Strip City: A Stripper's Farewell Journey Across America (13 page)

NINE

It's nearly impossible to get a decent bikini wax in Cheyenne. I can't tell whether this is due to timidity on the part of the local salon staffers or some weird stripe of homophobia, but finding someone who will wax me, much less wax me well, has been a challenge. In New York, I went to a stern Russian beautician who approached the task with admirable stoicism. She'd march into the room when I was ready, pull off the sheet I'd wrapped about my hips, dust me down with baby powder, scoop the runny amber wax out of the pot with a Popsicle stick and spread it thickly over whatever hair showed around the thong's edges, press the muslin strip down on the wax, and after a series of perfunctory yanks—voila\ Then she'd tweeze out the strays, wipe off any waxy residue with a cotton ball soaked in baby oil, and with a grim duck of her head leave me to get dressed. Efficiency personified.

I found a woman in town who will do the job, but I can tell she'd rather not. She comes into the waxing room like a patient at the dentist's. I try to distract her with conversation—How's your husband? Seen any good movies lately?—but it's hard dredging up small talk while having your most tender flesh paved with sticky goo. I feel more exposed having this done than I do onstage, which makes no sense, really. And she clearly fears something about me, which makes even less sense. Is there any way I can hurt her in my compromised position, pants around my ankles, knees splayed to the sides? She is, after all, the one with immediate access to a large supply of scalding hot wax.

This is my monthly maintenance day, so after the wax, I'm off to get my nails done. I'm very fussy about my fingernails—I don't like them too long or artificial-looking, and I've followed my manicurist, Suzette, as she changed salons four times. She does them just right.

After filing, filling, shaping, and buffing, Suzette starts polishing, her lower lip tucked in concentration. Behold the French manicure—pink tint on the nail bed, and a big, clean swipe of white across the entire width of the free edge. French manicures haven't been fashionable in years, but ambitious, ornamental women-dancers, porn queens, trophy wives, rich divorcees—insist on them still, and for good reason: Nothing signals femininity engaged as a survival mechanism like those prim, "nice girl" colors painted on in doxy detail.

"Hey," I say with a laugh, lifting up the polish bottles to read the names, "there's a color called I'm Not Really a Waitress!" A glittery harlot red. I wish I could tell Suzette why I find this funny, let her in on the joke, but I can't. She knows I write, but the rest of my resume is a mystery. I learned early on that I would often have to lie—outright or by omission—that I would have to cut friends carefully from the judgmental herd, to spin and twist in the face of bureaucracy. Tell the wrong people and they'll never treat you the same again. You're stained: Slut. Idiot. Damaged goods. As with everyone I meet, I ran Suzette through my filter—cool or not cool?—and she just didn't scan right.

"Yep," she says, brushing quick-dry top coat on my nails, her smooth, white fingers moving deftly, "a lot of women want that color, but only on their toes for some reason."

By the end of the afternoon, I have spent three hours on my hair, an hour and a half on my nails, an hour at the gym, and another hour for tan and wax. I don't mourn this expenditure of time. Like suiting up for battle, getting my glamour on has a galvanizing effect. After a day of being ministered to by capable hands, I feel ready to take on the world, buffed to a high gloss and impervious to hurt.

When I get home late in the afternoon, I have to address the dinner question. I rustle in the meat drawer and pull out a plastic-wrapped package of ground beef. In my New York days, the most I could hope to find when I opened the refrigerator was a shriveled old turkey burger nested on a lettuce leaf in a take-out container, condiment packets, bottles of vitamins, and maybe a splash of green-furred orange juice at the bottom of a month-old cardboard carton. I do all the grocery shopping, yet I'm still surprised when I look in the fridge these days and find it stocked. "Hey, there's milk in here. Right
on
!"

I set the oven to 350 and ease into a nice rhythm kneading ingredients together for a meatloaf. I'm so relieved to be home for the next month, with nothing more stressfull to do than tend to domestic detail or peck out an article. I don't have to cater to anybody's whim or force charm. For now I'm free from the stresses of stripping—anticipating desires, plumping up egos, presenting the most flattering angles, the strain of the charade. God, it's wearying.

I insist on helping with meals, even though Randy is a far better cook. I've never before had a kitchen big enough to stand in with my arms akimbo, let alone comfortably prepare a meal, so I am excited by the opportunity to learn some basic culinary skills. Should I be surprised that I enjoy futzing around in the kitchen and various other acts that indicate maturity? Outsider-fixated, I spent so much time kicking against domesticity that when I "settled down" in Wyoming, I almost had to fetishize home life, approaching it as either a weird experiment or a role-playing game. Like, "I'm buying something out of the Pottery Barn catalog! How camp," or "Look at me, I'm sassy and conscientious, hauling things to the recycling place." Having come to this late, I sometimes feel like an impostor, other times like a little kid clunking around in Mommy's shoes.

But inside the irony and winsome "How do I do this?" wonder is a little silvery burble of joy at the realization that I can be fully adult and still be me. I'm learning that what seemed like an ongoing struggle between freedom and domesticity was really just a style conflict, and I'm better off having a solid home base than living untethered and spastic in the vain pursuit of edge. I know it's heresy for a hipster to say so, but I think being a grown-up pretty much rocks.

I've got my freshly touched-up hair pulled back in a loose pony-tail, my face scrubbed, and I'm wearing a black Porn Star tank top and a pair of old baggy gray sweatpants as I crash around the kitchen getting dinner together. Understand, I don't just make a good meatloaf, I invented the meatloaf. All manner of things go into the mix-breadcrumbs, corn, celery chunks, and finely diced onions. I spend an inordinate amount of time patting and shaping until it's a perfectly formed pink mottled hillock, an extra loafy meatloaf. I open the oven door as it cooks, like a mother looking in on a sleeping infant. I sing to it, "Search and Destroy," "Raw Power," maybe "I Need Somebody." Then, forty-five minutes later, this masterpiece is taken from the oven, basted in ketchup and Iggy Pop.

…

"Let's go look at the ladies."

I say this to Randy as he stacks the dinner wreckage—purple plastic cups, mismatched stainless cutlery, soiled paper napkins crumpled atop black china plates. He carries the stack to the sink, turns on the faucet, and yells over the running water, "Really? Okay."

Usually when we go out on a Friday night, we choose between the Outlaw Saloon and the Cowboy Bar. But I don't want to go to either because some tipsy cowgirl, ranch raised or store bought, always tries to corner me in the bathroom or stare me down on the dance floor. I don't take it personally, as there's not much else to do around here. When the selection of men is poor, the tough girls swagger around in Ropers, bun-hugging Rockies, and button-down tops—too tight but neatly pressed—spoiling for something that will make a good story at work on Monday. I know drinking and fighting are two of the sanctioned local pastimes—and I don't have much objection to either, although I rarely participate—but I don't need the aggravation right now.

Wyoming, the country's ninth largest and least populated state, has only six strip clubs. Not the least, by far: Montana has five, Vermont two, and New Hampshire only one. In Cheyenne, you've got two choices. There's the Green Door on Lincolnway, which is a tiny joint tucked in the back of a drive-through liquor mart. The sign atop of the building is missing a few letters, "daners 8-2 am" it reads on one side, on the other, "dars 8-2." Inside there's a smoky pool room where you can shoot a few, and in the barroom is a small, square linoleum platform tucked in a mirrored corner where the girls dance. They punch up their songs on the jukebox before they get onstage, and the men lean forward, creaking in their wooden chairs, dollar tips between their teeth. A fun place, but not tonight.

We're going to the Clown's Den. Astride our Harley, we're headed southbound at a blatting, gravel-spitting forty miles an hour. We pass a handful of stripmalls, a flea market in a building shaped like a teepee, the VFW hall with bingo three nights a week, Big Country Estates trailer park, and a stock car track. In the opposite lane, livestock trucks carry sheep and cattle up from the feedlots in Greeley. We leave city limits and ratchet up to a world-blurring seventy-five. In the evening sun, the plains are golden fire.

The wind is raking my hair straight back, and I'm afraid my fall is about to fly right off. Two hundred dollars' worth of fake hair blowing down South Greeley Highway like a bleach-blonde tumble-weed? I don't think so.

I scream toward Randy's ear, "You've gotta pull over!"

He slows the bike and stops on the shoulder. A semi hauling sheep roars past. Little muzzles poke out of the air holes in the cargo trailer.

I bend at the waist and unhitch the combs that hold the fall to my scalp. A hank of my own hair has tangled into a series of knots around the crown, making it hard to pull the fall free of my head. I tug, tearing the blasted thing off, and a good bit of my real hair, too.

A pronghorn buck looks on from behind a fence. Curious by nature, antelope won't scatter like deer when they know you see them. He stands unmoving, his wide, dark eyes possessed of calm that a human couldn't hope to know.

"What are you staring at?" I call through the bent and rusting wires.

He lowers his black-antlered head and grazes on.

I roll up the fall and drop it in the studded leather saddlebag.

The Clown's Den squats eight miles south of town, in an odd sort of vice encampment situated right on the state line between Wyoming and Colorado. The club, a long and low roadhouse of dark logs, hunkers at the back of a gravel parking lot, with the club's name spelled out in spindly pink neon letters across the front. Behind the lot is a trailer home and a grocery that sells Colorado State Lottery tickets, and out in front is a fireworks store.

On a slow night, the Den is the most depressing thing you've ever seen. I've been in when no dancers showed up—none—and men sat along the tipping rail staring at an empty stage. I've seen nights when there weren't any customers, just dancers sitting in a row on a vinyl banquette along the wall—a party of only party dolls. But on a good night, it's the best. A circus.

Our friend Carmen slithers onstage, hips swiveling in sync with a heavy drum track. An ominous Germanic voice drones out Depeche Mode over the beats. An expert crowd-pleaser, Carmen plucks a man's cowboy hat from his head and squeezes it over her breasts so it stays put while she dances around. Another man stands close to slide a dollar under the side of her white velvet thong and she turns abruptly and hip checks him, to his great pleasure. She reaches down for a pitcher of beer that's next to the stage, and pulls an innocent-looking guy to his feet. His upturned face is pressed to her side. She steps over the tipping rail and pours the beer between her breasts, down her stomach and into the guy's mouth. He parts his lips to the sudsy flow as if it were manna from heaven.

Randy and I sit down at the tipping rail and order drinks. The girls come by and say hello. Here's Honey. Jessie. Monique. Pepper. Dee. The men smile to see me, a civilian female amidst the ranks. But I'm not the only woman in the crowd. At the far end of the tipping rail slouches a young, good-looking Mexican couple who are obviously deep in their cups—in front of them are several empty beer bottles, and a few dollars on the rail. With so many men vying for her attention, Carmen takes a while in getting to the two of them, slumped there at the end of the line. Finally, her second song over, Carmen kneels in front of the man, places the dollar bills between his teeth, and grabs them with her hands cupping her breasts.

Seeing this, the woman's lips all but disappear. Her pretty face hardens, her eyes go black as pitch, her chin pushes forth and her tongue works over her teeth with a hostile motion. When Carmen turns away and begins gathering up her bills, the woman says, quite loudly, "Aw, honey, I had no idea you liked them that cheap."

Everyone at the rail turns to her and stares. It was such a mean thing to say. Mean to her boyfriend, certainly, but meaner to the dancers. Meaner to us.

Her boyfriend doesn't know what to do—he tries to touch her arm but she jerks away. She grabs her purse and storms off to the ladies' room, her tall, sprayed bangs quivering with each angry step.

An old Allman Brothers song starts and Dee comes up to dance. Carmen heads back to stage two, unruffled, her tan skin glistening with sweat. She's twisted her crimped blonde hair up off of her neck to keep cool, and as she saunters through the club, she fans herself with her money. I think she rather enjoys getting a rise out of other women. I wish I could say the same for me. I feel like I've been socked right in the stomach.

I've become so expert at self-protection—deftly pruning disapproving people out of my life, avoiding humiliating scenes, monitoring my disclosure—that I forget how vulnerable I really am. How one thoughtless remark can cut me to the core. I could be smug, console myself with the notion that this woman is a small-minded prude and I'm not. That I am, in fact, the height of sophistication. But it wouldn't help. No matter what I tell myself—that she's probably just jealous, that I'm a bigger person than she is, that no one can make me feel bad unless I let them—that special brand of hatred will always hurt.

I look toward the ladies' room. She's in there, just on the other side of that wall. I could go in and say something to her. But what?

Did she come grudgingly at her boyfriend's behest? If so, I would tell her I give her credit for showing up. She can't be blamed for getting more than she bargained for.