party

Lately there's this crazy Algerian guy who comes into the club and wanders from table to table accosting people. He didn't strike me as crazy the first time I met him, because right after he says or does his outrageous bits he smiles like he knows what he's done is crazy. It's a sexy smile, the smile of a gambler in a smoky underworld bar in some noir movie set in Paris. He's bat-shit nutty, though. I finally twigged to that last night when he came up and started yelling at the group of guys clustered around the ATM in the VIP room trying to dick me out of money.

They were a bachelor party of over-priveleged young suits who'd rented out the entire Champagne Room and made Jagermeister flow like water. The head honcho of them attached himself to me while I was on a side stage doing a dispirited version of the macarena. It had been a crap night. In fact, I was only on stage because it was the DJ's final condition before he let me go home. Then suddenly there's this blank-faced little pink piggy in an expensive-casual shirt standing by the stage with fistfuls of money. I bent over and upulled out the side of my thong. "I love you," he said.

He sat there by the stage until the song ended and I climbed down, and then he took my hand and trotted me back to the furthest couch in Champ Room. "I want to bail on this whole scene," he said and buried his face in my shoulder. "I want to sit with you forever." I quoted him my hourly fee and we agreed that $500 would cover the rest of the night. We did shots of Goldschlager and he touched my legs and told me all the travails of his life as a sales representative for a manufacturer of very expensive golf clubs. He told me he used to like to party, but now he was too old. He was 25.

"Let's party," he said. "Let's just have crazy party back here."

Sure, honey. Sure.

Meanwhile the debauchery went on around us and some of his friends were trying to get Lori, the pretty waitress with the glasses, to go with them when they leave the bar. They offered her $250. For what, she wanted to know. To party, they said. Winkity-wink. No way, said Lori -- if she was going to get paid for sex she's was going to get way more than that. Like a million at least. "No way," said her chief propositant. "For a million I could fuck Shaq."

"So fuck Shaq," she said, turning on her heel.

All this was making the wheels spin in the head of my little compadre and pretty soon he was trying to talk me into coming back to the hotel with him. "There's got to be a price," he insisted. "I want you so bad and I have a lot of money. It's just a party, sweetheart. I love you."

It kills me that guys drop the L-word like it's a magic panty-dropping spell. Maybe in the outside it is, which is sad. Out there somewhere is some over-bred little pink piggy of a girl dying for a boy like this to say that to her. Sooner or later he will find that girl and they will have a big, fluffy wedding with a designer cake and they will buy a condo in the West End of Dallas and in five years he will be back in this bar bullshitting some stripper with the same old words, and loving her for not believing him.

I told him I'd party with him for $10,000. Compared to Lori, I'm a bargain, but then again my skank ass is used goods. "Damn," he said. "That's too much." He then calculated out loud how much time we would spend fucking vs. the price tag, and what the per-minute cost would be and concluded that $500 for several hours' company was a bargain.

He actually said this, which stuck in my mind, because immediately thereafter he tried to dick me out of almost all of that. I once saw Jerry Seinfeld do a bit on the illogic of paying for dinner after you eat -- you're not hungry anymore and you're stuck with a bill that now seems enormous. It's true for strip-clubs, too. Nobody wants to pay when they're getting ready to leave.

Unfortunately my bar has no mechanism for getting money up-front, nor is there anyone other than the dancer who's job is to collect. So you always have to do this awkward dance of getting boyzo to the ATM and then, by God, you can only withdraw $100 at a time, and they stick you with a $7 withdrawal fee every time. Sometimes it seems it's set up to make the process of getting paid as unpleasant as possible.

Towards closing, my gentle companion's friends started rounding up to get back on their chartered bus. "Hold up," he told them. "I have to pay the dancer." He told them how much, and they all looked shocked and said there was no way he could possibly owe me that much. He was looking at me now and sidling towards the door. "You didn't even dance that much," he said. "How about $100? I don't want to make any trouble."

I told him I had no problem making trouble and it was time to go to the ATM. His friends came with us, protesting all the way. In addition to the stick-up fee, the ATM also takes upwards of a minute to mull over the withdrawals and spit out the money. When things are turning nasty, the minutes go by like years. He got to the fourth withdrawal and the machine wouldn't read his card anymore. This also sometimes happens. His friends were antsy -- "That's enough, man. You don't need to give this bitch anymore of your money."

He looks at me under his eyebrows. Standing up, I've got at least 8 inches on him height-wise. "You don't need any more of my money," he repeats.

"Don't make me get a bouncer."

This is the emptiest of threats. Assuming I could even wade through all the Saturday night madness to find the frail octogenarian who is the club's one and only bouncer, the most he will get back for me is $20. Most of which he will extract from me as a tip for his services. But my little buddy and his friends didn't know this, of course, and all of a sudden three of them were around me yelling and two more were leading him away by his hands and one was snatcing his card out of the machine and making a beeline for the door. I have to hand it to them -- it was a smoothly operated heist, which they probably didn't even think of as a heist. They were just extracting their buddy from the clutches of the succubus. The world of over-privileged white boys runs on this kind of fucked-up loyalty. If he had taken me back to his hotel room and accidentally killed me, these were they boys who would have helped him get rid of the body.

Then the Algerian was at my elbow, yelling with everybody else, only he was calling them names and demanding that they give me money. "You call her bitch?" he howled. "You, you, you are bitch!" He likes me, you see. Only his attack startled me into silence and the boys scattered in the confusion like pigeons, so really he was worse than no help at all. "Niggers!" he screamed after them. "Pig-niggers! Jews! Faggots!"

"I hate them for you," he said. "Here, take all my money. Take what's in my pocket."

What's in his pocket was $42. He went and got another $100 out of the ATM and made me swear not to tell anyone he was rich. Then he handed me a piece of paper with a phone number on it and asked me to call his daughter and say that her father never wanted to speak with her again.

I could really use a break from this. I'm leaving town Tuesday for Colorado, where I'll be camping in the mountains with my lover and a truckload of psychedelic drugs. When I come back, I might not be a dancer anymore. With any luck I might be something completely different, like a mushroom or a squirrel.

favorites

Speaking of regulars, Joe made his presence known the other day. He wants to know if I'm going to blog this. You're damn straight I am, buddy. It's too good a story not to blog. Besides, you love seeing your name in print.

You remember Joel, right? My dream-turned-nightmare of a regular from last fall? The one who discovered and now reads this blog despite repeated promises to stop?

Joe told me months ago that he wouldn't be coming to see me anymore, and then he e-mailed me last week and said he was coming. You can't beleive anything this guy says, seriously. I asked him not to come, but you can tell he gives a fuck what I think and say.

I was annoyed in no small measure when I walked past the front bar and saw Joe sitting there, so I gave him a titty-twister and called him an asshole. But I was wearing my Saturday-night wig and he had no idea who I was. Or said he didn't. This is the guy who claims I haunt his dreams, but apparently always with the same hairstyle. We were all the way back in the Champagne Room before he figured out who I was, identifying me by my disfiguring abdominal scar. Tah-duh. Dramatic denouement. Then he had the nerve to ask me what I'm doing here.

I work here, pal.

Joe, I have to suspect that you've been finding my blog boring lately and thought you would lend me some dramatic tension. Don't think I'm not grateful. Seeing you again wasn't nearly as unpleasant as I figured it would be. I guess my mechanisms of disassociation of stronger now.

The Satanist stopped in the other night, too. Hadn't seen him in months. I had heard from his room-mate, my co-worker Slayde, that he had a new girlfriend, and he confirmed it. I've actually met her. He brought her to the club last fall when he was my regular and she was just a "friend." He says he's crazy about her and the sex is amazing, but he's sad, cause she won't make babies with him and wants to keep their relationship open. This is so much the opposite of all the other "my lady doesn't understand me" stories I hear on a nightly basis that I had to giggle. He thought maybe he could handle the "open relationship" deal better if he had somebody to fuck on the side as well, hint-hint. I thought he should he buy some dances and give me a large amount of money. We parted on good terms.

While we're on the topic of long-time regulars, Mr. B has jumped ship once again. We went through the regular cycle -- we had a good time for a while, and then he asked me out, and then I said no, and then he said that was fine, and then he didn't answer my e-mails for a few weeks, and then he called it all off. I was prepared for it this time, though. This is just the way it goes.

It was nice to see the old favorites again. Except for Joel. OK, Joel, you too. After a while it's like you're catching up with old friends, except that you don't have any clothes on and your friends resent you for not fucking them.

I've gotten less sensitive over the last few months, I guess. This is the first club where I've ever had what you'd call "regulars"...if you don't count Terry the World's Oldest Paperboy from my days at the Crazy Lady. It's a weird game, and at first I got my feelings hurt a lot. I didn't understand why people who were so keen on telling me how much they "cared" about me would go out of their way to pressure and disrespect me. Then I realized that men are cads, and life was easier.

Kidding. Kind of.

repeat business

Slow times. Without my regular customers I'd be lapping gruel in the poor house about now. Ah, regulars. My friend Scarlett used to call me spoiled. "It's easy money for you," she said. "The money's there waiting for you and all you have to do is show up and collect it." If only.

Not to say that I'm unappreciative. But the money isn't easy just because it's guaranteed. My favorite customer, bar none, is the anonymous out-of-town business guy for whom an evening spent with me on a couch in the Champ Room beats sitting in a hotel room watching Skinemax or drinking alone in the bar. We can get drunk and say all sorts of dumb shit to each other, exchange e-mails out of courtesy, and never think about each other again. It's easy to be the perfect woman if you only have to do it for an hour or two.

A step down in ease and convenience are the repeat out-of-towners like Sam, who works for some sort of mining consortium out west and comes to town once in a blue moon for reasons I've never bothered to understand, and drops a line to let me know he's in the neighborhood. We spend a lovely evening drinking and flirting and then he asks me back his hotel and I say no, and we wish each other happy trails.

Then there's the motley assortment of club regulars who pay no fealty to me in particular, but are more than happy to get a dance or ten from me if I happen to be around. They run the gamut from tolerable to highly tolerable. (I don't bother making regulars out of the customers I can't tolerate -- it wouldn't be a fun experience for anyone.) Mostly, they are geeks. RenFair/SCA/Ampgard, WoW-playing, Linux-programming, SciFi Channel watching flaming geeks. The affection is mutual.

Then there are the pseudo-boyfriend regulars, the ones who come in often enough and spend enough money and buy presents and remember birthdays, so that I end up with the distinct feeling that what they're purchasing from me is not a dance, or many dances, or even an evening of pleasant company, but an entire relationship.

And of course it is a relationship -- a professional one. I get quite fond of my regulars, the way you'd get fond of any valued client. I get to know them very well. Better than most of the women they date, probably, better than some of their friends. I care about them and want the best for them. Most of all, I want their time with me to be useful; I want them to get whatever sort of benefit an hour or two with a naked woman can give them. Still, I'm not a girlfriend to them. I'm not really even a friend. Some of them know that. Some of them get confused.

Soomer or later most of them get confused, actually. It gets ambigious in their minds who feels what about whom and why I'm taking my clothes off and why they're giving me money. The lines between fantasy and reality get blurred and this is the point where they want to take me to dinner. When I can't and won't go, they are sad.

I used to feel all torn up when they got sad. Still, if this job has taught me anything, it's that I can't take on the burden of other people's emotions. People have the kind of experience they want to have. If you want to have a good time, I'll help you have it. If you want to have a bad time, that's your perogative; I'll do times tables in my head until you stop talking about how you can't live without me and I've ruined your life. It used to hurt, but my mechanism of disassociation are stronger now, which is to say, my heart is harder. I think it's better for everyone that way.

So it isn't easy money, this regular business. But school's out and it's family vacation time and the out-of-town business travelers are few and far between, so thank God for the regulars. Thank you for your continued patronage. Thank you for liking whatever it is that you like about me enough to buy me drinks and spot me smokes and pay me money to sit around in my underwear discussing the rival advantages of zombies vs. vampires. Thanks for understanding the realities of our relationship. I love walking into the bar and seeing your friendly face and knowing that I'm going to have a good night. Peace.

(And then, of course, there's Joe. That's another story.)

music for airports

I flew back yesterday, after an extended visit with my brother and his wife and their 9-week-old infant in the stale midwestern city where they make their home. My sister-in-law is a medical resident who works 14-hours shifts and my brother spends all day at the gun range practicing for the coming apocolypse. Besides which he is a disordered personality who probably shouldn't be entrusted with the care of a child. Enter Auntie Grace.

It was about time for me to get out of town anyway. My last shift at the club was a silent meltdown that ended with me on stage grinning-mad with hate, wishing I could rip my skin off and throw it. The DJ hugged me when he let me go early, and tried to give me back the $5 I was tipping him. I'd done one lapdance all night and made $11 on stage. Burnout. Burn. Out. So, time for a break.

My niece is a melancholy baby; she only smiles when she farts. I invented little tricks to hush her when she cried. Letting my hair down and shaking it around her face. Balancing her on my shins and bouncing her up and down as I did Pilates-inspired leg-lifts to the tune of "Folsom Prison Blues." She had a strange, sweet scent, surprisingly strong. It soaked into everything I wore until I smelled like her, even at the airport, pre-dawn, after my brother dropped me off without a word or a hug.

The faces of men in the airport give me strange stirrings. Especially while I shuffle through Business Class on my way to the peasant's seats in the rear. These guys are flying out on business, or flying home. They will be in the titty bars tonight, or they were there last night. I can't help sizing them up as potential customers: the time-wasters, the ass-slappers, the ones who give you their hotel keys, the sad drunks, the angry drunks, the bitter drunks, the ones who tell you how much they love their wives.

I wasn't liking men much by the time I left town. My drains were clogged with tiny insults and little unpleasantries. The guys who try to touch my pussy don't bother me nearly as much as the ones who ones who waste my time. My last night at the club I had two fabulous time-wasters. The kind who flag you down and tell you that you're beautiful. They beg you to sit on their laps. They want you to dance, but oh, not just yet, just sit a minute. Their eyes get furtive and you have a sinking suspicison what's coming next, but the club is so slow, you stick with it a little bit longer, and they swear they will buy dances from you, that they just can't wait to see you dance. And then they have to go and make a phone call. That's the last you see of them, of course. I can't help feeling like it's personal. Like they must have set out to ruin my night on purpose. I don't like it when people fuck with me on purpose. The rage I feel reminds me that the gun-toting, blood-loving sociopath at whose house I stayed at all last week is really my brother after all. Half of that gun-toting, blood-loving DNA is mine.

I look at men's faces in the security line, and at the gate, and in the plane, and I don't see anything I like or want to know about. I lift my arm to put my bag in the overhead and smell my niece's baby-smell on my sleeve. When I left I told myself, based on no evidence, that when I got back I would be ready to dance again. It's a magic that has worked before. I don't feel ready, but that's why it's magic.

catfights

March was not a good month, and the end of any month is never good. Last week was bleak. Mr. B's unlooked-for return has partially insulated me from the downturn, but back in the dressing room I can tell the lean times are upon us once again. I need to be careful.

Saturday was Mr. B's birthday, and he spent the evening with me. I was at the club a good three hours before he arrived, though, and in that whole time I did once dance. One. Now, once he got there, it was a party. I brought him a slice of sugar-free cake, bought him a few dances from one of his other favorites, and let him keep my panties as a memento.

At the end of the night I was back at my locker counting hundred dollar bills. There were a lot of them. Lily, who attacked me on stage several months ago and then decided she was my friend, peeked over my shoulder.

"How'd you do tonight?" she wanted to know.

Pretty good, I told her.

"Did you break $300?" she wants to know.

I nodded and smiled, because I was happy. Then I wanted to kick myself. You don't ever want to tell someone what you made. Especially if you had a good night and they didn't.

Too late. Her face flickered and changed.

"I got lucky," I say. "It was my customer's birthday. He's a great guy."

I was making things worse, not better, so I shut up.

"Ohhh, that's great," Lily said. She left and I knew I'd have to get one of my customer to tip her stage or buy a dance from her in the next few days, or some other bullshit political move. I don't need enemies.

Sunday night there was a fight in the locker room right before night-shift started. Some girl talked to some other girl's customer, and the second girl jumped the first one out on the floor in front of God and everybody. One of them got fired; I don't remember which.

By the end of the night, a little gaggle of girls has collected in the dressing room a few lockers down from mine. "I hate nasty bitches," says the girl at the center of the knot. "I can't believe that nasty bitch told a manager on me and I didn't do nothing. I didn't even take my shorts off tonight. I ain't taking my shorts off on $10 dance night. Fuck those nasty bitches that do that, anyway."

The other girls cluck and agree for a while. Then Marisa comes barreling past me. She's the thickest dancer on night-shift, easily -- not fat, but built like a tank. Caramel skin and caramel hair in a braid as thick as a rope. She bears down on the group's skinny ringleader at ramming speed. "CALL ME A BITCH YOU FUCK YOU BITCH," she's screaming.

The skinny girl lashes back. "How can you tell the manager on me?" she wants to know. "Bitch, you're fucked up. I didn't even take my shorts off."

"I fucking see you, girl," Marisa says. "You put your pussy in some guy's face for $10? You're nasty."

"You're nasty," shrieks Skinny. "And you're fucking FAT."

On cue, the door blows open again, and two floor managers and the DJ storm in like a Secret Service detail just as Marisa closes the gap between her and Skinny. What's going on, they want to know and Skinny goes into her spiel about her shorts again.

The Sunday-night DJ hangs back by my locker. He is a skinny, bespectacled fop who couldn't be less happy than being called on to break up a fight over panties. He'd only get rolled if he tried to break Marisa's fury, anyway. "It's $10 dance night," he murmurs. "If you don't want to take your pants off for $10, you just don't come to work."

The conflict at the other end of the lockers subsides, though it will never be resolved. I put my second shoe on, grab my purse and prepare to jet. On the way to the door, I have to squeeze past a thin blonde who appears either passed out or exhausted in her chair in front of the make-up counter. Skinny steams up behind me and gives the girl's chair a kick. "Move it, fat-ass," she says.

The girl looks up, bleary and scared. "What?"

I keep going. I gotta get the fuck out. It was a bad night for me, too, until I met a westernized Pakistani guy who liked having his arms pinned over his head while I danced. Even then, it wasn't great. It was the end of the month. It's like that.

better living once more

My regular -- the one who used to sweep my off the VIP for hours at a time and pay the equivalent of my rent in a single evening -- has returned. I haven't seen him since January, when he e-mailed me to say that he was dating a lady and wouldn't be seeing me for a while. On Wednesday he e-mailed again: the lady in question had called things off, and would I be available some time in the near future?

I experienced a mild cringe. I mean, the misfortune of others being my fortune once again, and whatnot. Then again, how many women could you call you up after a dead silence of several weeks who would be not only delighted to hear from you but more than willing to get naked at the drop of a hat, no questions asked? The stripper/customer relationship is a beautiful one when everybody trusts the rules.

I exerted myself to give him the time of his life. For what he's paying me, I provide the full treatment: anticipation-stoking e-mail throughout the week, favorite outfit (he likes me in dresses as opposed to more "stripper" stuff), hours of scintilating conversation on a variety of light-hearted topics, and some very, very sexy dancing. It was a lovely evening. I'd forgotten how much I like the guy.

He does show some propensity to become dangerously attached to me, but for right now I'm not too worried. I think he more or less understands the parameters of the situation. I also take some reassurance from the fact that he comes to see another dancer at the club -- the Satanist's room-mate, Slayde. Somehow I figure him having another favorite stripper should insulate his feelings for me from being too serious. I also like the fact that he's still actively pursuing real-life romantic interests via flirting with girls on Match.com. This seems healthy, and I'm all for it, although sooner or later it will presumably take him out of my orbit once more. As much as I'd like him to keep coming to the club and giving me crazy sums of money a few times a week for the rest of my dancing career, I'd feel some guilt if things really did work out that way. He's a sweet, sweet man and some girl should scoop him up and make him her goofy, World-of-Warcraft-playing own.

But for now, he's mine, and that's probably OK for all parties involved. After all, outside the club he's a socially inhibited, recently-dumped guy. Inside the club, he's a socially inhibited, recently dumped guy with naked girl straddling his thighs. The difference is simple, but -- don't you agree? -- profound.

infinity's rash

The Wackos were in to see me the week before last -- Mr. and Mrs. Wacko. I'm crazy about them. An eccentric and well-shod couple whom I met for the first time on Valentine's Day. (Yeah, I was working on V-Day; spare me your pity.)They've been in a few times since -- actually, Mrs. said the other night that she's been in on her own to see me a time or two, but missed me. She's the weirder of the two for sure. Mr. is just a nice guy from Wisconsin with a few kinks in his attic. Mrs., for all her sweetness, seems like the single-white-female type who might decide she loves me too much to let me go and cut my head off and keep in in the freezer. They've invited me back to their house to hot-tub with them, and, uh, no.

But in the club, they're a treat. We convene in a corner of the couch-dance area and drink and dance and talk about sex for hours on end. The other night Mrs. comes up and announces their presence while I'm on stage, and by the time I get over there, they've got another dancer with them, sweet little Infinity who looks like a 13-year-old fashion model and can barely string words together. I don't know her well, but she's the kind of person you worry about. And tonight she is dead set on the subject of how much her skin itches.

"It's sooooooo iiiiiitchieeeeeee," she says, clawing frantically at her shoulder-blades with acrylic nails in her perch on Mrs.' lap. "I can't live like this no more. I can't think about nothing else."

"What do you think it could be, sweetie?" says Mrs. "Is your skin dry?"

"Nah," says Infinity. "I think it's from my man's dog? He was at my apartment and his dog was all like sick? I could see it's ribs like this--" she arches her back and indeed her ribs do stick out like xylophone. "And he was putting the dog in the bath-tub and I made him take it out so I could take a bath."

"Aww," Mrs. says absently. She continues softly petting Infinity between the shoulder-blades, which is more than I would do.

"Yeah, my boyfriend, he's real filthy. He brings home these other girls, like hookers, and I know he has them in my bed."

"Aww," say Mr. and Mrs. again. But I have to wonder if they are even hearing this, because they look so calm. And I for one, and squirming. I am sitting on Mr.'s knee, acutely aware of the fact that Infinity was sitting there a second ago and that potentially her boyfriend and his dying dog and the prostitutes he fucks in her bed are about to become my problem.

"So you think you can help me," Infinity asks Mrs. Her eyes are, seriously, huge. Too big for that pretty little face.

"Well, sure," says Mrs. all motherly and sweet. "I'll give you my number. You just give me a call tomorrow and I can recommend you a great dermotologist. I used to have dry skin, too. Aren't you just the cutest little thing, though? You know what I'd love to see is you and Gracie together. Gracie, don't you want to dance with Infinity?"

Um. Only if I can personally scrub her down with rubbing alchohol first, bless her heart. "I think I have to go on stage," I say.

"Yout just got off the stage," says Mrs.

Fuck. OK. Infinity flakes back on Mrs. in the posture of the Pieta, and I shimmy around in front of them. Infinity reaches out her long, skinny, soft arms and pulls me closer. Her skin doesn't feel dry; it feels clammy. After the dance, I go back in the dressing room and borrow baby-wipes to scrub myself down.

I wake up the next morning with my skin roiled and swollen from wrist to neck. I wake C. up to tell him I've brought home the pox. He patches me together and takes me to Pro-Med where the doctor tells me I've got contact dermatitis, probably poison ivy. I beg him to check again, but he just writes me a prescription for a two-week course of Cortisol, and, as it turns out, this has done the trick. So maybe it was poison ivy after all.

I didn't see Infinity again at work until last night. I asked her how her skin was going.

"Itchy," she says. "So itchy."

"Is it poison ivy?" I suggest. "That's what I had. It makes little blisters."

"No, I don't got blisters," she says. "I'm just itchy. Look." She turns around and the skin between her shoulderblades is flaking off like scales.

"You should go to a doctor," I say.

"Yeah, I just went." She points at a peach-colored band-aid just below her navel. "I ain't been to work for a while cause of my internals bleeding."

"What kind of bleeding?"

"My internals. They didn't tell me nothing about my skin, though."

"Are you OK, now?"

"Yeah," she says. "Sure."

Yeah. Sure. What can I say, I worry about people. Especially when they're strolling around my place of work, rubbing on the same people I rub on, with the bubonic plague.

tick tock you don't stop

The other night I'm in the dressing room at the far back make-up counter, pasting eyelashes to my face; the DJ announces the first night-shift dancer to the stage and this familiar groove comes over the loudspeaker and next thing I know me and Charlie and Leilani are bobbing heads -- I wanna sex you up --

Charlie giggles. "Girl, I ain't heard this shit since junior high."

"No way" I say.

"No shit," says Leilani.

To me, this song is an instant flash of the schoolbus home from sixth grade, that long drive through the flat farm country and all the bad kids in the back would sing along --

Cuz the first time i saw ya I wanted to kick it to ya
Your body is slammin, so honey can i do ya

-- and I couldn't beleive they were saying S-E-X on the radio and adults were letting us hear it. We pulled the bus windows down and the wind smelled like corn.

-- Cuz you and i both know tricks are for kids
So get the Don Perignon outta the fridge--

That summer at camp I would be obsessed with sneaking in the bathroom while the older girls were changing so I could look at their weirdly sprouting breasts. Like bananas, I thought, or some other wobbly fruit. I didn't have much for breasts yet and, as it turns out, never really would.

Hey, beautiful lady, I need you tonight
Lovely, lovely lady, I wanna make you feel all right, yeah--

Charlie does the little shoulder shimmy that all the girls did to this song back then, sexy little chicken-head weave, and the syncopated hands, and we all start doing it --

Say do you feel lonely girl
Let me turn down the lights so I can hold you in the darkness--

A row of younger strippers freeze with lip-glosses halfway to their mouths and giggle. "This song is old school," says the one with the black hair. When this song came out she was three.

Charlie and Leilani and I exchange looks. We are old school. Late twenties, all of us. Old strippers. Not as old as the girls I secretly call the pros -- the 35+ crowd who still rock the stage and hustle the floor as hard as steel, out-lasting the fuck-ups and the burnouts and the crazies and the junkies, going strong like finely-maintained German automobiles. Chanel, the Russian, who wears the same damn orange-and-white bikini every night and dances like a spastic and can have any man she wants. Josie, who has at least one teenage son and off whose body you could bounce a quarter at any point. Shawna with her thin-lipped friendliness and head-banger music and legions of adoring regulars. The women we will be someday if we stick this game out long enough --

All I wanna do is--

It's hard to be a young stripper. Customers tell you that they love you. They dick you out of money. They insult your body. And while you know you shouldn't take it to heart, you take it to heart. The slings and arrows of all that caddishness pierce right through your baby-soft skin. Maybe it's just hard being young.

The pros, they keep moving no matter what. No crying in the dressing room for them. No night-long arguments with ex-boyfriend on borrowed cell phones, crouched down in the last stall of toilets. They are solid.

Charlie does her little bob and weave again. She looks happy, like somebody you could never fuck with. I hope I look the same.

Make sweet lovin' all night long
Feels so right it can't be wrong
Don't be shy girl come to me
Open up your heart and I'll set you free
I want to touch you all the right places, baby
I want to make love to you
All night...

babydolls

There's two of them: Mimi and Mercedes. Two blonde babydoll strippers in frilly pink-and-white, pigtailed and beribboned within in an inch of their lives.

"All the guys who like me are perverts," Mimi told me cheerfully one night. "Dirty old fuckers like the little-girl thing. That's the only way I make my money."

Mimi is my age, or maybe a year or two younger. Tall and slim and graceful, with narrow hips and big fake tits. Nice ones, though. She wears her floppy blond pigtails way up high, right out on either side of her head in the style made popular by five-year-olds and Asian teenagers. Most nights she wears white booty shorts under her little pink dresses; when she strips down to them on stage they look for all the world like a pair of diapers. I can't really bring myself to look at her. But I saw her sitting at the bar the other night after work in her street clothes with her hair in a ponytail and she's really very pretty.

Mercedes I'd say is pushing forty, but she could be a hard-living thirty-two. She is pale as milk and the skin around her eyes is going to crepe. Still hot, but fading. She's not tall and her hips are spreading. Also, implants start to look weird as the skin around them softens with age.

Last night Mercedes and I sat at the same make-up counter at the beginning of the shift, getting dressed. I watched her curl her hair into tight ringlets and draw black circles around her eyes.

"I'm sad today," she told the waitress sitting on the other end of the counter, rolling silverware into napkins, and then she asked her to get her a Crown and Diet Coke from the bar.

The waitress, Amy, got up reluctantly. "You know Crown's not on the happy hour price, right?"

Mercedes grimaced. "I get four-dollar drinks. All my drinks are four dollars. You tell the bartender it's for Mercedes. Do I have to come out there myself?"

Amy left, and Mercedes snorted. She looked back at herself in the mirror, half her hair curled up tight, the other half limp as string. "She thinks I'm going out to the bar myself she can fuck herself," Mercedes said. "Takes me an hour to get my hair like this."

She pouted at herself, leaned her cheek into her hand. "I'm sad today," she said to nobody. "Today is a sad day."

I saw Mercedes again at the end of the night, after close. Her locker is near mine, one of the full-length lockers that mysteriously denote status. She's been at the club along time. She was changing into her street clothes -- jeans a T-shirt that said "Dior Addict."

"How'd you do tonight," she asked as I squeezed past her. Her voice wobbled up and down by full octaves, and the words came out in a sing-song snarl that might or might not be intentional. I said I did OK.

"Well, thaaat's niiiice," she said, same voice. I couldn't read her, didn't try.

She struggled to get out of her pink patent-leather heels without bending down. Her balance looked pretty shaky. She kicked one shoe off so hard it flew over and banged the locker next to mine. "Whoops," she said, unconvincingly. "Did you see that?"

The other shoe wouldn't come off, so she bent over further, and then she did fall. Collapsing onto her bottom, she sat there with the stuff spilling out of her locker around her like a frilly, pink-and-white tide. She looked lost.

The door to the dressing room swung open and Mimi wobbled by with a clutch of other girls who'd out on the floor dancing to the bitter end. Mimi was drunk -- shrieking and giggling and clutching fistfulls of money.

"I fucking hate everything," Mercedes said after they passed. She looked up at me pleadingly, and now I can't pretend I haven't seen her. "I hate this place and I hate all these fucking pervert men." She picked her other shoe up and chunked it at the wall, but it was a half-hearted effort and falls short.

"I'm not a bitch," she said. "I'm not a mean girl. Everybody thinks I'm a mean girl. I'm not. I'm a nice girl."

And you know, at that exact moment she really did look like a little girl. Just like a little old baby girl.

pay for play

My friend the Whoremonger was in town last week, which made things lively. He swings through town about once a month on some sort of business-related thingumy. The rest of the time he lives in some godforsaken, hardscrabble dry county of Arkansas. When he gets to town, he lives it up: whiskey, whores, and yours truly.

His favorite hooker is a young black or Hispanic girl. He doesn't like white girls, he says, and 21 is too old. Still, somehow he's taken a shine to my pasty white, past-date ass. Mostly, we just sit back in the VIP and drink Dewars while he regales me with his latest exploits. I do dance for him, once in a while; he is surprisingly gentle. Mostly we just talk, though. I egg him on, prod him for details. I'm not faking it, either; I've never met anyone else who was so openly, passionately into prostitutues. He knows a lot about it, too -- watches the message boards, follows the careers of all the top girls like some men follow professional athletes.

This time in town, he is full of the details of his last day or two in Dallas, where, if I can beleive him, he fucked three different prostitutes and, later that day, two strippers in the VIP room at a well-known Dallas strip club. "It was so hot doing it in the club," he says. "They said they were sisters."

I gently walk him through the story, drawing out the details of his favorite parts, and he gets excited like he's living through it all again. I sympathize. If he's like me, then doing things isn't nearly as exciting as thing talking about them afterwards.

Finally, though, I have to ask -- is he disappointed that I've never fucked him in VIP?

No, no, he protests. He looks almost hurt. "I know you don't like to play," he says. "It doesn't matter. If you ever do, though, you should let me know."

I try to imagine fucking this man with his twitchy mustache and retired-military bearing and skin like a boiled tomato, and can't. I wonder if getting paid for it would make it better or worse.

Out of curiosity, I ask him what the going rate is in this town. Not much, he says -- "I can get laid around here for a buck and a quarter." According to him, the most beautiful and highly sought-after escort in the city has recently raised her rates to $300 an hour.

That's not quite half what he pays me to sit and listen to him talk about fucking her. Of course, she's done in an hour. It took me all night to make that money. Then again, what else was I doing with my time?

If there's a discrepancy here, I'm not quite dumb enough to point it out, but he's no fool. "Hookers are cheap," he says, unprompted. "It's strippers that cost you."

"Is it worth it, though?"

"Oh, yes." He kisses me sedately on the forehead. "Oh, yes. I always have fun with you."

cough

For going on six weeks now this case of sniffles has dragged on -- bouts of what seem to be juniper allergies giving way to throat infections giving way to lingering coughs. Nobody wants a dance from the stripper with the lung cough. And then the whole thing starts over again. My lungs, full of puss, sit heavy on my heart.

However, there is a bright spot, to wit, I can't smoke at work anymore, because it gives me a tubercular death rattle that is pretty terrible for business. Oh, and also because apparently it's bad for my health. Who knew?

Fact is, I only smoke when I'm working. I haven't had a smoke outside of a strip club in years, but something about walking in the door at work makes me want a cigarette so bad I could cry. Sometimes I'll refuse to stop and buy a pack on the way work. Come one, I tell myself, this is silly. You know better. You're a yoga teacher, for crying out loud. Then I get to the club and within ten minutes I am so frantic I'll pay the club's insanely inflated $8 for a lousy pack of Camel's because I can't even get my make-up on straight until I've had a mouthful of ash.

It's worse when it's slow. When I've asked every trick in the place if they wouldn't like little ole me to keep them company a spell and they've all looked at me like I have two heads and there's basically nothing to do but go back the dressing room and re-apply lip gloss for the fifth time and limp out and sit at the bar with my favorite bartender and talk about sex and smoke-ity smoke-smokesmoke. Makes me look busy, right? Makes me look cool, no?

So Sunday night was my first night back at work since the last bout of tonsilitis, and my first night without a cigarette in who-knows-how-long. I did it, though. Huzzah for me. It was surprisingly easy, but probably only because none of my customers that night happened to be smokers. That'll be the real test.

I don't mind canning the smokes if I'm sitting with a non-smoker, but if the customer is lighting up, I want one too. Especially if he's not a big talker. Smoking takes the place of conversation. It's something companionable we can do together without actually having to interact. It gives the whole transaction a leisurely rhythm: we dance, we smoke, we ash, we dance again.

I'm a shy person, actually, and nervous, a bit of a fidgeter. Smoking gives me something to do with my hands. Otherwise I'll sit and do weird, distracting things, like play with my hair or, worse, knit my fingers and wring my hands together in unconscious displays of desperation.

I guess I smoke at work these days for the same reasons I started smoked in high school and college -- to have something to do with my hands, to look busy, not lonely. But I'm a big girl now, in most other facets of my life, not so concerned with the things people who don't know might think about the way I look. Thing is, of course, being a stripper is all about being concerned with what people who don't know you think about the way you look. Nothing like being naked and for sale to bring the good old insecurities all back up again.

totally excited about something completely different

My new project is launched! Well, kinda: people have promised to help me find other people who might consider helping me which is good, because this one is going to take a lot of people, and time, and money. I'm making phone calls. I'm making dates. I'm making nice. Life feels real again.

Thank god. Lately stripping has felt less and less like a giddy adventure and and more more like a -- what's the word? -- job. I suck at jobs.

Putting my babykins through art school has lent the whole naked-dancing enterprise a sense of gravitas and purpose for the last six months or so, but I'm basically too selfish for that alone to satisfy me long.

The money is good, but money doesn't motivate me in any reliable way. As long as I can pay the rent on my crumbling mansion and splurge on organic groceries, I'm pretty much good in the money department. If all I'm going to do is have a job -- go to work and come home and hang out on the couch doing Sudoku and watching Sister Wendy's Story of Painting -- then I might as well hang up my heels and get some grunt-level job in public relations or marketing or whatever it is exactly for which my education befits me, and get fat, and have babies, and die.

And that's why it's good to have projects. This one is a biggie. I've been mulling it for a year now and trying to figure out how to make it work, and now it feels like I've had my shoulder to an enormous mill-wheel and I'm finally beginning to hear it creak into motion. Once it gets going, it's going to take all my money and all my time and I'm going to be up nights gnashing my teeth because it's going to seem like it will never work, and I'll lose weight and gain weight and drink too much coffee and go off my meds and fight with my boyfriend and stop leaving the house for weeks at a time and I CAN'T FUCKING WAIT!!!!!!!!

testimonial

I got an e-mail from Mr. B the other day, a sort of thank-you note. Since the beginning of his strip-club adventures in November, he informed me, he has lost thirty pounds and started dating a real-live human female. You will recall that this is the man who used to have panic attacks around women and hadn’t been laid in eight years.

“During the dark years, when I had limited to no social connections with humans, I gained about 100 pounds largely because I had substituted food pleasure for companionship pleasure,” he wrote. “Bringing me down was loneliness; bringing me back up were cheeseburgers and fries. When I discovered in late November that I was capable of social relationships with women, and that I enjoyed them, I was able to reverse that transference. The club provided me with a low-stress, rejection-free environment in which to make that discovery. And the sexy nakedness was what kept me coming back to work on it.”

I would be a real cunt if I found this anything less than charming – the happiest possible ending to the boy-meets-stripper story. Better living through strippers, indeed. Even my darling, wicked Joel has as of very recent date renounced my company forever, claiming a new and improved world-view.

And guys think it’s just a line when I tell them my ass is magical and will change them forever.

OK, I am a little bummed that nobody’s rosy new dawn includes good old me, but what can you do? I’m like a doctor. People come to see me when they’re sick. I get them at their nastiest and messiest and then they get their acts together and move on. Wishing for a customer to keep visiting me is wishing for them to be lonely and questing and chronically blue-balled forever. (Except for those rare few who are completely fulfilled by looking at me in my panties for an hour or two every once in a while, but Zen souls like these are few and far between. Oh, how I miss the Plumber.)

So fly away free, little birdies, etc. On the other hand, I hope all this spreading of love and peace is accruing for me karmically, because it is decidedly not accruing in my bank account, and I would really like to do some fun things like pay C’s next tuition installment and go back to school myself in the fall and buy a computer – this one’s fucked again – and fund my next project (it’s a big’un) and go to Sinai in April with Pam and Nafis.

Still, being a bodhisattva who induces enlightenment through her mere (naked, writhing) presence is it’s own reward, I guess.

Namaste.

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?