More Than A Maybe (3 page)

I took a deep breath through my teeth. “When do we begin? How does . . . how does this work?”

“Don’t worry,” said Jayla. “It’s pretty straightforward. I’ll introduce you to Billy — he handles all the schedules. Like I said, he’s okay. After that, you’ll be doing Amateur School. It’s a theme night — naughty schoolgirl bullshit, pretty easy. You’ll dance one song, then work the crowd. Each new dancer gets 200 bucks and whatever other tips they make for the night. If it goes okay . . . well, I’m pretty sure I can get you in as a regular. Girls come and go a lot.”

I bit my lip, nodded. “Got it.”

“Okay, then,” she said. “You free tonight?”

* * *

I had no idea what to wear to that kind of interview. I settled on a look I decided to call Desperate Ex-Waitress — black skirt, my least grease-spattered blouse. It didn’t exactly scream
gentlemen’s club,
but Jayla had said it didn’t matter. She picked me up in her battered-but-reliable Volkswagen, wearing cutoffs and a Mirages T-shirt. I felt immediately overdressed, but Jayla was quick to reassure me.

“Don’t worry,” she said, giving my arm a friendly Jayla squeeze. “You look fine. Like you’ve never done this before.”

“I haven’t!”

“And that,” she said, flashing me a tight smile, “is why the guys love Amateur School.”

The club’s exterior wasn’t exactly a surprise. It was out in an unincorporated part of the county — neither city nor suburb, but rather a scrubby-looking area that seemed perpetually cloaked in a shady sort of grey. The building was pretty unremarkable during the daytime, just an average-looking rectangle in the middle of a rough gravel parking lot. True, its dark and windowless exterior gave it a feeling of being secret and forbidden, but I supposed that was the point. Men needed a discreet place to watch the dancers, and the dancers needed a discreet place to be watched.

Billy wasn’t what I’d expected. He was a round, cheerful man of around forty, with a booming voice and a scraggly beard to match. My first thought was that he’d make a good first mate on a pirate ship — or possibly a Fastpass attendant at
Pirates Of The Caribbean.
I didn’t know what I’d been expecting him to look like, though . . . someone more creepy, I guess? Billy seemed more like a reliable big brother — not what I’d been expecting. That’s not to say that it wasn’t a little shocking to actually find myself inside of Billy’s office. He had quite a few glossies on the walls of former and current dancers, who were posing in ways I would have thought impossible for anyone but yoga instructors. Seeing them made my heart thump a little more quickly.

“Jayla!” boomed Billy cheerfully. “How’s my very favorite Mirage girl?”

Jayla smiled. “You know me — I’m good. How’s Nina?”

Billy chuckled. “Still getting over her birthday party. You’d be surprised how much cake a three-year-old can put away.” He smiled at me. “Kids, what are you gonna do? I’m Billy, by the way.” He reached out a beefy hand.

“Alice,” I said, taking his hand in my own and shaking it. It was reassuring, seeing the two of them together — like watching any other co-workers greet each other at the office. I felt myself begin to calm down just a little.

Billy gestured to a pair of chairs, and we sat. “Jayla tells me you’re thinking of doing some dancing for us.”

I nodded slowly. “That’s about the size of it.”

Billy smiled. “Well, I also hear you don’t have any experience. But I’ll tell you — that’s no problem, okay? Our customers like to see a girl on her first time out, and you can’t fake that kind of genuine first-time performance. Did she tell you anything about our Amateur School nights?”

I shrugged. “Mostly just about the costumes. Schoolgirl things? I’m not sure I really have the body to pull off anything too . . . uh,
provocative,
” I said, feeling my eyes fall to the place on my chest where my boobies definitely
weren’t.

Billy gave a scratchy chuckle. “Don’t worry about that — trust me, we get dancers with a lot of different body types in here, and they all got their own loyal fans,” he said. “As for the dancing, you don’t have to worry about that either. We’ll get you a DVD with a little routine for you to do. You can practice at home.”

I nodded with just the slightest incline of my head, but I didn’t say anything. Billy noticed the apprehension, and he smiled, gently. “Listen, Mirages is a little different from some of your other clubs, maybe. We try to take care of the newbies, give them some advantage up there. We save the schoolgirl stuff for Amateur School. For first-timers only. Those costumes always go over big — should take some of the pressure off. And then, if you want to keep on dancing here, you can get more imaginative with your costuming.”

Imaginative.
I liked the sound of that, actually — if I was going to do this more than once, the mental image of me flouncing around like Barbara Stanwyck in
Lady of Burlesque
made me feel just a bit better about going through with it all.

Yeah — emphasis on the IF.

I gave a little nervous laugh. “That’s . . . good to hear. It’s just . . . it’s hard to imagine myself as a dancer, I guess,” I said.

Billy was quick to reassure me. “Don’t get me wrong, okay? This is a big step for every new girl. But we take care of each other around here. Family-owned, family-run. Our security is good. And it’s not so cutthroat like some of your city places. If you need anything, Jayla or one of the other girls will be glad to help you out. You just gotta ask.”

Jayla nodded and touched my arm. “Anytime.”

I nodded back, smiled just a bit more easily. Somehow . . . some part of me was starting to warm up to the whole idea.

“Okay,” said Billy, standing up. “Let’s get you fitted out.”

* * *

It had all been surprisingly organized after that. Jayla had dug through a jumbled closet in the changing room and fitted me with one of the club’s official Amateur School outfits — your standard plaid mini and midriff-baring top, with MIRAGES embroidered into the cotton. Billy gave me the DVD of the routine I had to learn, along with the music (I was hoping for Alice Cooper’s
School’s Out,
but ended up with Britney Spears’ 
Baby One More Time.
I tried not to make a face). Before I knew it I was out the door and back in the passenger seat of Jayla’s Volkswagen.

Jayla treated me to dinner that night to celebrate — we had caterpillar maki and spicy salmon rolls at her favorite sushi place. I marveled at the simple but beautiful accuracy of the sushi chefs, their movements like dancers themselves. It was incredibly nice to be the one ordering at a restaurant for a change . . . I realized that I couldn’t actually remember the last time I’d been waited on, rather than the other way around.

Jayla pointed at me with her chopsticks as she chewed. “Best advice I can give you, win or lose, just make sure to hang around with the customers after you finish your routine. You can’t make money hiding your ass backstage, and they always tip big for new girls.”

I nodded. “A damsel in distress, right?”

Jayla laughed. “Yeah! Now you’re getting it. That’s the game, girl. Just remember, you hold all the cards in that place. Someone gets too far out of line, you get them kicked right out of the club. But you let them
feel
like they’re helping you out.” She paused and looked at me thoughtfully. “That’s part of what they pay the money for — so they can feel that sense of control. Like the money doesn’t matter. Like they’re actually being a help to a girl.”

“Sounds like philosophy,” I said.

Jayla just smiled and popped another piece of spicy salmon into her mouth. “Just the way the world works. You’ll see, once you’re shaking it in on stage in that mini.”

I laughed. “Not much to shake, I’m afraid. Front or back.”

Jayla’s face grew suddenly cloudy at that. “Girl . . . just don’t talk that way, okay? Please. For me. It doesn’t matter what you’re born with. You just have to go out there and move all the things you
wish
you had. Those men will eat it up. I mean, shit . . . you told me you’re always watching those classics, right? About those old movie stars and all? The ones who could twist any man around their finger?”

“Sure.”

Jayla shrugged. “All I’m saying is that can be
you,
Alice. It’s all about that confidence. That’s what all those black and white Hollywood bitches had. They’d wake up in the morning and they knew exactly who they were. Only difference between you and them.”

I just sighed at that.
Give me a break, Jayla. It’s not that easy. Not for me.

I wasn’t sure if her speech was doing anything for my self-esteem, but Jayla seemed to mean every word. I managed to force a little smile in her direction. She just tossed that day’s candy-colored wig and shrugged, turning her attention back to her sushi.

“Oh, and another thing . . . ” she said, dipping a piece of roll into her dish of Kikkoman.

“Yeah?”

“You want to think of a name. A stage name. I mean, you’re Alice, right? But that girl on the stage — that hot new girl everyone wants to see . . . what’s her name supposed to be?”

I didn’t have an answer.

I knew I’d have to give it some thought.

* * *

The next few days were a lot tougher.

My lack of dancing experience quickly reared its ugly head. I had none, save for a quick turn on a wedding dance floor with a second cousin once or twice, which certainly didn’t count. I’d watched breathless as Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire cut it up at least a million times on TV, but that was an entire world away from what I found on the DVD I got from Billy.

The routine was taught by a cheerful woman who introduced herself as Kiki . . . an enthusiastic and astoundingly flexible Asian woman with a fantastically contoured gymnast’s body. The routine itself, though clearly designed for beginners, took more than a little time to wrap my head around. I gradually began to understand it, though — when it came right down to it, the dance was really just a lot of counting.

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. Again and again and again.

Perfectly simple in theory . . . much harder than it sounded in practice. Each count meant a step, or a shimmy, or a turn around the pole (I had to make do with a broom handle). And if you lost your count . . . well, it was all over. Find the remote, hit the button, start all over again.

There was another problem, beyond the counting. At first I’d tried to do the routine in the soft plaid jammies that I usually used for slouching around the apartment . . . but to be honest, I really wasn’t feeling it. The frayed fabric swished around my legs, completely throwing off both the count and my timing. It wasn’t until my eyes fell on the plastic bag containing my Amateur School outfit that I realized the piece of the puzzle that I’d been avoiding.

I need to take this seriously.

So I’d pulled out the shopping bags of accessories I’d bought — the lace thong I’d found on sale at Pink; the mile-high black platforms I’d borrowed from Jayla for the occasion. I wasn’t normally much of a heels-and-thong type of girl . . . but then again, my mother had told my whole life that I wasn’t. I realized that if I was going to pull this off, I needed to reevaluate what exactly my definition of
normal
was.

I tied the shirt over the little rises on my chest that passed for my boobage. No new surprises in that department, but I found myself suddenly missing my bra.  The thong was a pretty new experience as well . . . I’d only worn one once, briefly, during a particularly embarrassing birthday party game of truth-or-dare. This time the choice was all mine, though, and I tried to embrace the sensation of fabric between my . . . well, between my butt cheeks. It was going to take a little getting used to.

Next was the plaid schoolgirl mini; clearly it had been designed by the same fashion mastermind that made 90% of modern women’s Halloween costumes. Once I finished pulling it on, though, I had to admit: the overall effect was more than dramatic. My legs seemed to extend for miles, I had the slightest whisper of actual cleavage for once . . . and I actually felt pretty good about showing my tummy to the universe. Or, at the very least, to Kiki’s ever-smiling face on my TV.

It wasn’t all exactly
uncomfortable
— but it was certainly a very different
kind
of comfortable than the one I was used to, and I could tell that my feet were going to be complaining pretty soon. Nevertheless, I wobbled my way out of my bedroom and positioned myself once again in front of the living room television, then smiled at the frozen image of Kiki paused on the screen.

Okay . . . I’m ready now. Let’s do this.

Though the steps still seemed odd, and I tottered quite a bit on the new platforms, I suddenly felt in control. The clothes now matched the dance. I found myself throwing the entirety of my body into the routine . . . letting my feet guide me in new and unfamiliar ways; falling to my knees, grinding on my broom-handle pole for Kiki, for an imaginary audience . . .

And ultimately, I realized . . . for myself. I was just a girl dancing alone in her apartment, but it felt like something more, somehow — some new and wild blossoming of a blocked-off part of me. I was beginning to see myself as someone new. A —
dare I say it?
— sexual person.

Someone worth watching. Someone worth fantasizing about.

Did Ginger Rogers ever felt that way with Fred?

I couldn’t be certain. But whatever it was . . . that feeling . . .

Part of me liked it.

* * *

That is where I left my past.

In front of the soft glow of the television, in front of Kiki’s rhythm of overly cheerful encouragement. That is where I truly began to free myself from myself — from the sad, isolated girl who I was. The girl I never wanted myself to be.

My past. I stopped taking orders from it, letting it push me and pull me around. I stopped letting it mold me against my will into a lukewarm person of least resistance.

I didn’t realize it then, but I realize it now.

Now.

For me, my
now
begins on that stage, at Mirages.