Strip City: A Stripper's Farewell Journey Across America (6 page)

At the end of the afternoon, Ann Marie and Jade call us up one by one so Ann Marie can hand each of us a completion certificate. Afterward we crowd together while Ann Marie's husband, Jim, a smart-looking fellow in chinos, an Oxford cloth shirt, and silver wire-framed glasses, snaps a class photo. I hold my certificate in my hands, admiring the smart black plastic frame and my stage name printed on it. "Barbie Faust" is official. Credentialed, even. For me, this is a first. When I was seventeen, I received my high school diploma from an adult education program in the mail, rolled up in a cardboard tube. I unrolled the sheet of fake parchment, looked it over once, and stuffed the diploma back in the tube. I threw the tube in the lower cabinet of the teak secretary in my parents' living room, and that was that. This is as close as I've ever come to a graduation ceremony.

I'm ready to head out into the world. I think.

FOUR

Spring comes to Wyoming, bringing with it the fattest robins I have ever seen. Unsure how to balance their great weight, they bobble around the yard and take to resting on the fence along the driveway. When they aren't in repose, they work over the ground, pecking for worms. One damp, gray mid-April afternoon, I count more than a dozen robins between the back door and the garage, their plump red chests in stark contrast to the leaden sky and the trees still just in bud. I don't know how they manage to fly, they're so heavy—more than two sitting together bow the telephone wire that runs from the main line to the house.

Randy and I celebrate the season by getting our own bike, a beautiful '74 shovelhead that we bought off of a wiry retired Air Force engineer named Sam. His back could no longer withstand the jarring ride of a hardtail, so we took the rickety old growler off his hands. Riding, I come to find, isn't easy for me, either. The bike is a noble beast, but lands so hard that whenever we come up to a bump in the road, Randy yells "Bump!" over his shoulder so I can post up by bracing against the foot pegs to spare my cervical vertebrae the distress of my head slamming into my neck with the force of a big fat pumpkin pitched from a rooftop.

We spend the first warm evening of the year riding out Happy Jack Road to the lakes. A small herd of antelope graze on a low rise in the distance, then take off at a quick spring when they hear the bike rumbling up. In a few weeks these slopes will bloom with thousands of tiny purple and blue wildflowers. Twenty miles west of the city, the plains end and the road ramps into the mountains, where Granite Springs reservoir sits glassy and undisturbed a mile outside the entrance to Medicine Bow National Forest. The late day sun slants through the pines, mingling orange light and black shadow on the pebbly ground.

Tall reeds grow at the lake's edge. We walk around the rim in silence, holding hands and searching for flat rocks to skip across the water.

"Are you all packed?" Randy asks me, skipping a rock off the surface of the lake,
plip plip plip.

"More or less. I still need to get a padlock and some no-slip things for my shoes."

We settle into a weighty silence, both preoccupied with feelings too complicated to articulate.

I am leaving for the first round of clubs tomorrow afternoon.

After several weeks of poring over maps, combing Web sites and trade magazines, and culling recommendations from my dancer friends across the country, I've a loosely fashioned itinerary. I'm starting with a short, four-stop road trip: Pueblo, Colorado, to Las Vegas, then Dallas and El Paso, Texas. Later on in the summer, I plan on flying to the Exotic World Museum in California. Then at the end of August, Randy and I will fly up to Alaska. I had originally fancied making the entire journey by myself, but one night I was at the Outlaw talking with Rob, a guy on Randy's wild horse racing team. "Let me get this right," Rob said, shaking his head good-naturedly and rubbing the buzzed blond hairs on the back of his neck, "You want to go off to Alaska by yourself? To strip. Where there's big out-doorsy guys everywhere and all that oil money?" Rob brushed a wisp of beer foam from his mustache and cracked his straight white teeth, laughing. "Let me tell you, if I were Randy, there is no way in hell I'd let that happen."

Rob was right. Once Alaska was on the table, there was no way around Randy's resistance. So I cashed in my frequent flier miles, got him a ticket, budgeted more time so we could sightsee, and called it our working vacation.

I'll take most of the fall off, as that's my high season as a journalist, then when it gets colder and Randy's work slows down, I can explore the clubs of New Jersey around Thanksgiving and Randy can fly out for the holiday with my family. Jeanette invited me out to Los Angeles to tour the clubs, so come winter, when Wyoming starts to get miserable, I'll go out California way and warm up a little. In between stops, I can investigate the two Cheyenne clubs: the Green Door, the little go-go place downtown, and the Clown's Den, the topless honky-tonker way down South Greeley Highway, on the Colorado state line. This venture is going to be bloody expensive, even if I stay on the Motel 6 strata. I need to make this quest break even. Thankfully, stripping is a lucrative sinecure. That's what brought me to it in the first place, heaven knows.

Traffic on 25 South is a mess—there are five substantial jams between Aurora and Colorado Springs. By the time I hit Pueblo, two hours behind schedule, I've had enough time idling in the truck to put on my makeup, plus the hairpiece.

Aloha Glorya's is on North Main Street in downtown Pueblo, a discreet facade that blends right in with the other storefronts. My lateness is a blessing because I'm in too much of a hurry to be nervous. I pull open the heavy front door, and with my costume bag over my shoulder, I stride right in.

The club is a cute little party box, a single room with diamond tuck wall covering, carved wood tiki statues adorning the bar, and blue and pink streaks in the carpet that glow under the black light. And dark, of course. They're all so very dark. It's as if light would stall the growth cycle of whatever's seeded in these places and must be banished. Directly across from the entrance, in a carpeted conversation pit, a petite, dusky-skinned girl rolls around on a low, circular vinyl-topped table. She's topless, with diminutive, brown-nippled breasts that pay gravity no mind. She shifts onto all fours, then sits back on her heels so the flesh of her haunches dimples unprettily, as a bearded middle-aged man in a John Deere cap sits watching with his hands pressed between his knees. She looks back at him over her shoulder, her expression pleading in its sexiness and disdainful all at once, and he places a twenty-dollar bill on the table, delighted.

I smile at this tableau, so fleeting and familiar, with her showing more than she means to, him only seeing what he wants anyway, and the grace encircling them both for their respective show of will.

A thin man with a wiry gray mustache materializes out of the darkness. "Can I help you?" The silver steer skull bolo tie fastened loosely under his collar glimmers, catching the light from the horseshoe-shaped bar to the right of us.

Shifting my costume bag on my shoulder, I force a brighter smile. Out of my mouth comes an automatic phrase that I haven't uttered in a long, long time. "Yes, I'd like to audition."

…

I wonder if the good folks at McDonald's have any idea of their significance in the lives of strippers. Whatever the situation— whether someone is picking on you for your choice of job, or you're sick of dancing and need to convince yourself that it's worth coming in to work—the justification of choice is, "Well, it beats working at McDonald's!" I've never worked at McDonald's, or any fast-food restaurant, so I can only assume that this is true. I have, however, had a number of tedious, ass-busting jobs, mostly when I was in high school: cleaning lady, supermarket cashier, department store clerk. So I know a bit about scraping people's crap off of toilets, wearing mildly humiliating smocklike uniforms, and shuffling and refolding product for an indifferent corporation. I also know about trading all that for a job where you can make in one night what you used to earn in a week, or a month. Or two months. When you consider the sacrifices of social stature, privacy, and peace of mind, it is a rather big trade-off to make, but when the choice is limited to a McDonald's-type job or stripping, I can't fault a woman for making the money decision. I sure wouldn't mind making bank tonight.

The manager shows me to the stairway leading up to the dressing room. As I climb the stairs, my anxiety mounts. Although I've not had the displeasure of the experience, I've heard about clubs where the girls run off newcomers, not wanting their money threatened or their turf encroached upon. I hope things will be okay if I enter in low-relief. When I meet the women who work here, I will smile, self-deprecate, and dispense compliments like a salesman hands out business cards.

The dressing room is actually three—a large room with a long table and chairs, a smaller room fitted with a deeply gouged, double-sided mirrored vanity, and a locker room that's the size of a large closet. Two women sit at the vanity, smoking cigarettes. They both turn to look at me.

"Hi," says one, a skinny girl with a choppy brunette bob. She has homemade tattoos on either shoulder—a four-leaf clover with LUCKY inked in uneven hand beneath it on the left, and a letter C on the right. "Are you new?"

"Yeah, I just came in for an audition. How's the money here?" I say, pointing to the chair next to hers.

Lucky nods for me to take the seat. "Sucks," she says, stubbing out her cigarette in a fluted plastic ashtray.

"No way, really?" I pull a couple dresses from my bag. The black minidress with the mirrored squares on the front, the minidress with the bugs.

"I worked yesterday from three o'clock until midnight and made three fuckin' dollars."

My eyes widen. "You're joking, right? It couldn't have been that bad." I pull my sweatshirt over my head and take off my jeans. "Which dress?" I ask, holding them both up.

"The bugs. And I'm serious. Three dollars. You would not believe how slow it's been here lately. I usually make good money when my regular comes in, but he's in jail."

"My doctor guy is supposed to come in tonight," interjects her friend, Kitten, a short, plump redhead with fine lines at the corner of her mouth. "I really hope he does. He hasn't come in for two weeks and I am seriously hurting."

When I stand up in just my underwear to pull on the dress, Lucky looks me over, fumbling with an unlit Salem. Her fingernails are covered in acrylic tips painted with chipping red polish. Two tips are missing, the underlying nails bare and ragged. "You've got a good body," she says, coolly. "You're nice and thick."

Here we go. Back to the arena where every aspect of my body is up for scrutiny. I'm not skinny, and without dieting, I never will be. So I don't know why having this pointed out bothers me so much. "Thick" isn't an insult, I guess. It's just not what I want to hear.

"I could do better," I say, steering the appraisal back to her. "I wish I were thin like you."

She observes her reflection in the mirror, turning to the side, placing her hands on her plainly visible ribs. I'm the size of two of her put together. She seems pleased by what I said.

Slipping my feet into red stiletto heels and straightening my dress, I say, "Well, I guess I'd better get downstairs. I'll see you guys later. If they hire me."

"Of course they'll hire you. Won't they?" Kitten says to Lucky.

"Oh, for sure," Lucky nods, exhaling a plume of mentholated smoke.

Nice girls. Good.

Lucky and Kitten were right. The standard-issue three-song audition on the main stage goes by in a flash: First song in the dress, out of the top by the end of the second song, topless for the third. There are only ten or so women working in the club, and half of them sit at the stage for my audition and tip. The Mexican guys at the tipping rail seem energized by having them in their midst. Hoots and dollar bills all around. When I get offstage the manager tells me I can stay and work for the rest of the night.

There aren't many customers in Aloha Glorya's, so after a couple turns onstage and two hours of absolutely nothing to do except gossip with the other dancers, I head to the bar and ask for a soda.

A beefy middle-aged Asian man in chinos and a polo shirt swivels around on his bar stool. "Hello, I'm Arthur. You must be new!"

I hop up on the bar stool next to his and he buys me a drink. He tells me he stops in every day after work in his manufacturing concern, then proceeds to recite a list of the things he owns—two houses, three Harleys, a customized vintage Corvette. Plus, his business is worth several million dollars. And that, you see, is why he can't divorce his frigid, pain-in-the-neck wife. If he does, she'll get everything. His solution? Rental girlfriends.

He peels off two twenty-dollar bills and puts them under my glass. Then he leans in close, touching my arm. "What would you say to a proposition?"

At this question, something primal stirs inside of me. A long-dormant instinct is waking up and feeling the air. Sandra Dee has left the building and hustle mode has begun.

I rest my hand on his thick, hairless forearm. "What do you have in mind?"

"We could get together sometimes. You wouldn't have to work here. I could put you up someplace and support you. I promise it would be worth your while."

"Hmmmm, interesting!" I say, looking into my drink, smiling slightly. I have no intention of taking him up on his offer, but he doesn't have to know that.

My mind flashes on an earnest women's studies student I once met at a cocktail party. During a conversation about the sex industry, she swirled her vodka violently around in her glass and exhorted, "Well, stripping isn't as hypocritical as the rest of the culture, which denigrates sex but uses it all the time to sell stuff. At least stripping is
honest!
"

I would say that stripping is blatant in its purpose but I wouldn't call it honest. More than anything else, the point on which this business turns is suspension of disbelief. That's show biz. Plato said, "That which deceives may be said to enchant."

At this moment, I am about to become one enchanting motherfucker.

"Oh, that's an intriguing offer, Arthur," I purr, draining my glass, "but I just don't know you well enough."

As if on cue, he pulls out a hundred-dollar bill and slips it under the garter around my thigh. "I've made the same arrangement with a couple of women who've worked here and they've all been very happy. They get some extra money, then go back to where they came from, and it works out well for everybody concerned." He speaks with the money-clip cool of an executive sketching out a business plan.

Now I want to see how far I can push this. If I liked Arthur, I'd be restrained by guilt. I would feel terrible about leading him on and play it clean. But it's hard to work up sympathy for a self-professed serial cheat. I feel almost vindicated taking him for all he's worth. This isn't bilking an old lady out of her pension fund. This is relieving the pressure in a philanderer's obviously straining wallet.