Strip City: A Stripper's Farewell Journey Across America (20 page)

The shifts are thankfully short, only three-and-a-half to six hours. For ten minutes out of every hour, I am allowed a break. I lounge in the dressing room and drink tea, or chat with the show directors about what the Lusty was like when they were dancers. Kelly's stage name was Attila the Honey.

In her book,
The Lusty Lady
, photojournalist Erika Langley, who documented her years dancing at the Lusty's sister operation in Seattle, writes, "The Lusty Lady doesn't look like a comforting place, a place to find yourself or harness your power. It looks like a peep show, a funk-scented, creepy-dark hallway where men wait to stand in a booth, feed quarters, and watch naked dancers behind glass." But she found, as I found, that it if a comforting place, and that the finding of self and harnessing of power are pursuits that the Lusty could foster.

Because customers can't tell the dancers what to do, we learn a little something about controlling our sexuality. At no point is a customer allowed to point, beckon, or issue demands, which seems like a trivial detail, but isn't. When a guy taps on the glass, we tell him, "Cut it out, you aren't the boss here. We are!" or "Don't knock on the window, it scares the fish." Repeat offenders are asked to leave.

I love this aspect of working at the Lusty. I can be discriminating in who I perform for. I can walk away from a window whenever I want. And I can play. For the first time. If I didn't have anyone telling me what to do, and it were up to me, what kind of sexual role would I adopt? As long as my breasts and crotch are showing, costuming is up for grabs. I wear severe, thigh-high black suede boots and elbow-length black gloves. Plaid schoolgirl skirts. Lace corsets trimmed in maribou. And always the big red wig, which I don each day like a piece of armor. The ring through my upper lip goes over like a lead balloon with the management ("Tawdry, that looks awful," Kelly told me in the office, when the piercing was brand new and an ugly, angry red) but otherwise, my experiments are appreciated and encouraged. To be treated as if my sexual self-expression is important and unique makes a profound impression on me.

Dancing together, naked, side-by-side onstage, we Lusties grow very aware of the individual beauty of our bodies. Not having to compete with one another for tips, we become friends. We become agents of our own path. And, since we never have to hustle to make our money, we are never humbled by the word
no.

For me, living in San Francisco is like attending a sex and gender institute, or an esoteric college. I am confronted with new ideas every day, with different ways of integrating politics and desire. I had always lived uncomfortably with the notion that making sex a significant area of inquiry meant you were a bimbo, a head case, or a person with no better bargaining chip. The implication was that a woman had to choose between her sexuality and her credibility—you couldn't have both. But this is San Francisco in the early 1990s and radical sex activists are challenging every assumption with unprecedented wit and style. What a fucking blast! I feast on the works of the local talent: Susie Bright. Gayle Rubin. Pat Califia. Geoff Mains. These are people struggling to save sex. Like every woman in this country, I came of age sexually bent under the weight of guilt and judgment. My sexuality was something I knew how to use for financial advantage, but enjoying it to the fullest was a foreign concept. I gave a lot of lip service to autonomy, but I had no idea how to attain it, really. By reading these authors I feel like I am learning to walk upright.

Every so often I call my former roommate Deb in New York to tell her what a great time I'm having, like the school geek calling home to report to Mom that she's become the princess of summer camp. "Wow, sounds like you've really found a home for yourself!" she says, approvingly.

These are the dawning days of sex-positive feminism—when the notion of female desire is being reevaluated and affirmed—and at the Lusty Lady, we snap up the idea of women's erotic empowerment and work it like a reflex. Unlike the sexually repressive, reactionary timbre of feminism's earlier era, this is a halcyon period of expansion. Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin are dismissed as helplessly retro while Camille Paglia, the last of the Great American romantics, tosses verbal bouquets to strippers from her post in the Ivory Tower. We Lusties aren't sleazy, anti-feminist sellouts, we assure ourselves, we are gender warriors, reestablishing the parameters of enlightened female behavior. Spreading our legs for the men dropping quarters and thrusting out our breasts behind the peep-show glass, we are naked and militant. We are pretentious and sweet. We are, in our way, deliciously naive—all impudent struts, cogent analyses, and queer shoulders to the wheel.

While it has certain humane attributes, the Lusty Lady is no Utopia. I have to punch a clock at the beginning and end of every shift. The pay starts at eight dollars an hour and, after dollar-an-hour raises every two weeks if dancers are on time and comply with all the rules, maxes out at twenty-two dollars. You can make more if you work in the one-on-one Private Pleasures booth, but the house takes fifty percent of your tips. The theater opens at 9 a.m., so if you get the early shift, you have to be onstage, naked, and pretending to have fun, at an hour when most working folk are yawning at the office coffee maker. Talking among dancers onstage is forbidden. The days of combat boots and buzz cuts are over. There is some latitude allowed in appearance, but the show directors want you to look as conventionally pretty as possible—you get sidelined for being too heavy or having too many piercings or tattoos. Only one dancer at a time is allowed to wear black onstage. Freaky hair like dreads or unusual colors has to be covered by a wig. If too many girls shave off all their pubic hair, word comes from on high to start growing it back.

And the place stinks—I mean, stinks—of mildewing carpet, ammonia, cleaning solution, dirty wigs, and sperm.

Then there's the parade of dicks. In the corner booths, they are clearly visible. You see so many ejaculations it's like a bad porn film,
Onan's Revenge.
Plus, men flicking their tongues, making the treading-water motion that means "spread your legs," putting scraps of paper with a dollar amount scribbled on it against the window. Men who look at you like you're a foreign object and men who drop a quarter to see you and then don't drop in any more, leaving you to feel like a repulsive hag.

In my mind, the customers exist more as a lurking, spewing visual distraction than as individuals. Some dancers make an effort to talk through the glass and get acquainted with the men, but to me they're a bunch of sexual components: demeanor, size, preference, gesture, potency, frequency. I do have a clear favorite, or I should say, there's one that I actually like. His name is David and he is perfect. Physically perfect. Big, white picket teeth, washboard abs, slender waist, and a thick shock of brown hair hanging in his bright blue eyes. He comes into the corner booth, takes off every stitch of clothing, and makes himself totally happy. I look at him and marvel, Why would somebody that cheerful and handsome come to a place like this? How could somebody be that horny, all the time? When he is about to leave the booth, he always says, "Tawdry, if you ever get lonely, call me!" I ask him what he does for a living and he says he can't tell me. What could it be? Model? Actor? Software developer? Trophy husband?

Every now and then David brings in a girlfriend. I've seen a few women in the booths with their boyfriends, looking scared and ill at ease, mouths shrunken into tense circlets. It was obvious who came up with the idea to come in. But not David's girls. They sit pressed up next to him, smiling, waving hi. Then hand goes to fly and they start doing something that leaves me totally scandalized.

Lusty customers love to show off. Businessmen cruise each other in the hallway and enter the booths in pairs to give each other blow jobs (customers are only allowed one to a booth, but if they're giving us a performance, we let them bend the rules). There is a guy who can suck his own cock. Another can stick his fist up his ass. The customers at Peepland struck me as wounded and retarded by their own desires, but here, I am shocked at this steady stream of perfectly chipper, seemingly well-adjusted people who cannot wait to have sex standing up, or masturbate wearing rubber dishwashing gloves, or squeeze out their wife's breast milk all over the window. It is as if by looking through that thin pane of Plexiglas I can see into the happy, perverted secret heart of America.

Minx Manx, the peep show persona of my friend Carol Queen, loves the Private Pleasures booth—
loves
it. The booth is at the end of the hallway opposite the stage, with private pleasures spelled out in cursive pink neon over a curtained window. A dancer opens the drape and sits in the window looking comely, in hopes of attracting customers who want a private show. The booth is a carpeted four-by-four perch filled with throw pillows to lounge on. The customers side is a linoleum-floored stall with a bench and a money slot in the wall. When money gets dropped in the slot—five dollars for three minutes, tips on top for specific acts—the dancer hits a counter on the wall that starts the timer and the intercom so the dancer and customer can negotiate whatever show he wants to buy.

Carol, and her alter-ego Minx, is the whore with the heart of gold and the brain of Krafft-Ebing, so she is thrilled to spelunk in the erotic depths, talking dirty, doing dildo shows, and being a perfect audience for her customers' antics. Because she is so sympathetic to sexual quirks, she attracts the kinkier guys—one who inserts a dildo almost the size of a fireplug up his butt, another who asks her to read a particular bit of scripture while he masturbates. They flock to her, our Saint Francis of Lusty. Even though I could never be that patient with an endless procession of sexual idiosyncrasies, I am deeply impressed by the fact that she can. Where she sees it as a grand adventure and a turn-on, I see it as a tax on my emotional health. Too much, too close. I'm not judgmental. If it's consensual, I honestly don't mind whatever your brand of perversion is. I just don't necessarily want to facilitate. Private Pleasures is too much like Peepland for me, and I don't welcome any reminder of the place.

Dancing at the Lusty Lady is a contradictory experience. While you're encouraged to express yourself, that expression is limited to the "shiny happy" variety. And on one hand, in the process of showing your body to strangers for money, you learn that your sexuality is priceless and uniquely your own. On the other, your precious sexuality must be expressed within the confines of acceptable age, size, shape, and style. Despite being a great draw in Private Pleasures, Minx is let go for accidentally missing a shift when she'd taken another job. Bottom line: The Lusty Lady is a tightly run business. Making money for the owners is the mission objective, and a small paycheck is your reward for helping achieve that end. Anything beyond that is a perk.

Being impolite to the customers is a punishable offense, but sometimes we're rude anyway, especially on those tedious late shifts when our feet hurt and we long to trade our pinchy heels and smelly wigs for pajamas. One night, around twelve-thirty or so, a heavily tattooed dancer named Maya sashays over to a booth where a man stands beating himself with a studded belt. As she turns to wag her high, mulishly strong rump in his window, she says, "Somebody's got some childhood trauma he needs to act out!" A comment that strikes me as rich, coming from a stripper.

For all the ups and downs, I like being at the Lusty—dancing in that sweaty, red-carpeted mirror box that smells like girl. Sometimes I get tired, feel ugly, exposed, burdened, bored, or annoyed, but often, when I'm surrounded by all these smart, aware, sexual women— young, fierce, and fighting back—I'm delirious with joy. That happy fireworks feeling.

Somewhere in this festival of personal growth, I decide to tell my parents how I have been supporting myself. I am afraid to tell them, terrified really, but I'm also quite enamored of the novelty of Not Hiding. Doesn't every San Franciscan long to come out about something?

This isn't going to be easy. My family is not emotionally well equipped for surprise revelations. When I think about our reticence, I see myself lit by a glaring spot on a stage in a pitch-black comedy club, pacing with a mike in one hand and gesticulating wildly with the other, saying, "I wouldn't say my family is repressed, but…" The joke doesn't have an ending, but it illustrates my knowledge that the repression is so extreme as to be comical. Or sad, depending. When I was a teenager, my mother confided in me that she hadn't cried since 1978, when my father had a heart attack.

Because we are, at the core, shy and rather reserved people, we tend to spring important things on each other in the car. That way there's no eye contact or sudden movements. Or means of escape. I employ this tactic when I tell my mother about the Lusty Lady after she picks me up at the train station during my first visit home after moving to California. Thanks to the blessing of selective memory I am unable to recall exactly what she said when I told her, but I distinctly remember her knuckles turning an alarming white as she gripped the steering wheel. She didn't yell. She did not cry. I didn't expect her to. We're WASP, we don't do hysteria. I try to imagine her thought process at the time: After the initial shock wears off, she thinks to herself, How did it come to this? Where did we go wrong? Well, she's not a drug dealer. She is not a prostitute. She is a smart person, but why, why…? I feel her trying to temper pain with logic. What hurt her more—the truth or my keeping it from her? I want her to know, want her to be fully in my life, but to lay this on her leaves me seized with "rotten kid" remorse.

I suppose I decided to tell her now because the Lusty Lady seems relatively harmless—if she's to find out I'm a stripper, better I should be working at a politically progressive place. I have been operating under the assumption that honesty is the best policy, but when I see my mother's face, I wonder: What good am I doing by telling her this? Now I'm embarrassed and she feels like a failure—to say nothing about how she feels about me. Declaring your sexual independence to the world is one thing. Doing so to your mom is quite another.