Strip City: A Stripper's Farewell Journey Across America (29 page)

When the song ends, I get down and while I'm pulling on my shirt, the angry dancer sweeps up the tips I made and dumps them on our table. When I get offstage and John tells me what she did, I throw them right back on the stage. That'll teach her.

It's late and we've got to get going or I'll fall asleep at the wheel on the drive home.

As we rise from the table, another dancer comes over to me. She's flushed and a little embarrassed, the sweet fat roll of flesh about her hips jiggling with excitement. "Yes, congratulations. Yes, you want I am going up next. You dance with me?"

"I'm sorry," I tell her, shrugging and motioning no with my hands, "we really have to leave."

I would have liked to dance with a woman who actually wanted me there, but I'm tired and too put off by the bitchy dancer.

Well, I shouldn't be too hard on her. Maybe she was trying to make a political statement, something about the encroachment of white, American capitalists in the Third World.

I doubt it.

We cram into a cab that takes us back to the border crossing. John and Barb head off to their car on the Mexican side and Jeanette, Sue, and I wander back over the border to where we parked the car. A paved walkway curves over the highway that joins the U.S. and Mexico, and it's lined on both sides with beggars wrapped in blankets, holding out their hands to us as we pass by. Dirty-faced children in pajamas tug on our pant legs, trying to sell us Chiclets and beaded bracelets. We shower them with coins.

Even though it's obvious who shoulders the emotional and social burden in a strip-club transaction, I'm usually able to see it as more or less a square deal, tit for tat, as it were. But the whole Tijuana scene seemed deeply fucked up, a repository for Yankee sexual aggression. I bet those same men would never, ever treat American strippers so cavalierly. They might try, but they certainly wouldn't get away with it If they went twenty miles north to San Diego and attempted what they did in Mexico, either the bouncers or the strippers themselves would cuff their ears and toss them out on the sidewalk.

When we get in the car, I clutch my bag of Retin A to my side and breathe a sigh of relief at being stateside.

Los Angeles is the land of the pussy killers—those little booty shorts that you have to wear whenever you're doing a table dance. They give you a frontal wedgie so bad you'd swear it was karmic payback.

I'm trying to find L.A.'s best topless club. I try a club on the west side first. While I'm in the dressing room, a Vietnamese girl wearing a junior prom updo approaches me with a snarl of a smile on her face, as I stand at the mirror applying black eyeliner with a small pointed brush.

"If someone asked you to, would you have sex for money?" She asks the question as if she's simultaneously trying to recruit and accuse me.

What the hell kind of question is that to ask someone you don't even know?

"Um, no," I tell her. "Why?"

"You wouldn't?" Her tone is incredulous.

"I don't think so."

She turns on her spiked heel and click-clacks abruptly out of the dressing room.

Weird.

On the dressing-room bulletin board is a flyer: "Are you working as a stripper and cheating on someone, and want to tell them? Then call the Jerry Springer show at 1-800 ..." I'd always wondered where those guests came from. One mystery solved.

This club is severely bogus. Dead as a doornail. Nothing is happening except two dancers hanging on either side of a balding, middle-aged guy doing coke and drinking champagne in the VIP room. I bail out just before midnight when I see one of the girls start making out with the customer.

I try Crazy Girls, the Hollywood hotspot of the moment, but when I stroll in at one a.m., it's too much of a pose—like the Viper Room with tits. Models and rock stars languish in the booths as imitation White Trash girls and impeccably degenerate drugstore cowboys—faded Levi's, curled-up Resistol brims, Camels tucked into the corners of their mouths—slouch into the alleyway for a smoke. The dancers look fabulous, though. They're not generic McStrippers like me, more like models on a glam-rock bender.

An inked and implanted giantess winds through the crowd on the way to the small second stage in the center of the room. Her aluminum-streaked kohl black hair curls over full-sleeve dragon tattoos. Countless silver rings decorate her ears and fingers. The hem of her transparent ruby chiffon dress flirts with the ankle straps on her eight-inch platform shoes. A silver-studded black bikini embraces her slender body beneath the dress. On her way past, she fixes her haunted, almond-shaped brown eyes on me, leans down, and whispers, "You look like you can feel my pain."

This dancer is a specter of Lotusland, one of the city's dark damsels. I love these girls whose lives were cooked in the crucible of underground L.A.. Girls like this know that the designer-water health-consciousness and dogged optimism of this town is a cover-up, that death and, perhaps worse, obscurity stalk you at every turn. They know that the glittery orange haze that floats over the freeways and down through the canyons at night is made of the ghosts of would've-been stars and hopefuls who never had a prayer. Such morbidity only heightens their beauty.

I grab her hand, strangely flattered that she would pick me out of all the female customers in the place to say this to. With the biggest Honey of the Heartland smile I can muster, I say, reassuringly, "Sweetie, I've known your pain for the last eleven years."

The next evening, Jeanette and I go to Jumbo's Clown Room, which has been a Hollywood Boulevard hangout since the 1970s. It's a tiny dump off of a parking lot, unselfconsciously seedy in a selfconscious way. There's a small stage and a bar surrounded by tables jam-packed with all types of people I wouldn't want to be naked in front of.

Jumbo's has enjoyed a bleeding-edge renaissance ever since it became known that Courtney Love used to work there. But there are a couple of clubs around town claiming to be her ecdysiast alma mater. "Courtney Love stripped here" is the alterna-kid equivalent to "George Washington slept here." I wonder sometimes if there isn't a whole crop of young Hole fans out there, stockpiling their PVC miniskirts and bustiers in preparation for the day that they get up on the strip club stage to emulate their idol. They'd learn quickly enough that stripping doesn't make you Courtney Love any more than doing heroin makes you Keith Richards or wearing a spangly jumpsuit makes you Elvis.

As we shuffle toward the door, slowly, since the club is very crowded, a long-haired guy by the bar presses his business card into my palm with an unctuous, "I'd love to photograph you sometime." I look at the card. It says, ROB SALTER, BARTENDER/PHOTOGRAPHER.

"Gee, which one do you think is his real calling?" Jeanette cracks as I rip the card in two.

Los Angeles is not a lucrative stripping town if you don't dance nude. The girls who are very serious about making money fly to Vegas or Texas. I can't figure out why there wouldn't be much money in a city this populated, but Jeanette has a theory. "Consider this: Men go to strip clubs because they want to see beauty. But beauty means nothing in Los Angeles," she says. "Beautiful people come here from all over to make it big in show business. Then they don't make it, so they marry another beautiful person and make more beautiful people. You become immune."

"Look at this," Jeanette says, flipping to the back of the LA. Weekly. Page after page of ads for escort services and call girls. "Look at these women," she gestures with a quick swooping flourish of her hand. I scan the photos on the page. They're all gorgeous, it's true.

"And look at the ad copy," she adds. "'My actual photo. No driver. No agency.' So you can have your pick of any number of model-types, any way you want them. Why would you bother going to a strip club when you could have this? I'm telling you—you really do become immune. You never truly understand what 'just another pretty face' means until you come to Los Angeles."

Still, somebody must be making money stripping in Los Angeles, because the shops on Hollywood Boulevard that used to sell rocker clothes and leather jackets are all dedicated to "dancer wear" now. There are tons of them!

I spend an afternoon shopping for new costumes with Sue by my side. Some people bring a sensible, conservative friend with them when they shop so they have someone to rein them in. Not me. Sue is my fashion enabler. She's just there to "ooh" appreciatively and help me carry the bags.

Within a few hours, we've acquired a pair of pink glittered mules with Lucite six-inch platform heels. Pink patent sling-back platforms. Furry leopard-print platforms. Red-and-white gingham checked sandals. Booty shorts in hot pink, and shiny gold and silver. A leopard-print bikini. A long, shimmering gold gown with spaghetti straps. A black shortie corset-topped dress with pink roses on it. A white stretch lace slip with gathered puffed sleeves and red rosette trim. And an iridescent bubble-gum-pink backless minidress that matches the glittered mules.

On the north side of the street is Je T'aime, another dance-wear boutique, where I find a canary-yellow long-sleeved mesh romper with a neckline trimmed in yellow feathers, cut all the way down to the navel. Big Bird gone porno. It's too small so Uli, the store manager, offers to make me one in my size. I leave him my measurements and a forty-dollar deposit.

Just up the street Sue and I find a pair of platform Lucite mules with canary yellow marabou poufs over the toe. There's one pair left, and they're my size. And they're on sale! It's kismet.

By the end of the afternoon I have spent over nine hundred dollars. Dolly Parton wasn't kidding when she said, "It takes a lot of money to look this cheap." Not to worry, I tell myself, costumes are tax deductible.

I finally find the best club in Los Angeles. Way down on Hollywood Boulevard, almost in Silverlake. Cheetah's. When I walk in, it's like the fifties brought back to life. The walls are mirrored, the upholstery red. The stage is a little T with a runway and a pole at either end. The border of the stage is lit in tiny white lights. It's small and intimate, total Rat Pack cool.

When the manager takes me into the back office to do my paperwork, I look up at the Polaroids of the dancers. You know a place is going to be great when there are half a dozen Bettie Page look-alikes.

This is a place where a girl can dance to Marilyn Manson one set and Dwight Yoakam the next, and the audience will appreciate both. The crowd is young and trendy, but the lighting is so flattering and the atmosphere so relaxed, I don't mind having an audience of my own at all.

By the time they show up, I've watched a full rotation of the girls. My God, what a show! I've seen hiphop mamas in hot pants and eight-inch platforms, pole monkeys in Catholic schoolgirl outfits climbing all the way up to the ceiling to "I Love Little Girls" by Oingo Boingo, and a tattooed supermodely girl dancing to "Jesus Built My Hotrod" by Ministry.

I don't know how the money is here, but the stage show is excellent.

You know what's different about this place? The sense that everybody's trickin'. That get-over Scarlett was talking about—Us vs. Them? Here tonight it's all Us. Does this louche equanimity foretell a new wave of striptease? I doubt it—the business survives on skillful manipulation and if everyone were in on the scam, stripping would quickly become obsolete, collapsed by its own knowingness. No, this is an ethereal space—more like a clubhouse than a grindhouse.

My friends gather around the stage when I come on. I'm wearing the silver booty shorts over a silver bikini, and the silver stilettos to match. My music is by Tool, a fierce, driving song. Industrial Strength Barbie. I stalk the stage, pacing and twisting, then smiling serenely at a bunch of customers clustered at the corner of the stage. One by one, the seats along the runway fill up.

I walk deliberately to the end of the runway and kick my legs up over my head and catch my ankles around the pole, like I learned at stripper school. I put my hands on the stage and just hold the head-stand, my long blonde hair trailing-on the floor. I nod my head as I listen to the music.

Whatever compulsion I've got that makes me love stripping, this is what it sounds like. I don't know if it's skill, comfort, risk, dissociation, or a combination of them all that, in rare moments, makes stripping seem like a borderline ecstatic state. But I know I'm having one of those moments now. When it just feels right. Righteous. At times like this, I can believe that I have all the hearts in the room gathered into the palm of my hand. I will never get old. I will never know harm. As long as I stay on this stage under the benevolent auspices of darkness, everything will be okay.

I suddenly understand what Pillow was describing to me when I was in Alaska. That rush. That blue bolt high. It's like I'm suspended in a narcotic bubble, yet I'm more fiercely aware and alive than I've ever felt. I come out of the handstand and walk toward the center of the stage, loosening the string at the neck of my bikini top. I turn and gaze down at all the faces smiling up at me. They seem very far away, and yet very much a part of the rarefied space I'm in, clearly present and totally gone all at once. It's indescribable bliss resting on the blade of a knife, the most strange and foreign place I was ever meant to be. I would be helpless to try to explain it, but if you had ever known that sensation, you'd never want to leave that warm, wet spot on the lip of the maw.

TWENTY

Early the next day, after Jeanette has left for work, I sit at the battered wooden desk in her living room waiting for my laptop to boot up. The white-gray morning light shines through the vertical blinds casting long strips of shadow on the teal carpet. I carefully examine my face in my compact admiring how nicely the skin is peeling around my nose and mouth. This Retin A stuff really works! I am exfoliating my way to protracted youth.

I check my email and there's a message from Pillow. There's someone I've not heard from in a while. I open it right away.

Oh dear. Oh no. This is a dark day for purists. And for Pillow. What will she do now? I write a quick reply to ask what happened, and to wish her the best. She writes back saying two new girls came down to the club from Fairbanks, and would only stay if Hallie put a pole on the stage. Despite Pillow's protestations, he agreed. And Pillow balked.

This seems like such an unceremonious end—to be chased off the stage by a silly brass pole! But I understand why Pillow finds the presence of the pole untenable—she'd set her standards years ago, only to watch them get challenged, and her options thus narrowed, as the years went by. And now things have changed once again and she's faced with her own personal titty bar Waterloo.

I drive up to Hollywood Boulevard to pick up my Big Bird suit. In J'Ataime, there are two almost identical-looking young blondes pawing though a rack of fluorescent-colored baby-Ts with slut written across the front. Their jaw muscles bunch and churn as they talk loudly, working their gum, and their bony shoulder blades poke out like bird wings under the straps of their polyester tank tops.

Uli brings the yellow feathered suit from the back, wrapped in plastic and draped on a wire hanger. "Try it on. See if it fits, please."

I take the hanger from him.

"Oh, that's cute," says one of the blondes, noticing the feathers as I walk by. Her deeply tanned breasts stand out from her ribcage like stiff globes.

On the wall in the dressing room is a poster for a dancewear company. Three girls with teased hair wearing spandex racing check costumes, smiling with their acrylic nails in their mouths and making that "Oooh, baby" porn face.

I pull up the suit and look at myself in the mirror, bright yellow feathers wreathing my neck, then plunging down to my navel. See-through yellow mesh encasing my arms, torso, and buttocks. And sweat socks.

I think of Pillow, imagine her cleaning out her locker at PJ's, sorting shoes and g-strings and gloves. Folding up her capes. My eyes flicker back to the spandex girls on the wall sucking their fingers.

A cheesy heavy metal relic from 1988 bangs out, tinny and aggressive, from the store radio.

Inexplicably, the dressing room goes screwy and twisted. The lights seem too bright, the feathers on my skin too hot. I'm afraid I might pass out.

What am I doing? What the hell am I doing?

You have to stop stripping eventually. At some point you're going to get pushed to the side by something, or someone. That is, if you don't jump first. Jump or get pushed—those are your choices as to how to leave this business. Either way, you can't hang around forever. So take your pick.

I'm in that golden stretch of adulthood—I know where the pitfalls are and I've made enough dumb mistakes to know better than to make them again, but I can still get away with a lot. I can dance around on a stage in a see-through porno Big Bird outfit without someone rolling his eyes and whispering, "Who does granny think she's kidding?" And somehow the realization that the suspended adolescence that is exotic dancing won't last forever makes it all the more fun.

But this new development with Pillow forces me to reconsider my own career mortality—and how hopped up I'd become to defy it. The more I think about it, the less I like the idea of draining this stripping thing to the dregs, of dancing on till the very last. Yes, I've got plenty of time left—probably more than I'd ever want or need. But while I've got health and enthusiasm and gravity on my side, I think I'd rather apply them toward something else, something that feels less brutal. Less finite. There are more adventures to be had. More places to see, more people to meet, more pet theories to test. But, well, so what? None of this changes the fact that if I return to stripping full-time, and forgo writing, I won't be reconciling my past. I'll be living it.

Concerned civilians caution that exotic dancing isn't glamorous. But they're wrong. It is glamorous—there are pretty costumes, loud music, the flash of big bills, the affirmation of lingering gazes. To say nothing of the irresistible glimmer of risk. But glamour, by definition, is an illusion. A spell. A state of suggestion. It wears off eventually and you find yourself—peeling skin on your face and all, standing in your old socks in a cheesy Hollywood spandex emporium wearing what looks like an aborted attempt at a Mummer's costume.

A woman playing the role of girl.

You've had a good run, doll. Don't push it.

For whatever may lie ahead, the end seems rather predictable. Suddenly I feel very tired. I don't have much energy but I think I should fix for a jump. Time to go home.

Uli's on the other side of the dressing room curtain. "Miss! Your suit, does it fit?"

This is a custom-made garment. I already put down a nonrefundable deposit, and I have to take it.

"Just perfect, Uli," I yell through the red velvet. "I'll pay for it upfront."