It was not a big-deal first-time performance. I was extremely drunk, and even more nervous. I wiggled myself out of my clothes and did pretty much what the other girls had done, while trying my best not to fall off the stage. The crowd cheered and whistled and I kept asking myself "What the hell are you doing?" Then Carol rang a bell, signaling my exit, and I stumbled back to my table. And that was it. But then about an hour later, a hippie-ish woman in Birkenstocks leaned over to ask me if I would consider dancing professionally. She worked at somewhere called the Lusty Lady, a good place for beginners, she explained, because you dance on a stage with about four other women behind a sound-proof piece of glass. It didn't pay exceptionally well for stripping--just $13 an hour to start and $15 an hour after six weeks--but there was no contact with customers.

At first I said I wasn't interested, but I took this flyer she had anyway and at home later I started to think about it. My office day job didn't pay all of the bills--especially the $2,000 one Visa kept sending me--and I was already thinking about taking a second job waiting tables, which I had way too much experience at for my liking. So I thought about this stripper thing. And you know, I was like twenty-two and this subculture, or whatever it was, was unknown to me and seemed kind of cool. And I enjoyed dancing, and I didn't particularly mind getting naked, and my boyfriend said he didn't care. So I finally decided it might be a really easy way to bring in some extra money and I went in for an audition.

I took the bus to the Lusty Lady, a generic club near the financial district. I told the bouncer at the door that I was there to become a stripper, and asked to talk to the manager. He looked me over from head to toe, with a long pause at my B-cup breasts. I suppose I passed his test, because he brought out the stage manager, Shannon, who took me into the dressing room. We walked through a swarm of naked and half-naked women applying make-up, brushing their hair, straightening panty hose, calling their kids and so forth. Shannon instructed me to take everything off but the heels on my feet. Since everyone else was naked, it didn't seem that weird. I danced three songs on a stage with the regular girls and I guess I did well enough--even though I was the only one who seemed to be sweating--because Shannon offered me four nights a week. I took it.

The Lusty Lady was a glorified peep show--this wasn't a gentlemen's club where you actually go up to the tables and do lap dancing or anything like that. The dancing stage was U-shaped, encased in Plexiglas and surrounded with booths that customers could enter, pay 25 cents and a curtain would rise to let them see the dancers. The shifts weren't that bad because you were physically separated from the customers by the glass. They couldn't talk to you and you could only see their heads--so you didn't have to deal with watching them jack off.

I liked the other dancers a lot. They made the work bearable. There was a lesbian couple with the stage names Velvet and Carmen who were dancing to get money for their punk-rock band. There was Wynona, a forty-ish, Asian mother whose family thought she was a secretary at an investment bank. She only worked day shifts. Then there was someone who called herself Candy who worked as a grade-school teacher by day and stripper by night. Her husband came in about once a week to watch her dance. And there was Luscious, a single mom who had this weird way of smiling while she yelled obscenities at the customers--they couldn't hear her through the glass. These people were all pretty cool and funny. And they were nice to me. We didn't really socialize, though. Every now and then, we'd go to a cafe and eat after work, but not much. We never went to bars or clubs. We were all stripping because we needed the cash, so we weren't about to go out and blow it after work.

But the thing was, the cash was really not flowing so great. I had to buy a lot of stuff just to get started--fancy panty hose, four-inch heels, a boa, many bras, lots of see-through lingerie, sparkly make-up--and with those expenses, $13 an hour just wasn't going very far. So I decided to start working in the Private Pleasure booths, which initially I had told myself I wouldn't do. These booths were in the back of the Lusty Lady, but they were the place's real money-makers. Each booth was outfitted with a bench, a box of Kleenex, a microphone and a money machine for the customer, and behind a wall of glass, a mini-stage, a microphone and a meter attached to the money machine for the dancer. The minimum was $5, and that didn't get the customer much--only three minutes of tame dancing. The rest they had to haggle for. I usually charged $20 for dancing in unusual positions, $30 for masturbation, $40 for a dildo show. I got to keep half of what I took in. I'd say I made an average of $60 an hour, which was a great improvement.

In a way, though, I missed the stage dancing. One of the many drags about the booths was that you could see and hear the customer. I tried to focus on their faces while they jacked off, but that didn't really help much. The booths were also very physically exhausting to work in--much more so than the stage. When you're on the stage, men put in 25 cents for thirty seconds of dancing. Most of them don't stay for long. But in the booth, a lot of the men who go in there stay for quite a while. They can talk to you and they have these fantasies that can sometimes get very involved. And you have an incentive to give them a really good show, because you get to keep half of what you entice them to put in the money machine. For example, a guy comes in and says "I want you to hang from the ceiling." You tell him that you don't hang from ceilings. He says "I'll give you $30 if you do it." So you hang from a bar attached to the ceiling.

Also, on the stage, you got a ten-minute break every hour--and you'd take it because all you were earning was an hourly wage. When you're in the booth, you could take a break if you wanted to, but you were earning a percentage, so you didn't want to leave. A lot of times, I would be dying to go to the bathroom, but I'd usually wait until my shift was over. It really got to be torturous, especially because the booths were kept very cold. I don't know why that was; I'm sure it had something to do with men taking longer to get hard in a cold room and therefore staying longer and paying more or something like that. For me, the cold just heightened the feeling of having to go to the bathroom and prolonged the misery.

Shannon, the stage manager, was my boss. Her boss was the owner, who was this middle-aged lady who was never there. Shannon was about twenty-seven, very phony. Most dancers didn't like her. She was only a dancer for one month, then when a management position opened up, she got it because she had a business degree from years ago. Shannon would tell you, "we're all family," but that wasn't reality. She'd fire you in a heartbeat because they didn't want the customers to get tired of the same dancers. The older dancers, in particular, would get fired routinely over insanely trivial things--like forgetting to punch in their timecard or something like that. They never had a problem with me though, probably because I was so young.

The majority of customers were perfectly decent, but occasionally somebody would try to mess with you by calling you a cunt, a whore or worse. I really dreaded the weekly baseball-capped college kid who would inevitably get pissed off that he didn't get more for his five bucks. And every now and then, somebody would get really violent--you know, pounding on the glass and screaming and shit. That freaked me out. I was protected by the glass, but still, it's just really frightening to see that kind of anger directed at you. You could call security, but Shannon wasn't always supportive. I mean, her attitude was basically, "You're a stripper, what do you expect them to say?" A lot of times, she'd ask you what you did to get the guy going.

Strippers are constantly propositioned by customers. Like, I mean every night. Shannon told us to respond in a humorous way. Say something like, "Oh me, I never leave this place, I live here." If that didn't work, you could be more forceful--just say no. I would usually pretend that I couldn't hear them. Or I'd try the forceful "no." I never tried the humorous route. I just didn't want to get into joking around with these guys.

There wasn't any kind of typical customer; I dealt with everyone from frat boys to a McDonald's counter man to a schoolteacher to an ex-con to a lot of stockbrokers. And every one of them was capable of turning violent. It started to really warp my sense of men. Every guy I saw walking down the street turned into a customer in my eyes. Even my boyfriend exhibited customer-like qualities. He'd say something like, "you need to brush your hair" and I'd hear it as, "brush your hair for me," with the implication being, in my mind, that he wanted to have some fun. And of course, he would also ask for sex, which further demoted him to the role of a customer.

When I first started working, I would occasionally get excited while performing for a customer, because you know, you are kind of stimulating yourself. But I quickly learned to control this feeling because I didn't want to give the customer the satisfaction of seeing me stimulated. And after that, sexual stimulation just pretty much became disgusting to me. This carried over into my sex life with my boyfriend. After performing three dildo shows in a night, I wasn't exactly enthusiastic when he would initiate things when I got home. All I really wanted to do then was take a shower. I showered all the time.

The longer you strip, the harder it is to retain a positive view of men. Long-term dancers--at least the ones I met--were all bitter. Except for the lesbians. They seemed to be very grounded and able to deal. I told most of my friends what I was doing. They weren't judgmental at all--in fact, in general they were very supportive. But when I told my male friends about it, a lot of them would launch into a confessional about how they've been to strip clubs before, and they enjoyed it. Most wanted to see me dance, but I told them that if I saw them there, we really couldn't be good friends anymore, because then they'd turn into customers. It got to be very depressing.

Men fetishize strippers and give them a mystique. I guess that's a stereotype, but it's true. They have ideas in their heads about strippers--they'll be great in bed, they'll be uninhibited sexually. In fact, it's the exact opposite; I became almost anti-sex while I was a stripper. They also probably think it will be a status thing with their friends. The idea isn't founded in reality. If these men who fetishize strippers actually dated one, they probably wouldn't like it.

I quit stripping after about a year. It was a very smart decision. Certain people can't handle it--obviously I'm one of them. I think it really depressed and disturbed me. It was much more tiring than I'd imagined. And much, much more sleazy than I imagined. When I first started, I felt like in a sense, it was the theater. I was made to feel like a performer when I walked into the dressing room. There were overstuffed couches, make-up lights. Towards the end, I walked into the same room and felt completely different about it. I saw dirt I hadn't seen before, grime I hadn't seen before--the place felt so slimy. I just wanted to throw up.

I wouldn't recommend the job to anyone. It was a negative experience. You have to be extremely tough, and even then, I think it gets to you deep down. The dancers I met who said, "I love stripping" had only been working at it for a month. Be a waitress.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . .

TO ARCHIVE