“I Resolved to Become a Stripper or Kill Myself”

IT WAS MY THIRD DAY as a data-entry temp for the City of
Portland. I spent eight hours entering things like JX167HJ50 into the
appropriate spaces of computerized spreadsheets. XC90FH23
1/13/96 F2HU33M
C66 . For all I knew I was dropping bombs on
North Korea and turning large tracts of prairie into Walmarts. It
didn’t feel like honest work in pursuit of beauty and truth, that’s for
sure. At least it was only a two-week assignment.

“Hey Jack! I just realized that as of today I have 33 years and six
months until retirement!” hollered the 300-pound brunette in the next
cubicle.

“Oh yeah? I’ve got 28 years, three months, and five days,” countered
Jack, the foxy gay office manager.

I resolved to become a stripper or kill myself, and whipped out a
little notebook to start a list of pros and cons. Either choice
presented a highroad compared to office whoring, that was clear.

I had had the best training in critical thinking our nation could
provide and I couldn’t come up with anything very critical of the sex
industry. Degrading? Not compared to the brain-melting hamster cage I
was in at that moment. Exploitative? Of whom? In a free-market
situation, each party would enter into the business willingly and
prices would be set by the laws of supply and demand. Human sexual
appetites being what they were, the supply side stood to make a pretty
sweet profit. If only the nice entitled liberal arts ladies could stop
twisting their engagement rings long enough to consider who stood to
profit most from sex economics, the patriarchy would crumble.

Stripping was the Little League of the sex industry. It represented
a safe and not-so-invasive testing ground for my theories. As far as I
could tell it was an honest exchange: a dollar for a smile. In fact it
seemed to be one line of work in which society’s entrenched misogyny
was more or less absent. Guys worshipped strippers and totally
prostrated themselves at the Altar of the Naked Woman. The women I had
met were entrepreneurs. They made their own rules, set their own hours,
and drew their own boundaries. There were no middlemen. The girls were
free to embrace whatever far-out philosophies they wanted and could
even proselytize from the stage. And they certainly weren’t unwittingly
selling arms to Third World nations. The worst that could be said about
strippers was that they were flouting society’s conventions.

A flunky came over with a fresh pile of numbers and letters to be
typed into the computer, and I snapped out of my reverie. My adrenaline
was pumping and my ego had swelled to Che Guevara proportions thinking
about so much revolution. I took a walk to the pissoir to cool down. On
the way I quietly clocked my fellow hamsters with my best sociologist
stare. These kind, bland, fashionless people had swallowed the status
quo hook, line, and sinker and Lord look how fat it’d made them! They
were beached whales with little fire left in them. They’d given up on
beauty and truth—perhaps they’d never even thought of it. Sure
could count, though! Twenty-eight years, three months, and five days
until big gay Jack could sit in his easy chair and channel surf without
interruption.

I’d seen enough people who toed the line in my first five years to
know that I wasn’t one of them. Maybe I’d finally found my tribe.
Strippers! Who disavowed the proverbial fig leaf and were unashamed of
their bodies and their sexuality. Who found the key to the Garden of
Eden and let themselves back in. Whose mere existence threatened polite
society so much that it refused to even think about sex work, and
instead made grand pronouncements of degradation and victimization in a
fierce attempt to cast aspersions on any words of truth that might fall
from a stripper’s painted lips. Dangerous broads, man. Total menace to
society. I was in.

* * *

As research, I started spending a lot more time at the Magic
Gardens. It was air conditioned and offered respite from the hot August
sun, and Dave the English cook always fed us. And on Saturdays, Fat
Jerry the bartender made us omelets, and we’d sit around listening to
Led Zeppelin IV and drinking gimlets until the first yahoo came
in.

The Saturday afternoon crowd was depressing as a rule. Old geezers
who lived in the transient motels came in wearing all the clothing they
had so as not to have it stolen. They’d sit at the rack sweating and
offer a dollar every four songs. Jack would hobble in with his cane,
dressed in a down parka. His thick glasses magnified his bugged-out
eyes as he stared blankly and drooled. Black Larry would stop
by—always in a spiffy suit—order Chivas and demand, “Show
me the pink, baby,” and “Spread it.” The girls were inordinately nice to Black Larry because
once upon a time he’d tipped very well. But since retirement he’d blown
his cash. On them.

Black Larry liked me because I was a big-assed white girl. He was
forever croaking licentious crap in my ear, which was uncomfortable and
spitty because he’d had a tracheotomy. He had a serious chip on his
shoulder and was probably the most racist person I’d ever met. He hated
“niggers” and got really weird and schizo when non-whites came in. They
were all lazy no-goods in his eyes. And Larry—”Black
Larry”—was in fact black. He was so racist he’d get a stick up
his ass if a gal so much as danced to James Brown or Jimi Hendrix. One
time he gave Zyola, another curvy broad with a big white ass, half a
dozen bottles of perfume, each with the word “white” in the name. White
Shoulders. White Linen. White Whatever Else. One hundred-and-fifty
bucks’ worth. She knew because she returned them.

August melted into September and I was hurting for cash. I still
wanted to be a stripper in theory, but was just a wee bit terrified to
take the stage and drop my trousers. Mona was my stage mom.

“Watch and learn. Watch and learn.”

So I did. I watched Sasha—a diminutive Irish sweet-tart who
had an outsized attitude that more than clothed her when she was naked.
“No greenery, no scenery!” she’d snarl in her hoarsey brogue. She had
black hair cut in a shag—way before the shag’s comeback—and
wore suede cowboy boots she’d picked up at Goodwill. She danced to a
lot of INXS.

I marveled at Rose, an older gal with chubby cheeks and wide,
childlike eyes. She had a tattoo of a rose on her right shoulder. That
and her head of dirty blonde pin curls were all you could see as she
sat on the stage with her back to the room. Only when you looked at her
reflection in the mirror did you notice that she was all but
finger-banging herself, making naughty porno faces for the benefit of
the completely engrossed guy sitting at the rack behind her.

I watched Jenny, a tiny Asian chick with fake tits who wore white
chaps and white leather stiletto thigh-high boots. She danced
exclusively to heavy metal and somehow managed to do flips and
cartwheels and other wacky gymnastics on the Magic’s
five-foot-by-eight-foot stage. That’s how tiny she was. She had a big
husband, though, to carry her bags.

It was evident that there were as many styles of stripping as there
were girls. What I found least moving were girls like Jenny, who, from
the moment they hit the stage, were a dance routine with fewer and
fewer clothes. This seemed silly to me. What kind of sexuality is
implied when a girl swings around a pole upside down or does gymnastics
or a Solid Gold dance routine with no clothes on? To me
stripping was not about dancing, it was about stripping—the act
of disrobing. The girls who really got under my skin were seductresses
who knew instinctively that the more you tease your prey, the sweeter
the kill. The allure of the striptease wasn’t so much the gynecological
show as it was the slow unveiling of forbidden fruit. My absolute
favorite naked ladies could keep you on the edge of your seat for an
entire song by simply undoing a garter belt. Ladies like Mona.

* * *

Black Larry kept bugging me. When was I going to audition? I’d let
him know, right?

I’d wink and say, “Any day, Larry, any day.”

But the truth was I didn’t know when or if I’d audition. I was
scared, intimidated. Something told me that once you started, you
couldn’t go back, that stripping was an all-consuming lifestyle choice
and not just a means of putting off the real world for a few months or
years.

Mona, Pink, and I went to lots of clubs. Mo was the queen of
scamming free drinks and steak dinners, so we three skinflint vagabonds
lived pretty well for a while. We’d get up around 10 am, ease Mona
through her treacherous morning existential crises, then drink coffee
and smoke cigarettes at the hipster coffee shop, Umbra Penumbra, until
our free ride presented himself. By two we’d have some poor Joey roped
in, buying us fancy champagne cocktails and escargots at a swanky hotel
bar or something. We’d ditch him and head to the Magic for the
after-work regulars who were so desperate for relief from the humdrum
that they were a guaranteed free meal. Probably pot, too.

My favorite hours were those spent at the strip clubs. Mona was
respected by the other strippers. They’d all come by and say hi, and
soon I knew Sasha, Claudia, Morgan, June, Nikki, Tracy, Teresa, Rain,
Venus, and more beyond the fake-name basis.

“Watch and learn!” reminded Mona, knowing full well I’d take the
plunge sooner or later.

If a really hot ’70s song came on—say, Al Green or Marvin
Gaye—she’d bounce off her barstool and slither gracefully around
the joint, usually forcing me to join her, teaching me the Texas
two-step along the way. Occasionally she’d oblige us all with an
impromptu striptease, provided the working girls would cede the stage
for a song or two. Seeing Mo strip out of her wool lumberjack jacket,
Elmer Fudd hat, ratty cashmere sweater, patched blue jeans, clunky
boots, and stinky socks (she always ceremoniously sniffed them, sitting
catlike onstage) to reveal her superhero body—big tits, humongous
bush, and bald head—was art incarnate. Certainly not a dry crotch
in the house.

I felt so at home in these sleazy dive bars, the customers quickly
becoming my trusted friends. Mo would point out moves she thought
beyond disgusting. The rather standard hip grind, for instance, which
she said, “makes you look like you’re taking a shit.”

Mona’s brand of striptease was psychological. It required getting
into character—the vixen temptress—and never dropping it
for a second. She was all class, even when holding a stinky sock or
pair of panties to her face and inhaling deeply. Even when hurling an
ashtray at a cretinous customer’s head. Even when collapsing in tears
at the bar.

I started practicing moves in front of a mirror in my cramped studio
apartment to a soundtrack of the Ramones, the Clash, David Bowie, and
Marlene Dietrich. I picked through slips and robes at Goodwill and
looked for underthings at Fantasy Video, which had lots of creepy ’80s
lingerie: dollar garters, peek-a-boo bras, crotchless panties. When I
came across a pair of $55 “worn and refinished” seven-inch platform
heels, covered in sparkly burgundy glass bits and three sizes too big
for me, I knew it was time. I’d found my ruby slippers. I could click
my heels three times, say, “There’s no place like home,” and take it
off.

Viva Las Vegas will appear as a guest on the Ed Forman Show Tuesday, Sept 1, Dantes, 9 pm, FREE. See vivacide.com for complete, updated information on upcoming readings, events, and parties.