promptly. If you enjoy talking to a dancer and take up a lot of her time, consider tipping her. In most clubs it is not required, and a lot of guys don't do it. If you do, you will certainly set yourself apart. Should you return in the future, the dancers of your acquaintance will be more likely to remember you and make time for you.

In summation, the Golden Rule goes a long, long way in ensuring a happy strip-clubbing experience for everyone. Dancers are not really so different from other people. They are likely to be annoyed by things that most people would find annoying, like being condescended to, groped after repeated request to cease and desist, and cheated out of money. They are pleased by the things that please any vendor -- a simple, pleasant transaction and a fair price for services rendered.

So there you go. It is really pretty simple after all. Go forth and enjoy! We need more customers who WANT to be good customers, so get your asses in the seats.

Love, Grace

Grace,
What do you like to read?
Antonio

Dear Antonio,

It's hard for me to believe how little I read anymore. When I was a kid, I read all the time. All the time. I had this little set-up with the bath-caddy where I could read while I showered. These days I am lucky if I finish three or four complete books in a year. It is largely a factor of time. When I do have time to read, it tends to be non-fiction, and generally something practical. I like books about how to do things and make things. I also like books about the body and the brain.

One of my favorite books is "Listening to Prozac" about brain chemistry, depression, drugs, and the role of medication in the evolving definition of mental illness. The last novel I read was "Stardust." It's about faeries and stuff. Not necessarily my thing, but one of my customers gave it to me and I felt kinda obligated. I read it while I was in bed with a back injury in March. It was pleasant and escapist.

I'd like to think that at some point in my life I will have more time to read. If you think of a book or author I ought to know about, please suggest!

Love,
Grace

Dear Grace:
Quick question; When your satanist said

'"What are you doing?" he says. "Why do you do that? Why do you tell everybody what they want to hear? You're so transparent it's ridiculous."'

I felt really scared because I've heard a lot of people have that misconception about strippers, that everything they do it fake and that they are transparent. Have you found that happens a lot in your life?

Thanks!!
Lucky Luxie

Dear Luxie:
Most of the people in my life know me as myself, not as " a stripper." So honestly, I don't deal with that issue a lot, except at work.

When a lot of people around you think you are full of shit, you start to wonder yourself. This is why I always found it really important to keep pretty strong boundaries between my life at work and my personal life, and I would urge anyone starting out in dancing to do the same. It's important to have some relationships around you that are based entirely on mutual appreciation, and not at all on an exchange for goods for services.

To this end, I gave my customers an only-for-work e-mail address, never a phone number. I did not encourage them to contact me too much, and never met up with them outside of the club. I never encouraged people I knew from my civilian life to come to the club, and didn't share the fact that I was a dancer with many people, either.

Now, if the question is, "do guys at the club think I'm full of shit", the answer is, Sometimes. Some of them are really insistent about it, too, which is annoying. I mean, gold star for figuring out that I'm not really in love with you, buddy. Now do you want a dance or not?

On the other hand, some of them believe you for the moment, just like you go to a movie and enjoy the plot without worrying about whether or not it actually happened.

Still others really, really believe you, which is actually a lot more stressful.

The guy I call here the Satanist is an exceptional case, in that he is one (of two) customers with whom I ever made the transition from stripper/customer to sorta kinda friends.

Both transitions were weird and involved many leaps of faith and unwarranted extensions of trust.

What I'm saying is, it's not easy.

Does that answer your question at all?

XOXO,
Grace

boss man

2008-06-25T09:41:00.001-07:00

I push through the swinging doors into the dressing room. I just want to sit down for a minute. It's a lousy night. There are twenty waitresses on the floor and probably about that many customers in the whole stupid club.

The club's response to an ever-weakening economy has been to jack up cover prices, which has run off a whole tier of customers. They've also hired more dancers, so that the house can collect more fees from them. I don't know why they've hired a bevy of new waitresses and scheduled twenty of them on a Tuesday night, but if I had to guess, they're trying to turn them into dancers. In a week, the youngest and prettiest of the new waitresses will complain to the managers that they aren't making money and the managers will say, "Why don't you dance for a night and see how you like it." The older, uglier waitresses will just drift away.

I always had a feeling if I knew too much about the runnings of this bar I'd hate it. When I was a dancer I came and went like a ninja. I made my money and got out, keeping interaction with management to the bare minimum possible. This is harder now that I'm waitress. Now that I have to sit in meeting with the managers for thirty minutes after the shift starts and thirty minutes after we close and wipe the tables down. Now that I have to ask the managers permission for everything I do, and report every dollar I make. Something in me that does not love a boss. No wonder I've been fired from half the straight jobs I've ever had.

I just want to sit down. Unfortunately, the waitresses' corner of the dressing room is occupied. The shift manager lounges in the ass-sweat-saturated wheelie chair, legs spread like a pasha. Waitresses perch around him, and one brand-new little blonde teenager crouches at his side with her head on his knee. He has one arm draped heavily over her neck, a lordling posing with his favorite hunting dog.

I get just a flash of this as I walk past, back into the dancers' space, where girls are re-curling their hair and bitching in familiar ways about familiar things. I want a cigarette. I even carry them on my tray, for customers to buy from me. But I don't smoke any more and I'm proud of myself.

I can't shake it. I can't shake my distaste for that frat boy gone to seed, with his white-blond hair spiked up and his pink-pink skin. His baby-faced smugness, eyes opaque as marbles. I can't shake my distaste for the whole stupid scene and I'm not sure why. I hope that little blonde girl has an epiphany some day soon and realizes that even if crawling on the floor for men's approval is her thing, she could be doing it for somebody a lot more worthwhile than the little oinker in the chair there. For fuck's sake.

Later in the night the same manager comes up behind me and raps my tray with his knuckles. "That's one," he says. As in, that's one strike.

"Huh?"

"Don't put your tray there."

My tray is sitting on a wide ledge that lines the ramp down to the main floor. It looks pretty safe there to me, especially since I am standing next to it with my hand on it.

"Really?"

"Yes, really. Because someone could come along and just do this."

He puts his hand on my tray and gives it a sharp shove. It flies. Matches and lighters and cigarettes and ballpoint pens scatter while cocktail napkins and credit card receipts drift down slower, like snow.

We look at each other. "Really?" I say, finally. "But, who would do a thing a like that?"

He doesn't say anything and he doesn't have to. He folds his arms. I stoop to pick up my stuff, and here I am, on my knees, at his feet. He wins. I lose. I've been out-pissed in this pissing contest.

I sort everything back onto my tray. I go back to the dressing room. The chair is empty. I take one of my rescued cigarettes and roll it lightly in my fingers, put it to my mouth and light it with a kiss. It tastes like, fuck you. And it tastes like, enough.

service

2008-06-20T10:15:00.000-07:00

I never was a Superstripper. I never had the strategy. I just smiled a lot and hoped that would take me where the money was. It often did.

I have a big smile, open and full of teeth like happy dog. My eyes crinkle shut when I smile, too, which according to some eastern diagnostic traditions means I am destined for a happy life. Here's hoping.

I still smile a lot now that I am cocktailing at my old strip club. I think it's the only reason I make money, not that I'm making that much. Note to self: working for tips during a recession is shit.

I smile all huge at the guy I'm talking to now. "Can I get you something?"

He's all sprawled out in his chair and now his eyes roll up at me like bloodshot eggs. He probably doesn't need another drink. I ask again if I can bring him something. Water, perhaps?

"Just bring me your tits."

"Okey doke," I say. I turn and walk away.

Why are you waitressing? All the waitresss ask me this. Like there's going to be some big dramatic reason. I tell them I just needed a break, but they look at me like they don't get it, so after a while I start making up stupid reasons. I tell them I was tired of shaving my pussy. I tell them I developed an allergy to men's pants.

The dancers don't ask me why I'm waitressing, not the ones I've known for a while anyway. They know dancing can get old.

"I wish I could be a fucking waitress," Ronnie says. "I can't do it though. I'm a horrible waitress."

Ronnie's been here longer than most of us, and yet she never quite looks like a stripper. Her hair and make-up are haphazard, as though she's never quite got the hang of them. Clumsy in her shoes, she sidles crab-wise across the club, awkward and stoop-shouldered. Her pupils are no bigger than a pencil-tip and when she talks to you she stares right through you. Drugs, maybe. Or she's really crazy. I really don't know.

My regular, B., told me she once offered to give him a blow-job after the club closed. She wanted a couple hundred dollars and she gave him her phone number and promised the meet up with him. He says he didn't call her. I can't think of any reason he would make this up.

Everyone sort of knows that Ronnie is a whore, but everyone lets it go. In theory, strippers hate girls like this because they drive up customer expectations and undermine the market for the dancing-only kind of entertainment. But it's hard to hate Ronnie. She isn't hurting anyone.

"I tried to be a waitress," Ronnie tells me, staring right through me at a spot six feet behind my face. "I couldn't do it. It's hard."

"I hope I make it," I say. "I'm sick of dancing."

"Right on," says Ronnie, nodding. "Right on, right on."

And she squirrels away. I'll see her later at the end of the night in the dressing room, where her locker is two down from mine. I'm supposed to use the waitress lockers in the waitress part of the dressing room now, but I don't. Waitresses here are as cut-throat and mean as dancers are sweet and laid-back.

Or maybe it's just a sign of the times. No one's making money any more, and for some obscure reason the club keeps hiring more girls. More dancers, more waitresses. Flooding the floor with girls even as the pool of customers shrinks till we are like angry sea-birds around a vanishing tide-pool. I did OK tonight, but barely, and only because I smiled at the right people at the right time.

Ronnie is cursing next to me and I don't want to know why. "She's so fucking stupid," she says. "She thinks she's all that, but she's not. That's the funny thing. She is not. She is NOT."

She's slurring. She might be a little drunk, but then again she always slurs. It's hard to tell. Maybe she's always drunk.

"You OK, baby?" I say, only because I feel like I have to say something.

"She is a fucking god-damned piece-of-shit cunt whore is what she is,"Ronnie says. "And she thinks she's so hot. Fuck her! Fuck her, right?"

"OK, baby. It'll be OK."

Not because it will be. Just for something to say.

She slams her open palm into the closed door of the locker next to her. And then she does it again, and again, and again. "Fucking fuckingfuckingFUCK!"

I stuff my things in their bag. I pull the zipper shut. I take another look at her, but I can't think of anything I'm supposed to do. I'd rather just not be involved. I imagine a lot of people feel this way about Ronnie. I wonder if anyone loves her.

I back away, and really I don't turn my back on her until I am at the dressing room door and then I go out. The last thing I see is her pitched forward, with her face not quite pressed against the locker door, not quite crying.

hands

2008-06-11T22:24:00.000-07:00

I think that's the Egyptian. I've seen him here twice, at my favorite downtown coffee place, the one I stop at on the way home from meetings with my Dayjob Project partner and her team. Meetings start early and run long. I'm tired by the end, every time, but excited. Things are going so, so well. On the bike ride home I stop for coffee to balance my thrill out with my exhaustion.

I've seen him here twice now. I think that's him. He's quite distinctive. Tall, with a ridiculous, matinee idol face. Dark eyes and Rudolph Valentino lips. So nicely dressed, too. Lovely shirts, expensive belts and shoes. We met at the old club, when I'd been dancing for a couple of months. He doesn't look any different out here in the light. I wonder if I do.

"You should be called Layla," he used to tell me, and his accent reminded me of heavy perfume. "Layla means night. Not just any night, but a night in the desert, under the sky. A beautiful night. A romantic night." He really talked like this.

His fingers were always digging into my crevices, trying to creep between my thighs, or my ass cheeks, or my armpits even. Like he was going to put his hand right into me, the way you thrust your hand up in the warm guts of a freshly-killed chicken and neatly twist them out. He didn't stop when I asked him to stop. He didn't even stop when I would grab his wrists and try to force his hands off of me. He was stronger than I was, much.

He would come in in the middle of the afternoon lull when there had been no customers in the doors for an hour or more, and it was sit with him and make money or sit by myself in the dressing room and go home broke. I sat with him every time. And I didn't scream. I didn't go and get the manager. I didn't do the things that I'd tell any other girl to someone else to do if they were me. I stayed and silently fought his hands, and then I took the money and went back to the dressing room and folded and straightened all the bills and put them in my locker. I took his money, and so, I am sometimes reminded by voices in my head and commenters here, I have no right to complain.

Who's complaining? I'm just remembering. I sit here at my table with my coffee and remember. I remember everything. I remember pulling at his fingers and saying please stop, and I remember the obnoxious strength of him and the hairs on his wrist like black wires. He was a big man, with big arms. It was one of the things you would find attractive about him, if you met him somewhere.

"Baby, you're beautiful," he would say. "Your face is a doll face." And he would brush his hand across my cheeks, finger-tips jabbing lightly at the openings of my ears and eyes. "I love you so much, you know that? Run away with me, darling." Then he would laugh fondly. He had a wife. He told me he had a wife. But there was...something. Some real or imaginary problem. I don't remember, if I ever really knew. Then he would dart for my crevices again.

I took the money. I sold my right to be shocked. Some people would say it wasn't worth it, but those people put a higher price on innocence than I do. I'm not sorry I know the things I know now. I'm not sorry I know that there are people out there who will touch you even if they know you don't want to be touched, and that some of those people are attractive, well-spoken, wealthy, and nicely dressed. I always had my suspicions that this was true.

I sold my right to be angry, too, and that's OK. What I feel now isn't anger, anyway, just a great and unbridgeable distance. Such distance that I don't care if he sees me or not, if that curl of lip is recognition of me in particular, or just of the woman-shaped thing I also am, with eyes and hair and a mouth.

I don't care.

I don't care. He is just a shape. There's nothing he could say or do to me now that would matter to me at all. He could stand in front of me and block my way and I would walk right through him, because he isn't really there.

the light in the afternoon

2008-06-04T13:54:00.000-07:00

I am on the phone with Scarlett. It is 99 degrees outside and humid; clothes are impractical in this weather, so I am in my underwear in the middle of the afternoon, on my back, on the couch, on the phone, sweating.

I hate how dark this apartment is. There are no windows that face the sun, at any time of day. The light is always murky, and you don't know what time it is. Scarlett's voice sounds like it's coming to me from the moon, and my own voice sounds that way, too.

"I don't want to be touched anymore," I say.

This is not kind of me. Scarlett went to New York City and went straight, got a straight job and an apartment and some friends, and came back to visit this winter looking sleek and blooming. But things can go downhill fast in a city that big, and this week she started at dancing again, at a "private club" with beds in the VIP.

"I convince guys I'm going to fuck them for fifteen minutes for $160 and then I don't do it," is what she says.

Fifteen minutes is a long time to spend in a closed room with someone who thinks they just paid to fuck you. Everything about that sounds bad. Body-in-a-dumpster bad. I don't want to be that bitch who gets out of dancing for three weeks and comes back and tells all their friends they are Ruining Their Lives, but I am scared for my friend. I want to put a fence around her eight miles high.

I noticed the strain in her voice as soon as I picked up the phone. She launched right in, talking fast, spinning plans for the future, and I hear how she is pushing herself. I know my friend. I hear her brain scrambling in all directions, heart burning at a high heat.

I soothe her, like I know how to do, and when she simmers down a little she asks me what I'm doing, and I say I've left dancing, which is no surprise. I told her my reasons months ago. I try to be cautious about what I say, because there's too much tinder on the ground to go throwing out sparks. But like the good friend she is, she puts her finger right on the sorest spot and presses down.

"What does C. think?"

I tell her I don't know. I tell her he's playing along, but that I'm not sure he really understands, which might say more about me and my lack of faith than it says about him. He hasn't said a harsh word to me, or even rolled his eyes. He tries to live peacefully with me, the hurting monster lurking in the bedroom. He doesn't complain.

But I don't know if he understands. I don't know if anyone who hadn't spent too much time in titty bars could understand how you know that it's been too much time. I don't really understand it myself, not the exact mechanics of it. I don't know why a few months ago it was fine and now it's not, or why I can't conceive of getting my things together and driving to the club. The whole routine -- the coffee I buy at the drive-in on the way there, the parking lot I pull into just at dusk, the front desk where I pay my house fees, the dressing room where I apply my make-up ritually, every stroke, every day, the same -- seems foreign, like something I've heard about but never done myself.

I'm sure C. wishes I could suck it up and go back and make a thousand dollars in a weekend like I used to do. I am sure that he wishes this because I wish it myself. If there were just some actual reason why I couldn't do it anymore. Like, if my leg were broken. If I had a reason to give him, one that I'd know he could understand.

Scarlett understands.

"It's a tough job," she says. "You've done it for a long time. You got a lot of good things out of it. You're tired. It's OK."

She sounds pretty tired herself. I should stop, change the subject. We don't need to talk about how much stripping sucks right now, when she has to get off the phone and shower and shave her snatch and catch the subway to the private club with the VIP and it's waiting beds.

It feels so good, though, to know that someone understands, to be sure of it. And that's when I say it, about not wanting to be touched any more.

The pause is taught.

"Well, it doesn't get any simpler than that," Scarlett says.

"I can't do it. I really can't."

"I know. I know."

Her voice sounds tired. More tired than before? I wish I could see her face. I want to hug her, and be hugged. I wish she were here. There's not even a phone line between us, in a proper sense, just two thousand miles of electrified ether. It's not really quite enough.

dopamine

2008-06-03T11:34:00.000-07:00

I don't do a lot of re-posting on here, but this is the funniest thing I've ever seen. It really is.

I've got a tip for you

2008-05-31T01:13:00.000-07:00

So, a couple of people suggested I put up a link to accept donations and after some though I am doing so. There is absolutely no expectation or demand that anybody contribute. Having a reader is an awesome thing for a writer, and you do more than enough for me just by being here.

But in the instance that you enjoy the blog, and wish to express your appreciation through monetary means, then far be it from me to deny you. Give me whatever you woudl slide in my thong if I were on stage, or whatever you would spend to buy this if it were a book, or whatever you would give to a busker in the subway.

I think PayPal will let you include a "message to seller" or whatnot. If you send me an e-mail or an address I will send you a thank you note, because I try to be well brought-up like that.

Peace.

garbage in, garbage out

2008-05-26T17:56:00.001-07:00

So, this is what I was about to publish when all the crazy people from the Internet showed up and I got paralyzed by self-consciousness. Oh, well. Here goes nothing.

C. and I woke up so suddenly that for a flat second we didn't know what was waking us. Then we heard the sirens all around the house, so many of them, and deafening. From the bed, I pulled the curtain back and saw sparks raining from the sky. We hauled ass into our pants and I snatched the money from the special money drawer and stuffed it in my bra before we ran out into the street.

Fire was rising from the next block over -- a column of it, spiraling into the sky forty or fifty feet, whirling and throwing off sparks which were landing all around us, but thank God it was also raining and the ground was moist.

"It's that house they just renovated," said James, the neighbor we share a wall with, who was also standing on the porch and had had time to put his shoes on and light a cigarette. Fire trucks kept arriving, and showers of sparks kept blowing. Then there was a whooshing sound as the trucks turned the water on, or the foam, or whatever it is. And just like that, the chimney of fire collapsed out of the sky and there was just a red glow.

C. and I went back to bed, where I tried like hell to fall asleep because I had to get up at 9 a.m. to go to work. That's right. After four years of working whenever and wherever the hell I felt like, I had a job to get to. I fucking hated it.

No, not a "real" job, and I know what you mean when you say that, even if I don't agree. Just cocktailing at another titty bar. It's the kind of job you can walk into and make money that day, plus my friend Valerie worked at the club, and she's fun. If this dayshift was anything like the dayshifts I remember dancing through, it'll at least be nice to have a friend around during the long lull between the lunch crowd and the Happy Hour crowd.

So I drove there in the morning in a white top and a black skirt, asked to talk to the manager, and was clocked in to work by 10 o'clock. That part was awesome. Having Valerie trotting around in a Victoria's Secret camigarter and feathered hair like some kind of sexed-out Sixties go-go pin-up girl was also awesome.

Everything else blew. I'd almost forgotten this about the dayshift -- it sucks. Well, it sucks for me. For a certain kind of dancer it is like candy from babies, because all you have to do is sniff out the handful of rich old dudes who come in every day, and avoid the wannabee gangsters who wander in after lunch and sell or pretend to sell drugs all afternoon. You find those couple of customers who really, really like you --because they like redheads, because you remind them of some other girl, or maybe, just maybe because the two of you really get along. That happens, too.

Then you give them your phone number and call them every couple of days and they come to the club and give you a bunch of money to sit with them all afternoon and do whatever it is you do. Which is sometimes nothing. I have literally seen willowy blondes fresh from high school prom sit next to old men with banker's faces all day long, saying nothing.

Some girls are so good at this that they dance for the same five-to-ten guys for years. Not me. I'm really bad at this, it turns out. I have had a few loyal customers over the years, but there's a point in the pseudo relationship where I have to draw a line. I can't chat on the phone. I can't go out to lunch. I can't depend on any one guy too much, because if you do, they know it and they pull the plug. They can't help it, almost. They have to know if you really love them, and of course then it usually turns out that you don't, but if you want the money, you have to find a work-around. You DO go to lunch, or you swear that you will but then you cancel at the last minute, or you DO but then you immediately try to get him to go to the club with you afterwards and give you a bunch of money. It goes from there. I hate that stuff.

Sometimes you don't want to be anybody's fake girlfriend. You just want to take your dress off and be sexy and fun for a few minutes and get a couple of bucks and on to the next.

But this new club is not an on-to-the-next kind of establishment. Most customers who spend any kind of money have their favorite waitress up in VIP already. If you don't have one of those customers, you are stuck in the rotation where you simply get whatever customer walks in the door next, and if it's the homeless guy who comes in and buys an iced tea (the only drink that comes with free refills), tips you fifty cents and crouches in an empty dance booth all afternoon rocking back and forth and oggling the stage, well that's your fucking luck.

In two days I made $72. And on the third day I called the manager and told him I appreciated his help and wouldn't be back. I didn't really have to call. Most girls just disappear without a trace but for some reason I was inclined to be professional.

I spent the day aimlessly, but not a peacefully. I'm like a cow dog. If I don't have enough to do I chew on the furniture. Finally, around midnight, after a solid day of watching me pace the floor and whimper, C. got sick of me and threw me out of the house. "Come back when you've worked it off, whatever it is," said my sweetie, and locked the door behind me.

I rode my bike around in the dark for a while, and then I called the Satanist. He was home and said I could come by, so I tooled over through the steamy streets and we sat in his midnight garden and smoked a joint. It hasn't been the simplest thing to make a real friendship out of our stripper/customer relationship, but we have made some progress, and it's been worth it.

I like the Satanist because you don't have to downplay the drama in things to get him to take them seriously. He believes in karma and chi and magic and the collective consciousness and all that shit. So I can tell him about the apocolyptic vision, fire falling from the sky, and see it catch in his eyes behind those Grandad glasses. I tell him how my mother stood dumbstruck in her yard one day last month and saw the funnel of a tornado lift into the sky and pass over the farmhouse in a rain of leaves. We talked about the storm that tore through town a few weeks ago, blowing over trees and plowing up graves in the cemetery, cracking the plot-stones in half and up-ending them.

I lay on my back on the patio playing with the leaves of the rubber plant. I said, "Is the world ending?" and he squinted at me like a medicine man and said, "Dying people always think the word is ending."

So I told him I couldn't dance anymore, and I didn't know why, and it wasn't dancing that had changed, of course, but me. I couldn't blow the bad stuff off any more and my compassion was exhausted and I didn't think I gave a damn anymore about a single person in the whole world. And he said "Garbage in, garbage out, honey. How much shit can you take in without putting some of it back out?"

"It didn't used to bother me so much. I thought I could take in all the bad and make it good."

He nods. "You did," he said. "You did have that. But it's gone."

I tell him my chest is so tight it feels like a fist is squeezing my heart, milking my adrenal glands into my bloodstream till my body is a factory that never shuts down. I haven't really slept in days. And he doesn't ask me what I mean, because he knows what I mean, and he doesn't say he's sorry, because this is just life.

And then we smoke some more and he takes me around and shows me the holes that the hail made in the garden. He doesn't touch me once, and I am so grateful I could cry. For a minute I get confused and try to tell him how much I like him and why, but he frowns at me and things get weird for a second. "What are you doing?" he says. "Why do you do that? Why do you tell everybody what they want to hear? You're so transparent it's ridiculous."

It's too late to argue and I'm too stoned. I try to smile and not too long later he kicks me ever so gently back out into the night so he can get back to the work of whatever it is he does in his haunted house all night long. I take the hint and hug him and go. He locks the door behind me and I point my bike back towards home pushing myself up the hills and sweating and when I get home I feel so quiet and good, it's like it rained inside of me.

OK. Hi.

2008-05-24T23:48:00.000-07:00

So, I've been through to archives and taken out the couple of things that could have been incriminating to myself or someone else. All in all, I've been pretty cautious through the years -- I've used fake names for people who were already using fake names -- but I had to double-check. I think we're good.

So welcome, new people. Nice to have you here, even the folks participating in the backlash and counter-backlash like I was Paris Hilton's new hairdo, and even the ones who think I'm not a real stripper because real strippers don't use semi-colons or whatever. It's an interesting experience so far and of course, this too will pass.

For those of you who just got here, you are arriving in what may very well be the twilight of this blog. After four on-and-off years of stripping, I am actively looking for a way out, or at least an extended break. For those of you who read my recent posts and think I sound like a bitter cunt, well yeah. The past four years have not been without their difficulties and they have left their mark, for sure. Once upon a time I had a magical ability to transform other people's misery at least temporarily into happiness, and as a dancer I banked off that for a long time, but it's gone now, and there it is.

I'm not at all sure what the fate of this blog will be. I'm pretty busy trying to get famous for something besides being a stripper, so not looking for a book deal or anything like that. I could really use a big bag of money, though, so if you want to send me one that would be awesome.

For now, I'm probably just going to pretend to ignore all of you like I have lovingly pretended to ignore Nathaniel and Anna and the other long-time loyal readers. So, back to our regularly scheduled programming.

P.S. If you are writing to me about something specific and want a response, like a few have, you gots to leave me some contact information. I won't publish it, and if what you're saying interests me I will respond.

P.P.S. Dear Stripper Haters: You are in my house, so please behave accordingly. Your comments will not be published unless they contain unusual insight or some sort of unique expertise beyond "my friend's sister was a stripper and in my opinion she is all fucked up now so you are too." The garden variety of ill-informed vitriol will be deleted with a light heart. I don't have the time or inclination to respond to you individually, but perhaps you will enjoy this.

what the fuck is this shit?

2008-05-24T23:10:00.000-07:00

Who are all of you people? What are you doing here? Why are you yelling at me? Last thing I knew I was in here in the dark talking to Tara and Diopter and maybe Sixty, if he's still around, and now all you guys are here and you're scaring me.

no more mirrors, no more smoke

2008-05-17T12:02:00.000-07:00

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 Professor 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. The range of our topics of common interest is brief, but there's a genuine appreciation of each other, too. An awkward fondness. 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

2008-05-12T20:01:00.000-07:00

"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

2008-04-30T00:31:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-03T09:24:00.000-07:00

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 supposed to smell like vanilla and tropical flowers. 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 either going to hell or already there.

mad money

2008-03-29T11:01:00.001-07:00

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

2008-03-16T11:58:00.000-07:00

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 are wrong. I am nothing. I am not even here. I growl.

He smiles. "You ought to be chained up."

ready or not

2008-01-19T12:53:00.000-08:00

Last week I got an invitation to the club from a customer so gentle, so polite, and so harmless that I've probably never mentioned him before.

The Historian comes in at several-week intervals and we talk about geeky things like the coming apocalyptic battle between the zombies and the vampires, and then he buys a bunch of dances and pays me and goes home. These are pleasant, drama-free, low-gropage interactions and I appreciate them

When I got his e-mail last week I hadn't worked in a month and while C. and I hadn't totally depleted the little jelly roll of cash I set aside before Christmas, we were starting to feel the pinch. Still, I hadn't been able to get myself to the club, and as time went on my reluctance was only getting stronger. The thought of getting naked in a room full of people was scary all of a sudden. I don't remember being so terrified of my own nakedness even when I was new. Then again, back then I didn't know exactly what to be scared of.

So this invitation from a nice guy with plenty of money and a self-declared code of chivalry that obligates him not to grab my crotch was what you might call an offer I couldn't refuse. I dithered all week, but on Saturday I sent him a reply and we made plans to meet.

When I got to the club, I didn't recognize a single girl there, but other than that nothing had changed --same protocals of checking in, getting dressed, getting ready for stage. Different girls all around me doing the same things girls in strip-club dressing rooms always do, having the same conversations.

On the floor, I didn't feel nervous. I've gained two or three pounds and I need a haircut and I'm pale as a trout, but it doesn't matter. My body knows what to do and no one really sees me, anyway. If I walk the like hottest girl in the room, they will fall for it like they always do.

I cross the room longways to see whose eyes will follow me. A curly-haired guy at a big group table looks up, is caught. He doesn't even know that he is staring, breath suspended in his throat. I feel good. This is not just a den of bourgeoise perversion, upholstered in cum-rags and dusted over with a thin layer of body-glitter. It's also the place where I make my money.

I find the Historian at a table in a corner and he jumps up. He looks so happy. He is enraptured by me, by the shape of me in space, or the idea of me, or something. I take a seat on his lap. All I have to do for the next several hours is have an amusing social interaction with a rather socially awkward man, which is hard work actually, but I won't notice that I'm tired, or bored. The trick there is the suspension of the personality, divesting the self of any trait that might be less than agreeable, of opinions that might offend and flaws that are not lovable.

Simulating a simulation of femininity, the money pours into your garter and the money is tonic, analgesic, stimulant, and mood-elevator. Sometimes you'll strain a ligament in your knee, like I did that night, and won't notice until you get home. Sometimes you'll sit with a customer all night, you won't realize you didn't really like him -- not like like him that is, not like you said you did -- until you lie down in bed and close your eyes.

fivefourthreetwooneblastOFF

2007-12-29T10:58:00.000-08:00

I'm not at work. I'm not even in Texas. I'm holed up under a feather comforter in my brother's new house in the bleak mid-western city where he lives with his wife and eleven-month-old daughter.

The house is huge, swank, and located in an exclusive neighborhood of old trees and other nearly identical huge, swank houses. I don't think any member of my family as ever lived in a house and neighborhood like this before, ever. But we have always wanted to.

His wife is a doctor, see. She works in adult medicine at a city hospital, which has got to be one of the most thankless jobs in the profession. Her patients are all sicker than sick, most of them with chronic illnesses that only get worse. They might live relatively pain-free, she says, if they would take a modicum of responsibility for their own health, but they don't, so they end up in the hospital. Lots of them die, essentially of laziness and stupidity. That's her take on it anyway.

But, she makes a lot of money and has a really nice house and a semi-psychotic trophy husband to stay home and take care of the baby, cook her nice meals, and clean his guns. So somebody in my family married money, after all.

My brother. The handsome one. He got the blue eyes and the ash-blond hair and the eyebrows arched like one clean stroke of ink. He got the brains, too, and he got something else. I don't know what to call it. Men in my family are cursed, and I was supposed to be a man, but I'm not. I only felt the shadow of it but my brother got the full dose of doom. I always wanted him to love me, but I see now that he couldn't.

I recognize little things. Like yesterday I was looking for coffee in the pantry and found the half-eaten bar of chocolate wrapped up and hidden in an old canister. Food hoarding. Weird, residual instinct. I've done it, too, but not in years. Only in times of stress. Food under the bed. Food in the top left drawer of the dresser where no one can see it, no one can find it. Just in case. It's not the food you need as much as the secret.

When my brother and I were small, I didn't know we were poor. Life on the farm was pretty idyllic, in a Tom Sawyer way, if you filtered out my mom's trips to the hospital and my dad's rare but terrifying outburts. My brother was the one who taught me we were poor. He taught me not to ask for toys or treats or second helpings at dinner. He taught me that having things is a zero sum game and every bite you swallow comes from someone else's mouth.

And now he lives in this house, this enormous house. This house with rooms that they don't even use. He is making himself ugly, bit by bit. He fights, MMA, and his ear is permanently fucked. He shaves his head and tries not to be the handsome one.

He's sweet with the baby, though. Plays peekaboo and tosses her in the air and spoons mush expertly into her tiny mouth, like dads are supposed to do.

She's a pretty cool baby. She learned to walk about a month ago. She takes a lot of face plants, but gets up without a tear and keeps trying. I could watch her fall down and get back up all day.

I haven't thought about whether I'll be dancing in the future, and I won't bore you or myself with the details of the last couple of weeks. Well, just this: my last night, an occasional customer of mine I call John the Gimp paid me again to flick ash and spit loogies in his beer and "make" him drink it. When John the Gimp started coming to see me, I had to fake a lot of the agression. But over the nearly a year I've known him, I've come to hate him nearly as much as he wants me to. I wish he wouldn't come to see me, but he does. I tell him to give me the money and shut the fuck up.

He shuts up, but only for a little at a time. Then he's sniveling again. "Could you please -- oh, mistress, could you please -- could you blow your nose on this napkin and feed it to me?"

"Shut up," I say. "You're disgusting, you know that? I mean it. You make me sick."

"Oh, yes. Oh, yes."

I blow my nose and push the napkin into his loser mouth. He waits til he thinks I'm not looking and then quietly takes the napkin out and puts it in his pocket. I wonder, not for the first time, which of us is really being degraded.

So anyway, maybe I'll dance again and maybe I won't. I'm not deciding right now. I'm just enjoying this feather comforter for all that it's worth. Which, given how my bro lives now, is probably a lot.

six: funny story

2007-12-15T16:57:00.000-08:00

Friday night: holiday parties in full swing. And since it's chic and edgy for co-ed groups to go strip-clubbing these days, lots of civilian ladies with their tanned and moisturized civilian flesh hanging out of their civilian clubbing clothes.

The night's a blur, really. I was tired, and I was drinking: Two Bud Lites with an Asian guy who kept chanting "Jesus help me" while I danced, but must have liked it anyway, because he dropped a pretty penny. A Jack and Coke with Brit who wanted to know why some girls like other girls. Shots with some young Indian guys. More beer with some girl and her cowboy boyfriend. White Russians with another Brit.

It was well after midnight. The chairs had all been pushed away from tables, and the tables had all been shoved around, and the whole floor was one vast obstacle course through which I was weaving when I caught the eye of a man so non-descript I couldn't tell you the first thing about him, except his shirt was blue.

He waved me over and I sat on his lap and we were well into negotiations when there was some lady hovering near us whom he introduced as his wife. Strip club ettiquette, such as it is, dictates I offer her the first dance, and I did. She waved me off.

"I've bought about a million dances for her tonight," this dude said. "I want a dance for me."

Fine. The old song ends. The new song starts. I get up. He grabs my wrists and pulls me down. "You know what I like?" he says. "I want you to twist my nipples really hard. Make it hurt. Can you do that?"

Sure, guy. What the fuck ever. I ask if he'd like to go to the private dance area. He hands me $60. "Do it here."

I dance. I pull his hair a little bit and pinch his nips, because I am a dedicated hussy and I aim to please. He gasps. "Oh, you fucking bitch," he hisses. "Do it harder, bitch."

I don't like to be called a bitch, so I slap his face, just a little bit. He moans and tries to grab my tits. Over my shoulder I hear his wife say "You can't do that," but back off lady. I take care of myself.

I grab his wrists and pull them over his head, dig my knee into his thigh, and tower over him so he must lean way, way back. I lean down and whisper in his ear that he's a nasty, nasty boy. A dirty, squirming little slut. His eyes squeeze shut in ecstacy. "Make it hurt," he moans. "Make it hurt, make it hurt, make it hurt."

The old song ends. The new song starts. There seem to me more people around us now. I do his buttons down, reach inside his shirt and take his nipple between ring finger and thumb. I don't know what's gotten in me. I must have tasted blood. "Bitch," he screams, "You fucking dirty BITCH."

I hear his wife again, "You can't do that, Stan" or whatever his name is. I feel a little sorry for her, but I don't give a fuck really, about their nice little walk-on-the-wild-side office party. I don't give a fuck about her Pashmina shawl and salon highlights or their fifteen years of mediocre domesticity. I don't give a fuck about his six-figure job, or his cocksucker boss sitting wide-eyed over there. They're all in my house now. He makes another wild grab at my tits and I slap him again, hard. I whisper sweetly in his ear: "I'm going to fuck you up, asshole."

Then there's another lady bending over us, a blond, the nice friend of the family who volunteers at the homeless shelter and runs in marathons, and she is telling him firmly that he must stop. His eyes are glazed. She won't get anything from him. I push her hair aside and ask if I should disappear. Her looks says she's surprised that I speak English, but it also saysyes and thank you, so I go.

The crowd is thick and it's easy to disappear. The gimp paid me for three dances and got one and a half. Sorry, gimp.

Ten minutes later I'm on the couch in VIP with some guy named Patrick or something. I'm smiling and writhing and he's giving me his phone number and telling me he and his friends are getting together at his house later and I should come.

"Silly, you don't really want me at your house."

"Oh, yes I do," he says.

"Oh, no you don't."

seven: petty shit

2007-12-14T12:51:00.000-08:00

So that guy and I did have coffee, and he didn't ask to put his tongue in my ass. Instead we had a very productive conversation about state mental health policy, which led to him telling me about being abused as a kid and later institutionalized for bipoilar disorder back in the 60's.

I told him about having major depressive disorder and he stretched his hand across the table and said, "The only thing I still don't know how to deal with is the loneliness. I've done so well in life and I have a lot to be proud of, and sometimes I feel so alone that it just doesn't matter. I don't know how to be with people unless I'm working." He asked me if I was ever lonely.

Huh. You know, I've had variations of this conversation over and over in the last few years. I have met this man -- this lonely, successful man -- so many times, but never while fully dressed. And you know, it makes a difference. With my pants on, I felt less threatened, less overwhelmed, less tragic. Clothing gave me distance, and distance bred a truer compassion.

I told him the thing that makes me feel best is to subsume my own tortured ego to the service of others, and to find ways to belong to groups in whose aim and purpose I believe. And he nodded, and he said I had a friend in him, and he said he would help me and my project in any way he could. And we shook hands. "I respect what you're doing," he says.

Thanks, dude.

I went in to work that night. When I stripped my jeans off in the locker room I realized I hadn't shaved my legs in the several days since I'd been to work. The sink in the dancers' bathroom was clogged and overflowing. It often is. I don't know if the plumbing is just completely shoddy (probably) or if girls are forever dropping cigarettes and used napkins down the drain (also, probably) but anyhow, it's gross.

I went out to the old sinks in the dim hallway behind the stage, where the old bathroom used to be, hopped up on the counter, and put my feet in the sink. I had just finished shaving and was wiping the counter down with a paper towel when the manager rushed back -- the "handsome" one all the girls have crushes on -- and asks me what the hell I think I'm doing.

Shaving my legs, I say.

"Yeah. You can't do that back here, honey. This sink is for customers."

Bullshit. We are in the hallway behind the stage between the dancers' dressing room and a random room where Christmas decorations are stored in the off-season. No one comes back here.

"Dancers have their own bathroom, sweetie," he says. Like I don't know this. Like I haven't worked here almost two years. Does he even recognize me? Hello?

I tell him the sink in the dancer's bathroom is clogged, and maybe he can talk to someone about getting it cleared. It's like he doesn't hear me.

"Don't. Do it. Again," he says, in the loud, simple tone of voice people use on children and pets. "OK?"

"Where am I supposed to go?"

He raises his hand in a shushing gesture. "Just do as I say, OK?" He turns on his heel with out waiting for an answer, and he's gone.

Stupid little interaction. Annoying moment. Trivial. The kind of thing you ought to forget about the second it's over. But I brood about it for the next half hour. I hate being treated like a child. I hate it so much.

I know managers have to deal with a lot of dumb, drunk, young girls. But I've been here for a long time. I'm never dumb, rarely drunk, and have never caused a second's trouble for anybody here. I wish that counted for something, for anything.

The rest of the night is unremarkable, till the last thirty minutes, which I spent with some giggly, ham-faced guy who tells me within minutes of sitting down with him that he has "a lot of money, if that counts for anything."

I take him to the couch for dances and climb onto his lap. He tries to stick his hand under thong all sneaky. I climb off his lap, put a safe distance between us, and give a dance that consists mainly of striking sexy poses while defending myself from his marauding hands. "You're so hot," he says. "Are you going to cum? Are you, baby? Are you going to cum?"

Er, I'm two feet away from you, standing up, swaying back and forth and slapping at your wrists. But yeah, sure, I'm going to cum. Just give me a another song baby, and I will have a mind-blowing, earth-shattering orgasm after which I will fall in love with you, take you home, and give you oral sex til dawn. Seriously, just one more song.

This goes on until last call and the DJ turns off the music and the lights come up. Grabby McPhee pulls out his wallet, hands me thirty bucks, and says "That should cover it, right?"

"No."

"Well, how much do I owe you?"

"It's $20 a song and we did six songs."

"No way."

"Yes."

He says he has to go ask his friend for more money. He says his friend is outside and he will go talk to him. He says he will be right back.

I say no. I follow him to the front door and take firm hold of his sleeve. I say, call your friend on his cel phone and tell him he has to come back inside and bail you out because you're a retard with no self-control who's really bad at math.

Fortunately, the friend comes back in at that exact moment, before things get really ugly. The friend seems like a very nice guy, raises his eyebrows at his friend, and pays me my $90. I hope Grabby catches shit about this from all his friends for a month. I also hope he catches crabs someday, if he doesn't have them already.

These small things. These little moments of indignity. These things I will not miss.

eight: decay and fall

2007-12-07T15:14:00.000-08:00

All night there's this table of rich dudes on the main floor behind the DJ booth. Early in the evening, I approach the guy at the head of the table and unpack my charm, but he's guarded and dismissive. Geez, dude.

In his front pocket there a wad of "funny money", the club's mechanism for charging dances to credit cards. He must have a thousand dollars folded up in his pocket there. But he's making it plain in no uncertain terms that I am the kind of girl he wouldn't stoop to scrape off his shoe with a stick, so I buzz off and figure I'll come back later when he's drunk.

The club is slow that night, and back in the dressing room the talk is all about this table of guys. How much money they have, how little they want to spend it. They are the top brass of some Atlanta-based construction company, in town to romance prospective clients. I stop by once in a while to cut a junior officer from the herd and make a spare bit of scratch, but there are girls all over that table like sea birds on a tidepool. In fact, nearly ALL the girls are over there, which leaves the rest of the customers to just a few of us. Not a bad thing.

Except by the last few hours of the night, the customers are all bored with the small number of girls not pursuing the El Dorado of that folded wad of funny money. Soon all the regular guys go home. The table from Atlanta is still there, though their battleline has broken and scattered. The captain, the one I spoke to earlier, sits slumped and alone. I got over and perch lightly on the arm of his chair.

"Damn, you've got an ass," he says, barely looking up. He is an old man. Old. A night of drinking hasn't made him any younger. His eyes are bloodshot and his face is a map of lines. His speech is slurred so I bend down to hear him and he is offering me a thousand dollars to go back to his hotel room where he and his friend will double-team me. I look at his friend, a spry lad in his sixties, who nods confirmation. These two old men want to run the train on me. "I've got to put my tongue in that ass," my new friend says. "A thousand dollars. How does that sound?"

And I think: you dumb fuck.

And I think: Tithonos, all withered but your lust, aching forever towards the dawn.

And I think of a lyric in "Else" by Built to Spill: your body breaks/your needs consume you forever. It's better when you sing it, even better when you are singing along with it in the car on some mix-tape from some long-forgotten boyfriend, driving through a foggy late winter dusk in the city, and you pull up to a stoplight and a bum taps on your window and pats his knuckles on his lips in the international gesture meaning "I have none; give me yours."

I declined the offer from the guys from Atlanta, and went back to the dressing room to take off my shoes and sit on the floor by my locker and smoke.

When I got home I had an e-mail, in my real-life legitimate inbox, from a man I met on Monday while working on Dayjob Project. This nice retired guy volunteers helping troubled youth, and since this is tangentially related to the aims of my work, we got into conversation and exchanged business cards and agreed to have coffee later on. His e-mail follows up on that. At the end he signs off, "Look forward to seeing you again."

Which is so harmless. Which is nothing. It's just the way you end a letter to someone when you're making plans to meet them. But I feel anxious and ill and weird, like all of a sudden in the middle of coffee he's going to lean across the table and ask if he can put his tongue in my ass.

If he even puts his hand on my knee, I think I will scream.

I will scream.

It's a stupid thought, but I haven't been able to shake it, and I've felt strange ever since I woke up.

nine: and then again

2007-12-06T12:30:00.000-08:00

So then the next night was wonderful. I walked out of the dressing room and ran slambang into D., the sweet kid (well, he's my age) who's been coming to see me here and there for a couple of weeks.

They're a distinct type, these shy boys. They're cute and funny, prime boyfriend material, and when I meet them at work I'm not really sure why they're here in a strip club with me and not home spooning on the couch with a cutie during the Daily Show. Except they never have girlfriends and they seem really deprecating about the whole idea that they could ever have them.

C. was like this when he was younger. A late-bloomer and a virgin til 21 (when he was deflowered by a childhood friend who had become the town whore) he got the idea in his head somehow that girls were just not for him. Around 25 he had some kind of mysterious Saul-of-Tarsus moment of epiphany, after which he got laid like crazy for a couple of years and then met me. If I knew the secret of his converstion I would bottle it and sell it, but he says it just happened.

In the meantime, they pay me to get naked, and I pocket their money and no harm, no foul. I think D. might have a genuine crush on me, though. Oh well. He's a smart kid. He'll survive.

After D. left a waitress came and told me someone was looking for me, and lo and behold it was John Wayne, my irregular regular who splooged during a dance in the Champagne Room last time I saw him and then disappeared. Our reunion was awkward and affectionate. Pro forma, he asked me back to his hotel room and I said no, and we parted friends.

After that I made a random lump sum from some guy I'd never seen before who claimed to be a long-time regular of the club. I believe him; he had the professional regular vibe. These guys usually hate me, and it's mutual. I'm neither hot enough to be their evening's glamour queen nor slutty enough to give them something juicy to post about on ASPD, but I must have had my mojo working because this one rolled for me like a cream puff.

I ended the night back on the couches with some wild Lebanese dude who only wanted me to sit on his lap and stare into his eyes for $20 a song. "I love you," he said. "You are different. You are special. You are unique."

Sometimes you have to take a breath and remind yourself that just because some weird Lebanese dude in a strip club is telling you these things in between yelling for shots of vodka doesn't mean they aren't true.

"You are beautiful," he is still saying when I tune back in some time later. "You are amazing. I will hold you until the morning. I will never let you go. We will listen to jazz records and smoke pot together all day."

About thirty minutes into this I start getting nervous. I should have gotten my money up front. My intuition gives it fifty/fifty that he'll skip his tab, or pass out without paying me, or forget that I've been dancing this whole time, or claim he though dances cost $5. Some jive.

I'm gearing up to try and extract some cash from him in the here and now before he has a meltdown and gets taken away in an ambulance, but then DJ announces last call, and to my utter surprise, the dude takes out his wallet, pays the full (substantial) sum owed, tips, and wishes me a good night.

All in all, so sweet and easy. No one stiffed me. No one called me names. No one tried to zing me in the cooter.

This is the kind of night I'll be thinking about when I'm getting all rheumy and nostalgic in the nursing home about my glory days as a high-priced hootchie-cootchie girl. I must have talked to a score on asshats last night, too, but they are forgotten and nothing's left in my mind but the feel of swaying through a crowded room on six-inch heels, the glitter of a sequin on a dress, the smell of money on my hands.

ten

2007-12-03T09:46:00.000-08:00

Well, gang, this might be it. I'm putting my clothes back on, at least for now. I wanted you to be the first to know.

Mr. B came in last night and we spent a sweet and quiet evening in the VIP. It will be our last. B. is not renewing his VIP membership. The managers have changed their minds too many times about what is and isn't included in the VIP membership, and he's tired of the nonsense. And anyway, he's probably gotten the maximum psychological benefit out of having naked girls on his lap. When he started coming to the club late last fall he was overweight and shy, hadn't been laid in eight years, and didn't even remember (he says) what it was like to have a conversation with a girl.

"Coming here was like a dress rehearsal, practice" he says. "To remind me how to be with women." I feel good about my role in B.'s adventures in Lapland. I'm glad he's smart enough to quit while he's ahead.

This club's gotten strange lately. Or maybe it's me, noticing things I didn't used to notice. The dressing room seems filthier. Plates of half-eaten food and the dead remains of two dozen Bacardi-pineapples and Redbull-vodkas sit on the make-up counter all night. The lightbulbs die and no one replaces them. The new girls they're hiring now are very young, or have bad skin and bellies. It's not kind of me to notice, but it's a bad sign.

I see the new girls come in, flocks of them wheeling through the messy dressing room like seagulls, squeaky voices and eyes shiny with excitement and Jagermeister. I'm 27 and I'm old. It doesn't matter if the club has changed, or if it's me. When you feel like this, it's time to go.

B. leaves and I spent the rest of the night in VIP with a forty-something "credit specialist" who tells me he did two years in Huntsville for a three-strikes DUI. "I never joined a fucking gang," he says. "I'm not a racist. I was alone. I got beat up a lot of times. The worst thing was to see what people do to each other. Because I love people, and I hate to see it." He coughs, and then a tear rolls out one ice-colored eye. I hold him and kiss his cheek.

From the corner of one eye I see one of the new girls come in with a guy by the hand. They sit on the couch catty-corner to us. She straddles his lap reverse cowgirl and leans forward to put her hands on the floor. She rubs her crotch vigorously over his and he reaches down and grabs her tits full-handed and squeezes. I can't read her face at all.

My ex-con whispers in my ear that he'd like a girl to fuck him in the ass with a dildo, and do I think that's strange. No, I say. I think that's fine. "You're so sweet," he says. "You're just the sweetest woman. I never met a girl like you."

I'll work ten more days. Till the end of the month. Then something else, I don't know what. A woman I met at a professional mixer last month offered to do fundraising for Dayjob Project. She's a pro and she's working for me pro-bono because she loves the project. I trust her. She'll get me some money. That's six months away, though, at least.

What I'll do till then is anybody's guess. I could cocktail waitress at the club or at some other club. I could sell my body to medical studies, the way I did when I was 19. I could teach yoga. Or any combination of the above.

I could change my mind tomorrow and keep taking my top off to Fitty Cent for the next five years, or whenever C. plans on being done with school. I don't think so though. I think I'm through. At least for now.

mcdonald's money

2007-11-24T10:10:00.000-08:00

That's what we call it. It means that, in dollar-per-hour terms, you didn't make any more for dressing up and curling your hair and offering yourself to the general public for $20 a rub than you would have made deep-frying chicken mcnuggets for the drive-thru.

Usually when we say this we're exaggerating. Minimum wage being what it is, and taxes being what they are, you would be freaking lucky to leave the Fry Hut at the end of the shift netting $50. And it is darn, darn hard to make less than fifty bucks as a stripper most days, if you bother to leave the dressing room at all. Then again, having manned many a deep-fryer in my time, with the splattering of ancient grease-burn scars up my forearms to prove it, I might still rather dance.

It's been a long time since I've made McDonald's money, though it has happened before. My worst shift ever, I made $4. Actually, I'd paid the house $15 to work, so technically I left the club $11 in the red. It was a tough day.

This month I had two days under $100, which is worrisome. The first night, I failed to sous out and escape from a real vampire of a customer, the kind who just drains you of any will to live. Early in the night he told me he didn't buy dances, or if he did, he would only pay 2-4-1, because "really, they're not worth it. You know that right?" I should have walked away right then, but it was slow. Plus, he said he did give girls money to sit with him. "I want to be like your friend," he said. "Just come by and talk to me once in a while, and at the end of the evening, I'll give you whatever it takes to help make your night a good one."

Do I even have to tell you the rest? I sat with him periodically throughout the night, which continued to be slow, endured his jabs and put-downs, flattered his insufferable vanity, fed his self-obsession. At the end of the night he asked me how I'd done. "Not good," I said. "I could really use some of that help you mentioned."

He smirked. "I think I spent all the money I want to spend," he said. "You haven't really been coming by that much. And you haven't been that fun for the last hour or so. You must be tired."

"I am tired. I'm really, really tired, and I haven't made any money." I stretched my arms out on the table and folded forward onto them. I let my back and shoulders shield me from the room and the lights and the Top 40 rock and Mr. Whatsisname shifting around uncomfortably in his chair. Stillness came over me and I rested my head for a long time.

"I have to go," Whatsisname said. I heard him getting up and I felt a bundle of bills bounce next to my ear. I know the sound and smell and feel of money even in deep repose. When I sat up, with no idea how long I'd been down, I gathered the money up and took it back to the dressing room. Unfolded and smoothed out the crumpled bills and turned them all the same way up. It was $7.

People like that will ruin as much as you let them. Your coffee break, your evening, your best years, whatever you let them have. I can't remember the last time I felt so profoundly negative towards a customer, and in that way I gave him even more of my time. The next night was bad for me, and the next night, too.

But yesterday I said a prayer and put on my fightin' fishnets and had a decent afternoon. It was slow again. By five o'clock, the youngest girls were either drunk, crying, going home, or all of the above. I had no single good customer. The crying girls were right -- they were all cheap bastards with attitudes. But you hit it, and hit it, and hit it, and in the end it adds up.

The 19-year-old brunette with the glasses and the premature worry lines is crouched on the floor between two rows of lockers, whispering into her phone. "Forty dollars," she says. "Forty dollars, baby. I made forty dollars." I don't know why they all call their boyfriends when things go wrong. Like there's anything he can say or do.

She has her pants half on and the contents of her bag are spread across the floor. It's quitting time for this one. Times get lean enough, you don't even feel sorry. You just think "more for the rest of us" and you just keep walking.

fucking off

2007-11-14T14:35:00.000-08:00

Sunday night, $10 dance night, dead as a stone. Economic downturns hit the luxury market first, and leave us naked girls -- pneumatic, Lycra-clad little luxury objects that we are -- sitting at the bar with our chins in our hands.

Late night it picks up a bit. I got on stage for the umpteenth time and there's a lady in a T-shirt at my tip-rail. Lady customers in titty-bars are a questionable quantity. They hate their husband for bringing them, and me for being there. Or they've got something to prove and prove it by slapping my ass and biting my nipples just as mean and rude as the nastiest male customer ever born. Yeah, I'm real iffy about wimmins in clubs. But shut my mouth, this chick is into me. She's got her chin tilted up and her eyes all big like the cutest little stripling boy who ever lived. She positively glows. I do my thing and she tips me, and then she goes back to the table she's sitting with and gets a bunch more dollars and tips me some more and then I get off main stage and go to one of the satellites and she follows me, tipping, tipping, tipping.

I get off stage and go over to her table. "Hello, future wife," I say. She's a sweet little elfin Hispanic lady, probably pushing forty, classy vibe. Probably a professional of some kind. Smart. Her name is Veronica. She buys a dance, and dancing for her is so freaking fun. I am concious that I am letting her get away with a little too much, especially right out here on the main floor in front of the main stage. But I love the way she handles me. Her hands are confident and strong. I want to bite her. I restrain myself.

I sit with her too long after the dances are over. We drink a drink. She talks so dirty to me, I'm swooning. Finally I drag myself up and away. I've got to make money. It's been slow all week. I'm behind. A youngish man flags me down. I start to sit on his lap, but he waves me into the chair next to him. "My girlfriend's in the bathroom but she's been waiting for you all night," he says. "She really likes you."

Well, cool. It's nice to be liked by women. It doesn't surprise me anymore when guys want to nail me, but when women do, it's shocking and flattering and intimidating like I'm a teenager all over again. His girlfriend comes back and she's stunning, with eyes like Angelina Jolie. I know celebrity comparisons are lame, but serious, that's exactly what they look like. She's got on this little cashmere sweater and talks in a clipped, polished voice that I used to think was affected, but now know is just the way people with money talk when they're shy. "I saw you playing with that other girl," she says. "I wanted to come over and join you."

I talk her into a couch dance, which we end up doing a couple of, and then she excuses herself and tell me to wait right there. She comes back with my first friend by the hand. "I thought we could share a dance," she says. Veronica is giggling. Hell, yeah.

So they molest me for a couple of songs, and I am overcome with the visuals of it. They are both so pretty. Unfortunately, I can't really feel it, the way I can't really feel 80% of what happens in the club. Even if someone is nice, even if they're good-looking, even if they smell just right, I'm still at work.

I'm thinking about whether the next song has started yet and worrying about whether you are going to pay me, and making sure that everbody stays that critical inch or two away from the pink that is all the difference between everything being OK and getting clobbered with a shoe in the dressing room for being an extras girl. I'll be jilling myself for weeks on the memory of this encounter, but I'm sad to say that at the time I might as well have been being wrapped in a quilt and lightly pelted with small bean-bags for all the sexual impact of the experience.

I seem to feels things less and less. Not just at work, but everywhere. It's as though my senses were dimming one by one, leaving me in a world of numbness and fog and muffled sounds. It's not too noticeable, unless I'm doing something that requires my full physical presence, like conducting business on the dayjob, or fucking my boyfriend. Then it is sad and frustrating to know that I'm not really there. The rest of the time I drift.

Sometimes I have to think to know what room I'm in, and who is there with me. Sometimes I can't beleive that I'm awake. I need my meds, adjusted probably, because this is stage one. Stage two is sleeping all day long. Stage three is horrible.

the giver

2007-10-27T13:01:00.000-07:00

Last night I sat on my friend Maria's couch, watching her coax her live-in boyfriend Arthur into getting her a glass of water from the kitchen. Her eyes were droopy and winsome as a sleepy puppy's, her legs curled listlessly under her in the cushions. "Please, baby? Please?"

I was fascinated. It was so foreign. The art of asking for things, making people want to tell you yes. I can pull it off sometimes, but I haven't mastered it, can't do it on command. And honestly, I've never liked the kind of men it works on best.

It's not working on Arthur. Arthur has narrow lips and pale eyes. Arthur is thin and wry. It's a hard type to coax. Coaxing works better on fleshy folks, full-lipped, dark-eyed folks. They like it. Arthur is kicked back in his chair, amused, watching Maria work. He likes the bedroom eyes, but he's not getting the water.

I like Arthur's type, the bloodless type with the cold blue flame. Last time I was at their house he and I hugged goodbye for a fraction too long. I think Maria noticed.

Mr. K has been to see me twice now. He's a U.S.-educated Indian, young and well-placed in the tech industry; handsome, wealthy, and sheltered; fanciful, sweet, and lonely. Dark-eyed. Full-lipped.

The first time he took me back to the Champagne Room he tried to put his hand in my thong and I told him no, and he hugged me and told me if I ever needed anything --anything--all I had to do was ask.

"I'm a giver," he said. "I'm a giver, not a taker. I want to take care of people. I love to take care of people."

His family wants him to get married. They would arrange a marriage for him. They are wealthy, and would find him the prettiest, nicest, most cultured girl money could buy. "But what if she doesn't really like me?" he wants to know. "What if she's just pretending to like me because I have a good job and live in the U.S. and have a lot of money?"

I nod understandingly. I do understand. At least, I've got a vivid imagination, and that sounds like quite a pickle. I don't point out that, of course, the reason I'm here is that he's got a lot of money, too. That would be tactless. Besides, he must already know. Isn't that part of what's so reassuring about paying a stripper to hang out with you? You don't have to wonder if she's doing it for the money. She's doing it for the money. And when you're sick of her doing it, or out of money, no hard feelings.

Mr. K loves to travel, and play tennis, and, apparently, take care of people. He really is a catch. Maybe. For a certain kind of girl. I don't know why he's chosen me, though, because I'm not that kind of girl. I have no idea how to let someone take care of me. I don't even know what that means, really, but the whole idea make me sort of suspicious. You don't get something for nothing, right?

"I won't ask you to be my girlfriend," Mr. K says. "I know that's not appropriate. I just want to come and talk to you once in a while. And I just want you to call me if there's ever anything I can do for you. Anything. Can I bring you presents? What kind of things do you like?"

Uh. I'm such a bad stripper. I don't even know what to ask for. Seriously, I have no idea. Pay my bills? Give me diamonds? Maybe I should work up to that.

Mr. K tells me he wants to adopt a child. He doesn't think he will ever get married, now, because he is too old. "My years are almost over," he says. "But I would like to pass on what I have to someone." He's 33.

I suggest he adopt a cat, and he really liked the idea. He asks if I'll go to the shelter and help him pick on out. "Then when I am petting it I will always think of you." I resist making a joke about petting the pussy. I say I might go with him, maybe. We'll see. I wouldn't mind actually.

My guilt and suspicion over accepting things from someone so (pathologically?) eager to give them are abating. If giving presents really, really makes him happy, why deny him that pleasure? He'll just find another girl to wax generous with if I do. Another girl whose better at accepting presents. And I don't want that. I'll just have to work on my bedroom eyes.

dear john

2007-10-22T11:59:00.000-07:00

An Open Letter to the Strip-Club-Going Public About Some Things I Can't Beleive You Don't Already Know:

Dear Strip Club Customers:
There are customers out there who treat us like equals, pay us what they owe us, and respect our boundaries. Then there are sociopaths and anti-social personality types who make up 3.6 percent of the adult population -- probably a higher percentage of the strip-club-going population because these types have more trouble than usual forming the kind of normal, intimate, adult relationship that might lead to the removal of clothing, thus necessitating the purchase of service.

Then there's the rest of you. You are not sociopaths, but neither have you the strong inner compass that allows you to bring your personal ethics with you into unfamiliar environments. You look around you to gaugue appropriate behavior, and you do whatever other people are doing. If those other people are sociopaths, you go with the flow.

Take comfort, however. Going to a strip club is not nearly as confusing a moral environment as you may suppose. Girls are walking up to you and begging permission to take their clothes off, which doesn't happen to most of us much in real life, but space-time is not collapsing in on itself and all bets are not off. You are in America in the 20th century and the women walking around in their underwear are very possibly the same women you saw walking around in the grocery store earlier, and many, though not all, of the same rules and standards are in effect. So here's a reminder of some things you may not have thought about:

1. You have no idea how disgusting you are when you're drunk. Now I am no teetotaler, and a nice buzz is a fine thing. But there is nothing -- nothing -- as unsexy as a drunk. Maybe because with your incoherent speech and temper tantrums and flailing limbs, you are so much like a three-year-old. Not the cute kind that I want to pick up and hug. The kind screaming three rows behind me on a five-hour flight to Boston. You suck and you are ruining my trip.

2. Don't whine to me about how the last girl slapped you/bit you/was rude to you when you tried to grab her tit/ass/vagina/god knows what. Are you fucking serious? Think about it a for a second. Is there any other professional environment in the known universe where you would complain to me that you sexually assaulted my colleague until she was forced to take physical measures to defend herself and expect me to tell you that what you did was OK and that girl must be a total bitch? Maybe you think there are extenuating circumstances but -- as someone who just Saturday bitch-slapped a bachelor party attendee for pulling down my thong, and once dug my fingers so hard into a customer's wrist while struggling to prevent the forcible penetration of his finger into my vagina that I later found little flakes of his skin underneath my fingernail -- you are talking to the wrong bitch.

3. Don't touch me where I tell you not to touch me, because that's called sexual assault. Boundaries, people. Accepting $20 to take my shirt off doesn't imply that I will be doing any more than that, just like accepting a ride home doesn't mean I will give you a blow-job. If you won't take no for an answer in either situation, congratulations, you are a rapist. Now, I understand that sometimes you are not sure where you can touch and where you can't touch. Ask. When in doubt, err on the side of caution. Yes, you have money, and yes, that gives you leverage and yes, a girl might put up with more than she wants to because she wants your money and yes, that's technically "not your fault." But which transaction would you rather be involved in: compensating a professional to perform a mutually satisfactory service, or paying a hireling think about cheeseburgers while just barely tolerating three minutes of your sexual grotesqueries?

4. Wash your balls. Seriously. Wash your balls just like you would before you were going on a date. You do wash your balls before you go on dates, don't you? Never mind. I don't want to know. Just wash your balls. Sometimes I do this move where I kneel on the floor in front of you and look winsomely up through your knees. I do this a lot of you are ignoring #3, because it's a position in which you can't reach very much of me if you are being grabby. It's not like I have my nose buried in your crotch, but even from a foot away, sometimes it smells like you have a ripe fish in your pants. I'm not grossed out by wrinkles or warts or scars or confessions of bizarre sexual fetishes, but I am grossed out by this. Wash your balls. With soap.

I hope this been helpful. See you soon.

P.S. Did you wash your balls? Please double-check.