Strip City: A Stripper's Farewell Journey Across America (14 page)

Maybe she just doesn't want to see strange tits shoved in her boyfriend's face.

Maybe she's just had too much beer.

Does she resent the ease of access? How for a little money, women will dance around her man, press their breasts up against him, flatter and serve him? He can come here anytime and leave everything behind. Her complaints, her bothersome children, her tedious headaches, toothaches, backaches, cancers. He can step into a parallel world where flesh is supple and abundant, and Man Is King. The land of No Demands. His weightiest care is the price of a drink or a table dance that leaves him high and dry.

Maybe she hates the idea that dancers are getting away with something—cheating the Madonna/whore system by exploiting it baldly. If that's what she thinks, then I'd tell her that no woman escapes the system. Everything costs—her side, our side, either side of the wall exacts its own price.

Eventually, the girl emerges from the bathroom, still angry, still drunk, and leads her boyfriend out Of the club by the snout. I watch them as they leave—her shoulders pulled back stiffly as though starched in place, his curled forward. There's no way I could say anything to her now unless I ran after her, which would be too much drama. Ah, well. I can't help everybody. Alas, and damn.

When Honey takes the stage for her set, she pulls me up with her. She lays me flat on my back so she can dance over top of me, the master to my slave, and I overhear one of the guys who smiled at me earlier say something to his friend about how I must "have no self-respect" Now don't
you
start, buddy.

…

"Uh oh," I say to Randy, quickly pivoting to turn my back to the crowded restaurant, "customers."

Randy visually patrols every room he enters. He's a genius at it, really. But this time I spot potential trouble before he does. "Where?" His eyes scan the crowd at the Village Inn.

"Directly across from us in the smoking section. A whole tableful. They were at the Clown's Den earlier. They recognize me. Can you see them? They're looking right at us."

"Oh yeah. Okay," he says. He puts a sheltering arm around my shoulders and turns me back around to face front. The hostess comes over. "Nonsmoking, please," Randy tells her.

At 2 a.m. when the bars close, everyone's jammed into the all-night restaurants together—strippers, customers, the bar crowd, the bar bands, the bouncers. The only place where you might get some privacy is the Flying J truck stop out on 1-25. Not here, though, right in the center of town.

We're seated at a booth along the wall, far from the table of customers, and blocked from their view by a large pie case. Randy goes to the men's room. When the waitress comes, I get pancakes for myself and recite his order from memory: chicken fried steak, hash browns, white toast, eggs scrambled with Cheddar cheese, and coffee.

Randy returns, and I gesture with my head to draw his attention to the next table over. A man is loudly mocking a dancer from the Green Door. We eavesdrop in silence while awaiting our food. As he talks, his mouth moves with comic elasticity—how drunk is this guy, anyway? "I wouldn't fuck her with somebody else's dick!" he howls to his friends, men and women in party clothes. Fake pearls and third-markdown trousers. Randy and I both know the girl he is talking about. She's a sour little moppet, purply lips ever fixed in a dolorous downward turn. She doesn't like me much, and the feeling is mutual. Still, I don't like hearing her dissed.

Our order is set down, the hash browns crisp at the edges, butter pats sliding off the pancakes. Randy picks up a fork and a wood-handled serrated knife and saws angrily into his chicken fried steak. "Who's he kidding?" he snorts, "Like she'd give him the time of day anyhow."

"Yeah, no shit," I grumble, reaching for the syrup pitcher. "A stripper gets hit on eighty times a night and if she's interested in hooking up with a customer in the first place—highly dubious—she's gonna pick him."

"I know all the strippers in Cheyenne," the pickled lout bleats on.

"See, that's why I don't work out at the Den," I say to Randy, skewering a bite of his steak and dredging up some white gravy with my fork. "This town is so small a guy with a mouth like that could be a huge problem."

Randy shakes his head and snarls into his coffee cup. "Guy just needs to get his ass beat. That's the only problem I can see."

TEN

Stripping is an outlaw profession, with but one prevailing philosophy: Take the money and run. As a result, the long and colorful history of exotic dance is overlooked and underrecorded. I've been content with that so far. The lack of known lineage meant I could craft my stripper self as I went along, without pressure to conform to what should be or the influence of what has been. In a business obsessed with novelty, one that maps the sexual mores of an age by pushing two steps beyond them, how can there be room for tradition?

But that lack of connection to the past has been bothering me lately. Becoming a stripper was a step I took with another woman, but one that left me feeling very much alone. I wish I knew someone who could lend historical insight, a little background. I frequently talk with my ex-dancer friends, but my contemporaries and I are in the same boat—still trying to sort out the recent past. We're newly minted alumni, moved to deliberate and process in that "Girl, let me tell you all about it" way. We sift without the perspective that only time can bring.

In stripping, there is no sense of continuity. Women take their stories with them when they go. Some don't want to remember, so they blot out that chapter of their lives like a fugitive erasing her tracks in the snow. Others simply don't care to be inconvenienced by a blemished past made public record. And others who might share their story are stymied by lack of time and skill to create, or by arbiters of culture who wouldn't deign to "take the subject seriously." The feminist in me is angered by the deafening silence—this is women's history, after all. But the listener in me isn't so much angry as disappointed. So many delicious stories, gone!

People look for themselves in books and movies. They count on those touchstones, not so much for gospel as affirmation that others have walked the same path. But for strippers, there is no
Giovanni's Room
, no
Easy Rider
, no
Basketball Diaries
, no
Well of Loneliness
. Perhaps if there were an intellectual tradition, a floozerati that inspired a body of work to consult and a philosophy to impart, I'd feel less marooned. There was the writing of Colette, then of Gypsy Rose Lee, and then almost nothing, unless you count
Showgirls
. Which I don't. I'd like to know my history. Even outlaws need a sense of belonging.

I'm increasingly curious about strippers from days past. In what ways was their job similar to mine? And how was it different? How might I find out? I could prowl library stacks for obscure, out-of-print books, dig through microfilm of old magazine pieces. But whatever I'd find would likely be tainted by the author's opinion. I'd probably learn more about what the writer thinks than anything else. I don't want an outsider's version of what it is to be a stripper. I want the story straight from the source.

I research the stars of burlesque, to see who I can turn to for testimony. Ann Corio, dead. Sally Rand, dead. Lili St. Cyr, my role model, dead. Am I doomed to discover my heritage through the obituaries? If I'm to learn anything firsthand about the history of striptease, I'd better move fast.

The first link to my lineage resides in the middle of the Mojave Desert. The Exotic World Burlesque Museum is halfway between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, just off Route 66 in Helendale, California. The first weekend in June, museum director Dixie Evans, who performed in the fifties as the "Marilyn Monroe of Burlesque," hosts a reunion of burlesque dancers and the Miss Exotic World Pageant—where young dancers can bump-and-grind the old-fashioned way for cash and prizes.

I fly out for the event and rent a car at LAX for the three-hour drive to Helendale.

As I drive along Route 66 beyond Victorville, the two-lanes shoot me past railroad tracks, talc mines, abandoned whitewashed brick bungalows, and a defunct, one-room go-go bar called the Lost Hawg. The Hawg must've really been rockin' in its day—the front of the building is decorated with dancing shadow figures and silhouettes of reclining girls like you'd find on a trucker's mudflaps. There's a warped wood cutout of a pig on the front door, too. Now all that remains is the shell of the building, ringed by tumbleweed and creosote bush. Word is, someone plans to make it into a barbecue place. I pull over and snap a few pictures, with the gnawing feeling that I missed something good.

The pavement stops at the turnoff to Wild Road and the car bounces over ruts and gravel. Man, I am really in the boonies now. The sky is a ferocious summer blue, and the wind whips sand and pebbles along the desert floor. Roadrunners, the black combs on their heads rustling in the breeze, pip by on skinny legs. Just after a bend in the road, an enormous black-and-white iron filigree gate rises on the right-hand side. Arching over the driveway, it says, in big white letters: EXOTIC WORLD.

A whitewashed fence runs the length of the driveway. All along hang white wooden stars with the names of burlesque queens hand-painted on them in red: Little Egypt, who supposedly started it all by bringing her "hoochie koochie dance" to the Chicago World's Fair in 1893, Tanayo, Ricci Cortez, Sheila Rae, Linda Doll, Tempest Storm, Blaze Fury—names both familiar and forgotten.

I'm stopped at the top of the drive by an older man in slacks and a striped polo shirt. His thick glasses have skidded to the tip of his sweaty, large-pored nose. I hand him the twenty-five-dollar admission, and he adds the bills to a thick roll pulled from his pocket. He motions me toward a parking space.

In the middle of the dirt parking lot sprouts a small grass island with a dry fountain at the center and, to the side, a ceramic statue of a pig in a sheriffs uniform. An old white stretch limo with EXOTIC WORLD painted on the side in gold cursive sits next to a mobile home. Two gimpy-looking black horses drink from a trough in a lean-to out back. Sprinkled among the buildings is haphazardly positioned plaster statuary, a random chorus of goddesses listing in the Mojave wind.

The museum is housed in a converted farm, a series of run-down trailers and modular units cobbled together around a covered concrete lanai. The main, six-room building used to be a goat shed. The museum's founder, Jennie Lee, the "Bazoom Girl," was a burlesque dancer who retired to the area in the 1970s with her husband, Charlie Arroyo. Previously, Jennie had owned two topless clubs, the Blue Viking in San Pedro and the Sassy Lassie in San Diego. In the late 1980s, Jennie developed breast cancer and her friend Dixie moved in to help care for her. After Jennie's death in 1990, Dixie took over the operation.

The museum, a repository of tarty gewgaws and girly artifacts, looks the way one might imagine the attic of Barbie's Dream House. The walls are covered, floor-to-ceiling, in old burlesque posters, pinups, tabloid tearsheets, and promo stills. By scanning the articles, you can learn that the child star Shirley Jean, who appeared in the Little Rascals, grew up to become a stripper named "Gilda, Hollywood's Golden Girl." Or you can amble about admiring Gypsy Rose Lee's costume trunk, Mae West's cape (shredded and dry-rotting by now), Sally Rand's fans, and Jayne Mansfield's pink satin heart-shaped posing couch. But every so often in the va-va-voomery is something totally odd—among a collection of rhinestone jewelry in a case is a key chain from Myrtle Beach and a miniature bust of George Washington in blackface. In a grouping of dancer photographs from the 1960s hangs an autographed 8 x 10 glossy of baseball player Steve Sax. Those wishing to honor the memory of departed peeler Sherrie Champagne may do so—an urn containing her ashes stands in the middle of a makeshift shrine.

Dixie herself, now several decades past a believable Marilyn Monroe comparison, wanders the grounds in a low-cut black cocktail dress. Four former burlesque queens sit at a folding table, grinning behind stacks of old 8 x 10s they are eager to sign. One of them, her spotted scalp visible through scant wisps of black hair, sits slumped and staring off into the near distance, her flowered polyester muumu tented over her chest and rounded stomach. "Oh, you'll have to excuse Estelle," whinnies the tanned-to-orange blonde in a leopard-print pantsuit seated to her right, "she just had a mastectomy." Young women, half-dressed for the contest—hair set in glittering rows of pin-curls, sequined bras showing through their thin cotton bathrobes—dart to and from the dressing room. A formidably muscled woman named Pillow, wearing a black turban and a black sleeveless unitard that shows off her remarkably developed arms, is running around trying to corral camera crews and photographers.

The show is about to begin.

The dilapidated stage—a wooden runway with two stone lions keeping guard at either end—has a white trellis behind it, with crooked wooden letters spelling out EXOTIC WORLD ranging across. Badly frayed and faded American flags whip themselves in the strong wind. Old Glory on the skids. Rows of folding chairs line either side of a rather neglected-looking rectangular swimming pool, and people are filing in. A group of senior citizens just off the tour bus lays claim to the shady seats.

I grab a seat in front of the tour group and crane my neck to examine the crowd. A mix of old-timers, hip kids with fancy tattoos and dark glasses, and a bunch of bikers with their hands folded in front of them, like schoolkids.

The event starts with the emcee introducing Dixie. She makes an entrance from the lanai in her slinky black dress and a black feather boa. Throwing her arms over her head, she struts around the pool's perimeter and minces up the steps to the stage. She greets the crowd, welcomes the media, and promises a grand time to all.

The old burlesque performers come out, one by one. Cynthiana in a black cocktail dress, Daisy Delite in a red feather headpiece that the wind bats like a cat toy, Dee Milo in a red fishtail gown. Cynthiana, stout and beehived, strips down to her black fishnets and tassled pasties and comes our way. She points to her breasts. "They used to go this way," motioning around and around, "but now," she points to the ground, "they go this way." All the old-timers in the row behind me laugh.

To see so much seasoned flesh on parade—stomachs protruding, upper arms jiggling, crow's-feet creasing and deepening as the women smile in the desert sun—makes me a little uneasy. Stripping is a young girl's game—I distinctly remember feeling "too old" to strip when I turned twenty-five. And here are women drawing up on three times that age out there shimmying and shaking. In a way, it's refreshing. Who says a woman can't flaunt her sex appeal well into her later years? But in another way, it's embarrassing. Mixed in with the audience's admiration is a slap of novelty, and maybe some ridicule. Sexy-matron-as-shtick. Am I being oversensitive? Why does this seem farcical? I suppress the feeling because I know how much I dislike people fashioning armchair critique about me when I dance. I'm not the one performing, so my sense of what's appropriate is not germane. I don't get to make that call.

The Miss Exotic World contest that follows charms me completely. A belly dancer, her hips a mad, whirling fury, balances swords on her head, one girl wears a bright blue sequined bustier with a peacock feather tail attached that she flips up behind her and fans out as she spins around, another girl, in the tradition of Kitty West, emerges from an oyster shell, and several others gyrate frantically to the stylings of the jazz combo. Watching the contestants move in the old, slow, hip-waving fashion, I remark at how much the style of striptease has changed. Stripping today is more athletic—less subtle and more high energy. We're an accelerated culture now. Who's got ten minutes to spend taking off a glove?

The real highlight of the show, the moment everyone has been waiting for, is the appearance of burlesque legend Tempest Storm. She is seventy-two years old and still performing! Not just for special events like this one, either. Mitchell Brothers in San Francisco recently booked her to commemorate their thirtieth anniversary and she packed the house for four nights straight.

After much fanfare, Tempest struts haughtily into the late afternoon sun wearing a beautiful purple sequined gown and a white and purple feather boa, both of which set off her long, preternaturally titian bouffant hairdo quite nicely. Tempest, born Annie Blanche Banks in Eastman, Georgia, is the only stripper to have performed at Carnegie Hall. A true star. Decades later, she maintains a diva's carriage and poise.

As she slowly disrobes, people murmur about her impressive figure. Five foot six and about 116 toned-and-taut pounds. In her autobiography,
The Lady Is a Vamp
, she reports that she dropped down to this weight after a Las Vegas tryst with Elvis in the sixties during which he surveyed her then-135-pound form and called her "fat ass."

The sax player goes crazy, splatting, honking, and wailing as Tempest peels off layer after layer. How'd she fit so much clothing under that skintight gown? Somehow her confidence and expertise have transcended the novelty aspect, and she has the audience completely enthralled. When she gets down to her rhinestone-studded fishnets, g-string, and net bra, she twirls her boa and commands the audience to, "Eat your hearts out."

And we do. Yes, we absolutely do.

As the unofficial keeper of burlesque history, Dixie Evans has many stories to tell, but the one I'm most interested in is her own. "Burlesque was my mother, my father, my bread, my butter, my life," says Dixie. "In my industry, there were thousands of girls who could sing and dance—neither of which I could do. So when I went back East and met Mister Minsky, he said, 'You look like Marilyn Monroe.' I didn't particularly want to do Marilyn, I wanted to do myself. But," she says, shifting into a breathy, Monroe-esque voice, "I deliberately walked and talked and did a whole act just like Marilyn, you see. So then I became the Marilyn Monroe of Burlesque. It gave me a gimmick, you see what I mean …" She continues in her regular voice, "Because if you don't have a gimmick, you're not going to be a star."

Dixie started working after her father, a California oilman, was killed on an oil derrick in 1939 just before her thirteenth birthday, and she, her sister, and her mother were plunged into poverty. "My mother kept saying, 'God will take care of us, God will take care of us.' She sat in a blue chenille bathrobe for years with cold cream crusted on her face and neck, and she looked like she was eighty or ninety though she was only in her thirties. I finally had to say, 'Hey, enough of this.'"