Sun in cancer, moon in scorpio

It's m'birthday! My mom sent me this card, with a note that said, "This looks like your smile."




I am 28. If I were a Vulcan, I would have to mate, but instead I will celebrate the growing influence of Saturn by distributing prizes. I was recently given the Arte Y Pico Blogging Award, which looks like this:




The significance of the award isn't clear to me, except that (a) it was very nice of fellow Austinite mapelba , a fine writer in her own right, to give me an award, and (b) I am now empowered to give awards to other people and how fun is that? So, without further ado:

River City Kitty. Duh. As far as I'm concerned, this is where stripper blogging started, and it's still the premier online repository of photographs of weird-ass signs in strip-club dressing rooms.

Hobostripper. Double duh -- an unbeatable one-two punch of down-to-earth sultriness and over-the-top stripping stories worthy of passing into the cannon of club legends, alongside Girl Who Went Into Labor Onstage and Customer Who Named Stripper As Life Insurance Beneficiary and Died. If I were a junior executive passing through the midwest on an expense account, this van-dwelling siren is the one I'd pay by the hour to pet my hair and make me feel like a human-being.

Star Light Ministries. Among strippers I know, the mere mention of a "Christian outreach organization targeting exotic dancers" is enough to make us shit and run. The last thing I want when I'm naked and tired is to be judged by a fully clothed person waving a heavy-looking book. Lia Scholl of Star Light Ministries is a whole different breed, however. Her ministry emphasizes understanding and acceptance of exotic dancers as they are, an approach that demands at least as much change and growth from missionaries as it does from the natives Her post on "How to Pray for Women Who Are Exotic Dancers" is how I'd like to be prayed for by anyone who is thataway inclined. In fact, if you want to celebrate my birthday with me, maybe you could make a donation here to support her outreach efforts.

Boomtown Boudoir. This sometime fellow stripper ostensibly writes semi-autobiographically about perfume. In actuality, her blog is about everything that smell invokes -- sensuality, nostalgia, and gut-level experience. Somehow her writing manages to be about what it is like to be a girl, or at least to be the certain kind of girl that she is. I can't get enough and only wish that she would write more often.

Lord of the Barnyard. This one epitomizes everything I've ever liked about well-educated farm boys. Factual and tender, he writes about weather in a way that expresses hope and frustration and relief and despair with elegant economy. I guess the farm blog is dead and he lives in town these days. Still one to watch.

So there you have it. I would like to give out more awards to the many awesome bloggers out there, but I am limited to five. Now, if someone else will hurry up and give me an award, the distribution of favors can continue. (My foot is tapping.)

how it ought to be

Mei the waitress has been at the club for 15 years. She is fifty, plain-faced and shrewd, with a me-love-you-long-time accent that 15 years in a titty bar have barely touched. She has a million regulars and probably makes as much money as anyone there. She is funny, too; her occasional dark asides can make me spit a drink, but it takes a long time for her to warm up to you. She sees so many dancers come and go.

One of my last nights waitressing, Mei and I are perched on an empty side stage looking over our shoulders at an empty club.

"Bad night tonight, baby," she says.

"Tell me about it."

"Even last year was not this bad. Last year, on a Thursday night we have customer at every table. Every table, baby."

"Things are tough all over, huh?"

"Bad time," she agrees. "We not going to make no money tonight. You should have keep dancing. Me, if i could dance right now, I do it."

She throws her hands in the air and does a little boob shimmy in my direction. I crack up.

She's not done with me, though. "Baby, why you stop dancing? You don't need money no more?"

"Something like that." I don't like this question. I don't like it from civilians, who like to assume that I've stopped dancing because I finally acknowledge that dancing was evil all along. I like it at work even less. But Mei is cool, so I clear my throat and give it a shot. "You know, my boyfriend's tuition is saved up, so I don't have that pressure anymore. I want to do other things. I guess I'm just done for a while, you know?"

Her eyes narrow. "You pay for boyfriend's school?"

Shit. "Um, yes."

She starts shaking her head, goes on shaking it. "Bad idea. Bad idea, baby. He get through school, he going to leave you. I know. I see it, so many times. Girl is helping man and man is just take, take, taking. Men don't care. They don't care about you."

"Well, uh, I've known C. for a while. We've been together for five years. I really trust him. He's a good guy."

She's still shaking her head. "Yeah, you say that. You think that now. Maybe you right. Maybe you will be lucky. Me, I have never been lucky, so now I don't trust no-one. I don't trust no man no more."

"Well, you can't be too be careful. But this guy is a good guy."

"OK," she says. "OK, you say so." She looks over the club and then back at me. "But you never know. It happen when you least expect it. He leave you, baby. I say this because I care. He leave you with nothing."

People say this kind of thing to me all the time. And other things. I've been told that I lack self-respect. People who don't know either of have called my boyfriend a pimp. I guess because I'm a girl and he's a boy, and probably because I'm a stripper.

I get it. I know where it's coming from. When you trade in affection as a commodity, your ideas shift. You see how money can tie a person to another person, how it creates complacency. You see how you can put a dollar value on every gesture, and how money can stand in for gratitude, for admiration, for approval, for joy, for love.

You can think that someone who isn't paying you doesn't really love you. You can think that giving something away means you must be one of those losers who has to pay for love.

I think this way only at my worst, my most frightened and desperate. And then I think: you don't deserve this. It will be taken from you. You are not loved. You never have been loved. Tricked again, stupid. He will use you up and leave you dry as a husk. He will leave you with nothing. He will leave you.

When I am well, medicated, rested, stable, I don't believe these things. I think: You love him. He loves you. You are lucky. You are a good judge of character. He will never let you down. He would rather die; you see it in the set of his shoulders, the set of his lips. You will never let him down, either. You would rather die, too. You will have a long and wonderful life together, with many adventures, and one of you will be next to the bed when the other one dies, telling them it's OK, go ahead, go, I'll catch up with you later.

This is not to say that we don't have our differences:

C. is optimistic to the point of insouciance. I am apprehensive to the point of madness. When I am in the grip of my worry and I look over and see him smiling, I think he doesn't care. I want to yell at him until he cares.

When I met him he lived in someone's basement and owned two pairs of jeans and several thousand dollars worth of musical equipment. He was the happiest person I had ever met. He has that rare quality -- yogis would call it santosha -- where whatever he has at the moment is always enough. He has never had a bank account.

I opened a bank account when I was eleven, after I made my first serious money selling my bottle-raised show-lamb to slaughter. I've always been a hustler. All the worry about having things, nice things, enough of things, those are all my worries. I am a predator. I love the chase. I love the kill. And I am afraid. I am so afraid of running out, so afraid of dying.

Be calm, C says. And I say, You don't care. You don't care about me. You don't care about anything.

We have argued and given up and tried again, and in the end we have compromised for each other like neither of us has ever compromised for anyone else.

But then the questions. I hear my own answers and I know how ignorant they sound-- I love him. He loves me -- like I don't even know that people who say "I love you" are fucking over the people they say it to left and right all over the world right now.

I know that. I do. It's just that I think I'm different. I am sheepish, but I can't budge. I wonder if other people are asked to explain their love as much as I am.

On a night like any other night, I am talking to a guy like every other guy. We are negotiating a business transaction.

"So," he says. "Married?"

"Silly. No one in here is married."

"Engaged?"

"Why, are you proposing?"

"You have a boyfriend though. Every girl in here has a boyfriend."

Shrug. "No one serious." I lie without a second thought. Not because I don't care about my boyfriend, lying in bed at home waiting to hear me pull into the driveway. Because I don't care about this guy. In fifteen minutes his face will be a blur. By the end of the night I won't remember his name.

"That's good," he says, approving of me. "I hate to think of all the girls here...supporting some man."

"Uh-huh."

"If you were mine, I'd take care of you. You'd never have to work in here again. You could just stay home and take care of me."

Oh. Joy.

"A woman ought to be at home," he says. "A woman ought to have a man to look after her. I think that's right. I think that's how it ought to be."

uncharted seas

C. doesn't bat an eyelash when I quit my third job in two months. I tell him, I tell myself, I'll find another job, pronto. Piece of cake. Nothing to worry about. And oddly, I don't worry.

Together, we went online and applied for a Pell Grant to pay the rest of his tuition, which would mean I could take the fat bankroll I've saved for that purpose and buy groceries. The application is so easy I'm shocked it took us this long. That was just two weeks ago and his college already contacted him and told him he should have money by the end of the month.

One morning I sit down and invent a resume that says I am bright shining star of the food service industry and the best damn waitress and/or cocktail server your upscale establishment could desire, and then I go downtown and paper all the nice restaurants and hotel bars. One bar manager tells me to come back after the 4th of July. Everyone else says they'll call me. I'm waiting.

Late one afternoon my phone rings with an out-of-town area code and I pick it up and the guy who introduced himself is the public face of the biggest and most elusive of the institutions whom I have contacted on behalf of Dayjob Project and importunately demanded money. I have been in and out of touch with this man for a year. He has requested documents. I have sent them. I have waited. I have called. I have talked to secretaries and interns. I have waited. I have called again. I have left messages. Now he is on the phone with me and he's using words like "awesome" and "perfect." He's telling me my project is great, and needs to be done, and he's saying "I think we have everything we need to move forward" and he's telling me about the Process. The Process is long, and involves a lot of other people doing things, while I just sit tight on my little ass and wait for a decision. This will take until, oh, say November.

At which time they might or might not send me what I've always wanted: a big bag of money.

A big bag of money means the project can go on. If there is no money, I do not know what I will do. I don't seem to be worried. The project will go on, or maybe it won't. But probably it will. It has momentum, now. A lot of people want to see it happen. I myself will go on, regardless. I always go on.

I find I'm not scared, not at all. This little boat is on the ocean now and the only thing to do is make for the far shore. There is no point in thinking about how deep the water is, or what might be down there. The water is deep and the monsters are down there whether you think about it or not.

I only worry because I am not alone. If it were just me I would have quit dancing a long time ago. I would sleep in someone's garage and live on tortillas like I did when I was twenty, and it would be OK. But C. didn't ask for anything of this, and he trusts me, and I don't want to let him down.

I tell him that we're going to be poor for a while. I tell him I'll do my best, but times are tight. Like he doesn't know already. He does the shopping; he knows the grocery budget is half what it was at the beginning of the year. But I want to know that he knows. I want him to tell me it's OK. I want that so much.

"So you get it, right?" I want to know. We are in the car on the way home from somewhere. C. is driving. I am talking. "You don't mind that we're going to be poor?"

We pull up at a red light, which is good because he can take his eyes off the road and look at me. "How poor?"

"Poor."

"Poor like 'I might have to drop out of school and sell a kidney so we can afford medicine' kind of poor?"

"Poor like 'we might have to eat a lot of beans' kind of poor."

The light turns green. He turns his eyes back to the road. Quietness. He smiles. He reaches over and gently squeezes my thigh.

"Baby, baby, baby," he says. "Baby, you know I love beans."

ask an angry man-hating burnout retired stripper

Dear Grace,

Are there many customers who don't seem creepy?

I've only been to a strip club once. There were some things I liked about the experience, I'd like to go again, but if I'm going to be perceived as creepy, or if the experience is negative for them- I don't want that.

Are there 'good' clients, and if so, what does it take to be one?

Mitch

Dear Mitch,

Excellent question. Yes, there are many, many pleasant, congenial, non-creepy strip-club customers. I could roughly break it down like this: 25% of guys were super-nice; 25% were various degrees of pain in the ass; 50% were pretty neutral. So, pretty much your normal bell curve.

How to be a good customer? I'm so glad you asked.

First of all, you should be prepared to have a good time. As an entertainer, my job is to facilitate that good time, but it helps if you give me something to work with. For one thing, if you do not feel like going to a strip club, please don't go. It is no fun as a dancer to run across someone who hates strip clubs, hates strippers, and is only there because he is afraid his friends will think he is a big old homo if he says no. You are not going to have fun. I am not going to have fun with you. You are going to open your big mouth and say something mean to me and I am going to give you a weird look and leave and you are going to be ever-more convinced that strippers are gold-digging harpies, while I am going to be ever more convinced that you are an asshole. So, just don't come.

If you DO want to go to a strip club, go ahead and go. Go ahead and check your judgements about sex and money and who is exploiting who at the door and just relax. It is OK to want to look at girls naked, and the girls at strip clubs are there for that exact purpose. If you were not there, they would be getting naked on stage for nothing. You are in one of the very few places in our culture where it is OK to start a conversation with a girl by telling her you love her ass. Enjoy!!

Secondly -- and this is very important -- you must choose your dancer well. Look for a Happy Dancer -- one who is standing up relatively straight, making eye contact, and smiling. This girl is having a good time, or is at least willing to evince good-will. Avoid Crazy Dancers, Sad Dancers, and Angry Dancers. They are not smiling, and often slouch. They will not make eye contact with you, or will lock eyes and refuse to let go. Basically, they will give you a weird feeling when you interact with them. When this happens, throw 'er back. (If you cannot tell a Happy Dancer from an Angry Dancer, you need practice. You should go to strip clubs more often.)

When you turn a girl loose, do it promptly, without wasting a lot of her time, because time is money to dancers. Do it politely, too, the way you would appreciate having it done to you. Tell her you are not interested in getting any dances at the moment, but you will let her know if you change your mind. Be courteous.

As long as you follow this formula of promptness plus tact, you are totally at liberty to refuse the advances of any dancer. However, you should be prepared to buy dances from a dancer who takes your fancy. It is NOT appreciated when customers claim to be in the club "just for a drink" or "just to watch the game." This is a lie, and we know it. Cover charge to the club is $10, and the drink prices are a gouge. You did not "just happen to stop in." You are here to peripherally ogle us while we work, and we hate you. You know it, and you don't care. You want to look at us naked anyway. There is nothing creepier than being ogled by someone who knows you hate it and does it anyway. If looks could kill, you are dead.

Also, do not come in with the plan of talking a dancer into going home with you so you can get her services for free. I can't say this will never work. I can only say that I have never, ever seen it work, and the shit talked about these guys amongst ourselves should make their ears burst into flames. Of course, you would never do this, but I state it for the record.

Now, assuming you have found a Happy Dancer whose looks and personality are to your liking, it is time to ask her if she would like to dance for you. Depending on the club you are at, there may be a variety of services for purchase, and a range of prices. Ask her to explain, if you are interested.

Different clubs have different rules, which may vary widely from the actual laws regulating clubs, and even from the rules at other clubs in the same city, let alone state to state. If you are unsure of the rules -- i.e. how much you get to touch her and where -- ask her. Different dancers also have different limits. Just because Chantal let you touch her wherever does not mean Crystal will be OK with it. When in doubt, err on the side of caution. You might not get to squeeze as much jellyroll this way, but you will not end up being the guy all the dancers talk about back in the dressing room for being such a gropy, annoying clueless butt-plug. Some guys don't care, but you do, or you wouldn't have asked the original question.

After the dance(s), thank her and pay her what you owe her, promptly. If you enjoy talking to a dancer and take up a lot of her time, consider tipping her. In most clubs it is not required, and a lot of guys don't do it. If you do, you will certainly set yourself apart. Should you return in the future, the dancers of your acquaintance will be more likely to remember you and make time for you.

In summation, the Golden Rule goes a long, long way in ensuring a happy strip-clubbing experience for everyone. Dancers are not really so different from other people. They are likely to be annoyed by things that most people would find annoying, like being condescended to, groped after repeated request to cease and desist, and cheated out of money. They are pleased by the things that please any vendor -- a simple, pleasant transaction and a fair price for services rendered.

So there you go. It is really pretty simple after all. Go forth and enjoy! We need more customers who WANT to be good customers, so get your asses in the seats.

Love, Grace


Grace,
What do you like to read?
Antonio

Dear Antonio,

It's hard for me to believe how little I read anymore. When I was a kid, I read all the time. All the time. I had this little set-up with the bath-caddy where I could read while I showered. These days I am lucky if I finish three or four complete books in a year. It is largely a factor of time. When I do have time to read, it tends to be non-fiction, and generally something practical. I like books about how to do things and make things. I also like books about the body and the brain.

One of my favorite books is "Listening to Prozac" about brain chemistry, depression, drugs, and the role of medication in the evolving definition of mental illness. The last novel I read was "Stardust." It's about faeries and stuff. Not necessarily my thing, but one of my customers gave it to me and I felt kinda obligated. I read it while I was in bed with a back injury in March. It was pleasant and escapist.

I'd like to think that at some point in my life I will have more time to read. If you think of a book or author I ought to know about, please suggest!

Love,
Grace


Dear Grace:
Quick question; When your satanist said

'"What are you doing?" he says. "Why do you do that? Why do you tell everybody what they want to hear? You're so transparent it's ridiculous."'

I felt really scared because I've heard a lot of people have that misconception about strippers, that everything they do it fake and that they are transparent. Have you found that happens a lot in your life?

Thanks!!
Lucky Luxie


Dear Luxie:
Most of the people in my life know me as myself, not as " a stripper." So honestly, I don't deal with that issue a lot, except at work.

When a lot of people around you think you are full of shit, you start to wonder yourself. This is why I always found it really important to keep pretty strong boundaries between my life at work and my personal life, and I would urge anyone starting out in dancing to do the same. It's important to have some relationships around you that are based entirely on mutual appreciation, and not at all on an exchange for goods for services.

To this end, I gave my customers an only-for-work e-mail address, never a phone number. I did not encourage them to contact me too much, and never met up with them outside of the club. I never encouraged people I knew from my civilian life to come to the club, and didn't share the fact that I was a dancer with many people, either.

Now, if the question is, "do guys at the club think I'm full of shit", the answer is, Sometimes. Some of them are really insistent about it, too, which is annoying. I mean, gold star for figuring out that I'm not really in love with you, buddy. Now do you want a dance or not?

On the other hand, some of them believe you for the moment, just like you go to a movie and enjoy the plot without worrying about whether or not it actually happened.

Still others really, really believe you, which is actually a lot more stressful.

The guy I call here the Satanist is an exceptional case, in that he is one (of two) customers with whom I ever made the transition from stripper/customer to sorta kinda friends.

Both transitions were weird and involved many leaps of faith and unwarranted extensions of trust.

What I'm saying is, it's not easy.

Does that answer your question at all?

XOXO,
Grace

boss man

I push through the swinging doors into the dressing room. I just want to sit down for a minute. It's a lousy night. There are twenty waitresses on the floor and probably about that many customers in the whole stupid club.

The club's response to an ever-weakening economy has been to jack up cover prices, which has run off a whole tier of customers. They've also hired more dancers, so that the house can collect more fees from them. I don't know why they've hired a bevy of new waitresses and scheduled twenty of them on a Tuesday night, but if I had to guess, they're trying to turn them into dancers. In a week, the youngest and prettiest of the new waitresses will complain to the managers that they aren't making money and the managers will say, "Why don't you dance for a night and see how you like it." The older, uglier waitresses will just drift away.

I always had a feeling if I knew too much about the runnings of this bar I'd hate it. When I was a dancer I came and went like a ninja. I made my money and got out, keeping interaction with management to the bare minimum possible. This is harder now that I'm waitress. Now that I have to sit in meeting with the managers for thirty minutes after the shift starts and thirty minutes after we close and wipe the tables down. Now that I have to ask the managers permission for everything I do, and report every dollar I make. Something in me that does not love a boss. No wonder I've been fired from half the straight jobs I've ever had.

I just want to sit down. Unfortunately, the waitresses' corner of the dressing room is occupied. The shift manager lounges in the ass-sweat-saturated wheelie chair, legs spread like a pasha. Waitresses perch around him, and one brand-new little blonde teenager crouches at his side with her head on his knee. He has one arm draped heavily over her neck, a lordling posing with his favorite hunting dog.

I get just a flash of this as I walk past, back into the dancers' space, where girls are re-curling their hair and bitching in familiar ways about familiar things. I want a cigarette. I even carry them on my tray, for customers to buy from me. But I don't smoke any more and I'm proud of myself.

I can't shake it. I can't shake my distaste for that frat boy gone to seed, with his white-blond hair spiked up and his pink-pink skin. His baby-faced smugness, eyes opaque as marbles. I can't shake my distaste for the whole stupid scene and I'm not sure why. I hope that little blonde girl has an epiphany some day soon and realizes that even if crawling on the floor for men's approval is her thing, she could be doing it for somebody a lot more worthwhile than the little oinker in the chair there. For fuck's sake.

Later in the night the same manager comes up behind me and raps my tray with his knuckles. "That's one," he says. As in, that's one strike.

"Huh?"

"Don't put your tray there."

My tray is sitting on a wide ledge that lines the ramp down to the main floor. It looks pretty safe there to me, especially since I am standing next to it with my hand on it.

"Really?"

"Yes, really. Because someone could come along and just do this."

He puts his hand on my tray and gives it a sharp shove. It flies. Matches and lighters and cigarettes and ballpoint pens scatter while cocktail napkins and credit card receipts drift down slower, like snow.

We look at each other. "Really?" I say, finally. "But, who would do a thing a like that?"

He doesn't say anything and he doesn't have to. He folds his arms. I stoop to pick up my stuff, and here I am, on my knees, at his feet. He wins. I lose. I've been out-pissed in this pissing contest.

I sort everything back onto my tray. I go back to the dressing room. The chair is empty. I take one of my rescued cigarettes and roll it lightly in my fingers, put it to my mouth and light it with a kiss. It tastes like, fuck you. And it tastes like, enough.

service

I never was a Superstripper. I never had the strategy. I just smiled a lot and hoped that would take me where the money was. It often did.

I have a big smile, open and full of teeth like happy dog. My eyes crinkle shut when I smile, too, which according to some eastern diagnostic traditions means I am destined for a happy life. Here's hoping.

I still smile a lot now that I am cocktailing at my old strip club. I think it's the only reason I make money, not that I'm making that much. Note to self: working for tips during a recession is shit.

I smile all huge at the guy I'm talking to now. "Can I get you something?"

He's all sprawled out in his chair and now his eyes roll up at me like bloodshot eggs. He probably doesn't need another drink. I ask again if I can bring him something. Water, perhaps?

"Just bring me your tits."

"Okey doke," I say. I turn and walk away.

Why are you waitressing? All the waitresss ask me this. Like there's going to be some big dramatic reason. I tell them I just needed a break, but they look at me like they don't get it, so after a while I start making up stupid reasons. I tell them I was tired of shaving my pussy. I tell them I developed an allergy to men's pants.

The dancers don't ask me why I'm waitressing, not the ones I've known for a while anyway. They know dancing can get old.

"I wish I could be a fucking waitress," Ronnie says. "I can't do it though. I'm a horrible waitress."

Ronnie's been here longer than most of us, and yet she never quite looks like a stripper. Her hair and make-up are haphazard, as though she's never quite got the hang of them. Clumsy in her shoes, she sidles crab-wise across the club, awkward and stoop-shouldered. Her pupils are no bigger than a pencil-tip and when she talks to you she stares right through you. Drugs, maybe. Or she's really crazy. I really don't know.

My regular, B., told me she once offered to give him a blow-job after the club closed. She wanted a couple hundred dollars and she gave him her phone number and promised the meet up with him. He says he didn't call her. I can't think of any reason he would make this up.

Everyone sort of knows that Ronnie is a whore, but everyone lets it go. In theory, strippers hate girls like this because they drive up customer expectations and undermine the market for the dancing-only kind of entertainment. But it's hard to hate Ronnie. She isn't hurting anyone.

"I tried to be a waitress," Ronnie tells me, staring right through me at a spot six feet behind my face. "I couldn't do it. It's hard."

"I hope I make it," I say. "I'm sick of dancing."

"Right on," says Ronnie, nodding. "Right on, right on."

And she squirrels away. I'll see her later at the end of the night in the dressing room, where her locker is two down from mine. I'm supposed to use the waitress lockers in the waitress part of the dressing room now, but I don't. Waitresses here are as cut-throat and mean as dancers are sweet and laid-back.

Or maybe it's just a sign of the times. No one's making money any more, and for some obscure reason the club keeps hiring more girls. More dancers, more waitresses. Flooding the floor with girls even as the pool of customers shrinks till we are like angry sea-birds around a vanishing tide-pool. I did OK tonight, but barely, and only because I smiled at the right people at the right time.

Ronnie is cursing next to me and I don't want to know why. "She's so fucking stupid," she says. "She thinks she's all that, but she's not. That's the funny thing. She is not. She is NOT."

She's slurring. She might be a little drunk, but then again she always slurs. It's hard to tell. Maybe she's always drunk.

"You OK, baby?" I say, only because I feel like I have to say something.

"She is a fucking god-damned piece-of-shit cunt whore is what she is,"Ronnie says. "And she thinks she's so hot. Fuck her! Fuck her, right?"

"OK, baby. It'll be OK."

Not because it will be. Just for something to say.

She slams her open palm into the closed door of the locker next to her. And then she does it again, and again, and again. "Fucking fuckingfuckingFUCK!"

I stuff my things in their bag. I pull the zipper shut. I take another look at her, but I can't think of anything I'm supposed to do. I'd rather just not be involved. I imagine a lot of people feel this way about Ronnie. I wonder if anyone loves her.

I back away, and really I don't turn my back on her until I am at the dressing room door and then I go out. The last thing I see is her pitched forward, with her face not quite pressed against the locker door, not quite crying.

hands

I think that's the Egyptian. I've seen him here twice, at my favorite downtown coffee place, the one I stop at on the way home from meetings with my Dayjob Project partner and her team. Meetings start early and run long. I'm tired by the end, every time, but excited. Things are going so, so well. On the bike ride home I stop for coffee to balance my thrill out with my exhaustion.

I've seen him here twice now. I think that's him. He's quite distinctive. Tall, with a ridiculous, matinee idol face. Dark eyes and Rudolph Valentino lips. So nicely dressed, too. Lovely shirts, expensive belts and shoes. We met at the old club, when I'd been dancing for a couple of months. He doesn't look any different out here in the light. I wonder if I do.

"You should be called Layla," he used to tell me, and his accent reminded me of heavy perfume. "Layla means night. Not just any night, but a night in the desert, under the sky. A beautiful night. A romantic night." He really talked like this.

His fingers were always digging into my crevices, trying to creep between my thighs, or my ass cheeks, or my armpits even. Like he was going to put his hand right into me, the way you thrust your hand up in the warm guts of a freshly-killed chicken and neatly twist them out. He didn't stop when I asked him to stop. He didn't even stop when I would grab his wrists and try to force his hands off of me. He was stronger than I was, much.

He would come in in the middle of the afternoon lull when there had been no customers in the doors for an hour or more, and it was sit with him and make money or sit by myself in the dressing room and go home broke. I sat with him every time. And I didn't scream. I didn't go and get the manager. I didn't do the things that I'd tell any other girl to someone else to do if they were me. I stayed and silently fought his hands, and then I took the money and went back to the dressing room and folded and straightened all the bills and put them in my locker. I took his money, and so, I am sometimes reminded by voices in my head and commenters here, I have no right to complain.

Who's complaining? I'm just remembering. I sit here at my table with my coffee and remember. I remember everything. I remember pulling at his fingers and saying please stop, and I remember the obnoxious strength of him and the hairs on his wrist like black wires. He was a big man, with big arms. It was one of the things you would find attractive about him, if you met him somewhere.

"Baby, you're beautiful," he would say. "Your face is a doll face." And he would brush his hand across my cheeks, finger-tips jabbing lightly at the openings of my ears and eyes. "I love you so much, you know that? Run away with me, darling." Then he would laugh fondly. He had a wife. He told me he had a wife. But there was...something. Some real or imaginary problem. I don't remember, if I ever really knew. Then he would dart for my crevices again.

I took the money. I sold my right to be shocked. Some people would say it wasn't worth it, but those people put a higher price on innocence than I do. I'm not sorry I know the things I know now. I'm not sorry I know that there are people out there who will touch you even if they know you don't want to be touched, and that some of those people are attractive, well-spoken, wealthy, and nicely dressed. I always had my suspicions that this was true.

I sold my right to be angry, too, and that's OK. What I feel now isn't anger, anyway, just a great and unbridgeable distance. Such distance that I don't care if he sees me or not, if that curl of lip is recognition of me in particular, or just of the woman-shaped thing I also am, with eyes and hair and a mouth.

I don't care.

I don't care. He is just a shape. There's nothing he could say or do to me now that would matter to me at all. He could stand in front of me and block my way and I would walk right through him, because he isn't really there.

the light in the afternoon

I am on the phone with Scarlett. It is 99 degrees outside and humid; clothes are impractical in this weather, so I am in my underwear in the middle of the afternoon, on my back, on the couch, on the phone, sweating.

I hate how dark this apartment is. There are no windows that face the sun, at any time of day. The light is always murky, and you don't know what time it is. Scarlett's voice sounds like it's coming to me from the moon, and my own voice sounds that way, too.

"I don't want to be touched anymore," I say.

This is not kind of me. Scarlett went to New York City and went straight, got a straight job and an apartment and some friends, and came back to visit this winter looking sleek and blooming. But things can go downhill fast in a city that big, and this week she started at dancing again, at a "private club" with beds in the VIP.

"I convince guys I'm going to fuck them for fifteen minutes for $160 and then I don't do it," is what she says.

Fifteen minutes is a long time to spend in a closed room with someone who thinks they just paid to fuck you. Everything about that sounds bad. Body-in-a-dumpster bad. I don't want to be that bitch who gets out of dancing for three weeks and comes back and tells all their friends they are Ruining Their Lives, but I am scared for my friend. I want to put a fence around her eight miles high.

I noticed the strain in her voice as soon as I picked up the phone. She launched right in, talking fast, spinning plans for the future, and I hear how she is pushing herself. I know my friend. I hear her brain scrambling in all directions, heart burning at a high heat.

I soothe her, like I know how to do, and when she simmers down a little she asks me what I'm doing, and I say I've left dancing, which is no surprise. I told her my reasons months ago. I try to be cautious about what I say, because there's too much tinder on the ground to go throwing out sparks. But like the good friend she is, she puts her finger right on the sorest spot and presses down.

"What does C. think?"

I tell her I don't know. I tell her he's playing along, but that I'm not sure he really understands, which might say more about me and my lack of faith than it says about him. He hasn't said a harsh word to me, or even rolled his eyes. He tries to live peacefully with me, the hurting monster lurking in the bedroom. He doesn't complain.

But I don't know if he understands. I don't know if anyone who hadn't spent too much time in titty bars could understand how you know that it's been too much time. I don't really understand it myself, not the exact mechanics of it. I don't know why a few months ago it was fine and now it's not, or why I can't conceive of getting my things together and driving to the club. The whole routine -- the coffee I buy at the drive-in on the way there, the parking lot I pull into just at dusk, the front desk where I pay my house fees, the dressing room where I apply my make-up ritually, every stroke, every day, the same -- seems foreign, like something I've heard about but never done myself.

I'm sure C. wishes I could suck it up and go back and make a thousand dollars in a weekend like I used to do. I am sure that he wishes this because I wish it myself. If there were just some actual reason why I couldn't do it anymore. Like, if my leg were broken. If I had a reason to give him, one that I'd know he could understand.

Scarlett understands.

"It's a tough job," she says. "You've done it for a long time. You got a lot of good things out of it. You're tired. It's OK."

She sounds pretty tired herself. I should stop, change the subject. We don't need to talk about how much stripping sucks right now, when she has to get off the phone and shower and shave her snatch and catch the subway to the private club with the VIP and it's waiting beds.

It feels so good, though, to know that someone understands, to be sure of it. And that's when I say it, about not wanting to be touched any more.

The pause is taught.

"Well, it doesn't get any simpler than that," Scarlett says.

"I can't do it. I really can't."

"I know. I know."

Her voice sounds tired. More tired than before? I wish I could see her face. I want to hug her, and be hugged. I wish she were here. There's not even a phone line between us, in a proper sense, just two thousand miles of electrified ether. It's not really quite enough.

dopamine

I don't do a lot of re-posting on here, but this is the funniest thing I've ever seen. It really is.

I've got a tip for you

So, a couple of people suggested I put up a link to accept donations and after some though I am doing so. There is absolutely no expectation or demand that anybody contribute. Having a reader is an awesome thing for a writer, and you do more than enough for me just by being here.

But in the instance that you enjoy the blog, and wish to express your appreciation through monetary means, then far be it from me to deny you. Give me whatever you woudl slide in my thong if I were on stage, or whatever you would spend to buy this if it were a book, or whatever you would give to a busker in the subway.

I think PayPal will let you include a "message to seller" or whatnot. If you send me an e-mail or an address I will send you a thank you note, because I try to be well brought-up like that.

Peace.

garbage in, garbage out

So, this is what I was about to publish when all the crazy people from the Internet showed up and I got paralyzed by self-consciousness. Oh, well. Here goes nothing.

C. and I woke up so suddenly that for a flat second we didn't know what was waking us. Then we heard the sirens all around the house, so many of them, and deafening. From the bed, I pulled the curtain back and saw sparks raining from the sky. We hauled ass into our pants and I snatched the money from the special money drawer and stuffed it in my bra before we ran out into the street.

Fire was rising from the next block over -- a column of it, spiraling into the sky forty or fifty feet, whirling and throwing off sparks which were landing all around us, but thank God it was also raining and the ground was moist.

"It's that house they just renovated," said James, the neighbor we share a wall with, who was also standing on the porch and had had time to put his shoes on and light a cigarette. Fire trucks kept arriving, and showers of sparks kept blowing. Then there was a whooshing sound as the trucks turned the water on, or the foam, or whatever it is. And just like that, the chimney of fire collapsed out of the sky and there was just a red glow.

C. and I went back to bed, where I tried like hell to fall asleep because I had to get up at 9 a.m. to go to work. That's right. After four years of working whenever and wherever the hell I felt like, I had a job to get to. I fucking hated it.

No, not a "real" job, and I know what you mean when you say that, even if I don't agree. Just cocktailing at another titty bar. It's the kind of job you can walk into and make money that day, plus my friend Valerie worked at the club, and she's fun. If this dayshift was anything like the dayshifts I remember dancing through, it'll at least be nice to have a friend around during the long lull between the lunch crowd and the Happy Hour crowd.

So I drove there in the morning in a white top and a black skirt, asked to talk to the manager, and was clocked in to work by 10 o'clock. That part was awesome. Having Valerie trotting around in a Victoria's Secret camigarter and feathered hair like some kind of sexed-out Sixties go-go pin-up girl was also awesome.

Everything else blew. I'd almost forgotten this about the dayshift -- it sucks. Well, it sucks for me. For a certain kind of dancer it is like candy from babies, because all you have to do is sniff out the handful of rich old dudes who come in every day, and avoid the wannabee gangsters who wander in after lunch and sell or pretend to sell drugs all afternoon. You find those couple of customers who really, really like you --because they like redheads, because you remind them of some other girl, or maybe, just maybe because the two of you really get along. That happens, too.

Then you give them your phone number and call them every couple of days and they come to the club and give you a bunch of money to sit with them all afternoon and do whatever it is you do. Which is sometimes nothing. I have literally seen willowy blondes fresh from high school prom sit next to old men with banker's faces all day long, saying nothing.

Some girls are so good at this that they dance for the same five-to-ten guys for years. Not me. I'm really bad at this, it turns out. I have had a few loyal customers over the years, but there's a point in the pseudo relationship where I have to draw a line. I can't chat on the phone. I can't go out to lunch. I can't depend on any one guy too much, because if you do, they know it and they pull the plug. They can't help it, almost. They have to know if you really love them, and of course then it usually turns out that you don't, but if you want the money, you have to find a work-around. You DO go to lunch, or you swear that you will but then you cancel at the last minute, or you DO but then you immediately try to get him to go to the club with you afterwards and give you a bunch of money. It goes from there. I hate that stuff.

Sometimes you don't want to be anybody's fake girlfriend. You just want to take your dress off and be sexy and fun for a few minutes and get a couple of bucks and on to the next.

But this new club is not an on-to-the-next kind of establishment. Most customers who spend any kind of money have their favorite waitress up in VIP already. If you don't have one of those customers, you are stuck in the rotation where you simply get whatever customer walks in the door next, and if it's the homeless guy who comes in and buys an iced tea (the only drink that comes with free refills), tips you fifty cents and crouches in an empty dance booth all afternoon rocking back and forth and oggling the stage, well that's your fucking luck.

In two days I made $72. And on the third day I called the manager and told him I appreciated his help and wouldn't be back. I didn't really have to call. Most girls just disappear without a trace but for some reason I was inclined to be professional.

I spent the day aimlessly, but not a peacefully. I'm like a cow dog. If I don't have enough to do I chew on the furniture. Finally, around midnight, after a solid day of watching me pace the floor and whimper, C. got sick of me and threw me out of the house. "Come back when you've worked it off, whatever it is," said my sweetie, and locked the door behind me.

I rode my bike around in the dark for a while, and then I called the Satanist. He was home and said I could come by, so I tooled over through the steamy streets and we sat in his midnight garden and smoked a joint. It hasn't been the simplest thing to make a real friendship out of our stripper/customer relationship, but we have made some progress, and it's been worth it.

I like the Satanist because you don't have to downplay the drama in things to get him to take them seriously. He believes in karma and chi and magic and the collective consciousness and all that shit. So I can tell him about the apocolyptic vision, fire falling from the sky, and see it catch in his eyes behind those Grandad glasses. I tell him how my mother stood dumbstruck in her yard one day last month and saw the funnel of a tornado lift into the sky and pass over the farmhouse in a rain of leaves. We talked about the storm that tore through town a few weeks ago, blowing over trees and plowing up graves in the cemetery, cracking the plot-stones in half and up-ending them.

I lay on my back on the patio playing with the leaves of the rubber plant. I said, "Is the world ending?" and he squinted at me like a medicine man and said, "Dying people always think the word is ending."

So I told him I couldn't dance anymore, and I didn't know why, and it wasn't dancing that had changed, of course, but me. I couldn't blow the bad stuff off any more and my compassion was exhausted and I didn't think I gave a damn anymore about a single person in the whole world. And he said "Garbage in, garbage out, honey. How much shit can you take in without putting some of it back out?"

"It didn't used to bother me so much. I thought I could take in all the bad and make it good."

He nods. "You did," he said. "You did have that. But it's gone."

I tell him my chest is so tight it feels like a fist is squeezing my heart, milking my adrenal glands into my bloodstream till my body is a factory that never shuts down. I haven't really slept in days. And he doesn't ask me what I mean, because he knows what I mean, and he doesn't say he's sorry, because this is just life.

And then we smoke some more and he takes me around and shows me the holes that the hail made in the garden. He doesn't touch me once, and I am so grateful I could cry. For a minute I get confused and try to tell him how much I like him and why, but he frowns at me and things get weird for a second. "What are you doing?" he says. "Why do you do that? Why do you tell everybody what they want to hear? You're so transparent it's ridiculous."

It's too late to argue and I'm too stoned. I try to smile and not too long later he kicks me ever so gently back out into the night so he can get back to the work of whatever it is he does in his haunted house all night long. I take the hint and hug him and go. He locks the door behind me and I point my bike back towards home pushing myself up the hills and sweating and when I get home I feel so quiet and good, it's like it rained inside of me.

OK. Hi.

So, I've been through to archives and taken out the couple of things that could have been incriminating to myself or someone else. All in all, I've been pretty cautious through the years -- I've used fake names for people who were already using fake names -- but I had to double-check. I think we're good.

So welcome, new people. Nice to have you here, even the folks participating in the backlash and counter-backlash like I was Paris Hilton's new hairdo, and even the ones who think I'm not a real stripper because real strippers don't use semi-colons or whatever. It's an interesting experience so far and of course, this too will pass.

For those of you who just got here, you are arriving in what may very well be the twilight of this blog. After four on-and-off years of stripping, I am actively looking for a way out, or at least an extended break. For those of you who read my recent posts and think I sound like a bitter cunt, well yeah. The past four years have not been without their difficulties and they have left their mark, for sure. Once upon a time I had a magical ability to transform other people's misery at least temporarily into happiness, and as a dancer I banked off that for a long time, but it's gone now, and there it is.

I'm not at all sure what the fate of this blog will be. I'm pretty busy trying to get famous for something besides being a stripper, so not looking for a book deal or anything like that. I could really use a big bag of money, though, so if you want to send me one that would be awesome.

For now, I'm probably just going to pretend to ignore all of you like I have lovingly pretended to ignore Nathaniel and Anna and the other long-time loyal readers. So, back to our regularly scheduled programming.

P.S. If you are writing to me about something specific and want a response, like a few have, you gots to leave me some contact information. I won't publish it, and if what you're saying interests me I will respond.

P.P.S. Dear Stripper Haters: You are in my house, so please behave accordingly. Your comments will not be published unless they contain unusual insight or some sort of unique expertise beyond "my friend's sister was a stripper and in my opinion she is all fucked up now so you are too." The garden variety of ill-informed vitriol will be deleted with a light heart. I don't have the time or inclination to respond to you individually, but perhaps you will enjoy this.

what the fuck is this shit?

Who are all of you people? What are you doing here? Why are you yelling at me? Last thing I knew I was in here in the dark talking to Tara and Diopter and maybe Sixty, if he's still around, and now all you guys are here and you're scaring me.

no more mirrors, no more smoke

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

Our dates are always for Friday. We sat together through the tail of the afternoon and into the evening and the night. The range of our topics of common interest is brief, but there's a genuine appreciation of each other, too. An awkward fondness. A few hours in I started to notice the burning in the back of my throat, and by the time he left and I could get back to the dressing room my nose was just beginning to run full force.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

dirty talk

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Just be yourself," you say.

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

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

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

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

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

"Don't be afraid," you say.

I'm not afraid.

"Look at me."

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

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

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

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

any other name

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

twelve

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

mad money

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

the wild one

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You are wrong. I am nothing. I am not even here. I growl.

He smiles. "You ought to be chained up."

ready or not

Last week I got an invitation to the club from a customer so gentle, so polite, and so harmless that I've probably never mentioned him before.

The Historian comes in at several-week intervals and we talk about geeky things like the coming apocalyptic battle between the zombies and the vampires, and then he buys a bunch of dances and pays me and goes home. These are pleasant, drama-free, low-gropage interactions and I appreciate them

When I got his e-mail last week I hadn't worked in a month and while C. and I hadn't totally depleted the little jelly roll of cash I set aside before Christmas, we were starting to feel the pinch. Still, I hadn't been able to get myself to the club, and as time went on my reluctance was only getting stronger. The thought of getting naked in a room full of people was scary all of a sudden. I don't remember being so terrified of my own nakedness even when I was new. Then again, back then I didn't know exactly what to be scared of.

So this invitation from a nice guy with plenty of money and a self-declared code of chivalry that obligates him not to grab my crotch was what you might call an offer I couldn't refuse. I dithered all week, but on Saturday I sent him a reply and we made plans to meet.

When I got to the club, I didn't recognize a single girl there, but other than that nothing had changed --same protocals of checking in, getting dressed, getting ready for stage. Different girls all around me doing the same things girls in strip-club dressing rooms always do, having the same conversations.

On the floor, I didn't feel nervous. I've gained two or three pounds and I need a haircut and I'm pale as a trout, but it doesn't matter. My body knows what to do and no one really sees me, anyway. If I walk the like hottest girl in the room, they will fall for it like they always do.

I cross the room longways to see whose eyes will follow me. A curly-haired guy at a big group table looks up, is caught. He doesn't even know that he is staring, breath suspended in his throat. I feel good. This is not just a den of bourgeoise perversion, upholstered in cum-rags and dusted over with a thin layer of body-glitter. It's also the place where I make my money.

I find the Historian at a table in a corner and he jumps up. He looks so happy. He is enraptured by me, by the shape of me in space, or the idea of me, or something. I take a seat on his lap. All I have to do for the next several hours is have an amusing social interaction with a rather socially awkward man, which is hard work actually, but I won't notice that I'm tired, or bored. The trick there is the suspension of the personality, divesting the self of any trait that might be less than agreeable, of opinions that might offend and flaws that are not lovable.

Simulating a simulation of femininity, the money pours into your garter and the money is tonic, analgesic, stimulant, and mood-elevator. Sometimes you'll strain a ligament in your knee, like I did that night, and won't notice until you get home. Sometimes you'll sit with a customer all night, you won't realize you didn't really like him -- not like like him that is, not like you said you did -- until you lie down in bed and close your eyes.