Strip City: A Stripper's Farewell Journey Across America (24 page)

She never says anything within earshot after that.

That's the worst of the aggro. There's a lot of hissing behind my back, but no confrontations. Neither Jim Mitchell nor any managers get in my face. I don't receive any threatening phone calls, disturbing mail, or unwelcome visits at home. Jennifer is always a source of tremendous strength, our attorney Beth, and her new partner on the case, Lynn Rossman Faris, work doggedly on our behalf, and despite all the pressure to oppose the suit, the number of named plaintiffs grows from two to nine.

I never adjust to the fact that what was initiated in hopes of advancing the status of dancers is viewed by some as a setback. Objectively, I know it's not my fault, but still I feel terrible that everything got turned around and crazy. Disappointment crabs me and makes my heart heavy. I open the paper and wince to read an article in which a dancer derides the lawsuit, declaring, "We love our daddy, Jim Mitchell."

Daddy? Come on!

Well, there
is
something of a family dynamic at play in every club at which I've worked long term. Nothing unifies like a shared arena of misbehavior. Cast out from the larger "family" of the straight world, we band together and seek support in one another. And any comment or action that suggests that the newfound family might be dysfunctional is met with squinty eyes and sharp tongues. How dare you?

How dare we, indeed.

Now I'm one of the family's bad seeds, which hurts. Throughout my three years at Mitchell Brothers, no matter how intense it got, no matter how fried, aggravated, or scared I was, I could count on the other women. I never felt that the sex industry was my family (please!), but the women with whom I worked were my tribe—and now I have been banished. I begin having terrible nightmares in which I stumble into the dressing room with a knife between my ribs and none of the dancers moves to help me. There were many things I'd hoped to accomplish with this lawsuit—developing a martyr complex was not among them.

In addition to dancing at the theater and pursuing the lawsuit, I take a job editing a small local magazine, a job I am neither good at nor particularly interested in. But it gives me a focus away from the O'Farrell drama, as well as a means of supporting myself that doesn't involve nudity. I'm stressed to the gills, yet pressing forth. After several weeks of being knocked off-balance, I am regaining some equilibrium. But oh, those nightmares …

Support for the lawsuit comes in fits and starts. Some dancers make it clear that while they appreciate our efforts, they can't work up the steam to get mad about the stage fees or lack of rightful employee status. They are making good enough money, they feel, and if forking out fees and forgoing benefits is the price they have to pay, literally, then so be it. Others cheer us on, but make useful mention that some of the opposition may be a reaction to our militant tone—a point well taken. We're aren't experienced activists. We have the strength of our convictions but not much finesse.

But we feel we are in the right, so we don't give up. And ultimately we prevail. We settle with the theater in the summer of 1998. From start to finish, the whole process takes over four years. In that time, I move from San Francisco to New York to Wyoming, Jennifer moves on to a dot-com job in Silicon Valley, and our attorney Beth gives birth to two children. As part of the settlement agreement, the theater agrees to make payment for the back stage fees and missed wages of over six hundred former and current dancers still in the class, 2.85 million dollars' worth. And while they don't have to admit any wrongdoing, they are legally required to classify the dancers as employees.

When I look back at this long, drawn-out resolution to the San Francisco years, I feel world-weary, inspired, but mostly extremely glad that chapter has closed.

Now as I travel the country, I have found fees are de rigueur— house fees, booking fees, stage fees. The terminology varies, but the hand in the till is the same. Compared with what women are being charged elsewhere, the ten bucks I used to pay at Mitchell Brothers seems like a bargain. When I dance, I pay fifty dollars here, seventy-five there. One club waives the thirty-dollar house fee on a girl's first day, but that's the extent of the breaks. I've yet to pay less than twenty-five dollars in fees and twenty dollars on top of that in tip-outs to bartenders and deejays. Clubs that classify the dancers as employees aren't any better, either. At one club, I got paid an hourly wage, but I had to pay back my own minimum wage at a rate of seven dollars an hour, plus the taxes on my table dances, and tip-outs and house fees, which totaled more than one hundred dollars for the night. So far on this journey, I've paid out almost a thousand dollars in miscellaneous fees and tip-outs. The tip-outs I don't mind so much, because I'm happy to slide some cash to a bartender or deejay who has done a good job (I did, however, mind the place that made me tip the managers). But the fees still chap my hide—up to one hundred dollars for being late, for chewing gum, even for not smiling onstage—as does the house taking a percentage of girls' table dances. In some cases, it's nickel-and-dime exploitation—maybe twenty-five dollars or so. But in busier, glitzier clubs, girls sometimes pay fees upwards of two hundred dollars a shift. Club owners get away with it because they know dancers won't protest. Either the dancers don't know that in most cases the fees are illegal, or they don't make a fuss because they don't want to jeopardize their job or draw attention to themselves. But such scams have become industry standard. Just as customers expect to pay to play, dancers now expect to pay to work.

When I left Mitchell Brothers, I couldn't believe dancers everywhere weren't up in arms about the fees and tip-outs, but traveling the country has mellowed me. Not everyone can tilt at windmills, and most dancers just want to make their money with as little fanfare and frustration as possible. My activist entreaty has gone from "shake the system" to "get educated, get solvent, and get out." I applaud any woman who attempts to right the wrongs of the adult entertainment business, but I'm not convinced they can be entirely overcome. If a woman can leave the industry with some money, some insight, and some dignity, that's radical enough for me.

Things have changed drastically since I left San Francisco. The business seems harder, and heavier—as the social opprobrium has lessened around stripping, the dancer ranks have swelled and you have to sweat more to make less. Finding clubs that don't allow customer contact has been difficult. And establishments that were once familiar to me have transformed dramatically—or vanished. Peepland burned down in a blaze of suspicion. The Lusty Lady became the first unionized strip club in the country, but as sex-positive feminism spread and the peep show gained greater notoriety, particularly in elite academic circles, some felt the renegade philosopher Lustygirl image grew stale. ("Oh great," groaned a stripper friend as she read the contributor list of a recently published feminist sex-worker anthology, "more Lusty Ladies and their precious thinky thoughts.") Even Mitchell Brothers has changed. I couldn't help but notice the staff of other clubs smirking when I said I'd worked there, so I contacted some friends who still danced in San Francisco. Throughout our conversations, the word extras (code for illegal sexual acts) came up. A lot. Apparently there are now rooms where dancers can be alone with the customers, and sometimes the privacy is put to good use. And now Mitchell Brothers dancers no longer have to pay twenty dollars a shift. Despite the employee classification, they are required to pay a "quota" of over two hundred dollars for the day shift, and three hundred for the night. Ah, progress.

I'm sure that the lawsuit and my increasing disillusionment with and departure from stripping is a huge factor in why I decided that I had to get on the road to reexamine the business and what it means to me. Yes, my upcoming nuptials play a large part as well—I want to be done with this by the time I get married, draw a clear line between past and future. But when I quit stripping, the stress of the lawsuit left me so badly shaken, I never bothered to figure it all out. I just ran away to a new life. Or rather, limped away.

One of the dancers who opposed the lawsuit from the start, a pedantic gal in a Louise Brooks wig, stood behind me the morning I went to pick up my monthly theater schedule after filing the suit. She turned to the dancer next to her and sneered, "Now there's a used-up old thing!" I just ignored her, but I thought to myself, first, I wouldn't mind smashing her smug little face. Then I thought, But she's got a point. I was twenty-five, and I felt about a hundred.

That curled-over, dried-up feeling dogged me for months to come, after I moved to New York and went from struggling journalist to dot-com editor kid, to contributing editor at two glossy magazines. I was through with stripping, but stripping wasn't through with me. I was old for a stripper (that I wasn't stripping any longer didn't do anything to dull my anguish over this realization). I was old, period. If my peak was in my teens and early twenties, I thought, why hang around, taking up critical space? With every day that passes, I'm depreciating. I would fantasize about dying a swift and painless death, not because I was self-destructive, but because I'd survived for years as a daring young thing and I didn't know how to grow up.

Feeling prematurely over the hill is part of the exit package for strippers. I know that now, but I didn't then. There's no stripper manual that tells you how hard it can be to move on, emotionally and logistically. My self-image changed. I missed the convenience. The flexibility. The money. And the attention. I began to view stripping not as a day job I wanted to leave but a habit I had to kick.

I wish I'd known at the beginning that getting into stripping is the easy part—it's getting out that's the bitch.

Facing the perils of stripping head-on is new for me. I can view stripping plainly now because I no longer have anything to prove—to myself or anyone else. I first started stripping at Peepland to prove I could survive on my own. Then at the Lusty Lady I stripped as a political statement Then, at Mitchell Brothers, I stripped for financial security, and later, to advance the cause of improving working conditions. But now I'm just here to bear witness, no illusions, no agenda, no filter of idealism.

For me, what public face to wear is perhaps the most confusing thing about stripping. For all the roles I play when I strip—confessor, playmate, prop—the role outside the club is the one that taxes me the most. I get pulled in different directions by people's responses when they find out I've stripped, and what they expect of me as a result—iconoclasm, activism, contrition, bravado, a free emotional feel. I used to just play the Pollyanna Badgirl game—square my shoulders prettily in a stance of "no apologies, no regrets."

That has changed. I'm certainly not apologizing. But I do have certain regrets.

I regret hearing a woman at a dancers' meeting announce, "I thank God that I have this job. Otherwise, I'd still be at home getting raped by my dad."

I regret knowing that some club owners and managers (not exclusively men, I hasten to add) refer to the dancers who work for them, and fill their pockets, as "bitches" and "whores."

I regret that as I travel the country, I see women with bruises that clearly didn't come from a happy game of slap-ass, and cuts that weren't a kitchen accident.

I regret that one of the side effects of this work is selective vision.

And I regret that many times, when people expressed doubts about the soundness of my decision to strip, I mistook their legitimate concern for disapproval.

I wish stripping could be more humane, but then, stripping combines volatile elements: sex, money, and power. It is a business of many hungers. I suppose I became obsessed with stereotype-wrangling and politicking as a highfalutin form of pain management. Railing against stripping's outlaw status had a palliative effect. If I could blame the social stigma for all that is wrong and hurtful in stripping, I didn't have to face the hard truth that even in the most tolerant social climate, hunger isn't humane, sex will never be totally safe, and commerce isn't always kind.

I'd lie down in front of an oncoming train to defend a woman's right to strip for a living. But that doesn't mean I grant rubber-stamp approval to the business. I am a friend to strippers and an ally to the industry, but I'm no longer an apologist. Or a shill.

As I travel, I become more aware of the precarious balance that stripping demands. I know, and I've always known, that in the business of stripping the money is fast. What I've come to realize is that fast money doesn't equal easy money, and the difference between the two is not to be underestimated.

Still, a reflexive voice inside of me pops up from time to time.
No, don't acknowledge the bad stuff. Lie. Say that everything's great. That you're always in control. That the customers are always polite and respectful, the business has only helped you.
For as many people who disapprove of strippers, there are just as many who want to be supportive and compassionate. They trust my testimony, believing anything I say. I'm tempted at times to abuse that authority. Do it, the voice urges.
Spin it in your favor.

My hesitation in publicly naming the ills of stripping is neither unreasonable nor uncommon. If there is one taboo in the sex industry, it's the V word—
victim.
We gripe freely among ourselves about the unsavory aspects of stripping. Hell, bitching is a bonding ritual like in any other in the workforce. But let an outsider in on it? No. "Sorry," we say as we draw the curtains. "There are no victims here."

It's not so much that I'm trying to protect my image as be pragmatic. Any negative information can, and will, be used against me. To shut down clubs, to shame dancers, to advance a conservative agenda. Anyone who thinks being sexually objectified is the ultimate degradation has never been politically objectified. It is maddening and, unfortunately, a constant threat.

The problem is that my self-protective instinct can lead down a treacherous path. Sure, I want to show the world that strippers can be capable, thinking, feeling people, able to set boundaries, to care for other people and ourselves. But taken too far, such emphasis on the positive casts me as Paglian caricature—all triumph and no clue. When I think of the times I huffed out, testily, "I've never felt degraded! I've never been exploited!" I wish I could reach back in time and put a hand over my own stupid mouth.