Read the original here.
Searching for Suzi,
a flash novel, by Nancy Stohlman
Monkey Puzzle Press,
Boulder, Colorado, 2009
What happens to a young girl whose mother encourages her to enter beauty pageants as she herself had done, and whose father’s advises her at age 14: “If you want to keep a man, learn to swallow”? Whose parents were swingers until her mum found Jesus. Whose dad continued the open sex with the neighbor lady until she moved away and he took flight himself, leaving his daughter a note saying she hadn’t been much of a daughter. She becomes a stripper, that’s what, at age 16. And works the trade for the next four years.
This is “Natalie,” which was her stage name and is the only name we know her by. She now has a Masters degree, is in her mid-thirties, married, the respectable wife of a research scientist, mother of two children, and living a comfortable life in St. Louis. She has reoccurring dreams about strip clubs, however, and one particularly vivid dream about a stripper named Suzi Cooper—her first female lover—throws her out of her life of domestic conventionality and on the road in a quest to find Suzi. Not that she and Suzi had been that close; in fact, Suzi was rather trashy and stole from her, and the lovemaking had been more like fooling around. It’d been a passing thing 14 years ago. But for reasons that are not easy to articulate, the quest is on.
We follow Natalie back to Omaha where she grew up, and to a series of clubs—the Sugar Lounge, the Red Umbrella, Dick’s Yum Yum Club, the Love Shack—where she picks up on the old smells, “that mixture of cigarettes and perfume, designer fragrances with slogans like ‘If you like Giorgio, you’ll love EXCITE’”; while she quite comfortably handles herself at the bar, knowledgeable in strip-club protocol, not blinking an eye at the outrageously overpriced drinks, even game for buying a drink for one of the strippers when approached. Because they’re just doing their job. She knows.
She views the stage from the other side now, judging the dancers— “young and stiff,” she sees one; “mesmerizing,” she thinks of another, who flashes a glittery beaver. Some “Stripper Tips” are thrown in along the way as well as “Dance Moves,” and the reader gets a real feel for the seedy atmosphere where men pay to look, and for the chaos of the backstage dressing room, "the counter covered with abandoned curling irons crusted with brown hairspray, eyeshadow and blush ground into the Formica." Our narrator throws out mixed feelings about the scene: on the one hand, she can view it with some disdain (“another hour of your life wasted, thrown like pocket change to the sidewalk”), but she also knows the power it can give a woman (“Never, in any other aspect of your life, have you felt so uninhibited.”). It’s what you make it, this world of stripping.
The narrative switches from first to second to third person, from present to past and in between, but there is an immediacy to it all that keeps one turning the pages, 87 in all. We could call it a novella, or as the author prefers, a flash novel, but by whatever name this is a great romp into the world of stripping. Page by page our plucky narrator reveals more of herself until the perfect ending lays it all bare. J.A.
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