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Day Stripper: Chapter One
I don't normally chase customers out of Naughtyland. In the two years Iāve been working as a stripper, I've learned to tolerate catcalls, wandering hands, the breast fetish, the mommy complex. Besides, I depended on these men for my income, and the majority of them were well behaved. It didn't pay to be impolite in return. The few who were bounced were certainly never followed, at a run, down Jones Street.
But this guy had not only batted my breasts around like tetherballs. He'd also extracted my small wad of earnings from my bra, where I kept the twenties I charged for each lapdance close to my heart and safe. Nobody fooled around with my money. For me it wasn't just green paper, it was independence, it was freedom, and it wasn't easy to come by. I'd removed myself from the polite society of those who did their jobs in clothing in order to earn a wage that I could live on in San Francisco. This guy wasn't getting away with my hard-earned hundred.
My ankles turned painfully as my four-inch heels pummeled concrete. Running in high heels isn't all that much harder than dancing in them. They slowed me, but I didn't want to kick them off and risk slicing bare feet on a shattered crack vial then bathing the cuts in a fetid yellow puddle. The evening fog pressed smells of urine and Chinese take-out into the Tenderloin for the night.
My lungs were shredding and I was losing sight of the mudflap of yellow hair that marked my lanky quarry like an enemy flag. He'd had too big of a lead. I sped up, grabbed my breasts to keep them inside a bikini top made of a pair of triangles no bigger than quilt pieces. Nights are cold year-round by the Bay, and it was only late April. Chill bumps popped up on my skin as I pushed passed onlookers who didn't have the courtesy to move, or maybe wanted a free feel. I was half a block behind my target when he stopped and looked back at me from the corner of Market Street.
When I got close enough to see the white circle outline of a snuff tin in the back pocket of Yellow Hair's boot-cut jeans, I jumped and tackled him.
It was like wrestling a wiry Gumby. I went for his hair and his crotch. In an instant my former customer had slithered out of my grasp and wrenched one of my arms behind my back. He torqued the arm. I gracelessly fell. He released my wrist and jumped between a trolley car and an electric bus that moved slowly as a bride-to-be and her escort down Market.
San Francisco's bus system runs without noise, powered by electricity. Antennas connect the fleet to a grid of thick cables that sags like old clotheslines above the city's streets. I watched the busesā umbilical progress from the acrid cloud of Brut the man's flight had left behind. By the time they passed, Yellow Hair and my hundred dollars had vanished into the neighborhood opposite.
"Shit."
"He'll come back to you, baby." Our momentary tussle had attracted an onlooking crowd of homeless people and patrons of a nearby Wendy's. Other words of encouragement followed. An elderly gent who appeared to be wearing his laundry pile beneath several blankets gave friendly advice. "Put something on. It's cold out."
I stood and brushed unidentified grit off my backside. A young man poked me in the shoulder with the straw that stuck from his yellow soft drink cup. "You looking for a date?" he said. He shoved twenty or so French fries into his smile, then examined the four inadequate black triangles that strung into my bikini.
I smiled back, minus the foodstuff. "I don't know. You see, I haven't had the opportunity to see you in your underwear."
I left when his pants tangled around his knees and he couldn't follow.
I walked back to the club at a slower pace. The street atmosphere of San Francisco's Tenderloin varies from block to block, depending on what is on offer nearby, but most local citizens consider all of the neighborhood's blocks sleazy. Although it divides the Financial District from City Hall, the Tenderloin isn't listed in any guidebook. Tourists headed from the Powell and Market cable car turnaround to UN Plaza walk through a community as uncharted as Conrad's Congo. It's the part of the city where the restaurants are all fluorescent-lit and serve ethnic, the residents pass the time on the sidewalks, and the groceries are sold in convenience stores alongside liquor and Lotto. It's the neighborhood "forgotten" until someone remembers they need to score a hooker, or some cocaine. It's the place to go for stolen electronics. It's the place to see a live nude girl. These neighborhoods seem inevitably to teem across a city's flat bottomlands. Perhaps shame runs downhill.
back to topLive Nude Girls. The words pumped over Naughtyland's door, alternating blue, then red. The red neon sputtered the words, flickering like a mosquito zapper. The colors rang off the club's plate glass lobby windows. Red, then blue cracked along the spiderweb shatter made by a bullet aimed low. A boyfriend of one of the dancers had taken a revenge shot the year before. I opened the door into the dark theater lobby.
"Aisling. Where've you been." Lance's voice startled me. The sign's glare had prevented me from seeing into the lobby from the street. Lance had started working at Naughtyland about a month before, and his new-guy enthusiasm for his bouncer job didn't seem to be faked for the boss's benefit. He stood leaning against the plate glass. I should have known he'd be lurking in the lobby somewhere, positioned so that no one could approach him from behind.
"I've been doing your job. Bouncing, that is. Where were you? That guy got away with my hundred dollars."
Lance moved the thin beam of his penlight from a catalog of military supplies to each of my eyes. He held the small flashlight in his fist, forearm braced, as though he were delivering an uppercut. I focused on the shiny rectangle of his polished brass belt buckle while my pupils tooled down from the interrogation lighting. Lance believed in camouflage. For his night job in Sin City his uniform was black, from cloth epaulettes down to the boots he deliberately scuffed to cut the glare. Only the brown curl that began at his widow's peak dared to step out of formation by refusing to obey pomade.
"You're about to miss your set. Give me forty, I don't tell Mose, Junior about your close call." Satisfied that I was blinded and therefore temporarily neutralized, Lance returned to looking at his military supply catalog. He shone his penlight onto glossy photographs of the kind of knives meant to be carried between the teeth.
"I think I'll make it in time, thanks." Inside the club, Bruce Springsteen was rasping at a decibel level certain to hasten deafness. "Dancing in the Dark" was Cameron's second song of three. I had at least five minutes. "You're giving yourself away, you know. That buckle could be seen miles behind enemy lines."
"Shut it. I can still fine you. Don't know why people pay to see you." Lance had the kind of smile in which only the bottom teeth show. "Here I am getting it for free."
back to topI pushed through the black curtain that divided the lobby from the clubās interior. My eyes had to readjust to the stage area's psychedelic lighting scheme. Disco balls pixilated the spotlights and spun galaxies of colored dots across the floor, walls, stage, and the ten or so customers. Naughtyland's interior was small, and the ten men felt like a crowd. Lone, slouched figures seemed frozen to the round plastic tables. Onstage, Cameron teased the hem of her miniskirt upward. The customer's faces raised to follow her like baseball-capped flowers toward the sun. A few bolder sorts had chosen to sip their nonalcoholic beers while leaning against the runway, baseball caps turned backward, their faces, at lucky moments, three inches from some part of a live nude girl. The stage poked their chests like a stuck-out tongue.
Before I'd discovered stripping, I'd worked a variety of jobs. Though I hadn't been aware of it when I'd filled out the applications, all of my previous jobs had also turned out to be in the sex industry. I'd been a restaurant hostess; barely decent in the off-the-shoulder hacienda dress they gave me as a uniform, until I'd discovered that the male host, though he wore a more demure outfit, was paid more money. I'd been a photographer's assistant, until he'd tried to feel me in the darkroom. As a waitress, I'd actually had my ass pinched, an event with unfortunate timing that had caused me to glaze the pincher and his slice of strawberry pie with three large iced teas. I was fired for that one. Sexual harassment was clearly going to be part of any workplace, and since that was the case, I was blunt enough to appreciate it being the entire point of my workplace. I now received generous compensation for specializing in it. My Momma had impressed upon me, mostly by example, the importance of not being dependent on someone else for money. As a professional sex object, my financial independence was assured. Unless, I thought in exasperation, I continued to give private dances to pickpockets.
back to topThe dressing room was in chaos. The small roomās smells of sweat, tobacco smoke and floral perfumes had thickened to a saturation point and threatened to drip from the humid air. Women leaned into the dance-school sized mirror to rub in lipstick. Others sat against their reflections talking on cell phones. Jeans, boots, padded uplift bras and glittery spike heels drifted up to the row of gray lockers and made dangerous piles all over the pitted red rug. A countertop along the back wall slowly melted under smoking curling irons that forged new elements from spills of make-up and polyester thong underwear. A coffee urn dripped an expanding caramel puddle into the mess.
I opened my locker. It was identical to the one I'd had in high school except for a stenciled "Aisling" across the front. A leopard-print bra and panty set fell into a lacy embrace at my feet.
My stripper name is what my first husband, who was Irish, wanted to name the daughter he wanted us to have and raise on a bog somewhere in the moonscape of Connemara. He would dig peat for a living, and I would bake soda bread. We'd have locals over for Guinness at the trailer and entertain them with my exotic dialect of the American South, which resurfaces when I'm drunk. But a few days before his Resident Alien status had come through Conor went back to Ireland alone. There were many things about America he'd never understood: bagels, four-lane highways, casual adultery. From my point of view, it had been a casual marriage. He'd needed a green card; I'd needed financial aid for Ohio State. Conor never understood my point of view, either. He's no doubt better off in the cozy little green quilted land where divorce is barely legal, and things are slow and perfect and happy. Aisling is pronounced Ashling.
The smell of Liz Taylor's Passion suddenly elbowed away the competition. I looked up to find Jossie, my best friend at work, gesturing in disgust at my leopard-print panties. "I would ask you how long it's been since you've washed those," she said, "but I won't because we've got real troubles here. You know Peaches?" Jossie grabbed my elbow. She was deceptively strong. She was tall and thin, with the kind of stiletto-shaped body created to part sheaths of stretch-knit.
"You've got troubles? Some asshole just stole a hundred bucks off me." I'd ripped off the bikini bottoms by untying the loopy bows on each side and was reaching to untie the top when my arm was immobilized. "Let go. I'm onstage in like two minutes."
"A hundred dollars? You'll earn it back. Come with me. You've got to see this." Jossie pulled the string at my neck and the two black triangles slithered toward my waist.
"Did you hear me? I just lost a hun. Iām trying to change. I'm on next."
"Baby, this is bigger than money. Come on." She grabbed my elbow to steer me toward the crowd at the mirror.
I let myself be steered, because Jossie is almost impossible to resist and because her remark had left me temporarily dumbfounded. At Naughtyland, nothing was "bigger than money." Money was as overvalued to strippers as Parisian francs or London pounds to tourists. Regular United States twenties were mysterious and romantic as a foreign currency, inflated by the things we'd done to earn them. No dancer ever talked about money light-heartedly, and especially Jossie normally considered getting money stolen the gravest of tragedies.
back to topPeaches was a petite dancer with a gush of straight black hair and clear apricot skin that needed no concealer. Like most of the dancers at Naughtyland and many of the other clubs in town, she was Asian American. We found her applying mascara, her face three inches from the wall-to-wall mirror. When she pulled back and held herself, unblinking, to let the tar she'd brushed on her lashes harden into unsmudgeable crust, I saw her face. Peaches's left eye was swollen and blackening within its now visible encirclement of bone. Where her pink dusting of blusher should have gone, the skin grew taut over purple swells. Her face looked like the groundside of a cider apple. Jossie looked grimly into the mirror for my reaction.
"Are you okay?" I asked Peaches, after a moment of shock. Rumors flew around Naughtyland, and about Peaches the latest whisper was that her boyfriend beat her. I ignored the gossip, but maybe, I thought, this time the whisperers had been right. Lots of women in my profession have trouble with their boyfriends. They have to lie about where they work, or put up with a bad attitude from the guy who hates the fact that his girlfriend takes off her panties in public but sure likes the money that such activity brings home. Boy trouble was a common dressing room complaint.
Jossie had heard the rumors about Peaches, if not started them. "Can you wait and inquisition her later? She has to go onstage in thirty minutes. She's got to be presentable in half an hour, unless she's going to do the battered housewife act, so lend me your pancake. You two are about the same color."
My friend was wrong about our complexions. I'm of white trash descent. I wordlessly retrieved my compact from my locker and handed it to Jossie. Peaches's face looked bad, but she seemed angry rather than pained. She stood impatiently while Jossie dusted M.A.C. Ivory-Peach powder over her cheeks. Peaches was new to the club, had been working there about three weeks, and I didn't know her well. She was friendly, quiet, and she kept her distance. From me at least. It was impossible for anyone to keep her distance from Jossie.
"This isn't thick enough, you got liquid?"
"Of course not. That stuff clogs your pores."
Jossie glared at me, annoyed. "Who else is pale as Casper-Plantagena." She strutted off to find a more powerful bruise-disguiser.
"Boy trouble?" I asked Peaches, after Jossie was out of range.
"No. I've heard the rumors about me, too. Don't believe the hype."
"I usually don't. When did this happen?"
"Last night."
"After work?"
"Obviously."
"Who did this to you?"
Peaches examined her face in the mirror, running fingers delicately over her jaw. A stipple of four bruises there marked where blood vessels had exploded under the impact of knuckles. She didn't seemed worried about the bruises, her swelling features or the fact that she was expected to perform in full drag in thirty minutes. Instead she had the focused yet distant expression that my roommate Hugh got when he was working on cryptography, one of his hobbies. Like she was thinking how to maximize the points of her Scrabble word. Or determining which customer to approach for a lap dance by factoring in his race, age, net worth, attitude, nationality and willingness to spend money to calculate how much he'd spend on a small-busted Asian girl and whether he was worth her time.
After a moment she shook her head, then winced at the pain of the movement. "Long story."
"I've got one minute."
"I'm okay, stop staring. I only came in to avoid the fine. I'm going to do my show and go home. Aren't you on now? Wasn't that Cameron's last song?"
"Yeah." "Ziggy Stardust" was beginning to fade out. I still had the struggle into short-shorts to negotiate before I could take the stage. Peaches twisted a tube of lipstick and ran a half moon of bright red across her swollen bottom lip.
"Go on. You'll get fined." We were charged fifty dollars for getting to the stage late or missing our set. We were charged one hundred and fifty dollars by management if we didn't show up for a shift we'd scheduled for. One hundred for the stage fee, fifty more for missing our set. It was an effective solution to absenteeism.
"Look, I'll be fine. After tonight, this will all be over with. Go on."
Jossie's red sequined-clad figure reappeared in the mirror, at the end of the row of lockers, and Jossie never walks slowly.
I ran to finish getting into drag.
back to topI was struggling into the skin-tight pair of Levi's cut short as a bitten nail that I always began my show with when I heard the first notes of Lyle Lovett's "She Makes Me Feel Good." Shit. My song. I grabbed a pair of pliers out of my locker and used them to haul up the overtaxed zipper. An old trick I'd learned from Momma. I did a second windsprint of the night to the tall red-velveteen curtain that was our entrance to the stage.
I enjoyed dancing. We danced several sets each night, depending on the number of women that had shown up to work. At least I enjoyed the first two songs out of the requisite three, before I got bored with the pain of my tensed thighs, the country music I always danced to, the sweat that finally broke under the heat-lamp lights. Red lighting was a constant backdrop. Bright varicolored lights scurried through it. Onstage, a dancer's retinas are left so confused that all she can see is her own body in the wall-to-wall mirrors and disembodied heads staring at it.
Since I was more interesting to me than the disembodied heads, I often looked at myself while I danced. I was almost six feet tall with the help of high-heeled black cowboy boots. My breasts were just big enough to sag. Wavy dark brown hair, highlighted in red, fell past my shoulder blades. I wore the requisite strata of liners and shadows in shades darker than my green eyes. More powder created the illusion of cheekbones in a round face. I'd never considered my face prettier than average or my body especially well proportioned. Nevertheless, dollar bills were always anted up for me.
For my sets I changed into cowboy-themed clothes. Aisling was a country girl, and in the niche market I worked in it was better to keep one's image consistent. Tonight I'd chosen my reddish suede vest, too small so my breasts popped out through the fringe. My ass, which was bigger than fashion magazines approved of, fell far below the cutoffs. For a little pizzazz, I had strapped a silver plastic gun around my hips with a black leather holster. It was a squirt gun and, when I noticed audience members' eyes glazing over, I would give it to lucky customers to spray me with. They always aimed it at my tits.
back to topAfter my three-song performance I landed a customer, a polite if heated Malaysian businessman dressed in a Western suit and a turban. We went to one of the cubicles. These are a few square feet of the floor curtained off with the ubiquitous black drapery. One chair is within. It's a shade lighter than pitch black inside of these things, whether to disguise the beauty flaws of us women or to absolve the shame of the men I is not sure. About twenty such cubicles rim the walls of the club. It can be tricky to find an unoccupied one, rather like looking for an empty stall in a Ladies Room, with similarly embarrassing consequences. Customers happily pay more to have lap dances inside a cubicle. It's a lot less humiliating for dancer and customer alike when these ungainly events take place without an audience.
I straddled this man. Grabbing his turban for stability, I ground my panties on top of his crotch. My thighs burned with the pain of supporting my entire weight. Joints cracked from the impossible spatial configurations my gyrations demanded between inner thigh, spine, and buttocks. I was sure I was doing permanent damage to my lower half, and no workman's compensation would be forthcoming. The song was "What's Love Got To Do With It" and I was sweaty after one minute of it. After paying to be sat on for five more songs, my customer loosened up.
"I have three wives." He spoke in halting English.
"Really?" Great, a talker. I hated talkers.
"Yes, I am a lucky man, no?"
"Oh, yes. Where are your wives now?"
"Can you show me the pussy?"
"No." That wasn't part of the repertoire in the cubicles.
"Show me, show me the pussy. I want to see how to please the woman. My wives, she don't let me see nothing." He grabbed my ass.
"Time's up." I probably should have explained about the clitoris as a favor for the three wives, but screw it, I thought. I wasn't getting paid for sex education.
I clambered off the Malaysian to let him up. "So quick?" he protested.
"Thank you." I smiled sweetly and opened the curtain for him, letting in the slightly less dim light of the main floor of the club. He reshuffled his pants.
As he left, not bothering to wave, I noticed that Jossie was gesturing me over to her table. Two tables near the entrance were reserved for dancers, but every shift that she worked, the rightmost of the two was the exclusive territory of Jossie. The other thirty or so dancers never complained. Jossie sat alone. Her legs were crossed in such a way that one, light brown and perfectly milled as though it had been turned and polished on a lathe, lay exposed in the slit of her dress. My friend worked as a hostess, which meant she sat with men and conversed with them over soft drinks they bought her at twenty dollars each. She kept ten. I'd far rather dance naked for customers than have to chat with them, and didn't envy her her job. I slipped into the other plastic chair at her table.
"Buy you a drink?" I said. The City of San Francisco had proclaimed that naked girls and alcohol don't mix, and the only beer served at Naughtyland was the nonalcoholic brand O'Doul's. A good many customers seemed to get drunk off it anyway.
"Got one." She had three, actually, soft drinks in skinny glasses with red straws arranged in an arc in front of her, the ice in various stages of melt diluting the caramel color. "How'd I do, baby?" Jossie indicated the stage with a lift of her freshest Diet Coke. Peaches was up there, hooking a leg around the pole, holding poses for long seconds, the movements bearing no relationship to the beat of her music: "LA Woman," by The Doors. "Can't even tell, right? I loaned her your leather bikini to cheer her up. It looks better on her."
"Thanks."
"Well you're the one leaves your locker open for all the world to be pawing through your cheesy underwear."
"People like to borrow my shoes. She looks good." Jossie had done an expert job on the dancerās face. It was now a uniform, though aggressively beige, hue, and giant red seventies-style sunglasses concealed its entire upper half. My leather bikini was the sickroom pink of those peppermint lozenges favored by old ladies. The pastel color lent the battered stripper some innocence. These various enhancements, along with the colored lights that spun over her skin to give it the appearance of a neon leopardās, overrode Peaches's bruises to create the normal caricature of womanhood that Naughtyland's customers expect.
"Mm you do have that shoe fetish. Know my secret? Don't skimp on the base. Liquid. I don't care if it is the consistency of crude oil. You've got to slap it on there and don't be shy about it."
"Well, she looks uniform. Congratulations." Iād have appreciated Peaches' artificial color more if Iād known what she would look like the next time Iād see her.
But I only wondered: Who had punched her?
I felt expensive cloth brush my bare arm.
"Would you excuse us, baby?"
"Sure." I stood. A man in a suit was waiting to take my place. His belly was headed south, the light shirtfront a punch through the dark wings of his sportcoat, and his leather shoes were both wide and widely stanced. That's all I noticed of him. Jossie had many such visitors, men as expensive as she was. The shine of this one's gold watch winked out as my friend slid her manicured hand slowly down his wrist.
I went looking for another lap dance.
back to topThe dressing room sweated even more pungently at the end of the shift. By two in the morning my hair had humidified into sticky crinkles and the pancake was no longer able to muscle away the bags under my eyes. Wearily, I pulled my night's earnings out of my Wonderbra and tossed it into my locker. I'd removed the garmentās push-up pads in order to have a place to store my tips. Wonderbras are a boon to dancers in more ways than one. What other kind has a built-in wallet?
Jossie joined me at my locker as I was stepping into my hip-hugger stretch pants. My street shoes were lower heels, and Jossie towered over me by six inches, ten if the measurement included her sprayed upsweep. She was dressed for her cab ride home in a sheath minidress. The strap of a silver evening purse divided her deltoids from her collarbone. Jossie didn't look much different in real life.
Clothing comforted like a goosedown quilt after seven hours in the grips of thong panties and underwire bras. We compared notes about the shift, who'd done well, who'd done poorly, who'd gotten frustrated and left early. Jossie kept tabs on everybody, and at the end of a shift she could tell you exactly how much money every dancer had made, if one was rude enough to be interested.
"Peaches left after her set," she was saying, watching me dress. Going home after one set was permissible. As long as you danced once and paid your fee, you could abandon the field to the other strippers. "Where'd you get that bra? One of your mother's cast-offs?"
"I know it's frumpy but I've got to be comfortable." It was white cotton and loose enough to fasten in front, then spin around.
"Not like you'll be showing it to anyone later, I guess."
"What's your take on Peaches' bruises?"
"Aren't they the work of her man?"
"Come on," I pulled my shirt out of my locker, causing a high-heel avalanche. "That's the old story. She denies it. You must have come up with something more melodramatic than that."
"I've got an idea, baby, but you wouldn't believe it."
"I wouldn't? Why not? Is my imagination as frumpy as my bra?"
"She's not what she seems, dig?"
"No I don't dig. What does she seem like?"
"I'm saying you wouldn't believe me, but I would stay away from her business."
"Your cab's here," Lance parted the curtained doorway that divided the dressing room from Naughtyland's main floor. The house lights were on in the club, and it was suddenly obvious how dirty the place was. The black curtains were hemmed in crud, the plastic tables stained from spills. Oily smears blemished the silver pole onstage and the mirrors behind it. Lance had been speaking to Jossie. For some reason, he was always polite to her. I suspected he had a crush.
"Gotta go, baby. Can't keep my date waiting."
"Your date?" She leaned across me to check her make-up in the tiny mirror I'd affixed to the inside of my locker door.
"One of my regulars. Grady, he came in earlier tonight. When Peaches was onstage. Gold watch?"
I shook my head. "I met about a hundred men tonight. Sorry."
"Well he was one of the richest you'll ever meet." Jossie was already sweeping an exit. As she passed by Lance she raked his grease-trained platoon of curls with a manicured hand. He watched her with an open look so odd on him that it took me a moment to register the expression as a slight smile. Dog-like, he rolled his head to follow her touch. I turned away in disgust.
"And you, the boss wants to see you." Lance indicated that he was talking to me by yelling yeah you when I said who me. He yelled it to the curtains, which he'd let fall shut behind him after following Jossie out.
Our boss never wanted to see any of us, unless it was time to pay him his nightly cut. He literally didn't want to see us. He was terrified of a sexual harassment lawsuit resulting from an inadvertent glimpse of a bare breast.
"Shit." I began with the bottom button of my clingy black rayon shirt. The shirt gapped slightly over my chest and I thought of all the things my Momma would find wrong with it: too dark for my complexion, breast pocket adds bulk where you don't need it, really should fix that gap with a hidden safety pin. What could Mose, Junior want with me? My leather jacket weighed me down like a drunk's hug.
