Excerpt from "American Gypsy"

Chapter One

The cab drops me in front of the Sugar Lounge, duffle bag in hand. God, if I have to look at this place for one more week I’m going to shoot myself. And no, it’s not because I’m being pimped out on the side or dodging my lecherous boss or hooked on heroin. I’m not making $1,000 a night, I’m not snorting cocaine off the bar, and nobody is stalking me. Just because I work in a strip club does not make me a victim. I’m nobody’s victim.

Mostly what I feel today, as I shut the taxi door, is the sheer monotony of it all.

I started stripping after I left home because working graveyard shifts at Village Inn sucked and I couldn’t think of anything else that paid better. And since I would not swallow my pride and ask for money from my parents, or even consider going back to their fucked-up reality of a household, I had to figure something out. I’ll admit I was attracted to the whole drama of it, too; it comes from being raised by a military pervert who measured a woman’s worth by her attractiveness. My poor mother wore red lipstick and big wooden heels until the day she divorced him and finally let herself go gray, god love her.

Joe, the bouncer with skin like moist obsidian, towers half under the Sugar Lounge’s red awning and half in the open door. His suit is tailored, his bald head buffed to a shine. Above him the neon silhouette of a woman flickers with low wattage. He looks at his watch disapprovingly as I zoom past him and into the club, waving at the bartender and a few of the regulars: Lou, the rich cowboy who always comes on Thursdays and tips $20 bills when he gets drunk, the Chemistry professor in the corner with the foot fetish. They’re auditioning a new girl on stage as I hurry to the dressing room. She’s clearly never danced before—the stiffness, the overdone Flashdance moves. I remember my own audition and my cheeks warm with embarrassment.

Upstairs half-dressed dancers slam lockers and apply melted chunks of cheap lipstick. The go-go bar has a particular stink from years of unaired sweat and smoke and perfume; the smell is worse in the dressing room because sweaty high-heels ferment behind lockers night after night. I shimmy into a tasseled two-piece and strap on a pair of high-heeled spikes, smudge fat black lines around my eyes and rub red lips together. The air cools while descending the stairwell, the walls on either side covered with lipstick-kiss marks—the carved initials of a thousand women who have passed through the doors. My eyes rest on the faded purple of my own mark, though I don’t bother touching it for luck.

The club is crowded for a Thursday. The stupidest part of our job is to sit with customers and get them to buy us $8 cocktails when we’re not dancing. I visit the DJ booth and request “anything rock and roll,” then flash a smile at the patrons sitting stag at cocktail tables before the staff catches me sneaking away to the dressing room. Too late. I’ve been spotted. I acquiesce, steering into the closest swivel chair as if that’s where I was headed all along and wonder to myself: Would you like it better if this man, this Chemistry professor with the Russian accent who always smells of lavender soap, pulled out a $100 bill—would that make it more interesting for you to sit here and smile and lie about the details of your life? Would that change the fact that you know that under the table he’s handcuffed himself together in order to play out his dominatrix fantasy in a socially acceptable way, that he’ll expect you to retrieve his wallet from his coat pocket as usual and pay for all the drinks with his money? Does he suspect that you’re drinking $8 glasses of orange juice, that the shot you ordered for yourself is just water? Does he know and just not care, and if you were to yell butt out just buy me a drink, bitch, would he find this secretly exciting and tip you extra when he finally uncuffs himself to drive home? You decide it’s good to have power, even if it’s only sexual power. It raises you a few notches in the food chain. Well, you say, how’s your week been, as if the fact that this slightly overweight man with a European nose isn’t handcuffed, and you talk about things, boring things, what books you’re reading and what movies you’ve seen. You always attract the professors and the intellectuals, you’re too All-American to be nasty, there’s too much Elsa Brown Modeling School running through your veins. The television anchor men still wearing their suits, the visiting celebrities—that’s how you met Sean Penn and the Superstars of Wrestling. Jake the Snake autographed one of the dancers’ ass but you’re not like that, you’re the one who makes people snicker when she cusses—and would you be happier if he gave you $20 bills rather then $5 at a time so you could hurry up and be done with it? Well, you say again, drink gone, shot of water followed by lime, I think I’m up next so I should go get ready, and you tip yourself $40 from his wallet as he watches because, really, what is he going to do about it, and you walk up the stairs, two drinks marked off your nightly bar quota and another hour of your life wasted, thrown like pocket change to the sidewalk.