Spent (5 page)

10

“Y
ou can't be a
bald stripper,” Claire said.

“Why not?” I rubbed my newly fuzzy head. My hair was short and blonde. Bianca painted the walls of our apartment seven times and finally settled on battleship gray with burgundy trim. I decided to buzz my hair off.

I wanted to feel the rain on my scalp. I wanted to look like Sinead O'Connor.

“Put this on,” she said. She handed me her curly brown wig that smelled like it had been held captive in a bucket of Downy fabric softener since 1985.

“How does stripping work?” I asked.

Staple guns and fabric swatches covered the floor from our reupholstering frenzy that morning. Now Bianca was repairing the dryer. I thought about Claire and her girlfriend working together. They did girl-girl shows at strip clubs in the Tenderloin and made good dough.

“Can I just walk in and audition?” I asked her.

“You should come work at New Century,” Claire said.

I offered her a free line of crystal on a glass block, like I did for most of Bianca's customers who were also friends.

“Do they touch you onstage?” I asked. Claire snorted the thin, white line then thumbed through Bianca's tower of CDs. I handed her Rickie Lee Jones' version of “Rebel Rebel” and Sinead O'Connor's “Stretched on Your Grave” extended remix.

“Something more upbeat.” She handed me the Breeders CD. Pointed to “Cannonball.”

“What do I wear?” I asked. I heard scratching inside a wall. I pulled back curtains and there were construction workers digging a hole in the ground with a jackhammer. I pulled out my entire underwear drawer and emptied it onto the bed. I grabbed a vintage white veil, held it in place on my head, and marched around the room. Maybe I'd pull a string of pearls out of my pussy. I thought of it as performance art, after all.

“Here.” She pulled a striped, soft, ankle length T-shirt dress out of a vintage bowling bag, tossed me some scuffed plastic heels and a pair of tight, spandex black shorts. Shadows moved across the streaked walls. “You need a g-string underneath,” she said.

I tore through the pile of panties and fished out a black one.

“Take it off on your last song,” she said, matter of fact.

I pulled on the baggy, unflattering dress and the too-big shoes and slunk over to Bianca who looked up for a sec then disappeared into her toolbox. Claire nodded. I peeled it off and shoved it in my backpack with a ripped pink lace slip then I poured two long, thin white lines from a Ziploc and offered her a straw. “Lady lines,” I said. She snorted it and cringed. A single fat tear fell from her eye. “What if I don't get hired?” I asked. I snorted my line and sniffed hard, then swallowed bitterness. Numb all over.

“They'll hire you. They need girls.”

On the bus with my three CDs, and my scraggly wig, the tick-tick-tick sound of mice echoed behind me.

I studied Camille Paglia's
Sexual Personae
and embraced her shock tactics. I'd rebel against male desire and straight attractiveness. Yet, I was going to make my body available to men. Sure, I'd dance, convince them to part with their money, then laugh all the way to the bank. In queer circles, stripping was the solution to the rent problem.

That was the plan before I knew anything about golden handcuffs or hustling, when stripping was art.
Making three or four hundred bucks in five hours would give me plenty of time to study for my midterm exams. Of course I should strip.
I needed rent, and I was getting bored hanging around the house all day with sketchy tweekers camping out in our room, singing Throwing Muses songs. Still, the thought of it made me so nervous I wanted to throw up—which was no reason not to try it.

11

N
ew Century Theater was
no theater. It was a cobwebbed dive on the corner of O'Farrell and Larkin Street, next to the famous Mitchell Brothers club. New Century was the Mitchell Brothers' skanky stepchild. I was anxious about the audition, so I walked to the corner store for gum. A tranny in a wheelchair was bumming change out front while smoking a Pall Mall. “Nice wig,” she said. I dropped a couple quarters in her Styrofoam cup. She glared at me. “You idiot. That's my coffee.”

I scurried through the entrance to New Century and stared at the posters in the windows featuring stars with boobs the size of watermelons. No way would they want my barely B-cups. My hands trembled. “Can I audition today?” I asked the man behind the counter. He told me his name was Manny and handed me a job application form to fill out. New Century was a dark, musty theater with metal seats facing an enormous stage and a long, dramatic catwalk with poles on both sides of the stage. The air reminded me of old mattresses and Lysol.

“Go upstairs. I'll come get you for stage,” Manny said.

I walked up some steep, narrow stairs into an attic with a low ceiling and gray metal lockers. I put my bag down on a chair and got undressed. I secured my frizzy wig and attached my faded white wedding veil. I peered into the big cracked mirror and smeared on bright pink lipstick.

Downstairs, two identical twins were onstage dressed in black PVC dresses with ringlets that dripped down their backs. They were gliding across the stage to the Pixies' “I Bleed.” Their creamy skin glowed illustrious under the lights, their dresses fell down to the black stage, and their eyes were locked together in an embrace. One unfastened the other's bra. They were mesmerizing. I would have to do something extreme to get hired—I was clunky and out of shape. I had stage fright. I felt dizzy and clumsy.

When my turn came, I was blinded by the lights as “Cannonball” by the Breeders started. I jerked and moved too fast but couldn't stop. Speed bubbled inside me, and my jaw ached from grinding my teeth. I slipped into some cheerleader moves, but tripped. Claire's shoes were too big. I held the pole and noticed goose bumps on my arms. It was freezing out here. At the end of the song I pulled my slip off, tore the straps free then walked backstage. I fastened my wedding veil in place and crawled back onstage, punctuating the drama of Sinead O'Connor's goth remix. I flung my bra into the darkness—towards the only man I could see. I aimed for his glasses, which reflected the stage lights. The song was ending, so I grabbed the pole and hoisted myself up to stand, pulled off my wig-veil and tossed it onto the stage in front of the man. I slid onto my belly and lay face down with my arms straight out in front. I figured the glasses man in the immaculate white shirt would give me my first lucky lap dance.

I felt proud—I'd reached the end of my first routine. I walked offstage thinking,
This is something I could get used to. It might be something I could excel at. This could work…

“Don't ever do that again,” Manny said, wagging his finger at the wig in my hand.

“Do what?” My heart was about to explode on his shiny brown shoes.

“And, dance more slow.”

“Oh. Sorry.” I fastened the wig back on my head.

Being scolded wasn't part of my feminist manifesto.

“You want to work here, you have to work day shift,” he said. He paused like he was expecting me to decline his offer.

“Okay, I will. Thanks.” I smiled widely and gave him a thumbs up and walked into the dressing room where there was a white board with names written on it like “Violet” and “Luscious.” Manny looked at me, a sharpie in his hand.

“Well?”

He exhaled a great, impatient sigh. “I don't have all day, princess,” he said.

“Camille?” I blurted out. After Bianca's Karmann Ghia and Camille Paglia. I immediately regretted it. Camille sounded like lavender-scented baby wipes or tampons. I wanted my name to be “Blue” or “Roxanne” or something ballsy and artsy but it was too late. For now, I was stuck with “Camille.” Maybe that name would psychically transport my girlfriend into the musty New Century theater so I wouldn't have to be there alone.

Manny walked down the creaky stairs and back to his perch behind the front counter. I sat at the dressing room mirror with busty girls who were applying face powder with expertise under dark yellow lighting. I felt shabby and greasy. I was jonesing for more speed, too. I didn't match up, not in comparison to the women around me. They paid top dollar for their costumes. This was a joke, right? We weren't supposed to dress like the girls in
Penthouse
. We were playing with artifice and identity, no? We were revolutionaries fucking with the artifice of representation and having a face-off with the phallic transmission system. The artifice was on our side, right? I crumpled in the mirror, afraid of my image. My pupils were dime-sized, eclipsing the blue. Dark brown shadows collected underneath my eyes. I hadn't slept in three days. The sound of hyper rats scraping along the ceiling kept distracting me as custard-skinned girls glued on eyelashes and curled their hair with necks like tipsy swans.

Mom kept calling. I kept deleting her voice mails, but I always listened to them. I always listened to the whole thing. “Where are you? Where's my girl? I've been trying to reach you. Call me when you hear this. Call me.”

I secured the wig
with bobby pins and walked downstairs from the dressing room into the audience to watch and learn. I was paranoid. My skin was cold and jittery, and I heard girls whispering. I stood around, maybe for an hour. I was a failure—way too flat-chested for this job. The women around me were soft and languid and knew the lingo. I was brittle and stiff. A blonde girl in white smacked her gum right beside me.

“What do you say to them to get them to get a dance?” I finally asked.

“Ask them if they wanna play with the kitty,” she said and blew a bubble, staring straight ahead. She had pink barrettes and white knee socks. Her name was Madeline, and she kept ordering pizzas from the pay phone, but the pizzas never showed up. Her nappy dealer boyfriend did. He sat in the audience waiting for her with his arms folded across his chest. She sat next to him for a long time. I counted five songs that she stared into space. They didn't look at each other. Then he split. When I saw her later in the dressing room, her skin was gray and dead.

Onstage, a woman danced with long red braids and a tiny waist. She was at least six feet five in heels.

“I don't know if I can do this. I'm in love with my girlfriend,” I said to Madeline. She bumped against my hip with hers and laughed. “Don't make a fuss, just get on the bus.” She giggled and drifted away like a phantom Barbie.

I did more meth.

It didn't take long.
The touch of strange hands crawled across my thighs, ass, and breasts, and my first instinct was to swat them away. Soon, revulsion became compliance and compliance turned into assertive hustler. I enjoyed the power I had to turn men on with a gesture, a look, a phrase. I kept my feelings at bay in order to do my job.

It's not that I made killer money right away. I rarely left New Century with over two hundred bucks, but it was enough to keep my speed habit fed and wine bottles around the apartment, at least for a while. I could walk into New Century whenever and leave whenever, as long as I did my stage shows and paid the stage fees. I could wear black lacy kinder whore costumes. This other thing I became, “Camille,” was not a stretch.

Stripping was another rush I came to need. Not that I had other skills. I drifted from lap to lap and collected cash from men who became devoted customers. I watched and learned from girls like Danielle Willis. She was skinny and pale and long from her nose to her fingernails. Sharp knife hip bones jutting out of her expensive Victoria Secret lace bra and panty sets. She floated across the room in buckle boots, a fishnet shirt, and not much else; she danced to Siouxsie; whispered things to the men, and to me, while bent in half. She ensnared them; she secured regulars. I learned by watching her.

She was just so fucking sexy.

Camille was this other thing, who smiled when she was sad, and grinned even bigger when she was angry, and laughed when she was rejected. As Camille, I tried to maintain my militant feminist ideals within the context of lap dancing. I tried to feel empowered while swatting men's fingers away, and I always came home with cash to Bianca. But often what I really felt was mangled, by the way the system rewarded me financially for disregarding my boundaries. I broke my own rules, crossed my own lines of conduct. Survival took over in the cavernous frenzy of the clubs as wallets opened and closed. I told myself men weren't invited into my life or my skin, and then began to have orgasms during lap dances—which did feel like power, for two minutes.

I allowed myself to get off so I could focus on work. I'd find a man who wanted me and gyrate on him like a piece of furniture until I came. I never shared my orgasm with them. It was only for me. I felt distraught that I'd morphed into a caricature, ignited by men's desire for me. I became that thing for that cash, and the line that once separated the dancer from the girl reduced to a fine spray as the system had its way.

12

T
ime was a hurricane
with Bianca: weeks and months of snorting and fucking; more former than latter. Then silence. She ignored me so I stripped more, moved on to a bigger and better strip club called Crazy Horse. We stopped talking. We grew chilly from the speed and from the neglect that happens when two people love each other plenty but love their drugs more.

When I wasn't at Crazy Horse, I worked part-time at a used clothing store, Wasteland, sorting clothes and arranging shoes with all the local punks. Marya swaggered in one day to shop for a belt buckle. She was the Rhinestone Cowboy of dykes with black leather motorcycle pants, steel horns pierced through her chin, and spurs on the heels of her black boots. She passed me her number on a torn piece of binder paper, which I wrote on the beam upstairs in the break room with a black sharpie. I called her on my lunch break.

“What are you doing later?” she asked. My heart flopped out of my rib cage and onto the floor, begging for water.

“Not much.”

“When are you off work?”

“I live with my girlfriend,” I said.

The next day, she came into Wasteland again. She brought me a six-dollar burrito and a huge orange soda in a white cup. I crossed and uncrossed my legs in a plastic chair that wobbled and made a farting sound when I shifted. We made each other laugh, and I realized it had been months since I had been touched by someone who wasn't paying me.

“I'm one year sober,” she said with one hand on my knee. “I'm going to a meeting on Capp Street at ten o'clock. You could come.” I was snorting a quarter of speed every couple days. I'd soak the baggie in my morning coffee to get out of the house and on the train to the Haight.

After work, I walked
to the empty apartment Bianca and I shared, uncorked a bottle of red wine that was on the kitchen counter, and took a swig. I found a ripped red and black slip and put it on with fishnets and platform boots. Then I walked across town to the AA meeting where I knew Marya would be. The AA meeting was in a tiny, bleak, dark room. Marya glowed under an old, dusty fringed lamp. The coffee tasted like dead water but I drank it anyway, listening to addicts complain about their rent being raised. I sank into a stained couch that smelled like pee. Winos and hookers wandered in from the dim streetlights and doorways, looking for cookies and shelter from the relentless night. The guy reading from a white paper said that anyone who had consumed a drink or drug in the last twenty-four hours should not share but just listen. I bristled with anger and guilt.

Marya tapped me on the shoulder.

“I'm sending a driver to pick you up from Crazy Horse—Friday at seven.” She put her arm around my neck and looked down my slip.

“I can't. You should leave me alone,” I said, jutting my nipples out at her. Bianca and I chose meth over sex. Marya woke up something else, something that scared me. I went home and snorted a fat line of speed, praying it would save me like a God.

Friday at Crazy Horse, I piled my costumes into my locker and faked a headache when Marya's truck showed up with the hazards on out front. I got into the truck. “Hi,” I said. The girl who was not Marya drove in silence with a smirk on her face until we got to the top of a hill, across from a park where gay men sucked each other off in the bushes. She parked and opened my door and pointed towards tiny cement steps leading down to a basement apartment.

Marya opened the door and nodded to the chick then she grabbed my arm, tugged me inside, and slammed the door. She held a long knife to my face. I wished she would. “This is what you're gonna get if you say anything but yes,” she said. Her grin was greedy.

She pushed me towards the black leather sling in the middle of the living room. She flogged me for a long time with a leather paddle, then fucked me with a huge black silicone cock while choking me. It was so much better than doing meth and listening to Joni Mitchell with Bianca.

“You're mine now, ” she said.

Hours later, I took a taxi back to work at Crazy Horse, covered in bruises and hickeys, bloated from the maple sugar candy Marya had fed me. I made my usual lap dancing dough, which I brought home to Bianca.

“I made a mistake,” I said.

Bianca's eyes were closed. Her stomach was concave and her hip bones poked out of my favorite flannel plaid boxers. It was rare to see her sleep. She was still and quiet. She had been up for three nights, swallowed a couple Zanny's, and crashed hard for twenty-four hours. Her breath was shallow and slow. She was my favorite Bianca when crashing. “I slept with someone else,” I said. I rolled over beside her and faced her.

“You slept with what?” She shot up and leapt across the room. She wouldn't look at me.

“She came into my work. I slept with her.” A fat line, the burn down my throat, to get gone. I wanted to fall inside her and fill the space between us with speed. I wanted to fix her, fix us.

“I want to stop. I'm going to AA,” I said.

“You're one of them now.” She was right. I was one of them. An addict, a coward, and an AA clone quitter. On top of that, I was a cheater.

I knew how to stop all this. I grabbed a serrated knife from the drawer and held it in the air. She looked at the knife, and then me, and cried “no, no,” in a nasal voice that seemed to come from the next room. I held it up. The knife was something we could agree on. I hurled it at my left wrist. I didn't feel the cut at first, but I knew it was there. I collapsed to the floor slowly on my knees. I felt dizzy, light-headed relief and there wasn't pain exactly, just a floating. I stared longingly at a bottle of Jameson. I heard The Pixies CD on shuffle and imagined dancing in PVC buckle boots. My limbs buzzed. The knife was bloody and must have dropped from my hand because it was on the floor, too. Blood squirted onto the yellow tiles. My right hand drifted over to my left to cover it up like a piece of paper over a random turd. Bianca tied my wrist together with a faded blue bandanna that she had around her forehead earlier. I watched her lips say, “Don't look down. You'll freak out.” But I saw the inside of my arm, the veins and tendons and deep red river, paused, not flowing.

The voices stopped.