Strip City: A Stripper's Farewell Journey Across America (27 page)

I know what she means—it's the latest turnaround in popular perception. There are always market-driven half-truths coming and going like intellectual fashion. In the 1970s—"the golden age.of porn"—there was a "self-discovery" angle to the sex industry: Me-Decade decadence and artistic experimentation with a First Amendment chaser. In the 1980s, the dominant theory was that everyone in the business was crushed under the thumb of the patriarchy and blinded by "false consciousness." Lately the slant is self-determination and a keen, if compromised, eye toward the bottom line—a savvy capitalist detente. But while the temper of the times may shift, the whole truth rarely changes.

Despite many shifts in feminism, Scarlett says, she doesn't think things have changed that much between the sexes. "My old boss said to me, 'More than anything, you've got to remember that the power of the pussy is golden. Men will do anything to get it. Not once they've got it, but to get it.' And women still trade on that, on all different levels. We want their money, so we give them 'everything but.'

"We know it's a game. They know it's a game. We don't want to hear that they just want to fantasize about us, and that it doesn't matter to them who we are or what we do, what our dreams are, or whether or not we have children, or whether or not we even like them. They have a scenario in their heads, and in the sex industry, our job is to figure out what that scenario is and give it to them."

She means, "sell it to them," I'm certain.

"Still"—she mellows a little—"I think women should be able to do this work. I don't think there should be such a stigma. I honestly don't have a problem provided it's a choice you make when you have a whole array of choices in front of you."

"Yeah, but how many women who start stripping have a whole array of choices, or believe they do?" I ask her. "Did you?"

"I had more choices than I thought," she replies. "I really didn't think I had anything else but my body. I was ready-made for this." Scarlett was molested as a child and raped as a teenager. Her parents expected her to go to college, but by the time she graduated from high school, she just wanted a mindless job. "I didn't want to be bothered," she says. "I'd been hanging out in hustler bars for years as a teenager, so when I went into this it was such a small transition. It's where I felt I belonged."

After ten years, Scarlett finally got out, but with little to show. "I know girls who've bought houses," she says, "who've bought cars. I didn't have anything. I didn't travel anywhere. I didn't have any jewels. I made a thousand dollars a week, my rent was only two hundred a month, and when I finally got out, I had eight thousand dollars in credit card debt."

The humiliation visited upon her by a night manager of the Mardi Gras hastened her departure from the business. "This guy's favorite thing in life was making me cry," she recalls angrily. "In front of customers, he'd tell me I was garbage, that this was all I was ever going to be." Her desire to prove him wrong has kept her from returning. "I don't ever want him to be able to say, 'See, I knew sooner or later you'd be back,'" she says. "And that's enough to keep me out."

Entering the legitimate job market with a ten-year gap in her resumé was daunting, but Scarlett came up with an enterprising solution. "I consolidated all the clubs I worked in and called it 'MG Entertainment.' I said that I did payroll, because sometimes I paid off the girls on their drink commissions at the end of the night I said that I booked entertainment, and that I trained new employees, because when new girls came in I would teach them how to pick pockets, how to hustle drinks, and how to spot cops."

Dramatic as her years in Times Square were, Scarlett is quick to point out that they weren't all bad. "I made some really good friends," she says. "And I loved the get-over, the separation between Us and Them. I had fun with the regulars in the neighborhood—the street hustlers and the loan sharks—because we knew what we were talking about, what we were doing. We were in on the secret. As opposed to the regular customers, the straight johns, who thought they were in on it, but weren't."

But, Scarlett says, "I think I rationalized the get-over to make myself feel good. You have to in order to survive. Or
I
had to." There were times when she imagined she was living a Damon Runyon story. "The reality was different," she admits. "The reality is I learned to dislike and distrust men. I learned to dislike and distrust women. I can't say anything about the way people treated me. I allowed myself to be treated that way."

Now her day-to-day existence is more sane, and satisfying. She's got a good job in publishing, a boyfriend, a better relationship with her family, and a cache of interesting—if sometimes disturbing—memories. "I couldn't go back," she says, "I'm not that person anymore. I'm too shy. I'm even too shy to dance for my boyfriend.

"But I would go back to it in a heartbeat if I needed to in order to survive. It's only within the past couple years that when I have a hard time, I don't turn to the adult pages of the Village Voice classifieds and look through them like, 'Okay, now what do I do?'"

I laugh out loud because I still do that!

Scarlett drains her coffee cup and I finish my tea. We get into our coats, settle the bill, and step out into the amber morning light on Saint Marks. A young waitress dressed in camouflage baggies and a blue bandeau top is taking orders from the customers sitting at the sidewalk tables. "Put some clothes on!" Scarlett calls to her as we walk past, her breath clouding in the cold air.

The girl's stubby bleached-out dreadlocks bounce as she lifts up her head to look at us. Her face puckers in confusion—she can't tell if Scarlett is joking or not. "No," the waitress says, her expression shifting from indignant to nonplussed as she bends back over her order pad.

Scarlett and I stand on the corner of Second Avenue before parting ways. I'm heading off to pick up my rental car, and she's on her way to the Astor Place Kmart. How, I wonder, after all this time away from dancing, is Scarlett feeling about having done it, about herself? "I like who I am now," she tells me. "I'm more comfortable in my body, I think I'm sexier. I'm glad I did it. There are things I would have chosen not to live through—I didn't need to see people get stabbed, I didn't need to be abused myself, but I'm not going to apologize," Scarlett asserts. "I learned a lot of people skills and a lot of survival skills. It's how I learned to do small talk. And it's how I know how to give a really good blow job. I'll always be grateful for that."

EIGHTEEN

The afternoon before Thanksgiving with my family, I am dancing on top of a bar in Rahway, New Jersey, desperately trying to avoid stepping in a guy's plate of turkey and stuffing. Why am I up here, wavering and acrophobic in my iridescent gold platform heels? Somehow I got into my fool flossy head that if this place allowed dancing on the bar, then, by God, I was going to hoist myself up on the beer cooler, step over the compartmentalized plastic tray of drink garnishes— maraschino cherries coddled in their own pink chemical soup, green olives with pimientos poking forth like out-thrust tongues, silky-skinned pearl onions, desiccated wedges of lemon and lime—and rock out. What I end up doing is weaving on a bartop slalom course of beer bottles, shot glasses, sloshes of spilled whiskey and sticky fruit liqueur, and food-laden plates. The man in front of me, strawberry-blond bangs mashed to his forehead by his furnace-repair-company cap, hunkers protectively over his holiday lunch while I gyrate in his face. I'm wearing a bikini—deep pink velvet with a spray of rhinestones, my most elegant one—but the close proximity of food to my sexed-up self makes me feel a few shades past vulgar. I grab an overhead pipe for balance and prepare to swivel past. The man hands me up a dollar, then draws disinterestedly from his Coors. I take the damp bill and tuck it under my gold garter. "Thank youuuuu," I say, in my patented saccharine trill. He doesn't look up.

Thanksgiving Eve is traditionally the busiest day of the year in the go-go clubs, so many places host a uniquely Jersey event called a Go-Go Rama. Instead of booking the usual five or ten or twenty dancers, they declare open season and take however many girls show up. Some clubs promise a hundred dancers or more. It's not killer money for the girls, necessarily, but the gimmick of abundance is a great draw for the house. The upside for the dancers is they can come and go as they please. Instead of being stuck for six to eight hours like on a regular shift, you stay for an hour or two, do a couple sets onstage, then get on down the road to the next club.

The real purpose of my trip to New Jersey is, of course, to spend the holiday with my family. There's going to be a full house, all my siblings are coming, plus Randy and my sister Annette's husband. But I'd planned from the outset to take advantage of this long weekend and see what's up with go-go in the Garden State. I have to pick Randy up at Newark Airport at 11 p.m., which gives me the whole day to bomb up and down the Turnpike in my rental car, 'Rama hopping. At the very least I'll make enough to cover my tolls.

New Jersey, the most densely populated state in the country, has the highest number of clubs per capita—well ahead of the other club-heavy states like Texas, Florida, and California. There are 173 clubs in the 7,419-square-mile area of eight million residents. Aside from a handful of nude places—called juice bars, as that's all they can legally serve— Jersey mostly has go-go bars where dancers have to wear bikinis at all times. Only Utah has more stringent regulations for adult entertainment establishments. Jersey dancers don't typically work in one place. They find a few that they like, book into them a couple times a month, and rotate. My own choices were limited to locations no farther west than Bergen County. Anything past that line is too close to home, literally. I'm trying to keep the Freudian nightmares to a minimum.

My Go-Go Rama marathon is a blur of dingy, grime-impacted bars and off-duty dancers, hair teased high and makeup done heavy, sitting in dressing rooms with turkey dinners from the free buffets resting on their knees. They gossip and maneuver the plastic silverware with long, lacquered talons. The stage is always set behind the bar where a few girls dance for a couple songs, then hop down and "walk the bar," dodging the bartenders hustling to fill drink orders. We present ourselves to the men, one by one by one, as they drink beers and eat, entreating them to slide dollar bills under the outstretched sides of our bikini bottoms. They comply, folding singles from big stacks at their elbows, hoping for a quick peek of something that will make them want to part with another buck. Such low-brow machination isn't what I had in mind the night of the Miss Topless Wyoming contest when I decided to stick with this stripping thing. Maybe a Denver showclub where the image is polished and the rules are strictly hands-off. Maybe some weekend trips back to Dallas with Randy in tow. But not this, where I have to dash off to the dressing room to de-grunge every half hour or so.

In Clifton, a shrunken old black man in a gray Members Only jacket and brown slacks says to me, "I'll give you a dollar for every inch you lower your thong."

I pull the sides of my bottoms down a bit One dollar. And again. Another dollar. And again. And again. And again. Any lower and he's going to know whether or not I'm a natural blonde. Okay, I got five dollars out of you. That's enough.

In her book, Bitch, Elizabeth Wurtzel likens stripping to "begging with your body." When I first read that, I fumed, "What the hell does she know. She's never done it" But now, walking the bar, moving from guy to guy, shimmying or winking or tugging at my thong to get him to give me a dollar, begging with my body is precisely what it feels like.

At one bar in Newark, the girls are tough and fast Latinas, with white frosted eye shadow high on the brow bone and lips lined with brown pencil and filled in with pearly pink gloss—steak lips, I call them. They openly flash their pubic hair to capture extra bills, let customers' hands wander to their nipples as they tuck tips in their bikini tops. At another, all the dancers are Russian and Brazilian (the signs in the dressing room are written in Russian and Portuguese, as well as English)—part of the new immigrant class in the industry. The owner begs me to book there. "Keep this under your hat," she tells me, "but we pay more per set for American girls because they're harder to come by." It's a shock that they pay anything at all, regardless of nationality.

Some of the Russian girls are brought over to the States specifically to work as dancers. They are booked into clubs together, then loaded into a van by an agent (or an "agent") and taken to and from work every day. What is it like for them, living in a foreign country and being carted around to bars all over the state? I guess they have one another for companionship, but it seems lonely. Nomads wandering turnpike and parkway, from town to town, booking to booking. I watch them leave when they've finished their sets, dressed in sweat suits, hair pulled up atop their heads in scrunchies, over their shoulders bags full of dirty bikinis reeking of smoke and cheap cologne, nick-heeled pumps, and singles in sweaty rolls secured by a hair elastic or clipped into bunches of twenty each. Today I've met many Russian girls who are clearly free agents grinding their way to the American dream, dollar by dollar, but I wonder how much autonomy is afforded the women who travel in groups. My hope is that they're not going off to yet another loud, dingy bar, but home to pull together something resembling a holiday celebration.

On her way out the door, one of the Russian girls hands a couple of paper tickets to a customer. As a promotion, many of the clubs are holding turkey raffles. Get a winning ticket and garner a twenty-pound Butterball. I wish I could follow all those birds home. What does a guy tell his wife when he comes in with one of those suckers tucked under his arm?

I consider begging tickets off the customers so I can show up at my folks'—the prodigal daughter returneth—with a carload of ill-gotten turkeys in tow.

On Thanksgiving Day, the kitchen is a cacophonous hive of sisters. Kelly puts heat-and-eat dinner rolls on a baking sheet Barbara spoons two kinds of cranberry sauce—whole-berry and jelly—into a cut-glass dish. Annette sorts silverware and counts napkins while Mom drains the potatoes for mashing. I stand over the turkey, which is cooling on the stove, surreptitiously picking off bits of crispy skin to eat The men are in the family room, clustered around the game on TV.

I tell my sisters about the turkey raffle and my idea of scamming turkeys to bring home. I figure they'd find the story entertaining, especially the part about my plan to drive up with a turkey propped upright on the passenger seat buckled in a safety belt Kelly and Annette have always been cool about my dancing. Kelly, an engineer, is a peacemaker by nature. She isn't the kind to judge, and Annette, a chemist, has told me she admires my guts. Barbara, however, is a different matter. As a Presbyterian minister, moralizing isn't just her wont, it's her calling.

When I finish with my story, she asks, "Do you think that when you tell people about being a stripper they think it has something to do with how you were raised?"

The timing and nature of the question are classic Barbara.

Barbara is the one person in my life who can pull my pin, that individual who can completely unnerve me and topple every defense. We're similarly willful and direct, but while I'm the black sheep, she is the dutiful daughter. I adore her, but she's long on nerve and short on subtlety. She will burrow into a sensitive subject at any opportunity, whether it's appropriate or not. When she launches into that line of questioning with me, I feel like a small, flightless bird at the end of a long branch: How did I get here, and, more importantly, how the hell am I going to get down?

Of course, some variation of "why" or "what made you do that" is the question on everyone's lips. It's what people really want to know. But such questions are more easily asked than answered. I never know what to say. Any response would just be an approximated fiction, a right-sounding best guess. While stripping may be an unusual line of employment, the justification is so banal: It really was the best I thought I could do at the time. And I thought whatever dare it implied would be worth taking.

But within "why" there is often a much larger request: Assure me. Make stripping okay. Solve it. Make the enterprise not seem unjust. Make the very idea not catch in my gut. If not that, then at least make its difficulty portable—boil everything down to a kernel of pathology, so that when I am troubled by what I see, I can roll that kernel between my fingers to remind myself,
Ah, this is why they do it. Here's the answer.

But "why" isn't a tidy singularity, or a linear equation. When asked to explain, we attempt life as straight algebra: A root cause (sexual trauma, violent relationship, crappy parents), and an aggravating factor (low self-esteem, substance abuse, lack of education) equals stripper, but this never works, because there are always women with the same variables who don't end up in the clubs. An authentic reply isn't obedient, it won't shrink down into something you can fit into a pocket, an index of facts, or a list of diagnoses. The truth is much more complicated than that. The truth is so much more of a mess.

I try to fashion the perfect retort, one that makes people shake their heads and smile with relief and knowing. But I rarely succeed. What can I tell my sister? I could lie, say I was meant to do it, a natural-born stripper. I could appeal to the gods of voodoo science. Pop psychology. Astrology. Numerology. Birth order.

I could tell her about being so mad at the straight world as a teenager that I felt I owed it nothing. Tell her of walking into the kitchen one winter day and seeing my mother leaning on the sink, with her head in her hands, looking absently out the window, yet again. Wondering Where does she go when she does that? and thinking that if I engineered my life in a way completely opposite hers, maybe I wouldn't end up standing in a kitchen in a suburb, staring into a bleak arch of naked branches. It was a childish idea, but then, I was a child thinking as a child. Yet surely there was a spasm of individuation in my becoming a stripper.

Would that answer be good enough?

I could tell her that our father asked me, in his own way, the same question years ago. After I "came out" about my life in San Francisco, he sent me a long, pained letter in which he wrote, "If we had held the reins more tightly with you as a child, would you have felt the need to go as far as you did to rebel?" I gripped the letter with both hands, aching with the restraint and love with which he chose his words. I imagined him hesitating, pen over the paper, knitting his bushy brows together as he struggled to come up with a way to tell me what he felt and ask me what he wanted to know without making me feel bad, without making a difficult situation worse.

What I want to tell her is that I don't want anyone to hold Mom and Dad accountable. I certainly don't. What I have done, am doing, isn't punishment or cause for indictment.

"I, I, I don't think they have anything to do with it," I stammer at Barbara, stirring a pot of sauerkraut bubbling on the back burner. "I make it clear to people that I bear the mantle of responsibility." I sound formal and ridiculous, scrambling for dignity in my embarrassment, like a professor speaking before a lecture hallful of colleagues who has just realized his fly is down.

My mother, who has overheard everything from her station in the doorway between the kitchen and dining room, is looking at Barbara with an irritated expression. I can tell she's put off by Barbara's theatrics, that she thinks this is a bit much.

My mother comes over and stands next to me, making a human shield between me and Barbara. She knows I'm upset. She puts her arm around me, her voice even and low, "It's okay. It's o-kay."

I turn into her outstretched arm and hug her, breathing in her special scent of shampoo and cigarettes. I whisper into her sweatered shoulder, "I really don't care what anyone else thinks. Just you."

Which is the very heart of the truth.

I remember a phone conversation with my mother last year, when I said something about every byline being penance for humiliating her for so many years.

"Good heavens, you're not still hung up on that, are you?" she asked in disbelief.

"Kind of."

"Oh, L," she sighed deeply. "In some ways I think your life is my secret fantasy."

I pressed the receiver tight against my ear and my eyes brimmed with stinging tears. This was the first time she'd ever said anything positive about stripping. I doubt she'd remember having told me this, and I'm sure she'd never repeat the sentiment, but I desperately wanted to hear it. Thank you, I thought. Oh, thank you. Papal dispensation would pale in the wake of what she had given me. I had escaped the wrath of Mom, and I was so extremely grateful.