All I Could Bare: My Life in the Strip Clubs of Gay Washington, (18 page)

I turned my head back to the TV as if the "Sports Blooper of the Week" demanded my full attention.

"But when I start feeling like this I try not to dwell on it," he said. "I used to have this theory that many more dramatic bad things were going to happen to you in life than dramatic good things. But a friend once told me that the key was to look for the good in small things, like a sunrise or something like that. And I try practicing that. But sometimes it gets hard."

We chatted a little more after that. I updated him on the new dancers that I thought he'd like and told him that "The Rule" was still in effect at the other clubs. Then I left the lobby to get ready for the midnight show. On the way back to the dressing room, the D.J. asked me what I wanted him to play for my set. "Whatever," I said. As Tina Turner once sang, "I'm your private dancer ... and any old music will do."

When I walked out onto the stage that night, I didn't even bother with my normal thirty seconds of two-stepping from side to side. I dropped my jean shorts and stepped right out into the audience. There were only three people in the theater. One was a fat, hairy-chested white guy who was leaning against the wall playing with his cock. Another was a disturbingly thin man who, when I walked past him earlier, smelled like formaldehyde. And then there was Dave seated in the center.

I avoided the other customers and went right over to Dave. He smiled. I lifted my left leg and he placed a wad of folded bills into my sock. Usually, at this point, I stayed standing as he worked me over with his hands, but this time, I opened my legs, put my full weight on his lap, and pressed close to him, placing my arms on his shoulders. He grabbed my dick firmly and moved his hand steadily up and down as I continued to push my weight into him. We stayed like that for my whole set until the last song faded. And as I got up, I put my arms around him and gave him a hug. He smiled again and slapped my ass as I walked away.

It wasn't long after that night that I decided—once again—I had to quit, not just dancing, but the whole life I was trying to lead. It wasn't working. I couldn't afford to just work at the clinic, and I didn't want to dance anymore. I didn't want to grow to hate it. Besides, I was about to turn thirty and stripping is a
Logan's Run-ish
sort of job. I didn't want to step onstage one day and suddenly burst into flames or, nearly as bad, become one of those older dancers who were often the butt of customers' jokes.

There was one thirty-something dancer who looked a fresh-faced twenty-four except when he smiled and you could see the deeply etched crow's feet around his eyes. I once heard a customer quip that it looked like a cat had attacked him. I didn't want people talking about me like that.

But even more, I felt it was time to reboot my entire life and really try to pursue my dream of writing. My mom, who now lived out of state, told me that I could move in with her until I decided what I wanted to do, so I started making plans to temporarily leave town.

I gave notice at the clinic and signed up for my last time dancing at the Follies. The theater's twenty-fifth anniversary was coming up and I decided to make my last appearance at the accompanying celebration. It made perfect full-circle sense. I'd started at the Follies and it was where my stripping adventure would end.

On the night of the anniversary party, the Follies was more crowded than I'd ever seen it. Dozens of guys filled the lobby and the theater. The attendees reflected a mix of regulars and local gay VIPs who'd all been specially selected for this invitation-only evening-wear event. Although the Follies existed on the redheaded stepchild periphery of the gay community most of the time, it took on a certain nostalgic charm during its annual anniversary celebration. The theater had been a D.C. gay fixture for more than two decades, through the fire that killed nine, the death of the original owner—and later his namesake son, who was gay and died of AIDS—and then all the raids and scrutiny that dramatically changed the vibe of the other strip joints. The Follies had survived it all.

That night, as the crowd of older men, dressed almost uniformly in suits, ties, and shiny shoes, milled around, eating from the buffet and drinking from the open bar, they talked about how this wasn't really the theater's twenty-fifth anniversary at all. The Follies opened in the fall of 1974, which would have only made it twenty-four. But several years back someone made a clerical mistake, bumping the theater's age up a year. Everyone knew about the error, but no one wanted to repeat an anniversary party or, even worse, skip one. And to some extent, it didn't matter anyway. The Follies' main appeal had always been about fantasy and the suspension of disbelief.

About an hour after the party started, the show began and the guests moved from the lobby into the theater, which was decidedly less dirty and crotchy than usual. "Gentlemen," the announcer said over the loudspeaker, "welcome to the twenty-fourth, well, twenty-fifth anniversary of the Follies." Then the music started—I don't remember the song—and I walked onstage with about ten other dancers who'd been handpicked for the party. We were all dressed in black G-strings and bow ties, the stripper equivalent of formal wear. Because this was a mixed crowd of regulars and local luminaries, we didn't have to take anything off. We just walked through the crowd collecting tips. Things felt so different from when I first stepped onto this stage a few years earlier. Then it seemed like I was entering a strange, smelly, scary new world; now, I was leaving home.

I deliberately didn't say that this was my last night to any of the customers, even Dave, who I spotted smiling as he talked in the corner with Peter, who had returned just to dance at the party.

The show lasted only ten minutes. It was over before I could even tell myself to really feel what was going on, to really remember the experience because it was going to be my last time. I went back to the dressing room, put on my dress shirt and black pants, and my entire memory of the show vanished like a puff of breath on a winter's day.

I made my exit quickly, saying good-bye only to those people who happened to be in my path to the door. But as I left the theater and took that familiar walk down the dark, Utter-strewn street to my car, I heard a voice call out from behind me. It was the Follies' manager. He'd forgotten to give me the framed photo that they used to advertise my appearance at the party. He handed me the cheap, plastic pop-in frame with the picture of me smiling widely, and "Craig" written in showy cursive above my head. I looked so happy. I thanked him and said good-bye again.

I continued toward my car, and as I walked farther and farther away from the theater, this strange feeling rose inside me. I was sad, but in a hard-to-pin-down way. Sure, I'd felt ready to quit stripping for a while now, but the finality of it felt so, well, final. There was a voice in my head saying over and over again, with a James Earl Jones-ish thunder, "No matter what else you will become in life, you will never be this again."

20

I was sitting in a small room on the outskirts of Minneapolis talking to pop superstar Janet Jackson about masturbation. It reminded me of one of those moments when I'd be stripping and think, "How did my life lead me here?" Of course, I'd made strategic decisions to get to these places. But I still felt awestruck that I'd actually done it, that I was living a dream. Oprah has her "Aha" moments; these were my "Holy fuck" moments.

The reason I was talking to Janet—and she was letting me get all up in her business without cursing me out or kicking me in the nuts—was for a
VIBE
magazine cover story. It marked my biggest accomplishment yet in a career that I first started thinking about while at the clubs, flipping through
Entertainment Weekly
and other magazines between sets.

Shortly after I stopped dancing at the Follies, I began writing a music column for a D.C. gay club 'zine,
Metro

Weekly.
I did it for free, but I liked the exposure and it was good practice. Not long after that, I placed my first review in the
Village Voice,
which has served as the training den for almost all the major pop music critics. I got this gig by writing the music editor a letter explaining that I was an aspiring music critic/stripper. I sent this along with some of my
Metro Weekly
reviews. The editor called me about a week later and said that while he hated my reviews, he was intrigued by my letter. He decided to give me a shot and a couple of weeks later my first review appeared in the
Voice.

The fact that I got this gig in part because I'd told the editor that I used to be a stripper was life-changing for me in ways that I couldn't fully appreciate at the time. When I started stripping, I thought that I'd have doors closed to me because of what I was doing, but I did it anyway because I felt it was something I needed to do. Now, stripping was actually opening a door for me, potentially leading me to a whole new world of opportunity. I became a firm believer in the power of taking risks.

After being published in the
Village Voice,
I started reaching out to other publications and was soon writing for the
Washington Post, Spin,
and
VIBE.
I'd also moved from simply penning reviews to writing feature articles where I had to interview various music artists. I found my stripping experience came in handy when talking to celebs. After years of working the bars and making small talk while people were playing with my dick, I'd learned something about relating to people—how to lean forward when they were speaking and look deeply into their eyes, and how to listen closely to what they were saying in order to get a sense of where they were coming from.

I relied on these skills very early on as I found myself talking with celebrities whom I was by no means qualified or experienced enough to be interviewing. One of my first big feature assignments was to interview Mariah Carey for the
Washington Post
in 1999. Mariah had recently divorced her Svengali hubby, Sony Music's head honcho, Tommy Mottola, and was about to release a new album,
Rainbow.
It was the follow-up to 1997's
Butterfly,
an album which featured contributions from rappers Sean "Puffy" Combs, Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, and Missy Elliott, and brought her criticism from people thinking she was a pop princess trying to go hip-hop.

The plan was for me to take the train up to New York and then spend much of the evening watching Mariah flounce around doing her trademark diva thing. But I almost messed things up from the start. I arrived at a nondescript row house on a cobblestone street in lower Manhattan. It was some kind of boutique editing facility, where Mariah was overseeing one of her new videos. The guy who answered the doorbell told me to wait downstairs and that Mariah would be with me "shortly." So I sat on the leather couch and flipped through my notebook of questions and checked to make sure my tape recorder worked. "Shortly" became fifteen minutes, then thirty, then forty-five.

Finally, the guy who'd answered the door came back in the room.

"Mariah wants to meet you," he said.

"OK," I said. "Should I bring all my stuff with me, or can I leave it here?"

"Leave it here," he said, referring to my backpack, which had my notes and tape recorder in it.

I followed the guy up the stairs. With each step, I thought, I'm getting closer and closer to meeting Mariah. I was, after all, a huge fan, having stripped several times to "Fantasy" and hearing my breakup with Seth played out in songs like "Butterfly" and "Breakdown."

We reached the top of the staircase and entered a room where Mariah, dressed in an olive midriff-baring top and jeans, sat in front of a small video monitor along with three or four other people. As I walked in the door, she looked up at me with an expression not unlike that of a dog wondering who's going to be next to kick it.

The guy who brought me in gestured for me to sit on a worn black leather couch in the back of the room. He walked over to Mariah, took her hand, and led her over to where I was sitting. Like most celebrities, she looked smaller in person—thinner, I could report to my cattier friends.

"This is Mariah," he said, as if there was some question about this, like instead he was going to introduce me to her secret twin sister, Moira.

"How's it goin'?" I asked.

"Fine," she answered breathily, shaking my hand and sitting on the couch next to me. "Let me just preface this whole thing by saying how tired I am. Did they brief you on what my day's been like?"

"Uh, no," I said.

"I've done two major interviews. And I went to bed at seven-thirty
AM
because I was editing another video with Sanaa [Hamri], my friend, my Moroccan homegirl, my biracial homegirl. And all the while, I've been approving photos and doing phoners for the Italian press. So I'm kinda exhausted. And I'm just saying that because if I come across a little strange, that's why. A lot of reporters try to take advantage of that and try to make me sound crazy."

"I understand," I said.

Mariah then started talking. And talking. And talking. She launched into a ten-minute, nonstop stream-of-consciousness soliloquy that rushed from why she needed to finish this video before she headed to Japan to all the work she's been doing to finish her album to all the stress that she's been under trying to keep her career going in the wake of her divorce to all of the selfless things that she does that people don't know about like taking care of a nephew who she's putting through college and who she's so proud of because he's on the honor roll and . ..

Suddenly she stopped. "Are you going to write any of this down?" she asked me.

"Oh," I said. "I didn't realize we were going to do the interview now. I left all my stuff downstairs."