Strip City: A Stripper's Farewell Journey Across America (18 page)

I drop down in front of him, knees together, and motion for him to come close. He leans over the bar, right up against the tipping rail, hands clasped under his chin like an altar boy.

Can't touch. Won't.

"Are you in the military?'' I ask over the breathless teenage chorus of my second song.

"Yes, ma'am.''

"Ma'am?" I tease, hands on my hips, feigning offense.

"Sorry. Officer's manners." His ears are turning red. "What gave me away?"

"You look so capable. That, and the haircut."

Kneeling now, I hold his gaze. I blink slowly. He blinks back, his lashes thick black fringe. Easy, girl. Nice deep breath. Go figure—here's this blue-collar Adonis looking at me like I hung the moon, and all I want to do is cover up and run. But I stay right where I am. What did the Pure Talent class manual say? "You have to fully understand why men come to a club to begin with … They want you to pay attention to them" I'm not looking away until I see that slow burning fire come up in his eyes. After giving him a shy, lingering "stripper you take home to meet Mom" look, I see it happen, the change I'm working for. A sign of life. His expression shifts from curious to grateful, something alit deep within. I want to shout for joy. I rise back up on my feet, savoring this feeling so rich and rare. I'm not thinking about money. Or rules. Or my body. Or the handsome man in front of me. For one small moment, I am naked and completely unafraid.

Dollars line the railing in front of every man at the meat rack No one is doing that laser-beam-on-the-cootch stare. I haven't yet seen any motions for me to "spread 'em." Not that every guy is a crotch-watcher, anyway. Randy's friend Todd, a well-intentioned, timid fella, went to a nudie club in Denver once and when a dancer dropped down in front of him to give him a big old gap shot, he was so embarrassed he just sat there staring into his beer. The girl got really offended and said, loud enough for everyone in the bar to hear,
"Well you could at least look at it!"

Randy walks up to the stage and tosses me a handful of bills. We're pretending we don't know each other, in case the manager gets uptight about boyfriends coming in while dancers work. I check his expression. Is he jealous? Freaking out? No, he's smiling. He fans himself like he's overheating. He rules.

When I get back on the floor to work the room for table dances, Randy comes up behind me, his breath humid warmth in my ear. "These men love you, baby."

"You think?" I say, reaching back to pull his arms around my waist. "Well, then, I guess it's tough noogies for them that I only love you."

That's true, too. It takes a certain kind of man to not only abide his stripper girl, but to celebrate her. They're rarer than one in a million. What he has to contend with: Knowing that foreign eyes are boring holes in his lover's body. Having to fight the "Hey, that's
mine!
" territorial reflex. My fatigue. Fear that some clown might hassle me in a way that I can't handle. The suggestion that no "real man" would "let" his woman do "that kind" of work.

Jesus, it's huge.

Not that Randy doesn't get jealous or territorial—anyone who's ever seen a guy try to talk to me when we're out together can testify to that. But he knows the customers aren't a significant threat—they're more marks than men in my professional estimation. And his attitude may change, his limits might shift. But for now, I trust that he'll love me when I'm onstage, and guard me like a pit bull when I'm off. I daresay he's got a bit of a crush on Barbie Faust—and Daisy, my persona du jour. I've never put up with a man who couldn't accept my decision to strip, but I never dreamed that I'd find someone who treats me with such admiration, protection, and honor.

I stand over my costume bag in the dressing room, deliberating over which dress to wear next. A heavily freckled dancer crouches in front of the open locker next to mine. As she shifts her weight, her white leather thigh-high boots creak. Her long chestnut hair gives off the strong, hot waft of gardenia. She smells like she's wilting.

I'm halfway into my pink polka-dot bikini when she pivots on her boot heels and starts talking to me. "Is that your man that you had your arms around downstairs?" Her braces are a twinkling accompaniment to her voice.

"Yep." I tie the triangle top behind my neck.

"It's cool you've got a man who supports you doing this."

"Why? Yours doesn't?" I peek inside her locker. There's a Sears portrait of her in a red blazer and skirt, holding a fat, grinning baby girl in her lap. Next to the photo is a purple glittered sticker that reads skinny little bitch.

"Oh, he likes the money just fine," she says with a derisive snort, "but other than that…" Her voice trails off. She shuts her locker door and spins the combination lock. "Anyway, you're lucky."

She's wrong.

I'm beyond lucky. I'm blessed.

…

My next night at the Bush Company, I'm up first in the rotation, just after the club opens at 4:30. There are only two men at the tipping rail, both young, and they don't look very impressed. As I walk offstage after my set, I hear one say to the other, "Oh, well. At least she has nice hair." (Ha! If he only knew!)

Did he think I wouldn't hear him?

In comedian Norm McDonald's "Weekend Update" segment on "Saturday Night Live," he reported in jest that a Virginia dancer stabbed a man for telling her she was too fat to strip.

In moments like this, I can see how that could happen.

There's no way to tell whether or not a customer is going to find me attractive. I can't tell by looking. Appearances aren't that instructive. I could analyze consumption patterns (body type, hair color, age, attitude) and figure averages (number of dances purchased, tip) but really, I've no set rule. All I know for certain is that the idea of "every man's fantasy" is a lie.

Later on, I'm leaning over the back of the booths just in front of the bar when I strike up a conversation with a Cadillac cowboy from Houston. He's just returned from one of those deep-sea-fishing expeditions where they promise you'll go home with a big fat fish on ice—a halibut or salmon—whether you caught it yourself or not.

We're making small talk, how long I've been up in Anchorage, how long I've been dancing, what I think of it.

He says, with clinical calm, as if he were sitting next to me while I'm lying on a couch and he's got a notepad balanced on his knee, "You must really get off on the power you have over men."

My jaw tightens. I'm well-acquainted with my pathologies. Well enough to have nicknames for them, so it's not his presumption of deficiency that rankles. It's more his delivery, like, if he can pin me on my power trip, get my fatal flaw down,
he'll
feel more powerful I hate that "I've got your number" crap. Does he really think that to know someone's pathologies is to know
them?

I want to flail my arms and yell, "I'm a self-loathing misanthrope with body dysmorphia, intimacy issues, borderline manic depression, and situational exhibitionist tendencies. If you're going to analyze me, you nosy creep, get it right!"

I can't blame anyone who tries to figure out this stripping thing—the dancers or the dance itself. Some maintain that deconstruction is an act of coldness, but I don't think so. I've never considered curiosity cold. Why not try to drill down to the bedrock? On the face of it, there's really nothing particularly compelling about a girl taking off her clothes to music so she can make some money. But there's something about the permission. And the imagination. A guy will never get the girl, but he'll shell out an entire paycheck's worth of singles for the suggestion that he might.

Around midnight, I'm standing next to Randy by the entrance. We've dropped our cover, and the doorman knows we're a couple. He even offered to help Randy find work should we choose to relocate to Anchorage. But we're not interested in pondering a move just this minute. We're rendered slack-jawed and stupid by the dancer onstage. She entered in corporate drag—short black skirt, fitted pinstripe jacket, hair up, glasses. All business. Then she slowly came undone, taking down her long, blonde hair, stripping out of her uptight clothes, piece by piece. Now she's nothing but lean, tan limbs and glory. For her last song, she rolls an inflatable kiddie pool onstage, steps into it nude, and begins soaping herself with a sponge. The music in the background is a spare, shameless track of a woman moaning over a bass line. The tempo slows and speeds up and slows down again—the pace of sex. And she's lathering herself and sliding around in the pool, head thrown back. She is the ultimate Hitchcock blonde—an ice queen with a smoldering core. Men can scarcely stop staring long enough to put bills on the rail. We're held captive as she turns her back to the audience and squeezes the sponge over her head. A perfect white rivulet of suds runs down the center of her back, and as if trained, splits at the small of her back and covers her buttocks. She bounces a little, and the motion of her butt muscles makes the bubbles quiver. No one in the room is breathing.

We watch this woman, entranced. There is nothing in the club that can compete with what's happening onstage. A bomb could drop in the parking lot and no one would move a muscle. She has single-handedly brought the entire audience to its knees, this common genius, this protean hottie. And here is the heart of striptease: You can analyze and deconstruct the act all you want—you will never totally demystify it. You can't break the spell. Nothing can fully explain why some people take to strip clubs—sometimes to the point of addiction, why some find the very idea offensive, and why others just don't get it and shrug. What I like best about stripping is this, the arbitrariness. The mystery. The fact that you can't definitively state what makes one woman stand out from the next. That some tiny part of every dancer's soul spills out when she performs, whether she means it to or not. That you can see a woman totally nude before you, and there's still so much about her that you don't, and can't, know. And that you can never predict that singular instance, like right now, when the world falls away and the only thing that matters is the light falling on the stage and the dancer unfurling herself against the music the way a singer wraps her breath around a note.

THIRTEEN

PJ's Showclub is in Spenard—a seedy neighborhood in southwest Anchorage that's full of auto body shops, cheap motels, and dive bars. PJ's is at the opposite end of the spectrum from the Bush Company: a humble hangout that takes all comers and dazzles none. Tourists, if they know about the place, tend to avoid it. But word rarely travels far about PJ's these days. It saw its heyday over twenty years ago when oil money and the Pipeline ushered in the state's second gold rush.

One gathers that money isn't so great at PJ's anymore. Customers are sparse, and one of the cocktail waitresses, a heavyset blonde with dark roots and scuffed white leather hi-top sneakers, wears a dress fashioned out of an oversize T-shirt that reads, in big black letters, WHAT PART OF
TIP
DON'T YOU UNDERSTAND?

Randy and I drop in there on one of my nights off from the Bush Company. On the wall across from the entrance hangs a dart-board and a list of several years' worth of Anchorage champion darts players. Tacked up about the bar are babes-in-bikinis alcohol posters. Neon beer signs color the smoke and dust in the air. We take seats at a cocktail table two rows back from the stage and a waitress comes over to take our drink order. She's an androgynous-looking woman, with silver-framed glasses and headful of long, wavy red hair that's flying off in several directions. A sexy mad scientist in a little black dress. She deals two napkins like a seasoned card sharp, collects our drink order, and zips off to fetch from the bar.

She look very familiar. I'm certain I've seen her before. But where? After she comes back with our drinks—a beer for Randy and the customary Diet Coke for me, I sit chewing on my straw for a while, and then it comes to me. "Hey," I say to Randy, "I think that's Pillow."

"Who?"

"Pillow! This bodybuilder lady who was helping out at Exotic World."

I had completely forgotten about her. We flag her down, and lo and behold, it is Pillow! This is a total coincidence—a happy accident.

Pillow is her real name, and she's worked at PJ's for twenty-one years. Growing up, she never had grandiose dreams of stripping, she just kind of, as she says, "slid into it sideways." She moved to San Francisco in 1975 after dropping out of high school in her native Santa Fe at the age of seventeen. One of the men she knew from the gay scene worked up on Broadway at a strip club called the El Cid. "He would make twenty bucks a night sitting in a booth for seven hours flipping switches. He ended up being less than responsible so I took over his job." Watching the four nightly acts go up while manning the switches, Pillow got the idea to strip. "The acts were making twenty-five dollars a night, so I thought,
hmm, I could make an extra five bucks a night, and I'd only have to get onstage for fifteen minutes out of every hour instead of working for seven hours straight."

An extra five dollars per night might not seem like much, even in those days, but to cash-strapped Pillow, any raise was better than none. "Back then," she says, "I was staying in a hotel up on Columbus Avenue in a room that was $125 a month. It had a sink with a plug in it, and the bathroom and pay phones were down the hall. I made coffee in a mayonnaise jar, using a paper towel attached with a rubber band over the mouth of the jar as a filter. We'd steal ice and make an ersatz fridge in the sink. My boyfriend used to get food stamps, so we'd pay the rent with them, shoplift our groceries, and what little money I got, he spent on booze. Because of hanging out with drag queens, I knew quite a bit about making costumes— how to set elastic, how to make a bra out of shoulder pads, etcetera. I used to shoplift lingerie from the Goodwill, then sew on beads and lace and sell the costumes."

Pillow's stint at the El Cid was cut short when management learned that she was underage. "I had a bad fake I.D. and my boss figured it out. I was horrified." Pillow reluctantly shuffled across the street to the Erotic Theater, a dingy porno house that had no liquor license, and therefore could employ women under twenty-one. "It was just awful," she recalls. "They would run movie loops and play reel-to-reel music in the background. The guy that worked behind the counter was the projectionist, the barker, and the bouncer. We'd sit on a stool in the window while the guy barked and enticed men to come in off the street to watch the movie. Once he gathered enough customers, he'd start the film. Toward the end of the reel, dancers had to go through the audience to hustle quarters: 'Hi, I'm going to be dancing, but I need some money for the jukebox.'

"The worst part was working the crowd to get private dances after the movie. They had this room in the back with a platform, which was a massage table with the legs cut in half and a carpeted top, and a bean bag chair for the customer to sit on. In 1976, it was thirty dollars for a half-hour show and fifty for the hour." These long and up-close shows were quite a switch from what Pillow was used to at the El Cid, where a girl took fifteen minutes to strip down to a g-string, and she had to be six feet away from the customer when she was topless.

Trying to successfully work the stage was a grave concern at the Erotic Theater, Pillow explains. "The Erotic Theater used to be a music club called the Barbary Coast and the stage was built to resemble a wooden ship, so there was this big sail sticking out from behind the corner of the screen, and this five-foot sloping polished wood stage. The boom of the sail stuck out so you had to be careful not to hit your head. I tried as best I could to dance," Pillow says, but she gave up soon enough. "That's when I discovered floor work."

Pillow tired of the Erotic Theater but given her age, her employment options were limited. Pillow pocketed her fake I.D. and checked out another club, an old burlesque house called the Follies on the corner of 16th Street and Mission. "They had one of those big marquees with all the letters falling off," Pillow recalls. "You know, when they have to turn a letter upside down to make another letter—and they had some gnarly old porno posters hanging up, and eight-by-tens in glitter-covered frames in the window.

"I show up for the audition, and this short, pudgy old guy who talked around the stub of a cigar between his teeth looks me up and down like a customer would look at a chicken in a butcher shop, 'Yeah, let me see whatcha got, kid.' I go in the dressing room and there's all these tired-looking strippers back there smoking cigarettes with their feet up, they've got fifty pounds of makeup on—big fake lashes, old-fashioned showgirl makeup.

"The old guy says, 'Pick out a song.' I hand him my reel-to-reel tape and he goes, 'No, no, no, pick out a song'—he wanted sheet music. So I had to pick something out of a fake book. I picked 'Hooray for Hollywood' because it was the only title I recognized. A man played it on a Wurlitzer while I performed. There was a couple of steps and a runway, and the surface was really uneven, plus, I wasn't wearing my glasses, so I'm up there wobbling around, and in my mind's eye I'm imagining all these old strippers rolling their eyes at this dumb, awkward kid with no tits. After I finish, I get down and the guy goes, 'Yeah, kid; come back when you got a better I.D. and I'll give you a job.' The guy knew I was underage all along, he just wanted to see me naked!"

The vulnerability that young Pillow felt because of her paucity of options became the ferment of her stubbornness today. Even though PJ's offers table dancing, Pillow abstains. While she will strip down to the buff onstage, she won't "show pink," i.e., expose her genitals. And she has special dispensation to excuse herself from the rotation of dancers, and instead has her own show times at 7, 9, 11, and 1 a.m. The rest of the time, she's cocktailing on the floor. "When I finally turned twenty-one and could work in a club where there were solid rules and a good stage, I vowed that I would never again stoop to the level of compromise that I had at the Erotic Theater," she says. "I would never let someone tell me that I had to do something I didn't want to do."

After turning twenty-one in 1977, she headed straight back to Broadway. She had a number of venues to choose from—the Hungry I, the Garden of Eden, the Off-Broadway. "I was one of the B-girls," she says, "as in Plan B." She even worked at the famous Condor Club, known for being the first topless place in the city, with Carol Doda performing sans brassiere atop a hydraulically-lifted piano. The same piano, incidentally, lifted all the way to the ceiling one night and fatally crushed club manager Jimmy "the Beard" Ferrozzo, who was having sex with a dancer on top of the piano at the time. The dancer lived, but she was pinned below her dead consort until they were discovered by the janitor the next morning. Pillow remembers the incident well. "I felt sorry for the poor girl who got stuck against the ceiling, naked, with that dead guy," she says. "But he was an asshole, Talk about karma!"

After the Condor, Pillow headed down Broadway to the Hungry I, a nightclub-turned-strip joint where Lenny Bruce polished his act in the fifties. "I worked the love act at the Hungry I with my friend Max. It was just stylized moves that mimicked sex, nothing graphic. Max was short and had a bad back so we couldn't do any lifts—you know, where the guy picks up the girl and spins her around, so we got into character acting and props.

"Our favorite routine was our
Star Wars
act. In 1977
Star Wars
was brand-new. I was Princess Leia with buns bobby-pinned to my ears that I'd made out of hairpieces, and he was Darth Vader. We had a robot that we made out of a fifty-gallon drum put on casters, and Max had this homemade Darth Vader costume—a big cape, footless tights, and a homemade light saber.

"We would play variations of the
Star Wars
theme, and I wore a g-string that had MAY THE FORCE BE WITH YOU embroidered on it in little tiny letters. Max would take his Darth Vader helmet off to this heavy-breathing sound effect and act like he was using the Force to make me strip, that I was being 'Forced' to do it. When he took off his helmet, he had one of those leather bondage hoods underneath so you couldn't see his face. Well, one night, the deejay started our music but we weren't ready. I had to keep my head cocked to one side because one of my buns was falling off, and he didn't have time to tighten the strings on the back of his hood, so it moved and his eyeholes slid over making him totally blind. Since he couldn't breathe or see, he's missing all his marks. I hear this Mmph! Mmph!, and I realize he's almost going off the stage! So I grabbed the edge of his cape, pulled him back, and we had to jerry-rig the rest of the act."

Around PJ's, there are hollers for more beer. Pillow excuses herself and takes off to tend to her rounds. I look over to see how Randy is doing. He nods that he's okay. Last night after we left the Bush Company we had a terrible fight. A dancer who didn't know he was my boyfriend started flirting with him, which pissed me off. Then I spent a lot of time talking with a customer for free, which made Randy furious. We sat in the car at a drive-through shrieking at each other: "I swear to God I almost pushed that girl down the stairs. You could've told her right away you were with me!"; "If you're not making money off of a guy, I don't want you sitting with him!" and on and on. We got so involved in our fight that we didn't even notice that Randy had missed the drive-through squawk box entirely and instead recited our order into a garbage can. We definitely needed this night off at PJ's. I look at him and mouth the words
garbage can
, and he cracks right up.

A dancer wearing square-toed engineer boots clomps onto the stage—she looks like a backstreet Bette Midler. After stripping out of her black halter top and denim cut-offs, she perches indifferently on a chair, spreading her legs to the near-empty room. That's a hell of a note—sitting on a stage, showing your cunt to the world, and no one gives a damn. Not so much as a dollar. There's no deejay, so girls don't get an introduction before they dance. You have no idea what their names are, and the CD player tends to skip, so the dancers have to hoist themselves up from the stage, duck back behind the curtain, and give the stereo a whack.

Still, a thirty-five-year-old gal who has recently started dancing again to help her college-bound daughter pay for school tells me, "We're like a family here." I don't doubt it. All the girls collect a paycheck, the minimum wage going a ways to ease any competition. And there doesn't seem to be any dressing room diva attitude, either. Perhaps the girls just don't think it's worth the bother.

Pillow wound up in Anchorage by chance. In 1978, a recruiter from an Alaskan club came into the El Cid. He handed her a business card, then told her about Alaska over dinner. Pillow liked what she heard so she said, "Sounds good. Get me out of here."

"I flew up to Anchorage and worked one night at this club downtown called the Embers, then later at the Wild Cherry," she says. But Alaska wasn't the Shangri-la the recruiter had promised. "I'd talked to a bunch of the other girls who'd come up from Timbuktu on a one-way ticket and had to stay at least as long as it took to make the money to go back home.

"The downtown clubs were just terrible. The girls were disgusting, squatting down and showing themselves. There was a girl at the Embers who shot a hard-boiled egg out of her pussy. You had to sell champagne and drink with the guys and they'd try to grab you."

Her friend and mentor from San Francisco, Brandy, was also working up in Alaska, so Pillow called around to all the clubs until she found her at PJ's. "Brandy sent a couple biker friends of hers after me. These two great big scary-looking, long-haired bikers walk into the Wild Cherry shouting, 'Who's Pillow?'

"And I'm like, 'Uh, me...?'

"They go, 'Where's your stuff?'

"I kind of pointed to the dressing room area behind the bar and they barged right in. The staff is yelling, 'You can't go in there,' and the bikers just give them this look like, 'What, you're going to stop us?'

"One of them tossed my trunk up onto his shoulder like it was nothing. They said, 'You're coming with us!', and I'm like, 'Oh, shit.' Then they finally told me, 'Brandy sent us.'"

Pillow walked into PJ's and saw that it was a clean club. "On amateur night, girls would come from clubs all around the city. If a girl bent over when she was bottomless, the MC would hold his hat over her snatch, and say, 'If you wanna do that, girlie, you can pick up your paycheck downtown,' or something like that. Either that, or the light and sound man would turn off the lights." Pillow asked for an audition. She was hired right away and has been working there since that night twenty-one years ago.