Strip City: A Stripper's Farewell Journey Across America (26 page)

I take the trophies from him, embarrassed. "That's goofy, honey. I'll put them in my office."

"No! Leave them here."

I framed his rodeo photos and hung them all over in the room, but I don't know, that seems different. I'm pleased that I won these trophies, but I doubt I'll want to see them every day.

Once I put away my costumes and props, and get the trophies settled on a shelf in my office, I trudge upstairs for a bath. I lucked out in the bathroom department when we got this house. I have one all to myself, set in a dormer on the second floor. When we first moved in, Randy set to renovating it right away, so now the walls are cornmeal yellow, the floor is pale maple, and the tub is an old iron clawfoot with brass fixtures and matching brass-tone feet. I fill the bathtub with the hottest water I can stand and slide in for a good, long victory soak.

Right now I'm elated, but normally when I dance, I careen between states of liberation and despair, of excitement and tedium, of serenity and self-hatred, lust, repulsion, sadness, inspiration, joy, and fatigue—often within the course of a single night. Everything used to end up entwined in a giant tangle of feelings, lodged in my guts like some vile emotional hairball. But now, after six months of careful consideration and diligent inner watch, things are falling into place. I feel like I'm gaining command of a wily, evasive force. So I'm not just enjoying the exhilaration of an unexpected win, but also the cumulative effect of forging order from chaos.

For so long, I felt like I was a total washout, just marking time until my (hopefully imminent) death. But now I've got a newfound sense of possibility—that time really is on my side. I'm not a decrepit old loser. In fact, I'm anything but, and I've got the trophies to prove it.

At the perimeter of my increased awareness and nascent optimism is an unexpected outcropping of stubbornness. Is stripping really so bad? I know I got out at a time when I desperately needed to prove to myself that I could do something else, but now that I've done that, why not keep on? I'm enjoying it. I'm good at it. And I don't miss my other, more cerebral life.

I haven't written anything since June. I don't have the mental energy to spare. My thoughts are absorbed in processing, organizing, evaluating what is happening to me, all that I'm seeing. I don't mind it being this way, exactly. In fact, it's kind of nice, like I've been given a break from adulthood. My mind has veered away from the demands of the straight world and has lapsed into a luxuriant, meditative dumbness, a lazy inward gaze. My perception is right on, my observations acute, but my intake is skewed. It's as if everything I see, hear, or touch is cushioned by a layer of cotton batting. Some knob has been twiddled, making the world appear to operate on a several second delay.

Not only have I not been writing, I haven't been reading, either. A stack of old issues of The New Yorker sits by the bathtub, untouched. The sight of them, piled haphazardly next to the pedestal sink, evokes a pang of tender guilt, the sort someone might feel if she had been ignoring someone whose friendship she'd worked especially hard to cultivate. Maybe I can at least page through and read the cartoons.

Sloughed-off body glitter floats on the surface of the water, then flitters down to the bottom of the tub, settling like festive colored silt.

I crack open an issue.

In one cartoon, a fussy poodle, shaved down to poufs over each paw and at the tip of its tail, minces on a leash past two onlooking mongrels. One mutt is saying to the other, "Something ought to be left to the imagination."

In another issue, a buxom young blonde jiggles her way across a college campus. "Good Lord, professor!" says one excited graybeard to the other. "There it goes—the theory of everything!"

If that's what it comes down to, I wonder, then why pretend otherwise?

A nefarious shadow self is rising up to mock my respectable self, calling me away from writing and back to stripping full time. Maybe, this shadowy being thinks, I am meant to navigate the world by instinct, doing indecent things. Even knowing full well the numerous downsides, I feel gutter glamour's addictive pull. I like living suspended in semidarkness. For all the attendant occupational hazards, it's the safer option, the low and easy road. The proper ambitions and ideals can easily be bundled up and stored away for future consideration.

And what of the business of being a writer? Those agonizing publishing parties, with Yalies creaking around in their leather pants, drinks in hand, going, "And what are you working on?" The chronic, embedded frustration because there are too many geniuses and no guarantees. That studied, "I'm not pleading" pleading look that comes over everyone when a person of greater influence enters a room. Editors who use the words edgy and transgressive with a straight face. The cash-flow hell. Why bother chasing paychecks around, hectoring magazine accounting departments, and cursing the empty mailbox for weeks, when I could get cash on the barrelhead each night?

Randy and I could go on the lam. Dancing is a highly portable means of employment. Have body, will travel. I'm in decent shape, don't have any visible tattoos, and have a bagful of long, blonde hair. I could go anywhere. Randy busts his ass every day. He's up and out the door at 7 a.m., and never home before dark. He could be my manager, keep my bookings and travel arrangements in check. I bet he'd love the change of pace.

Somewhere in a distant, scarcely accessible area of my consciousness is the memory of my friend Andy, a reporter, giving me a pep talk over French toast in a diner when I was depressed about my writing. "But journalism is forever," he said, the tone of his voice verging on panic.

Andy, you dear, you naif, you just don't get it.

I scrub my skin with a loofah, weighing the relative merits of either life. Right now the scales are tipping toward dancing, by a substantial measure. At its best, writing feels like a strike at posterity. But stripping, at its best, feels like cheating death. A blast of expansion. Staring down the litany of "shoulds" that defines a woman's lot. Do I want to resume the march of duty or stay on this thrill ride?

Is there any question?

I sink lower in the glitter-dappled tub until my eyes are just over the waterline like a croc in a primeval swamp.

I hover with the serene surety of an ancient, sharp-toothed creature that has weathered ice ages, great floods, poachers, hunters, belt-makers, and crowds of dumb humans wielding cameras and raw meat foisted on sharp sticks. A horn-hided beast that knows where its next meal is coming from, and that it will be taken, stealthily and quickly, in a series of violent gulps.

I've got plenty of time. Plenty of time.

SEVENTEEN

A stripper's story may end in any number of ways, but the beginning rarely varies: Young woman needs money. Young woman casts about wildly, weighs options, and, in some crazy moment, considers stripping. Young woman measures potential worst-case scenario against potential pot of cash. Young woman steels nerves and makes leap.

Miss Scarlett Fever jumped into the roiling chaos of Times Square, long before the family-friendly neon glare chased the darker elements from the area. You couldn't tell from looking at her today, with her sensible clothes, sturdy body, and wavy red hair cut into a stylish short cut, that she spent more than a decade working in the country's most notorious sex district. "I worked, on and off, from 1975 to 1986. It was insanity then," she tells me. "It wasn't a job, it was a lifestyle."

…

I've known Scarlett casually for a long time. When I lived in New York, I'd see her at parties, hear her name in conversation, run into her at a reading. That she'd been in the business was no secret and I found her candor interesting, but when I discovered that she'd worked in Times Square—my old stomping ground—I had to get to know her better. A few days before I headed to New Jersey for Thanksgiving with my folks, I set aside some time to meet Scarlett in the city and compare notes.

Learning more about the history of striptease has been the highlight of my year. Yeah, I've had a hell of a time at the different clubs—show me a colloquialism and you'll see a smile on my face. But the stories from way back then are what's rocking my little stripper world. To connect with these women and have them trust me enough to unspool their lives while I listen is awesome. There's honor in being an audience.

Raised in a middle-class Jewish household on Long Island, Scarlett started working at Robbie's Mardi Gras on Broadway right out of high school. "I had just turned seventeen and was still living at home," she says as we sit across the table from each other at Cafe Orlin on Saint Marks Place on a brisk November morning. "The first time I got onstage," she recalls, "I had to borrow a g-string from the manager—it was a tiny blue piece of scratchy, glittery fabric with a strip of elastic that ran between the cheeks of my ass. It was really tacky, it had somebody else's pussy stains on it. But it was my first g-string." Unskilled as she was, Scarlett considered the experience a revelation. "I felt so gorgeous. I felt wanted. It was like my bat mitzvah. It was like, I don't know, I'd become a woman.

"I was really awkward," she continues. "They told me to do floor work and I didn't know what they meant. The manager told me, 'Just pretend you're having sex and you're on top.'" But Scarlett had never been on top, so she started doing naked pushups on the stage.

Gimmicks weren't critical to the stage show like they were in Dixie Evans's day, but Scarlett developed her own nonetheless. "I had fabulous nipples," she says, "like little thumbs. I could hang my clothes off of them. I would sway back and forth with my dress hanging from one nipple, and that was it. A couple years later, someone taught me how to light my nipples on fire."

Of course, I can't resist asking: How do you light your nipples on fire? But I wait until the waitress puts my plate of eggs in front of me and serves Scarlett her pancakes with pumpkin butter and a side of bacon. "I love bacon. It's one of my weaknesses." Scarlett sighs happily, picking up a piece and folding it into her mouth.

"Now," she continues, "lighting your nipples on fire is actually -pretty easy. You take a regular cardboard-stick match from a match-book and split it slightly with your fingernail from the bottom up. Not too far—about a third or halfway up, depending on the size of the nipple. The match should look like an armless man with two short legs. The 'legs' fit over the nipple—it works better if the match sits at a slight upward angle so there's sort of a clamp action there." Then you use another match to light the matches once they're sitting securely on your nipples. " 'Course you can't keep them lit for long," Scarlett takes pains to point out. "The sexiest thing to do after lighting them is to have another dancer pull you close, light a cigarette off one of the flames, then quickly blow them out."

I make a mental note to try this as soon as possible. Good thing they don't have smoking sections in New York restaurants any longer or I'd corner her into doing a demo.

The seventies in Times Square were the days of Anything Goes, and Scarlett took advantage of the latitude, taking to the stage wearing cowboy boots and fishnets with the crotch torn out. "I did that to all my fishnets to cover up my legs because I thought I had too much cellulite."

The bosses weren't picky about appearances, as long as you were hustling champagne and the bar made their money. Mardi Gras dancers were real girls—short, fat, skinny, there was even a grandmother. Scarlett marvels, "There was one girl, she had the biggest ass, thighs, tons of cellulite, really droopy tits—she was such a Long Island Five Towns JAP. And she made so much money because she could talk the talk." Another girl who worked there was a glue head. She didn't dance, she just worked the floor and hustled drinks, then sat in a corner sniffing glue out of a paper bag. Scarlett recalls the woman's broken nose, missing teeth, and scrappy, drug-ravaged body. And she, too, earned plenty.

Dancers were then compensated quite differently than they are today, when your take is usually what you hustle yourself—minus your house fees and tip-outs. "They used to pay seventy-five dollars a shift," she says. My mouth is agape. "I understand they have fees now for this, that, and everything," she continues. "There were no fees or fines then. I mean, there were things that you weren't supposed to do: You weren't allowed to touch yourself, but there were ways around that. No pubic hair was supposed to show, you weren't allowed to have customers touch you when you were onstage."

Working at the Mardi Gras, Scarlett says, was all about the champagne hustle. The champagne hustle is a total mystery to me. It sounds so old-school. And tipsy-making. Assuming you convinced customers to buy bottles of champagne to share with you, wouldn't you end up dead drunk at the end of every shift? Well, Scarlett explains, there was a way around that. Namely, the spit glass. "The spit glass is a frosted glass that sits by the side and the customer is supposed to think it's a chaser of club soda; it's filled about halfway with club soda. You'd take a sip of champagne, and then take a sip out of the spit glass and let the champagne dribble out of the corners of your mouth. That way you got through the customers quickly. You'd get the guys really drunk and get their money." The unpopular men got a little something extra. "We used to save the spit glasses for the customers we didn't like," Scarlett confesses. "We wouldn't wash them out and then serve them drinks in there."

"It was foul champagne," she says. "Really cheap and gave you a bad headache. Instead of getting the customers to buy me a twenty-dollar nip of champagne, I would get them to buy me a twenty-dollar shot of vodka. Then I could get through it. Otherwise I really couldn't."

I ask Scarlett, "Were you drinking so much because you were bored?"

No, she tells me, with a tart self-deprecation that sounds like the acid edge of peace long-since made, "I drank a lot 'cause I'm an alcoholic. That was one of the reasons I loved the job. The more I drank, the more money I made. I did a lot of drugs 'cause it was boring." Scarlett used cocaine—so much that after a certain point she couldn't snort it anymore because her nose was too damaged. "This was before crack and free-base. I was buying it in rock form," she says, "and I would just eat it."

One of the reasons I was interested in talking to Scarlett is that her tour of duty in Times Square ended just as mine began. I wanted to meet a woman who could tell me what it was like in the '70s and early '80s. When she talks, Scarlett uses the word insanity a lot, which strikes me as more apt than hyperbolic. It was insane—even when I was there. "Times Square was very, very different than it is today," she says, and I nod in agreement I'd venture that it's not even the same neighborhood. The building Peepland was in is now an Applebee's, for Pete's sake.

Scarlett is a natural storyteller, unfurling her life with candor and ease—and a great Long Island accent. A young, Gap-clad couple strains to eavesdrop, eyes agog, whenever she speaks. They quickly redirect their focus to their cappuccinos when I fire them a scolding look.

Scarlett feels that for some women, the desire for familiarity and acceptance can obscure the hard realities of the sex business. "I think a lot of women who go into this don't feel like they have a family or like they have a place to be safe. I mean, I had a family, but I didn't feel like I did, and the sex industry is a very enclosed world. I was seeing the same people every day, so I thought it was okay." But nothing could be further from the truth. Scarlett was raped more than once. She saw a girl get stabbed onstage. And she claims to have been kidnapped. "This pimp who was trying to turn me out kidnapped me, locked me in a hotel room in Jersey, and I had to break out. He wound up killing two friends of mine a couple of months later." As Scarlett tells it, one of the girls who worked for him, Crystal, was trying to leave and he beat her up in an after-hours club one night when the two women were out partying together. Crystal kept her money in a condom in her vagina, in case she got mugged—a practice Scarlett says was a common preventative among the hookers she knew. He beat her up in the bathroom of the club, then reached inside her, and took all her money. Still, Crystal was determined to leave. Crystal's friend Angie was going to lend her money to go home to the Midwest. "Crystal was staying at Angie's," Scarlett says, "so he went there and killed the two of them. Literally sliced them up like roast beef, the cops said. Angie's kids were in the next room in a crib.

"We all knew who had done it," says Scarlett. "We told the police, and they didn't care. They did not care. As far as they were concerned, we were just clearing out our own. And we were part of the cops' lives. We partied with them—they'd sit in the bar drinking. I had cops drive me to work. So, you think you're protected &hellep;"

But you're not.

Scarlett sighs. "I tried to get straight. Once, I bought all these straight clothes—A-line wool skirts, low-heeled pumps, button-down shirts, good bras. I would get dressed in the dressing room, leaving work in all these clothes, and my friend looked at me and said, 'It doesn't matter what you wear, you still look like a whore.' She meant it with love, but I thought, 'You know, she's totally right.'"

Scarlett moved to Robbie's second location, which was where the Marriott Marquis, a large tourist hotel, stands today. Scarlett started doing favors for the bosses, "but not with customers,'' she says—a distinction that separated her from a number of her coworkers. Some girls tricked with the clientele, either in the back room or making appointments outside. One girl used to sell the key to her hotel room. She'd get the money up front—two or three hundred dollars—then give the man the key. Right at closing she'd say, "Meet me there. They can't see me leave with you, I'll get fired." But the key was bogus. "She looked so different when she left the bar," Scarlett says, "they'd never recognize her in a million years, and they'd be too mortified to come back and say that they'd been slammed.

"At the time I didn't think of what I was doing as tricking," Scarlett says, "because I figured I'd end up sleeping with the bosses anyway since they were the partners or the wise guys. What they were giving me wasn't money for sex, it was cab fare home. Three hundred dollars cab fare home from Midtown to the East Village? Right A trick is a trick no matter what you tell yourself…"

…

That the business of topless dancing—and its profile in popular culture—has changed dramatically is not lost on Scarlett. "It's so different with the gendemen's clubs where the women wear gowns. What I see people writing about now"—college girls stripping for tuition then moving on to the profession of their choice, experts extolling the divine power of the exotic dancer—"is so different from my experience.

"For instance," she goes on, "I worked with a girl who was fifteen. The most perfect body and little rosebud lips, like a Barbie doll. I remember when she got her first hundred-dollar tip, it was from a couple. She was so excited, she was jumping up and down onstage and we told her, 'No, no, calm down. If a couple wants you to come sit with them, this is not a good thing. These are not your parents. They aren't going to take you out and buy you clothes. You're fifteen, you don't want to go there yet.'" Within months the girl went from an innocent to a hard-core junkie, shooting heroin between her toes to conceal her habit. Her feet became so badly abscessed she could no longer put on her high heels. One day she sat crying in the dressing room because the managers wouldn't let her skip her stage show. Scarlett and her fellow dancers took turns spreading cocaine and lidocaine on the girl's feet just so she could get into her shoes.

For the first time since we sat down today, Scarlett seems self-conscious. "This is weird," she pauses. "I've never told this to anyone before."

But you know, it often ends up that way when two of our kind get together—the alliances are quick, the dish nonpareil. We share stories we won't tell anyone else because they might be used against us, taken away from us, lorded over us, or simply dismissed: "Well, it couldn't have been that bad." There's a million ways to hear this stuff, but we can be sure it'll get across the way we mean it—the way we lived it—when told to our own. When you've been through something that few other people are likely to understand, something that rearranges your soul and changes your position in the world and your view of it, anyone who's gone through the same thing connects right away. There's an almost palpable empathy—you've been there. You get it. Sometimes, like during this brunch with Scarlett, we trade war stories and gossip and make scathing indictments of the straight world. Other times we just say to each other without words, "Lean here."

"Stripping, even hooking, certainly has more respect now than it did then," Scarlett says. "There's this movement now to glorify it, to present it as legitimate."