Liberty Begins (The Liberty Series) (2 page)

I think I’m a little bitter. But I know I shouldn’t complain, because a lot of people have it worse.

I try to concentrate on my sparkly eyeshadow in the mirror until Alex tells me it’s time to go out. I was first and being first on a shift meant you were a warm-up act; the girls that came on later were usually the prettiest and got the biggest tips from the late-night, liquored up crowd. The Treasure Chest was different from most other Vegas clubs this way — girls actually wanted to dance onstage here. At some of the other, bigger clubs there were over a hundred, sometimes two hundred, girls who worked there. A lot of the dancers didn’t want to bother going out on stage when they could let the newbies do it and they could go into the crowd and do lap dances, where if they hustled they could make a lot more.

All of the other girls at the Chest were big on going out into the crowd, too, but because there were less of us and it was a smaller club we all wanted to dance onstage. It’s what we were known for. The other girls used that to leverage the crowd, to give them a little taste so they’d want to buy an appetizer, an entree, and dessert. So going out first, before prime time, meant you were either in trouble with management, the crowd didn’t like you, or both. Usually it was both.

Tonight for me it was because I was in trouble. Alex was punishing me by making me dance for the college boys who only drank light beer and could only afford happy hour. There were enough girls tonight that I wouldn’t be on stage when the conventioneers and post-steakhouse crowd showed up. Those guys got bottle service and tipped in tens, not ones. If you didn’t get that stage time you wouldn’t be able to get them interested, thinking about you, and clamoring for individual dances.

When I was first hired, six months ago, I got all the best shifts, all the best slots. When Alex interviewed me he asked if I had any experience. “No,” I said, looking at the floor, hoping it was dark enough inside that he didn’t see the blush creeping up my neck to my face; strippers couldn’t blush.

“Who needs experience?” he asked, and laughed. “You’re a perfect ten.”

People had always told me I was pretty. I got stared at a lot. I had long, thick, dirty blond hair, big blue eyes, and perfectly smooth skin. My sister Sasha, especially, used to get so mad that people were always nice to me. She said it was just because of the way I looked. She was pretty herself, and very smart, but she said none of it mattered when she was next to me.

“But look at Mom,” I would say. Mom was more beautiful than me and Sasha and every supermodel ever put together. She was tall and thin, with alabaster skin, long raven hair and beautiful, thick, naturally long black eyelashes. It was like living with Snow White. Wherever we went, complete strangers, male and female, would gape at her. Men would trip over themselves to open doors for her. Sasha and I used to joke that small birds and butterflies would follow her around. None of it mattered, though. Sometimes I think her looks made it worse. It made it too easy for her to get what she wanted, and what she wanted never seemed to be good for her.

“Look where it got
her
,” I would say, and Sasha would look over at Mom, passed out on the couch, and she would just shrug.

“You won’t make the same mistakes,” she’d said, and she was right about that. But just because I wasn’t strung out it still wasn’t easy, like she seemed to think it was going to be. Being pretty didn’t mean you’d never be lonely. I would tell her that now….if I knew where she was.

Stripping wasn’t easy for me, but I needed the money. Waitressing was not an option. I couldn’t handle talking to people that much. So dancing was it. I had no clothes on, but at least I didn’t have to chat. At first Alex took care of me and gave me the good shifts because he had thought he had a chance with me. I had since heard that he did this with all the new girls, and that made me feel better. I didn’t want to be singled out. But Alex was getting enough play that he was okay — most of the time. You had to be firm. He was just looking for something beautiful for free in a town where nothing was free, not even the free drinks. But I wasn’t giving anything away. Some of the girls who weren’t the best looking managed to hang onto the best shifts; I didn’t like to think about how.

Next to me Adriana is adjusting her long, fake black ponytail and examining her eyeliner. “Are you up first?” she asks. I square my shoulders.

“Yup, he moved me,” I say, and manage a smile. “He wants me out on the floor. Alex is trying to make a point.”

“Always,” she says. “Tell him to keep his little point to himself.” She laughed. Adriana’s aunt was married to one of the owners, so Alex left her alone. She had a boyfriend and two little girls and kept her coveted place in the lineup because she was absolutely beautiful and could sell Champagne time better than anyone. At twenty-five, she was a legend at our club. All new hires had to train with her, myself included. She gave me twenty minutes my first day. That was it. She taught me how to maintain eye contact while I was on stage, to make the customer feel like he was the only guy in the room, even when I was looking at every guy in the room, and to get them to tip well and request private time with me.

She gave me all the basics, but I would never come close to her. I could memorize my lines, but I would never be an actress. Adriana, however, was a natural. She was born to do sales. She made it look so easy and night after night, guys paid thousands of dollars to have an hour with her. Men flew across the country to see her on a regular basis. One older guy, who was rumored to be a millionaire, had even proposed. I didn’t have her gift. I couldn’t look at someone like she did — like she knew who they were and they didn’t disgust her. Like she still wanted them and liked being with them. All while managing to get paid a large sum of money. It was a business transaction, and Adriana got that. I knew what it was supposed to be, but I couldn’t get over feeling like it was some sort of messy emotional exchange that I wasn’t at all capable of.

“You’re up,” she says and points with her chin to where Alex had appeared at the door. He looked like he had spent too much time in a tanning booth, which he probably had. Like so many other men in Vegas, he used too much hair product and had too many sparkly details on his too-expensive jeans. But this was his perpetual look, like he had no choice in the matter, and I couldn’t picture him any other way.

Alex was chewing spearmint gum loudly, and it seemed like I could have smelled it from halfway across the room, mingling with his cologne. My stomach hurt. I couldn’t tell if it was the smell of him that was making me nauseous or if it was my regular jitters. “Gonna go out on the floor tonight?” he asked, snapping his gum, smiling at me. He always smiled, even when there was no reason to.

I returned the smile from under the protection of my makeup. “Probably not,” I said, shrugging. I couldn’t go out on the floor. Not yet. He knew that.

“I don’t know how you’re paying your bills,” he said, returning my shrug, “but it’s your talent you’re wasting.”

I kept my smile plastered on and managed to laugh a little. “Talent? That’s a fancy word for what I’ve got.” Then I heard the music that I danced to. I touched his arm. “I gotta go,” I said, keeping my voice light. I had to play nice if I wanted to make rent this month. I needed all my shifts and maybe some extra. He smiled at me while snapping his gum and then slapped me on the ass on my way to the stage.

I said he was
usually
okay
.
I told myself that I probably deserved it, just for being here.

As for talent, Alex and I both knew I had none. Adriana had the brains, Keisha had this ethnic-goddess thing going on that drove the customers wild, as well as absolutely no problem telling them to knock it off if they started grabbing her body parts, and Tracey was just plain aggressive. So were many of the other girls. They just kept grinding it out, literally, moving from guy to guy.

My “talent,” if you could call it that, was my looks, and the fact that I seemed innocent. Alex told me that. He told me none of the bartenders or the other girls could figure out why I was stripping, when I didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, didn’t swear, and wouldn’t give lap dances. In reality, I swore often and drank occasionally — I just didn’t do these things in front of other people. That bad girl behavior was not to be seen by others. I always went home right after my shift and usually brought a book to read for when I was in between stage time. This was not normal stripper behavior. Not that most of the girls were bad — but pretty much everybody needed a free drink when they were done with this kind of work. I probably did, too, but I always just went home, like the scaredy cat that I was.

Hence the schoolgirl outfit. It was Alex’s idea. “You have that look,” he said, leeringly. “Barely legal and no tattoos. Like you lost your fake ID and gotta get old guys to buy you wine coolers from the ABC. Like you could be here on break from
boarding school
.” He wagged his eyebrows suggestively at me. I wasn’t sure why he thought the idea of boarding school was hot, but a week after I was hired I wore the outfit he suggested, and the guys sure did seem to get excited when I started taking it off.

I wasn’t ready to take my clothes off tonight, but I was never really ready. My stomach hurt. I knew it wasn’t the smell of Alex’s gum or cologne. I took a deep breath. I straightened my shoulders. I pulled my shirt down a little, pushed up my bra, and put my chin up. They were playing my song, and it was time.

Even though stripping was scary, there was something about the stage that I found oddly comforting. The lights were on me, and I could just see myself and what I was doing. All of the guys in the bar were in the shadows. I only saw them if I tried. Sometimes I could get lost in the music and just dance. But when I started to take my clothes off, I could feel all eyes on me.

It really wasn’t fair that I got tipped as well as I did. I usually made about a hundred dollars more than most of the other girls on stage, and I was not a good dancer. Maybe it was my mother’s good-looking genes, or maybe it was the boarding school factor, I didn’t know. All I knew was that when I started to strip, the crowd got quiet, and people seemed to pay attention. Then they started putting money on the stage. Tonight it would be one dollar bills from the college boys, but I’d take it. These tips were the only thing keeping me in my cockroach-infested apartment and away from the Champagne room. At the rate I was going, I wasn’t sure how much longer I could hold out.

If I was being honest, I would say maybe I liked stripping a little. I felt something when I was up there, dancing with only a thong on, with a hundred guys staring at me like they were hungry. I felt powerful.
Better than that, I felt untouchable.

If I did private dances, though — if they could touch me, the spell would be broken. It would be real and I would have to tell them to stop, to keep their hands off, and I would have to say it repeatedly. So I had held out, even though everybody knew the only way to make any real money in this business was to get people to pay for lap dances. That was your chance to get the guy so riled up that he was willing to spend a couple of hundred dollars, sometimes more than a thousand, to go with you to the darkness of the Champagne Room. It was real money, but the stakes were higher. The guys were a lot bolder in the semi-darkness. Sometimes the girls got hurt. One night somebody bit Tracey on her thigh and broke her skin. She had to get a tetanus shot. Up on stage they could want me, but they couldn’t touch me. It made me feel in control, for once. If only the rest of my life up until now had been like that.

From what I could see, tonight the young crowd was mostly wearing baseball hats and drinking domestic beer. I tried to concentrate on my body, my music. It was funny, but the boarding school outfit sort of turned me on; I liked the idea of looking buttoned up and then surprising someone. Because I
was
like that. I was conservative. I read books more often than I talked to people. I had never had a boyfriend. So the idea that there was somebody absolutely wild underneath the white button down shirt and plaid skirt appealed to me. When I danced, this wild girl took over. It was so freeing to not be scared all the time, to be on guard, to be holding my breath. The wild girl liked people looking at her. She liked the feel of the cold stage beneath her when she rolled on it. She liked to get close to some of the men near the edge of the stage and know that they wanted her.

And that they could never have her.

At one point when I looked up I could make out Alex out there, talking to a group of men. He kept looking at me, gesturing. I couldn’t tell who he was with. It looked like a mixed group of older and younger guys with suits on. I only noticed that because they stood out in the sea of baseball hats and tee shirts tonight. I didn’t get to see much more. My song was ending and I had to collect all my money before Tracey got out on stage. As I was leaving I winked at the boys near the stage, just for fun. They hooted and hollered. Tonight was a good night. Even though I was first and hadn’t made nearly enough money, I actually found myself smiling my real smile as I went into the locker room.