My First Night Ever Stripping

There ain't no such thing as a frown in the titty bar.

The following piece is a follow-up to my popular essay, “I Never Wanted a Whore for a Daughter.” Both works are excerpts from my memoir, Too Pretty To Be Good.

Mama hadn’t wanted me to leave Danville. Her hair still white from my suicidal antics, her skin ashen from her own heart attack that followed, Mama finally lost her mind altogether for the remainder of the nineteen hundreds when Daddy died.

Daddy got sick, which was unusual because he was a man who could not be felled. When he missed work for two days, Mama knew something was wrong—perhaps the flu? A trip to the doctor—and then to the hospital—and then an emergency helicopter ride to Duke later, and Daddy was a hundred miles away by the time I came home from a sleepover early the next morning. As I walked through the front door, I found Mama standing on the stairs, frozen. “Your daddy’s got leukemia,” she said, just as flat out as if she were telling me it was going to rain that day, and then she promptly folded to her knees.

During the time of his dying, I found my mother’s diary. Among entries of chemo dates and prognoses, I discovered scrawled large across a page, I WANT OUR LIFE BACK.

She never got it back.

That raven-haired beauty with the red nails and dark eyes turned to ash, clutching a photograph of her dead husband and sitting silent in his chair. She was only forty-three then. There was no room for me to lose my own mind, so vast was Mama’s sadness, so hungry, so jealous. I wanted to bellow for my daddy, the one who had loved me with such tenderness and left with such suddenness, the one whose love I’d forfeited with my depravity; I wanted to rip open my chest and dig through my entrails to find what viscera were his—to hold, bloody, a piece of the man I’d never have back: here, this heart that loves storms, this is him; these lungs that breathe lightning, these are him; and now I shall feed these organs, pulsating and hot, into the dirt.

But I knew better than that.

A home can only hold so many black holes.

And so, as Mama imploded, I shattered outward.

My brothers showed up for Daddy’s funeral, and then promptly returned to the lives they’d created since they’d moved away. I alone remained in Evil Land, occupying a home heavy with the presence of Daddy’s absence, a carton of Marlboros forever unsmoked on the kitchen counter, a tube of Alizarin Crimson leaking on his easel, dust collecting on the paint, a cloud across a sunrise. I alone remained with Mama in that house that had once held three people, but now held two and a closet full of clothes for a dead man. Daddy’s lunchbox became Mama’s child then. She paced the house cradling his left-behind things while I raced out the door.

That house was haunted, but not by Daddy. He died and I haven’t heard from him since.

---

It was the year 2000. I was nineteen, a college freshman and recent Danville escapee, not so much tasting freedom as devouring it whole. I’d spent my girlhood watching boys win trophies—where I’m from, women play supporting roles; we occupy bleachers. Not me, not anymore. If my brothers could leave Danville, so could I. College provided the perfect excuse, a degree in English the natural course. I spent my free time composing poems—coffins on beaches, corpses, birds squawking doom in your ear.

“You ought not be so goddamned dark,” Mama told me, handing back a journal of poetry she’d dug from my closet.

The failing grades that followed Daddy’s death might have kept me from the top universities my peers were attending—as with packed bags and smiling parents, one by one classmates embarked upon freshman year. However, one school did accept my application, despite the ugliness of my senior grades—Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. Along with my acceptance into college, in turn I accepted loans bigger than any money I’d ever seen. “They’re just giving thousands away,” I told Mama, wonder in my voice.

And so, when I started stripping, I can’t say I needed the money. I had Uncle Sam’s borrowed cash in the bank.

No, it wasn’t money I needed.

What I needed—was vindication.

What a reversal I would pull upon my enemies!

And that’s how, just few days after leaving Danville, I journeyed into the shadowy labyrinth of Richmond’s warehouse district and walked into my first strip club.

A half-orphan, the town slut, unlovable by all. The one the boys liked enough to touch, but not enough to claim. Hands clasped in the dark of closets, but not in the hallway at school. Did you know you can get paid for touching boys in closets?

---

I sailed past the goons flanking the front door and up the stairs to the dressing room, hoping I’d have time to gather my nerves. Come eight o’ clock, all dancers were expected on the floor; one minute later would get you a fine.

The dressing room announced its presence through the nose first, waves of Exclamation perfume mingled with burning Newports. As I crossed the threshold into this unfamiliar lair, around me naked women surrounded mirrors, preening. Towering above everyone else in the room, her hair a golden mane, her eyes creased at the corners but nonetheless painted with the artful care of a veteran hoe, sat a regal individual, spine straight. Unlike most of us, this woman was no kid. The pride of her posture, the upward tilt of her chin, the way the others smiled brightly in her face and whispered behind her back, alerted me: this one here is the queen.

“Honestly, Babygirl,” she muttered as I walked by, “what’s with the pantsuit?”

Before I could answer, she pulled a trunk from beneath the makeup counter. Spray-painted on it were the words, “Sheena DO NOT TOUCH.” Diving elbow-deep into a mass of garters and thongs, she reemerged at last with a sequined two piece. “A little sparkle,” she said, handing it to me.

I stared at her offering, unsure if this woman I’d just met actually intended for me to wear her thong.

I’d been in rooms with naked girls before—after gym class, or at a pool party. In those spaces, however, we crouched over our bodies, backs curved and protective like turtle shells, pulling one shirt over the other before removing the first, threading bras through the arms of tees—afraid of our own bodies, afraid of each other’s.

“Go ahead,” Sheena urged, shoving her bikini into my hands. “Put it on.”

And so I did.

As she fastened her top around my ribcage, she nodded toward the mirror.

“Tell me, Babygirl—what do you see?”

Flesh. Supple and full, straining the strings of the bikini. Breasts, newly-bloomed and high. Black-rimmed eyes. Red lips. A face painted with Wet N’ Wild and inexactitude, a woman’s art practiced with a child’s hand. At my feet, the Norton’s Anthology of American Literature peeked from my bookbag, my supposed-life in a pile on the floor. I kicked it under the dressing room counter, spun in the mirror and grinned. Of all the boys that had touched me, of the all men with whom I’d laid, never had anyone made me feel like a woman the way Sheena did that night.

She stepped back, hands on hips, scanning my body, examining her handiwork.

“Remind me again what your name is?”

“Lindsay.”

“No, not your real name. Your stripper name.”

“Oh. Lux.”

“Lux! Where’d you get that?”

“Well, it’s Latin for—”

“Whoa, kid, whoa. That ain’t gonna work. These men don’t want no damn Latin.”

“Well, how about…luxury? Do they want luxury?”

“Babygirl, you are luxury. That’s your story and you’re sticking to it.”

---

Clad in Sheena’s bikini, I scanned the floor, hands sweaty and plans big. The air curled with smoke. Richmond, Virginia: we’re in tobacco country now. Everybody in the world smokes here. Women in six-inch heels stalked the floor like Amazons through the jungle, eyes sharp for prey. In this dark corner, or that shadowy enclave, huntresses camouflaged in fishnet and neon—or nothing at all—stroked men’s arms and egos, smiling and nodding their way into small fortunes. How gentle the kill. Beneath the flickering light of a neon PBR sign, one of these towering goddesses rose from a table, taking a man by the hand, leading him into a darker room, a place we all want to go, but for different reasons. Money. Power. Excitement. Validation. Whose desires are whose?

Among the swirling whirlpool of wants and needs that had driven me to this place, one desire now dominated my heart: I wanted to be an Amazon, too. I wanted my hands bloodied green with tender that would prove I’d won—never mind that I couldn’t quite identify what battle I was fighting. The dark years of cruel laughter and rescinded invitations had been a steady march towards this fate, each wound another brick in the construction of me.

No one gave me a tour of Hot Styxx. No one gave me lessons.

I don’t remember much about that night: a blur of electric nerves and ill-gained White Zinfandel, a man my professor’s age inviting me into the dark room, running his broad hands over my body, the first of many hands that would caress me that night—so many men, none of them children, like me. On couches: women riding men. Men laid back in pleasure, haloes of steam dotting the mirrors behind them. A tall blonde, a statuesque marvel all legs and implants, balanced on a couch, her spiked heels sinking into the upholstery, her crotch pressed against the face of a skeletal dotard, the grim reaper himself inhaling fecundity.

“Let’s sit,” Professor of the Roving Hands told me, gesturing to an empty spot amidst this Caligulan pandemonium.

I don’t know what to do with this man—but then again, I do. I do what I’ve done in basements, in locked bedrooms, in the backseat of cars, with boys I desired. I ride this man, whom I don’t desire, but I can still find the right spot with my thigh. I untied the knot of Sheena’s top and let it drop.

With sudden ferocity, an old woman appeared from nowhere and jerked me from Professor’s lap.

“You stupid kid!”

A Pall Mall perched on her lip, she sunk her nails into my flesh.

Meet Mama, the house mom.

“You can’t take off your goddamned top during a dance!” she hissed. “Didn’t they teach you anything?”

And that’s how, just one hour into my first shift, I earned my first strip club fine.

Of all the memories I possess of this, my night of initiation, I remember not the face of the professor, nor the faces of any of the men who would follow. Yet clearly I remember the crisscross lines beneath Mama’s eyes, the way they led like crooked country roads to the firepit of her pupils. I was afraid of the heat in those eyes, the power, the rage against stupid kids like me.

---

I paced the dressing room, my cheeks burning with humiliation.

“That’s probably a sixty-dollar mistake,” Sheena surmised. She cocked one leg up on the make-up counter, pulled her thong to the side, and inserted a tampon. With a pair of scissors, she snipped the string a hair’s breadth from her flesh, tucking the rest inside.

“You want my advice, Babygirl? Set a goal. Walk in thinking, I’ve got to make four hundred dollars tonight. At twenty dollars a dance, that’s twenty dances.”

“Four hundred dollars?”

“Four hundred is what you want to clear, Babygirl—you’ve gotta make a lot more than that. The house, the DJ, the bouncers, the house mom—every one of ‘em will have a hand out at the end of the night. So go ahead and add another ten dances to that twenty. And one last thing, kid—lose the frown. There ain’t no such thing as a frown in a titty bar.”

She massaged her fingers into her cheeks.

I’d soon know this pain, the soreness of smiling without end, the knot in your jaw that spreads like a strap beneath your chin, a muscle cramped tight to shut up complaints and replace them with quiet loveliness.

“Sit down and ask him, right off the bat: ‘How do you feel about corny jokes?’ Everybody likes corny jokes. Then tell him this:

“’What did the egg say to the boiling water?’

“I don’t know, what.

“It said, ‘It might take me a while to get hard, I just got laid.’

“Then—hit him with the sale.

“When you grind, grind him slow. Only pick up the pace as the song ends. When he asks what you’ll do when you get home tonight—they always do—tell him: masturbate.

“What you’ll really do when you get home tonight: feast upon a peanut butter sandwich.”

She turned in the mirror for a final inspection. Bending over, she spread her cheeks, checking for any loose string that might betray her blood, her messy humanity.

“Get hard,” she told me, over her shoulder. “Most these motherfuckers ain’t gonna want you.”

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Thank you for reading. I publish generally once a month. Ask me anything in the comments.