by Unknown
At Christmas, a human-sized animatronic snowman came out of storage to greet diners in the foyer. My aunts poured Manhattans behind the bar, and an eccentric organist performed every Saturday in the banquet room. (My brother and I were obsessed with the organist because he had a wet-look Jewfro, a porno mustache and a Clapper-equipped bachelor pad.) The waitresses, hefting trays of prime rib and sauerbraten, wore bodices that crimped their waists and made them look like aging St. Pauli Girls. They cooed gamely over my brother and I, even though we were unattractive children with chapped lips.
The Matterhorn was a big Mafia draw. My grandmother, a take-no-shit Leo who ruled the joint with a heavily bejeweled fist, ordered the prettier waitresses to entertain the various mob heavies who haunted the supper hour. The girls, dour but obedient, would cozy up in a booth and drink Dom with whichever coterie of gangsters had shown up to dine that day. My grandmother knew that this kind of socializing was vital to the success of her crumbling bierhall. The waitresses were aware they were being pimped, but there was something flattering about sharing a magnum with Lucky or Pancakes or whomever had just been released from the state clink and felt like celebrating with bad music and Kraut food. The Matt was not unlike a strip club in this regard. I often think Grandma would have made a first-rate titty-bar proprietor.
Don’t get me twisted; those were wholly innocent times. GUT ESSEN, GUT TRINKEN read an antique placard above the dining-room entrance. No one in the family was able to translate this, as my clan was neither German nor intellectual, but I suspected it meant something about good eats and fulfillment. Indeed, my family was well nourished in every regard.
We lived in the same rock-solid brick manor for the entirety of our childhoods, and we graduated from state universities. At that point, we were expected to connect the dots and move onto lucrative, satisfying jobs in the corporate sector. Marc bailed early on and became a career waiter; I held on a few more years doing administrative “girl” jobs in a series of downtown high-rises. I typed memos, brewed coffee and fretted over whether I’d ever be promoted to Assistant Junior Micro Flyspeck Account Coordinator. Naturally, my folks were delighted. It wasn’t until I moved to Minnesota that I began to reconsider my kid-tested, parent-approved lifestyle as a white-collar grunt.
I don’t know what my first exposure to stripping was. As a curious kid, I was vaguely aware that nude dancers existed, but my mental image of them was inexplicably corny and burlesque, rather than overtly sexual. (Maybe I’d watched the strip-club scene in The Graduate where poor, chaste Elaine Robinson snivels at the sight of tasseled pasties.) Later on, I saw strippers on the trashy talk shows that dominated my freon-cooled summer afternoons circa 1989, but I never imagined myself doing such a thing for money. Those broads were toothless and shrill; they threw chairs and sobbed until fjords of blue-black mascara stained their cheeks. There was nothing sexy or intriguing about that. Stripping seemed desperate, the provenance of the chronically unfortunate.
Things are different now that stripper-chic has infiltrated youth culture. As of 2004, modest gym bunnies can take “cardio strip” classes and tone their glutes while fulfilling a transgressive fantasy. Teenage girls wear Hustler logo hoodies and spray-tan themselves into Gold ’n’ Plump splendor. Feminists, brainiacs and “alternative” types are peeling their Elizabethan corsets off on Web sites like Suicide Girls and Nekkid Nerds. Coeds lift their shirts and squeal for spring-break sexploitation pictorials. Sexual exhibitionism is the norm, not the deviation. But when I was a teenager in the era when punk broke, no self-respecting riot grrl (save Courtney Love, a vocal alumnus of several strip clubs) would have mooned a crowd for cash tips. We cocooned ourselves in flannel and neglected our hair. We railed against ozone pollution, Ticketmaster service charges and impossibly proportioned fashion dolls. Becoming a stripper would have been an unthinkable waste of our so-called lives. ***
The first time I gave critical thought to stripping as a profession, I was nineteen years old and attending college in Iowa City, a town that prides itself on being the lone follicle of hoch kultur in the dank armpit that is Iowa. I routinely got my hair cut at a punk salon downtown, and all the hairdressers there were rowdy tattooed hellcats who looked like they’d just ponied out of a hot-rod magazine. One day, during a haircut, one of them revealed to me that she occasionally danced at Dolls, a strip club in the neighboring town of Coralville.
“Do you make good money?” I asked her as she sheared my hair into a reasonable facsimile of Winona Ryder’s late-nineties pixie cut.
“Yeah, the money is awesome,” she enthused, reaching over me to crank the volume on the Natural Born Killers soundtrack. “You should try it.”
“Really?” I said, stunned. “Do you think I could?”
“Definitely,” she said. “You’re the right type. I can loan you a pair of my shoes if you want to audition.”
I laughed. “I don’t think I could. I’m too chicken.” I was secretly flattered that this ubercool Nancy Spungen look-alike thought I could be a stripper, but at the same time, the idea seemed ridiculous. I decided to keep my day job doing Dutch-language data entry at the library.
So when—why—did my little red Corvette veer onto the freeway of indecency? I think I’ve finally got it sussed. Most girls get into stripping because they’ve discovered a fast crowd, are mired in financial woe or have lived with dysfunction for so long that they’re naturally drawn to the fucked-up family dynamic in strip clubs. For me, it was the polar opposite. I had spent my entire life choking on normalcy, decency and Jif sandwiches with the crusts amputated. For me, stripping was an unusual kind of escape. I had nothing to escape from but privilege, but I claimed asylum anyway. At twenty-four, it was my last chance to reject something and become nothing. I wanted to terrify myself. Mission accomplished.
Coda
You, the reader, are hoping to find some sort of redemption in this sprawling epic (okay, sprawling pamphlet) of a corporate yes-girl who literally puts her ass on the line and becomes a sex worker for sport. I’m afraid you won’t find any here. That’s the deal with true stories; they rarely deliver on a climactic level. Especially when the story is about something as puddle-shallow and symbolically molecular as stripping. Girl goes wild. That’s all she wrote. For the curious, Jonny and I did get married, and we’re the happiest cats in the whole U.S.A. Peanut was a gorgeous flower girl. We live in the ’burbs, and no one strips unless they’re taking a bubble bath.
I will admit that I was permanently altered by my time living among the strippers in their moist, humid habitat. I underwent a chemical change as well as a physical transformation. I dinged up my femurs on the pole and was suddenly gifted with a pair of bad knees. My feet, like Barbie’s, are practically stuck in a tortured high-heel silhouette. (On the plus side, pole work gave me abs of adamantium.)
I wrote this because I never could have let all of this psychic detritus percolate inside of me forever. Some stories beg to be told (narrator’s rule of thumb: Any story involving a panty auction is required to be told). So I spilled it. I hope you were adequately entertained, and I hope the periodic waves of nausea were tempered by at least an occasional frisson of enjoyment.
What is it about that damned pole, anyway? Some girls assault it, some girls ignore it, some girls hitch a ride on it and spin. Doesn’t really matter; it takes all kinds to entertain. I went from regarding the pole as an adversary (like Charlie Brown’s kite-noshing tree) to eventually scaling it with quick, calloused thighs. The last time I took the stage, I climbed the pole, hung upside down like a naked fruit bat and waved at the crowd. From that perspective, the place looked almost normal. That, friends, means it’s time to come down. I righted myself and slid to my feet, bruised but otherwise smashing.
* Porn Shui: noun, refers to the art of positioning oneself in one’s office or cubicle so that one can surf porn undetected. Usage: “I have great porn shui—I face the hallway and the desk behind me is vacant.”
* Plus, once w
hen I was in L.A., I passed this club called the Seven Veils, and an extremely foul dude emerged from the shadows. He hissed at me like a cockroach, and I ran away in my stupid, ill-fitting Icelandic sneakers.
* A purveyor of shockingly comfortable stripper shoes; I swear Ellies have better arch support than Easy Spirits. I would totally play basketball in Ellies if I didn’t have a chronic fear of my glasses getting smashed.
* Tip rail: the seats closest to and/or surrounding the stage. May or may not involve an actual rail.
** House mom: a woman employed by a strip club whose job is to resolve disputes, manage the backstage area, apply defibrillator paddles to the bosoms of overdosing strippers and perform other as-needed duties. Usually a former stripper.
* You know how in the lyrics to “Tangled Up in Blue” Dylan mentions going to a topless bar and staring at a girl’s face? He lied. Nobody looks at your face when you’re naked—not even nice Jewish boys like Zimmy.
* Incidentally, my tattoos are totally bitchin’.
* Hustle club: noun, a strip club where girls use an impersonal, hard-sell approach, moving quickly from customer to customer rather than flirting at length or feigning an intimate connection.
* Official scent of Midwestern strippers at the turn of the millennium
* Highly useful!
* Jack shack: noun, a strip club where hand jobs and other sexual acts are freely sold
* It did happen. I gave exactly two dances to one of the Minnesota Vikings, and he was wearing these wretched spandex pants, accessoried with a stylish boner. He didn’t even buy me a Coke.
* This quickly became a humorous catchphrase in the Jonny-Diablo household. “We need some groceries in this bitch!”
* I was twenty-five.
** I’ve never been to tennis camp, nor am I familiar with the rules of tennis.
* No I didn’t.
** Where do I get this stuff?
*** I graduated.
* Nope!
* Half blow job, half sex, much like a pizza with two or more evenly distributed toppings
* The titles of most begin with “F.”
* The greatest bar game ever. It’s like playing Memory, except with boobs.
* The zenith of eighties thrash cinema, starring a young, pre–domestic battery Christian Slater
Table of Contents
Doll Parts
White City
Take It Off
Ragdoll-for-Hire
Against All Odds
The Entertainer
Parallel Lines
Material Girls
Big Pink
Girls, Girls, Girls
Sugar Low
Fake Plastic Hair
Slippery When Wet
Some Girls
The Girl from Ipanema
Good-bye, Yellow Brick Road
Burnt Wienie Sandwich
Rawhide
Tricks and Hos
Lick It Up
Dollhouse Girls Don’t Have All the Answers
White Christmas
Back in Black
Motoring
Stephanie Says
A Stripper Was Born
Coda
*
**
***
