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.