goodbye, vickie lynn

I was at the gym earlier trying to sweat some some ojas into my winter-weary body, and of course every TV screen was blathering Anna Nicole Smith Dead, and not one of those sniggering hair-heads could summon up a nice word to say about her. Now, I can't say I've ever given Anna Nicole two thoughts myself, but it still hacked me to hear them call her stupid, and greedy, and messed-up and crazy, because this is the shit they always talk about strippers. Like they even know.

Everywhere I got in the last two days I overhear another scrap of her biography, and it kills me how it could be any story I overhear in the dressing room while glueing on my eyelashes and don't really listen to because, really, I hear enough sad stuff in a night. I know, I know. You're from shitsville Mexia, Texas and your fry-cook boyfriend at Jimmy's Fried Chicken knocked you up when you were 17, most likely bent over the front counter after closing one night between cashing out your register and mopping up the floor, and you got married but it didn't work out and then you worked at WalMart but it wasn 't enough money and besides you've got a kid, so here you are shucking for bucks and you know how it goes. I read on Wikipedia that poor old Anna -- then "Robin" -- was too heavy to work the night shift, so the management made her work days. Of course, it turns out days are the when the oil billionaires come in, so it worked out. So this wheelchair-bound octegenarian offers to take her away to a life of luxury. Who in her place would have said no?

People like to say she was a gold-digger, and of course, she was. But they say it like it's a bad thing, like it's a dirty secret they themselves figured out just now. Like a rich man marrying a beautiful woman isn't the fairy story we tuck into bed with our children every night. Men make money and women wear lipstick in the half-remembered hope that this story is still true. They like to say her husband was misguided. No way. His ninety-year-old wheelchair-bound self got to parade that hot blonde stripper around for four whole years, and probably even got to fuck her a few times, which is a few times more than you've ever fucked a Playmate of the Year, so lay off.

Men go to strip clubs looking for women who are for sale. Really, completely, for sale. As a stripper, three different men have asked me to marry them. As far as I could tell, they were serious. Mentally ill, maybe, but serious. They wanted a girl they could just buy outright and take home. I'm not that girl. (So far. Then again, no one's ever offered me a billion dollars.) Anna Nicole was.

"Tragic," everybody says with a sneer. But then again, can anybody squint their eyes and see the twisted Cinderella story in it all? It's too bad about the drugs, and the lawsuits, and the drugs, and the paternity suits, and the drugs. It's really too bad. But she lived a certain kind of dream -- Playboy, and a billionaire husband, her own TV show, a certain status as an infamous household name, and finally, her early, tragic death plastered all over television and tabloids, the biggest thing since Brangelina's baby. For a too-fat, dayshift stripper from Mexia, Texas, that's something. And if in the end it was a hollow, stupid dream she lived, well, she's not the only one who ever dreamed it. That's all.

the size of an eggplant: a love story

I think he's in the mob. Raised in Long Island? Lives in Boca Raton? Travels through Texas occasionally on unspecified family business? C'mon. He's in the mob. Or just wants me to think he is. Fuck, I'll bite. Fantasies are fun for me, too.

If he is in the mafia, he's a little guy, a cousin's cousin, a brother-in-law's nephew,. He's got a nice watch, but his shirts are over-starched and his shoes are cheap. Fucked-up hair, too: long and gelled crisp in a style one step up from a Puerto Rican cafeteria worker. He's got a pretty face, though -- all big,dark eyes and curly lashes, ripe mouth and tight-lipped, East-Coast, Robert De Niro smirk. Also. Either he's got the most disconcertingly over-sized phallus yours truly has ever encountered or there's some kind of tragic elphantiasis in his pants region. Seriously. The first time I danced for him, I tripped over it. Literally. And then I got wet.

I've never been much of a size queen. Pretty indifferent on the whole question, actually. It what you do with it, etc. This is different. It's not just the pants-monster that does it for me. It's the whole thing.

We don't talk much. Everything I know about him I told you in the first paragraph. If we must talk -- if the bartender is closing out his tab, or the lapdance area is currently occupied -- we make cocktail-party chat: the weather, Florida, the weather in Florida. He doesn't ask me any questions. I'm not sure he even knows my name. I don't remember his. Tommy? Jimmy? Who cares?

He stands and waits for me with his elbow on the bar, the way they only do up north. All men should wear black wool top coats. His posture is excellent. I go over and ask if he wants to dance. He says yes, always faintly surprised, as if the answer's obvious. And then we go in the back to the darkest couch we can find and dance.

Dance?

Hardly. I straddle his leg and press my thigh against that baby python and grind down hard until I feel it twitch.

I've never been much of a grinder, really, but this I can't resist. His heart beats so fast and hard I can hear it, and if I put my ear against his mouth I hear him groaning softly under his breath. I can smell his sweat, and it smells clean. He barely touches me, only now and then his hands, lightly, fleetingly, on my waist, on the backs of my calves. He doesn't ask for anything. He doesn't even look at me. His eyes are closed, or trained over my shoulder, watching for interruptions. If there's a manager nearby he lets me know with a soft tap.

"How can I turn you on?" they all want to know, hands straying crotchward, fingers paddling at my breasts. Honestly? You can sit down, shut up, and keep your hands to yourself. I'm not just being a wise-ass when I say that. I love a good frottage. But I can't indulge my tendencies when I've got to constantly karate-block your wandering hands away from my intimate regions for fear of (a)personal violation (b) betrayal of my nuptial commitments (c) losing my job. Groping makes me anxious, and anxious isn't sexy.

With Pretty Boy I can lose myself. I can fantasize. I can wish he would touch me, stroke me, kiss me. (God, how I wish he would kiss me.) There's a place in life for longing, for denial, for the eternal tease.

We always dance for a long time. If he comes in some silent, teeth-clenching burst of ecstacy, I don't know it. I hope so. Afterwards, he pays me, tips me well, and we exchange and handshake and a dry, formal kiss on the cheek. After all the rescue fantasies and ego-transference and complicated head-fucks of recent months, I swoon for a guy who just wants to dry-hump for an hour, pay me, and go home.

"You're not just a stripper," says this guy or that one, says Joe, says the Satanist, says Mr. B. "You're more to me." By which they mean, I want more from you -- a hand-job or a phone number or a lunch-date or a weekend fling or a thirty-year marriage.

The Godson doesn't give me any grief like this. His Catholic mama's boy up-bringing probably doesn't even let him think along these lines. I can't tell really what he's thinking. Like I said, he doesn't say much. But I like to think that in his mind a whore's a whore, and that's pretty much that. Things are simple that way and I, for one, like it.

"I'll come back," he always says as he's leaving. I look forward to it.

big swede

Sat down last night with a big, good-looking guy with an unplaceable accent that turned out to be Swedish. He was in town for some computer thing, like everybody was last night, with a colleague from Atlanta who was buying dance after dance from everybody, including me. The Swede sniffed at his friend. "These women, you are only interested in him for his wallet," he said.

"That's true," I said. "See, that's how it works."

He sniffs again. "In Sveden we don't have places like this, because in Sveden we are more liberated about our sexuality."

"Well, that's terrific. Now you're in an American strip club and you can see what you've been missing all these years."

"Are you going to sleep with me afterwards?"

"Well, no."

"So why wake up the little man if you are not going to put him to sleep?"

Gee. OK, you get some points for quaint phraseology, but what really rocks me is that you come from a culture so highly evolved that doesn't use fire-arms but solves its interpersonal conflicts through hauteur alone, and yet here you are using the same line of argument as every dustbin cowboy from Hutto County blowing into the city on his big night out. Some things truly are universal.

"Well, it's been nice talking to you," I say.

"Yes, I enjoy your company," he says.

"You want to tip me then?"

"Ah. I see. You just want money."

"That's true. I would really, really like some money."

I hold out my garter enticingly. He puts in $10. "I still don't understand this place," he says. "What is the point? It's all bullshit."

"You're right," I say. "It's bullshit, and Texas bullshit is the best bullshit in the world.It comes from the same place art and poetry come from and it's the province of evolved cultures."

(Come to think of it I can't think of a single Swedish author off the top of my head. Hamsun and Ibsen are Norwegian. Even Tove Jansson was Finnish.)

"Come on, sit down," the Swede says. "Don't be mad. Have a drink with me."

But I'm gone.

popular girls

Friday night I sat with the Cowboy. The Cowboy and me go back to the last time the rodeo was in town, nearly a year now, all the way back to Sugar's. Back then he lived in Dallas, but relocated last fall to be closer to yours truly. Just kidding. He's a construction chief who has a big job running in town. I forget exactly what. Anyway, he's an absolute angel-puppy and I adore him. He doesn't spend a ton of money, but he is consistant, respectful, and fulsomely complimentary. Also, sometimes he comes in with crews of horny young construction workers or rich old dudes, and he does a really good job of talking me up so that they all buy dances from me and I make a million dollars. That, and he once he gave me a toolbelt.

He was complaining Friday night that I barely worked in January, which is true. "I came in three or four times to see you and you weren't here," he said. "This place is no fun at all without you." (I happen to know he gets dances with other girls and has a perfectly fine time in my absence, but thanks for the kind word, dude.) "They should have a big marquee outside that says 'Grace Is Working' or 'Grace Is Not Working' so us guys would know if we should even stop."

Awww. See? It's nice to feel like the Most Popular Stripper, even if it's just for one sweet old cowboy. Unfortunately, Cowboy's opinion has not been shared of late. The general public does not generally seem to care if Grace Is Working or not. Well, January is hard. The collective consciousness is hungover and regretful from it's Christmas-time orgies of excess, and the titty-bar-going public is surly and impecunious.

That's what I tell myself anyway. I struggled through Friday night, lacking serious sparkle but finally managing to pull the minimum dollarage it takes to go home satisfied -- barely. At the end of the night, I was hobbling out of my spike heels in the dressing room while two thin blond girls hunkered on the floor a few lockers away, shuffling stacks of hundred dollar bills. I hear them counting out loud for each other -- four hundred, five hundred, six hundred.

"Did you do good tonight?" asked the thinner, blonder one.

"I did OK," said the other. "Not that great. I made $600. But I bought an outfit. And I tipped everybody at the bar $20. And I gave the manager $60. So really I made more like $800."

"Yeah, it wasn't a great night," the first girl said. "I made $800. I tipped everybody, too. This one guy gave me $400 for an hour and then I got him to tip me another $100. It wasn't that great a night though."

"Yeah, working here sucks," said the other. "We should go to Dallas. They're nice here, though. The manager always buys me drinks. Did the manager buy you a drink?"

"Oh, yeah. He always does."

Rule: you never want to know what anyone else makes. Don't ever ask. The answer won't make you happy. I have a general idea what the average is, and a general sense that I'm in the top of the average range most nights. These blondes are VIP Girls, though. Bombshells. Superstrippers.

I'd done OK that night, or thought I had -- but I sure as hell didn't make any $800. I make that money maybe once a month, and it makes me spin around and shit myself twice every time. Hearing these girls count it out so blase and bored put a cold lump in my stomach. Oh, and the managers didn't buy me any fucking drinks, either. I thought I was doing well when they started remembering my name.

I get home and pour out my misery to C. He hears me out with an incredulous stare. "You're jealous? of those girls?" he says. "Baby, those girls are losers."

Weeeelll, maybe. But yeah, I am jealous. Not of their lives, not of their personalities, not of their sportscars, one payment away from being repossessed at all times. Did I tell you the thinnest, blondest girl said she *had* to make even more money the next night, because she was $30,000 in debt and owed her parents money? So, yeah, not jealous of that. My life is awesome, my boyfriend is cool, and my bank account is solid. Just jealous of the money -- the beautiful, beautiful money. The mountains of large denomination bills and the cred that comes with earning them, knowing that your flesh is trading at a premium. And maybe of their hair -- pale, glossy, soft, cotton-candy blonde hair. If I had that hair, I tell myself, I could trip the miracle money-spending trigger in the male brainstem that all my curvy flesh and bandinage and good-humored sluttiness and high standarized test scores are powerless to touch. Blonde. That's it. I want to be blonde.

Bah. I'm in no state. My hormones are haywire. Last night I cried at a kung fu movie, during that requisite scene where all the villagers are giving the hometown hero their pitiful life-savings so he can go into the city and avenge their wrongs by kicking major-league ass. Seriously. I wept. It was just...too much.

(Blonde. That's it. I want to be blonde.)

dream a little dream

For the last two nights I've dreamed about work. Weird, because I haven't been to work in almost a week -- hideous weather, a gnarly throat infection, and a doting boyfriend having conspired to keep me home.

The first night I dreamt I was dancing at a club darker and weirder and seedier even than the Crazy Lady where I made my stripping debut so long ago. The stage was tiered like a wedding cake and painted shiny red and shiny black like Japanese lacquer. Being on stage embarrassed me in a way it never has in real life. Jay was there, an old customer of mine -- former Pittsburgh Pirate, current talent scout, prodigious philanderer and cokehead extrordinaire. Seeing him made me feel safe. I've certainly never felt that way in real life, either.

Last night I was in the same club, more or less. To get to the DJ's booth you went through the locker-room. Men's Club in Dallas was set up this way, too. A body had recently been dismembered and stashed in a locker. Blood had leaked out and gotten all over the floor. Shiny red, like Japanese lacquer. A crew was there, cleaning it up. They were in my way as I tried to get to the DJ booth to pick music. I didn't want to get blood on my shoes. It wasn't horrifying, just another hassle. The body parts looked like mannequin pieces.

scheduling conflict

Sure enough, Mr. B asked me out last week via the mysteriously universal Let's Go to a Concert Thursday Night Gambit. Only I work Thursday nights, so no go. Also, I don't date my customers because I'm not a prostitute, but "I'm working tonight" sounds, you know, gentler, so that's what I say. This is all by e-mail, and at the end of the e-mail I wish him a good time at the concert. He writes back and says he won't be going now. I counter with "Well, now that you don't have plans for tonight..."

I don't really expect him to show, but he does. I don't directly solicit business like that very often, and it always blows my mind that it works. It also blows my mind that people respond to junk mail,too, but I guess if they didn't it wouldn't exist. So yeah, people are suggestible.

Unfortunately, when he shows up I am in mid-session in the private dance area with a NASA scientist who wants to give it all up and pursue his dream of professional snow-boarding. (One nice thing about the job is that I really don't have to care if the stories people tell me at the club are true; thus I can spend my evenings with millionaires and former pro ballplayers and snowboarding rocket scientists.) Anyway, Mr. Rocket Science is in love with me because I spent a semester in engineering school and like movies; he has a lot to get off his chest and is paying handsomely for the privilege, so I am not immediately available to cater to B's need for titty. He is sitting in the area immediately above and behind the private dance area sadly watching television, and I am just wrapping things up with Rocket Boy when some other trick whose face is instantly familiar but whose name escapes me even now comes and sits on the couch right next to us and make it apparent that he is in line for my services. I stop to say hello and explain that somebody is waiting for me, but then I see B roll his eyes, get up, and storm back to VIP in an apparent dugeon. I get back there quickly and am just starting to get his feathers smoothed down when I hear my name over the intercom. Apparently I am already late for main stage. B indicates he will not be waiting around for me to get back.

When I get home there is an e-mail waiting for me saying that he "didn't feel like much of a priority" to me last night. I am sad. I really like B. But then again, I'm not sure what I was supposed to do differently. I express electronic remorse. He extends his forgiveness. I hear nothing for several days, then get an e-mail saying he is going to be taking a break from the club for a while. I'm sad to see him go. Spending time with him really was a treat, as he is good company, makes me feel pretty, and is fairly free with his dollar. I've been getting quite fond of him.

A break's not a bad idea, though. (And I do hope it's really a break, not a final farewell.) I've been getting really lazy the past few weeks, what with hardly having to work the floor at all. It's amazing how quickly those skills can can atrophy. So back to the grind, as it were.

But this is part of why I don't want to "be friends" with customers. At the end of they day, a customer comes and goes as he pleases and without obligation. Me, I'm like the ballerina in the jewelry box -- always there, every time you open the lid, twirling and smiling. It's the nature of the relationship. It's what makes the relationship attractive. I get it. I support it. At the same time, a person who can disappear from your life on their whim without warning or explanation doesn't make a very good friend. Or not for someone like me, who gets pretty attached to the people I like. Sometimes I almost want to explain this, but better not. Better just hold out the cookie of the impossible someday, and back slowly away. Forever.

snow days

Two days of intermittent sleet has left a solid inch of ice on every outdoor surface, which in Texas is the signal for civilization as we know it to break down. C. was supposed to start his second semester of art school yesterday, but classes have been cancelled until tomorrow. I myself will be damned if I'll drag myself forty minutes up an icy highway to dance nekkid for whatever slavering poon-thirsty junkies will brave this weather for a glimpse of nipple. Instead, we've spent these last stolen days of vacation holed up in our bedroom -- the only room in our crumbling manse that can be maintained at a livable temperature -- putting on hats and gloves for occasional forays into the kitchen to make cocoa. C. draws pornographic portraits of me while I solve endless Sudoku. It's a sweet life.

Tomorrow, alas, school's back on and C. will be up and gone at the crack of dawn. It's been nice having him home and all to myself these past several weeks, and I will be forlorn tomorrow when I wake up without him. I'm going back to school myself, starting next Tuesday, taking an adult extension course on "Evolution and Society" or some such at the university across the street. Should be fun. I think I want to be something when I grow up.

satan moves on

The Satanist broke up with me last night. It was all very subtle and polite, but surprisingly disheartening. I haven't seen him since he offered me a fairly generous $300 for a blowjob, and I turned him gently down. Last night he shows up though, right around last call at 2am, and the first thing he tells me is that he's taken some crazy barbituates and is in a bad way. I offer to help him find a chair and he looks away and clears his throat and says, "Actually I'm here to talk to Andy." Poof: dismissed. I do help him find a chair, though, since the Friday night circus is in full swing, and that's not a nice place to let a man on barbituates wander alone. Then he kisses me on the cheek, rather coldly, pats my hand in the international sign for "get lost" and I zoom off.

Andy is his dancer room-mate's new best friend -- the other girl with rock n' roll tattoos and Manic Panic hair. More his type anyway. It's all good. The money's not a terrible loss. He was never a huge spender, though reliable and consistant.

I miss him, though. He was fun. I liked him. Customers don't have a monopoly on confusing fantasy with reality and getting their feelings hurt. Only my fantasy was that he and I had some sort of bond, that we were, kinda, friends. Repeat with me this strip-club mantra: Friends don't pay friends to take their clothes off.

better living through strippers

Up late tonight, but these are normal hours now. C. is out of school and has resumed his normal nocturnal habits; I am undressing til the wee hours four nights a week. It's nice that when I get home he is still up to rub my head and debrief me.

I've finally got the customer every stripper dreams about at night, the kind who comes in three times a week and buys out your shift and treats you like a princess all night long so that you get to walk through the room all tall and sassy on your way to and from the dressing room -- no sitting at the bar chain-smoking like some washed-up floozy from Talladega tonight, baby, nosir. Gotta hurry, mama, can't talk right now, gotta guy waiting for me up in VIP.

We've got a whole little routine going, loverboy and me, with a corner staked out in the VIP and the hostess knowing by heart what shots we like, and the whole damn bit. I feel bad, is all. Well, a little.

He came to the club for the first time a month or so ago, with a bachelor party. I wasn't there, but as he tells it to me, he was dreading coming -- hadn't been to a titty bar in years, and had a panic attack the last time. Seriously. A panic attack. But at the bachelor party last month, he made a conscious effort to relax and have a good time, and succeeded so heartily that he has been back a few times a week ever since. I met him on his second or third visit. He told me about his search for enlightenment and better living via strip-clubbing. I said righto, and we had the sort of meta conversation about what-it-all-means-anyway-this-strip-club-thing that I usually weasel out of like crazy, because they are a big downer, and then the guys get all remorseful and quiet and don't want to play anymore. But this guy was smart, and sweet, and sort of touchingly enthusiastic about it all, and so I gave it up a little bit, and then he bought a ton of dances and everybody had a good time.

And then he just kept coming back. And back. And back. He's in a honeymoon stage with the whole idea of paying girls to take their clothes off. We've bonded over Holy Grail and WoW and Hitchhiker's Guide, and bagged on LARPing together and compared SSRI's and shitty past relationships. He says he hasn't been laid in eight years. He says until he started coming to the club a few weeks ago, mere conversation with women was enough to overwhelm him with anxiety. He's an odd bird. Nice, though. Seriously nice. I like him a lot, actually.

There's a cycle to these things, though, and we are on the verge of enterting a heavier phase. He will want more, whatever that means -- almost certainly in this case "to be friends" -- and eventually he will butt up against the boundaries of the possible, and then he will be hurt and rejected and feel that it was all for nothing, and all a big trick any way, and what a gold-digging cunt I am, anyway.

The really cool stripper is the one who can prolong the honeymoon phase for months (years?) and slam dunk the break-up over a weekend with three text messages or less. I seem to get stuck in the reverse pattern a fair bit. I get confused and tell myself that honesty is the best policy, and still it all ends up very messy and later I think of a million lies I could have told that would have served me better. I'm a lesbian. I'm a lesbian, except for my long-distance boyfriend. Did I say boyfriend? I meant ex-boyfriend who hurt me so badly that I'll never even consider trusting another man again, not ever.

I tell myself that they check ID's at the door, and everybody who comes in to the club is an adult. They know what they're doing, they're responsible for their own emotions, they choose their own adventures, and so on. Still, I can't help feeling like somebody just handed me a rope and told me to walk the lamb up to the slaughter. Then again, it's slim pickings for strippers in the holiday aftermath, as last month's credit card statements start coming in. Not a good time for moral high-horsery about where the money comes from.

happy goddam holidays

The Season of Love was rough this year -- eight days of canned beets and escalating tension in East Jesus Nowhere with my family, culminating in a dramatic, albeit temporary, disownment on Christmas Eve, and an offer to drive me to the bus station in cold rain and return me to Texas like a wrong-size sweater.

On a brighter note, my bestest friend from high school was visiting her own set of relatives in the area, so I cut down to visit on Christmas proper, and from there on things were pretty sweet. Her mom and stepdad are gentle and kind and spread a mean table. Also, they have a hot tub. Naturally, it wouldn't be Christmas in the boonies without fire-arms, and we spent a satisfying afternoon on the day after Christmas shooting handguns at a salt lick in an abandoned coal pit. It was pretty sweet.

On Wednesday, back to the airport, where the sight of the Starbuck's made me feel safe and warm. My friend back to the Beltway to make grief for former student-government presidents who think a lifetime of kissing ass qualifies them to run the free world. Me to get naked for strangers.

All of which is a long-winded way of saying, sorry I haven't written in a while, and P., if you don't know it, you saved Christmas for me.

hot streak

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itch

I'm under the influence of wierd stars, friends. For a while it seemed like the short days had me hobbled at the knee. When you consider that I go to bed most nights at 4 am and wake up around noon or after, that's a severely truncated ration of daylight. The old disorder has been flaring up. December is always a hard month.

My clinician has been liberal about doubling and tripling my medications on demand, though, and so far things have stayed tame. No howling fits of despair; just a dreamy melancholy, voluptuous and self-absorbed like the early, almost pleasant episodes I remember from my teens.

Meanwhile, increased dosage of the old SSRI's has tilted my brain chemistry around so that it is ridiculously easy to get aroused and pretty near impossible to get off, inducing a state of mild, chronic sexual frustration. The resulting fog of sex pheremones has men following me around the grocery store and tripping over themselves at the club to paper my path with money. This weekend I broke my previous (quite respectable) record for most money earned in a single evening, and also set a personal record for most songs consecutively lap-danced --25. This ammount of attention and success when I want nothing so much as to be home in bed all day under blankets has me walking around with my hair standing on end.

Not to mention that popularity never makes you popular. Other dancers tend to like me -- I'm free with my cigarettes and I talk no shit. But there's been a distinct coolness in the dressing room since I started my hot streak. Twice, guys have actually sent the dancer sitting with them to go and find me. From a customer's perspective, this might not seem like such an insult, but trust me, every dancer born hears this as, "You're ugly. Could you please go get the pretty girl?" The gossip starts right away. Any time any dancer does well, there's a little coven in the dressing room, whispering. <You know what I heard she does? She lets them put their...> Then everybody stops as you walk past, and stares. Oh, well. It'll blow over. Not that I give a fuck, really.

But the topper was the sudden reappearance of Joe (on the immediate tail of the the World's Longest Lapdance) come to train his charm and WASP-ish good-looks and large vocabulary on me like a jacklight on a deer. Come to think of it, I'm not even sure I like Joel that much and now he's in my head again, stuck like a catchy song. I went home that night and fucked my boyfriend till dawn. Woke up with scarlet hickies all over my breasts. Something else I haven't had since my teens.

I'm rich. I'm irritated. My shins are bruised. I'm tired. I'm disliked. And I'm still horny.

I'm back, motherfuckers

Man, sometimes -- not often, but sometimes -- this job is so retardedly easy it almost kind of sucks. Seriously, like taking candy from a baby. Which is not strictly the most ethical thing one can do, although candy is bad for babies and you can rationalize anything.

Like, sometimes it's as easy as walking into the bar in a t-shirt and jeans and throwing a casual smile at the guy sitting by the bar, not really even seeing his face, but he is the only person there more or less, and you are trying to get into the swing of smiling at people, and WHOOMP, that is totally it. By the time you are suited up and ready to roll, that guy -- a jug-eared thirty-something surveyor who has injured his shoulder and is temporarily dismissed from his job, with time to kill and the proceeds of a freshly-cashed worker's compensation check in his pocket which he is absolutely positively bound and determined to blow on somebody or something RIGHT NOW -- is hunting for you high and low. He likes your eyes and your smile and your dress and your shoes and your laugh and your ponytail and if there is any way he could buy two dances from you at once and thus spend money on you even faster, he would be doing it. (You have a twinge of conscious about taking his money, but it is simply and literally the truth that if it weren't you it would be any some one of these other girls, so what the hell.)And every time he gets up to go to the bathroom or you walk across the room to get some water there is some other guy, like maybe a bearded employee of the forrestry service, who is tapping you on the shoulder and asking if he can't get oh, maybe just one or two dances from you really quick until eventually you are palming the first guy off on friends of yours because you have so many customers lined up waiting for you that it's getting ridiculous. And then you tip all the staff a million dollars and everybody loves you and you come home and have a slice of pie.

If I could, I would french myself right now. Goddamn. Nothing cures the wintertime blues like a crisp stack of C-notes.

ain't goin no place

Nothing could have gotten me to work tonight, and I was supposed to go. I need to go. There's plenty to motivate me if I were open to motivation: the Vanagon is in the shop for costly repairs, my computer is not nearly as fixed as I thought it was, my boyfriend is pretty and has expensive tastes, and so on. But every night for the last three nights, when it's time to hustle my dance things into their special bag, I get cold and queasy like a middle-schooler on algebra-test morning.

I am such a puss.

I don't know what all the dread is about. I figure I'm pretty thick-skinned by now about being groped, slobbered on, dicked around, cheated out of money, and turned down. I know how to charm and connive and pout and nod my head and winkle the money out Ben by Ben and Jackson by Jackson. When I'm in stripper mode, when I'm on, when I'm really and truly Grace, it's easy. But I just don't feel like it right now. It's hard to summon Grace up on command. Right now it's just me, and I feel like hanging out with the cats in my sweatshorts, reading and drinking tea and biting my nails.

Just the act of picking out which frilly, see-thru number I'll be sporting that night makes me feel like a dumbtard, the last few days. Lessee, I've got a so-tiny-you-can-see-both-ass-cheeks black sequined satin skirt with matching bra...I could wear it with a black thong, in case I start my period tonight, but it makes my boobs look small(er.) Or, if I wear a schoolgirl skirt, I can get away with knee-socks so I wouldn't have to shave my legs right now. Slut-tastic pink salsa dress with spangly flower applique? White booty shorts and matching bikini top? Did I really buy this shit?

(To be fair to myself, not all of it. Quite a few things were given to me in moments of mysterious kindness by co-workers who were probably drunk. One or two were gifts from infatuated customers whose sartorial taste did not match their generosity. Or whose ideal pin-up was a redheaded girl in a signal-orange, dark-light responsive fishnet tube-dress. Whatever. I think my point stands, regardless.)

I'd feel as dumb dressed like this right now as I did being crammed into a tutu and shoved on stage at the fucking Elk's Lodge for the fucking ballet recital when I was eight. Smile, they say, and give you a push and then you're out there and you have to smile. Eesh.

I think I could even pull the whole act off -- the Hey, how are you, sweetie and the falsh eye lashes batting and the chit-chat and the Boy, I'd love to get naked for you now -- if I could just do it in the comfort of pajama pants and reading glasses and french-braids. You don't know. Maybe you'd love it. You'd feel like you were over at my house and we were renting movies and any minute I'm going to start yawning and telling you how sleepy I am and suggest going to bed and there's slim chance you might get to feel me up, but most likely you will just be shifting around in bed all night with your raging boner listening to me breathe. Is that sexy?

No?

Well, good thing I didn't go to work then.

NB: This is my hundredth post. Hoist a beverage of your choice for me.

me again, who else

OK, we're on again. I've called in some favors and the old jalopy is back on three wheels for the time being. I don't have much of relevance to blog, though. I've been playing hooky from the titty bar since the Monday before Thanksgiving, nursing myself slowly through a gentle, seasonal bout of melancholy. Does anyone else think Seasonal Affective Disorder is just another name for Really Hating Christmas?

Appropo of nothing, this morning I got a $50 haircut for $25 in a backyard full of dogs and rusting bicycle parts and blowing leaves. Grace's tip for thrifty living: make friends with junkies. The costs of their professional services are surprisingly flexible, especially around the end of the month when rent is due and they still want to score.

filler

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improper boston

I didn't get hired at Centerfold's. Or rather, I did get hired, after a thirty minute wait during which I had plenty of time to assess the three working dancers (not remarkably prettier than the girls at my club back home, despite Centerfold's reputation as a fearsomely picky hirer) and general atmosphere of the place (stuffy, ornate, dead empty.) Finally, the daytime manager came out and gave me a limp handshake and a bored look and some paperwork to fill out. I was working my way through the stack when he told me he couldn't book me that week, but I could come back next. I told him I was only in town for the week, so that wouldn't work, and got a reaction so melodramatically negative I can only assume that a stripper from Texas who was only in town for a week must have murdered his entire family and burned his village to the ground. I was told that "girls from out of town have no incentive to follow the rules" and escorted unceremoniously from the premises.

Fortunately, the only other strip club in Boston, the Glass Slipper, is right next door. Like, literally, right next door. I invited myself in. It was different -- a tiny place, like a neighborhood bar that just happened to have a naked lady dancing on a stage behind the bar. I found out later the club had moved from it's 21-year home across the street the Friday before. The decor was nice and new and managerially everything was sort of in chaos.

Everyone was friendly to me right off the bat. In strip club context, this is not necessarily a good thing. It smacks of desperation. Still, I needed a place to work, and the other clubs were out in the suburbs, many subway transfers and train rides and taxi fares away from me. And I did see customers, a nice row of them sitting along the bar like ducks in a shooting gallery. Good.

They wanted me to come back the next day to dance, so I took the afternoon to walk around Boston in the surprisingly nice weather and showed up the next morning bright and early. I was the first girl on stage, and some Irish guy tipped me $20 (an unheard of stage tip in Texas) and told me I had a nice can. And really, it never got better than that.

A dump doesn't have to look like a dump to be a dump. The customers, though grumpy and aggrieved in that unique New England style, were bearable. The place didn't smell. But it was awful. Probably it's the fact the management here makes it impossible for their dancers to earn money, consequently attracting only girls who (a) can't get hired as dancers anywhere else (b)are genuintly too dumb or too cracked out to work at McDonald's.

You see, there are no lapdances in Boston. Dancers can't touch customers unless they are fully dressed. Customers can't directly hand money to dancers. With money and touching -- more or less the life-blood of the strip club transaction -- off limits, what's left is a pretty pale experience for everyone. Now, you can give a "private dance" back in the brand-new "private dance area" -- a bathroom-sized space with restaurant-booth-style seating around the walls, where a dancer can remove her dress and panties and prance around buck-ass (except for shoes) as long as she stays three feet away from you at all times and her gentle admirer sits on his hands. Oh, and a bouncer is back there with you, watching every move either of you makes. Now, I pride myself on being able to create an intimate experience out of pretty much nothing, but this was tough.

And I'm almost forgetting, the process of buying a private dance -- what with handing a girl money constituting prostitution and all -- is positively Soviet in it's baroquely bureaucratic complexity. The customer gives $25 to the bartender, and then you go back to the private room to wait. The bartender goes and buys a ticket -- looks just like a carnival ticket and says "Admit One" -- from the doorgirl, who then gives the ticket to the floor-guy, who goes outside to make a phone-call and then maybe has a beer before coming back over and handing the ticket to the customer, who hands the ticket to you, and then you get naked. If you happen to touch the customer lightly on the shoulder or leg while waiting you are Out.

I'm dead sure that this process could be streamlined and dead sure that it won't be, not any time soon. The club hasn't got much incentive to make it easy to sell dances, since they are "only" keeping $10 of the $25 price of admission. The club would much rather the dancers sat at the bar all day selling "ladies drinks", which cost $30 and consist of watered-down Sunny-D or black cherry Kool-Aid. The agreement is that you will sit and flirt with the customer while you drink the drink. For this, the club gives you a cut of $4. Yup. Four fucking dollars. You can't drink more than one drink every ten minutes, either, effectively limiting your income to $24 an hour. The club, in that hour, will make $156.

The first day, I hustled my ass off, worked a double and made a pinch over $300. In Texas, this is the kind of night I would bitch about all the way home. At the Glass Slipper, managers were all over me like I'd pulled off some kind of economic miracle. Yuck. And the general manager's hands, on which I fixated each night while he counted out my money, were white with scaly, star-shaped warts, or maybe it was leprosy.

The girls who stick around for this kind of bullshit are girls for whom $24 an hour is money they just couldn't make any other way. There was a fat girl -- not thick, not heavy, not curvy, fat -- with a gap between her front teeth who wore fish nets and a blond wig and staggered around all day with a boozy smile, like something from another century. There was a sad-looking girl with a muddy complexion and many scars who, once fully nude on stage for the last song of her set, would reach down and sort of milk her vagina until a few drops of whitish fluid dribbled onto the stage. With these notable exceptions, the girls were not that ugly. The black girls especially were lovely, as is often the case in racist areas where they can't get hired at better clubs. I don't know why they put up with it. Dumb, maybe? Used to being taken advantage of and treated like shit, so what does it matter?

I lasted three days, but the strain of making so much money for the club and so little for myself was making me bitter and bored. On my last day, I found I'd really rather sit at a corner booth and read the Wall Street Journal than troll for surly guys to buy me Kool-Aid. Four dollars hasn't been enough to motivate me since I was, like, five years old. I swore I wouldn't smoke in Boston, but on my last day I was up on the fire escape outside the fourth-floor dressing room sucking ash. Since the typical fire-escape grating acts like a cattle-guard for girls in stilletto heels, someone has thoughtfully put down a few sheet of cardboard to keep us from spraining our ankles and falling to our deaths. From here we can look down the alley at men and women with briefcases and J. Crew sweaters hurry to and fro, tiny as ants. Maria, a cute, thin Puerto Rican hoodrat with glasses, joined me and asked what kind of day I was having. I assumed my expression of kabuki calmness and said I was doing alright, though I wasn't.

"Well, I'm doing bad," Maria said. She started telling me about her best friend, who used to be a dancer but now has a pimp and is flying around to Vegas and L.A. making three thousand dollars a night, or so she says, and how she showed up at Maria's apartment last Christmas Eve with a carful of presents for Maria's son. "It look like she bought out the whole fucking Toys R' Us," Maria said. She gets wistful. "I sure would like to have that money. I'm thinking about fucking around with them for a while. She says he's real nice, says he don't put his hands on his hoes hardly."

I'm not one to make other people's decisions for them, but I ventured that if I were going to enter the realms of prosititution, I'd be working for myself and keeping my own money.

"Nah, mami, I know," she said. "But he looks out for you. Like just now, I'm sittin at the bar rubbin on this guy's dick, and he put fifty dollars on the bar and say if I get him off I can keep it. So I rub him off and he cum in his pants, then he take the fifty off the bar and give me ten. And there ain't nothing I can do about it. If I have a pimp, he'da make sure I get my money."

Er. Touche?

the jewel of the lotus resides within

I spent the first 24 hours of the retreat in an internal monologue of relentless derision against the smug self-satisfaction of people who wear linen pants and put "om" stickers on their cars and pay $50 a pop to have their auras photographed and float around in a haze of middle-class entitlement dressed up with New Age spiritual patchouli-scented loopiness. At the silent breakfast hour on Saturday morning I began to soften; no civilized society should allow an occasion so serious to be adulterated with chatter. Any institution that understands this cannot be all bad.

After breakfast, B. and I and our twenty or so fellow Concious Hiking program attendees got into a school bus and were shuttled out into the mountains and dumped out to consciously hike the seven miles back. We went single file, spaced a long way apart and enjoined to silence. It was cloudy and cold and I had thoughtlessly neglected to bring gloves or boots, but after the first ten minutes everything went comfortably numb. The ground underfoot squished and crunched in deeply satisfying ways. Late morning the sun came out and shortly afterwards it began to snow.

I grew up in woods like these, ginko, ash, turkey beard and hemlock. Even the smell was familiar, and the light through the last brown and yellow leaves; snow in the moss; tiny streams of water running over rocks with a sound like beads falling. I always loved fall.

Back at the house there was a monk's narrow, virginal bed for each of us and a sauna in the basement where you could sweat in cedar-scented darkness. Three days of this, until I was shaken and pummeled and smushed and boiled clean like the chickpea in the Rumi poem, naked of my stripperisms. And then it was time to go back to work.

beantown

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silver city blues

Baby Dolls wasn't hiring, but fortunately all the strip clubs in Dallas are within about a five-mile radius, so we headed down the highway to a club called Silver City, which I'd heard about from girls at the P10. We were hired with no questions and taken upstairs to get dressed in an enormous, echoing locker-room. Our hiring manager then collected us and gave us a tour. The club was very well appointed, close to empty, and creepy. It's hard to describe why.

Might have been the extreme seclusion of the VIP, which had booths with doors; I have worked in a club with booths before and they were called blow-job boxes for an excellent reason. It could have been the hard expressions on the faces of the other girls. I don't know. Neither of us felt good. We seperated and walked around the floor for about ten minutes befor bumping into each other and achieving instant consensus that it was time to leave.

We went up to the dressing room and suited back up. On our way out, the manager followed us to car, begging us to come back in. I just Googled the club and apparently there've been a number of high-profile stabbings, killings, and sexual assaults at this place. Check it. So we're not crazy, after all.

So back to the Men's Club for a couple of decent but unrewarding days. I'll finish out the week here, which is more than I would have promised Wednesday night, but after that Dallas can crawl up its own ass and die as far as I'm concerned. A more coherent analysis most likely to come.

prick city

On Monday my travel companion, whom I'll call Tommi, and I applied at the Men's Club of Dallas, which is one of the Big Kahuna clubs here in Big D. It is spectacular inside; the only club I've seen to rival it is the Scores in Vegas, and this was perhaps even a little glitzier -- lots of gold and mirrors and velvet curtains and a courtyard with statue of Venus de Milo with exageratedly large boobs. We were hired on the spot, which I guess says something nice about our pretty faces and/or Tommi's hilariously large breasts.

The first two nights I made what I'd make on very best nights at home, and this is a Monday and a Tuesday we're talking about. One the other hand, the money is very grueling to make. The men here are big, angry, carnivorous, and carved out of something very dense of hard. They are impossible to talk to, educated only to the point of profitability, devoid of interests or interest, and apparently take no pleasure in life beyond coming to a dressed-up titty joint and sulking by the bar. I don't usually have a problem making conversation. I can bullshit about a variety of pleasant subjects, including football, golf, music, computers, art, religion, horses, my ass, blah didddly blah. But this was not a club where personality seemed to be at a premium. Looking perfect, sitting still, and smiling seemed to be a profitable skill set. Yikes. I felt like I was milking every last dollar out of rock. Please understand, I am a stripper who generally like customers, enjoys customers, sometimes becomes overly emotionally involved with customers. And so far, I have not met one guy I could stand the sight of after thirty seconds. The possibe exception was Peter, the fruity drunk from Western Massachusettes (Sixty, I was trying to figure out for an hour if this was you) who was amusing in the way that Ivy League graduates born into entirely too much money can be amusing, if you do the aural equivalent of squinting and crossing your eyes.

Yesterday, the club required us to work day shift as part of the new-girl hazing. It was lamentable. Girls who had worked there for years and had regulars were banking, I know. A blond girl named Star with perfect breasts and zero body fat, tanned the color of tea, was floating around with tributes of jewelry and Godiva chocolates which is an everyday thing for her, I guess. Kudos. But it was not for me. We had meant to stay and work a double shift til at least midnight. I left at 8pm with the kind of money I used to make back in my weeping-stripper days at the Crazy Lady. Tommi was hanging on, so I walked back the motel right around the corner and called C. and cried for an hour. At the end of that hour, Tommi too trailed home defeated, which makes me feel better, because she is an astounding and tireless Superstripper, so if things weren't working for her either then it wasn't just me.

Tonight it's a big Fuck You to the Men's Club and off to check out Baby Dolls, which has a reputation as an enormous emporium of wickedness, but girls have told me that there's easy money to skim off the top without having to do any sucky-sucky. We'll probably return to the Men's Club for the weekend, unless Baby Dolls is just astonishing.

I miss my boyfriend. Post me, I'm lonely.

grace does dallas

Woot! Leaving for Dallas in about ten minutes. Scared shitless and probably forgetting a ton of stuff. I'll let you know how it goes.

crow's feet

I look tired to myself tonight. Eight hours of sweat and cigarette smoke and the paint and powder seems to exagerate the lines on my face more than it disguises them. I made good money tonight, the lion's share from a breeder of show-horses with whom I had the same two-minute conversation -- "You're beautiful." Thank you. "I could make you happy." I bet you could. "I love you." Oh, silly you. -- over and over for three hours. Then he tried to gyp me out of money, but in the end I won.

People throw the word love around in a strip club like it's nothing. They trip you with it like a wire, slap you with it like an open palm, wheedle you with it, like it's candy. If it were my world, you would have to pay a dollar every time you said it. Then maybe people would fucking think.

I just get tired of it is all. I get tired of being on the receiving end of so much emotion, of being blamed for feelings that no one can fix. But it's my job and it's what I signed up for, and so be it. I just get tired of it is all.

I come home through the rain and my love has cleaned the kitchen. He waits for me asleep in the big bed in the room with the bay window. He is my heart. I think he will still find me beautiful when my face is full of lines and my bones are melting away. I think so.

Pam pointed out to me that I dropped the f-word a few entries back without warning or explanation. So yes, C. and I are affianced as of a week or so ago. Or, as I prefer to say, afinanced. It's not a hard decision. I wake up in the morning and see his face on the pillow next to mine and feel giddy. I can't imagine anyone I'd rather have coffee with every morning for the next sixty years. He's such good company. We're still impressed by each other, amused by each other, in awe of each other, even. It's nice.

Still. I spend four nights a week talking to lonely men, the vast majority of whom are at least once divorced. It could make you cynical. Or, at the very least, wary. But the canary in my heart beats its wings. C. and I are different. We will always be different. We will always be in love. I will always want to fuck him. He will always hold me after.

We will. I will. He will. Right?

Sometimes I'm afraid all the love will just get up and walk out one day and there'll be nothing either of us can do about it. I had a dream once that I was standing on a dock and C. was in a dingy and didn't seem to notice that he was slowly drifting away. It was one of those dreams where you need to scream, but can't. How is that people let love go?

I remind myself often how much I love him, how lucky I am. I try to do it every day, like brushing my teeth. I am not good at remembering things, but I hope I will remember. As far as I know, that's the best I can do.

clark kent

Speaking of being eaten alive, let me tell you about Clark Kent, so-called for bearing an uncanny resemblance to that bespectacled Man of Steel. Only this is Clark Kent if he married Lois Lane and settled down and had two kids and got a job as a warehouse manager. And Lois got jealous and lazy and fat and stayed home all day watching soaps and yelling at the kids and complaining that their house wasn't nice enough. And Clark became nervous and withdrawn and put on some weight and adopted the permanent stooped posture of the broken-hearted. And then Clark decided he couldn't live like that anymore, and with the kids out of high school he wanted to enjoy whatever was left of his life, so he sold all his stuff and moved into an apartment.

His first night in the apartment he went out to a strip club for the first time in more than ten years and only halfway into his first rum-and-coke he was familiarly accosted by a redheaded stripper named Grace. He was so terrified he couldn't think of anything to say, and after about two minutes of attempted small talk she patted his knee and left, and the sight of her walking away filled him with such feelings of abandonment and loss that when he saw her on stage ten minutes later he walked up and tipped her $50. Because maybe if she would just come back, it would be like everything was OK. And she did come back, and for a while everything was.

He gave her his business card and asked her to call, but she didn't, so the next week he came back and spent even more money. And because it was lonely in his new apartment all by himself, he came back the next night and the next. And she was always glad to see him, and she was always nice to him, and she always took her clothes off any time he asked. And he told her how he thought about her all the time -- every day at work and every night while he was falling asleep. He told her how much he'd love to take her up to upstate New York where he was born, and he told her how she should meet his parents and how much they would love her, and he told her how he thought he and she would have beautiful children together, and how every love song on the radio reminded him of her. And then he asked her to marry him.

And she never says yes to anything, but she never exactly says no, and any time he tries to bring it up, he finds they are suddenly talking about something else. She told him that she has a boyfriend, but he knows it won't last, because that guy doesn't love her like he does and someday he will make her understand how much he really loves her and they will be together forever and everything will be perfect. And now she's changing her schedule without telling him, working different nights, nights when he can't make it in. Sometimes she has other customers and is too busy to spend time with him, and that seems to happen more and more lately, but that's OK. He understands, and he just sits at the bar drinking rum-and-coke and watching her walk around the room. Now she's telling him that she's going to be traveling and might not see him for a while, and he's sad, he will miss her, but not too sad, because he knows that meeting her was no accident -- it was mean to be -- it was fate. And nothing can stop fate.

grace and satan and the dog with cancer

I was talking to Slayde, the Satanist's room-mate the other night, and she told me he had just gotten back from taking his dog to a specialist three hundred miles away to see if anything could be done about the poor critter's cancerous throat tumor. Turns out the answer is no, and the dog is going to die. He was devestated, she said, which is bad news she says, since when he's depressed he tends to go on drug binges. Six months ago he over-dosed (I forget on what) after breaking up with his girlfriend and nearly died. This is how young Slayde came to move in with him and take care of him. Apparently he is one of those lovable, self-destructive types who needs an entire team of devoted followers just to keep him functioning.

I told her I'd give him a cheer-up call the next day and because I'm not a liar I did, and left a message. He called back sounding awful, more or less on the verge of tears. We talked about the circle of life, and the karmic cycle, and that stuff. I truly felt for him, cause he is just lovable, but I also started to get nauseous tremors of paranoia. I've been suckered into nurse-maiding emotional cripples before, and it's not cool. The Satanist's disembodied voice -- light, querulous, tenor -- was a dead ringer for the alcoholic mailman I lived with an loved the year I was 21, during which time I declined into a long and terrifying depression. Maybe it was that giving me the cold chills. At any rate, I logged about twenty minutes on the phone with the Satanist and then I had to make my excuses and go.

He was in Friday night, though, and seemed better. Same old sweet self. We danced and smoked and he told me the correct way to appease the spirits when taking soil out of a cemetary for the manufacture of voo-doo gris-gris -- cigar smoke and pennies, in case you ever need to know. He was passive and blissful while I danced; seemed tired. Nothing heavy. I'm wary, though. There really are excellent reasons for a dancer to keep some professional distance between herself and her customers. I like my customer, most of them. Some of them I like a lot. I just don't want to be eaten alive.

disclaimer

OK, it's time we had a talk. This blog is not a democracy. It's mine, and I made it because (a)I'm a compulsive person and writing is one of my compulsions; if I didn't blog I'd smoke more (b)my boyfriend is tired of my stripping stories (c)I enjoy the shout-outs, feedback, and occasional constructive criticism.

I do not enjoy random, inarticulate abuse. I deal more than enough at work with the various manifestations of desire as it curdles into hatred, and I don't propose to do so on in spare time, in the vulnerability of my pajamas. If you just don't like reading about strippers, there are 18 grabillion other things on the Internet for you to look at, like this or this or this. If you feel a burning desire to express hostility towards a woman in the sex industry, you can turn it sideways and shove it up your ass.

Articulate objections to my personage, prose style, and line of work will be considered for posting. Abusive drivel will be deleted with a light heart.

Go and sin no more,
Grace

grace loves satan

So last night was slow again. Mercy. They told us things would be better by October. They, of course, is a notoriously unreliable source. I still made my nightly goal, by magic, at the last minute, and only because of a Buddhist and a Satanist.

Has anyone else noticed that many of my best customers are followers of obscure sects? Maybe I've forgotten to mention that detail, but there's got to be a good joke in it. The Buddhist, the Satanist and the Charismatic Christian walk into a titty bar looking for Grace...

The "Buddhist" was a bit of a pill, actually. Since when did Buddhism become new Satanism in terms of attracting disaffected loners who long to identify with something exotic that won't require too much from them beyond the purchase of some cool new accessories? At least he had the class to wear his prayer beads under his shirt.

The treat of the night was another visit -- the fourth in three weeks -- from my buddy the Satanist. OK, I give -- he's not a Satanist, but I like to tease him about it because with the long white goatee and the Grandad glasses and the toothy smile he looks like Anton LaVey if you met him at a Halloween party and he'd gained some weight and was doing keg stands and then later you sat on the porch with him and bummed cigarettes and told funny stories. I adore him. Last night he came and paid me above and beyond my normal Champagne rate to sit on the couch with me and read to me from Robert Tallant's Voodoo Queen by candlelight.

In real life, the Satanist is a fashion and fetish photographer of some local reknown and he has fallen in love with my belly scar and wants to take pictures of it. If I haven't described my scar before, or if you are just tuning in, said scar runs from sternum, flanked on either side with rows of scarrified dots from where the staples came out. I got it when they removed my ruptured spleen and picked the bone shards out of my heart and lung after my car accident. The Satanist calls me Zipper Girl. One of the other dancers at the club is his roommate, and pulled me aside in the locker-room last night to tell me that the Satanist is a really great guy, a very professional photographer, and has a crush on me the size of a cow, so if I have a boyfriend I should tell him before he breaks his heart over it. So I do tell him, and he takes it in stride. I really, really like this guy.

Still wants to take pictures of me, and I think I'll go for it, as I do need promotional shots before I can start booking out-of-area and I've seen his stuff before and it's quite good. He'll have to Playboy it up for me a bit -- I don't think the Suicide Girls look will go over too well with club managers in Tempe -- but I think we've got ourselves a deal. He'll take Glamor Shots for me, I'll get naked and crawl around in a cemetary in a bloody wedding dress for him, and everbody can go home happy. Don't tell me this job isn't all about networking.

"wanna see something cool?"

You know your job is hardcore when you're chatting casually with the cute co-worker you've been flirting with on and off for weeks and he asks you whether you and your boyfriend would threeway with him and you say maybe and then and all of a sudden he busts out his cellphone and shows you a 30-second video clip of his girlfriend, who is also your co-worker, sucking his erect, slightly-larger-than-average penis and this is so very much not the weirdest thing that happens to you at work that night that you only remember it two days later at breakfast and laugh so hard that you blow chunks of muffin across the table and your boyfriend asks you what's so funny and you say, "Oh, nothing, really. Just some shit at work."

hello, joe

Shit. He's here. Everybody, hide the bong. I mean, everybody welcome Joe, who has apparently stumbled into our secret lair. I forgot that he's in some respects a Computer Guy and, like the rest of us, probably spends too much time on the 'net Googling through the infinite after our lost desires.

First my yoga students come to my titty bar. Now the regular for whom I have ambiguous feelings finds my blog. For fuck's sake, is there no such thing as anonymity anymore? I guess not when you go and post about your darkest feelings on a public board under your real-fake name for all the world to see. Even precious C. has started mooning around over my shoulder while I type. I hate all of you. Go away.

goodbye, joe

So Joe came in Saturday night very late -- after last call in fact, but the bar stays open til 4am. He didn't want to hit the couches in the Champagne Room and dance, just sit at a little table in the main room and talk. He's been generous with me, so I didn't mind giving him a little bit of time for free. Except that the conversation quickly got emotional, with him telling me he didn't want to be seen as a customer, and me trying to make everything OK, but my guard was down, as it has been with him, and I couldn't make a recovery.

He wants to be friends, but I don't think that's reality. I'm a 26-year-old stripper with a fiance, and he's a 47-year-old businessman with three teenaged children. Maybe if he'd really seemed sincere about the friendship part, but it was pretty obvious that the version of friendship he had in mind consisted of waiting around in the wings in case I broke up with my boyfriend. "Friendships" like that are crap.

There's also the fact that the girl he thinks he loves does not actually exist. I wouldn't go so far as to say that Grace is a completely fictional character, but Grace is definitely a cleaned-up and sexified version of a real woman who is not always in a good mood, doesn't always have perfect hair, and isn't completely fascinated by you and totally hot for your body. Grace is a service that I provide; she's available only at the club, at certain times, for a set rate. She isn't someone you can date or fuck or even be friends with. Even my boyfriend doesn't get to date Grace. He's stuck with me.

When Joe says he wants to get to know me, he's talking about Grace and he's asking for something that's not possible. He wants to scoop up the happy, sexy redhead and carry her home to dance on his coffee table every night for free, and it doesn't work like that. He thinks he can see the "real me" but if he could he would see that the real me is a girl who happens to be a stripper, who wants to do her job and get paid and go home. This is the highest level of strip-club-customer sophistication, and few achieve it. Most get bogged down somewhere in the idea that their stripper is either an eager slut available for the asking, or a soiled dove in need of rescuing, or some other fantasy that casts them as the hero who gets the girl.

I didn't attempt to explain this amidst the smoke and flashing pink lights and hip-hop soundtrack of the Saturday closing-time bar. I just said, no, I have a rule that I don't mix up my dancing life with my non-dancing life, and rules wouldn't be rules if we only followed them when we felt like it. And he was upset. Today we exchanged e-mails going back and forth over the same ground, and I haven't answered the last one because really what's the point.

I'm sad. I was sad at work the next day, and tired -- a zombie dancer. I'm sorry Joel is hurt, because I do like him, although not as much as I did before. He's just another ex-regular now, and the more he tried to say he wasn't, the more obvious it was. Just another guy who can't beleive Grace doesn't really want to fuck him, after she sat on his lap and stared in his eyes and listened to him talk and smiled like that, another guy who thinks life would be perfect if a full-time free stripper would move in and spend all her time making him happy forever.

Men are so strange, so weirdly fragile. Did you know that male infants cry when seperated from their mothers much sooner than girl babies, find abandonment much more traumatic, are more stimulated by being held and caressed? I imagine pink flashing lights in a smoky room of crying male infants, and I am even sadder than before.

jinxed

Yup. And I know that most curses are nothing more than self-fulfilling prophecies, but this Friday night was really something else. For one thing, I started my period that afternoon and thus was bloated, grumpy, and hobbled with cramps. For another, it was the end of the month, which is a slow time in this business. There was a crowd, but they were young, and broke, and surly. I made the rounds, accomplished little, then stumbled on a guy who said I danced for him before and was all excited about seeing me again. Had me sit with him about ten minutes while he drank a beer and told me how much he was looking forward to getting some dances. Then he told me he had to go call his wife, because she would expect him home. I said OK. Guys goes out to make a phone call and never comes back. Because I have a charitable heart, I'm going to assume that Wife yanked the leash on him and he had to bail, rather than that he is the kind of cheap perv who can con sufficient masturbatory material out of ten minutes of flirtatious chatter and surreptitious thigh-rubbing. But this was regular bullshit -- nothing compared to what happened next.

Those of you who have been paying attention know that I teach yoga at a shelter for domestic abuse survivors. You might think that I'd be less likely than most strippers to encounter folks from my day job, but however low the odds are, when they come up, they're up. Barely an hour into my shift a guy walked past me who looked vaguely familiar, but not in a club-regular kind of way, and after a rummage through the mental Rolodex it clicked that he was in fact an employee of the shelter, and a regular class attendee. So I follow him with my eyes, and sure enough, there is a whole table of shelter employees whooping it up front and center by the main stage. To their credit, they were tipping and seemed to be having the best kind of cheerful good time. If they'd been anybody else, I'd have made a beeline for them. But shit.

So I tipped the DJ to take me out of rotation and scuttled back to VIP to hide. It was more or less dead back there, save for a customer of my acquaintance named Sam, who talks a lot, looks like the sort of simple, good-hearted goon character who would be rubbed out halfway through a movie about the mob. He has allergies and his eyes water all the time as if he were crying, and given the way he talks and the things he talks about, you actually think at first that he might be. He did eventually buy a few dances from me, but for every dance you sell this guy, you have to start again from the beginning and explain that you won't date him, because he gets quite emotionally confused every time and thinks you are in love with him. And he feels bad about it because he's not sure that he loves you back. It's hard work, and I was at it for three hours, because that's how fricking long my yoga students were out there living it up in the front room.

Finally, they left and I was released but the night was pretty much as dismal as before. I sat with the world's most depressing bachelor party, honoring a groom-to-be who had just been released from prison that morning and attended only by an aging former stripper and a guy who races stock cars out in Killeen. They called me over to their table to dance, then wasted another ten minutes of my time before they figured out that they'd already squandered their meager funds on cocktails and couldn't afford it. So they gave me everything they had left -- about $8 in ones -- and a napkin with the address and number of their hotel room in case I wanted to stop by after work and party.

By then there was only an hour or two left of the shift -- too short to make any serious money, too long to just go back in the dressing room and put my head down. I was headed back there anyway, to kill some time reapplying eyeliner or whatever, when a middle-aged Dude in a Suit flagged me down as I passed the ATM, and asked me for help because he didn't have his glasses and couldn't see the buttons. I navigated him with utmost charm through the withdrawal of several hundred dollars, and he indicated that he was back in VIP with some other very important persons, and I should stop by. A last chance at redeeming the spectacular awfulness of the evening, thinks I. But then I got to the bathroom and discover that my own personal crimson tide has burst through it's fragile packed-cotton barrier and soaked my (black, luckily) thong with blood. And it's the only thong I had with me.

A trooper would have borrowed a thong -- or made one out of leaves and twigs or something -- and gone back to VIP anyway to hustle the rich guys. But this little panty waist simply sat on the pot with her head on her knees and moaned. Then I packed my things and got the hell out.

Happily, the next night was better, up until the very end when Joe came in and schizzed out on me and broke my heart. But that's it's own story.

winning streak

I didn't run away from home, nor did our friend John come back to the club and murder me, as promised. I haven't felt like blogging, and I finally realize it's because I don't want to jinx a good thing. I've been having such ridiculously great times -- er, make that totally adequate -- um, let's just say things have been OK, very OK, and I'm afraid if I do or say anything, it'll ruin it.

This month is the one-year anniversary of me getting fired from the yoga studio for reasons to this day unknown ("not a good match for us"), crying for two days, and returning to the sordid life of iniquity I lovingly call the titty business. I didn't plan to do it for long. I'd never been more than an average dancer for a week here and a week there in shady, two-bit dive bars, anyway. I wasn't drawn to it for the glamor (ha!) or the riches (double ha!) but for the speedy and easeful hiring process. Throw a thong, a bikini top, and a pair of shoes into your back-pack, hit up every club in town on a Tuesday afternoon until somebody gives you a job, and by the end of the day you've got a fistful of twenty dollar bills. Or ten dollar bills. Fives. Ones. Hell, money is money.

As it happened, I went to the two sleeziest joints in town and got turned down. Then I went to a relatively nice place and was hired before I'd walked all the way in the door. Gambler's luck, I guess. Also by chance, it was Texas-OU football day and in the middle of the afternoon the club was full of drunk Hispanic guys up from the Rio Grande valley to make a day of it in the big city. I made $400 that day, which to me then constituted riches beyond my wildest imagining. That's when I understood that you could make real money prancing around in your underpants. As it turned out, that was an unusually good dayshift at that particular ass factory. Still, the pickings were pretty good.

At the time, I wanted to go to Washington, D.C. the next month to see that Dalai Llama with my friend and consort, Barbara. All of a sudden, the money was easy. So I went. Then I went to Vegas, cause I felt like it. Then I went to New York City to visit my friend Emily and welcome my old high school roomie Pam home from foreign wars. Then I went to Florida to see my Grammer cause she's the one who put me through yoga school in the first place and I don't get to see her much and I love her. Finally, I settled down and started saving some money. I never knew how much money I'd make in a day. It always felt like luck, but my number came up often enough. My bank account got so fat and I got so cocky, I told my brilliant and beloved college-dropout boyfriend that I'd send him back to school on my dollar and he took me up on it.

So then all of a sudden, it couldn't be luck anymore. Because luck is not going to support two adults and three cats and a college tuition and two aging automobiles that have to go to the mechanic a lot. All this hit me when we got back from the trip in August. And so I spent most of that month -- when I wasn't at the club -- in bed, shivering.

And then suddenly, everything got good and I started making money. I don't know how, or why, except that I really, really, really wanted to. All of a sudden I'm an ass-shaking, high-heeled money-making machine. I think I finally figured this game out. I think things finally clicked. Or else it's all just a hot streak, and then I'm fucked indeed.

john's speech

Hey, come over here. Yeah, c'mere. S'down, OK? Wow, you're pretty. Hey, how long you been dancing? Two years, huh? So you're an experienced girl, right? OK, cause I need to talk to a girl with some experience. This is the thing. I just got off probation, OK, and I want to have some fun, you know what I mean? I mean sometime you just want to have a cookie, right? Like you just think, hey, I've been a good boy -- I should get a cookie. OK?

So this is what I want, OK, and I will give you a hundred dollars if you will tell me, if you can get me, or you can tell me where, some coke. You know what I mean? OK? Oh, come on, you know where to get it. The other girl knows. Look at me. Look in my face. You don't know? OK, fine. No, sit down.

You're so cute, aren't you? Hey, take that top off. What? OK, dance then. Start now. I don't care. I've got plenty of money. If you can tell me where to get some coke I'll give you anything you want. Hundred dollars. Two hundred. It doesn't matter. Listen, they've been piss-testing me for two years and I just wanna have some fun, now, OK? Is that so bad?

Oh, wow. Put those tits in my face. C'mon, closer. What the fuck, no one's looking. Can I suck 'em? No? OK. No, keep dancing. I wanna take you home tonight. Can I take you home tonight? Please. Please, I just wanna have some fun. I've got six hundred dollars and you can have all of it, I don't care. Why not? Why not? Don't you like me? Is something wrong with me? C'mon. I don't wanna get you pregnant or anything. I just wanna fuck you. I just wanna look at your face when you're cumming, like it was a movie and we were in Russia and you thought you were about to die and it was the last time you were ever going to have sex, that is just so, so, so...

C'mon, I thought you liked me. Don't you like me? I'm a good guy. Don't you think I'm a good guy? Listen, I used to be a quarterback. Yup. High school. Yeah. Quarterback. I'm the guy that counted off for the other guys, that's me, the guy that counted off. The guy in charge. I'm a good guy. I can see that you're different. I can see that. And I don't want you just for sex. Other guys, they want you just for sex. You know that, don't you? Life is short. Life is so short and pretty soon you won't know what happened to you, and a guy like me is going to come along once in your life. I hate to tell you this, but after me it's all going to be downhill. You are never going to meet anyone again who cares about you like I do, OK?

You're sure you can't get me some coke? The girl earlier got me some. C'mon. I just want a little bit more. Just for the drive home, OK, because I've had a lot to drink, and I need something so I can drive. No, don't call a taxi for me. If you do that, I will kill you. I've gotta drive home tonight. Cause I -- here, c'mere, closer, I don't wanna say this out loud -- cause my daughter is with me this weekend, OK? My little daughter and she is just ten years old and I just got off probation this weekend. I waited till she was asleep and then I left, and right now she is there at the house all by herself. Do you think I'm a bad father? You probably think I'm the worst guy on earth. I'm not. There's a lot worse guys out there than me. But I need you to sit right here while I walk to the door, and every once in a while I'm gonna look back over my shoulder. Don't call the police on me. Don't tell anybody anything. I'm gonna look back at you, and if I see you talking to anybody, just remember that I know your name. I know your name and I know where you work, and I could hurt you. I know people that would kill you for fifty bucks, no questions asked. I know people. So look at me. Look at me in the face and tell me you won't tell anybody about me. Look at me.

I knew you wouldn't. You're different. You're nice. I like you. I'm gonna come back and see you, OK? I'm gonna come back and you'll come over and sit with me and dance for me again. Won't you? Won't you do that? You will, won't you? Won't you? Won't you?

never mind

OK, I'm over it.

Got a normal night's sleep. Went to the gym. Did laundry. I'm over it. I think I just needed the attention. C.'s deep into the semester at school, and preoccupied much of the time, and I've been working a lot -- between my four part-time jobs, I'm doing about 80 hours a week. It was nice to sit down for four hours and be told how beautiful I am and how clever and how desirable. And I have to remember, my buddy Joe is a Salesman -- and not the kind who wear the polo shirt with the company logo on it and bother you when you come into the store in the mall, but the kind who is on the phone to China closing multi-million dollar contracts when you call in the middle of the day. No wonder he had me eating out of the palm of his hand. That handsome bastard.

OK, but I'm not going to give myself grief over it. Because at the end of the day (make that night) I didn't go home with him and I didn't promise I would in the future, either. I just had a good time, and there's nothing wrong with having fun at work, once in a way.

Peace.

crushing

I called Joe midweek, somehow expecting to leave a message, but he picked up. It was the middle of the day and he was at work, doing business on the other line, so it was a very brief conversation. I thanked him for the book and he asked if I was still working at the club, and I said, yes, and we rang off.

Last night a waitress came up to my stage during my rotation and told me a customer wanted to buy me a drink, and I looked where she was pointing, and there he was. I checked myself in the mirror and was relieved that I had done my hair and smeared myself with fake tanner and was looking pretty good. It was "Hawaian Night" at the club so I had on the brown-with-gold bottoms of my actual bikini, and a cute peasanty-beach top and my $3 imitation Louis Vuitton sunglasses from Juarez. It was a good look. These things matter. So I got off stage and did my slinkiest walk over the table and he stood up to give me a hug. He's tall. Tall enough that I still have to tilt my head up a little to meet his eyes, and bear in mind that in my six-inch Lucite heels I am NBA height.

With little ado, we went back to the Champagne Room and scandalized the entire staff for the next four hours by drinking moderately, talking much, and keeping all of our clothes on. The bouncer kept wandering past our couch to eye us suspiciously and wonder what the hell was up with us. "Are you two getting married?" he asked at one point. Later, a manager came over while Joel was rubbing my shoulders and told us the police were in the club. This is a polite way of telling you to stop whatever you're doing because it's crossing the line. Funny thing is, if I'd been using my ass muscles to grind him to orgasm, no one would have blinked an eye, but putting my head on his shoulder and stroking his hair made everyone uncomfortable. So grinding is fine, I guess, but affection is tabu.

I left that night with my throat hurting and my brain in a buzz. This morning I feel sticky and clumsy still. I remember this feeling. It's a crush. How remarkable. How stupid. And, probably, how unwelcome. A stripper's job is to flesh out fantasy. Fantasies don't have feelings; that's part of the deal. A stripper doesn't miss you when you don't call, is in love with you only for the hour a week or evening a month that you can spare, doesn't have a birthday for you do forget. It's a lovely arrangement that way -- simple, elegant. Hell, my number one dance-selling line is "You won't have to call me in the morning."

Besides which, I adore and admire and belust my boyfriend and want to be sorting his underpants our from mine in the laundry for many, many years to come. I'm not going to take a flying leap for a roll in the hay with a 47-year-old high-power-salesman type, however lilting his British cum North African accent, however tom cat his smile. So now I'm Googling brachmacharya, the yogic principle of chastity, loyalty, continence. I'm coming up with stuff like this:

Often translated as celibacy, brachmacharya is controlling sexual desire, redirecting this energy to deepen our connection to the Devine. Uncontrolled, sexual desire and activity can easily bring out the worst in people. When one attempts to completely sublimate or suppress this energy, it has a tendency to manifest in life-negating ways. Only when one learns to channel this energy in healthy, nourishing ways will one be free to deepen spiritually.

Yes, sure. But how? How how how how how how HOW? I need to know, and soon, or else I'm off to flog myself into a masturbatory frenzy over a middle-aged guy with three adolescent children, and then maybe I'll I dunno meditate or something. God help me.

oh, canada

This weekend I was offered marriage and Canadian citizenship by an online gambling magnate from Toronto. Failing that, he also offered to fly me in for a weekend rendevouz in Cancun or London or wherever I might want go. Oh, if only.

This was also the weekend that I began my new goal-setting regime. It's been lousy the last few weeks -- few customers and no one who wants to spend any money. It's the end of the summer, and everybody's either saving to go on vacation or spent all their money on vacation already. Besides which, this is still largely a university town -- 50,000 young people with disposable incomes and poor impulse control leave every June, accompanied by the sucking sound of the municipal economy going down the drain. Couple that with a positive deluge of expenses on my part, large and small, expected and unexpected, and you get that scene with the Red Queen from Through the Looking Glass -- "Here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place." Now add to that a throat infection, a hideous outbreak of acne, and a flare-up of the old clinical depression and you've got Grace moping around the club all night starting at her fingernails and wishing she could have a cigarette. I wouldn't have wanted to dance with me either.

But this weekend I'd had enough and decided to pull it together. I was thinking wistfully of the average money I was making last spring -- easily two or three times my new average since coming back from vacation -- and I decided that fuckit, there isn't any reason I shouldn't make that money again. So I just decided I would. Every time during that day that I felt a flicker of doubt or apprehension about the night ahead, I just repeated the dollar ammount to myself. At work, every time I got turned down for a dance, every time I heard another dancer back in the dressing room ranting about the slowness and impossibility of it all, I repeated the ammount to myself again. It was my mantra. And stunningly, amazingly, magically, it worked. I exceeded that average two nights out of three, and on the third hit it dead on the button, despite that fact that local college football team lost the first game of the season and the mood in the club was quiet and sullen.

But the best night was the night I met the Canadian. At first, I didn't know he was there at all. I stopped to talk to a swarthy, corpulently handsome Brazilian guy in a sports jacket, who seemed to be sitting by himself. A few sentences into things, the Canadian returned from parts unknown, a non-descript 50-ish white guy in a nice shirt. The Brazilian was playing hard to get, so I switched the charm over to Mr. Canada, who was telling me how classless he thought it was to tip the stage with less than $5. This is a great line to use on strippers, obviously. We got along swimmingly, talking about the lovely lines of girls' hip-bones, and how I registered with marryacanadian.com after the '04 election, and next thing we knew we were back in the Champagne Room getting naked and romantic.

Some customers -- young ones, mostly -- ask me if I don't hate dancing for men who are old or ugly or fat. What they don't know is that when you're a stripper, there really isn't any such thing. Being a stripper, for me anyway, is sort of like being truly in love. Appearances are incidental. What I care about is, truly, what lies underneath -- i.e. your wallet. But the single-minded focus on whether or not you are going to give me money also shows me, peripherally, a host of other qualities that might otherwise be hidden. If I were going to date you, or fuck you, or take you home to my parents, I would be worried about things like your appearance and your circumstances and your station in life and your probable impression on my friends. Freed from these hypothetical constraints, however, I look at you and see your soul. Most of the time, people's souls are boring and/or a little bit gross, but sometimes you meet a real sweetheart, and the Canadian was one. Interesting fact well known to strippers: the guys who give you the most money are almost invariably also the ones who don't try to finger your orifices. And the Canadian lived up to this rule. He did try to get me to go back to his hotel with him, but I can't blame him. I'm hot like that.

Turns out that for legal reasons involving his line of work, he can never come back to the States, though, so I guess I won't be seeing any more of him. Unless I want to fly to London and be his mistress. Actually, I'd adore being a highly paid courtesan to wealthy globe-trotters, but I'm very attached to my boyfriend and value the regard of my family too highly. If only I were a friendless orphan, what a time I could have.

NB: Joe must have been to the club sometime recently and missed me. He left Memoirs of a Geisha at the front desk for me with his name and phone number inside the cover. I should probably call, but then again, do I need the headache of a customer whom I actually find attractive and charming? Answer: As long as he's paying, why the hell not.