Strip City: A Stripper's Farewell Journey Across America (8 page)

I think I'll try Club Paradise.

Before I can work at Club Paradise, I need to get my sheriffs card back from Cheetah's, so I drive over there first thing the next day, feeling somewhat better but still pretty raw. I'm blinking in the darkness of a strip club at 8:30 a.m., and the breakfast crew in this place is quite a slice of humanity. Casino workers and cab drivers just off of their all-night shifts sit curled over their Bloody Marys, the roil of night given over to the quiet of new day. Morning stays safely on the other side of the tinted doors, leaving the inside of the club sleepy and black as a cave. The dancers on duty, barely visible in the darkness but for their Day-Glo party clothes, seem to glide silently over the carpet. You're in Bukowski country.

I find the house mom shuttling around the dressing room putting grooming supplies on the counter, saying something about how she just started her shift and she's trying to get organized and could I give her a break and wait. With my skin still thin from the night before last, I'm irritated that's she's more concerned with arranging hair spray and breath mints than with helping me. I bang out of the dressing room in search of a manager. By the time I find the manager in the office, I'm practically foaming at the mouth, which he aggravates by doing that pantomime remote control clicking gesture at me, that, "I'm trying to turn you off" thing. This sends me sailing right over the edge.

"I need my sheriffs card now and the house mom just totally witched out on me …"

"Calm down, honey," says the manager who just tried to channel surf me. "Just calm down."

"No, I won't calm down!" I'm screaming now. "Because a house mom is supposed to tend to the dancers' needs and being a bitch is not in her job description!"

I have officially lost it. I've never so much as raised my voice in a club and now I'm having a total diva meltdown in front of the top brass. I fling open the office door, storm back to the dressing room, demand my card, tap my foot, and huff loudly while the mom fishes it out. I grab the card and leave without saying thank you. I've got to get a grip. The point of this trip is to sort the bright and complicated fragments of striptease. This trip is not about money. It is not about resuming bad habits. No more "go-go head" for me.

As the day wears on and I walk along the Strip, past virtual Venice and virtual Paris and virtual New York, it occurs to me that my fragile emotional state might be partly due to the Vegas Creeps. Whenever I come here, at first I feel a magpie's delight at all the shiny surfaces, but after about forty-eight hours I grow leery of the blinking lights and chirping slot machines and steak-n-shrimp dinners had on the cheap after midnight. The manufactured fun starts to get frustrating. I end up wanting to claw off the wallpaper, melt the tinsel into puddles of silver, tear apart all the scale models of big, meaningful cities. I want to scrape down to the soul of the Strip and there isn't one. Vegas isn't evil, but it's maddening for lack of moral reverb. Indulgence is the coin of the realm here, but what good is pleasure without the contrast of propriety? Just tinny decadence in a neon cavern and it makes me a little crazy.

"It's because this place was built in the middle of a desert, you know," Don says. Don is the manager of Club Paradise, and he's sitting next to me at the bar, listening intently as I describe the Vegas Creeps. The night is young and there aren't many customers in the place yet, so we have time to share a drink, me in my black beaded evening gown and him in an expensive navy suit. The club is sprawling and elegant—the two of us are dwarfed under the high ceiling hung with elaborate chandeliers. Don continues: "People come to Vegas to do what they can't do at home. They come here, dump their psychic garbage, and the desert just sucks it right up. Then when they leave, all that negative energy stays here."

Don looks weary—he doesn't seem to have the thick skin or the hard-headed business sense you need to climb the ranks of management in this industry. And he cops to it. His big dream is to work in music promotion. But as long as he's there, he says, I'm welcome. "You can come back here and work anytime you'd like, but I can understand why you might not want to. This place is just a huge void, built around loss. It sucks people in and takes everything they've got."

He taps the filter end of a Marlboro Light on the bar, then flips the cigarette into his mouth and sucks the tiny flame from his lighter into the tobacco. Don is a young man but his eyes contain decades of sadness.

I've got to get the hell out of Vegas.

SIX

The epicenter of strip culture shifts periodically. In the early 1990s, Tampa's outrageous lap dancing generated the most buzz, then Houston's sheer volume of clubs (more than thirty in the city limits) made that city the hot spot, and now that Houston has passed an ordinance that requires three feet of space between dancers and customers, the locus of stripping hype has shifted north to Dallas.

Dallas is a matured cow town, sprawling and flat, with a small, centralized skyline surrounded by ropy gray tangles of freeway that wind round and fling you off in whatever direction you need to go. The tidy thing about Dallas is that most of the major strip clubs are on or near the same road, Northwest Highway, a.k.a. "Pervert's Row," so you can just drive along the strip and check out whatever looks promising. Now, I'd heard that stripping is different in Dallas— a town known for big money, big party atmosphere, and a big air of high-status masculine entitlement. But nothing in my most lavish macho man dreams could have prepared me for the Lodge. From the minute the valet took my car, I knew I'd found a new level of luxe. Most gentlemen's clubs are an interior design travesty, all polished brass and potted ferns—a motif once referred to as "Bennigan's with tits." This place, however, is another story. As the name suggests, the club is tricked out like a giant hunting lodge—the walls sided in lodgepole pine, the carpet an egregiously tasteful leopard pattern, a stuffed bear poised for attack in the foyer. The main stage is a wonder: A cave built around a black polyurethane platform, with a small waterfall running down one side. Exotic animal heads line the perimeter of the ceiling—the exit sign is wedged into a mounted hippo's mouth. The restaurant area boasts cases full of rifles, crossbows, pistols, and old hunting trophies. Clearly, the management courts patrons of a type somewhere between Gerry Spence and J. R. Ewing. If strip clubs are the last bastion of dudesmanship, the Lodge pitches that sentiment into butch overdrive.

The manager who hires me is a baby-faced jarhead with a mind for discipline and a gift for idiom. When he impresses upon me that "lewd" dancing—flashing, tugging on my thong, any contact with the customer that goes beyond touching his knees or shoulders for balance—will not be tolerated, he looks me square in the eye and drawls, "Don't even think about bending the rules here, 'cause that dawg don't hunt." No lie, in the office they have a corkboard filled with Polaroid photos of women they've fired, some with the word lewd scrawled, Prynne-like, under their names.

He also tells me that the music women can dance to is restricted to selections that will "be pleasing to their demographic—affluent men age thirty-five to fifty-five." No rap, no alternative, no heavy metal. Ah, one of those clubs where they keep the wild side carefully groomed.

It's a gown club—a place where your nails have to be perfect (they checked mine), your costume formal (evening dress—prom queen style, not streetwalker), and your heels a certain height (nothing less than three inches). They're very serious about all of this. Micromanagement is a fairly recent development in strip clubs, but if a place caters to a corporate clientele, it hardly seems inappropriate to institute corporate practices.

I do my rotation: two songs each on the main, bar, and restaurant stages. The men who sit stage-side in the fancy upholstered armchairs are a mixed bunch. Some are generous with their attention and tips, others couldn't care less whether I am there or not. I hate that "Hey, I'm dancing here" feeling that slinks around in the face of indifference. But that feeling dissipates when I notice the customers' eyes that are upon me. In my dancing days, I've been looked at all sorts of ways—the furtive glance of a shy guy, the predatory gawp of a trick, and the friendly leer of a party boy, but until now, never with the pampering gaze of a would-be lover. These men court and woo like none I've ever met.

"Marry me, our children would be gorgeous," says Johnny Pepsodent as he tucks a buck. "My divorce is final soon," is the pitch of a dapper entrepreneur. "Can I come back then and take you to Tiffany's?" I always thought the point of coming to a strip club was to get away from commitment, with a carefully orchestrated "Him up here, her down there" social dynamic. But the sorority-girl spin the dancers get here seems to bridge the gap. In this kind of environment, working presents a potential slippery slope between a job and a relationship.

Dangerous. But it also charges the air.

Later in the shift, I'm dancing in the restaurant area of the club. The stage is nothing more than a small raised platform set amidst the tables, and right in front of me a group of men in elegant suits is having a business dinner. Unsmiling and rigid, they wear their entitlement like a shroud. One of them, a middle-management type in his early thirties, watches me intently as he dines on a steak. He doesn't look cruel, or even needy, in fact, his face is placidly handsome and kind, but watching him eat as he looks at me gives me a chill. Locking gazes, we are bound together by primal rhythm—my undulating and his chewing.

I shudder and turn my back to the table. The only other man near the stage is pointedly looking in the other direction. Fine. I'd rather be ignored than consumed.

The big money here isn't made doing table dances, but rather sitting around with the customers, chatting, eating, and drinking— like trophy wives for hire (minus the sex, of course). This creates an air of Lobster Palace swank, and it's pretty fun, if a little bit hard to figure out. I'm sort of bad at small talk, and my money radar is severely underdeveloped, so I spend the time between sets tucked into an armchair next to a dreamy-eyed rancher who talks to me about hunting and dog breeding. It's almost too sophisticated to be truly sexy, this club, but it is quite a break from the rat race. I fully understand why a guy might be drawn here. The Lodge is the most physically beautiful reinforcement of male privilege I've ever seen.

I squeeze my way through the crowd at Baby Dolls Saloon the next night, because word of mouth has it this is Party Central. Baby Dolls grosses more on liquor than any strip club in the state, and it's one of the industry's few havens for country music fans. I break into a broad smile as the sound system begins blasting John Berry's "She's Taken a Shine," a song that's fresh as ozone and sunlight. Two black cowboys are standing by one of the stages, handing out singles and singing every word. This place is more my style than the Lodge. It's loud and rowdy, with a great sense of sensual freedom and Texan largesse.

The manager shows me around the club, beginning upstairs in the dressing room. "We don't load the girls down with rules here because we want you all to make money and be happy ..."

I'm not paying attention because my gaze is riveted to the two tanning beds, gleaming white under the fluorescents—there's a girl in one of them, baking away as she talks on her cell phone. There's also a wrap-around vanity, fitness equipment, a beautician for hair and makeup, a house mom to watch over the girls, and—gasp, sputter—a manicurist. The typical strip club dressing room is nothing more than a meat locker with a mirror and a coat rack, so thoughtful details like this blow me away.

The only hitch at Baby Dolls is that you can't wear a t-back or thong; you have to wear a tanga-cut bottom, which still shows the entire behind, but is about two inches wider across the top. It seems a silly distinction, but local municipalities are always forming ad hoc committees to dicker over what constitutes a buttock or a breast or a nipple, and how much—down to a fraction of an inch—a dancer can show. There's a nipple issue here, too. They have to be covered, and Baby Dolls has a canny solution: liquid latex mixed with iridescent opaque powder.

"Do you know how to do latex?" asks the house mom, a big old tough gal who frankly scares me some. I shake my head no.

Pick a color, she tells me. I look at the choices: gold, bronze, copper, and dark copper. Um, dark copper. She pumps the Elmer's glue-like latex into a relish cup, and scoops in a small amount of sparkly powder with a Q-tip. Once it's mixed to the color of Thousand Island dressing, she swabs it in circular motion onto my nipples.

"Give it five minutes to dry, and don't start working until they're done, because they have to be covered," she warns. "It'll peel right off at the end of the night." I wander the dressing room, saying hi to the girls, alternately fanning my latex and admiring the visual effect of all our gilded nipples. One Filipina with a huge set of implants chose gold powder, giving her the mighty rack of Croesus. Too cool.

This ain't no gown club, so once I'm dry, I dress to hustle. I tease my hairpiece to stratospheric heights, snap on my rhinestone choker—sine qua non by now—buy a fluorescent pink tanga from the house mom, and zip on a dress I named The Tentacle of Love. The hottest of pink spandex, it reaches my ankles and is slit up to mid-thigh. The shoulder straps are white to match the rows of rubberized oblongs that dot the fabric, and the rubberized bits glow under black light. It's nothing I'd consider wearing in civilian mode, but when you work in near-darkness, you need to play big just to show up. Besides, this is about courting the peripatetic male gaze, not about the imprimatur of Polly Mellen.

"Love that dress!" whoops the Arkansas businessman who buys my first table dance. I say thank you, tuck the twenty into my garter, nudge his knees apart and start dancing in the space between his feet. His fingers start creeping up my thighs. I brush them away. More dancing. More creeping fingers. Finally, I grab his hands and pin them to the arms of the chair and finish the song that way. Of course he doesn't want another dance, because I'm a priss. Almost all the dances thereafter go like this, but the manager had warned me that some dances could be "handsy." "Handsy" is something of a euphemism. "Grope fiesta" would be more accurate, but you can set your own limits here and still do okay. You just have to settle for a minimum of repeat business. Still, I manage to recoup my travel expenses in a few hours while wriggling just out of the customers' reach.

Dancing onstage here is totally awesome, but it's a workout because there are eight stages you have to dance on consecutively, which takes about forty-five minutes. The only problem with the stage rotation is that you might get trapped onstage during a song you hate, which is what happens when a little Black girl comes onstage to "The Devil Went Down to Georgia." Sure, she looks great in her hot pants and halter top trimmed in flame appliques, but those lyrics, "Chicken in a bread pan. Pickin' out dough" are so anti-erotic and what the fuck.

I'm not sure if it's the booze or the Texas machismo that makes the men here want to spend money, but they sure do fork it out. They like to tip girls onstage as well as at the tables, which usually isn't the case in a place that does a high volume of table dances. When a guy steps to the edge of the stage—most of which are three feet high, making the girls look positively giant—we do a little smiling dip and shimmy before he tucks in the tip. It's good policy, really, to do something that conveys, "I see you," before taking a guy's money. Nothing is worse than a preoccupied stripper staring off into space, lost in her own private orbit. That disinterest bores its way into a man's heart. To appear interested in the Baby Dolls boys is no chore, though, because they're so enthusiastic. By the time I get to the eighth stage, my garter is full-to-groaning with money. I look down at the singles wreathing my thigh and picture myself at the bank, trying to deposit four hundred dollars in ones and smiling weakly at the teller. "Oh, I'm a waitress."

I would dance to country music all the time if I could, but not everyone likes it as much as I do. I ask a man for a dance, he says yes. The next song begins, "A Lot More Action" by Toby Keith.

"No, no." He grabs my arm to stop me. "Wait until the song is over. I can't stand country music. I had a terrible one-night stand in Nashville once and ever since then I can't stomach the stuff."

Fair enough.

This guy is pretty cool. Turns out he's an orthopedic surgeon with a practice in town. He asks if I've ever seen foot surgery.

"I've got one tomorrow. Would you like to come?"

When I work, I get all sorts of offers, some strange, most predictable—every dancer does—but this was the most unusual by far. I have a pretty weak stomach, but when given the chance, I always want to see fetal Siamese twins pickled in a jar, or a TV show with the world's largest tumor, even if I end up queasy and sorry I ever looked. So, naturally, I'd love to see the inside of a human foot. I'm tempted, I really am. But I'm also engaged. And I think, given the context, foot surgery would be cheating. I have to pass.

A couple sits at a table along the back wall, and when I get offstage the man motions me over by waving a twenty and slurs, "It's for her." When I see the notepad on the table, I realize his speech is a little off because he's deaf, and so is his girlfriend. This isn't so much a charity case as a recruitment opportunity, so I climb down off my prissy horse and pull out all the stops. It takes real nerve for a woman to come to a strip club and it's a form of female misbehavior I think should be richly rewarded. So I work it—belly to belly, breast to breast. I nuzzle her neck, inhaling her scent. It's so rare to get any kind of approval from women not involved in this line of work, I want to draw her excitement deep into my lungs, as if to keep it with me always. If I rubbed up against this woman any harder, I'd end up standing behind her, and she really seems to enjoy it. Here's to claiming new territory, sweetie. Sisterhood is powerful.

I have such a fine time at Baby Dolls that as I drive back to my hotel room at 2 a.m., I am high on the whole business. There's worse ways to earn your keep. You can make your own hours, the money is plentiful, and on a night like tonight, it's a great party and a fat ego-buzz.

But morning is the great equalizer—a good night usually begets a crispy day after. When I wake up, I'm so bone-wrackingly sore I can barely stand upright, and after eight hours of chronic politeness and idle chatter, I am unable to form a coherent thought. My mind feels trashed—like a broken tape, snapped and flapping stupidly on its reel. I stand in front of the mirror, scraping the raccooned mascara from under my eyes, just letting my thoughts settle where they may. The drive to El Paso. Check-out time at noon. Finding a big omelette for breakfast. And money. Last night's money.