by Unknown
For whatever reason, I had never felt that bald hostility toward strippers. They were just the dancing ladies of yore, modern-day cantina girls with superhuman breasticles. I’d heard strippers were extremely well compensated for their attentions, so I had trouble believing that they had any genuine interest in purloining someone’s else’s boyfriend, husband, or Friday fuck. The way I saw it, even the really nasty strippers who gave blow jobs were really just putting in 110 percent at the office. Besides, I secretly imagined all strippers as members of a tight sisterhood who shared hilarious blue jokes backstage, swapped costumes, gargled with Tanqueray and midwifed each other’s babies on off nights. There was no way women who paraded naked before men could ever be catty or hateful. They must have cleaved unto one another in their vulner ability; how else would they survive among the dripping mandibles of all those alien men?
Standing outside the Skyway Lounge, I found myself drawn to the bay of blacked-out windows. My heart was banging against my ribs in speed-metal time. I wanted to be in there, part of that spangled corps of women who knew better but walked in anyway. It didn’t matter to me that I was somebody’s girlfriend or somebody’s daughter or somebody’s quasi-stepmother, or even somebody’s fucking copy typist. I wanted to take shelter in the dank, yeasty darkness, safe from the glare of snow and medium-bright typing paper and the file folders that slashed up the fleshy parts of my palms. I wanted to march into that topless dive and expose myself to the shadowy goons, winterized in parkas and boogeyman balaclavas, who slipped in and out of the door at regular intervals. And so, I respirated purposefully several times, and walked in like a first-class dumbass.
Frankly, I can’t read a memoir without a crystalline visual of what the writer looked like at each stage of the narrative. So here you go: A broad walks into a bar, bundled up sensibly in winter woolens like any sane resident of a state that borders Canada and dumps frozen precipitation on every exposed head. I was skinny (we neurotics often are), but I had the pallid, pliant flesh of a person who enjoys computers and dislikes cardio boxing. My dark hair was cut in a Davy Jones pudding bowl, my nails were chewed to waning moons, and my maquillage had sloughed itself off hours ago. I was about 2,000 light-years northeast of Pam Anderson in terms of conventional stripper-chic.
“Hello,” I said to the doorman, a fat, grizzled old cuss with the kind of face you expect to see on a titty-bar sentry. He looked like he used to run a boat repair shop until Betty Anne divorced him, and well, you know how that goes.
“What do you want?” he asked me through his graying whiskers. He looked like his kisses would taste like Bac-Os, or the sucked heads of crayfish. Something rank and saline.
“I want to sign up for Amateur Night.”
“Oh yeah?” he replied, completely incredulous. This was the first (but definitely not the last) time that someone indicated that I did not look at all like an exotic dancer.
“Yeah,” I said with defiance. Yeah, I wanna get my kit off, fatty!
Grizzly eyeballed my long patchwork skirt and snow-dredged penny loafers. I looked like a guest lecturer at the Oberlin College Womyn/Transgender Potters’ Collective. “You really think you can get up there and take your clothes off?”
He gestured to the stage, where a stout Chicana grappled with a brass pole, pivoting to reveal a cesarean scar on her midriff, red as a sockeye salmon. I watched the dancer for a moment and admired her six-inch platform stilettos, solid enough to house a school of betta fish in each transparent sole. Lesson one: Even a birthing-room Betty can be glamorous in the right pair of kicks. I committed this visual to memory.
“Sure,” I said. “Obviously. I’m just the type you’re looking for.”
“Can you show me your body?” Grizzly asked licentiously.
I sighed, shedding the first of many ego boundaries as I parted my long winter coat and revealed my (entirely clothed) body. I was a hippy girl, shaped like a Gretsch bass guitar, but otherwise passable. I didn’t have any fresh incisions or Y chromosomes, and my textbook smile bore witness to years of corrective orthodontia in my white, white girlhood.
Grizzly remained dubious. “Can you show me?” he repeated emphatically, his man-teats jiggling like silken tofu.
“Like an audition? I don’t have anything to wear,” I squeaked. Did he expect me to fuck him? I mean, I’d seen lots of porno movies with “audition” scenes. I knew how shit went down, and I wasn’t about to mount Lil’ Grizzly in some cloistered storeroom.
Grizzly’s already-furrowed mug creased like a rubber dime-store mask. He seemed deeply annoyed by my girlish reluctance to disrobe and ride him like a champ. “Yeah, like an audition.”
“I don’t have a stage outfit with me,” I repeated. “I don’t own any special clothes. I only wanted to sign up for Amateur Night. It’s Thursday, right?”
“Yeah,” Grizzly said, resigned. “Just show up.”
I left the bar feeling discouraged by the innuendo-spiked exchange with Grizzly but committed to my half-baked, idiotic plan. That night at home, I announced my plan to Jonny while we watched a Dr. Who video. He was surprised at the randomness of the idea, but cheered it instantly. Seriously, the boy didn’t flinch. You’d think I’d suggested slinging chowder at the local women’s shelter, or taking up vinyasa yoga. Not stripping at a topless bar conveniently located less than two blocks from either of our workplaces. I love the guy because he’s mellow-yellow to the nth.
“You’re going to do amateur night at the Skyway? Honestly, I think it’s cool,” Jonny said. “You must practice in front of me. I’ve got to see what kind of moves you’re planning to bust.”
“Too bad you can’t actually be there,” I said. “It’s on Thursday.” Jonny’s daughter customarily spent the night on Thursdays, and I didn’t think my nude public cater-wauling should take precedence over his parenting time. That’s the kind of “Daddy no-no” that results in biweekly therapy down the road.
“Oh yeah,” Jonny said, crestfallen.
“Don’t worry about it,” I reassured him. “I can do this alone.” Frankly, I wanted to go solo. Stripping, though implicitly public, felt oddly private. Also, if I wound up skidding and falling on my can onstage, I didn’t want to do it in front of my savory Internet boyfriend.
The next night, I trudged through the congealed sleet to an exotic dancewear emporium in south Minneapolis. Contrary to its image as a city of reeking galoshes, Hüsker Dü T-shirts and snow-caked mittens, Minneapolis is home to at least four shops that cater to its curiously large stripper population. This particular place, owned by an industrious former showgirl, harbored no pretenses of being a lingerie store; it was strictly for working girls of all stripes. I had passed it on my way to Arby’s on a couple of occasions, and had peeked in the window at the neatly stacked boxes of Ellie platforms*, display cases of pseudo-Turkish belly chains and salesgays in head-to-toe fishnet. Today, sweating ponds in my peacoat, I deigned to actually enter.
The racks were a riot of fluorescent Lycra, metallic spangles and animal prints; strings, straps and assorted fringe dangled from the costumes like man-o’-war tendrils. A girl in this place could be anything she wanted, from Mackie-era Cher to Cheetara from Thundercats. There were bikinis so itsy-bitsy teeny-weeny they occupied negative space. There were exorbitantly priced gowns in black and pink and South Beach tangerine for those who peeled at upscale cabarets and lounges. There were racks of thongs and G-strings to match even the most hideously patterned clubwear. I invented names for some of the more eye-searing ensembles: “Sequined Tigress,” “Symphony in Chartreuse and Ochre” and “Shine On, Crazy Rhinestone.”
Everything was impossibly small. I sensed my fat ass could do more damage to this merchandise than a seam-ripper. The gowns were bad enough, but the fluid polyester stripper pants were downright Lilliputian. I swear, I once had a doll named Cricket who wore larger pants than the sizes represented at this shop. Unfortunately, I needed something more than an XXS to cover my slacker fat and lumpen glutes.
I was planning to wear a regular black tank and vinyl mini that I already owned, so my stage outfit was already taken care of, however ineptly. But I did purchase a reassuringly thick, grope-resistant black thong, a black feather boa, and a pair of five-inch, clit-pink Lucite platform stilettos with sequined uppers. As I paid my $45 and exited the store, I felt like a common whore. It was the best day of my life.
I went back to my apartment, put on Def Leppard’s Hysteria (a valentine to strippers if there ever was one) and practiced mincing around the apartment. Gait training. I wasn’t sure how strippers were ideally supposed to move, so I tried to visualize Star Search spokesmodel and Warrant video stunt-cunt Bobbi Brown. In the seminal “Cherry Pie” video, Bobbi swings her drape of platinum hair, purses matte red lips that appear to be plumped with cadaver fat and catches a falling slice of pie in the Y of her crotch. I lacked the hair, the lips and the magical pie-catching hoo-haw, but I could pout, strut and chicken-flap just like Jagger thanks to years of clandestine practice. A Web site I’d surreptitiously read at work had informed me that strippers were supposed to move slowly, but I was sure guys preferred a manic jeepster on heels to a semi-comatose cold fish. Naively, I assured myself that I knew what was sexy. Still, I sensed my lifelong lack of coordination might be difficult to surmount. As I shimmied past the kitchenette toward the living room, my ankles teetered on the stratospheric heels, and the deep pile of the carpet kept pitching me backward. I wondered if I could survive Amateur Night without shattering my coccyx and spending the remainder of my career as a typist perched on an inflatable doughnut.
Ragdoll-for-Hire
Thursday came too quickly; there’s a paucity of daylight hours during a long Northern winter and the days run together like the plasmic globs in an egg timer. At work, I typed some unfunny radio spots and guffawed with phony laughter for the sake of the copywriter. I wondered how my coworkers would react if they knew what a bad apple I was, planning to strip for strangers at a low-end place where bus drivers hung out. They’d probably be horrified. The women would snigger into their sleeves like Betty Rubble, and the guys would dismiss me as a maladjusted whore. For the first time in eons, I felt like I still had some cred.
After work, I stopped at home and bagged my stripper accoutrements with shaking hands. I got back downtown too early, and tried to kill time at a chain bookstore crawling with lonely geriatrics and foreign students. My hands shook as I leafed through an issue of Jane and drank an ill-advised mocha with whip. Like everything in downtown Minneapolis, the bookstore dimmed and locked its doors at 9:00 P.M., and I was forced to head over to the bar.
Inside the Skyway Lounge, the smoky air was the color of a bad shin bruise. The evening shift was in full swing. A stripper paced the stage in a glow-in-the dark bikini, grimacing at anyone who dared to look away. The whole joint reeked of indifference. I checked in at the front door, and was relieved to see that Grizzly was nowhere to be seen.
“I’m here for Amateur Night,” I said to the managerial-type at the coat check. He was the first of many disconcertingly clean-cut young men I’d encounter in the industry. Real suit-and-tie types, the fair-haired sons of the skin trade. I have no idea how these Chipsters wind up working as go-go wranglers. Whatever happened to entry-level positions in copy-machine sales?
“Great,” the man-boy replied, handing me a clipboard. (I am now convinced, by the way, that 80 percent of all clipboards manufactured eventually wind up in strip clubs. They’re everywhere.) “Write your stage name on the list.”
I thought for a moment, then wrote “Bonbon” on the list. I thought I was pretty hilarious.
“Okay, Bonbon, we’ll let you know when it’s time to get dressed,” the man-boy told me. “By the way, feel free to have a drink if you’re of age.”
Mais bien sûr! I bellied up to the bar, dropped the duffel bag containing my costume and shoes and ordered a Heinie. As the bartender checked my ID, I noticed a pride of disarmingly childlike strippers drinking soda pop and smoking near the bar. One of them wore cotton scanties and crooked pigtails; she flinched and squeaked as a passing customer honked her breast. It occurred to me suddenly that I would be one of the older girls in the competition, maybe the senior contestant in this twisted baby parade. This was a sobering thought. At twenty-four, I’d rarely been the “oldest” in any situation. At the advertising agency, I was practically regarded as a babe-in-arms. Now, here I was, surrounded by Lycra-clad teenagers exhaling mentholated cumulonimbus clouds in the darkness. They stared at my duffel bag with a mixture of hostility and interest; it was obvious that I was not a patron, but a participant in tonight’s topless showdown. I nodded at them, then scanned the room for other potential rivals.
There was a blast of icy air, then a girl walked into the bar, hauling a suitcase the size of a bathtub and looking like she’d lost her smile somewhere between Nicollet Mall and Hennepin Avenue. She had limp, ketchup-colored hair, an Easter Bunny face and fucked-up teeth. Weirdly, she was attractive in a foreclosing-on-the-trailer kind of way. She made a show of dragging her bulging valise to a table, then bellied up to the bar.
“Got a smoke?” she asked me.
“I don’t smoke,” I apologized. “I just drink. Tons.”
“I can’t drink yet,” the girl said, grinning like the “before” photo in a periodontist’s office. “I’m only nineteen.” She noticed my bag. “Are you here for Amateur Night, too?”
“Yeah,” I said, hoping to commiserate with a fellow neophyte. “I’m so nervous. I’m totally freaking out. You?”
“Naah, not me. Been stripping for two years, and I ain’t never lost an Amateur Night,” the girl said, vermilion gums flashing.
The stripper onstage, who had now removed her blacklight-sensitive bikini top, began to lob insults at the unresponsive crowd. “I’m fucking naked!” she hollered. “You could at least look at me!” A balding man at the tip rail* chortled, and it sounded like a nicotine milk shake.
Soon, a woman with a clipboard appeared at the bottom of a staircase that ostensibly led up to the dressing room. “I need all of the contestants for Amateur Night to come upstairs and get ready,” she shouted, arms akimbo.
There were seven of us. We were herded up to a poorly lit room with a low ceiling and the approximate area of a travel-size box of facial tissue. The woman holding the clipboard introduced herself as the “house mom.”** A fierce little rubber-band bitch, wearing acid-wash jeans and a scowl, she somehow looked fifteen and fifty at the same time. She’d lived. The house mom surveyed us briefly, then laid down the ground rules for the competition:
1. No touching the customers during our stage set. Not that I’d be tempted, since most of the guys in the bar looked stoop-shouldered and scurvy-afflicted, like they lived on Dorals, cheap brandy and Andy Capp’s Hot Fries.)
2. No pulling aside our thong to flash the goodies. (Well, pooh. I so wanted to give everyone a gratis beaver shot.)
3. No leaning over the tip rail to accept tips. (The conservativeness of this rule surprises me in retrospect, since I later worked at clubs where girls were literally cartwheeling over the tip rail to score that extra greenback.)
Mom then handed out euphemistically named “personnel files,” which were blank, brief surveys of our hobbies (crocheting? decoupage?) and favorite sexual positions (Reverse Cowgirl? Hot Karl?). We were supposed to fill them out and hand them to the DJ; he would then share these tantalizing personal details with the crowd while we performed our individual sets.
One of the contestants, a drunk Venus Williams look-alike who called herself Destinee, seemed perplexed by her personnel file. She stared at the questions, half-dressed in a lace teddy, conspicuously menstruating. “I can’t read this. Can someone help me fill this out?” she asked, using a wad of one-ply toilet paper to absorb the blood that issued forth like a Mexican flash flood. I read the questions to her, but she wasn’t listening. Her eyes were blank and shifty as the viscid blood pooled in her loosely cupped hands. I hastily fil
led the form out for her with made-up answers. I think I wrote that she wanted to be a concert harpist.
Kayla, the redhead I’d spoken to earlier, was now standing naked in front of the dressing-room mirror, seizing her tiny breasts proudly. She appeared to weigh about sixty-five pounds; both racks of ribs were clearly visible through her translucent flesh. She reminded me of the anatomical glass female at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, whose vascular systems and breast tissue lit up at the touch of a button. “I just had a baby, and see how good I look?” Kayla brayed, clapping her concave belly. The other girls ignored her and slipped into their tired lingerie.
A slippery, gorgeous black girl who gleamed like a chess piece and called herself Mystic boasted about the three grand she’d made stripping in the past week. She eyeballed me coolly as I arranged my feather boa over my shoulders. “You’ve got a classy look,” she declared. “You should be dancing at a sophisticated place, like Schieks. I work there sometimes, and I always mint.” I murmured some thanks from within my boa, and got a feather in my mouth.
It occurred to me that I was not in the midst of amateurs. After quickly interrogating the contestants, I discovered that there were only two bona fide amateurs in our motley crew: me, and a trembling Hmong teenager who’d brought at least fifteen friends for moral support. The rest of the contestants were pro-circuit scenesters who worked at other strip clubs in town and had entered the contest anyway for an easy shot at the $200 prize. Well fuck me! Uncoordinated, alone and obviously past my prime, I felt doomed.
Still, I was surprised by how undeniably average the girls were. I had always imagined all strippers as sinewy, exquisitely painted Jezebels, airbrushed by genetics and smelling of exotic fragrances like Elizabeth Taylor’s “Passion.” But there in the sallow light of the dressing room, I saw nails nibbled to the quick, prickly hedgehog vulvae, breasts that hung like worn athletic socks, and bodies of all makes and models, from Ford to Fuck’d. Granted, I was at a working-class strip bar in one of the country’s least glamorous states, but still. If these girls could get naked without spooking the clientele, I could certainly strip without fear of being chased offstage by an incensed mob. My confidence scaled up slightly.
