My Last Night Ever Stripping

No good stripper ever says “retire,” but I haven’t been a good stripper for a long time.

WHAT A LOOK! This was my favorite outfit of all time.

I wrote this piece in 2015, at the end of my stripping career.

I had re-entered the game a few years earlier, after a decade-plus spent pursuing postgraduate degrees, when I at last graduated and my disillusion with the academy was complete. Now a doctor, wife, and mother, I hadn’t meant for stripping to yet again take over my life—but of course it did bc it’s the greatest addiction of my life and also who doesn’t love self-abuse and vanity and money all at once lol

Side note: today a fellow mom at the playground asked me if I thought that going to graduate school was a good idea. I told her, flatly, NO. She looked stunned at my frankness, but I cannot in good conscience encourage some poor soul desiring a life of the mind to pursue a PhD in some shit like “Art History” without warning them that they’ll still need to go to ITT Tech afterwards to get an associates degree in plumbing. Or, you know, do like I did:

I quit the academy and went back to stripping. I did very well financially and reputation-wise in my final stint hoeing, and indeed was voted Best Stripper in Atlanta the year I wrote this piece. I hate to brag—just kidding, I love it—but there was a time in my life in which I could walk into almost any strip club in far-flung locations globally and dancers would know my name. Some even asked me to sign their titties. What a life.

Nonetheless, as a lifelong stripper in her mid-thirties tends to do, I became burned out on shaking ass for old dudes until 4 a.m. three times a week.

Burned out to the point, in fact, that I started routinely puking out my car window on the drive home.

Now square that image with the photo of the beautiful woman above.

My body, in revolt, pleaded: get this shit out of me.

This story is about the night—I chose to do just that.

It comes from an episode of my hit podcast, Stripcast: True Stories from a Stripper with a PhD.

Read on, but first, please:

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No good stripper ever says “retire,” but I haven’t been a good stripper for a long time.

Perhaps my anxiety has increased with age. Certainly, my indignation. Maybe staying up all night drinking doesn’t have the same appeal. I don’t know what caused this shift of emotion, this move from party-time to the hellhole, but evidence of the change is everywhere:

Exhibit A, mustachioed middle-ager points to me and says “that one ain’t got no tits.” Strangely, he says this to me, as if he’s talking about a product on a wall or some other person or a piece of livestock?

Exhibit B, drunken bachelor vomits into his own drink, cocktail glass overflowing, as I undulate my vajazzled pussy inches from his face.

C, bored co-ed, almost certainly a Chad, or possibly a Brad, reluctantly receives dance from me forced upon him by a friend. He is at least a decade my junior. His display of disinterest is pointed, exaggerated, calculated. I up my sexiness to 5000. Do that thing I do with my eyes. You won’t ignore me, motherfucker.

Feels good and bad, right—using sex as a weapon?

I knew for sure it was time to quit when I relapsed into the habit of vomiting out of my car window on the drive home. Stress-puking, I call it. I started to pack vomit bags in my car but they were never big enough for all I wanted out of me.

Stripping used to be easy. I’ve been doing this shit half my life now. When I was a kid, a teen, a twenty-something wild thing--this shit was easy.

I haven’t always needed to be in the strip club, not financially—

But I have always needed the strip club in me.

My schtick, my calling card, my elevator pitch.

I loved stripping, and stripping loved me.

Sure, there were things that happened. Job hazards. 

But I—

handled them.

The beautiful outfits and compliments made up for the pain. 

I developed a passion for cash, wide stacks in my hand, counted out across the bed. Those lay-outs of money remain some of my fondest memories.

That life--that was a best life. That life--was good.

But now, I wanted out. My heart pounded the moment I hit the floor. I took pills to stay sane. What had been so easy—always so easy—going to these men’s tables, sitting down, inviting myself into their night, hustling and manipulating my way into dances—a fine and complex art—what was once so easy now stretched out before me like a deadly expanse of wilderness dotted throughout with wolves.

I can’t talk to these motherfuckers tonight.

But I must, or there is no point. The hour spent on make-up alone would be in vain, all of my meager earnings so far due to the house. 

I must talk to these motherfuckers.

And so, from table to table I persevere; I make small talk—squeezing blood from a stone—and marvel that I once excelled at this illusion. That glittering personality that invited men to brag about themselves; that delightful moneymaker, the one all the boys liked—damn, I think, I know her, I invented her, where is she now? That girl. The one having a party, playing a game against herself. Always trying to beat last night.

Where is she now?

I thought she was me?

A customer tells me I’m beautiful, and this is a relief.

“I’m Matt,” he says, and I sit down.

I tell him about my academic past, my PhD.

He responds, hand up as if to say halt--

“You don’t have to explain yourself.”

The fuck, Matt?

I’m not “explaining myself” nor do I need your approval, Matt—

or—

am I?

Do I?

Why do I feel so compelled to let him know--that I’m not just a stripper?

Why is it so imperative that I make my “real life” clear to these dudes? 

“There’s more to me than this,” my explanation promises…

I thought I wasn’t ashamed of stripping?

And I’m not. I’m not. I’m not?

Honestly—I wish I had the fortitude, drive, moxie, energy to hustle these dudes like I used to. I look at these young girls in this club and I see me. 2002. Drinking white zinfandel and having parties with men older and richer than my dad ever got to be. 

Those days.

That girl.

What a gift she was—is—to me.

Back to Matt. He wants a dance. He’s 37, my husband’s age. He’s got a five-year-old son, like we do. His brown hair is tousled and he’s handsome enough. We go to a dark enclave and I get naked for him.

He smiles and surveys my body with approval, with admiration. Afterwards he asks for extra time to remain seated in order to let his erection subside. I find this validating in a way that takes me back to junior high school.

Then he tells me:

“I don’t want to embarrass you, but—”

Oh no, I think. My tamp string’s hanging out.

“—the fact that you’ve had a baby—your belly, and your breasts—I find it—so sexy.”

I spend the rest of the night puzzling over this remark. I can’t decide if it’s a beautiful act of love, a testament to my value exactly as I am, or if I should spend another hour holed up in the dressing room, counting my stretch marks and my years.  

When the nausea and fast breathing starts, I tell the housemom I’m sick.

I tell her I’m sick, and in a way, it’s true.

In the dressing room I run into my homegirl Johanna and I tell her, “This is the last time you will ever see me here,” and she nods. She is a goddess, Princess Jasmine meets Cleopatra, the most beautiful woman I have ever seen, yet ever inexplicably believing that she ain’t shit.

I jabber another explanation for myself, stammering the words “I do this because—”

She put her hand up.

“Lux. I know why you do this.” 

When I get the clearance to leave, I change into my street clothes before management can change their mind. Sweat pants. A ragged T-shirt. Thick socks. No underwear. Big blue hoodie. Clothing designed for comfort and ugliness. This is my treat to myself. 

I haven’t made any money--the meager earnings tonight certainly weren’t worth the wasted time.

What I did make, however: the final realization that—I’m actually done here. 

Driving home, I light a cigarette—another treat. I turn on sports radio, although I hate sports, because I can’t stand the sound of music anymore. And so, the announcers’ inane chatter about trade-offs and score-sheets has become another ritual of comfort, another treat. 

Yet despite these talismen—the comfy clothes, the cigarette, the sports radio—I feel the lurch.

First, my mouth fills with spit. That is always step one.

Then the bitter taste in the back of the throat. Step two.

Then, the coughing.

I know now better than to believe that this will pass.

I look for a good place to pull off the road and I find none. I look for a bag in the car and I find none.

I roll down the window, lean my head out, and spill my guts into the night air.  

—L.B., 2015

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Dear Reader, you ever been so sick of something that you were straight barfing over it? Tell me your barf stories below, kthx.