Strip City: A Stripper's Farewell Journey Across America (9 page)

After dragging my bags to the car, muttering and cursing at their heft, I go back to the room and sit on the bed, listening to Travis Tritt on the clock radio and methodically sorting last night's haul.

First, I separate piles of twenties, tens, fives. Ones in stacks of twenty each. Each of the bills facing the same direction. It's got to be the same way every time, this stabilizing ritual. Handling this much currency gives me a primitive sense of contentment. There's something so satisfying, so intimate about the riffle of bills and the odd perfumey smell they take on from passing through all those sweaty fingers, fabric softener-scented pockets, leather billfolds, metal tills.

Almost seven hundred dollars.

From the world's hands to my wallet.

It's good to be back.

SEVEN

Distance is different west of the Mississippi. If "far" to a New Yorker is Columbus Circle to Wall Street, and to a Midwesterner it's Fargo to Beloit, then to a West Texan, "far" is, I think, El Paso to the moon. I call the motel where I'm booked for the night and ask how long to get there from Dallas. "Oh, the drive isn't too bad," says the gal at the front desk, "by taking I-Twenty to I-Ten, it's about six hundred miles." Rough calculation: nine hours, if I don't lollygag at lunch.

The sights: A discount western-wear outlet luring shoppers with a giant inflatable cowboy boot staked to the ground like a docked blimp. Homemade memorial wreaths and white crosses, descansos, plunged into the grass at roadside, plentiful enough to move a morbid person to keep tally with hash marks on the steering wheel. A blur of dwellings. An abandoned town, now just windborne sand, a gas station, and a name: Sierra Blanca.

There is a blinking neon sign that says GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS because there has to be. There are mirrors everywhere. The gouged linoleum floor is swept with a moving pattern of swirling silver dots, cast down from the mirror balls that turn round on the ceiling. The walls are red and yellow—happy colors, fast-food restaurant colors. Everywhere the gaze might rest hang photographs of naked girls, smiling gamely as they bend and twist in corny, lurid poses. Flashy disco music is forced through the speakers, pumped in at top volume to give the place rhythm, life. The atmosphere is stubbornly festive, as if repeatedly emphasizing its own cheerfulness would make it somehow believable. The sweat-bloated air smells of grime and Clorox.

While most eighteen-year-olds are starting college or picking up a trade, I am here, amidst the porn theaters, the live sex shows, and the cluttered, brightly lit shops that sell fake I.D.s and Chinese throwing stars, in the vicious heart of Times Square. This is Peepland. This is where I work.

I could blame it on New Jersey. When I was twelve my family moved there. Not to the broken-down boardwalks and smoke-belching factory towns of Springsteen country, but farther west to the low sloping foothills where white-collar families raise college-of-their-choice children. You don't hear much about this area— Madison, Chester, Bernardsville, Tewksbury, Livingston, Jefferson Township—a region beyond the reach of the turnpike, and therefore immune to the "what exit" joke. It's almost an entirely different state than the steel-and-grit parts they call Jersey.

New Jersey is the last stop after numerous executive peregrinations. The moves are hard on my family, given its size. I'm sure things were easier for my parents at the outset. There is a photograph of my mother and father, taken early in their marriage, with my brother and eldest sister on their laps—my brother, Tad, a jug-eared tot in black woolen shorts and a button-down shirt, my sister Barbara a newborn, her tiny form lost in a delicately embroidered christening gown. My father, at the time attending graduate school in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is beaming down at my brother, handsome in his dark suit and skinny tie. My mother, with her black hair in a short pixie cut, smiles coyly at the camera, prim in a black jacket with a Peter Pan collar and matching black skirt from Peck and Peck. My parents look smart and tidy, like they've got the world on a string. Whenever I see that photo, I think, they really should have stopped there.

But they don't. My family moves to Sweden and my mother gives birth to three more children, my sisters Annette and Kelly eleven months apart, then, five years later, me. After two dark-haired children from two dark-haired parents, my sisters and I are an aberrance of blondeness, prompting much family ribbing about Swedish mailmen. But the three of us all have father's close-set, heavy-lidded elfin eyes and mother's forbidding pointy chin. We belong.

When I am still an infant, we move back to the States. As we grow, the five kids form our own universe—a solar system loosely arranged in orbit around my mother. My father is the chief breadwinner, but like so many, he's a phantom dad—more absent than home, more aggravated than content. So he moves among the planets as a separate, belabored presence, whirling out of sight as quickly as he appears—a vital satellite, a scowl of moondust.

Since I'm the youngest by a wide margin, I am frequently ditched by the older kids; who don't want to be saddled with the baby. So my mother and I form an inseparable pack of two. I am happy to be a hip-pocket kid. I stand so close to her side as she works in the kitchen that whenever she moves her arm, her elbow strikes my forehead, which doesn't hurt and makes us both laugh. An indulgent mother, she makes me feel like I am her favorite and never does anything to contradict my assumption that this is truth, not wishful thinking.

In idle moments, my family will impress their hopes upon me. "She should go to Harvard like Dad and be a philosophy major." "She should go to NYU and study acting. They have an excellent drama department."

"She will do whatever she wants," my mother says, then later tells me she wishes I'd take up the drums.

They fuss over my future as if I am the family's last great hope. The exact outcome is uncertain, but that I will grow up to do something grand, turn into someone significant, is not in doubt.

What I turn into is an all-American misfit, a sullen, moonfaced ghoul. Come fourteen, I hate school and hate New Jersey, and don't want to do anything but listen to the radio, go to the city, and read. At my English teacher's behest, I launch into the junior outcast's canon— Hesse, Salinger, and Plath, who quickly becomes my favorite. Holden Caulfield seems to me a captious little pecker, but I love Esther Greenwood—that she was so full of promise yet so full of despair makes perfect sense to me. I consult "The Colossus" and "Ariel" for spiritual succor as if they are the Testaments.

Whenever I get to the end, I clasp the books to my chest, look out my east-facing window, and silently vow, "Someday."

When my Dad gets home from work, I drift downstairs and join my parents for dinner. My father takes off his glasses and rubs his eyes, his brows, thick and bushy as Brezhnev's, furrowing as he scours his eyelids with his knuckles. Another day run through the Lomanator. As the only child left under their roof, I observe my parents closely. My father always seems exhausted, and my mother gives off the melancholy impression that she is bigger than any suburb that might contain her. Between watching them and watching my siblings wander aimlessly between college and the real world, I figure if that's what obedience gets you, then the hell with it.

I develop terrible insomnia and stay up well past two, devouring books and plotting my next escape to New York. When I finally sleep, my dreams are filled with visions of the city. I walk the streets downtown and people with great plumed hairdos and surreal outfits nod at me, as if they know me intimately. Doors open and strangers invite me into their home. I know I have to move there eventually, but how?

Every school day, I drag myself out of bed fifteen minutes before I have to run for the bus and start my morning ritual: Plug in the curling iron. Wash my face and brush my teeth. Dress in something black. Spread white makeup stolen from my sister Annette, who had a brief stint in clown school, in a thin layer over my face and neck. Meticulously apply a coat of Hazel Bishop's "Black Mink-berry" lipstick, to stain my lips a deep, deep red. This is the greatest cosmetic, the only cosmetic—chalky and cheap, ninety-nine cents a tube at Woolworth's, it lasts all day and is the exact color of dried blood. Next, outline my eyes with black liquid liner, all the way around with points at the corners. Spray my bleached-blonde bangs with Aqua Net Super Hold (in the white can) and curl my bangs, half under, half back, until the hair hisses and burns. Tease the bangs until they stand up in a flaxen pouf and spray again.

If Goth is my look, then punk is my life, for I was just slogging along in a fugue state, not fully alive, until I heard it. It completely turns me around. Books are one thing, but here is this music that sounds as torn-up raw and tangled as I feel inside, and it has something dangerous and weighty to impart. This isn't just "fuck you." This is "fuck you" with a philosophy, and I organize my life around the stuff. I become so wedded to this identity that when someone calls me a poseur in the hall at school, I burst into tears. After school, I scan the radio dial—from WFMU in East Orange on one end to WPRB in Princeton on the other—in search of the hardcore bands that I like: Dead Kennedys, Circle Jerks, Suicidal Tendencies, Youth Brigade, Minor Threat, FEAR. The record that really blows me away is Social Distortion's "Mommy's Little Monster." Once I get my hands on a copy, I listen to it every day. It is my refuge, my gospel, my hope. I sit on my bed, punching my fist in the air as I sing along. I would say I began straining at the parental leash, but what leash? With no real call to rebel against anything at home, I simply rebel against everything else.

My parents smile bemusedly at their bullheaded child. They are pleased that I am developing a social conscience, so they are patient with me—a patience I will test repeatedly, starting with the day Jeanette and I get arrested in the city at a No Nukes demonstration. Jeanette, in a group of protestors who were blocking the sidewalk, was being swept into the paddy wagon, and I couldn't let her go to jail by herself (what would I tell her mother?), so I stepped forward and let them take me, too. We spent the night in the juvie cell, while the other protestors were thrown in the regular lock-up. We remained alone, but they kept cramming more women into the group cell—streetwalkers ("My God, they're barely wearing any clothes!" Jeanette and I whispered to each other, peering through the bars as they were led past), dealers, petty thieves. Later on they put someone else in with us, an older woman with long blonde hair. She'd been caught shoplifting costume jewelry at Bloomingdales and was sobbing inconsolably. The guards knew the other women in the lock-up would make good on their threats to kick her ass if she didn't stop crying so they moved her to our cell, where she spent the night sitting cross-legged on the floor, rocking back and forth, raking her fingers through her hair, and crying some more. Our case was dismissed the next morning and Jeanette's mom picked us up from the courthouse and took us to the Second Avenue Deli, where we sat, gray-faced and contrite, as we ate our latkes.

But such trials are few and far between. Most of my spare time is spent with friends roaming the nearby towns for something to do that doesn't incite mixups with jocks or other local meatheads. We search everywhere for a friendly corner—punk shows, gay discos, midnight showings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show and The Hunger. Maybe a road trip to see the Ramones at Trenton City Gardens, whatever we can get. If it's the only territory you can mine, you will find someplace to fit in. You will dig toward sanctuary.

Sometimes there are all-ages shows at the Showplace in Dover, a dumpy low-ceilinged box across from the Kmart. The Showplace is known more for its weekday lunch special featuring go-go dancers than anything else, but they'll advertise any feature they have in hopes of attracting some business to the miserable old place. When my boyfriend Pete's band played there, the sign out front said MENTAL ABUSE on one side and GO-GO LUNCH on the other. My friend Laurie, a temperamental, spiky-haired twenty-six-year-old who has been my idol ever since the night she cut in front of me on line for Rocky Horror, has been inside during the day and seen the go-go lunch for herself. One night while she touches up my roots in her kitchen, squirting my scalp with the gritty blue bleach solution, she tells me about it. "I went in to get some flyers and this dancer was wearing a stretched-out old leotard that she had pinned across her chest and it wasn't even a safety pin, it was like a badge, turned around backwards. It was so sad!" We cluck and murmur, united in girlish pity, glad that we aren't losers in bad leotards grinding away in front of a bunch of slack-jawed businessmen.

Then Laurie brightens. "Which is a cooler name for my band, the Vampiristics or Lust for Blood?"

"Lust for Blood is good," I say, "because it's like 'Lust for Life.'"

"See, that's what I think!"

The conversation heaves further and further away from the subject of stripping, and it never comes up again.

The distractions I am able to find in New Jersey help me muddle through the days, but it is the trips to New York that I live for. When the bus gets to that point on Route 3 where the Manhattan skyline unfurls—from the stately high-rises of Riverside Drive all the way down to the Twin Towers, my heart flutters at the majestic sight and my insides unclench. Oz dead ahead. I don't have to do anything outrageous to be happy—just being there is enough. I walk around Astor Place with Jeanette, looking at the junk people have spread out on blankets in hopes of selling, or follow Laurie around as she shops for records at Free Being and Sounds. Once in a while we go to a show—a hardcore matinee at CBGBs or Rock Against Racism in the park. Most memorable of all the shows we see is the triple bill of Reagan Youth, Murphy's Law, and the Dead Kennedys at the World Theater on 2nd Street, where Jello Biafra kisses me backstage. He grabs my arm, pulls me to him, and mashes me full on the mouth. It is like being kissed by the lips of God. A sweaty, warbly-voiced, preachy-preachy God. A pivotal moment. I spend endless hours in study hall writing letters telling him how much it meant to me and that he is the only one who could possibly understand me, man. I don't mail any of the letters but Jeanette finds a few in the locker we share and immediately confiscates them for future blackmail purposes.

I show up the first day of senior year in dirty clothes, a white petticoat with a black fishnet handkerchief skirt over it, a man's undershirt with the collar torn off, grubby tights, and black pointy-toed boots. I slept forty-five minutes the night before. My stomach hurts constantly and the doctor is afraid I might have an ulcer.