Archive for the 'Writing' Category

I got in her blue Nissan. We’d never met before. A tiny purple candle burned between us in the center console. The candle made me nervous at first, but she was so tender that nothing could possibly catch on fire. Not even her i-phone cord. The vision I had of her in my mind was a hipster punk with black hair. Black buckled boots and maybe a scarf. Her knees would be exposed. She’d have a piercing or twelve and she’d look at me between drags of cigarettes with her filmmaker eyes. The eyes of Filmmakers twinkle with the obsession of trying to capture the uncontrollable. The same way surfers love the ocean, filmmakers are in love with light.  

Milcah

The purple puddle of melted wax stayed put while the chilly San Francisco sun shot through the windshield. Milcah smiled with a full set of braces. She was even younger than I expected. We drove into SF from the airport. She only knew me by my writing. I didn’t want to disappoint her in person. That ride was the first of a hundred radically loving gestures in SF that day that would burst my heart open.  Thank you, Milcah.

Julie Grecius

While we shared chocolate mint vegan ice cream and sipped bright pink beet soup, Milcah told me about her mother and her job. I asked her why she’s made the decision to enter the sex industry (she doesn’t need the money). Why she will use her own name in her web cam videos. She’s exactly my age when I first started stripping. Twenty-two and obstinate with ripped black tights and knack for caring for the sick. She told me about asexuality we walked past stores on Haight Street. I thought about the writers we both love and how we forget our Kindles exist because we like to hold our books in our hands.  I’ll ask her when I interview her (for RSW-Rumpus) if she thinks sex work is akin to caring for the dying. I do. My years as a counselor made me a better stripper. They both required patience and empathy.

    I arrived at the Verdi Club hours early with 300 cupcakes and six pair of silky gloves that I cut and bedazzled for the Rumpus Women.

Hells Belles

A group of us set tulle party favors with aqua pencils on chairs and mini cupcakes on tables. Upstairs, in front of a big dressing room mirror, I applied mascara and patted gold and purple eye shadow on Sona and Rebekah. I dipped my fingers into Julie’s red glitter. We were giddy. We wet our temporary tattoos and peeled their skins back. “We are all Sugar.”  I hugged Isaac and complimented him on his red and white gingham shirt.  It was the most natural thing in the world- to stand around in fishnets and fret about both Sugars, the column excerpts we were going to read and drink tickets. As I hurled myself into the middle of the celebration, I felt my heart stretch beyond it’s capacity.

   Steve Almond, who’s disarming humor is as powerful as his astute commentary on politics and sex, delivered a surprisingly tender, profound introduction likening Sugar to Christ’s Sermon on the Mount and pointing out Sugar’s radical empathy. The Sermon on the Mount contained the Beatitudes (from Latin Beatus: happy, fortunate or blissful) and similarly, the Sugar column has gathered a die hard following as a result of her generous insights and advice.  He spoke eloquently about her depth and his own gratitude for his beautiful wife (Erin) and the fact that Sugar had huge responsibilities before she decided to take on the Dear Sugar column. Steve Almond introduced Cheryl Strayed as Sugar #2. Applause rippled through that room. We stood up for two standing ovations and watched her bravely accept our love.  

Sugar Strayed

My desk seemed far away, a tiny place of No’s, cat sand and unpaid bills. A place where the bright spot in my week was a three-paragraph rejection from Creative Nonfiction (not sarcasm—I really got a great, wonderful rejection). This was happy, fortunate and blissful. 

At the Verdi Club that giant room became small and cozy. Both Steve and Cheryl answered questions from the audience. The first one was mine, “How can I handle rejection?”

Can you believe my luck? Both Sugars answered it. I’ve got a purple candle on my desk now to remind me that I’m at my best when I’m celebrating someone else’s success.

And that If I keep digging in and doing the hard work, rejections will be a fun thing to write about.

Writer

My desk has a sweet flame, a burning place of yes.

My desk overlooks an orange tree, a Redwood deck and a BBQ that’s rusting from yesterday’s rain.   I’m on a third major rewrite of my book, SPENT. It’s a completely different book than it was last year. It felt like essays before-a catalogue of events happening outside of me.  

     I’ve always felt terribly inconvenienced and skeeved out by my feelings and have been diligent about stomping them out.  That’s when freak brain takes over. Exactly on year after my mom died, I was driving to my assistant job and called a pharmacy to renew a prescription I had for Vicodin. I hate Vicodin and had it because I’d been hospitalized for Typhoid Fever (the mosquito one, not the poop one). While quarantined, they gave me a spinal tap that triggered my puking migraines.

    So I had this empty bottle of Vicodin and renewed the prescription. I planned to take the pills.  All of them. But, I felt better after I got off the phone with the pharmacy. When I showed up for work at my assistant gig. I worked for  a wonderful, kind, successful lady and I idolized her. I bought her dog vitamins and went to all of the super expensive hippie elixir stores for special healing tonics. 

by Kent Geib

                                                   “How are you?” she asked. She always asked me that. 

                                                       “I’m not going to kill myself today.”

                                                      “That’s a good start.” I filed her bills and alphabetized her books in her new office. By lunch time, I felt better. Years later, I still  have freak brain looking for a way in or a way out-whichever’s quickest.  

A scene in "Plainclothes Naked" by Kent Geib

  I loved  Melissa Febos’ Whip Smart. I  related to her story, more than any other sex worker memoir I’ve read. Not because of her Pro Domme/Ivy League combo but the way she described the grey areas of the industry so well, her addict brain and pushing her own boundaries over time, normalizing the inertia and exuberance and secrets. Hiding pieces of herself in her sessions. Knowing this and doing it anyway. Not stopping, while wanting to. 

               I loved the way she described the kind of intimacy and confusion that happened when a client became her friend. I related to the power dynamics at play with her own desires, the way she denied them at first. How she separated herself from her clients to feel superior. I related to her quitting and feeling that her identity hat been gutted when she moved away from NY, away from her client base.

             I related to her fear of living on the sidelines of life by staying in the industry and outgrowing that, and finally, the fear of being broke and average by leaving it behind. Sometimes she over-intellectualized her experience and I related to that impulse because it’s more comfy than being skinless. But there were many sections that spoke to me in a way that was honest and tender. I entered the sex industry a lesbian man-hater prepared to do battle and come out on top, but the industry was full of men who were too squishy and sad like me only they had more courage. They were honest about what they wanted. I always felt like I had to put on a show to get what I wanted.

 I hope more women write about their experiences, especially if they take issue with the stories being told and circulated.

Miss A by Romy Suskin

I’ve been speaking with other women I adore about happens when you quit. It’s almost like the women still in the industry feel betrayed. But I’ve only got what’s true for me. I’m true to that. The real betrayal is this culture that criminalizes it, demoralizes the women and hurts them.  One woman wished more than anything that she’d saved her money. She made so much money. Squandered it away. She quit because she had to (she got pregnant). I had to quit because I aged out. It’s that simple. It’s that complicated. Quitting. Starting over.

 I wrote my letter for the Rumpus’ new epistolary enterprise “Letters in the Mail.” It’s a backwards letter starting with now and ending in childhood. I wanted to write about quitting things. I wondered if people could relate to that.

I love books

Today’s wild and fresh with possibility. I’m painting on silky red gloves for Sugar’s Coming Out Party next weekend. I’m teaching students to write content for their magazine. They have to come up with a slogan about how art has added to their lives for a poster contest to win some cash. This is what I learned: making a mess with beads and a hot glue gun burns your fingers. It’s best to resort to a black sharpie and sequins.

(This post was originally written for SLAKE’s blog as a companion to 55 Steps, my essay the upcoming  Dirt issue.)

    One glance at the Tantric Temple website and a civilian would assume the barefoot girls seated in Lotus Pose were advertising yoga classes. A click on the bio photos revealed more: tanned, flexible calves stretched against a mirror and cleavage draped with shimmery fabric, soft curls dusting delicate necks. The text below our pictures reads: sacred sessions with tantric nuances, which are euphemisms for oily massages with happy endings by crystal-wielding naked chicks in a candlelit room in the space of a fifty-minute hour.  Book today!

Sensual Massage ads are meant to allure hobbyists and hoodwink vice so they’re veiled in immaculate delight and sprinkled with flirty riddles.  The women never show their faces or use their real names on Craigslist, EROS or Backpage but at the Divine Temple, where I worked, we stared straight ahead with confrontational glossed-lipped gazes, the whites of our eyes clear and fearless.    Look at us. Our faces demanded.  Here we are.  

L by Romy Suskin

Another way our ads stood out from the others was our quirky lingo. Sex workers often referred to themselves as providers but we called ourselves therapists and had non-stripper names. We weren’t allowed names that were flavors or brands like Gucci or Luscious. We were assigned mythological Greek heroine names like Venus Starlight, Artemis Grace and  Lampetia Dream. Our names could easily be seen on tarot cards or an MK-18.

Shortly after I got hired, there was some discussion about my name. Did it express serenity? Was it open hearted? My tattoos were aggressive so my name had to be soft and inviting, according to my boss, a gorgeous and unusually tall woman with long black ringlets that reached her ribcage, I was given the name Aphrodite Grace after an old goddess who was born from the foam of Uranus’ snipped genitals, and I got busy booking clients. I doled out 40% of my earnings to my boss, her called herself Monarch Divine and delivered the bills in white sealed envelopes at the end of my ten-hour shift.

Turquoise by Romy Suskin

    Language is the thin membrane that connects and separates my skin from yours. Words pinpoint the place on the map to navigate my culture, my neighborhood, my home and my handjob menu. I learned by making mistakes. At age two, I thought the stove was called hot-hot-seet-heart, because every time I got close to it my mom said, That’s hot, sweetheart. Like the stove, I learned the lexicon of sex work by getting burned. Words were mighty hot and they could seriously fuck up my life, like the time I met a man named Joe in the lobby of a hotel.

You’re giving me a handjob, right?

            Yeah, I said. No money was exchanged and no clothes were removed, but the yeah was enough to handcuff me and throw me in the back of a van. After spending the night in jail, I removed all of my ads and studied the craft of sex worker code. Knowledge was power. 

 First, I learned what I couldn’t say: happy ending, hand release, full contact, stimulation, prostate, fingers, orgasm or cash.  Never say erection, cock or pussy. Never, ever say yeah.

For pussy we said kitty and bliss refered loosely to an orgasm. But not always. Massage-plus meant more than a handjob, possibly a blowjob, prostate massage or perineum stimulation. GFE meant the girl would probably make out with a client. If you enjoyed Greek, it meant you might allow a client to eat your kitty. Happy making and deep tissue massage is a Hollywood handshake, a slick romantic comedy with a happy ending and free parking.  Tissues, antibacterial wipes, rubbers and towels were included in that package.

 When in doubt, said energy. Its definition vague but it suggested strength and vitality, vigor and heat with the capacity to move. I learned about energy when I met another girl for a job with her regular client. When I asked what to expect, she replied, He’s a lot of energy. When I arrived at the hotel, she fell to her knees. Her client expected oral sex and water sports, more former than latter. After the job, I was catatonic under a fuzzy blanket, hoping a Law and Order marathon would keep me from puking. I don’t like giving oral for cash. It makes my blood ache. It’s not that I think it’s intrinsically wrong or boring.

I learned that the lexicon of sex work is layered with nuance and agenda. At the TT, we didn’t say body sliding massage. We said integrity, abundance, and manifestiny as if we were winged, untainted nymphs, our farts dipped in gold, fluttering from above in garter belts and flip-flops, giving guys magical boners. When a client asked What exactly do you do in the session? the protocol response was: I offer sacred touch body work.

Miss Jackson by Romy Suskin

 In this hazy world of code, one fact remained clear:

 I was giving handjobs to dudes for cash and on a good day, I stacked about five hundred bucks. Clients were Googled and ID’d and I didn’t have to drive to the Four Seasons on Wilshire alone, vibrating with a secret in my throat. I didn’t give blowjobs. The TT allowed me to conserve my energy.

The women I worked with were travelers, dancers, performers and juicers.

Sex worker lingo was not only used to describe our world but to protect ourselves from the dogma against sex workers in this culture where cops delighted in rooting one of us out, like Dorothee.

A notorious arsonist was detained recently in Los Angeles, charged with 52 counts of arson. His motive, according to an LA Weekly writer, was that his mother, Dorothee faced deportation for fraud. Turns out, Dorothee was a sex worker and her ads were printed in the article. I imagined Dorothee’s son lighting a match and grinning while his fires raged. For you, Mom.

Apollo by Romy Suskin

Dorothee’s ads contained subtle cues. She hinted at extras: Loving, erotic touch in combination with deep tissue, G-spot and Hotspots, Sensual, relaxing, Happy making, very different!!!

Like me, her menu changed according to her shifting needs. When she panicked, she did more for less: She stimulated their perineum with her fingers, which is the male version of a G-spot. She gave them a Happy Making- an anally infused handjob. Like all providers, she longed to stand out.  It’s a competitive business, clogged by young, augmented girls and Dorothee knew the score. She taught her son how to light the kind of fires that are impossible to put out. And so they blazed..

She got increasingly desperate; offered a special for limited hours in order to extract some quick funds, and used words to sound credible and legitimate, urgent and wise:

Traditional TANTRA massage techniques, based on DOCTORS’s knowleges (sic) about the body, spirit, psychology of MAN!!! $100 promotion. Earth shattering erotic touch, body-to-body sliding massage until midnight.

Dorothee’s manic post reminded me of a night, before my stint at the TT. I had three bucks to my name and rent due in two days. I scanned Craigslist for a wild-card client who wanted a session now! and lived nearby. An attorney called. He wanted to be paddled for $150. He was short and rude with knobby knees. I was afraid my landlords would hear me whack him with his wooden paddle. I accidentally hit his tailbone. You want too much, I told him. He wailed and tried to pay me only $100. I had to yell to get him to leave.

Dorothee’s ad in the LA Weekly showed her pale neck and sucked in waist. Only the bottom half of her face was in the blurry shot. Her blond frizzy hair reached her shoulders and her lips were downturned at the corners. She had the lips of a mature woman, over forty, a mother of the man who lit 52 fires in closed carports. Her son.

I wondered if Dorothee was relieved to be incarcerated. I wondered if she grew tired of rubbing and sliding the blubbery flesh of dodgy clients with hairy backs and lint on their balls. I wondered if she had high energy clients. Would they remember her earth shattering touch? Did they know her by her flames? I wondered if she held their secret in her throat like a hot stone and if they held hers in theirs.

Dorothee, the fire keeper, touch healer, enflamed with fraud, awaiting trial. I wondered where she wanted to be, more than anything and if she burned she wrote this ad: You can lead me to the places you will like to be.. You can trust me to be respectful of your –Secret.

    (SF. 1999)

    In your grey striped bathroom wrapped in a monogrammed towel, you shaved. You splashed on Amber aftershave by Tom Ford. You button your favourite cornflower blue Fred Perry shirt. You look good for forty-two, you think. You listen to Aerosmith, but kind of like Marilyn Manson. You don’t tell the guys that you’ll meet later in a bar in Hayes Valley that you like Manson, or they’ll think you’re a fag.  The guys from work are twenty-five with sharp jaws and gym memberships. They travel business class and will do anything for free miles and American Express points.  

    Two duck pot-stickers and three cosmos later, you pile in a cab with the guys and roll over to O’Farrell and Larkin Street to hit the titty bar where you can get a handjob-maybe more. You wonder if Mark got a bigger check than you today, and you get a jolt of rage that settles in your gut, but you got your bonus and there’ll be more to come. Your portfolio is stellar and blowing up faster than real estate in Vegas. You’re looking early retirement in the eye. You own a couple rentals in Silicone Valley and have a sweet country home in Danville for weekends. You bought new Escalade. Thank God you hid your assets from the wife. You’re relieved that you divorced her after six years of mechanical cold sex. Now you wanted some full contact friction.

            The Century’s open until 4a.m. so sometime after 2a.m. you staggered in with the guys from what’s-his-name-from-work’s bachelor party. A girl in pink and black polka dots and bangs bounces up to you. She’s more alternative than you usually go for but she’s got dangerous curves and a sincere smile. She smells like cotton candy bubblegum and says, “Let’s go play.”  You’re flattered and shit-faced and wonder if you’ll be able to get it up. Of course you will. You wonder what this chick means by “play” and you decide to find out. The guys roar with laughter and high five you when the very tattooed girl sticks her erect nipples close to your mouth. You stagger after her towards a private area where she informs you “Nude full-contact dances are sixty bucks a song.”

You feel your head nod. She directs you like a circus monkey: “Sit here,” and presses you down until you plop onto a black vinyl couch. You’re drunker than you thought and regret the shot of Petron.

              “Put your weapons on that table,” she says.

            You laugh and empty your pockets of phones, lighters, keys and wallet and set them down next to a lamp the same colour and style as the room, which all had a theme, but you can’t remember what. There were blue walls and white fluffy clouds, maybe a King Tut lamp. Or a Buddha. You hand her three twenties and watch her slide out of her pink bikini. It’s so shiny- it looks wet. She probably spends a lot of time on the elliptical machine at the gym, like your ex-wife. She should try spinning instead. Her thighs are thick but her tits are perfection.

            She holds both of your wrists and slides your palms over the surface of her boobs, belly and smooth inner thighs. You recognize cheap peach and vanilla perfume on her neck. She props herself onto your lap so her knees and boobs eclipse your vision. Her arms reach behind you, rub your back and swipe the wallet from the table.  While undulated on your crotch, she counts your money behind your back. She wants to take the whole wad of crisp twenties, but after determining her level of misery a seven on a scale from one to ten, she takes eighty bucks and puts back the rest. She keeps the bills in a crumpled wad in her right palm and keeps dancing.

MIss Jackson by Romy Suskin

You get hard, but you don’t stay hard. She unzips your pants anyway and reaches inside. She moves slowly, her hands up and down your cock and moved hips in circles. You remember the belly dancer your ex-wife hired for your 35^th birthday. Her pink glossy lips touch your ear and her hot breath makes you jump.

That’s enough, you think. You’re soft. You’re too shy to let this woman get you off. You’re embarrassed. You start talking:

            “How long have you worked here?”

            “Too long,” she says. She doesn’t want to be numb anymore, but she is. Sometimes her defenses melt. Sometimes she loses control. She wants to stop stealing, but not tonight.

            “It’s my friend’s bachelor party. I should buy him a dance from you,” you say.

            “How do you know he’ll like me?”  She’s slightly disgusted with herself for stealing the money because he’s not awful. He didn’t try to stick his fingers in her G-string or tell her she’s too smart to work here. Her feelings are a hideous inconvenience to her, like sludge underneath her toenails. She guides your chubby fingers to her nipples and squeezes them.           

            “He will.” You zip up your pants, embarrassed that you’ve disappointed her, even though you know that’s ridiculous. Suddenly you feel angry and out of place and you think maybe this girl is also angry and out of place. The angle of her chin reminds you of your ex-wife. You wonder if she has a boyfriend. What he must think of her job. You wipe your wrinkled shirt. You worry the guys are scheming to fuck you out of your latest deal, so you hurry back out onto the floor and convince what’s-his-name to get a dance with her, but she’s gone.            

Later, you’re in a cab, reaching for your wallet to pay the driver, who dropped you off where you parked your Escalade. You think you’re missing a hundred bucks. Maybe you spent more on drinks than you’d planned. You remember the girl with the tattoos. She smiled big and acted horny but there was something sad about her. You dismiss the image of her smooth thighs from your mind. What was her name? Rosie? Violet? Stevie?

Cougar Town by Sheila Hiber

“Women don’t care enough about each other, in my opinion, but it took me years to figure that out.”-Alana Noel Voth

Dear “Marie Calloway,”

            When I was 21, Britney Spears was a Musketeer. I was insecure with a voracious appetite for attention and compliments, particularly, the admiration of older men. I ached to be seen, so I took off my clothes for money. When I started stripping, Tao Lin was ten years old. This was before FB, YouTube. Twitter, Tumblr and I-phones and before the send button became a lethal weapon. This was before celebrity sex tapes, before Americans became obsessed with gawking at the horrific unraveling of the human spirit on 60 inch Plasma TV’s.

    I was 21, and I knew what time it was. Time to use my feminine whiles to obtain the thing I craved.  I explored the shit out of my sexuality and smeared it all over bathroom walls and lesbian magazines. I took my stinking fingers to fisting parties, spied on my girlfriend who’d broken into my house and held a gun to my head and fucked me. I ensnared a slave.  I’d try anything.

Laura Jackson by Ronna

    You know you’re pretty. Thin legs and luscious hair, the pictures of your glossy lips surrounded by fog. I didn’t see “Adrien Brody’s” load on your face. I don’t know “Adrien Brody.”  I don’t know who his girlfriend is either, but I picture her nail polish and wonder if she’s my age and if she poured that nail polish onto her boyfriends balls and grinned as the lacquer dried.

What about him? Does he regret his actions? Does he feel like a slimy, arrogant douchebag? I wonder why he’s off the hook and “Marie Calloway” is under the microscope. I also wonder why, as a woman interested in female subjectivity, she gave men exactly they wanted: a star-fucker, hipster chick with a load in her face. They would jerk off endlessly. Her father might too.

Maybe we shouldn’t give them what they want all the time. Give them our beautiful legs open and lonesome. Let’s give them furious, witty, enraged words and see if it tickles their fancy.

So, you’ve made some mistakes. We are not fucked.  We are women who dig deep and write about our hideous parts with great love.

In my 20’s and 30’s I rooted out the women who saved my ass, and taught me craft. They are: Lorrie Moore, Mary Gaitskill, Michelle Tea, Eileen Myles, Cheryl Strayed, Lidia Yuknavitch, Dylan Landis, Susie Bright, Susan Straight, Sapphire, Mary Karr, Jeanette Winterson, Jennifer Egan, Dorothy Allison and Joan Didion.

Young writer, you are no Dave Eggers. You are no David Foster Wallace, writing to become “Unlonely.” You are not “fucked” like the characters on the pages of a Tao Lin novel. You are a Daily Rumpus, an on-line journal story, a lovely little thing with an angelic face with moxie and nerve. You could be the girl on her back in thigh-high leg warmers on an American Apparel billboard. But, you’re not. You’re a writer. You’ve read some books. You’ve been an escort, and you’ve made a splash on the Internet by the age of 21.  Writers I admire are blogging about you: Stephen Elliott, Roxane Gay, Tao Lin, and Alana Noel Voth.

Stephen Elliott was in my apartment once, handcuffed to a chair, hooded and blindfolded, penetrated by my cock. His head was lowered, almost touching his chest. I could hear him breathing. He seemed happy. I wanted him to be. After red wax dripped down his spine, my friend Ronna arrived. She walked into my house, took pictures and lightly mocked him, then left. I removed a red rag from his mouth. Know what I made him say?

“Tell me I’m a good writer.” Like he had a choice.

“You’re a good writer.” His heart wasn’t in it. I was crushed. He was a wet mouth, saying the words I wanted to hear more than anything, more than oxygen.

“Tell me again.” I wanted more conviction, but the words came out and landed like a damp piece of cardboard in the street.

I wasn’t a good writer. I was in grad school. He attended my senior reading, during which I broke the microphone stand so I had to hold the microphone like I was singing Karaoke while reading a painful, sloppy non-fiction piece about my mom dying of cancer.  

But I was going to be a writer. I swore to do what it takes. Criticism hurt.  I thought I learned how to shoulder rejection in strip clubs, but this flavor of rejection was different. One man rejected two of my stories, but gave me extensive notes. I asked him:

Are you just being polite because I know all of your friends and I have great tits?

Man: you have great tits?

Me: Yeah, my tits make Jenna Jameson’s look like a couple of juju bees.

I emailed him a naked picture of me. It was tasteful and staged and airbrushed, a pin up photo like the ones I put up on my blog.  Sending that picture was begging: Am I good enough?

I’m exactly twice your age. I could be your mother.

Leah and I, NOLA

I’m not. If I were, I’d tell you to not accept an open drink from a stranger and to beware of the send button because you can’t take it back.  I liked your sexual agency and your well-thought out views on subjectivity. Still there was this: You exposed “Adrien Brody” and his girlfriend. That was mean and cowardly.

I’ve learned by making mistakes. I dig for the courage to reveal myself and protect others.  Sometimes I fail. I wrote a story about being drugged with GHB on a paid date. The man who drugged me was black and he had a black name. But the name was too telling so I changed his race and his name, which was weird, because the professional black man who essentially raped me, not a white guy named Rob.

 I changed his name, race and other telling characteristics in order to protect his identity, because the story was about me, and the shame of my secrets. I’ve written many stories about men who paid me to touch them. One asked me to change more about his character on my blog because he was uncomfortable with the details. I changed them.

Writing is treacherous terrain where we dance the line between sparing others and splaying ourselves on the page. We write about our own suffering and shame because we want to connect with our readers. That is how we do it, with our words. We are not fucked. We can begin anew, with the blank screen, lit up and waiting.

    My dad used to play a game with me. After he suited up for work in a jacket and tie, he’d dig in his pockets for change then he’d ask me, “Who’s the President on the coin or bill?” If I guessed right, I’d get to keep the coin or bill. I rarely got it right. I didn’t understand that I needed to value the coin. I had to want it. I didn’t want it. I just wanted to follow my dad around before he walked out the door and into his silver-blue Chrysler. After my parents divorced, whenever I wanted something extra (a ski trip with a friend, a dress for prom, new clothes) my mom’s response was “Money doesn’t grow on trees” then, “ask your dad.”  He’d given her the house, the car and me. He paid alimony.

            I could tell he didn’t want to give me extra money. Maybe he wanted to teach me the some-people-have-to-dig-ditches-lesson. My dad got up at 5a.m. every day and worked until 5 or 6pm. He still does. He built his own practice from an empty building on a quiet street to a thriving business. Asking was so uncomfortable that I learned that I’d rather drink a pint of my own piss than ask anyone for help.  

A staircase to the sky

    By age twenty-two I was already lap dancing in San Francisco’s seedier strip clubs, hell bent on being self-sufficient. My mom was wrong. Money did grow on trees; I just had to figure out how to climb the damn thing, snatch it and steal off with it. I wasn’t afraid to work. I would earn the shit out of that money. In sex worker circles, there are names for girls like us; our relationship to earning: lazy bitches, wolves, hustlers, money- makers, campers, sharks or cougars. One of my managers called me a “piranha,” and by this he meant, I only left bones. “Other girls are sharks,” he said. “They take a chunk and move on.”

            With practice and time, I found out what men wanted: a counselor, comedian, sex therapist, bartender, a hand job, a hug, a nipple in the face, a counseling session, an escape,  and mostly, to feel desired. Unlike most women who had the sense to make a mint and pursue non-stripping careers, I only got better with time. I blossomed into a piranha. I also got older, injured and twenty years later, stood at a crossroads with a boyfriend and MFA, unsure of how to quit. I’d aged out. 

          At the end of 2011, I quit. It wasn’t a parade kind of leaving with cymbals crashing, drum rolling or high-fives. I didn’t have fifty G’s in the bank. It was a gentle leaving: one night after a mediocre Wednesday night at the Bruiser, I walked onto Bourbon Street into the drizzle with my stripper bag full of my costumes and shoes in search of a cab with this knowledge:

$1=Washington

$5=Lincoln

$10= A. Hamilton (non-president)

$20-Jackson

$100-Bennie Franklin

    On the Rumpus, Stephen Elliott writes daily emails that are often beautiful, thoughtful springboards that launch me into thinking about stuff: movies, plots, books and money. Yesterday’s Daily Rumpus, “The Artist and the Apartment” therumpus.net/subscribe/ was borrowed from Janet Malcolm’s “The Journalist and the Murderer.” The content of Stephen’s email gracefully referenced her interview in The Paris Review www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6073/the-art-of-nonfiction-no-4-janet-malcolm that was sent to me by my friend D. I found it compelling, so I shared it with Stephen, who also likes Malcolm. In the Paris Review interview the journalist scoured Malcolm’s apartment looking for details, some secret pathway into Malcolm’s personality. Stephen’s DR followed that line of thinking, as he mused about the importance of a tidy apartment. I also borrowed from the Paris Review piece.

Art in Downtown Los Angeles

    In it, Malcolm said, “You have led us into deep waters,” a response to the journalist’s comment that Malcolm’s apartment was “carefully unpretentious,” which had a nice sting. I took the murky terrain idea and used it in a story in which I write, “I’ve led you into hazy terrain where you might call my behavior “acting out” or a “reckless act of despair.” I knew seeing Joe could seriously fuck up my life, but who gives a fuck? I thought. I have to pay my rent.”  Taking our cues from writers we admire is as bold as lunging over a table and licking their faces. The writers I licked in 2011 were mostly Cheryl Strayed, Lidia Yuknavitch and Michael Ondaatje, but there were others too.

      Which brings me to the epic texter, Marie Callaway and her story about the writer she fucked, and then blogged about while exposing him. There’s a romance associated to work that’s considered “raw” because it’s unfettered by formality or training. This also goes against what I’ve been told and what I believe (and what Stephen has said in many DR’s to the point where it borders dogma) that you have to write for ten years to be good.

     That’s not always the case. There will always be a Marie Calloway hanging around; a star that burns bright for ten minutes then dies. Also, there will always be a fresh voice that stands out from the rest like William Burroughs, Kathy Acker and Sara Gerot (Black Clock #14).

Storefront Silverlake

     I don’t know if Marie Calloway is a twinkling voice that will last. Time will tell. Stephen recently interviewed her about her text message story. If you don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about, skip everything and just read this essay by Roxanne Gay about it: http://htmlgiant.com/web-hype/the-price-of-revelation/

             In the DR interview, Marie Calloway mentioned doing sex work and brought up the class differences, which is interesting. In the interview she mentioned girls who were fucking for $40 and I don’t know where she’s writing from, but I’ve never heard of such cheap prices that weren’t junkies living in their car with cocks in their mouths.

            It’s true, we, the people (99′ers) were broke and pissed off in 2011. The bleak economy changed the way everyone experienced and thought about class  (the driving force behind RSW http://therumpus.net/2011/11/recession-sex-workers-14-phoenix-rising-an-interview-with-nadia-payne/ also on The Rumpus). I think of sex workers as a hole in the class argument.

    For instance, my friend Jen was raised middle class-ish. Then her father got hooked on heroin. By the time she was a teenager, she was doing heroin with her father, who sold her out of his van. She would call a liquor store to reach him. She later got clean, became a paralegal to the stars, drove a jag and made $75K a year. Then she went back to sex work, specifically doing sensual massage (handjobs) in NY and LA. Which is how I originally got into the sensual massage game—she passed me her clients when I was in grad school. What class did she belong to? How about the nice girl from Jersey who got involved in an international prostitution ring?   My friend L has stripped for years in LA and NOLA. She’s from a semi-rural depressed economy in Indiana. Her parents had money. She calls herself “spoiled.” But her dad lost his business and now when she visits him, she sleeps in a cot in the kitchen. She’s getting all A’s in college where she’s attending. She’s decided to do escorting on the side. What class is she?

It’s not as simple as making a good decision or bad decision. There are only decisions.

Palm Desert 2011

                                          There is always a price to pay.

    It seems  like a million years ago, J and I were feature dancers at the Market Street Cinema. We had a certain amount of money we needed to make, we put on four shows a day: 11am, 4 pm, 7 pm and 11pm and then worked the audience, by giving lap dances. We were two of very few white women at that club and were considered the “clean girls.” At first, I thought it was because the girls found out we didn’t do drugs or drink alcohol, but it was because we didn’t do any “extras.” Then the club jacked up the stage fees to $180 every four hours and everyone started doing handjobs, including J and I, leveling the playing field.

In this molting, I hope to write like a motherfucker in 2012. 

Our little Xmas Tree

Lastly, thank you for your generous donations to my blog: reading me or sending money. You know who you are.

2012-Bring it.

   It was time to leave. The empty Tularosa apartment had tacks and bobby pins embedded in the ratty, brown rug along with ancient hairballs from my fussy male cats. The window ledges were covered in paw prints where they sunned themselves for the last eight years.

       I held the last garbage bag in my fist and stole a long glance out the windows. There was my view of Griffith Park, the observatory and the Hollywood sign. There was the giant jacaranda tree now withered and red, dropping dead, wet blossoms. And downtown: there were the buildings in a grey cluster, circling the hazy lavender sky. I’d exchange one fig tree for our Christmas tree, decorated with antique ornaments, a lemon and orange tree out back. I’d leave a shared deck for a private porch to sip espresso with my sweetheart. I’d depart from Flore Café in search of the one supreme taco truck in Highland Park.

            The last thing to go was my motorcycle, which wasn’t my dream bike at all, but an affordable replacement bike–a right now bike. My favorite bike was Grace Landing, a cherry 1971 blue Honda CB 550-4 with the original paint job, and, she hated Los Angeles.

          She stalled on Sunset Boulevard in the August heat. The potholes on Beverly were hell on her wheels. The stop and go on Wilshire made her start smoking. She seized up, refused to particpate in my hour and change commute to Century City. A beautiful girl with brown hair and blonde bangs told me to ask Roberto because he fixed motorcycles out of his one bedroom apartment in an alley behind Circus of Books in Silverlake.

            “Bring it by,” he said. I towed her to his house and I sipped coffee on his steps, and got a migraine, which were consistent at the time.  Every Sunday after the breakup with the stoner, one look at the sun and rainbow prism zig-zags appeared on faces and cars. When I looked at Roberto, he had rainbow prism horns. I laughed, knowing I had twenty minutes before the puking began. Just enough time to  chit-chat, diagnose the bike and get home to my cool, dark bathroom floor.

             “You have fuses?” he asked.

            “Yep.” I showed him my tiny glass fuses I always kept in my jean jacket pocket.

             “Give me a couple,” he said. Roberto stood in a circle of tools;  three motorcycles deep in friends’ bikes. He had cute flirty orange 70’s Honda in his kitchen (he built if for an ex-girlfriend) and lots of clown paintings on walls. His house looked a lot like mine, with rusty 1950’s blenders and vintage aprons for curtains. Roberto was a dark cloud boy; an ex-junkie with permanently greasy fingernails and a quiet Bad Santa sense of humor. We talked about motorcycle like they were lovers.

            “It was love at first sight. I drove her straight off the showroom floor from Scooteria in SF. Honda in SF right off the lot. The name on her title was “Grace Landing.” Seriously. That was the name of the lady who left it sitting in her garage for over ten years while she collected dust, which is why I had every cable, wire, carb and clutch replaced. New battery. When I first got her, she died on Folsom five times so I’d push her all the way to the Hansen brothers. She took a lot of work and cash to get going. When she finally ran, she started in the fog, hail, rain and even snow. Every day. Every night.  I slid on wet cardboard on hills, I leaned down too far, stalled out on the occasional steep hill, but I never dropped her and she never dropped me.”           

            Roberto nodded and tinkered with a bike he built from scratch. It was matte black with no ignition, no mirrors.  Grace Landing stood next to it. He got her started.

            “I think I finally built the bike that’s going to kill me,” he said, smiling at me then his bike.

       He had a patch over one eye from rogue metal dust that flew in his eyeball while welding his bike. I didn’t know how to respond, but I admired his drive. 

      A year later, I sold Grace Landing to a hipster over 4th of July weekend in LA, when I was a few hundred short my rent. The buyer was a hipster and it was his first bike. He could afford to pamper her.  I’ve sold the clothes off my body for a burrito. I’ve sold lap dances, my own company, the touch of my skin, but selling Grace Landing was the only time in my life I regretted selling something I loved.

              I didn’t realize that until it was too late. 

Smoke by Brian Perkins

    It’s Christmas and I think about Roberto and  Grace Landing. I still look for her on the road, at the BBQ joint on Angeles Crest highway, in parking garages around LA and on Sunset Boulevard. I thought I spied her on the street and waited for the owner to arrive for a few minutes, then bailed, fearing I’d seem like a slimy stalker.

             Roberto didn’t get killed by the bike he built. He shot himself in the heart with an ak 47.

A while later, his bike showed up at my friend’s shop. I bought it, but never got it running. The guys at the shop worked on it, gave it a new battery, tinkered around with it for months on my dime. They tried to start it with the wires, but it was mocking and quiet like Roberto. “I’ll take that one instead,” I said, pointing to a puttering brown 1974 CB 450 Honda, which I still have. When I look at it I think of Roberto sometimes and wonder if he was looking out for me, that he didn’t want me riding his bike. Fucker. 

        I left a fabulous two-bedroom Victorian apartment in the Mission in 2002 to follow my stoner boyfriend down South after he announced, “I’m moving to LA with my band.” We crammed into a lime green apartment the size of a bathtub across from a gas station on off Sunset Boulevard where I awoke to the sound of Armenian Senior citizens hocking loogies outside our bedroom window each morning.

            I’d left my soaring lap dancing career behind in San Francisco, bought a bullet-holed, 1978 crap-brown Disco Nova from a guy named Clyde for three hundred bucks. I drove the bucket to Simi Valley at 5a.m. to learn how to draw blood so I could work at a clinic where I tested porn stars for HIV so they could stay on the payroll. 

            I was born to hate Los Angeles. It’s in my Northern California DNA. We had a burl plaque hanging in our house with black letters carved neatly: “I Don’t Give a Damn How it is done in LA.” I clenched my teeth and gripped the steering wheel in hundred-degree heat with no air conditioner, learned to tie a tourniquet and crack jokes, while porn stars told me about their kids and boyfriends. I filled tubes and spun purple black blood and only one guy passed out in my chair. When he came to, I realized I had to ditch Hollywood and the stoner. 

            I learned that to break up with someone I had to wait out the shakes, allow the breakup worms to crawl up my throat and out my mouth. I’d stave off migraines for a few months. I left the harmonica playing stoner with his patchouli-drenched armpits, his bong and his orange Tupperware jar full of quarters on Curson Street and I drove another U-haul to Silverlake where I subleased a Spanish bungalow apartment on a quiet street called Tularosa (tulip+rose) where my friend Sheila was storing her stuff before she moved in with her girlfriend. 

            I allowed Los Angeles to melt me with her ridiculously un-snowy Christmases and her unconvincing rains that grew on me like a bright fungus. Tularosa had trees that grew so ferociously that their roots punched through sidewalks and mutilated the landscape and their conviction made me giggle with relief. Silverlake, my new neighborhood, was Hispanic and queer, with avocado trees that stretched their limbs across the street to the other side, with branches so hefty, they made ghost shadows on the ground below. Tularosa was where Bird of Paradise plants grew big as buildings like Audrey II and orange and pink bougainvillea smashed through the neighbor’s fences, grabbing at the sun. In the U-haul, the stoner’s cat and I both howled and trembled so much it was hard to see the freeway and drive. Black streams of mascara made tracks down my face. I didn’t unpack my boxes for weeks and I used that U-haul memory as a reason to avoid moving. I’ll stay here forever, I thought.

            The sublease became my home after I met the landlords, a soft spoken elderly Hispanic couple who called me “Mija” (“my daughter,” “my girl,” or “honey”). I made an offer on the apartment that was painted the color of raspberry ice cream and had a Pepto Bismol pink kitchen, red bedroom and lots of windows with views of the trees.  I stacked my collection of 1950’s blenders on top of the refrigerator and hung my six black velvet bullfighting paintings that I swiped from junk shops in S.F.  The walls were repainted recently. I had two accent walls the color of Tapatio hot sauce and my room was four shades of grey. In my mailbox, I got letters and bills for Carlos and Miguel. I asked the landlord, Anita about the history of the other tenants.

            “Who’s Carlos?”

            “My bother, Carlos died of HIV.”

            “In the apartment?”

            “One time he was so feverish he jumped out the living room window and landed on the lawn, then crawled back up the front stairs.” She chuckled. “He was covered in blood, like a horror show. He was real confused.” Places contain memories. I never intended to stay in Los Angeles. I’ll give it five years, I thought. It’s been nine. I’ve lived in the Tularosa apartment for eight.

               Carlos threw himself out the front windows, and fell onto the grass below, where the stoner’s cat loved to play. I recently smashed eight windows in the living room while pole dancing in a rainstorm.  The pole slipped off the ceiling and six little glass panes fell onto the ground. In the driveway, I buried the ashes of the stoner’s eighteen-year old cat,  picked limes out off the tree and squeezed them onto steamed zucchini. I’ve eaten figs right off the vine at the bottom of my stairs, ripped open the flesh and stirred them with yoghurt.

Life and death swirl in every room and in each corner on Tularosa:

In the kitchen: I made my mom’s lemon bars, sat in a chair while my friend bleached my hair and ate cheese. I’ve made out with boyfriends fed hungry cats and listened to podcasts. I’ve had photo shoots, had arguments, made my first blueberry pie and made thousands of cups of tea. 

In the bathroom: A junkie I dated shot dope. I wrestled needles out of my friend Jen’s hands years ago. She died this February of an overdose.  I gave two different men their first golden showers. One paid me.

In the bedroom: I slept with my mom in my bed one mother’s day then drove her to Vegas to see Celine Dion. This was the last vacation we took together because shortly after Vegas, she was diagnosed with bile duct cancer and battled illness for three years. I fell in love with a comedian who didn’t love me back. I hugged my boyfriend and cried for my mother night after night. He never knew I was crying. My nephew, stepbrother and stepfather and mother have all slept in my bedroom. I’ve massaged clients in my room for cash and had a one-night stand with an actually kind of well known rapper. I’ve fallen in love again and again.

In the living room: I rehearsed burlesque routines, memorized a lecture on Hubert Selby for my senior lecture at Antioch.  I tied a naked boy to a chair and blindfolded him, then invited my girlfriend in to take pictures. I gave a five hundred-dollar girl/girl naked show on my couch to a guy who found me on My Space with my friend, Bunny. We called the guy “the kid” because, although he was our age (mid-30’s), he dressed like a fourteen-year old surfer. During the blowjob, I surprised him with a tight slap on his cheek which made all of us laugh. After that, he was referred to as “the kid I slapped.”

In the living room:  I adopted kittens, I hung my mother’s wedding dress in the closet, the stoner’s plants grew into enormous trees and reached the ceiling. I wrote and wrote.

            “Who’s Miguel?” I asked Anita, holding en envelope addressed to him.   

On the deck: I’ve sat with my mother in the sun on blue metal chairs and read books.

She adored the stoner’s cat. My bluesman got on one knee and proposed to me there. I got engaged.

In the driveway: I’ve broken up with men. I’ve dropped bags of groceries on my toes. I’ve slipped on the stairs in spike heels.

In the driveway, Anita watered her cactus and lavender plants. I mounted my 1974 Honda, which I had kick-start to get it to turn over.

“Miguel, my other brother, died in a motorcycle accident,” she said.

“Be careful, Mija.”

 I put on my red, white and blue helmet. “I’ll be careful,” I said. There were tears in her eyes as my bike sputtered down the driveway. Or maybe they were mine. 

Humboldt

When I reached for dollars to pay for my coffee at Cafe Leche, I couldn’t find the picture of my mom.  I kept it between my CVS card and VONS card behind my Driver’s license. I panicked, holding up the line of rabid coffee addicts, but it was gone. “Do you want a receipt?” the boy with the black bangs asked. The people in line crossed their arms. It was the only cafe with electricity today. Line out the door.

            “What?” I asked, thinking Shit. I must’ve tossed it in a trashcan outside that 7-11 while I cleaned out my wallet because it wouldn’t close due to being stuffed-not with money-but with expired gift cards, receipts and business cards with my notes scribbled on them: TP, cat food, toothpaste.

            “No.”

             Outside that 7-11, a scraggly homeless guy squatted against the wall with his dog and watched me empty my wallet into the trashcan. His eyes were on the loot.           

            “There’s nothing worth anything.” I shrugged.

            “Was wonderin,” he said.

Portrait by Romy Suskin

In the picture, that was the size of two postage stamps, my mom was around thirty-five and tan, smiling in the sun wearing a big floppy hat and a flowered bathing suit top. The top could’ve been worn by the likes of Jane Mansfield or Scarlet Johansson.  At eighteen, her teeth had been knocked out by a horse, one of several accidents with horses that resulted in stitches in her face and mouth. Her replacement teeth were even and white, her Dentyne smile was relaxed and warm. Her fierce love for horses, stubborn and life long. She always got back in the saddle, and insisted that horse play a major role in our family vacations, but I could never forgive them for their volatile skittishness. It seemed misdirected and unfair. Even though there are still horses being boarded on her property, I barely go near them, beautiful and majestic as they are. I’m both comforted and scared of them. They’re not to be trusted.

             In the picture, it was summer. Mom reclined against the back of a seat on our white ski boat named, “Moonraker” or Dream weaver,” like band names from the movie Boogie Nights, airbrushed in cursive on mirrors from the county fair. On the moonraker, while my parents sipped Lowenbrau, I drank Fresca and Tab. I worried about calorie intake by age nine, got my period at ten, and was barfing by eleven.  My mom’s brown wavy hair was in ponytails under the floppy hat.  I remember thinking she had such pretty hair as I watched her ski behind the boat on doubles, her tan knees and tight life jacket with delicate girl buckles fastened across her perfect “C” chest. She floated on the top of water and held the handles of the taught rope, arms straight out in front of her, strong, determined. “Hit it!” she yelled.  She always got up and she stayed, until she let go of the handles and lifted her arms in the air while the rope dropped lightly into the soft water. She sank too. But it looked more like floating.

            Waterskiing trips were decades before the lexicon of bile duct cancer: carcinogenic free radicals. Whipple surgery. Abnormal cell count. Dead cells. White cells. Radiation. Chemo. Weight loss. Hair loss. Four abdominal surgeries.  Feeding tube. Going septic. Bile duct cancer loves gall bladder cancer loves pancreatic cancer. She loved horses.

            I don’t remember ever getting up on doubles, but my memory’s a loser: I tend to remember my failures. My dad liked to impress. He’d give thumbs up to my mom at the steering wheel when he was ready to go. She’d gun it.  He skied on a single ski, thighs bent and bulging, white ripples on either side of his bent knees. I remember his mahogany ski red as dirt, skidding on top of the water. He leaned over on his side, his elbows out, handles touching, facing each other against his chest. He dared the rope to slack, the water sprayed like a couple of wet wings sprouting from his calves. He leaned so far his ear nearly touched the water. “Down!” I yelled and raised the orange flag high in the air so the other boaters would see that we circled around to where he bobbed in the water. We’d wait to hear if he wanted to do it again. “One more,” he said. I have my dad’s thighs. According to him, I skied on them too, on doubles. I did get up. And, I need to keep getting up.  

             I’m not grieving according to plan. The pie chart is all askew. I’ve climbed out of the sex work cave but I’m still enraged. The helplessness shows up when I’m in her house, the guilt sneaks up and I have an urge to die. I jog and do yoga to burn off the anger but it leaks out. I look like her when I wear my seventies jackets. I didn’t get a birthday card from her again. She was great with cards. She had the kind of penmanship that lands the job, in the days when that mattered. I cried myself to sleep in my boyfriend’s arms the other night. Inconsolable. I kept her picture in my wallet and made her crock-pot chili but it still leaves me motherless. I miss her. 

            My impressive dad who built his own house and business, did all his own plumbing and still gets up at 5a.m. to work every day at age 70, compared skiing memories with me over Thanksgiving. I got some things wrong.

For instance, the Mt Bachelor snow blizzard when I learned fear in a whiteout. I remembered standing in line inching up the steep hill to grab the T-Bar chair lift and then returning to the lodge because he acted weird, quiet and scared and I couldn’t see. He remembered this: I was seven or eight. I’d been skiing for four years by then. We were on the T-bar chair lift at Mt. Bachelor. We rode up the mountain and the blizzard began when we were at the top and needed to get back down. He was scared.

It was white and silent and icy. We couldn’t see but I could hear him.“Stick close by,” he said. I remember my green and blue snowsuit with snow melted on it.  I listened for the clicking of my dad’s skis smacking ice. I remember the silver starfish shape of his pole hitting the ground, brushing against my K2 ski. He was made of sounds that day: “Stay close,” he said. Click Click Click. White snow surrounded us, and I followed the tips of his skies.  

*This post originally appeared in Room 220: Antenna Gallery here http://press-street.com/room220/

“The women station themselves by the sides of the roads that traverse the undergrowth, weapons at the ready, killing all those that pass.” -Monique Wittig, Les Guerilleres

The women who strip at the Bruiser travel from Florida, Denver, Mexico, Alabama Georgia and Philly because they heard there’s money in the clubs in New Orleans, but they’re too late, the money’s dried up. The Katrina money’s spent and the oil spill is yesterday’s bad dream. New Orleans, the final frontier and last surviving economy, is hobbling on her sprained ankles.  The women struggle. They say they make in five nights what they used to make in three. I’m one of twenty-nine mercenary women on the schedule on this rainy Wednesday night.  

A woman sniffs loudly in a bathroom stall, walks out and adjusts her long blonde hair. Words drip out of her pink lips like warm milk: “I told him, I promise. Mommy will wake up tomorrow, in time.” In the mirror, her pupils are tiny pepper flecks. “…I’ll take you to the fair tomorrow.” Her goopy smile, a lie. She walks past me. 

    Downstairs, on the floor, there’s a cold draft in the black and red room, so smoky, it’s like dancing in a chimney. Our hair smells like ash, our shoes are scuffed. Our knees have blue walnut-sized bruises from the marble stage. We wear dresses that aren’t actually dresses. We whisper into ears. We shiver, rattle our beaded glitter bracelets like furious snakes, hoping to get lucky, begging for a $20 yes that leads to a $60 yes. My neck’s out and I’ve nursed two migraines in four days. My thighs burn as I walk across the floor.

 Rhinestone necklaces fall between our boobs, drop into the pink, black and red spandex below. We have legs like gold ropes and eyes like slits and we climb over men. We’re ravenous spiders that swing our hips to dance music and hide our worry. We bend over and smash our bellies onto the stage while lights press down on our skin. We dance fast and then slow, like an erratic heartbeat.

The women miss their mothers. What fathers? They ask.  The women are hungry.

“I’m six weeks pregnant.” The woman from Georgia says while smoking a cigarette. She giggles and touches her shiny turquoise belly, to smooth the fabric creased there.  

    “They’re going to fire me,” she says.

 “No they won’t,” I say. The woman from Philly walks by.

 “The manager said I need to lose weight.” Her forehead crinkles.

 “Unless they say you can’t work, you’re fine.” I have an impulse to pet her and feed her chocolate dipped strawberries. I want her thighs to stay thick, her mouth to stay plush. The Black Keys play. The Stones. Britney Spears. A soundtrack of jagged disconnects in a mostly empty club.

    The women slither between chairs and perch on sets of knees. They say they have lower back pain. They say, “This sucks. It’s slow. It’s dead.” Philly wears red; her skin is the color of biscuits. Sexual attraction is fickle. Thin women aren’t sexy to me. They look small, brittle and hard like Adderall. They smoke cigarettes and don’t have an innocent ass that jiggles. They’re all sharp angles and tight grins. They’re victims of an impossible standard of beauty, cult of the Master Cleanse.  I’m a wake-up-I’m-a-fat-stripper-girl. 

The women frown. “One more dance, then, I’m gone,” they say.  They lean against the bar, their buttery skin bulging through fishnets and lace.  Their rosy cheeks fat with bubblegum and their purses empty.  

Bauhaus: "Burning From the Inside"

                                                            ***          

            The men who come to the Bruiser are from Chicago, Connecticut, Norway, Minneapolis, Montreal and Florida. They come to strip clubs knowing in their bones they’re moving towards death. Their knee jerk response is to grasp at life, grab at beauty and dance with it.  

The intimacy of sorrow forbids a person from fully merging with another.  The man in white pants sips a Michelob. “Tell me something about why you’re here,” I say. When he was thirteen, he was hit by a drunk driver and pronounced dead. According to his parents, he said, “Get away from me, I’m not dying,” to the priest. Five hundred stitches later and a rebuilt hip, he’s like new. 

“Don’t be afraid to fail. If you don’t fail, you’ll never know what it is to reach your potential,” he says.       

 “Let’s have a profound dance,” I say. I consider failure, how easily I feel crushed by agent rejections, while at the Bruiser, I shrug off rejection and keep moving. I circle my hips and removing my bra, and commit to failing.  I noticed the scars on his face, delicate gossamer strings over the surface and a crooked eyebrow.  

   “Americans have forgotten how to dream,” he says, eyes closed.  I nod because he’s right. He hands me sixty bucks.

   “Go out there and fail,” he says. Our dance is over.  I walk over to a very drunk fat man who’s yelling something. He tips Philly on stage and waves his arms around wildly. “Do you want to sit down with me here?” I ask.  I want to sooth him, sober him and take him to AA. He smells like puke. His shirt is wet.  I hear him say, “Touch me like you know me.” He collapses in a chair and reaches out his hand to me. It is also wet but I hold it anyway. 

     “Okay,” I say. He reaches in his wallet for sixty bucks. I take the money and lead him to the couch for our dance. His pants are wet. We are both failing together—me, in a job I’ve failed to leave, and the puke guy for failing himself. We are all failing tonight, I think, the men and the women. And the drunk guy says, “Touch me like you know me,” like he’s rehearsing the line until he gets it right.