Back to Stripping
After two years in grad school, it was time to return to hoeing.
Man, this one’s is a favorite.
It was Spring 2007, and I was on the verge of moving alone to Atlanta to pursue a PhD.
I had no money—no boyfriend to comfort or control me—
and a long history in strip clubs to which I was contemplating a return.
I vividly remember writing this piece. I was drunk again, and writing in the middle of the night—again. The sheer volume of cigarettes I smoked INSIDE THAT APARTMENT—OMG. I can still see that ashtray just piled with butts. This memory only makes me WANT TO GO BUY A PACK OF CAMEL LIGHTS IMMEDIATELY AND TAKE THEM SHITS STRAIGHT TO THE DOME, but I digress.
Anyhoo, I wrote this meditation on my future as a back-from-retirement stripper as a threat to my secret lover as much as it was a working-out of my own thoughts.
Spoiler alert: on the day of our final goodbye, I would give this man a manila envelope filled with all the things I wrote about us during those torrid six weeks. That was always my plan. Therefore this piece, along with all of the others in the Tick collection, were written always with the intent that one day, this dude would read it all.
At periods in my life of great tension or uncertainty, I have returned again and again to the strip club. I am now 42 and it is not without some measure of sadness that I reconcile myself to the notion that I will likely never strip again, despite the immeasurable damage to my psyche that stripping wrought.
Even though some of my most unhealthy patterns were exercised in those clubs, so also were my greatest strengths, which I draw from still today.
Back to Stripping
Sometimes, when I think about going back to stripping, I do feel a little scared.
I think, wow, stripping again, and this time I have to show my pussy. I don’t want to bend over in men’s faces. I wonder, does it have to come to that?
My expenses have doubled since my boyfriend left me, and financially, I never planned on making this move alone. My car is breaking down. But I’m moving to Atlanta, where the clubs are all nude, and I am a stripper. I will also be beginning my Ph.D. in the fall.
I’ve thought about asking my grandmother for her car: a Buick Le Sabre, silver, huge, automatic transmission, everything I hate. I thought I could say, Hey Granny Audrey, why don’t you forget about the money you were going to give me for graduation and just give me your car instead? I could tell her, You need a new car, something zippy. But shit. She just gave me a grand a few months ago—the first time as an adult that I’ve ever taken this kind of money from a family member. Only once have I asked my mother for money—one hundred dollars—which she denied.
I quit stripping for two full years while I’ve pursued this Master’s degree. Grad school has been hard. I’m leaving this town feeling hurt and rejected. I tend to romanticize the stripper lifestyle I once lead. A portrayal:
Play dress up four nights a week. A constantly shaved snatch. Go out the other three nights a week, buy your friends drinks, get your own for free. Expensive Cuban dinners. Professional manicures. Sleep until one, nap from three until five, shower, work at the club, divide your money into piles of denominations on your boyfriend’s bed. Smoke weed. Have a snack. You made eight hundred dollars tonight. Seventeen this week. Go to Vegas. Fuck it.
But in those days, I lived in a house with five friends. My best friend was working on her Master’s in Sociology, and therefore I had someone in the house who could ground me intellectually. I had a boyfriend who adored me. He sent me flowers to the strip club. I wore pasties at work, a thong. I was never really naked. The house was never dark when I came home.
But men licked all over me. They put their fingers in me. They came in their pants, leaving my thigh wet. Some of them did worse. I have always been able to disconnect, and I have studied for history tests mentally while humping a fifty-year-old man’s erection. I know, right? Fucked up. To see it written, without the benefit of being couched in self-deprecating laughter—sure, it’s fucked, even to me. And I have no morals.
But I loved going to bars, traveling, department store make-up; I loved the constant assurances that I was beautiful. I enjoyed having a bedroom drawer that was consistently filled with thousands of dollars in cash. At times I have placed the money on the bed and rolled around in it. Good God, the new clothes! The new clothes!
Now I’m moving again, and I’m doing it alone. I have no idea what this type of thing entails, and I have managed to entangle myself with a man who occupies most of thoughts but who is unfortunately moving in with his real girlfriend in two weeks, and otherwise I’m leaving my friends, and otherwise I’m going broke—I’m just going fucking broke. I can barely force myself to go to the grocery store and yet I have to figure out how to move to Atlanta in the midst of all these terrible goodbyes and crushing emotional paralysis. Whenever I think of this situation, all I can think is Yuck. Get this out me.
But I have to be practical.
I have to make money.
I can’t ask my grandmother for a car.
I have to pay rent in Atlanta somehow. And get utilities connected. And eat.
The meager assistantship at the University will kick in eventually, but I’m still faced with two empty months. No income. No friends.
I think: I’ll strip when I get there. If I strip, I won’t have as much time to be sad. I’ll dedicate myself. I’ll make a lot of money, I’ll buy a new car, I’ll write like crazy; I will produce a new show. Maybe I’ll play some music. Yet I know if there is a goal I pursue out of these various self-improvements, it will be the money-making. On all the other, more creative pursuits, I can’t trust me right now.
But, alone there in Atlanta, coming home night after night to no one and darkness and whimpering dogs, what will I be with only the strip club in my life? Can I be okay with strange men blowing on my pussy if I can’t go home and be hugged by a man that I love? What if it’s four a.m. and too late to call any of my friends, and I’ve lost the only person I could possibly call in the middle of the night, lost him to my East Coast and his real life? Can I be okay? Is it a choice I can make? To be okay?
The new clothes.
The new clothes.
There’s no limit to what I can afford.
-LB, 2007
Read my literary retelling of this tumultuous period in my life in my memoir, Too Pretty To Be Good.
ASK ME ANYTHING IN THE COMMENTS, DUDE. IMMA ANSWER.
Also! Have you ever been a stripper? What was your experience like? And if not, what do you imagine it would be like? What would be fun? What would be hard for you? Talk to me in the comments. I want to know all about you.
I always worried so much for you back then.
Shit, I still worry now - that's friendship for ya, I guess.
But stripping has always looked so, so hard to me. Impressive, yes, but mostly hard in every way fathomable.
...
It's sweet seeing our young faces up there. Love you.
When I was about 8 years old I had an extremely vivid dream (nightmare?) where I was an adult and a stripper. I stepped into the dream while on stage dancing. I remember feeling the feathers from the outfit I was wearing, I remember a man leaning close to my cheek while I knelt down to relieve his money, and I could feel his hot whiskey breath on my neck. I remember feeling myself force a smile and a thank you as I twirled away. I could smell the smoke in the air and hear the clinking of glasses. I had never been around whiskey drinkers and hadn't even seen a movie that portrayed a strip club at that point. So, I think I was a stripper in a past life. In this life, the only thing that kept me from trying it was body dysmorphia in my 20s and the weird recollection of that dream. Looking back, at the time I would have considered it I was massively impressionable and addicted to everything...I don't think I would have walked out of that world alive. I love that the act of pole dancing has become so defiant and free. More empowerment. Less whiskey breath. Thank you for being so honest always. You've inspired this little past degenerate to drag out my old journals, organize and share them in a way that I always dreamed. ♥️