Strip City: A Stripper's Farewell Journey Across America (30 page)

TWENTY-ONE

"What's the matter, baby? You look so sad!"

Randy stands in the entrance to the living room, his wet hair combed back. He drops his black nylon gym bag at his feet.

I sit curled in a lethargic ball on die green velvet recliner. Ever since I came home from L.A. a week ago, I've been feeling out of sorts. I know my decision to stop dancing was the right one, but the change in course was so abrupt I'm a little whipsawed. I've been groping for a conclusion, a way to bring this an elegant close. I'm feeling the impulse to reach out to someone to help me make sense of things but I'm afraid.

I'm fortunate to be surrounded by plenty of sympathetic people. My parents. My mate. My friends. Any of them would be happy to lend some support. But they're not who I want to call. The person who can help me the most is the one who, through it all, understood the least about what stripping means to me.

"Hey," I say when I get my sister Barbara on the phone. "I'm having a minor spiritual crisis. Can you help?"

No sense mincing words.

Barbara laughs for a second, startled. "What kind of spiritual crisis?"

"The dancing thing," I tell her. "I'm finished traveling and I just don't know what to do with this stuff. I need to close the deal here."

"Aha." I picture her scratching her chin while she sits back on the couch in her living room, one eye on the television. "I see."

Am I going to regret this? I fight the urge to hang up. The phone feels heavy in my hand.<3p>

"So," I ask. "Can I come out for a visit? Can you help?"

Good girl. Keep on. She's blood, not a hanging judge.

"Sure, come on out. I'll pick you up at the airport, it's only five minutes from my house. You can help me with Mom and Dad's anniversary quilt."

"I don't know anything about quilting!"

"Hasn't stopped me yet."

Barbara is eight years older than I. I remember thinking her oddly hip when she was a teenager wearing a Nabokov T-shirt, listening to B. J. Thomas, and getting into arguments with our mother that ended with Mom saying, "But the world isn't always black and white, Barbara!" then drawing deeply from the straw in her take-out diet soda, annoyed. Then Barbara was off at seminary school and living up near Columbia University. The next thing I knew, she was being ordained as a Presbyterian minister in upstate New York, moving into a world largely beyond my reach, as ever. Now she lives in a small Midwestern city, where she teaches a philosophy class at the local university and preaches to two different congregations every Sunday.

…

My family is religious but I wouldn't say strictly religious, because there isn't much about our stripe of Presbyterianism that's strict Sinners aren't threatened with damnation, they're broken down with reason.

In the 1970s, blue-jean Christianity hit our church pretty hard. The teenagers would load up rucksacks and march off on youth-group retreats and stage musicals for the congregation. My sisters performed in the musical version of the story of Shadrach, Mesach, and Abednego called "Cool in the Furnace."

My religion is buried deep in the most private memories of childhood, in the same place that people guard their invisible friend or their conversations with trees. Now and then, in some unexpected situation—a trivia game, a discussion of college theater exploits— someone will sing a bit from the
Godspell
soundtrack and cut right into my secret heart. I can unleash an earful of screed about God the Corporation, and thieving, holier-than-thou zealots, but my personal recollections of church and organized religion are actually pretty good.

Barbara's living room floor is covered in colored file folders overflowing with personal papers, boxes, striped throw pillows that have fallen from whatever chair or couch they were sitting on, and back issues of
The New Republic
.

She brings the quilt in from the dining room. It's stunning, a dark emerald green with pink calico and white squares. She shows me the squares she's making, one for each parent, a ring square with their wedding date embroidered on it, and a square for each child with our names embroidered under a flower.

"See, here's a lily for you. A forget-me-not for Tad because that seems like a sort of masculine flower, a pansy for Annette because they're pretty but sturdy, and violets for Kelly because they're dainty and sweet. And poppies for me"—she pauses for a beat—"because religion is the opiate of the people!"

My sister, the original Christian stitch.

Barbara is nearsighted, and often goes without her glasses, so she tends to squinch up her eyes when you're talking to her. But even with her glasses on she looks like she's squinting from a place deep within herself. She gives the impression of constantly exerting effort to get things into better focus, to bring her senses to bear on what someone is really trying to convey. She is a very deep listener. This is what makes her a good person.

Sometimes I'm jealous of Barbara and I don't even know it. I say something fresh when I'm around her, and I'm suddenly taken aback: Hey, where did that come from? I truly envy her clarity regarding right and wrong. She's got guidance, a deeply entrenched system of belief. She doesn't seem to wrestle with ambiguity the way that I do. I've got a definite moral center, but there's a lot of wiggle room around it. I don't envy her everything, though. I think she gets lonely sometimes. She'd like to get married and have children, but it's hard to meet people, surely harder for her than for most. "Mentioning that you're a minister is a pretty effective way to kill a hot tub conversation," she has said.

Barbara wakes me bright and early Sunday so we can get ready for church. It's been a long time since I've attended services. The drive to her first service takes us out of the city and into the next county, endless verdant, Cheeveresque spans of open pasture and horse farms. Humidity is already leaching into the air—I'd never realized how heavily mornings in the Midwest can hang on you.

Atop a pretty knoll stands the one-room church. Inside, the plaster walls glow the color of ancient parchment. There is no stained glass, just tall, simple Palladian windows with slender dark walnut mullions in the form of a cross. The church is empty, so I leave Barbara to put on her vestments and step outside to explore the graveyard.

Amid the graves is a stand of old pines, listing west as the wind blows. The grass makes a lush, barefoot-soft carpet. A weathered headstone, blackened with age, reads, "Remember man as you pass by, As you are now so once was I. As I am now, so you must be." The date on the stone, I can barely make out, is 1767.

The church bell rings—my sister pulling on the rope that drapes down and coils round on the floor of the narthex. I head up the slope and enter the church, where the parishioners have gathered in the pews, all twelve of them.

The third Sunday after Easter is "sheep Sunday," with a call for a sermon about Jesus and his flock, and the need for resistance to false voices.

"What do you get when a minister blesses a flock?" Barbara asks from her pulpit.

The congregation shrugs.

"Pastor-ized sheep."

The congregation groans.

I swear my sister is a bad sitcom waiting to happen.

After joining in the singing of "Savior, Like a Shepherd Lead Us," Barbara begins talking about our need for inclusion.

"My feeling is, we never get beyond third grade. When I was young, my family moved a lot. I remember being in third grade, on my first day in a new school, standing in the cafeteria with my lunch tray. I was thinking, Who will I sit with? Will someone invite me to their table?" She goes on to draw the parallel between our child selves seeking belonging among classmates, and our spiritual selves wandering in search of flock and shepherd. She segues into God's appeal to resist the false voices and bad shepherds that lead people away from the truth.

Everyone sits in rapt attention. I stare down at my church program, biting my lip, cheeks hot, flushing with sisterly pride. This is good stuff. Preaching that's nonpreachy.

Another town, another service. The elderly congregation closes the cloth-covered hymn books and awaits communion. I haven't taken communion since I was twenty. It was at Barbara's ordination, actually. I showed up with spiky orange hair and honored her request to play "Be Thou My Vision" on the flute. I notice that the cover of today's church program is inscribed with Proverbs 31:30. "A woman that feareth the Lord shall be praised." Did she have that put on there for my benefit?

For the second time today, I stand and confess with a churchful of people, "Good Shepherd, we have wandered down the strange pathways of our world. We have ventured into dead-end streets that looked more inviting than the narrow ways marked out by the signposts of your love…"

Barbara breaks the bread and the distribution of elements begins—first, a small silver dish containing spongy cubes of white bread, then, clear plastic thimble-sized glasses of grape juice. I roll the bread between my fingers, releasing its subtle smell of yeast and expiation. When Barbara says, "Taste and see that the Lord is good," I tuck the bread under my tongue. There's no bolt of lightning. No voice from on high booming,
You're joking, right?!

Come dinnertime, my sister and I sit in a booth at a Mexican restaurant with our elbows propped on the table, digging eagerly into our enchilada and burrito platters. A TV in the corner broadcasts a Telemundo soap opera at top volume, which competes with the Top Forty music piped in from the stereo. Latin drama versus bad alternative metal, neither of which appear to be winning. Flustered waiters reel around the tables, dispensing chips and ice water, and salsa verde out of quart carafes.

I wind stringy melted cheese around my fork. "So I spent months and months traversing this fine land of ours and I'm feeling done. But I have this left-over baggage that I don't know what to do with."

Barbara scoops up some guacamole with a half-eaten corn chip. "Have you thought of doing a ritual?"

"No, actually. Is there a decrepit old 'ho ritual that I don't know about that will make this go away?"

"No, but you could create one for yourself. When a woman I know turned fifty, she had a croning ritual with her friends. Whenever you do a ritual, it's important to have people around you so you can share your story."

"Can't I do something by myself?"

"Well, the presence of other people is what gives a ritual its power."

The waiter huffs over, green and red salsa stains on his white shirt, and drops off our check.

"I'll get it," I say, snatching the bill from Barbara's hand.

We sit down in front of the television with the quilt and Barbara teaches me how to "stitch in the ditch," sewing in a single, straight line around the border of a square to create that puffed-up quilted look.

The stitches have to be small and meticulously placed at the very edge of the white squares or else the white thread will show up in the green border fabric. I get halfway around the inside of the wedding ring square when my thread gets tangled in an irreversible knot. I mutter under my breath.

"See, you're learning," says Barbara, rummaging on the cluttered end table to find the embroidery scissors for me. "A major component of quilting is the cursing."

We stitch along in silence, with me working the ditches and Barbara embroidering more names under the flowers. I figure out that small stitches yield the puffiest results.

"That looks really good," Barbara says. She still talks to me like an older sister, as if I need encouragement and extra care. I like it. "So what did you want to talk about?"

"I don't regret dancing," I tell her, cutting fresh thread from the spool. "And I always thought 'ignorance is bliss' seemed really iffy but I wonder if everything I've been exposed to isn't too much for me to handle."

"I know what you mean," Barbara says, "'
wish my eyes had never been opened.
'"

"Is that from the Bible?"

"No, the Indigo Girls."

"I'm trying to view everything in a positive light, because I don't want to stay as ambivalent as I am. There's this New Age-y philosophy that 'energy follows thought…'"

"Yeah," Barbara interrupts, "that's called prayer."

"Really?"

"Really. Do you pray?"

"No. And I'd feel weird praying. I don't want to ask God to help me!"

"Why not?"

Good question. Why not? I guess I'd feel selfish praying for something as trivial as peace of mind when I could be praying for an end to world hunger.

"Think of Saint Augustine. He had problems with behaving himself sexually, so he prayed, 'God, give me chastity but not yet.'"

I don't want to repent. Repent! What a scary word. I always associate it with hateful extremists—fire and brimstone and burning pits in hell. In San Francisco, there's this street preacher, well, not a preacher, exactly, more of a visual proselytizer. He is a clean-cut young white guy, in his mid-thirties maybe, who stands at the corner of Fifth and Market wearing a sandwich board that reads, FALLEN, FALLEN IS BABYLON THE GREAT.…Like the Brown twins or Gaffe Trieste, this fellow is a San Francisco institution. He stands, stock still and silent, in the same spot every day, rain or shine, with his laminated forecast of doom for the unrepentant The tide of the sidewalk churns around him. Skateboarders ripping by. Shoppers juggling bags, slices of pizza, cups of designer coffee. Jabbering tourists fumbling with maps and running for the cable car. Amid it all, his placards entreat: Repent, ye sinners, fags, dykes, tramps, druggies, hippies, and freaks. Basically, my ilk is in for it. Down the street a ways from him, closer to the cable car turnaround, rages an older black guy with a bullhorn, yelling his head off about whores and plague and pestilence. There's something about AIDS in there, too. And he also makes a big appeal to repent. Conformity is the way of the Lord, is the tacit message, so I've always thought of repentance as requiring the complete negation of my identity. The Big Stick school of salvation.

"I don't want to disavow what I did," I say to Barbara, "like, oh, stripping isn't useful to me anymore so I reject it whole cloth, even the things that I liked."