Sliding Into Home (12 page)

I went into the dressing room to get changed and there were a bunch of girls already back there getting dolled up, talking about how they were doing that night.

“Hi, I’m Kendra,” I said to the room. “I’m eighteen.”

A couple of girls glanced over, then went right back to what they were doing—applying hair spray, using a curling iron, grabbing anything they could get their hands on to look pretty, smell pretty, and feel pretty enough to make the money.

“Can I sit here?” I said shyly to one girl as I made my way to the bench closest to the front. I didn’t want to be in too deep. She looked kind of annoyed, and I felt like Forrest Gump when he gets on the school bus.
Seat’s taken!

Once I was dressed I went out to watch some of the girls in action. You get two songs on the stage—one to tease to and one to strip to. I watched as the girls worked the pole, teased the guys, and made their
money. Then it was my turn: “Kendra to the main stage,” blasted the MC’s voice over the speakers.

I used my real name. Why not? What else was I going to use? I didn’t think I looked like a Scarlett or a Maxine. I was Kendra, and that’s what the customers were going to get.

I went onstage to a Limp Bizkit song and the crowd went wild. The owner didn’t like hip-hop and I was into heavy metal that week anyway, so Limp Bizkit worked fine for me.

Doing the tease part seemed silly. I’m not a tease, so I stripped off all my clothes right away. The guys appreciated that. For the first time in my life I felt sexy, strong, confident, and powerful all at the same time. I was naked, free for the world to see, and I felt like the greatest person in the world. Dollar bills were flying everywhere, and I scooped them up as I danced.

When I was done one of the customers called me over. He was a thirtysomething average Joe white guy.

“Are you new here?” the obviously horny man who, rumor had it, was into the fresh meat at the club asked me.

“Yes, I am,” I replied.

“Want to dance for me?”

So I gave him my very first lap dance. Actually, it was barely even a lap dance, since I didn’t touch him at all—I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do or how close I was supposed to get. I didn’t really want to go near him, but I didn’t want to lose the job, either, so I just sort of danced around him and then sat and talked to him for a long time, which he seemed to like. You’d be surprised how many of the guys at strip clubs just want a girl to sit and talk and be flirty with them for a little while.

I danced a few sets, worked my way around the room, and talked
to some more customers. By the end of the night the other girls were being really nice to me and had accepted me as one of them. They thought I was so little and cute; I guess it’s hard to feel threatened by such a young, innocent-looking girl.

Before it was time to leave, my new friend, the fan of fresh meat, came over to me and handed me $2,000 in cash. I made more than two grand on my first night! He wanted me to “hang out” with him after my shift was over, but I told him “maybe next week”—a line I’d end up using with a lot of guys. There was no way that was ever happening, but I didn’t want to lose the business.

I got a ride back to Zack’s house as fast as I could. It was 4:30 in the morning when I got there, but I woke him up screaming.

“Look at what I got!” I yelled as I tossed the money onto the bed. “Two. Thousand. Dollars. In one night!”

Do you know how many pizzas I had to forget the cheese on or how many hours of teaching kids how to brush their teeth I needed to clock to make that kind of money? I felt like I had won the lottery, and all I had done was take my clothes off. How easy is that?

The next day Zack and I went and signed a lease on a new apartment. We used my $2,000 as a down payment for the first and last months’ rent and a security deposit, and when it came time to fill out the application, under occupation I proudly wrote “stripper.”

It wasn’t long before I was completely comfortable at Cheetah’s. I’d walk in with a big smile on my face and say hello to everyone. “What’s up, girl?” I’d shout to a stripper friend who was grinding up on some customer. The other girls were like family to me.

After I’d say my hellos, I’d walk over to the DJ booth and check in, and then before I knew it they were playing my song. I started with Limp Bizkit, and my second song was Tim McGraw’s “Something Like That” I loved country music, and that song was perfect:

I had a barbeque stain on my white T-shirt,

She was killing me in that miniskirt.

The crowd would go crazy.

Cheetah’s was the most popular strip club in San Diego. The crowd was usually the same—younger people on the weekends and an older crowd during the week—and they had a lot of regulars, mostly white and Asian guys, and I got to know some of them really well.

The regulars just adored me, and that’s why I made so much money. I know in the back rooms some girls will take it a little further than they are supposed to just to make some extra cash. Luckily, I never felt like I had to do that. I had a good group of guys who loved giving me their money so I made bank without having to cross any lines.

My feelings toward the customers wavered. On one hand, I always looked at the men as stupid; no matter what I was doing or saying to them, I was always thinking,
Give me my fucking money, you sucker.
I’d smile and say whatever it took to get them to just keep giving me more money. But then sometimes I would talk to them and I’d actually start considering them friends. I tried to be a tough bitch, but I’m also a softy.

One regular once told me that I would be famous someday. I thought,
Shut the fuck up!
It was like he was a fortune-teller or something, because the next words out of his mouth were, “You’re going to be one of those famous girls at the Playboy Mansion.”

“Are you just saying that because I’m giving you a lap dance right now?” I asked, laughing.

“No honey, for real,” he said. “You’re going to be famous.”

For whatever reason, that stuck in my head.

Famous or not famous, I was the top earner at that strip club. Of course, I had slow nights where I would come home angry. I didn’t want to strip for nothing! I was working my ass off out there, literally, so I wanted to get paid. Regardless of who made what, all the girls got along really well. We were happy for one another when someone was successful. It was a business for all of us; some girls had kids they were putting through school, and some were in school themselves. There were no crackheads in the bunch. By the end of my first night I was comfortable enough to walk into that locker room and sit wherever I wanted to sit and talk to whoever I wanted to talk to, and I didn’t feel like a little girl in there anymore. After all, when you’re stripping you grow up pretty fast.

One of the girls at the club and I got really close. We talked all the time, and eventually we started to get flirty with each other. When you work in a club where all of your coworkers are naked there is a pent-up sexual tension that you can’t release. Sometimes I’d go home to Zack in the middle of the night and release it with him, but other times that wasn’t an option.

This girl and I started talking about our past lesbian experiences,
and the conversation got hot. Without saying it outright, we both knew where this talk was going. When I told her Zack was out of town, she let me know she was ready to party.

“Let me come over,” she said, and after our shifts ended, we both went back to my place.

I had been down the girl-on-girl path before and it hadn’t worked out, but I figured, hey, why not try it again? Once we were back at my place, we sat on the couch and had some drinks. Then she made the first move.

She leaned in and kissed me on the lips, then slowly moved down my neck. It was a little awkward but I was down. Eventually clothes started coming off and we were going at it. It was a fun night, but Zack was not happy about it when I told him what happened. “But it’s a girl. How can you get mad?” I asked, but he and I could just not see eye-to-eye on the issue.

However, he got over it, and eventually we let her and a couple of others come over for threesomes on occasion. Okay, we never really had a threesome, because I never let Zack do anything with the other girls. I was allowed to have fun and do whatever I wanted, and he had to keep his eyes and hands on me. (That’s fair, right?) Trust me, he wasn’t too disappointed; I got a stripper pole for the house and put on private shows for him all the time.

Zack came to the club once in a while, but he wasn’t really allowed to be there. Cheetah’s, like many strip clubs, had a “no boyfriends” policy. At the end of the day, Zack didn’t really care. I needed to work only one or two days a week, and I was coming home with tons of money. He actually quit his job and I started paying for everything. A friend of mine was living with us, too, and I supported her as well. Everyone was counting on me to be the moneymaker, so I kept
at it. Every now and then I would have a bad night. Something crazy would happen at the club and I would get discouraged, but there was no turning back.

One night a teacher I’d had in high school showed up. I’d had him both freshman and senior years so he saw me at my worst and my best. He knew who I was and what I went through to turn my life around. Yes, I was stripping now, but I was a good person; I wasn’t a hooker, I didn’t do drugs, and I had a boyfriend I was probably going to marry. I thought I was doing pretty well, actually.

The teacher recognized me immediately. I looked at him and all I could think was
Oh my God, what are you doing here? That’s so gross!
Within seconds of entering the club he walked up to me and said, “Hey, Kendra, do you know where I can get some blow?”

Gross!

“No,” I told him. “I’m done with all that.”

He was already completely fucked up and kept pushing. “Come on, I know you know,” he said.

I was so mad. Who did this guy think he was? His dumb ass failed me once, too. What a fucked up asshole. I was so pissed off that I ran into the bathroom and hid from him the rest of the night.

That encounter really put things into perspective for me. That guy gave me a hard time in school and basically treated me like a failure, and a few years later he was in a strip club begging me for coke.

On another evening, Tony, my tagger jailbird boyfriend, walked into the club. I hadn’t seen him since the cops took him that night and I’d thought I would never see him again. He’d gotten out of jail and heard I was working at Cheetah’s so he decided to pop in.

“Remember me?” he asked.

Sex in the park, fighting constantly, cops driving me home after one of the scariest nights of my life—yeah, I remembered.

He sat for a while and watched me dance. I told him I had a boyfriend and eventually he just left. I didn’t mind seeing him; it was like a blast from the past. Plus, it was nice to know he was still alive.

Other than a few odd nights, it was pretty smooth sailing at Cheetah’s, and I made good money. I clocked in and clocked out. It was all business.

Then one day Zack and I were in the car on the way to grab something to eat and I thought of an idea of how I could make business even better: bigger boobs!

Pamela Anderson was on the radio talking about saving animals or something, and all I could think about were her boobs. A lot of the customers at Cheetah’s liked me because I
didn’t
have big boobs—I was that innocent-looking girl guys always love.
But still
, I thought,
I’d do even better if I were bigger.
A lot of the girls had implants, and I felt like they would make me look and feel even sexier.

Just hearing Pam’s voice was inspiration enough. The next time I was at the club I really studied the girls’ breasts. I found the ones I liked the best and asked the owner of those perfect boobs for the number of her plastic surgeon. His name was Dr. Kim and I went up to L.A. for a consultation. Then I went back to San Diego, worked for two straight nights to collect my boob money, went back to L.A., and had them done.

I had my dream boobs and business was good!

CHAPTER 10