TWO
“Hey, mama,” Alannah greets me cheerfully as I scurry in front of one of the full length mirrors, drop my bag and hurriedly begin to change into my stilettos.
She passes me a poorly rolled blunt, still wet from all the spit it took to roll it. No doubt it contains dirt weed from the Bronx.
I shake my head at the offering. “No thanks, ma.” I glance around the dressing room to make sure Kaia, the Spanish girl with the gangland tattoo, isn’t in here. She’s the one who probably sold the weed to Alannah. “I can get you better shit than that if you want,” I say.
Alannah exhales heavily. “Nah, I’m good. Kaia gave me this for free.”
I sniff. “Smells like it. What’s in there? Rubber bands?”
She giggles. “No, that’s the paper. I ran out of ZigZags. Had to roll this joint in a tampon wrapper.”
“That’s gross,” I laugh.
She shrugs. “Does the job.”
I like Alannah, although I don’t know her well. She’s a tall, lean blonde in her early twenties. Her breasts are small, natural and perky. Her ass is firm and her legs are long. Her blonde pubes are clipped close to show off the piercing next to her clit. You’d never know she came from upstate New York. She lives in the Bronx now, and speaks “Spanglish” like she was raised there. She’s funny, too. You don’t expect to see a girl that pretty suddenly imitate the voices of Beavis and Butthead, or burp the alphabet.
She gets along with everyone. The manager loves her. She may never make him money, but she’ll always have a job in this club as long as he’s here.
Alannah doesn’t seem bothered by the fact that she isn’t an earner. It appears to be her choice. She won’t hustle, rarely ever does a lap dance, and refuses to enter the champagne room. As far as I know, she almost never goes home with more than seventy-five bucks. She’s unusual for a stripper. Because she won’t shill for the customers, she spends most of her shifts onstage. When she gets up there, she dances like a Spanish girl, shaking her ass fast and hard in a way that’s so collected it’s almost defiant. Her face remains expressionless the whole time, as if her upper and lower halves are operating independently of one another. She gives off the impression that she could do a stage set in her sleep.
I don’t understand why Alannah dances here instead of waiting tables or bartending. But it’s not the kind of question you ask someone.
Unless, of course, you’re a customer.
The customers have no problem asking us anything.
And they have no problem asking us for anything, either.
Dressed in my gown, I rush up the stairs, but carefully, so I won’t trip. I walk out onto the floor and nod at Tim, the manager. He’s sitting at the bar with his clipboard, marking off the late fees and the no-shows. It’s seven-fifty-eight – I made it. I smile at him like I swallowed the fucking canary and didn’t bother saving any for the cat. He scowls at me.
“One of these days,” he mutters under his breath in his thick Queens brogue.
“You get to keep the money when you fine us?” I ask in an innocent voice.
“Don’t push it,” Tim warns me.
Shrugging, I eyeball the club, trying to get a sense of what the action is like right now.
Despite the upscale neighborhood, Angels is a real hole in the wall. It’s one of the smallest clubs I’ve ever seen. From the street, you almost miss it. There’s a rinky-dink yellow neon sign glittering above a sketchy looking staircase. All the sign says is BAR. Vasquez stands on the top step, freezing or sweating depending on the time of year, and he waves guys in from the street. I don’t think he ever takes a night off.
Down those steps, the front door is metal with a small, one-way window. The bouncers can see out, but no one can see in. That window makes me think of dice parlors, numbers games, or any other backroom operation where the mark says a secret word into a slot before the door opens.
If only they screened our customers so completely. The only thing these marks have to produce to get inside is a ten-spot.
When the door opens, the mark is greeted by a cloud of smoke and two, sometimes three, huge bouncers. He probably starts blinking as his eyes strain to adjust to the low light. On his left, there’s a cramped cubicle that he likely won’t notice. It’s the size of an outhouse, and it’s where they keep the DJ. Just a few steps farther in sits a side stage, about as wide as the DJ booth. The wall behind the stage is a mirror. Any wall that isn’t mirrored is painted black. The mirror is dirty, and so is the short brass pole in its center, which is bolted to a low ceiling.
During prime time on a good shift, a girl will be on that side stage, moving her hips a little but not really dancing. There isn’t enough room for her to dance. She won’t make tips, either. The mark’s just walked in, so he hasn’t warmed up yet. Maybe he pauses to look at her, but before he has the chance, the barmaid hits him up. “Sir? SIR! There’s a two drink minimum.” He turns to his right, and almost smacks into a barstool. The space between the stage and the bar is scarcely wider than he is.
The bar itself is about ten feet long, with a barmaid crammed in on each end. Tim always holds court in the last chair at the end of the bar, with his clipboard and his perennial frown.
The dressing room doors are on one side. Across from these, there’s a cashier’s stand. It looks exactly like a pulpit. After that, the aisle gives way into the rest of the club, which is a dark, cramped and grimy room containing more of the same. No matter which way you sit, stand or turn in this room, you’re bound to wind up in somebody else’s space.
Officially, the club’s maximum occupancy is sixty-five. Management must take it for granted that none of the girls can count. I’m sure that the fire marshal’s getting his cut, too. On some nights, I’ve seen three times as many people crammed into Angels. When it gets crowded like that, it feels like the inside of a pressure cooker. Or a slaughterhouse. Did the owners plan it this way? The restrictive area doesn’t feel a whole lot like an accident.
An awful techno song blasts out of the speakers. I grimace. It sounds like Trent Reznor and a couple of clowns are torturing each other in the backseat of a car.
“Hey, Chloe,” I wave to the day shift girl who is twirling onstage. “Oh, look! I can see your underwear,” I say, pretending to be horrified.
Chloe lets out a big, fake gasp and looks down. “Oh, no!” she cries. Then she yanks off her g-string. Now she’s naked except for her stilettos. “That better?”
There are only three customers in the club. These men have isolated themselves into the corners of Angels’ tiny main room with their nonalcoholic beverages. They’re pretending they don’t see her bending over for their stage dollars.
“I think so,” I say. “But it looks like I’m in the minority, huh?”
Chloe and I exchange sympathetic glances. I plop down in a chair and spark up a Marlboro. I tap my garter, move my eyes toward each customer once, and make a face that conveys the only question that matters.
Chloe shakes her head in answer, meaning she’s tried all three of them, and none of them are spending.
I lean in her direction. “Why are they even here?” I comment, loudly enough so that I know they’ll hear it.
“Beats me,” Chloe says.
The men ignore us. Cheapskates. I don’t think they’re even embarrassed.
“It’s early, anyway,” says Scarlet, a tall redhead with mid-western features, as she passes through the conversation. She waves to the DJ, who has just walked in and is taking off his coat. Damn. Richard again. I can’t stand him. And the feeling is mutual.
It’s gonna be a rough night.
The evening shift girls are out on the floor in full force now and beginning to circulate. There are only about twenty dancers working. Fortunately, one by one, the customers are starting to straggle in.
A guy in a suit makes his way over to a corner seat. His fake beer dribbles awkwardly down his hand, soaking the napkin that’s sticking to the bottom of his mug. His movement is stiff and he doesn’t look like much fun. I don’t want to be the first girl to talk to him. Anyway, I’m not done smoking my cigarette.
“Did you make anything at all up there?” I ask Chloe as she climbs offstage.
“Yeah, right,” she says. “Today’s shift was a wash, honey. Hope you have a better time.” She takes off into the dressing room, still naked and hugging her gown to her chest.
Tina, our house mom, scuttles into the club from her private dressing room upstairs.
Tina’s an obvious junkie. She’s in worse shape than almost anyone I’ve ever seen. She wears her makeup in dark black circles around her eyes like a zombie or a vampire. Her long tattered sleeves hang like gothic nightgowns off her arms, which are covered in bangle bracelets to hide the tracks. Her hair is ratted and sprayed. She looks like she’s already dead.
I like some of the junkies. Most girls who do dope are only out to make what they need in order to get straight. They don’t get involved in the club’s politics, and they won’t usually cut your throat with a customer. When I meet an exception, I have to assume that this girl would be difficult with or without the junk.
Tina, though, is used up. She’s in her mid-forties, slumped and bloated. But at some time in her life, now unimaginable to anyone, she was a dancer in one of Tim’s clubs.
Right now, Tim is leaning on the bar next to Diane, a pregnant dancer who has just started to show.
“Mine’s bigger,” I hear him saying.
“No way,” says Diane.
“I’ll prove it to ya.” Tim rolls up his polo shirt. His giant, white belly protrudes forward and hangs over his belt. “See? Your turn.”
Diane leans back right next to him and pulls up her dress. “Katie, what do you think?” she asks the bartender.
Katie stops washing glasses and comes out from behind the bar. “Definitely Tim,” she says. “He wins by a long shot.”
Everybody laughs.
“That’s a good thing,” Tim says to Diane. “The day you got a belly bigger than this one, you don’t work here no more.” He slaps his gut proudly.
“Yeah, but don’t worry. You’re not carrying triplets, are you?” Katie adds.
“I’ll give you triplets, you little wise-ass,” Tim replies.
“No you won’t. I’m on the pill.” Katie runs back behind the bar just as Tim takes a swipe at her.
Tim is big and gruff with a thick head of white hair and a deep Queens accent. As far as club managers go, he’s not a bad guy. I’m hardly his favorite girl, but I’m not too concerned about that. I’ve worked with far worse managers at other clubs.
And there’s one thing about Tim that I respect a lot. He will find a way to give a girl a helping hand if she’s holding on for dear life. He’s loyal to people like Tina and Alannah, who have both worked with him for years. He’ll never fire them, because they would never fuck him over.
Tim enjoys being compared to Archie Bunker. He’s obviously got a sense of humor, which is more than I can say for a lot of people. But when he’s in a lousy mood, he can be volatile.
I’m just about to take a stroll around the club. Then someone taps me on my shoulder. I whip around. I hate being touched unless I know who’s touching me.
Richard stands behind me, beaming like a game show host. “You’re up next,” he says.
“Oh, am I?” I reply. He’s definitely not someone that I want to have touching me. And he damned well knows it. “So are you gonna put me up there for a million sets tonight, like you did last time?”
Richard takes a step closer. “That depends on you, babe. You gonna give me more than the minimum tip-out?”
Richard’s one of those people who makes his whole career out of extorting money from dancers. He wants large tip-outs, and if he doesn’t get them, he’ll change our set lists unfairly. He’ll call girls to the stage even when he can see that we’re working the customers. He can lose money for us that way.
And he always plays the worst songs he can find during my sets.
I take a step back. “You do that and you’re keeping me from getting lap dances. How am I supposed to make enough to tip you anything extra if you keep me onstage all night?”
It’s a rhetorical question, since he knows I never tip him extra anyway. I despise Richard because he’s a bully. He loathes me because I fight back. We’re in a vicious cycle.
He smacks his lips. “I dunno, babe. Shake it harder up there?”
“Go to hell.”
He grins even wider. “Next song,” he repeats. “You got that, babe?”
“Don’t call me babe,” I say as he retreats into the booth.
Then he gets on the microphone and calls out my stage name.
I exhale a raspberry. Richard will probably put me in rotation tonight until I can’t walk, because that’s the kind of guy he is. Hustling will be next to impossible. I pick up my bag and get out of my seat. Just as long as he doesn’t play that Barbie song for me, I can probably dance to anything.
As if on cue, the Barbie song begins to blare through the club’s speakers. Sometimes I wonder if telepathy works better with the people that hate you. I climb onstage, holding out my hand to help Daisy get down. She smiles gratefully. Unspoken protocol says that we do this for each other. It’s considered bad form to forget.
The stage is nothing but a few low boards nailed together in the very center of the room. It’s got a rim around it where the guys rest their drinks, and a short pole on either end. The ceiling above it is only a few feet higher than the one over the bar. Bob Vila did not build this thing, that’s for sure. But it’s sturdy. It sees a lot of traffic in pointy stiletto heels.
The Barbie song is impossible to actually dance to. I lean my back against one of the poles and gyrate instead. I check my movement in the mirror. Sure enough, I look stiff. There’s a shocker. As I slide the top of my gown down over my breasts, my nipples are rock-hard. It’s not because I’m the slightest bit titillated. The air blowing out through the vents is cold. And I haven’t done much to generate heat.
“Take it off!” someone cries out.
There are two customers sitting at the stage. And only a handful of them sitting away from the stage, back against the wall. After I have rolled the dress down to my waist, I approach one of the guys topless. I wink at him and gyrate some more. He stares up at me as if my g-string contains the Holy Grail.
I run my hand through his hair. I brush the skin of my chest gently over the skin of his face. My nipples graze his forehead just a touch. I release him, leaving his glasses askew. Then I show him my leg and pat my garter. He puts a hand in his pocket.
Yes. That’s right. Give me money, motherfucker.
He smiles, his dumb mouth hanging half open like he is slow. “Do I get to see more?” he asks.
Bastard. Fucker. Just give me the damn dollar! What do you expect to get in here for a buck?
“Sure,” I purr. “But first give me some sweetness, sugar pie.” Wanting to choke on my own sarcasm, I pat my garter again. He knows the rules. He’s just seeing how much he can get away with.
“Can I get change for this?” he asks, holding up his dollar bill.
I give him a withering look. I can’t believe how many of them try to play these games with us. Perhaps their lives are restricted. Maybe they’d do anything to feel like they have a little bit of control over someone else.
Not in my house, he doesn’t. He hands the dollar over solemnly, like a little boy who has just been told to give it back, son, because it doesn’t belong to you. I snatch it triumphantly and return to my pole, where I wiggle, stifling a yawn.
The next song comes on, bumping techno bass through the speakers. House rules are that I must either be completely naked now. Or else I’m supposed to be flashing the guys the part of my body that they came in to see.
I bend down and slowly take off my thong. My show is directed at the mirror. These guys can watch if they want to, but I’m not getting any closer to them. I don’t see anyone reaching for his wallet. Why should I go out of my way for one lousy buck?
I begin to twirl around the pole. I’ve got to do something to fill up the time. My set is far from over.
It seems like hours go by before the right number of songs has been played. I could swear that bastard Richard stuck a fifth song onto my four song set, playing two techno tunes back to back.
I have resigned myself to expecting warfare with Richard every single night we work together. I’m not even going to bother saying anything else this time. Maybe if ignore it, it goes away.
I’ve only made three bucks. I try not to think about that. If I get wrapped up in it now, my discouraging start could set the pace for the rest of my night.
Sloane is onstage after me. She forgets to hold out her hand to help me offstage.
“Selfish bitch,” I mutter. She doesn’t turn around.
Standing on the floor next to the stage, I put my panties back on and pull my gown back up. Sloane doesn’t see me glower at her. She’s either too stoned, or more likely, she doesn’t give a shit.
Sloane and I are about the same age. She once told me where she grew up. Both of our childhoods were spent in repressive, upper middle class suburbs. I’ve heard of her hometown. It’s not far from the one I ran away from.
She’s late tonight again – I didn’t know she was working, but I should have guessed because she’s usually here. And she’s usually late. She just shrugs her shoulders and hands over the fifty dollars like it’s a standard house fee. Then she has the dressing room to herself for the next forty-five minutes. She makes all her own rules, and Tim doesn’t seem to care.
This will likely be the only stage set Sloane does. She’s busy all night, every night. She’ll be into the champagne room in no time with some customer. After that, we won’t see her until last call at four AM. She easily racks up four or five “bottles” on every shift, leaving with a grand or more. She’s the girl everyone whispers about in the dressing room. There are a couple of others, but Sloane’s name has become synonymous with locker room innuendo.
Sloane and Tina are buddies because Tina, as the house mom, makes a commission every time one of us goes into the champagne room. It’s rumored that Sloane is also a junkie, which would explain her vacant, glassy eyes. But if it’s true, it hasn’t taken its toll on her body yet.
She’s about five feet four, taller in her stilettos. Her hair is dyed brown and is Shirley Temple curly. Sometimes the light blonde roots peek out. She has big baby blue eyes. Her tits are small, and she doesn’t have much of an ass. Her skin is impossibly pale. She probably doesn’t ever see the sun.
Onstage, she takes off her dress unceremoniously, and throws it into a corner. All the customers that were just ignoring me have moved over to the stage. One guy pulls his chair so close that he’s practically up there with her.
I don’t understand it. Sloane makes no pretense of being a dancer. She doesn’t gyrate or move gracefully. She always takes off whatever she’s wearing in a hurry, bends over or opens her legs, and strokes herself while the customer watches, mesmerized. Every thirty seconds, she demands another dollar. She always gets it. I’ve watched her many times, and it is oddly enticing, in that absurd way that straight-up porn is simultaneously thrilling and repulsive. She probably got her start at a peep show.
I almost have to admire a girl like Sloane. She makes a lot of money because she has made an absolute commitment to her path, and never questions it.
She’s not on the fence, trying to piece her way through murky morality. She clearly abandoned that a long time ago. She is free of it.
This makes her less of a hypocrite than the rest of us.
What we think of her doesn’t matter. She’s paying her rent in Gramercy Park, one of the trendiest areas in Manhattan. Or maybe a sugar daddy is paying it for her. She has some of these as well. They take her to Bloomingdales and let her loose.
I cannot imagine having to put up with those men outside of the club for any length of time. I get at least one offer every single night, and I always turn it down.
I don’t even like having a regular customer. I prefer the anonymity of a one-shot deal and afterwards, a clean break. These guys expect more from us every time they see us, as if it were a real relationship of some kind, and could progress.
I don’t want anyone in here to know me too well. If they do, they might see through me… down to the pain, the failures, and the humiliation of walking through my life wishing I could crawl away from my own skin.
On the surface, I’m no better and no worse than anyone else. If I saw any one customer enough times, he might be able to chip away at my surface and glimpse my real personality. That would make me vulnerable.
Vulnerability is dangerous.
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August 4th, 2009 at 11:00 am
We were years apart. I come from a time before house moms, house fees, late fees or any kind of fines, before set lists or lap dances and although we had the champagne hustle and back rooms the closest thing to a dressing room was a two stall bathroom crowded with every girl on that shift.
But the feelings are the same. Don’t get close to me, keep your distance, it’s none of your business. I had customers that showed up all the time, that I could have cultivated the way other girls did, like your Sloane. But I didn’t, really, I couldn’t….
August 4th, 2009 at 1:40 pm
Did you stay in touch with anyone after you — or they — “retired,” and if so, do you know anyone who came out ahead of the game?
I’ve met former strippers who were house moms, costume ladies, even club owners. I’ve also seen women who were fifty and still stripping. Not a lot, but I know it happens. It’s easy to think that once this business takes you, it takes you forever. Because usually the sad stories are the only ones we hear.
Same time, there are some fabulous stripper blogs I’ve seen, some which I’ve linked to, and these women seem to be in absolute control of their lives. They have portfolios full of good investments, they own real estate, maybe they also have a side business. They keep records of their expenses and they write off their false eyelashes for the IRS.
And never the twain shall meet…
August 4th, 2009 at 3:48 pm
My 70′s & 80′s crew, no one left on top. I’m still in touch with a few, two who are doing very well and have moved past the business, two who are still running the same sorts of scams twenty and thirty years later – insurance scams and massage parlors. It’s kinda sad when you’re 50 or 60. But it was different, like I said. Drugs was a big big part of the lifestyle, for the men as well as the women.
I only knew one girl who kept her head about her. Big Susan. She worked in Walls Street and would show up in the clubs just before the holidays for extra money. She was incredible, in the way that Ursula Andress was. Statuesque, stunning, aloof. She didn’t drink with, talk with or have anything to do with the customers and they worshipped her.
It’s a different breed that’s stripping today. Wish I had had my head about me for even a month or two. So much money. It went out as quickly as it went in
August 12th, 2009 at 8:02 am
I wonder where Big Susan is now. She sounds amazing.