Pierced

My '71 Beetle was in my mechanic's driveway getting a new water pump. The Boyfriend came by the club to pick me up. He showed up a little early with his boss, Erik. Erik's wife had moved back to Texas a month before while they "figured things out" and Erik was sad and horny.


I had a drink with the guys and then Erik slipped me a couple of twenties to go dance for the table of dykes who had wandered in from the country & western bar next door. Sweetwater was sitting with them. When I finished dancing, she came with me to chat with Erik and the boyfriend.


Sweetwater was dancing for Erik. He pointed at her navel, "Are you pierced?"


"I was," she answered. "My ex ripped it out during a fight a few years ago and I had to let it grow closed. I've been thinking about getting it pierced again."


"Talk to him." Erik pointed at the BF. The BF was the first body piercer in town. He had operated out of the back of a tatto shop, eventually buying his own place. He and a former girlfriend went through a bad cycle and he had to sell the shop to pay taxes

Sweetwater and the BF talked. It was agreed he would pierce her and Jade at their apartment after we got off shift.

Jade was REALLY, REALLY drunk that night. She was drunk even for Jade. At first the BF refused to pierce her, but Sweetwater got him high and convinced him -- against his better judgement.

Jade wanted her tongue pierced. She had it done once before, but it hurt so she took it out. The BF scruitinized her mouth and announced they had pierced her in the wrong spot and she was lucky she could still talk. Then quickly stuck a needle through (presumably) a different part of her tongue. Jade began bleeding like a stuck pig! The BF started cursing, he was having trouble seeing. "That's why you aren't supposed to get drunk, you silly lush! It thins your blood. Look at this fucking mess! You're going to have to wait for another time." He packed her mouth with cotton.

Jade was petulant, but Sweetwater told her to shutup. The professional had spoken.

Then Sweetwater spread herself across the couch and patiently explained to the BF that the last time she had her navel pierced she came all over. He promised her that wouldn't be a problem.

I watched him slide the needle through her navel and abdomen, pulling the jewelrey through to fill the hole, as her toes curled and she cried out, ecstatic.

Red Leather, Yellow Leather

Look I'm standing naked before you.

Don't you want more than my sex?

I can scream as loud as your last one,

But I can't claim innocence.

Oh, God could it be the weather?

Oh, God why am I here?

If love isn't forever

And its not the weather

Hand me my leather.
-- Leather by Tori Amos

Costumes are very important to a dancer. They set the tone of your evening and your outfit defines you nearly as much as your stage name.

I tended to work a bondage queen alterna-slut look. I wore a black lace-up vinyl garter belt with black lace stockings, black lace-up boots, black bra, black leather vest, etc. Leather smells good. Even back in those days when I was a vegetarian. It smells like musky dead animal and co-mingling pheromones. It feels like skin and that's probably why it turns many of us on, at least unconsciously.

I started altering my costume based on some advice received from one of the Jades. This was the prototypical Jade (in my mind, anyway). She had just been released from a court-ordered rehab stint and fell nose first into a kilo of ice. Jade also drank A LOT, she couldn't seem to sober up long enough to find an apartment -- her boyfriend moved another woman in when she was sent away -- so she started shacking up with Sweetwater. They both seemed pretty happy about the situation, always giddy, drunk and kissing.

Back to my outfit. Jade came stumbling in the dressing room one afternoon. I had just arrived with Naomi. We were all wound up. Naomi was trying to paint on her pasties and getting latex on every part of her breast except her nipple and areola. I was so sprung, every time I stuck my toes in my stockings, I would rip through the fabric. My pseudo-silk stockings looked like cheesecloth. Jade started giggling and pulling my stockings off of my legs.

"Damn, Jade! Knock it off!"

"Shit, Mia. Have a drink. You're spazzing out all over the place." She pulled a flask out of the bodice of her white lacy negligeé and passed it to me. "You got a little something-something to share with me?"

I took a long pull from the flask. The booze burned my throat and sinuses. It was Jim Beam. "Yeah, I've got a little something. Give me my stockings so I can finish getting ready and then we can go to the can."

"Oh, hell no! These stockings are done." She balled them up and shot them into the scary trash can under the counter. "Mia, you need to change your look. This goth motorcycle chick thing is getting worn out. Besides, whenever you're onstage all of the guys go on about how great your legs are. You need to show them off. Stop hiding them in these dark stockings. Tell her, Naomi."

Naomi had been rooting through her bag for the last 5 minutes. She stopped and met my eye in the mirror. "She's right, Mia. You've toned up and lost weight since you started dancing. You don't have so many weaknesses to hide. Lose the vinyl garter belt and the stockings. Men like bright happy colors -- just like little babies." She started tugging at something trapped in her canvas bag and produced a strappy lycra dress in the brightest yellow I have ever seen. It was actually chartreuse. "Put this on."

The fabric felt great in my hand but I was intimidated by the color. "I can't wear this. I'll look silly. I only have a red t-back. With this yellow dress I'll look like Ronald McDonald."

Jade smiled and held out her flask again. "The only thing Mia's afraid of is wearing colors. Take a chug for courage, my dear. Let's pop into the back can for a pick-me-up, then I'll do your hair to go with your new dress, Mia Sopapilla." I took another slug of Jim Beam and the three of us tottered into the back corner toilet. Naomi chopped up 6 bumps on the back of the toilet -- one for each nostril. The shit was very potent but rough, you had to snort a couple drops of water after so it wouldn't keep burning your sinus tissue.

Jade fluffed out my hair and ordered me to wear the yellow dress with the red t-back and my Cinderella lucite platforms instead of lace-up leather boots. I felt a little vulnerable and without the boots and stockings I had to change up my stage, as well. I couldn't do as much knee work and confined myself to pole tricks and gyrating. I felt more feminine and less tough. It wasn't very comfortable.

During my first stage in this new role, Jade walked up to tip me. When one dancer tips another, it's naturally a much more intricate and dramatic affair for the sake of everybody's earning potential. This particular time, Jade lay across the stage on her back, placing herself between my ankles, with the dollar grasped between her teeth. I slowly gyrated down, knees about 3 feet apart, until I was squatting over her face, and she slid the dollar between the silk of my t-back and my pudenda. I hadn't expected that and squealed a little. After my stage, we were both busy with table dances for a solid 2 hours. We finally met at the bar and had a beer together. "Sweetwater is gonna be jealous of you," she chanted and then slowly and lasciviously ran her tongue along her upper lip.

It is important to note Jade's appearance at this point. From the dirty talk, general drunkeness and swearing one might imagine a hard and manufactured overly made-up, bleached blonde. One would be wrong. Jade had an unbleished porcelain complexion with rosy cheeks and wide green eyes with perfect bone structure and wavy, raven hair. She had a toned, slightly curvy figure and she was 22 years old. There was nothing overblown about her. She looked like a Waterhouse painting. She was Snow-Snorting-White.

Jade went back to chanting like a school girl. "Sweetwater's gonna be jealous cuz I kissed Mia's chocha. Sweetwater's gonna be jealous. There's gonna be a catfight. Meow. Meow. Meow."

"Shutup, Jade. Don't try and start something where there's nothing. Kisses don't count at work. You know the rules."

"Well, Mia. If you give me a bump I won't tell." She gave me one of her jalapeño and chocolate grins and I realized she had been teasing me.

"Damn, girl. You just had to ask." We tottered off to the dressing room. Jade was leaning hard against me. The woman was using herself up quickly. She was too sweet and silly and young and beautiful for this stupid place.

She was too fucked up to work anywhere else.

Jasmine, Jade and Other Cheap Sluts

Jasmine and Jade are probably the most popular stripper names, so there is always a Jasmine and a Jade dancing at the club. The women rotate, but the name constantly resurrects itself like some deranged strung-out yogi in platform sandals.



The Jasmine who arrived in May was terrible. She was cute -- country, with a round face and freckles, a twang in her speech, petite and curvy. She had just moved to town from god-knows-where. She may have been keeping that a secret, or she may have told me. At that point, I was trying very hard to stay drunk and high and impervious to all of the drama and emotion around me, so I didn't always listen very closely to the new girls who seemed so very needy and wounded and self-destructive. These new girls weren't any better or worse than my circle, but I was just already saturated with trauma.

The Jasmine who arrived in June GAVE IT AWAY. She would walk around giving backrubs to the customers. She did stages, but didn't seem to try to sell any table dances -- I suppose because she was too busy walking around giving out free backrubs. On slower evenings this started cutting into everyone else's money, so we threw an intervention and the dumb ho still didn't understand us. Finally, we told her if she didn't stop touching and entertaining for free, we were going to let Dominique kick her ass -- Dominique thought talking to this woman was a waste of time better spent punching her until she was too ugly and sore to work. I have to admit she was right.

After that, Jasmine confined herself to giving backrubs to her one special regular for free. Eventually, she moved in with him and he would come in every night for most of her shift and she would dance for him for free. I never could understand it.

A Maudlin Interlude

I hate men. You're stupid, juvenile pig liars. You never have enough , You suck and you suck and you suck us dry. You want our bodies, preferably objectified. You want our souls shriveled and cut to your specifications. You want our minds, thinking what you tell us to. And you don't want to give the most paltry triviality in return.

You come into the club: young, old, married, single, divorced, horny and bitter, bitter, bitter. You bitch about paying child support. I don't get child support, instead I dance topless for the likes of you. I smile at you, I close my eyes in a half-dreamy way. You think I'm fantasizing about you.

I am. I'm fantasizing about picking up the discarded olive spear in your martini glass and stabbing you in the eyeball. I imagine I can hear the cornea tear and I sigh. I fantasize about watching you cry. I think about splitting your lip with my fist. That makes me wet.

I've had my lip split and my eye blackened. I ran away from it and now I get no child support; only phone calls in the middle of the night telling me how useless and hopeless I am. After I hang up, I count my scars and throw down some whiskey and lay back in my bed. But I don't sleep. When I do sleep, I dream I'm being chased by masked gunman and runaway trucks and I try to run away with my boy in my arms, but I can never run fast enough.

My big money regular tells me he comes to see me because I remind him of his wife when they met. I smile and pick up his hundred dollar bills andI shake my tits in his face and he gets a boner through his painter pants and he smells like acetone and old man sweat. He tells me how much he loves his wife and his eyes well up and then he offers me $200 to go fuck him in some hotel room and I say, ohnosweetieyourwifeican'tican't but I'm thinking youmakemesosick and then I purr and I shake my tits in his face and he lays another hundred on the table and I hate him and his false sentimentality.

Another regular likes to fancy himself a sexual sophisticate. He talks about obscure erotica in museums and the sociological insight it provides. He like to take weeklong sex and drug vacations in Thailand. He boasts about how cheap it is to shack up with a woman there. It costs him a mere $500 for a week plus airfare. She does anything -- ANYTHING -- he wants and her brother buys him drugs and her mama cooks for him. He smirks. I want to knock him out of his chair. Instead, I shake my tits in his face and take my twenty and he reminds me again that he gets a much better deal in Thailand and asks what I think of fisting. I go back to the dressing room and vomit. I look in the mirror and reapply my lipstick before I go back out to the floor.

At least once a week a man offers me money for more. The more usually involves a motel room or a car or their place and my mouth or my pussy. Sometimes the money offered isn't much more than I make in a night. Sometimes the money offered is unbelieveably generous; hence, a lie. I always politely decline but there is an instant between the offer and the refusal where my brain makes the cha-ching sound of a cash register. The request makes me hate them. The noise makes me hate me. My refusal is diplomatic but the whole process is costly. I almost always have to buy a double cuervo to wash away the conversation.

Eventually when I quit dancing, I will gain 40 pounds so I can walk through the streets without constantly being imprisoned by the male gaze. I will also become adept at destroying every relationship I come across before I get beat up. I will try to grow hard inside, but in this I will fail. So consequently, I cry too much with the frustration that comes with hurting and being hurt.

I will also bear vivid memories of scars: Leila's cigarette burns, Dominique gagging on a straw, Candy who could only get off when she called the guy daddy, Sweetwater's tears -- and Kelly with the tipped uterus. When she was 17 she snuck off to a motorcycle gang's mountain party. They fucked her up, bad. When Kelly cried, her best friend screamed -- so the guys smashed the end of the bottle on a tub before they stuck it inside of her friend. She hemmoraged to death and Kelly was placed in a psychiatric hospital for 2 months.

Dress Up Party, Part 3

Kelly pranced up to me and the BF, chattering away about this new woman she was into and how excited she was because the woman had arrived and was mingling nicely and was just as sexy as Kelly thought she might have remembered from a fuzzy night of car-kissing the previous week. Kelly was an equal opportunity lover -- but it had been awhile since she had been with anyone she was REALLY interested in, and frankly she needed a woman's touch just now. She needed compassion and softness and this oh-so-very-interesting woman seemed the perfect antidote for her loneliness. Oh, how she wanted a woman! Wasn't this woman unbelieveble sexy??? She did that attempting-to-be-secretive-sideways-head-point. We followed the indicated trajectory with our eyes. Then the BF and I looked at each other in puzzlement. Was it possible Kelly didn't realize? Possibly she didn't realize because she was waxing enthusiastically about her return to the Sapphic Arts. On the other hand, Kelly was an equal opportunity lover and this new woman of interest ...

...was definitely a man in women's clothing. S/he was sporting a vampiric goth look -- not a traditional drag queen by any means BUT definitely a drag queen. Kelly tottered off to kiss her gender nondescript partner and the BF and I discussed if it was more ethical to clue Kelly in, or just let it lie when Sweetwater took the floor.

"D--- is having a tax day party at his mansion. Let's all carpool over there now."

D--- was a very wealthy rancher and one of Sweetwater's regulars. She and Kelly sometimes went to his mansion with him for hot tub parties. Then they would get high, drunk and do an olive oil jill-off and occasionally dine on each other for his benefit. He would give them each a couple of hundred for the show. Sweetwater claimed he was more-or-less impotent around women. The show was fantasy fuel. I didn't believe her.

We all drove up to the North Valley. D---'s driveway was gravel and my new shoes sank deeply. I couldn't gain enough purchase to walk. My Knight-In-Sharkskin BF swooped me up in his arms and carried me up to the front porch. Kelly and Naomi/ Yvette applauded his chivalry.

Inside the sprawling ranch, about 6 feet from the front door was a stocked and staffed wet bar. We ordered drinks and I noticed that the very large and beautiful CEO of the best local BBQ chain was manning a giant mesquite grill alongside the bar. He offered me some beef, but I was vegetarian and too high anyway. Sweetwater waved her arms around like a drunken, tragically beautiful Vanna White and led a guided tour of the house. It took a half hour to see the whole house -- even though our guide was drunkenly succinct.

We finished the tour at a second fully stocked and staffed wet bar in a brick indoor patio alongside an olympic-sized pool. A DJ was spinning soul classics as we took over most of the stools. There were a few old money, wrinkled and bleached over-tanned, over-jeweled rich divorced bitches chatting up some big ranchers. The ranchers immediately shifted focus to our entourage of high and drunken dancers in form-fitting evening wear. I felt like a movie star.

The rich bitches pretended they were charmed by us while staring daggers. They called us cheap, so we ordered shots and stuck our generous tips in the bartenders pockets. They called us sluts, so we all started making out with each other. The ranchers were mesmerized. The tanned diamond ladies surrendered and retreated to the dance floor.

My beautiful BF looked me in the eye. "Thank you so much."

"What? The girl-on-girl visuals?"

"Well ... the girl-on-girl visuals -- but these are the same guys who made me feel like nothing in high school. Now, I've arrived at their party -- the only man in the company of the women they want, and a few of you have kissed me in front of them. No one kissed them. I've had delicious cold revenge and it was hot."

"I can't stand up in these shoes anymore. Take me home and I'll give you some more hot revenge."

We found our way to the door and he carried me across the driveway, buckled me into the pickup truck and we went home to bed.

Dress Up Party, Part 2

The night of Kelly's party, I got all gussied up and even set my hair in hot rollers. I felt like Rita Hayworth in my vintage cocktail dress and super high platform glass slippers. The BF picked me up, had to boost me into the cab of his pick-up truck, but he gave me a good goose on the way up and I giggled at his trouser tent when he climbed in the other side.

"God, you look hot. Usually, you're such a tomboy. Tonight, you look all girly, but you're not too made up, like when you're dancing. "

"Shutup, you're making me blush. Besides, look at you. Yummy!" He was clean-shaven and his hair looked nice (it was usually goofy from wearing hats at work) and the cut of the suit flattered his broad shoulders and muscular thighs. Plus, the sharkskin suit was just plain cool.

We arrived fashionably late. Most everyone else was already there. The first thing we dancers did was introduce ourselves to each other by our real names.

"Hi, my name is Ana," said Sweetwater.

Naomi held out her hand, "My name is Yvette."

"I'm Liza," giggled Fay.

"I'm Laura, " said Mary Jane.

"Jennifer," I pointed to myself.

"Yeah, well, I'm just Kelly -- all day long." We all laughed. Kelly passed around beers and margaritas and we spent the rest of the evening saying each other's real names whenever we could.

(Dress Up party Part 3 -- coming soon.)

Kissing

When you spend 30 hours a week projecting sexuality, you tend to be really turned-on most of the time, even if it's for the purpose of making money. If you spend most of your time around the same group of people and those people are beautiful and your friends and just as high and turned-on as you are...

...eventually everyone starts kissing: onstage, off stage, during table dances, at the bar, in the bathroom while snorting lines, at the dyke bar next door, at after parties, through and under your new satin panties, in the car, in somebody's bed, etc., etc., etc.

Dress Up Part 1

Kelly decided she was having a party. "It's a dress-up party. We're always naked, so we'll make this special by wearing fancy clothes."

That weekend she arrived armed with flyers for the "Dress-Up Party. (I mean it.) Food, Friends and Fun (ie. Booze). Bring Your Boyfriend, Bring Your Friends." This was followed by her address, phone number and a hand-drawn map to her house from Central Avenue.

I told the boyfriend about it while we were running errands. He got excited. "A stripper dress-up party! Cool! I have a great sharkskin suit from the 50's that I hardly ever get to wear. What are you wearing?"

I did a mental inventory and realized I had no party dresses. The boyfriend grabbed my hand and whisked me through the busy afternoon traffic, across the street and into a Vintage Shoppe.

We found a round rack in the middle of the store with cocktail dresses, Some were amazing, but they were pricey. I thought we should leave, but he shushed me. "Just try them on for fun. Classic dames turn me on," and he kissed the back of my neck, so I grabbed a space-age lamé sheath and a basic black. He thrust a quilty cream and gold broacade silk with matching evening jacket into my hands.

"Ack! This is a musty old lady dress!" I tried to hand it back. He refused.

"Just try it on."

I tried the gold lamé first. I felt like Barbarella attending a dinner party hosted by Captain Kirk. It was cool. Then to humor the BF, I tried on the cream and gold brocade silk.

Oh my god!

I walked out to show him and he immediately flushed and got a partial hard-on. It was as if the dress -- cut, color and fabric -- had been custom-designed for me. With the jacket on I looked designer elegant. Without the jacket, the fitted tank halter dress made me Iook like a silver screen sex goddess.

"I'm buying that for you," he sighed.

I looked at the price tag. "It's $75.00." The boyfriend was a cook and taking care of his terminally ill mother.

"It's worth every cent."

******

None of my shoes matched my new vintage outfit. It was 2 days before the party and I was obsessing as I sipped a beer and waited for my big money regular to drop by after his shift. Brandy hopped on stage. She sort of lazy pranced around -- it was early and dead -- when I noticed her shoes -- clear high-heeled lucite strappy sandals. They would match my new suit and they were the perfect accessory for a stripper dress-up party. When I asked, Brandy said she'd picked them up at the mall at some faux-boutique shoe shop on the second level.

The next day my 3 year old son and I were driving across town to the place my roommates and I had derisively nicknamed "Hitler Mall". (The mall was actually named for a conquistador who had decimated the local Native American population -- the survivors' descendants lived in the hills beyond the mall. Also, I hate malls.)

My boy and I wandered around the mall until we found the store. The salesman brought me a couple of styles to try, I found a style I liked that was comfortable and stood up to prance around on the carpet. My son looked at me and his deep brown eyes widened with awe.

"Oh, Mommy! You look just like Cinderella!"

Thunderbolt

It was a very, very slow Saturday. One of the Unser boys had wandered in and Calico was making her rent money. He really liked her. Besides them, there were 2 drunks not buying dances and 5 very frustrated dancers. Janine and I went to the dressing room to kill some time and catch a buzz.

I didn't come out again until my next stage. I was hoping to keep my mood as positive as possible in case more customers arrived. I played this christian rock song I really liked that the DJ had turned me on to. ("The Flood" by Jars of Clay.) I decided to dance for myself since the place was slow. I practiced some new pole tricks and worked on a few belly dancing moves I had picked up at a workshop. I was lost in my own ecstatic dance and didn't even notice the man that was sitting at the top corner ringside table.

He walked up with a dollar as the song was fading out. "You're amazing." he whispered. "You dance like you love it." I had been gathering up the pieces of my costume scattered around the stage. I stood up and smiled. I was holding my skirt and bra over my naked breasts shyly -- as if I hadn't just been shaking my tits to a christian rock melody. Absurd!

"Would you like a dance?"

"Yes, please!" He sat back in his chair and I dropped my clothes on the table and moved very close to him. He probably received one of the best table dances of my short career. You see, when I first looked at him, I was hit by the thunderbolt -- like Michael Corleone in Sicily.

I was always quite capable of drawing a thick line between my desires and the men that visited the club. Occasionally, I found one attractive -- but that merely made working them easier. Occasionally, I found one to be interesting -- but that merely made working them more entertaining. Sometimes -- rarely -- but sometimes, a dancer would start a relationship with a guy she met at the club. Naomi met her boyfriend there. He had come in with a bachelor party and returned every day for a week until she agreed to go out with him. But every wise dancer knows that you don't shit where you eat. Your highest dollar regulars were rarely boyfriend material anyway. My hundred dollar a night men were respectively:
+ a 50 year old married family man who claimed I reminded him of his wife when they met and
+ a 50 year old thrice-divorced drunk who ran a paint crew of ex-cons and liked to party.

But there was something about this gentleman. He was only a few years older than me. He had black intelligent eyes, broad shoulders, silky black hair and his skin was the color of cinnamon. I wanted to lick him. I wanted to go wading in his eyes and kiss his soft full lips. I was giddy and nervous and shaky. I forgot I had a boyfriend. Mostly he had that undeniable magnetic quality that I can't begin to describe.

When the song was over, I sat down with him. The waitress sauntered by and he ordered us each a beer. We talked for a while. We shared interests in music, books and movies. He said he was just passing through town.

"Why?" I asked. "Are you a truck driver or something? "

"No," he said. "I have to be at the airforce base at midnight. Then I'm being sent away."

"Midnight? That seems rather clandestine. Are you Special Ops or something?'

"Kind of. My term starts the 15th, which is midnight. I can't talk about it."

That piqued my curiosity. "What? Go ahead and tell me. I'm just a stripper. My job is keeping my mouth shut while dancing mostly naked."

"No one would believe it." He looked sad and tired.

"I'll believe you."

"You're not a government agent are you? No, I know you're not. You haven't seen any hanging around here, though? Any customers in fedoras and trenchcoats?"

"Not tonight," I laughed.

"OK... I haven't been able to tell anyone the whole story, not even my Mom. I'll tell you because you're beautiful and amazing and I want bury my face in your skin all night and I still trust you somehow. I'm really good with computers. A couple of years ago I hacked into a very sensitive location and found a lot of very sensitive information. I got caught while trying to expose it. They threatened to kill me, but brought me up on federal charges instead. I -"

The waitress had walked up again. "Would you like another drink?" I looked at him.

"I'm broke. I'm sorry." The waitress rolled her eyes and walked off. "I'm going to get you in trouble. You need to go make money -- you have a kid. I just wanted to kill some time before going. I didn't expect to meet someone I liked. But damn, watching you dance..."

"Go on with your story," I said. "It's slow. I'm not missing anything. I like you, too."

"OK," he continued. "I was given a choice. Twenty-five years in federal prison or I could spend 5 years teaching my computer skills. Hey, teaching -- no problem. But then I found out my assignment. Do you remember the Star Wars program?"

"Sure," I said. "That super-expensive defense program Reagan devised that didn't even work."

"Oh, it works. They just don't want anyone to know. What happens is... you type in a set of coordinates and the person who is at that location gets assasinated via sattelite. They use intelligence and surveillance to know who will be there and when -- then bingo! The government assasinates enemies and no one knows who is responsible. My job will be to train a bunch of hacker kids who have gotten into trouble to use it."

The waitress walked up again. "Rachel wants to see you."

He looked at me. "See, I did get you into trouble. I'm sorry. I better go." We both stood up.

I put a hand on his arm. "Don't go. I'm not in trouble. Let me go talk to her and I'll be right back. Wait here."

At the bar, Rachel told me about some guy sitting alone at a table in the corner. The waitress said he had a big wad of cash on him and no one was working him. I looked at him over my shoulder. His eyes were tiny and cold. He looked mean.

"Thanks for the tip, Rache. Look -- this is weird. You know I'm all about the money, but I'm really enjoying the guy I'm talking to. I think I might sit with him for a little while."

"OK. I just figured you'd want to know."

"Thanks, Rachel." I turned around, but my thunderbolt man was gone.

And I swayed over to the table with the mean-eyed money man.

Hexing Doug

Jasmine and Coral were cousins. Coral came here from the Philippines because she had fallen in love with an American GI and he asked her to marry him. Then she helped Jasmine get a student visa and Jasmine came to stay with them. The GI tried to fuck Jasmine. She turned him down and told Coral. Coral, being hot-tempered, brought up the subject while breaking dishes and windows and the GI threw both ladies out. Three months later Coral was still unmarried, her visa had expired and she was broke.

After hearing her sad story, Doug agreed to let her dance at the club -- provided she gave him fifty dollars and a blowjob at the end of every shift. So Coral worked hard and drank hard and sucked Dougie's dick and soon Jasmine was dancing, too.

One Tuesday, Coral called off sick and Dougie told Jasmine she would have to suck his dick and give him fifty dollars at the end of her shift. Jasmine asked the rest of the dancers in the dressing room if this was standard policy. Six boozy voices chorused, "Oh, hell no!" Which is precisely what Jasmine told Doug at the end of her shift when he tried to collect.

Jasmine came into the dressing room crying. Doug had fired her.

Sweetwater stalked into the dressing room cursing. Doug had fired her for sticking up for Jasmine and for calling him pig jizz.

Coral ran into the club screaming and throwing beer bottles at the wall. Doug had called her sick at home and fired her.

Doug called the police. Everybody left.

But before leaving, Sweetwater and I chanted a hex on Doug in the bathroom. We wrote his name in lipstick and flushed it down the toilet. We focused all of our hatred onto that stained piece of paper.

******************************

Friday night at 8 o'clock the club was slammed. I was working a table full of Mexican nationals and this vaquero was talking dirty to me in Spanish while I shook my nipples 5 inches from his mustache. Jonas and Mike -- the proprietors -- swaggered through the door with their cocky frat boy sneers.

This was extremely odd. I only recognized Jonas and Mike because they had called a mandatory meeting 2 weeks earlier at 10 a.m.on a Sunday morning -- quite sadistic given that half of us worked until 2 am. In this meeting they spent an hour essentially calling us a bunch of slatternly whores and dispensing advice on topics like working out, waxing your sphincter and saying no to drugs. They then reminded us that the club we worked wasn't as nice as their midtown establishment, which we weren't fit to even visit. You can perhaps understand why their sudden appearance caught me off guard.

A couple dancers greeted them, but they ignored them and marched straight back to Doug's office. About a song and a half later, I was shaking my ass for the next vaquero. Jonas and Mike marched a weeping Doug through the club and out the front door. They then spent a minute talking to Wayne, the head bouncer. The handed him a ring of keys and left.

When I finished working the table of Mexican cowboys, I made a beeline for the dressing room. All of the dancers were chattering excitedly and passing around a blunt. Dougie had been fired! Jonas and Mike discovered he had been skimming most of the dancers' house payments. I mused out loud, "I wonder if it was because Sweetwater and I hexed him on Tuesday."

Janine chimed in. "Girl! You hexed him! Jade, Dominique and I put a hex on the dirty chingado last night. He's always trying to make me fuck him and when I said no, he bitched us out for not giving him enough money."

Calico then launched into a dramatic recreation of the black candle/ bathtub hexing ceremony she performed in Doug's honor the previous weekend after he told her she couldn't work after calling in sick twice.

Brandy and Cocoa told us that they had performed a Dougie hexing ceremony with Rachel on Wednesday in his office. They also wrote his name in lipstick, but they soaked the paper in tequila and burned it in an ashtray.

When we went back to the office to give Wayne the house fee, he told us Jonas and Mike had made him the new manager. Wayne was Brandy's boyfriend and he had once been a nude dancer in Vegas. He had a great sense of humor and he always talked to the dancers kindly and respectfully. He promised me that Sweetwater, Jasmine and Coral could come back to work the next day.

Hurray for hexes!!!

Wild Mountain Honey

Ooh, mama
Well look what's been done
You can only see the stars
After a setting sun

You run for the money
You don't even know about wild mountain honey
"Wild Mountain Honey" by Steve Miller

The first time I laid eyes on Kelly, she was doing a twirling hippie stage dance to that song. I fell a teeny bit in love with her and walked back to the dressing room to get ready for my shift.

I was curling my hair and talking to Sweetwater in the mirror when Kelly strode though the door. "Ah babydoll! I haven't seen you in a couple of years. Give me a hug." Her sinewy arms and long blonde curls enveloped Sweetwater.

"And you," she said, locking her cornflower eyes on me. "I saw you from the stage. I just want to wrap you up inside of my legs and kiss you til you blush."

I blushed immediately . Sweetwater cackled and introduced us.

It was a steady Thursday. We three, Dominique and Janine were the only ones who showed up for work. We danced our asses off and sweat so much I had to reapply deodorant about a dozen times. By 10:30 the crowd had thinned out and a few other girls had arrived so we decided to call it a night. We loaded into my VW bug, grabbed a 6 pack at the grocery store, and drove out to the volcanos.

Kelly lit up a joint of some of the skunkiest dope I ever smoked. The three of us sat on top of 5000 year old lava and giggled at the half moon as it emerged naked and white from behind the mountains on the other end of town.

Friday Night

You wouldn't believe all the girls who show up to work on a Friday night, especially the first Friday of the month. You can't even get any mirror space, so I usually stop at Naomi's place to spiff up and catch a buzz before reporting for duty on those nights. The first few months I don't even recognize a lot of the dancers, but after a while...

Some are the semi-retired. They've stopped dancing regularly because of jealous boyfriends or because they've joined some 12 step or maybe gotten a straight job but show up a couple of times a month to pay off the bright red disconnection notices.

There are floaters -- dancers who stay in reasonably good standing with several clubs and a couple nights a week will bop around amongst them until they find a full house which they will work very seriously and tenaciously until closing. They usually perform some of the loveliest stages, but their song choices are challenging. (Try shaking your ass in somebody's face to Crash Test Dummies' "Mmmm".) Floaters are usually artists or doctoral candidates.

Then you have traveling show girls and spinners. Traveling show girls are careerists and usually very well put together to make up for their lack of style and imagination: professional waxing, buff, fake tan all over, tit job, lots of makeup -- as generic, vanilla slut as you get. They book gigs in various towns and work the smaller clubs in between bookings. They are usually trying to make it big in Vegas or porn and they don't share useful info. (Example of useful info: I just hit that guy up for a dance, but he said no, he prefers brunettes. Go get him, girl!.).

And then there are the spinners. Spinners are usually between the ages of 35 and menopause. They aren't career dancers so much a lifers and I call them spinners because they seem to run through every club in town, working a few months, leaving in a huff or getting fired. When they've burned their way through the circuit, they start again at the first, and so on.

Some spinners used to be show girls who never quite made it. Then they got old and the bookings dried up, so they continue to dance in whichever town they've chosen to land. This type is extremely sour and any other dancer hoping to make money should consider them bubonic. Talk to one for ten minutes and she wil tarnish your mojo with cynical experience and no one will buy a dance from you. (Ironically, the living archetype of this spinner danced under the name Nova. She used to be new, but now she just won't go.)

The other kind of spinner makes me sad. Sad, because this other breed is a Priestess of Seduction and a Daughter of Pain. She will give you amazing, money-making info, distilled through the warped glass of personal prejudice and abuse. This type of Spinner is a hoot and a holler and a mess of psychic scar tissue; a Drama Mama with pizzazz. She will pull you into her personal pathology but her costume tips are lucrative and you will never forget the sparkle of her vulnerable toughness. In my mind, Sweetwater is a prototypical example of the Spinner but Kelly is the archetype.

And she deserves her own entry.

Fat Hogs

The rumor was that a certain dangerous biker gang had a controlling interest in the club. A few of the dancers were the old ladies of members serving time and management never called those dancers into the office, no matter how drunk, how high or how often they went without nipple latex. Many members of the bike club, especially those higher up, spent a lot of time and money in the topless club. Reportedly even their leader, whom many of the dancers spoke of wistfully.

When I finally saw him for the first time about 2 months after I started dancing he didn't look much like the picture in my head. He was younger and cleaner with not very long hair. He was also kind of short, about an inch shorter than me in my heels. But his eyes were two ebony flames and he had the confidence and curt charisma of a Roman general.

Sweetwater was drinking at his table and she called me over and introduced us. He was occasionally caressing her, but none of the bouncers said a word about it. He asked me to join them and sent the waitress to get me another beer. Sweetwater got up to do her stage and he looked at me.

"I've never seen you before. Are you new?"

"A couple of months." I was a bit buzzed and no one at the table was talking. They just sat there looking at me. I was getting nervous and when I do sometimes I talk too much and occasionally my babbling turns into a kind of comedy stand-up act. Tonight it did. He and his buddies thought I was hilarious and bought me another beer and a Cuervo.

As the waitress bent down with our drinks she said, "Doug wants to see you in his office."

"Uh-oh, Mia. Little Dougie's probably going to give you a hard time for talking to me. You'd better hurry before he gets annoyed." He said this sarcastically.

As I walked through the office door, Doug started shreiking like a 13 year old girl. "Are you trying to get us all killed, Mia??? Do you realize who you've been talking to for the last half hour??? That's G----------!!! He's chief of the B-------!!! Haven't you heard the stories? What's wrong with you??!!!???"

"Dougie, relax! He liked me just fine. That's why I sat there for so long. He bought me drinks."

"Ohmigod, Mia!!! He never buys drinks, not even for Sweetwater or Dominique or Jasmine! He never buys dances, nothing! Why would he buy drinks for you? It must be something he does before committing mass murder. I'd better go out and talk to him and straighten out this mess you've made."

I shook my head and walked out of Doug's office. When I got back out to the floor I went back to his table and he smiled at me. "Did Dougie give you a good talking-to, Mama Mia? Are you in big trouble?"

"Not quite yet."

Just then, Doug came stumbling up behind me holding out his right arm to shake hands, loudly greeting the table. " G-------, so nice to see you!" Everybody started looking around. He gave Doug a long, cold stare. Doug was sweating. He looked like he was going to shit his pants. "Mia, honey. Trot up to the bar and have Rachel make me a Tanq martini." I rolled my eyes at Doug, but complied.

When I brought the drink back to the table, Doug said, "Thanks, Mia. Now run along and stop bothering these gentlemen." I was horrified, but all 3 bikers burst into laughter -- laughing at Doug.

He angled his chair away from the table and pulled out a $20. He looked me in the eye and handed me the bill. "Mia, I want you to dance for me."

I gave him a dance choreographed by the butterflies of desire, fluttering in my stomach.Yes. I wanted to fuck him.

Very much.

But we didn't.

And I never saw him again.

Sweetwater!

Sweetwater is beautiful, a fine blend of Apache and Swedish. She's six feet of bronze skin with legs up to her ass, a fantastic set of hard-earned tits and large almond eyes the color of coffee that contrast nicely with her long blonde hair. She's so crazy beautiful it hurts and I am reminded of the geometric rainbows thrown off a shattered windshield on a day of pure sunshine.

She was so bitter cold to me at first. But one slow Tuesday she was having a bad night and as I tottered by (you can never just simply walk in 5 inch heels) she said, "Mia! Sit down!" patting the bar stool next to her.

"OH! Mia, Mia, Mia, MIA! I'm such a bitch. I need a friend so bad, right now. A real friend. Why are you so real? Why are you so kind? Why am I such a bitch?" All of this was said with a generous amount of flair and drama but her words were almost unintelligbly slurred. Almost, but I am fluent in drunk.

"LOOK at me, Mia." I complied. Her face was a Jack Daniels meltdown, mascara running in streams down her cheeks, eyes bloodshot, lipstick faded and smeared. Her bra was even crooked.

"OH MIA! I miss my son. I miss my boy. He's with my mom. I can't take care of him. I CAN'T. LOOK AT ME! I'm a barely functioning addict. I'm a crazy fucking mess. He's safer with my mother -- but then again, she's the one who did this to me."

Rachel brought me a double Cuervo and a beer on the house. Rachel is an excellent bartender.

"OH MIA! I'm so drunk. I'm such a mess! Doug just fired me! I can't even keep this stupid job and all I have to do is take off my top and shake my tits. Fuck me!"

I looked into her slightly crossed eyes. "Sweetwater, you're gorgeous. A dozen guys come in here every afternoon just to see you. You have twice as many regulars as any other dancer and a bunch of semi-regulars, too. Are you sure Doug fired you?"

"OH MIA! I'm sure he means it this time, because it's the third time he's fired me this week....but, wait. Would you talk to him Mia? He listens to you, because you don't get too fucked up and you always show up and you sell a lot of booze for the house. And he doesn't want to fuck YOU! Oh...ummm...I mean...I mean, he respects you. Talk to him for me, please?"

"OK." She did bring a lot of guys into the club. Revenue would go down if she went somewhere else. Doug understood money and when I put it like that he might be reasonable.

"Oh, thank you, thank you, THANKS. My drink is done. I'm going next door to the dyke bar. Talk to Dougie and then come tell me what he said."

It was an hour before my shift ended, but the place was dead and I wasn't making money anyway. I went back to Doug's office and sat in one of his pleather chairs, sipping my Cuervo and presenting Sweetwater's case as one part business negotiation, one part humanitarian generosity. Doug ate it up but said she was unmanageable and told me she had to promise not to come to work already drunk. He let me leave early so I could go tell her.

Neither one of them wanted her to leave but they were both too proud to fix it. She played me, and I knew it.

Next door, Sweetwater and I laughed and talked and drank like fish. Periodically, we would get up for a little two step with the swaggering middleaged butches who asked us.

And so began one of the more dysfunctional, exhausting and thoroughly entertaining friendships of my life.

Flashback...Interview

Doug was the manager. I first met him on that fateful Tuesday, after interviewing for a waitress position at the lesbian country western bar next door. The gay boy wearing wranglers told me I was perfect, and they would hire me next month -- when the current waitress moved to California.

Shit, shit, shit!!! I needed money yesterday.

As I waited to turn out of the parking lot, I noticed the strip club had a sign posted, "Waitress Wanted". I threw it in reverse.

Inside, the bartender I would later know as Rachel brought my resume into the back rooms. She came out a few minutes later. "Dougie wants to talk to you."

Feeling as if I were falling like Alice, through the black painted hallways and into a black painted office with a couple of lamps, a couple of faux leather easy chairs and a very, very long desk. There was Doug. He stood to shake my hand. His hand was white, flabby, soft and clammy. He stood about an inch and a half taller than me, making him about 5'5''. He was chubby in a gross, wimpy way, kind of like the pillsbury doughboy. All of this obvious dorkiness, yet the overwhelming quality he emitted was unfounded arrogance.

"I used to manage 3 Chuck E. Cheese's before Jonas and Mike recruited me to run this place," he proudly announced, running his limp sausage fingers over his de riguer band t-shirt like a pigeon preening. I thought to myself, if this were true:

A: Why kind of idiot brags about managing a Chuck E. Cheese while interviewing someone and

B: What kind of sick misogynist fucks were Jonas and Mike, to recruit a guy from a kids' playground of bad pizza and video games to manage a couple of dozen women who found themselves dancing naked?

Doug continued, "I looked over your resume. You can waitress if you want but you won't make much money. You could be a dancer. I need someone else for the afternoon shift. You could start tomorrow at four, and work until ten. Most dancers stay later if they're making money but you have to stay at least until 10."

"What would you pay me?"

"Your payment is the opportunity to work at this pleasant establishment. You pay the house $20 or ten percent of your earnings each night, whichever is higher. That goes to the bouncers, because they protect you from all of the drunk, horny customers. You'll also want to tip out the bartender about 10 or 20 bucks each night. We expect you to sell drinks but you don't have to drink alcohol. Maybe it's too early for you, so when you start your shift tell the bartender not to send you any booze until you say. Right away a guy offers to buy you a drink and you ask for a Grey Goose screwdriver. The bartender sends you a glass of $10 orange juice at a $9.50 profit, and the guy is happy. He buys dances because he thinks you're getting drunk. But you can't have sex with the customers on the premesis. It's illegal. Also, no whoring in the parking lot. You don't look like the type, but it happens. You'll get fired."

"From a job I'm not getting a paycheck for? Besides, I didn't say yes to dancing." It seemed like crossing a giant moral line. Then again, I had been a hippie chick and had certainly run around enough topless. Doug explained that you wear a thong to cover your ladythings, because this club sold alcohol. I didn't like the way dancers had to pay the club like some kind of pimp but it sounded like I would make my rent money within a couple of days. If I waitressed, it would probably take more than a week and I'd be in the same environment, with the same gross men, only schlepping drinks.

"All right, Doug, I'll try it out for a week and see how it goes."

"OK. You'll need to pick a stage name. You also need to get some of this." He pulled what looked like a blottle of white nail polish out of the desk drawer. "It's a latex pastie. You can get it at most costume shops. There's a decent one one Central and Lomas. You paint it on you nipples and it dries clear like Elmer's Glue. Some of the girls mix it with lipstick. You can ask them for help in the dressing room. Jasmine and Mary Jane and Brandy are pretty nice. Some of the girls are crazy, drunk or mean -- or just plain bitches."

"Why do we have to wear that?"

"Oh, it's a law. Some nutjob in the state legislature got it passed a few years back. All women of an age in which they might be capable of lactating must seal their nipples with latex in the presence of open containers of alcoholic beverages or some nonsense. You also need to think about your costume. You want something that will turn a man on enough to buy dances and give you money. I'm going to tell you a secret because I sense you are a respectable person, unlike most dancers. I have a good sense of people. Go buy some fringed white boots. Fringed white boots are hot. You'll make a million dollars! See you tomorrow at 4 o'clock."

White-fringed boots? What an asshole!

"Heroin Girl"

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