Strip City: A Stripper's Farewell Journey Across America (22 page)

I can't lie—they cut me a lot of slack and treat me well. I have no idea why, as I am not one of their top girls. But still, for all the breaks I get, I'm just as afraid of getting pink-slipped as any other dancer.

When management asks the dancers to come up with last names to heighten our starlet appeal, I tell them to bill me as "Lily Burana," right out there. Here I am! Unashamed! Sex positive and proud! I had known the shelter of my own hard exterior at Peepland, and the shelter of sisterhood and managerial support at the Lusty. But this is the first time in the sex industry that I have known the shelter of status—and my own considerable hubris. For the first time, I start working without a wig. I don't have to hide anymore. I walk into the theater without a disguise. I figure, if someone thinks I'm a tramp, they know I'm a tramp of a certain pedigree.

Somewhere along the way, the nimbus of sexual fairy dust that hangs over San Francisco condenses into a stifling fog of political correctness. What began as a push for affirmation of alternative lifestyles morphs into an unspoken rule that you can never criticize any sexual minority, ever. And I am leading the charge. When I publish a fanzine created by and about people in the adult business, I write in the editorial, "There is absolutely nothing wrong with sex work except society's hypocritical attitude toward it." Sanctimony and condemnation are the bane of my existence, and I am ever poised to take on any offenders, wielding the damning term "sex negative" like a circus knife thrower. Dare to impugn dancing? On my watch? Taste the blade, sucker! I am quick to stress that stripping is legitimate work. Hard work. Undervalued work. And woe to the person who suggests that a stripper can't be a feminist. What is feminism about if not exercising your options? My body, my choice. Inwardly, my ambivalence about the work has deepened; however, my facade is becoming smoother and more politically astute, more vocal. My showmanship is improving on every level.

I have my financial safety net, and I'm starting to earn money as a writer, but there are other areas of instability cropping up. My self-worth continues to fluctuate based on how much money I make each night, on how many shifts I am granted per month. I am getting older (twenty-four!) in a business where aging is treated like a federal offense. For someone who considers herself a rebel, I sure seem to be living by the numbers.

Eventually, I tire of being braced against everything. Dancing was supposed to be a day job, but it has come to occupy an unreasonably large part of my life. Am I a sexually sophisticated feminist warrior woman, I wonder, or just another coasting 'ho? Like a spreading stain, the paranoia and hyper-vigilance I feel at work seep into my off hours—I try in vain to ward them off by intoning, "I am not my body, I am not my job." I can never relax.

I worry that I am developing stripper damage.

Stripper damage isn't something quantifiable. It's a state of being. In this job, there is no neutral territory. No repose. It's chaos.

You're managing the chaos, you're in control. Then, suddenly one day at work, you're not. That invisible thread that keeps you together just snaps and shit's flying everywhere.

Exhaustion. Men in the club sucking the life out of you and women outside the club sneering at you and bitchy management and bitchy coworkers and you feel fat and old and insignificant. And then the inner monologue begins…

…If this is all I'm good for, then what good is my life? How much time do I have left, anyway? You'd think that for all I go through I'd make more money, but what if I can't ever find a job that'll pay me more than this?

I am my body. This amazing machine, fierce with life, made up of eighty-five cents worth of chemicals (okay, a buck twenty-five, adjusted for inflation), capable of the miracles of pleasure and creation, is a money machine. Tens, twenties, fifties, hundreds. In the abstract, I am worth more than the sum of my parts, but marketing them as I have, my parts seem to be worth a lot more than the Magical Miraculous Total Me.

A boob lift. That's what I need. Yeah, that's it—a concentric mastophxy with aureola reduction and symmetrical realignment. Lipo. Eye job. Collagen. Botox. Chemical peel. Better living through surgery, right?

And the motherfuckers know when you're out of it, too. You're radiating frailty and hate like the rays of a malignant sun and you can't make a goddamn dime.

Would you like company?

Wouldyoulikecompany?

I said, would you LIKE COMPANY?

I SAID WOULD YOU LIKE COMPANY?!

Now you're crying in the dressing room, girls putting their arms around you, patting you, daubing at the eyeliner that's run down to your chin.

It'll be okay.

It's okay.

No,
you're really sobbing now,
it's not fucking okay.

Then you're out on the floor looking at the pretty new girls through eyes narrowed to slits, thinking, "Oh, just you wait." Then you're canceling shifts, lying in bed all day watching movies and eating Mallomars. Better living through glucose.

I said if it really got to me, I'd quit, but now I can't quit So now what? Hang on here till I'm kicked to the curb, then work my way down to the shittiest club in town? And after that, then what? I don't even want to go there.

The promise you made to yourself when you started that you'd work the business and not let the business work you seems like a joke now.

But you gotta do something, you just have to, because you've seen the girls with serious stripper damage and you don't want to end up like that. That permanently shell-shocked look. That inability to de-dramatize and get life on track. Another surgery every few months, a different hair color. Crazy boyfriend or girlfriend yelling or whining or hitting or cutting down and spending all the money. A life small as a mouse/insect/penny and self-hatred wide and deep as the sea.

Now, you ask yourself, how is this worth it?

You say, I should get out. Yes, I'll get out.

Then you think, maybe I just need a vacation.

I think I'll go to Hawaii.

I heard there's some good clubs there.

I can make the trip pay for itself.

I am about to turn twenty-five and I am helplessly addicted to
Dynasty
reruns. Every night I come home from Mitchell Brothers just in time to watch the show at 1 a.m. After dropping my costume bag on the bedroom floor, I retire to the living room and lie in front of the television on a folded-up blanket doing leg lifts while Krystle and Alexis battle each other against their luxurious Denver backdrop. Roaches crawl out from under the futon and skitter over and around my legs, but I flick them off and keep going. Lift, and hold. Lift, and hold.

In one episode, Alexis storms into Krystle's office in a perfumed snit. Wearing a chinchilla coat and matching toque, she leans over Krystle's desk and sneers an ominous threat into Krystle's quivering face. The hat, squat and ludicrous with its bulbous gray pelts, sits on Alexis's head at such an assertive angle, one gets the impression that the hat—not the woman—is backing Krystle into the corner. In another episode, after Alexis bankrupts her ex-husband, Blake, by masterminding a hostile takeover of his company, she buys the house in which Krystle and Blake live. In a turf-marking display, she stands on the staircase and begins throwing their possessions into the atrium hallway below. A crystal fox coat goes sailing over the balcony.

I believe the
Dynasty
reruns gave me the idea that the best twenty-fifth birthday present I could give myself would be a fur coat.

Ruth is one of San Francisco's middleweight madams. Not the kind who sets up girls on clandestine penthouse trysts with a movie producer or flies them off to Nice to meet a shipping magnate. Rather, she's the executor of connections between willing and able-bodied—if not scrupulously discriminating—young women, and attorneys, accountants, and dentists seeking reprieve from their stressful, lonely jobs, or the tedium of family life in Orinda. I guess her business falls under the rubric of "high-class escort service" but when the popular image of prostitution is streetwalking, what can't be classified as high-class by comparison? Of the few girls I know who do outcall, none of them can stand working for her, as she is notoriously petty, not particularly rigorous in screening her clients, and really more interested in volume than anything else. They'd rather work off referrals or run ads in the local adult paper and set up their own appointments. "If you need a lot of low-paying work in a hurry," they say, rolling their eyes, "you go to Ruth." But they do admit she is a very good shopping connection, and so when the issue of the fur coat came up, one of them made a phone call for me.

I call Ruth myself the day before my birthday and tell her that I'm so-and-so's friend, the one interested in getting a fur coat.

"Yes, of course," she says, "I was expecting your call." I hear a little girl's high, thready voice in the background. Ruth muffles the receiver with her hand but I can just make out her saying, "Quiet, Emily. Mommy's on the phone." There's the slight suctiony sound of her taking her hand off the mouthpiece. "I'm sorry," she says to me, "I have two daughters at home and the youngest is eight, and well, you know how it is. Anyway, why don't you come over tomorrow at two o'clock and we'll go to the Gift Center to look at some coats." She gives me the address and we hang up.

The next afternoon, I take the N Judah train from Van Ness station to her house in Cole Valley. I arrive just as a dark green Honda station wagon is pulling into the drive.

A slender, middle-aged woman gets out of the car. She's dressed in a baby-blue sweat suit and white Keds, and has big, red hair, like a post-Gilligan's Island Tina Louise. Or Stefanie Powers. A large pair of black sunglasses practically obscures her entire face. A small girl with the same brilliant red hair pulled back in gaily colored animal-shaped barrettes gets out of the passenger side. She must be Ruth's younger daughter.

"Are you Lily?" the woman asks, juggling McDonald's take-out bags and soda in either hand.

"I am. Are you Ruth?" I ask. Duh. Who else would she be? I'm a little nervous. I think I'm about to see the inside of a brothel. I stand there staring, shielding my eyes from the sun shining behind Ruth, illuminating her like a saint in a portrait.

The young girl comes around to her mother's side. Ruth hands her the bags and drinks and shoos her inside.

"Come in for a minute, okay?" Ruth says to me, heading up a red brick staircase that leads to an enclosed porch built over the garage. "I need to pack up my furs. I want to take them with so I can have them appraised."

Ruth's house is a gracious two-story Edwardian done up in advanced shabby chic. Baking smells waft through the rooms. Wild-flower arrangements set in steel buckets sit on every table in the living room, and the overstuffed couch is a beautiful moss green paisley velvet. French doors separate the living room from the porch, which has been transformed into a Jacuzzi room. An extremely thin woman with long blonde corkscrew curls, twenty-ish, I think, is getting dressed beside the hot tub. Some thin women seem deprived and ravaged, but she looks futuristically sleek, like she was compressed for efficiency. She buttons up her fitted burgundy suit jacket, straightens her miniskirt, and slips her bare feet into a pair of expensive-looking black leather pumps with delicate heels. She balls up a wet silver maillot in a towel and walks through the living room and into the kitchen where I'm sitting at the table with another girl, also in a suit, who has introduced herself as "Alyssa from Maryland." Alyssa's heart-shaped face is framed in a lank, blonde pageboy tucked behind her ears, and her small chin comes to a shy point. She is eating a bowl of macaroni and cheese made from a box. As Ruth busies herself in the living room closet, Alyssa from Maryland tells her about her new boyfriend. "… And the best thing about it," she says, tipping up her little chin with pride, "is he's Jewish, too."

The long-haired blonde opens the oven door, looks inside, and inhales deeply. "Almost cookie time!" she says in a voice that surprises the hell out of me. This glossy creature has the raspy croak of a carnival barker. She closes the oven and sits down at the head of the table. "Hi," she honks, thrusting her hand forth, "I'm Elissa. Not that Alyssa," she says, pointing to Alyssa from Maryland, "I'm Elissa from Florida."

I shake her hand, not too hard. Her bony knuckles feel very fragile.

Ruth's voice singsongs into the kitchen. "Elissa, your wet bathing suit had better not be on my nineteenth-century farm table, dear!"

Elissa sweeps the damp bath towel ball under the table and whispers to me, "She's such a witch about her furniture. Once I left a glass on a nightstand without a coaster under it and she swore she'd make me pay for the refinishing."

I make some sympathetic noises, then I say, "I like your suit."

In her call girl chronicles, my friend and fellow Lusty alum Carol Queen writes, "A good hooker dresses up, not down." I imagined that meant evening gowns, but no, she goes on to explain, it means looking like an executive secretary. How boring! It's bad enough having to wear a suit to work in an office. Who'd want to wear a suit to work as a prostitute? I mean, if you're going to do it, you might as well go all out and do hooker-luxe. I'd rather work in the realm of the over-the-top elite escorts, sitting with a client at Le Domé in an Azzedine Alai'a dress, fashioning my lipsticked mouth into a pout because I wanted a
princess
-cut diamond, not an
emerald
-cut.

Of course it's ridiculous for me to even consider what kind of call girl I'd prefer being. I've already established several times over that I'd be a complete failure in any adult trade besides stripping. I've tried various other gigs—from pinup girl, which wasn't too bad, to a two-week stint as a professional dominatrix in Manhattan, which was a disaster. I should've known pro domination was beyond my ken— I've always been touchy about the commercial nexus between sex and therapy. I don't have the stuff to make a living mucking around in someone's psychosexual ooze. The majority of the clients at the dom house were either Catholics or Hasidic Jews and I really couldn't cope with watching them thrash around so violently within their guilt. I felt the sting of their shame as acutely as a wound in my own flesh. I'd dutifully wield whip, crop, cane, and quirt, unsure whether I was helping the men exorcise their demons, or exercise them. When they'd leave as rumpled and stooped-over as they'd come in, I didn't feel that my ministrations were aiding them in any meaningful way. Quite the opposite, actually.