Strip City: A Stripper's Farewell Journey Across America (17 page)

All the while a woman bleats over a bad disco track: "Lemme see your pussy! Show it to me! I wanna see your pussy! Show it to me!" The bouncer steps up to the stage and theatrically mops the guy's brow with a bar cloth.

At the end of the song, the bouncer trots over with a cup of ice water, which Stormy ceremoniously dumps down the man's shorts. Such indignity costs twenty dollars, and it's a very popular feature.

Every time I visit a new club, I do a little mental exercise, picturing what it might be like to work there. Would the money be good? Could I keep the customers interested? Would I have fun? I'm having trouble here. I fix my gaze on Stormy, trying to imagine myself doing what she's doing and I can't. I just can't. I envision myself on all fours on the stage, sliding my knees around either side of a man's head and feeling his whiskers tickling my inner thighs. I shudder at the thought. Now I'm the girl on the other side of the wall. I can't see how a woman could work here. On a practical level, I understand perfectly well: You show up, you get into your costume, you take your costume off, you go through the motions, and you take home your cash. But viscerally, I don't get it at all. I can only wonder. I don't wonder about practical matters, like how you work when you've got your period. (You tuck in the tampon string. Or cut it.) Or how you stay "femininely fresh." (Good hygiene and bottle after bottle of cheap perfume.) I wonder about the intangibles: Is it frightening to have so many men get close to you at one time? What is it like to go home after spending the night bouncing your crotch over the faces of people you don't know? How long does it take to settle back into your body, because you'd have to go pretty far away in order to be that exposed for that long, wouldn't you?

Everything about Shotgun Willie's seems outrageous, like I'm watching stripping being spun by a tabloid news show: Can you believe
this?
There's a vague and off-putting savagery to this place. I'm not sure if it's due to the tensions between the different groups of men, the mix of alcohol and pussy, or the fact that the security staff looks so light. Would I expect anything different from Montana, a state notorious for the rawboned and unpredictable? This is a state with little use for speed limits. Like it or leave.

I get the feeling that if there were any trouble, the women here could give as bad as they get. No hothouse flowers, they. To them, this is just another day at work. Business as usual. For every impulse that I have to run into the dressing room yelling, "Stop! Don't do this! You can go somewhere where you don't have to take your bottoms off, or plant your face in some guy's crotch!" I know that my missionary zeal probably wouldn't yield more than a dancer shrugging, "It's okay. I'm used to it," while generously spritzing body spray into her neatly trimmed pubic hair.

I know that nonchalance well. Years ago, when I was dancing at the Mitchell Brothers O'Farrell Theater in San Francisco, a man was heading down the long hallway toward the exit. His boyish face was flushed, as if his necktie were fastened too tight, and when he walked past me with his young-important-guy stride, he said to his friend, unaware that I could hear, "That is a hell of a way to make a living." I grumbled to myself, Well, screw you, then, bristling at the pronouncement, which, given the setting, seemed a little ungracious. And now here I am thinking just like him.

For all my discomfort, I don't want to be a bad sport. When Stormy leaps back onstage for another set, I push a five toward Randy. "You want to go tip her?"

He shakes his head no. "She's too much for me."

"Let's you and me go tip her," says Kendall, shaking my arm. "At the same time!"

Randy slides the five back toward me and drops another on top of it.

Kendall and I take our tips to the stage and find a clearing between two stretched-out Road Dogs, one of whom, according to his insignia patch, is named Peanut. Kendall stuffs her money in the waistband of her long madras shorts, and I lie down next to her with the two fives, each folded in half lengthwise, tucked into the top of my bra, waving out like antennae from under my shirt.

My hands are at my sides. My tongue is in my mouth.

Halfway through the first song, Stormy crawls over me and pulls the dollars out from under my shirt with her teeth. It tickles a little, so I smile. She smiles back, her eyes dark liquid in that tough, hungry face. She says, "Thanks, sweetie," then she tosses her shoulders back, and
whappity-whappity-whappity
blasts me in the face with her boobs. They're cool and moist from her sweat. It's a little like being beaten with soft rubber erasers. She moves on to the next willing victim.

Kendall and I sit back down. "Well, how did they feel?" my boyfriend and her girlfriend want to know.

"Kinda rubbery," I say. "A little cold."

By now the crowd has turned over a couple times. Clusters of young men and women have come in, probably winding up a nightlong club crawl. An athletic blonde gal and a guy who looks like he could be her brother are dragging a shrieking, overweight girl toward the stage. She pulls back to resist them, but they grab her shirtsleeves. Strands of straight brown hair escape from her pony-tail and swing in her face. She tries to pull her arms out of her shirt to escape, laughing and yelping in protest. Finally, she lies on the stage while her friends shower her body with bills. She's giggling helplessly. The dancer takes the money from her in a gingerly, sexless fashion and minces quickly away.

Retail vagina.

I'm standing at the sink in the motel room brushing my teeth when the words pop into my head. With a start, I look at my reflection in the mirror. My face is tinged green from the fluorescent overhead. I know it's the light, but I feel as if the roiling in the pit of my stomach is what has queered my complexion. Retail vagina. That's got to be what's at the core of my unease with working nude, at least at a "spread club" like Shotgun Willie's. Some nude clubs forbid dancers to show genitalia; you can't even bend at the waist. But in a "spread club," the pussy shot is standard practice. So in this environment, there's this part of you—this very private, personal part of you—that's the center of your livelihood. Literally. Unlike working topless, dancing nude isn't so much about tease and suggestion. It's more about the packaging of your vulva. The dancing is almost a formality. You can dance like Cyd Charisse, and still be upstaged by what rests between your legs. Guys want to see it. They can't wait to see it. They crane their necks to get a look at it. They fix their gaze on it like they're waiting for it to say something profound. And they talk about it: How it's shaved; how it's shaped; what it might feel like, smell like, taste like.

Perhaps part of the attraction for men is the beauty of the female flower, but I'm skeptical. Maybe it's more about the submission. The access. Seeing the unseeable. Regardless, whatever enabled me to comfortably work nude in the past is gone. I reflexively clasp my knees together at the very thought.

Randy lies in bed watching a movie about an older man married to a model many years his junior. They're in Alaska and a photographer hired to work with the model is trying to edge her husband out of the picture. The plot revolves around competing for the girl, macho posturing in the woods, and bear attacks. I climb into the bed beside him, curling up against his side.

"Did you have fun tonight?" he asks, stroking my hair and hooking his foot between my ankles.

"Man, it was really something else. I don't think I could ever work there."

"You know, I'm glad to hear you say that. Because that place is a fight just waiting to happen."

On the drive home, we stop for gas in Buffalo and decide to find something to eat. At the Hole in the Wall Cafe, we have chicken fingers and mashed potatoes with gluey white gravy served on paper plates. While I wait to pay the bill, I examine the hunting photos on the wall. In one photograph, a beaming hunter kneels beside a felled buck, holding the animal's testicles in his hand. There's a slash of red in the white fur between the buck's hind legs. The caption reads, "Number One Nut Buster."

As we leave the cafe and cross the street to get in the car, I say to Randy, "I still can't believe that Stormy girl, you know?"

"Yeah, me neither!" he shakes his head, digging in his front pocket for the car keys. "She wasn't really like Tigger, though," he says. "Tigger is cheerful and sort of crashes into things because he's excited. She's more like the Tasmanian devil. I mean, she was
violent
.

He's right, too. She really was.

TWELVE

Forget it. Just forget it. If you think you know something about the beauty of nature and you haven't been to Alaska, then stop right now-and admit that you know less than nothing.

I'm not talking about the formidable glaciers, the crystal-blue streams, the emerald-green mountains veined with snow, the elk, moose, whales, or eagles, though I've seen them and they're breathtaking.

I'm talking about the girl.

There's this girl, with an atomic red pixie bob, in the entrance to the club. She's leaning on a piece of furniture that looks like a lectern, sucking on a cherry Tootsie Pop and looking bored. I am astounded by the amazing natural architecture of her ass, which immediately commands my attention when I stroll into the building after Randy drops me off so I can inquire about work. Rather than have a conventional door, the front of the club is completely open— come one, come all—and shielded from the street by a partition. The nine o'clock sun (nine o'clock! sun!) sneaks in behind the partition and gleams off of the girl's deeply tanned flank. Her upper body is rather petite—under her shiny red PVC teddy, she has no breasts to speak of, and her face is a little girl's, but her ankles are thick, her calves sturdy and her thighs firm and mighty. The stuff of R. Crumb's dreams, the inspiration for a thousand hiphop songs.

This girl is a masterpiece. Mother Nature's magnum opus.

Good thing I'm female or I'd get slapped and branded as sexist for even thinking these things.

Am I staring? I must be staring. I'm staring.

The girl looks right at me.

"Hey."

"Hey," I smile, not lecherously but nicely. "What's your name?"

"Trixie."

Trixie. That is beautiful.

I love her.

It took Herculean effort to get this far. Not the actual distance—though that was a bit of an ordeal, having to fly from Denver to Chicago to Anchorage, where Randy and I landed at 10 p.m. under a bright orange gibbous moon, traces of sunset still in the western sky. The bulk of the grunt work was the psychological preparation.

About a week before we left, I decided I needed to lose five pounds. Alaska would go a lot better, I was convinced, if I pared down a bit. A couple pounds less would lighten me up to do battle with my inhibitions. They don't call it "fighting trim" for nothing.

I bought a can of mocha-flavored SlimFast powder and tried making shakes with skim milk, as per the instructions on the label, but despite my diligent shaking and stirring, the powder never fully mixed. It separated into globules on the milk's.surface, a gag-inducing chocolaty sludge.

But I knew there was a more palatable, less torturous diet shortcut. SlimFast makes meal bars, so I went on a recon mission.

A trip to Wal-Mart is enough to give anyone a panic attack. Squalling kids everywhere, yelling parents, a clerk calling for a price check over the PA system, someone crashing a cart into a towering display of sandwich cookies, two packs for two dollars, and long lines at every checkout.

People prowled through the school supplies.
Wow, is it back-to-school time already?
I wondered. I felt a brief vertigolike flash of cognitive dissonance from browsing for stripping-related products near hordes of children toting boxes of pencils and colored plastic files to their parents' shopping carts.

I found the SlimFast bars between the food section and the pharmacy. I loaded up my basket with several different flavors. Chocolate chip, chocolate peanut, oatmeal raisin, cinnamon spice, a dozen in all.

I drifted aimlessly though the lingerie department, for grins. I spotted a display of black-and-white snakeskin separates, including some rather saucy hot pants. I put a pair in my shopping basket and headed for the checkout.

Stop,
I told myself sternly.
Put down the hot pants. Put back the SlimFast bars. You can't expect to successfully self-medicate your apprehension with the ditz prescriptive of retail therapy and weight reduction. You should just sublimate and press forth.

Well, repression be damned, I bought the hot pants. Snakeskin. Six bucks! Xanax and couch time billed by the hour can't even come close.

On my way out the automatic door, a harried woman collared her wandering toddler, her voice an extended groan of maternal frustration. "What, I turn my back for one second and you decide you have to run off and join the circus?"

…

It's some sort of cosmic joke that the one place I'm working nude is called the Great Alaskan Bush Company. After I meet Trixie, the manager comes over—a skinny, dirty blond rocker-biker mix with shoulders stooped by the weight of his foul disposition—and invites me to see the show. I watch a few girls go on. Some of them doff their dresses and crank their legs wide open almost the minute they step onstage, others wait till their second song to get naked and keep their legs together the whole time, which seems doable. And the table dances are strictly no-contact and topless, not nude. Most doable.

A woman I know who has never stripped once wondered aloud if there was really that much difference between working topless and nude. "You're almost naked already when you're in a g-string," she said to me, "so how is it any different to go without?" Well, the difference is huge, psychically. Long before my time, going bottomless was called "working strong"—for good reason. When you're completely naked, you're out there, sans cuirass. Extra mettle is required. Dancing nude was never a problem for me before, as I was all about the barricades, but now I'm acutely aware that there's nothing to hide behind, literally or figuratively. Someone looking at me sees every last inch of me, and I don't really like that. I feel as if I don't get to keep any part of myself as mine alone. But if I'm to do this, to strip Alaskan-style, I have to go all or nothing.

The club is a vast single room with tables at the center near the stage and restaurant-type vinyl upholstered booths on platforms farther back. There is only one stage—a large horseshoe shape with chairs and a bar counter all around it and a padded tipping rail, affectionately referred to as the meat rack. Behind the stage ranges a mirrored wall with THE GREAT ALASKAN BUSH COMPANY frosted on it I gather they're going for a frontier motif—everything looks very rough-hewn and outdoorsy. The room has a high ceiling and a wrap-around walkway that accesses the dressing room and office on the second floor. A staircase from the far side of the walkway connects the dressing room and the stage. In the corner directly opposite, up near the ceiling on a small loft, perches an ugly, life-size soft-sculpture tableau of a Yukon frontiersman pressing his foot into a saloon girl's back as he helps tie her corset.

I want to have a good time, be someone fun and breezy, so the ponderous Barbie Faust is temporarily sidelined. I pick the stage name "Daisy." I like having the opportunity to reinvent myself every few weeks. A new town, a new club, a new me. Each time I draw up a new character, I incorporate facets of my personality that I wish were more prevalent. If I want to be sweeter, or more patient, polite, understanding, fun-loving, or glamorous, I can draw that out. Like dress-up on a constitutional level. Some nights, my persona seems so far removed from who I really am I feel like a female impersonator.

A girl playing the role of girl.

I can only change so much, though. No matter what I do, or how well I play-act, I'm never pure femme. My aggressive streak comes through regardless, but at least it can be cut with some sugar. I have learned quite a bit from my multifarious personae—what works and what doesn't. The positive reaction I have gotten in response to my more patient, friendly work self has informed and improved my slightly crabby quotidian self. If profit motive was the impetus for that change, so be it. I'm glad to have gotten more from this job than just money.

As I stand in the dressing room, I wonder, what would "Daisy" wear? Nurse's uniform? No. Evening gown? No. Plaid schoolgirl skirt? No. Something plain and pretty. I rifle through my costume bag and pull out a melon-colored minidress and thong. I don't know how fast the finish on the stage is, so I wear a safe pair of shoes— white, ankle-strap stilettos. I can change into platforms when I get out on the floor to do table dances. I sit at the mirror in the dressing room digging in the makeup bag for my rhinestone choker and as the other dancers file past, they say hi, introduce themselves. They get a fresh crop of girls who come up every summer from the Lower Forty-Eight to work tourist season, so they're used to new faces this time of year.

I have quite a while until I'm up in the stage rotation so I slink downstairs to see if I can get a table dance or two started. Getting up here cost a freaking fortune—to say nothing of the cost of a hotel room at the height of tourist season—and I really need to make my money back. Sitting by himself at a table by the stage, a middle-aged man in a button-down shirt and jeans catches my eye. He wears new-looking hiking boots and his beard is neatly trimmed. I take him up to one of the booths where he'll be more comfortable.

I step into the space between his feet and nudge his knees apart. When the song starts, I run my hands along my body, facing him. Then I turn around and bend at the waist, rolling my hips in a slow wave. I untie the halter on the dress and slowly uncover my breasts, one at a time. I face him, with my hands covering my breasts, then, in time to the music, bring them down and place them on his shoulders. I lean forward and grab the back of the seat behind his left ear so I'm bending over his shoulder.

When the songs ends, I ask if he wants another. He does. Then he wants four more.

I run out of fresh moves, and as I turn away from him and roll my hips yet again, I think he must be bored out of his mind. But when I turn around to face him, he's still leaning back, smiling, happy as a biscuit. My favorite kind of customer—he just settles in, drifts away, and wants dance after dance. I wish I could see what he sees, what enraptures him so. I suspect the fascination is a testosterone thing. I recall reading an interview with a female-to-male transsexual who said that once she started taking the male hormones, she understood what men got out of looking at skin magazines. For the first time, she said, the pictures came alive as s/he looked at them. Maybe the intense visual stimulation is a male province. I'm sure I would enjoy a woman table dancing for me, but not enough to drop over a hundred bucks to have her do it again and again.

As the night wears on, the club fills to capacity. Burly packs of Harley dudes, hot-to-trot tourists on hunting and fishing vacations, and a curious assortment of fuzzy-faced loners (you know what they say about Alaskan men: The odds are good, but the goods are odd). When men walk through the entrance, they're greeted by a guy stationed at the door—really good policy. There's also no dress code, which is another sound policy. I understand wanting to maintain a sophisticated air in a very upscale club, but I never have a very good time dancing in a place where a man can't enter unless he's wearing a tie. Bush Company is more friendly and casual than that. And they'd have to be—this is Alaska, home of renegades and nature men, guys who make it a point to live their entire adult life without even owning a tie.

But there's something else that's great about this club—a certain playfulness. The dancers put a lot of effort into their stage shows, some performing extended theme routines, which the men at the meat rack reward generously. There's free-floating lust perfuming the air in a fine mist. A benevolent swirl of orgone. Not a goal-oriented, predatory sexual energy like in Montana. It doesn't seem to want to go anywhere, you can just enjoy the vibe. When I'm not table dancing, I sit down with a customer and watch the girls. As they twitch their bottoms and roll languidly around onstage, there's no comparison between myself and them, no competition, no jealousy. Just admiration. I think back to what a customer said to me once as he fixed his eyes on the stage, dreamily, "The most beautiful creature in the animal kingdom is the human female."

Where do you draw the line, I wonder, between objectification and admiration? Is it a matter of manners? Intent? Money? I can pass off a casual leer as maintaining my competitive edge, so I don't need to worry about what anyone thinks of my girl-watching. Maybe it's a matter of time and place, of when it's appropriate. Or maybe it's just a matter of respect, of knowing that there's a complicated girl behind the glassy facade that's caught your eye, one whose wishes and desires may have nothing to do with yours.

Here it is, my turn onstage. I'm less intimidated than I was at the outset, because this is a fun place. A secure place. I chose my music carefully. The first song is "Brick House," an homage to women who butter their potatoes. This is not a song for a sylph. A diminutive dancer I know played it one night and was humiliated when a man in the audience shouted out, "But you're flat!" No, this is for someone healthy like me. As I come out onstage, the men cheer loudly. Wildly. I feel good. Strong. I'm not self-conscious about having shoulders like a Viking oarsman or quads that mean business.

I need to enjoy this feeling while I can, because it never lasts.

I strut the stage, smiling at the men, one by one. I am archetypal and fab.

Song two. The moment of truth. I lie back, press my feet on the stage and push up onto my toes as I wind my torso and work my thong down. I roll over onto my side and straighten my legs, sending the thong flying. The lights are hot on my skin. Here I am, bare-assed at the last frontier. I start to float away from myself a little because I'm nervous. But I'm pretty much okay.

I stand up and try to stay in character. Daisy rising. I am not a reformed nerd from New Jersey walking around with no underpants on, I remind myself. I am a goddess clothed in my own power.

I lean back, lift my arms over my head, then sway my hips slowly to the left as I bring a hand down to gently sweep my long hair over my right shoulder, concealing my breast—one of those tiny, feminine moves that can paralyze a man. Like the swarthy one in the last seat on the right side of the meat rack. I turn to him, a devastating butch confection, buzz-cut and wide-eyed—mook and boyish charmer all at once. I smile softly into his upturned face and he beams back. Beautiful. My heavens. Something other than nerves is making my legs shake. Why is it so much harder to dance for the cute ones?