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.