Forthcoming in Monkey Puzzle Magazine, Fall Edition
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Fourteen years after you’ve quit dancing, when you find yourself in the middle of a conversation about strippers at a wedding reception, or a book club, or any of the many places that these conversations begin, stay silent. Soon someone will admit they have a friend of a friend who is a stripper and then the inevitable elbow jabbing from the others, “Sure, your friend is a stripper,” someone will say. To which they will all laugh knowingly, the superior, non-stripper race.
You love being in the middle of these conversations. They never believe you, sweet, normal you, was an ex-stripper. So stay silent awhile before dropping the bomb.
“Well my friend told me that she makes a thousand dollars a night.”
“Yeah, I heard that, too.”
“I knew a girl in college who put herself through medical school as a stripper,” (this usually comes from a man). “She worked at night and went to medical school during the day.”
“I hear it’s dangerous. Stalkers and psychos trying to follow you home every night.”
“Oh, it is,” another assures. “My friend told me they are required to take taxis.”
Consensual nods and mock worry. Poor little strippers.
But the mystical, elusive stripper is in their midst and they don’t even know it. They sip chai lattes, unaware. Timing is everything. It has to be done in such a way to elicit maximum humiliation—not too early that everyone hasn’t revealed their fleshy pink judgmental insides, but not too late that the topic is beginning to wane.
“One of my friends went to The Romper Room and the dancer bent over and a crab jumped into his eye.”
“That’s disgusting.”
“He must be lying.”
“No, it’s true. He even had to go to the doctor.”
The best place to drop the bomb is in a group of women. When it’s mixed company you run the risk of impressing the men too much (they’ll mentally undress you, place you against an imaginary brass pole to see if the story stands), which will turn the women against you.
“You know, I would do it,” one of the women confesses.
“You would?”
“Sure,” she says, “if I was getting a thousand dollars a night.”
“Well you know, they offer pole dancing classes now at such-and-such yoga studio.”
“We should all go.” Giggles. Painted fingernails.
The moment to drop the bomb might be passing. If they collectively agree to go to pole dancing classes, then your announcement will only come off as bragging. Or worse—they’ll invite you to come along.
“I was a stripper for four years,” you say. The women face you, realizing for the first time that indeed you haven’t chimed in on this conversation. “Really?” one of them manages amidst much throat clearing and backpedaling through the conversation in everyone’s minds: Did I call them sluts? Whores? Damn. Should have kept my mouth shut.
This is the golden moment, of course, so let it last. Shrug. “I didn’t have to take out any loans for undergrad.”
An inaudible sigh—yes, you were one of those, the student strippers, the “good” ones, studying your textbooks in the dressing room. Thank god, you can hear them thinking. Don’t tell them about Suzi or the bachelor parties. “I was sixteen.”
Protests crease their foreheads: Impossible.
A club would get shut down for that.
The owner would go to jail.
That’s what laws are for.
They’ll want to call you full of shit but they won’t dare. “How did you manage that?” one finally asks.
“I said I was twenty. They never checked my ID. As long as I didn’t drink they didn’t care.”
The women don’t like this answer. They fidget. If it’s that easy then nobody is safe. “This was in the nineties though. The laws might be stricter now.”
Relieved, they all nod—of course the laws are stricter now. Whew. What a heathen time that must have been, when sixteen year-old girls could walk into strip clubs and get jobs and no one was the wiser.
You know the truth, though—why would the laws have gotten stricter? It’s not like there’s an orange alert crackdown on underage strippers. But at this point they’re very uncomfortable so you find a way to let them off the hook, throw in your “official” two cents about the sex industry and then gracefully suggest a new topic of conversation. You have several options. You can go the “Funny, the laws are different in every state” route, or you can go the “Want to hear the weirdest thing that ever happened to me as a stripper” route.
There is a third route, though. You could tell them that, at age sixteen, you felt like you had one-upped society—presented with limitations, told your greatest asset was your looks, you found a way to give yourself financial autonomy and a higher education. That you pat yourself on the back for your clever outsmarting of the society that placed the limitations on you to begin with. Fuck them for their pity. Every stripper you ever met was there on her own accord. There were no pimps waiting in the parking lots. You were more protected dancing on stage than in the real world. At least you chose to be there. At least you got to say yes.
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