Unashamed (15 page)

That was my green light.

Not every gentleman’s club is the same, despite their reputation for being seedy. But stereotypes tend to come out of truth, so my mission was to find one that had some sort of class. Yeah, kind of like a garbage collector who refuses to pick up a torn bag; it just didn’t make sense. In Vegas, some clubs are small and, apparently, they do not believe in lights. I walked out of one establishment simply because the smell was unidentifiable. Others are huge and very intimidating with disorientating disco lights and multiple stages. Something in the middle of the two extremes would have been perfect.

After stumbling upon an acceptable strip club, I put on a little lipstick in the car and asked to speak to the manager. The manager said he did not need shot girls, he needed day shift dancers, and he offered me a job on the spot.

I immediately corrected him with my application in hand, pointing to the requested position. He abruptly restated as if this wasn’t his first time. “I don’t need shot girls with zero experience serving alcohol. I need day shift dancers. Do you want the job or not?”

I thought about buying German potato salad for my empty refrigerator and said yes.

Oddly enough, I bought my first pair of stripper shoes at one of the big name department stores at the mall. They were not the clear plastic ones with lights and a nine-inch heel, rather, sparkling brown, strappy shoes with a four-inch wedge. Until then, my shoe collection consisted of military boots, sneakers, and flip-flops. This transitional shoe was functional and sexy. Not to mention, should I snap the smaller heel, I couldn’t afford new ones.

The classy and seductive little brown dress was in the same store. Well, it wasn’t supposed to be worn as a stripper dress. It was actually a long trendy club shirt with an asymmetrical hem that sat just at the bottom of my ass cheeks. It too was sparkling from top to bottom.

On my first day, I was so nervous I went into work two hours before my shift technically started. This was an acceptable thing to do in this line of work. Believe it or not, some strippers have respectable day jobs or kids they want to protect, so they come in early to transform themselves into their alternate personalities. Mine was Shyah.

When the DJ asked me what my name was, I hadn’t even thought about it. Picking a stripper name is actually harder than you would think. It’s part of the fantasy of your character. Shyah was a girl I befriended for a short time in Germany. She spoke English better than me and kissed me on both cheeks once as most people in European countries do. In a split second the memory of her became my personality simply because her name was not taken.

The DJ announced, “Gentlemen, please welcome to the stage, for the first time, Shyah!”

The men clapped and smiled. The other girls clapped and smiled. I smiled and walked my exposed ass up the stairs to the stage. I was completely sober and just did it. Fuck it.

All of my stripper stories are priceless, really. How can one choose a favorite from the multitude of anecdotes, which include getting paid in pennies to stepping on testicles to a three-hundred-pound man ejaculating on the back of my leg? After awhile, each event became just another day in the life. It was the norm for Doug and me.

By that time, our pact to have an open marriage was normal, too. He started dating his college tarts, and I started going to the gay bars after my shift. Hell, all I had to do was put on jeans and comfortable shoes.

Stripping did not make me promiscuous, nor did dancing at the club. The sexual onslaught of women began after I dated Tracy, who was technically my first recognized “girlfriend.” Our sad fling was like a test run for how things should not go in lesbian dating. After living through a miserable existence with her, things got wild, but she was the key to Pandora’s box.

I met Tracy at the club. She was a feisty little Italian gnome of a woman, who was so much fun to be around that we started seeing each other. She stood to the grand height of four foot eleven, truly an Oompa Loompa compared to my five-foot-seven stature, without the added four-inch stripper heels. She was butch with dyed blonde hair, loads of tattoos, and piercings all over her face. She looked like the perfect rebellious wild child who could take me away from the mundane life previously lived, which was perfectly acceptable when denying my sexuality.

I kept it honest, so she was always aware of my marriage. A friend dropped her off at my apartment once so I could finish getting ready for a night out. It was only once because she joked around with Doug and bit his ear so hard she drew blood. I am clueless to the details, but all I heard was his yelping in the bedroom. She was one crazy Oompa Loompa.

I was always searching for someone else while seeing Tracy. It was obvious she was not a quality woman, so my online chatting had become an obsession to find one. Doug tried to understand my attraction to butch women; however, he never quite did. In fact, he became enraged one evening after looking at photos of a girl I was interested in. His anger came from how butch the girl was, almost manly. “Why do you want to talk to someone who looks like a dude? You have a man already,” he argued as he bent in as close as he could to the computer screen to see more detail. He wanted to be sure it was really a female.

Butch women, androgynous women, appealed to me. Keynote here: they are
women
. Although, I do admit that some of them could fool a few innocent bystanders, they were ultimately my type. Ironically, at the time, the online term for a young, butch, lesbian was “boi,” and God bless my heart, I loved the bois.

Tracy was most definitely a rebel boi. She liked me to call her Tray and paraded me around like arm candy at the club. She didn’t have a job, but she always made sure a drink was in my hand by stealing money or swindling someone into buy it for us.

Tray moved from California after a car accident, from which she received a monthly settlement check. She lived with a fifty-six-year-old lesbian, for free, in an unfinished porch attached to a trailer. She was without a car, so we used mine. She was immature and almost always drunk, but she bought fake paper roses to give me with my own gas money. I guess that makes up for the time she stopped during sex to chug a beer, then belched and tried to continue.

Psych. I didn’t care about Tray, and she certainly didn’t care for me. A better example of our jaded relationship was a separate incident when she answered her phone in the middle of sex and told me to hold on. Tray proceeded to tell the person on the other end that she would be right over. She hung up, got dressed, and went to fuck the girl that called.

Sex was so bad that I faked it each and every time for two months just to make her stop. She is the only woman I have faked it with in my entire life. It was a relief when she left, believe me. It was also a relief to heartlessly tell her it was over one night at the club. Strangely, the gnome cried, begged, and pleaded for my love in the parking lot. Apparently, she was so lovestruck that a gay boy had to help peel her hands from my neck when I told her our relationship was a joke.

When I arrived home that night, Douglas was sitting on the couch, watching a movie and sipping a beer. His date left moments before; the smell of her feminine perfume was still in the apartment. He paused the movie as I shut the door and immediately unzipped my boots to release the pressure to my aching feet. “How was your night?” he asked as I dangled one boot from the bunched seam at the toe of my sock, then flicked it to the floor about three feet from me.

“Eh, I dumped her ass.” I pushed off the other one with my sweaty sock and flicked it in the direction of its mate. Knowing he would want me too, I scooted each boot neatly against the wall.

Douglas watched me as he said, “Thank God, she was a twat. I got a B in my fucking psychology class. I’m pissed.”

When I joined him on the couch, we nonchalantly talked about his classes while I counted my tips on the coffee table. When it was time for bed, I peeled myself out of sweaty club clothes while Douglas carefully placed my boots on the shoe rack in our closet. My shower never felt so good.

The ease with which we lived our hectic lives was normal to us. It is easier to blame my transition into promiscuity on our comfort level with extramarital affairs, than to admit I had just enjoyed being a ho. Unleashing repressed sexuality was the next step, and the only way to achieve this was to explore. Something about the City of Sin gives good people permission to do bad things.

Desired is an understatement. It wasn’t my features that made me attractive, but my lack of involvement in love triangles. This fact makes an average girl beautiful in the lesbian world.

One wonderful aspect of Vegas is that it is a hub of cultural diversity. There were all types of beautiful women in all shapes and sizes. I was overwhelmed trying to pinpoint who I wanted to be with. The general rule was, if you were interested and I was interested, it was on. Especially, if they didn’t mind the idea of me being married; this was always my disclaimer before it went any further than a first date. But, girls who didn’t mind are not exactly quality women. Hindsight is blind.

I made a lot of beer friends, you know, the type of girls that are fun only when they drink. They introduced me to more club heads that eventually networked me to Lindsey.

She was a hot Japanese butch girl with the most mysterious history. She was a very reserved wallflower. Her wardrobe consisted of worn Keds, baggie jeans, and an oversized black leather jacket that she never took off, no matter what time of the year. She dyed her hair a horrendous platinum blonde, and her only friend seemed to be a lanky old black guy with an afro. I told Douglas all about her as we laughed at her misspellings during an online conversation. Education is unimportant when it comes to sex; besides, Doug was already my scholar.

Rayya, my closest beer friend, thought Lindsey was the ugliest thing she had ever seen.

“She’s trash, Emma. Ugly chink trash!” Rayya, a heavyset butch girl, grew up in Iraq but claimed her Dominican side when she sensed a hostile crowd. Despite her mixed ethnicities, she really tried to live the life of an American, albeit a hick American with racist shortcomings.

“Lindsey is hot!” I immediately defended. Not every girl is for everyone; I get that. But she was attractive by many lesbian standards, not just mine. She would have been the catch of the day had she developed a better fashion sense. A sexy girl in a busted outfit equals ugly to a lot of women, but my philosophy was, the clothes can come off.

She dismissed me with a head and eye roll. “Whatever. Fuck ‘sushi’ if you want to. All I’m sayin’ is stick with the white girls. White is right, don’t get it twisted.” Her head tilted to the side as if what she just said was gospel. Then she laughed as hard as I did.

“You are the most ghetto bitch I have ever met!” I managed through the kind of squealing laughter that makes your stomach muscles pinch up in pain.

Money was tight for everyone, so a month later Rayya moved in with Lindsey and Afro Man due to a financial jam. Or so she said. She called me in a panic a few weeks later and insisted I pick her up because she had “some seriously fucked up shit” to tell me about “Sushi” Girl.

She’d overheard Afro Man talking on the phone about some “old bag” that had a heart attack during a home invasion. The woman had to be placed in intensive care, and Rayya explained how Afro Man giggled about it to the person on the other end. She said he talked about his heart transplant and how he almost died when he had to jump from a second-story window when the woman’s dog attacked him.

Her first instinct after overhearing this was to snoop.

Rayya waited for him to get off of the phone and leave before she began some of her own investigative rummaging. She claimed to have found over twenty-five high-end DVD players stacked neatly in the garage under a tarp and some very interesting papers.

“Emma, what do you know about this girl? She’s trash. Look at this.” Rayya dumped a plastic grocery bag upside down on my dining room table and pulled out a state license from the pile. “Who’s this bitch?”

Giggling, I grabbed the identification card out of her hand with an old photo of Lindsey smirking on the front. It was a painful smile, really. She looked miserable. Her shoulder-length mouse-brown hair was teased in an attempt to recreate an eighties style. The Pennsylvania ID captured Lindsey wearing huge, thick glasses and a turtleneck that seemed to be very thick and suffocating. She looked to be about nineteen.

“She said she was from New Jersey,” I frankly noted.

“She also said she was twenty-six! Do the math. She looks good for…thirty-three!” Rayya pointed out the birthday printed on the front. Then she pointed out the name on the card. “I didn’t know you spelled Lindsey that way.” In clear black print the name on the card was April.

“What the fuck!” My mouth was open in shock as I sifted through every piece of paper.

“She’s the home invader! She stole that lady’s bird, sold that fucking thing on eBay.” Rayya slapped another ID on the table with a different name printed on the front. “You know, one of those exotic rainbow birds that talk. She brought it to the house, Emma, and tried to feed it crackers and tuna! It was loud and Lindsey—or whoever this bitch is—tried to give it some drugs to sleep! She stole the poor old bag’s pet after giving her a heart attack. Who does that?”

“On eBay? They ship pets?”

“You mean stolen property! She was scared to death of that bird. Emma, she tried to give it water and it bit the bitch’s finger. I laughed so fucking hard. Serves her right stealing someone’s pet bird. I thought it was odd that they got a bird like that if she was scared to death of it. Seriously, who does that? I’ll tell you who; crazy people and murderers.” She crossed her arms and sat back in the dining room chair as if her statement was, again, gospel. She certainly believed everything that was coming out of her mouth. Her conviction when she spoke was genuine. “The papers said the invaders had animal masks on, and I saw animal masks in Lindsey’s room!” Rayya exclaimed with wide, worried eyes but without moving from the back of the chair.