It’s a Saturday and I’m not going to the strip club in the desert. I’m doing J’s makeup instead. I’m going to help her get dressed, pressed, rehearsed, powdered, shadowed and shined. I have to make sure she’s calm, collected, dressed and out the door at 5:50 A.M. for her guest spot on CNN. She lured me over to her place with an eyelash issue.

“You don’t understand. I can’t put fake eyelashes on myself,” she said. She wanted glamorous fake lashes so elegantly seamless that no one will know she had them on. “Can you do it for me?”

“I’ll show you. It’s easy,” I said. I figured we could meet briefly in a bathroom. I told her about the best espionage black eyelash glue on the market. Promised her that no white gooey line would give her away. But she wouldn’t have it. “I need you here at 4:30AM,” she said. I like to be needed. Besides, I wanted to be there for her to do this one scary thing.

I’m no makeup artist. I’m nothing close to a stylist. Most of my clothes are from Forever 21 or from garbage bags donated from generous friends. But, fake eyelashes I know by rote. I can apply them with a hand mirror on my knee and one hand tied behind my back. One thin dab of glue. Ta-Da.

J didn’t need a stylist, really. Her wardrobe was lady chic; not Lady Gaga. I have her text messages to prove it. She’s been sending me photos of herself in potential CNN-worthy shirts: emerald green sleeveless, silky royal blue tank, dark blue jersey and her electric smile with the words, “Which one is best?”

She got the call to appear on CNN last minute to talk about her choice as a 27-year old woman to have a double mastectomy and to have her ovaries removed when she found out that she had precancerous cells. She was going to have a conversation with the world about vanity, our bodies and taking responsibility for our health. She was going to tell a million people, especially women, that she felt deformed and ashamed, but not now. Thanks to the sexiest woman alive, Angelina Jolie, she had cried for the first time in ten years about making that brave and necessary choice—the choice to live without her boobs and her ovaries. That making her decision was perhaps sexy and beautiful. She was going to tell women to love themselves. She practiced her responses with me in her bathroom.

“It’s not a death sentence,” she said as I applied gold shimmery Mac eye shadow to her lids and warned her before I dipped a chocolate color into her crease with her long makeup brushes. I watched her apply a surprisingly Barbie pink blush called “orgasm” to her delicate, angular cheeks.

She wanted to look and feel like herself: unruly curly hair and nude lip gloss; mischievous twinkly eyes and a gorgeous wide smile. “Do I need the eyelashes?”

“Your eyes are perfect. You don’t need them, but if you will be more comfortable, we should.”

I showed her the ones I brought: long dramatic stripper lashes of the hyper-femme variety. Compared to her soft subtle whips;mine were furry lethal tarantulas.

J told me about her double mastectomy once, casually, over a chopped salad (dressing on the side) as if it were a small and forgettable thing. Her mom had breast cancer also and opted for the same procedure. J froze her eggs for cancer research. I had read about the cancer gene mutations that run in families and about certain tests that detect the cells. I’ve read that with the surgeries, risks of cancer are reduced dramatically and I flirt with hope while sipping my coffee.

It’s 5:30A.M. and we still haven’t glued on her eyelashes. We have decided on a necklace and earrings; her hair will drift off her face so she won’t mess with it. She’s got on the tight dark blue shirt.

Rings are considered. “Do you talk with your hands?” She does but she won’t.

In 2007,when my mom’s cancer went into remission, I reapplied to grad school and got in. Mom valued education and pushed me get my MFA. Grad school started in June. Her cancer came back to the exact same spot. Three months later, she died. I remember washing her hair in the sink with Vanilla scented shampoo and wrapping it in a towel while J blow dries her curls. But today, I have hope. I also know there are never any guarantees. My health insurance was cancelled this week. I can’t afford it right now and I’m not in the strip club. The fake eyelashes remain in their plastic package. I am happy to be there with J while she does a brave thing. She inspires me to do the next brave thing: I am going to design a class to teach at UCSD in the fall.

skywriting

I blow on her face to remove the brown eye shadow that has spilled on her temples. Later, when I see her on CNN, I will obsess about those walnut shaped shadows under her eyes and curse myself for not using a washcloth doused in rubbing alcohol. I’ll wonder if it’s eye shadow or the lights and then I’ll catch her phrase about dating and forget about the lashes.

We rehearse the prompt: Is it awkward to tell guys you date about your inability to bear children or your double mastectomy?

She practices saying, “Dating in LA sucks with or without your ovaries.” In her bathroom, sweating over eyebrow pencils and mahogany lip liner, I don’t care how dismal my bank account is. I don’t think about my awful work week—The unpaid hours and difficult kids, deadlines and getting written up for being tardy. I will be teaching adults in the fall at UCSD and I will pee myself when students address me as “Professor Crane.”

Instead, I fled to my happy place and swam back into the womb of New Orleans where I would be loved. Philip Shepherd writes: “You cannot reason your way into love. You cannot reason your way into fulfillment. If you wish to be present, you need to submit to the present, and suddenly you find yourself at one with it. You submit to love” (The Sun, Issue 448).

Dinner with Friends

Coyotes used to howl their nightly blood song in the backyard near the delicate wall of young bamboo. Now I hear voices: a young couple out in the courtyard calling a stubby, orange dog chasing a yellow ball across a cut lawn. The groundskeepers are fastidious here. They show up on Tuesdays with their blowers and scare the shit out of my cats, who used to vanish in the morning to chase birds and return with blood on their chins from hunting gophers. When I fill the air mattress or the blowers come, they spaz out and race with a mighty bored fury, fight and knock over my piles of journals.

Unicorn!

Yes. I brought my slaughterhouse-sadness to New Orleans. Jazz fest was in the air. You could feel it buzzing by night and rising by late morning. It would fill out the noise between my ears. I found the magic candle store and my sweet friend L and drank way too much coffee and ate fried everything. I watched a morbid gorgeous creature with brownish black eyes do the moon walk suspended from a stripper pole and climb the air like it was soft ribbon in her fingers. I fell in love with her strength and grace. I met a man who offered to teach me how to read bones and I took him up on it, but there was no time. I posed naked wearing an Indian headdress and nothing else for several hours for a photographer whose work I respect. I ate lunch with a friend’s partner and his lover and her roommate who had just started stripping. The roommate reminded me of being young and queer in San Francisco and starting to strip and all of those itchy insecurities. The advice I gave her was “Build community.” What I wanted to say was: “Be a person and have integrity and you will stand out. See where you fit in and if you find you don’t then leave.”

I ate melted Parmesan cheese on raw oysters and was served by a waitress named “Minnie” who I remembered from two years ago. I walked in and out of strip clubs and watched women survey the land and pounce. I stomped around on Royal and Bourbon Streets with my heart banging in the night and faced the music. Grow up time. I accept this: Look up. It’s us up there shooting light. Catch it. Open your hands. Love.

Jazzfest

Easter’s a reminder of things I’ve lost and things I’ve given up; other things I should quit and the constant nagging question: With what do I cram this new crater in my heart? For starters, books.

Before I Die Project, New Orleans

I put down George Saunder’s “Tenth of December” and picked up Emily Rapp’s memoir “The Still Point of the Turning World,” which is about surviving the loss of her baby son who died from Tay Sach’s and it’s kicking me in the gut. She writes about happiness and loss: “I realized you could not have one without the other. That this great capacity to love and be happy can be experienced only with this great risk of having happiness taken from you—to tremble, always on the edge of loss.”

Right after Easter comes my sober anniversary, when I quit meth in a psych ward back in April of 1995. Quitting meth led to a series of other quits: cutting, bulimia, cigarettes, men (and later, women), stripping, sugar, stripping ten more times, carbs, my custom iron bed frame (finally), and last week, my boyfriend and the house we lived in together with his dog, Zoe.

After Easter means dreaded Mother’s day is coming and the gorgeous pink trees that she became obsessed with that blossom in the most unlikely places, like the Home Depot parking lot; Canopies of bright pink flowers so pristine, they make garbage and concrete break out in song. “What are those trees?” she asked, in awe. She’d visited me in Los Angeles before she turned yellow and was diagnosed with cancer. “Trumpet Trees, Mom.”

Last Easter was a blur because I was in love and probably in a TV coma or reading on the lawn in the sun with my guy, thinking we would last forever, but that helium balloon slipped from my fingers then popped because, that’s what they do.

The Easter before that one was Spring in New Orleans which is the best time to be there, before the steamy heat settles in. I escaped to New Orleans to write the last fifty pages of my book and dance through jazz fest. I was reading Gina Frangello and Lidia Yuknovitch and, inspired by both, was allowing the end of my book to reveal itself. An essay of mine was accepted into an anthology and I was ecstatic.

New Orleans was euphoric too with the buzz of jazz fest. I was hit with insomnia. Before I left, I had gone on a couple dates with a guy who sent me flowers for my sober anniversary. I’d waved him off with his fledgling sobriety— figured he needed time to get his land legs; muck around and curse AA, punch holes in other girl’s hearts before nesting in mine. But no. We began a clunky and inquisitive email exchange and I sent him a jazzy care package from Royal Street trinket stores where I roamed and biked about; drank too much coffee and danced till light.

In typical New Orleans dancer fashion, I went on a quest to the local voodoo shop, got a blessed candle and prayed for the blue-eyed one and I to get it together in an epic, life changing fashion (e.g. Marry me). That candle burned dusty and red in my purple shuttered room and it remained lit for my whole stay in NOLA. Love voodoo crawled along the dark kitchen floor; kept me itchy and awake. In the day, I rekindled an old flame, tried to forget about the flowers the man had sent to my back door; forget the damned candle; release the balloon of romantic hope to other, more deserving skies.

The Easter before that, I was dating Marc Maron who made my heart lurch from panic to love a hundred times per day and not just because he had extra sensitive nipples—the Tesla coil to his boner. It was an especially fiery Easter day too, so damn bright, I sensed a migraine approaching. I went to my regular AA meeting and afterwards, when we spoke (or texted; I can’t remember). He’d been cordially invited to hang out with his roommate (a beauty he used to fuck) and her family because they were Greek and evidently really did it up for Easter. I was cordially not invited to join him. I was certain he was rapidly losing interest in me and his post-Greek Easter podcast that day confirmed my hunch. In my tight, blue dress, I tortured myself by listening (along with thousands and thousands of his fans) to his description of the elaborate meal and the conversations with his roommate’s well-bred, well-groomed, educated, Orthodox, property owning family. I tore my hair out from my dim bedroom and stared out onto my shared deck as the mean sun dropped into a pink and orange sky. He hadn’t told them he was dating me and was musing as to why on the air.

Why?

His handsome narcissism hinted at his own subtle shame, perhaps of being associated with such a bawdy gal. Why didn’t he mention he was dating a sex worker with an MFA who adored him? Why didn’t he tell them he was dating anyone at all? That Easter, I was the anyone.

I unsubscribed to his almost super famous podcast and walked outside on the deck. Orange and pink stripes faded in the sky. It was the Easter of being uninvited to things and dumped. It was also the Easter of liberation from other people’s vague shame. Beyond my cracked driveway were pink Trumpet trees spilling pink blossoms under foot, waiting to be smashed.

Our room was hot and stuffy in the morning and the door was stuck, so I used the wall for leverage and pulled hard. Outside, snow-capped mountains towered against a pristine blue sky. Palm trees lined a packed parking lot. I thought I recognized a customer from the club the night before, walking his dog on the lawn. He called me “Humboldt” all night then in a drunken stupor, asked me to be his Valentine.

Legs

Stripping has never flattered my real romantic relationships. It makes them look like fat neglect machines, poking holes in my pincushion heart. While guys in strip clubs shower me with easy, unconditional adoration, my real relationships are tense and difficult. Lately, I’ve been filling up my empty wallet and my emotional well with knee-jerk marriage proposals from strangers. I’m not saying it’s right, but I’m grateful to have found Desert Showgirls; at least, my ego is.

L is my stripper spirit guide. She knows where to go and I listen, pack my survival kit and hit the trail. Years ago, she swore by New Orleans, so after a bloody Mongol fist fight broke out at an Italian restaurant (that also illegally allowed us to strip) near Pasadena, I borrowed $200 for a one-way plane ticket and spent the next three years falling madly in love with NOLA and the clubs that embraced me there. Ever since then, I follow L’s lead. The best place to strip in LA is not in LA at all but near Palm Springs in a nondescript strip mall. Desert Showgirls is the Snickers Bar of strip clubs: Generic and dark on the outside, creamy gold mine on the inside. And like most places of ill repute, it’s near an adult video store and shares a parking lot with a suspiciously vacant cigar shop and a yummy Mexican restaurant that keeps unpredictable hours.

So Edie

Unlike San Francisco, dancing in LA has always sucked. After dropping the drunken girls off at their overpriced apartments in Hollywood, I wondered why I didn’t go put on a skirt and wait tables at Swingers instead. Actually, I knew why. I’m a terrible waitress, but a great stripper. The two jobs are similar but different. Both jobs require being nice to rude, demanding people and having superb listening skills. But, I have no instinct for that perfect balance of timing and attention to detail when it comes to serving food. However, I am acutely aware of other hungers: the desire to be desired and the need to be heard. And In twenty years of stripping, I’ve always been a night girl, never a day shift girl, but now I see the benefit of being the one girl on the floor at noon. Day shift guys are different. They seem sadder, sneaky and more stoned which can attract a strange breed of clientele, like Jerry, the man who cried while I gave him a lap dance.

No matter what time of day, strip clubs invite a heightened sense of suffering and affection, kind of like kissing the hand of someone dying; meeting their suffering head on and dancing with it, like last Saturday, when Jerry cried during our lap dance.

In issue #441 of The Sun, Janna Malamud Smith recalls psychoanalyst Jonathan Lear’s belief that we are “finite erotic creatures.” Meaning, we dangle on a tight rope between our “expansive desire and our inevitable death.” We Strippers shimmy to that tune. We experience the world through erotic movement and connection and that movement is towards our death.

An older dude in a bright red sweatshirt kept calling me “honey.” He followed me around the empty club, so I had to deal with him.
It was about 4p.m. and he was shitfaced.
“Honey,” he growled. “I’m sixty-four years old. I’ve been to clubs all over the world. I saw Jim Morrison perform in public for the first time.”

“Oh yeah? Where was that?”

“The Rainbow Room. He was scared.”

“Scared of what?”

“Performing in public. What’s the matter, Honey. You too cool to dance for me?”

“I’m about to go on stage right now,” I lied. “You like Pink Floyd? Led Zeppelin or the Stones?”

“Oh, Miss Attitude is too cool, huh.”

Daydreaming

A petite brunette finally joined me on the floor. I told her Jerry was looking to spend some money. She refused to talk to him. He stunk. He was rude. He was shitfaced.

“I’ll dance for him, so he’ll leave,” I said and pulled him into the VIP area, slightly worried he didn’t have enough cash on him to pay me.

“Before I die”

He grabbed my hands when I took his glasses off his head.
“What is wrong with you?” I whispered, my mouth brushed his ear.

“I love women. Been married four times and they always leave me.”

“Why is that?” I asked.

“I cheat. I get bored. I hate women.” Tears streamed down both of his cheeks.

I kept dancing and he kept crying. At the end of the song I said, “I’m not taking any more of your money, Jerry.”

“Keep dancing,” he said, still crying.

“Fuck you, Jerry. Go smoke.” I snatched his cigarettes, phone and his cocktail, his headphones and his wallet.

“Listen honey.”

“Get up. We’re going.” He over tipped me by fifty bucks and I walked towards the door where guys could duck outside and smoke.

The bouncer walked up to us. “Your cab’s here sir.” I kissed Jerry good bye on his wet cheek.

David Foster Wallace described top athletes as “profundity in motion.”

“To be a top athlete,” he wrote, “is to be that exquisite hybrid of animal and angel that we average unbeautiful watchers have a hard time seeing in ourselves.” Pastorius not only personified immortality and fragility, he was a winged genius, a revolutionary fighter and my personal hero.

Write Girl

Born with a disease that deformed his legs below the knee, they were amputated when he was just 11. But he couldn’t be stopped. After competing in the Paralympics and winning many races, he longed to compete in the regular Olympics and finally won that that long battle with the powers that be. What a stud muffin.

On robotic legs of fancy curved metal, sexy Pastorius sprinted ahead of the other runners with an unfettered, joyful grace. Not only was he visible proof that the next to impossible was very fucking possible, Pastorius was absolutely beautiful. With an underwear model physique and chiseled jaw, his gaze was magnificent and inspiring.

Look at him go, I thought. See, he can do it. Maybe we can too. Pastorius made me believe in human triumph as he sprung ahead on his amazing blade-legs. I joined the yelping masses as I clapped for him on my couch and cried in my soy latte.

Hot Damn, I thought. We can do the one true thing: protest and try harder and wake up earlier and never ever give up. He’s doing it!

Pastorius showed the whole world that it was possible to be the best, regardless of difficult circumstances. He was living proof we could better ourselves; We could succeed and rise above our petty limitations. Pastorius tattooed my brain with the mantra: “never ever give up.”

Never Give Up

It’s amazing how a person I’ve never met can inspire me to change the world one student at a time and plant a seed of tenacity and dedication and then come Valentine’s Day, that person could become the lowest of creatures.

I don’t know about you, but Valentine’s Day has always made me feel inadequate. As much as I want to be a person who celebrates love and is light and flirty and fun, Valentine’s Day usually makes me feel like a loser. I read the cutesy cards and want to hurl. I fixate on what I’m doing wrong. My relationships are unpredictable, doomed for failure and marked with protracted tension. Or else I feel elated and delusional—like everything is a-okay when clearly, it is not. My defects are glaring on Valentine’s Day; my failures flash like a tinfoil wrapped chocolate kisses. I’m a flawed lover who digs her high heels in when she should run like her hair’s on fire and runs for the hills when she should stick around. So, this shaky Valentine’s day, I turned on the news and there was my hero being tried for premeditated murder. Turns out, he shot his gorgeous model girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp.

Ironically, Steenkamp had planned to attend an event where she’d give a talk on domestic violence but was shot instead by Oscar Pistorius.

Write Girl

Heart sick and sad with the realization that first Lance Armstrong was a liar mouth and now this, I decided to hit the road and do my Write Girl gig. Screw it, I’d spend Valentine’s Day morning volunteering for the incarcerated girls camp. After all, it was songwriting workshop day—my favorite workshop of all. Two incredible, accomplished musicians showed up and performed the girls’ lyrics on the spot if the girls hadn’t given us their lyrics the week before. The musicians taught the girls rhythm and structure and made sure the girls knew that their stories were important and their lyrics beautiful. Many of the girls seemed like they’d never heard before that they were good at something.

The girls were in awe of the creative process and loved seeing their words come alive. They clapped, smiled and folded their hands in front of their mouths. As I watched them fall in love with the musicians, I thought that while some of our heroes become monsters, others are busy taking flight. The songs and their words were used to make something powerful and beautiful.

Write Girl

“What do you do when you are trying to have a reading and there’s a naked man sitting in the audience?”

My answer: “In my experience, the best way to make a naked man go away is to jerk him off. Do I have any volunteers?” The largely lesbian audience looked disgusted. Rhodessa Jones grinned. My ex-girlfriend, Marya laughed hysterically.

Jill Soloway did not volunteer to jerk off the fellow, but she read something searing, bright and funny about same sex marriage by which she meant having the same exact sex for over ten years with her adorable composer hubby, Bruce who also stood in the back and also did not volunteer to jerk the nudist off. A couple weeks later, Jill invited me to walk the reservoir with her. I was nervous because I’m a huge fan of her work. I wore lipstick and an extra cute, pink “Love’s Baby Soft” t-shirt, but Jill’s easiness and grace mellowed my nerves. We talked about sex work and love, feminism and whether or not women had a responsibility to each other in the context of sex work. I think the consensus was that we all have a responsibility to each other. And that fact shines brightly in the way Jill wrote and directed her first feature film “Afternoon Delight.”

Afternoon Delight!

Morgan, A blue haired pixie with a sexy mole on her eyelid picked me up from the Salt Lake City airport last Monday. I couldn’t believe I was at Sundance. I wasn’t a director or producer or actor—just a technical consultant to Juno Temple for the sex worker scenes and in casting, where I was able to hire 15 dancers for the strip club scene in order to create the authentic strip club vibe Jill envisioned. But, Sundance? There was no way I could go. Then, Jill made me a seductive offer and a week later I was en route to Park City, being delivered to a cluster of condos packed into puffy white snow where the rest of the caste and crew stayed. It was magical, all that gorgeousness.

Morgan

“Afternoon Delight” was scheduled to premiere Monday night and so I planned to steam my wrinkled dress and gussy up for the dinner party then shred the dance floor at the after party.

First, I had to find Stephen Elliott, who was somewhere writing about Sundance for The Rumpus. His condo was down some icy metal steps and was a toasty warm reprieve from the cold. He offered me pineapple chunks and bagels right away then showed me his latest film project in preparation to make his next movie based on his novel “Happy Baby.” He had just broken up with his GF, but after we talked a while, it sounded like it was anything but over and we commiserated about how relationships are about compromise and those compromises can be annoying. At one point he said “I’ve never been in an open relationship where it’s okay to have sex with other people.” His phone rang and he disappeared into his room while I got busy finagling tickets to movies and made plans to meet the crew and cast at the dinner later. I hopped on one of the free shuttles in search of a hot cup of coffee and soak in the crowd on the streets.

Morgan and Chelsea

Before I tell you how amazing it was to see the final cut of the movie for the first time at the premiere, I have to tell you how amazing it was to work with Jill Soloway. If a woman sets the tone of the home, Jill Soloway is entirely responsible for the unusually intimate feeling on the set of “Afternoon Delight.” She maked clear that everyone was critical. Her organizing, helpful spirit was at once cohesive, patient, obsessive and joyful. I’d been on movie sets before and felt the sting of the imposed and normalized hierarchy that made me wince. Jill’s entire crew felt like an insta-family—not stuck together but absolutely crazy about each other. We all poured everything into creating Jill’s vision together. After our little reservoir walk, I read her script and was floored by her desire to create a relatable and complex sex worker who was naïve and streetwise, lost, found, independent, slightly unhinged and at home in the sex industry. The protagonist, Rachel, played by the hilarious and vulnerable Kathryn Hahn was a palette of gray areas touching on that responsibility women have to each other with her stew of mixed loyalties and motives, confusing desires and maternal impulses.

The premiere was a rush of tears and hugs. The movie was better than I remembered and more moving and edgy than I had expected. Stephen and I piled into a car full of party goers and cut up the dance floor well after they closed and continued the party after hours and buzzed until our happy, ecstatic brains could finally calm.

And that was only the first night of Sundance. To be continued..

In 1985, many cases of rape go unregistered because of the social stigma associated with rape. Women who are raped are outcastes. Rape cases in India have more than doubled since 1985.

Recently, an Indian woman was gang raped in Delhi. The gray hate and gray shame. The red angry spit. The cold gray shadows where the little girls are still sold out of cages. The gray spaces in the alleys filled with girls carrying gray tins begging for coins. Gray, dirty bandages on their hands. Accepting a Dowry is prohibited in 1986 but still widespread, like arranged marriages and the caste system. And the families I stayed with all had several servants and for the most part, the servants were girls. Women who file for divorce are outcastes. Lepers are outcastes. The women in Bombay who care for me are ornate and graceful with their God of hope and tenacity.

If they are outcastes, so are all of us. Let’s interlock our fingers tight and walk into the new and turquoise day.

The day those children were murdered, I crossed my arms around my knees that were pressed into my chest on the couch. It was raining so softly outside— a tentative spring drizzle in December. I cupped my mouth and yelled “Oh my god,” and drooled and sobbed into my palm. The number of murdered children kept increasing. A mother. A son. Twenty first graders. Six adults. Oh my God.

2. “Where is this?” I ask Luis during a walking field trip. The day’s lesson is an exploration of their neighborhood and identity. They were asked to consider their personal story. “East LA,” Luis said. “Where in East LA?” I asked. Luis shrugged. He pointed his camera at a tree near the freeway. He took to my photography class like a fledgling rock god to ACDC and immediately shot directly into the sinking sun, throwing an eerie glow onto a fence, an angelic halo to the tip of a palm tree. Those magic sun shots are now his signature. “Just East LA,” my student, Kennia stressed. They called their art show “In Other Words” because they wanted to tell their story with their photos. I hung their photos on flimsy white ribbon during their lunchtime on the roof in the cold wind the day those children were murdered. Students had to duck underneath the photos to get to the benches with their lunches. The art they made, unavoidable. Kennia and Luis smiled shyly as their peers complimented their work. None of the pictures fell down and it didn’t rain. They dangled from the delicate ribbon and fluttered.

Roof School

3. My 7th and 8th grade leadership students in the Garvey district share a campus with the elementary school next door. They are not allowed to wander off and disappear, so when they sneak off to the ice cream truck or to the store I have to write them up. If they disappear or get hurt while under my care, I will be the one to blame. “What will I tell your father, Selena?” I ask. The elementary school kids wear a uniform. They walk in two rows past us out into the green field where they play monkey tag. If you don’t know what monkey tag is, it’s like freeze tag but when you are “it” you throw a stuffed monkey at people and they are frozen and when they are frozen, they have to kneel on one knee until their friend sets them free. I smile and wave at them while searching for Selena. “Where are you going?” I ask them as they walk past in crooked rows like they don’t know they are small, off kilter and vulnerable. “We don’t know,” a boy with glasses says. They trust it will be fun and there will be graham crackers and chocolate milk.
I watch them shrink into tiny dots skipping on wet grass.

Self Portrait: Roof

4. The locals call this place Cat City— short for Cathedral City. They’re not exactly locals. They’re stationed in 29 Palms, about forty minutes away and they’re Marine Corps from Kalamazoo Michigan and Arizona. It’s the holidays and they are getting shitfaced at 3 p.m. at Desert Showgirls. Around the corner are an adult video store and a 7-11. In the parking lot, Mexican construction workers whistle at me when I bend over for my stripper bag. I feel at home here, but I feel at home in remote and dangerous places, like the Motel Six off East Canyon Road. Like the luggage compartment on the train from Calcutta to Bombay. Like Bourbon Street at 4.a.m. Like the jail for incarcerated teenagers, the campuses where I teach and my dad’s house with all of his guns.
On the ten, the snow gathered on the tips of the mountains makes them appear closer. The bright sun is thin and crisp. It melts the knot in my shoulder from holding myself so tightly before on the couch, unable to peel myself from the news.
I waited until the twenty children were accounted for and when they were, I drove to work.

AC: Roof School

Just past the windmills near Desert Hot Springs, where the sky opens up and the city is a toxic cloud in my rear view mirror, the air is alive again. By Date Palm Drive, the highway ends and shoots off into classy movie star names like Bob Hope. And the hotels and casinos all flaunt water features and golf courses. I speed past the pristine hot springs and the resort with flamingos. I’m here to support myself between teaching gigs. Inside the musty doorway of Desert Showgirls, a fat DJ I’ve never seen barks “Who hired you?” I walk past him to the dark yellow dressing room where the regular girls have lockers. “Why?” I ask him. I’m feeling real skinny — not a good skinny— strep throat skinny. The DJ walks in and out of the dressing room. I am the only girl there and figure he wants to catch me naked, so I fiddle with my curling iron and eye shadow until he leaves. He grabs an extension cord. “I can’t remember his name, but the manager, Cassandra hired me over a year ago, ” I said. Like it matters. Like I wondered in off the street to panhandle in my underwear and break into the supply cabinet to steal scratchy paper towels. I hold myself in the dressing room. It’s dark. I feel safe there. Alone.

The DJ plays Nickleback. Aerosmith. Old Van Halen. Green Day.

I walk towards two men sitting at the bar talking about gun control and national security. The one with the jacket said when he was in DMZ (Korean Demilitarized Zone), he wasn’t allowed to carry a weapon and he had to go to the middle of a field between South Korea and North Korea. He would stand there and yell the meeting’s agenda on a bullhorn. He wasn’t allowed to make funny faces or any gestures he said because it would threaten national security. He would just yell on his crazy bullhorn and wait, sometimes for 18 hours and if North Korea didn’t want to talk about what was on the agenda, then they just didn’t send anyone to talk to him. Imagine the disappointment. I ask him if he liked his job. “I want to be an actor,” he said. I nodded.
The friend sitting next to him hunched over laughs loud into his pint glass, full of amber beer. “Actor,” he snorts. Some of the Marines say they’ll go home and go back to school when they’re finished. All of them have loaded gun eyes. I lead the one who wants to be an actor into the lap dancing area where there are big soft chairs with armrest against mirrors. “Do you have kids?” he asks. I dance and wonder why that question. “No.”
“Kids are fun,” he said. And then he told me he bought his 4-year old twins bicycles and how he wished they would just “stay four.” I thought of the kids who were slaughtered and how they wouldn’t ride bicycles. The boxes in tacky paper would sit under the tree and I was devastated for every parent, dancing to Guns and Roses. At least he already bought his kids bicycles.

5. The dancers arrive with their babysitters in place. In the dark dressing room, an Asian dancer with hair so glorious it nearly reached the backs of her knees says “Take my purse,” to a butch dyke stripper who dances to nothing but disco. She is so drunk she was throwing up in the bathroom. The floor manager storms into the dressing room. “Is Suki in there?” Every single one of us lies. Suki was not in there. We didn’t know where she was. Suki was fine. Jeri drove her home and texted me later that I could stay with her. There was room for me there. This is how we hold one another.

Elevator: Long Beach Field Trip

I’m applying bright turquoise eye shadow on my lids the color of striped mini-skirts I wore in 7th grade. Turquoise reminds me of Love’s Baby soft and Breck shampoo. I curled my hair and burned my ear those mornings in Mom’s pink bathroom waiting for “99 Luftballoons” to play on the radio again before school. Mom was a big believer in baths and I inherited her soaker gene. She filled glass vases with red and silver bath beads. She could build a robot out of erotic oil and bath salts clumped together in pink chalky balls. She morphed our DNA with her bubble bath, soaking and soaking while she assessed. The steam from that room was so epic I expected tendrils to slip through the crack under the door.

But this eye shadow would not sit on the shelf next to her incandescent body powder. This desert shadow was from Target down the road. I smear the lid with a cheap blue film. I know there’s a really good chance they won’t hire me but at least my eyes will sparkle nice.

I’m supposed to have a teaching job. I’m supposed to be happily married. I’m supposed to have a book. I’m supposed to have a full time gig. I’m supposed to be self-supporting. I’m supposed to have kids. I’m supposed to own something.
I’m supposed to know how to do this mainstream work thing. I don’t.

It’s been exactly one year since I’ve stripped. In that time, I’ve played a stripper in two movies and worked as a technical consultant for Jill Soloway’s dark comedic stripper film “Afternoon Delight,” but I have not danced for dough. I’ve not spread a man’s feet apart so I can squeeze in between them. I’ve not been on the pole.

I’m nervous. One look at my ID and they’ll turn me away. On tough girls, terror of rejection is dressed up like an over-smiling prom queen candidate, but never believe that. In my turquoise and pink spandex glory— I’m skinless. A part of me hopes this Motel 6 will be the end of the line but even the fart smells of our broccoli and hummus dinner on counter charms me. I focus on the task at hand: Eyelash glue.
$1.99 Sugar body spray also from Target.
My tax bill to the IRS=$337.00

Vienna

Desert Showgirls is less than a mile away from our luxurious digs and like many places I’ve worked before, the parking lot is not full of cars—a bad sign.

We walk in the door like we’re really grateful to own the place and a cute blonde chick with rugged lines on her eyes puts her arms around my shoulders. “How old are you?” she asks. (I lie and tell her 40.)
“I’m forty-two,” she admits (three seconds from my age). I feel like Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler when he knows better but does it anyway.

A big black guy younger than my nephew hands me a job application even though I just told him I worked here a year ago.

The blonde is taking her break with me. She looks older than forty-two but who am I to say.

“I made $250 on Thanksgiving just playing pool,” she crosses her arms. She must have kids and some dogs she rescued from the pound. I thought of all of the Thanksgivings, Valentine’s Days and Christmases I spent on the laps of strangers in clubs in San Francisco and that specific lonely ache of holiday sex work. Chasing the holiday spenders hoping for a big mint, but it never once was what I hoped for. It was always just a little more lonely than was reasonable.

And now. It’s Thanksgiving weekend and I’m dancing at a titty bar in the middle of the desert that attracts military guys from the base in 29 Palms and prehistoric golphers—completely in my element.

The black body builder dude did look at my ID and at me. Back at my ID. Back to me but he just shook his head and said I didn’t look my age at all.

The man returned my ID and took my filled out application while I watched the women dance on stage.

I have missed women’s bodies. How they uncoil and sashay on stage climbing the pole like savage hunters after blood in the ceiling. And customers are a place to mine stories, a place to sink into and soak.

I sat with a woman who was so pretty like Heidi Klum. She had the word “Warrior” tattooed on her forearm so I got curious about it and waited for the story. Her boyfriend was short and charismatic with silver hair and had a gadget fixing business and he told me that I was exactly like him because I never give up and probably I had a bad childhood.

“I know you. You’re just like me,” he said. He sat very close to her and held her one free hand.

I wanted to tell him I’m not competitive, just hungry, but maybe that was his point. After all, I glanced at the strippers’ dances and made sure that I had more pen marked “X’s” than the other girls on the chart. The ones who had lots of “X’s” I studied hard for gesture and technique. Once we were are all little girls just doing our best, then things got ugly.

I didn’t want to hear about the man’s childhood or mine. I wanted to know about the “Warrior” on his Heidi Klum’s forearm. She got up to find the bathroom.

So when she was gone I asked him. The boyfriend swirled the gold liquid in his glass and leaned over so he was speaking directly into my ear and breathed jack and coke in my face. He told me a serial rapist guy who had killed 7 women abducted her when she was 19 and she was the only one who escaped. He told me that she had a daughter named August who didn’t know. I thought again about all of the little girls doing their best and things getting ugly like knives and projectile vomit and rape ugly.

Warrior

She appeared again and sat down and crossed her Heidi Klum legs that were sweetly draped in a flow-y pant that looked more like a skirt. Maybe those things are called “skorts.” I wanted to hear the story from her, but I didn’t ask. She grinned the familiar sad girl grin and held her drink too tightly and I knew it was true. And when I danced for her I kissed her neck so softly that it’s possible she never even noticed she was kissed.