Strip City: A Stripper's Farewell Journey Across America (19 page)

Pillow lives in a trailer next to PJ's. A run-down four-room affair that she shares with three other dancers (and one of the dancer's six ferrets), it's not exactly the Ritz, but for thirty bucks a week, you can't beat it. It's certainly more space than she had when she first moved in during the boom years, there were two girls in each room and girls on beds in the living room.

The cheap lodging is the work of Hallie McGinnis, the diffident manager/owner of PJ's. Hallie inherited the bar when founding owner Papa John (a.k.a. PJ) died in 1982. If you can imagine Garrison Keillor leaving Lake Wobegon behind to run an Alaskan strip club, you've got a pretty clear image of Hallie. A mellow guy noted for his soft touch, he tends to hire freely and winces when he has to cut back on girls when business is too slow to make payroll. Nobody who works for him has anything bad to say about him. He's the only club owner in town who doesn't exact hefty stage fees or tip-outs, and, on occasion, he'll even front a hurting girl a loan.

It's time for Pillow's eleven o'clock show. Pillow cues her music in the tape player backstage. In 1995, she won the Miss Exotic World title, and once she starts dancing, it's easy to see why. Her dance is perfectly choreographed classic burlesque. Where a more modern stripper might undulate and grind, Pillow struts and kicks. She grabs the edge of her cape and spins in dizzying circles around the perimeter of the stage, her cape billowing out like a sail in the breeze. The femininity of her movements starkly contrasts with her muscular, ultra-defined physique. She doesn't make much eye contact while she dances, she looks like she's off in her own dream world. She later tells me it's because she is almost legally blind. She literally works the stage from memory. "I can make out shapes and stuff," she says, "but I don't know how many times a guy held an unlit cigarette in his hand and I thought it was a dollar, or someone would have a dollar on top of his head and I'd have no idea that the money was there. A lot of times I'd end up with five or six ones and a twenty and not know who gave it to me!" She also wears ear plugs onstage. "It's the Helen Keller School of Dance," Pillow deadpans.

Pillow is committed to keeping the spirit of burlesque alive. As the business gets more lascivious, Pillow uses her antiquated gestures as a hedge against the encroaching lewdness. "It's a shock," she tells me. "I'm trying to cut the prurient thing. You know, the guys who hold out a dollar, 'Hey, baby, come here, yeah, yeah!' It lets the guy know, hey, you're not going to buy my time.

"I try to do it nicely," she says. "But inside of me I'm screaming, 'Go the fuck away!'

"When a guy wants a table dance, I'll be like, 'Oh no, I don't do that, I'm the waitress.' Or 'Oh no, I'm shy.' Sometimes the guys will get belligerent, like, 'What's the matter, my money's not good enough for you or something?' One time, a guy wanted a table dance and he kept escalating his price. Did I want the money? Of course I wanted the money. But I wasn't about to do it. It's a matter of principle. So finally, I just said, 'Look, I'd rather suck your dog's dick than give you a table dance. Now go away.' He just stood there with his mouth open. I think I got the message across.

"Table dancing started here in 1989, and totally changed the atmosphere. You used to sit down, have a drink and chat with a customer. Then the girls started pestering the guys. It killed the conversation. There was a type of guy who would come in, kind of mousy, real shy, but generally okay. The girls would hustle them for table dances, but the guys would be real uncomfortable. They didn't want to spend the money, but they didn't have the ability to say no. Once they started getting worked, they stopped coming in.

"They were replaced by the guys who like to throw their money around. The atmosphere became more competitive, it became downright mean.

"The change has been real insidious," Pillow says. "It just sort of wends itself in. The older girls move on and new dancers come and they've never been exposed to any other stuff. For them, it's status quo. I left Alaska to start doing the bodybuilding thing, and I came back in 'eighty-five and they were showing pink. It was subtle by today's standards—a girl on her back doing slo-mo stuff, but if had never been done. It got more and more explicit—how much can you get away with? At first the girls are like, 'Did you see what so-and-so is doing? That's disgusting!' And then six months later, everybody is doing it."

The obvious question then is why does she bother dancing at all anymore. Clearly, she's got the brains and wherewithal to go into another line of work. She is a rabid crafter, making virtually all of her own costumes. She bodybuilds and is an active Klingon (she even treated Randy and me to a recitation of a three-minute long anthem in Klingon—a complicated language with some tricky glottal stops). How is it worth it to continue working in an environment where you're not comfortable with what goes on? Especially when she's so obviously capablevof other things.

Pillow's answer is simple: The dancing itself makes it worthwhile. "I like the performance. It's not a sex thing, it's a power thing. With dancing, you have the endorphins of the movement. You're in the moment. And you have the sheer kinetic joy. I've always called it my Blue Bolt. Athletes call it 'the zone.' You don't get it all the time, but when it happens, it's like a suspension of time. Of pain. There's no telling when it will happen—it doesn't always if there are a lot of people or a lot of money. I always saw it as an energy circuit—you're projecting out into the audience and they're receptive and they send the energy back to you.

"I'm not technically a good dancer, but I've always aspired to what my mentor Brandy had, where you transcend yourself. Brandy was overly tall, she had saggy tits, she had a huge nose, her hair was kinda scraggly, and her voice was this honking, braying thing. But she'd put on her makeup and go onstage and it was magic! She would turn into anything she wanted. You couldn't put your finger on the technique, but it worked."

But Pillow's not sure how much longer she can stay at PJ's. She still loves the dancing, doesn't mind the cocktailing, and is glad to have a place to perform in the manner to which she is accustomed, but things change. They've changed since she's started, and they'll probably do so again—most likely toward the extreme. Pillow was once a passionate competitive bodybuilder—one of the first women to embrace the sport—but stopped, for ethical reasons, when anabolic steroid use went from taboo to more common practice. She sees an obvious parallel in stripping. "What was bad and unacceptable became good," she says. "It changed out from under me. It's deja vu all over again."

I can't say which I think would be better—to stick to your limits in a club and try to hang on to your place, or to just say the hell with it and move on down the road. But regardless, I admire Pillow for the strength of her resolve. It isn't easy to stand your ground when what becomes standard exceeds your comfort level. Most women would just go with the flow.

The night is drawing to a close. There aren't many customers left in the bar, and most of the dancers are huddled at a corner table talking. Randy and I finish our drinks and get ready to head out as a heavyset black woman in a red lace teddy and red flat-soled boots gets onstage. She drops into a deep squat and begins cackling maniacally. The few men sitting at the meat rack flee. Pillow sits on a bar stool against the wall, head bent down in concentration, studying her Klingon book under the white neon light of the beer sign.

FOURTEEN

There are five CDs that I bring with me to every club, my "can't miss" collection. If I'm allowed to choose my own music, I'll pick from them: Metallica's black album, Sade's
Diamond Life
, Nine Inch Nails'
Pretty Hate Machine
(Nine Inch Nails is so popular among strippers, lead singer Trent Reznor once snorted in an interview, "I think my next album is going to be called
Music for Titty Bars
"), Kid Rock's
Devil Without A Cause
, and Motley Crüe's
Greatest Hits
.
Motley Criie's "Girls Girls Girls" is one hell of a Proustian trigger. When I hear the motorcycle
vroom
and the priapic thrust of guitar chords that kick off the song, I'm blasted back in time to San Francisco. I see, with visionary clarity, dancers twirling nude around brass poles with lissome vigor, walking across the stage in the golden halo of a single spotlight, waving and blowing kisses and snapping the sides of their thongs as they're introduced by an incorporeal deejay's voice, sharing lipstick and bottles of imitation designer perfume in front of glary dressing room mirrors. The song was already ancient history by the time I moved West, but it's one of the first to sing the praises of stripper mystique—an anthem to an era of my life that left a fiery, indelible mark. The five years I spent dancing in San Francisco still float in my memory as random bursts of vibrant jewel-tone colors, or the explosion of fireworks.

I'm tempted to say the murder made me flee New York for San Francisco when I was twenty, but really, it was lots of things—which, when they ground to a dumb halt, had the decency to do so more or less all at once.

I come back to the apartment on East 11th Street after a weekend in Provincetown with a couple of friends, and Deb is in the kitchen cooking big pots of quinoa and adzuki beans.

She wipes her hands on a dishtowel and vanishes into her bedroom. She reappears holding a bit of newsprint. "I was reading the paper while I was temping today and look what I found!"

She hands me a short article torn from the
Daily News
.

The story is about Rita, the stringy-haired manager from Peepland who the girls called "Mom." It reports that "Mom" and a young accomplice killed Lennie, the floor manager who had vanished—apparently over a drug-related matter. Rita and her friend shot Lennie, then wrapped his body in a blanket and threw it in the Hudson River. They were apprehended and Rita was sentenced to prison. Her accomplice got a reduced sentence in exchange for testifying against her.

I don't know what to think. I want to be shocked, but I'm not. The story is so terrible, but at the same time, not surprising. Rita was obviously strung way out to hell and gone, and given how fucked up Peepland was, this outcome made sense. If there was any kind of logic to the place, it was that the hardcore, thuggy hustlers and users would come to one of two ends: Go home and clean up, or pitch headlong over the edge. Accepting this as simple fact is but another thread in the fucked-up fabric of my life.

By now, I have abandoned acting completely. I don't enjoy it, and I value being a punk more than I care about being "adaptable." I know, too, that few directors would cast me as Ophelia with a purple mohawk. The last straw came when I was in Herbert BerghoPs class for young actors at HB Studios. During an improv exercise in which we enacted a party scene, another girl in the class, attempting dialogue, asked me, "So, how's that bladder infection? Is it getting better?"

A small voice deep in my gut said, plainly and definitively,
I quit.

To a person without a plan, New York City is a dangerous place. After a year at Peepland, Rachel, my entree to the business, leaves to become a high-school art teacher. I get a job at Life Cafe, a funky restaurant right down the street from my apartment. With nothing much else to do, I start eating. A lot. I graze ferociously to fill the void; stuffing down anything cheap and devilishly satisfying I can find. Bagfuls of twenty-five-cent bodega snacks: Bon Ton butter popcorn, mini ice cream sandwiches, Little Debbie snack cakes, Dipsy Doodles corn chips, and Cheez Puffs. Greasy slabs of pizza. Entire pints of ice cream. Peanut butter by the tablespoonful. And enormous Mexican dishes from the restaurant, followed by surreptitious shavings off the forbidden mud cake.

I grow huge and reasonably sated, but remain bored.

I write a report for the San Franciso-based punk fanzine
Maximum RocknRoll
, and Tim Yohannon,
MRR's
driving editorial force and the king of the dogma punks, offers me a steady column. The gig doesn't pay, as per 'zine custom, but Tim grants me unlimited space—more than enough rope with which to hang myself. My topics range from alternative health to juvenile anti-parenting screeds to women's issues, but my tone is always total aggro. I can authentically say that I was a jaded GenX twit before it was cool. Although, of course, it was never cool. But writing, I quickly discover, is a lot more interesting to me than any thespian pursuit. I latch on to this new passion the way a drowning woman grabs at a raft.

I scrape together some money from my café earnings, buy a cheap plane ticket, and fly out to San Francisco to visit the
MRR
house—a tidy duplex in Noe Valley with bedrooms full of "shitworkers" given free board in exchange for working on the 'zine, a large living room on the main floor crammed with Macs and production tools, and a sprawling split-level den downstairs that has an entire wall lined with Tim's extensive record collection, thousands of punk vinyl 45s and LPs with covers edged in dark green electrical tape. The most excellent house I've ever seen.

Compared with San Francisco, New York seems unpredictably violent. Uptight. Expensive. And, in my case, pointless. A cluttered landscape of scatty, unfulfilled hopes. I gather all my girlfriends together one night and give away almost everything I own. Books, dishes, jewelry, and heaps and heaps of clothes—the spoils of all those Peepland-funded shopping sprees. I reduce my possessions to five boxes, which I ship West book rate. Flying out on an economy ticket, I arrive in San Francisco broke, just barely twenty, and, for the first time in years, hopeful.

San Francisco's Lusty Lady Theater is as close to a liberating force as a sex business can get. The classified ads for the woman-owned and -operated peep show that run on the back page of the Bay Guardian and the SF Weekly emphasize the "fun, friendly, feminist" work environment. On Kearney Street, just south of Broadway in North Beach, the Lusty building is wedged into a steep hill. Out front is a red neon sign of a naked lady. As the sign blinks, she looks like she's doing the Shimmy.

I am not sure I want to get back into the adult business, but my temporary job at a Haight Street record store ends and my friend from
MRR
, Stella, a Central American activist, extols the Lusty's virtues. She had worked there, dancing in nothing but her buzz cut and combat boots, and her description of the management intrigues me. They are former dancers themselves, and don't allow any drugs or alcohol on the premises. The only thing dancers have to do is dance naked on the stage behind glass. They earn an hourly wage, so there is no hustling for tips, and many of the dancers are artists, activists, and college students working their way through school.

The entryway to the Lusty Lady looks like the foyer of an old-fashioned Barbary Coast bordello. The walls are mirrored and thick red velvet drapes with scarf valances trimmed in gold tassels hang in the doorway. I ask the hippie guy behind the desk if they are hiring. He is wearing a T-shirt with a tongue-wagging smiley face on it that says have an erotic day—the official Lusty Lady logo. He smiles and hands me an application.

I can't imagine why I have to fill out an application. There certainly was no such thing at Peepland. The application is full of unusual questions: How do you feel about men's sexuality? How do you feel about your own? Are you comfortable with your body?

I'm impressed that they take things like this into consideration when they hire women.

When I'm done with the paperwork, the guy buzzes for the show director and after a minute or two she comes into the hallway. A brunette in her early thirties with thick calves, she shakes my hand and introduces herself as Kelly. She's wearing a long, off-white cable knit sweater and jeans tucked into cowboy boots. Her mouth is an almost lipless horizontal furrow that she wrenches back into a sad, tight little smile.

Kelly leads me through the dark hallway. The carpet squishes under my feet, and there are black shapes—men—moving around us as we head toward a row of doors with lights over the sills—red for In Use, green for Open. Kelly opens a corner door and we go into the booth together. There's a built-in bench that we sit on side-by-side.

"You ready to see the show?" Kelly asks.

"Ready!"

"Good attitude, I like that," she says, dropping a quarter into a red, illuminated slot.

The window rises and the first thing I see is pink. A bright pink carpet in a tiny room with mirrored walls. There are four nude women on the other side of the glass, dancing, leaning against the mirrors and posing, and sticking their butts in the windows while men drop quarters and watch excitedly. This is a girl aquarium!

A childishly plump dancer comes over to our window. In her black Vampira wig, she wears a big yellow polka dot bow. She sits down on the raised ledge beneath the window, holding her. yellow-gloved hands over the soft pooching milk-white flesh of her belly. Then she blows us a kiss and with a kick of her black granny boots, she's up and away to another window.

"Customers aren't allowed to direct the show in any way," Kelly says as I watch the women crouch with their legs spread, cocking their heads coyly to one side or tossing them back in counterfeit ecstasy. "They can't motion you over or tell you how to move. We do ask that you smile, act sexy, and look like you're having fun;"

I can do that.

I hadn't intended to audition today, but Kelly asks if I am interested in trying out, so I figure why not, since I'm already here? I don't have any costumes so Kelly just puts me onstage in my white leather high-top sneakers. "This is Polly, ladies," she says, sticking her head through the curtain in the doorway to the stage. "She's going to audition." Kelly disappears to watch me dance from one of the booths with one-way glass.

I step onto a stage full of smiling faces. I notice that the carpet is really red, not pink. A black girl with long silky dreads squats down in front of the window of the corner booth Kelly and I were in. The window only comes up about waist high, so she grabs onto the handlebars on either side of the window and spreads her legs, leaning her head back as she sways to the music. Oblivious to the man, only his torso visible, masturbating at the sight of her exposed crotch, she leans her head back farther to look at me, upside down. "Hello! I'm Shy."

News to me!

The stage is a modified rectangle, with three sides lined by windows. Two corner booths allow a customer to sit, but the rest of the booths have windows at eye-level, which is about waist-height on the stage side. Three of the windows have one-way glass so dancers can't see the customers. The girl in the Vampira wig is kneeling in front of the one-way window in the center, licking her fingers suggestively. The two other girls onstage flit from window to window, pinching their nipples, slapping their buttocks, or dancing to the music on the jukebox.

The crescent of glassed-in faces around the stage is startling—so many men seeing me all at once! But I remember what Kelly told me, "Customers aren't allowed to direct the show," and I feel relief. I scan the windows. A fat Chinese man with unexpressive features. A pasty, beak-nosed yuppie with his tie tossed over his shoulder standing back in the shadows to hide his face. A young, eager Filipino guy in a football jersey, his nose practically pressed against the glass, looking as if he's seeing naked women for the first time in his life. And three mirrored panes that reveal nothing but my own reflection blinking back at me—the mystery men. I'm not beholden to any of the onlookers, I only need to look like I'm having a good time.

I try to move sexily, but I'm completely new at this so I'm sure I appear foolish. The sneakers don't help. Looking at myself in the mirrors is hard, because I feel so big. Some of the weight is coming off, but I'm still thirty pounds heavier than I was eighteen months ago. I jump around in my sneakers for the length of a song, then Kelly's head pokes through the curtains again.

"Okay, come on out. You can get dressed."

I wave goodbye to the other dancers and follow Kelly down the carpeted steps to the damp basement office. The office is next to a locker room with a worn-out couch and payphone in it.

"That was great! You've got a terrific grin," she says, as she offers me a seat next to her desk. Was I grinning up there? I hadn't noticed. On the desktop is a huge schedule sheet laid out with names partially penciled in next to a half-empty coffee cup with an oily smear of russet lipstick on the rim.

When I first entered Peepland, I was frightened, and when I saw what working there was like, I became petrified. Then I just shut down completely. But here at the Lusty Lady, I am not even remotely scared. The stage feels self-contained and snug, like the inside of a snow globe. I feel the hinge of my jaw start to relax, just a tiny bit.

I get hired, and immediately the New York years I left behind just a few months before—the wayward, confused Peepland and Lower East Side ye^rs—get slammed in a drawer, and I won't think about them for a long time to come.

As if the audition wasn't indication enough, I know that working at the Lusty Lady will be different when I see the list of dancers' pseudonyms. Usually stage names are predictable—oh great, another redhead named Ginger. But here women call themselves Polyester, Chicklet, Euphrates, Arp Quasar, Cherriluv, Sacred Amnesia, Virginia Dentata, Squishy, Insertia, Velveeta, La Meme Fromage, Vixen Bliss, BamBam, Seldom, Rag Doll, Sistar Aqua Divina, and the chilling but brilliant Tralala.

After some deliberation, I choose the stage name Tawdry. I buy a huge wig of long, synthetic auburn curls at an overpriced shop in the Mission run by a grouchy Korean couple, and show up for my first day of work with a pair of pretty patent leather ankle boots and my wig in a plastic bag.