Strip City: A Stripper's Farewell Journey Across America (28 page)

My heart thumps in a deep clutch of love at the memory, but I quickly tamp down the feeling and break out of our embrace. This is a day of Thanksgiving, not a day for breaking down in the kitchen.

Barbara backs off. The family gathers in the dining room. A blessing is offered, dinner is served, and in the foothills of New Jersey, a truce has been declared. I make no mention of the fact that I intend to keep right on dancing.

NINETEEN

You know you've reached a milestone of maturity when your Tijuana drug runs aren't for Quaaludes or Valium, but for Retin A. My posse from L.A.—Sue, Jeanette, her friends John and Barb—and I are wandering along Avenida de la Revolucion, canvassing the farmacias, trying to find the best deal on the skin cream.

The resolution I made the night of the Miss Topless Wyoming contest to go back to stripping has stuck, so I need to prepare myself for the long haul. My original plan was to fly to Los Angeles to get some sun, see friends, and work at the clubs, but now I need to buy stripper supplies, and Retin A is at the top of the list.

Wrinkle-wise, I've more or less been spared so far, but there are a few fine lines coming in around my mouth that I wouldn't mind getting rid of. So here we are, the five of us, among the tequila-puking teenagers from La Jolla careening in and out of open-air discos with names like Senor Frog's Cantina. We stroll among the shops selling knockoff Harley-Davidson Tshirts, ceramic statuettes of cacti wearing sombreros, and dye-bleeding huarache sandals. The air is grayed by the smoke-belching trucks clogging every intersection. Diesel fumes and dust sear our lungs.

Randy doesn't mind that I'm planning to resume dancing full time, but I can tell he's a little tired of me running off without him. His face goes forcibly placid when the prospect of my leaving comes up. I think the crush he had on Barbie has waned and the run-off glamour is gone. "How much more?" he asked when he dropped me off at the airport shuttle, in a not-very-convincing attempt at sounding patient. Not much more, I assured him, rubbing his arm as if to stir up some faith from under his skin. I left him with a kiss and a promise to scope out the very best clubs so we can return on vacation after this is all over.

Practically every other shop on Revolution is a farmacia. The white-smocked pharmacists and clerks stand out front touting, in the exact same fashion as the men outside the nightclubs and the souvenir shops. "Best price, best price. Hey, Barbie," they motion to us. Barb bristles at the detested molestation of her name and I jump at the split-second thought that these men might know me from a strip club somewhere. "You come in, Barbie. Best price."

I used to make fun of the women who'd had so many facelifts they looked like their cheeks were stapled to the back of their head. Their vanity seemed ludicrous to me. Did they really think that they looked younger? Or that it looked natural? But somewhere along the way, it stopped being funny.

The window displays are brightly lit paeans to abundance and order. Stacks of three-pack asthma inhalers, rows of five-hundred-count botdes of ibuprofen, antibiotics of all kinds. Boxed tubes of Retin A are arranged in pyramids right at the front of the store. Six bucks each, American. They're forty dollars at home. I buy two tubes.

We head back out onto the crowded sidewalk. A bedraggled, five-man mariachi band walks slowly by, their brown polyester suits too small, the soles of their shoes cracked and worn.
"Musica?"
asks the accordion player, his face drawn and sunburned. We shake our heads no. He nods, adjusts his cowboy hat, and moves on.

"Well, I guess my mission is accomplished," I say to the assembled group. I had envisioned a long, laborious search culminating with a shady back-alley transaction with the illicit tubes handed off in a brown paper wrapper by people who first demanded a secret handshake. "What should we do now?"

The world, or more specifically, Tijuana is our oyster, as John and Barb both speak fluent Spanish. Barb is a droll, athletic strawberry blonde. John, an affable, loudmouth Marine with smiling brown eyes and a buzz cut. The designated muscle of the group.

I scan the street, looking past the men with Polaroid cameras trying to woo tourists to get their photo taken with glitter-encrusted sombreros and burros striped with paint to look like zebras. I see a neon sign advertising topless dancers. "Hey, strip club, dead ahead. You up for it?"

Affirmative from the entire posse. John and Barb are open-minded, up for anything. When John goes off to strip clubs with his buddies in L.A., Barb gives him money to buy rounds of table dances. Jeanette has no issues whatsoever with stripping—after she moved to Los Angeles six years ago, she briefly ran an outcall strip-o-gram service for women. Her boyfriend at the time was scandalized at first, but he got over it. And Sue, well, Sue is the mack daddy of all time. She and I "met" for the first time at the Lusty Lady when our friend Artemis brought her into a corner booth to say hello. Sue thought the big red Tawdry wig was my real hair and instantly fell in love with me. When they picked me up after work and I got in the car with my real, short brown hair, she was decidedly less enamored, but we have been friends ever since. She has a way with strippers, a combination of genuine admiration and rogue flirtation that any male customer would kill to have. Get that girl in a strip club and every dancer in the place, straight, gay, bi, whatever, will make a beeline to her side.

We march into the dank tunnel of an entrance like an invading troop. The linoleum floor is covered with sticky black grit. "Yeesh," Jeanette says, as we enter the club and the noxious tang of dust, beer, mildew, and piss assaults our nostrils.

A host in a penguin suit shows us to a stageside table. The stage is a rickety wooden T-shaped platform about two feet high with a ring hanging from a chain over it. A flabby dancer with kinky hair that was peroxided from black to a brassy orange grabs the ring and goes up on one toe, spinning herself into a blur.

"That's cool," Sue says, excitedly. "We need to get you one of those!"

A waiter comes by and tells us there's a two-drink minimum. We place our order and dig out some singles for the dancer. This is a pretty miserable place and if we're going to be here, we should make it worth the dancers' time.

Two dancers come over to Sue and me. "Do you want a table dance?" asks the shorter one, who has flashing black eyes and a nervous, rabbity energy. Her friend, older and butchy-femme with cropped black hair and a cross tattooed on her hip, clasps her hands behind her back and rocks back and forth, one toe turned inward, as if under instruction to hide her coltishness under a layer of sugary pink frosting.

"No, thank you," I say. Sue smiles her best loveable urchin smile and tells her, "No, I'm sorry. But you're very pretty. Have you worked here long?"

The coltish girl walks away but the nervous girl sits down and curls up in Sue's lap. The bartender comes over and serves us our two-drink minimum drinks, both at once.

I look over at Jeanette. "Would you mind telling me how Sue does that?" she asks, taking her margaritas from the bartender's tray and shaking her head in disbelief.

John, Barb, Jeanette, and I are chuckling at Sue's magnetism at work, then suddenly, a swarm of waiters is all over us, chattering quickly in Spanglish about how we underpaid and owe them ten more dollars. Barb is clearly annoyed. "What are you talking about?" she says to one of the waiters in stern English. He appears to be the ringleader of the scam, but he isn't a very good liar. He's trying to pretend that we stiffed them on our tab but he keeps screwing up his numbers and his story. The other waiters keep nodding and repeating what the ringleader said.

"Oh, the hell with it," Barb says, thrusting out a ten-dollar bill. "Will this take care of everything?"

"Four dollars more, miss. You owe four."

His grifting technique could stand some refinement. Shouldn't he wait until we're drunk before he tries this?

"No, I do
not
owe you four dollars," Barb says quite loudly. "I am giving you ten dollars and you asked for ten dollars and that is all you are getting from me!"

I have a fleeting vision of police being summoned and the five of us being hauled off to Mexican prison, but the waiter backs off.

Sue disappears into the corner with her new friend to make out. I tip the orange-haired girl onstage and she crawls off the stage and into my lap. I shriek in surprise when she lifts up my shirt and sticks her head underneath, loudly bussing my stomach.

"There aren't many customers in here," I say to Jeanette and Barb. "I wonder how the dancers make their money."

John comes back from his trip to the men's room. "Well, if what the girl who cornered me by the bathroom says is true, you can have sex in that corner over there for forty dollars. Without a condom."

We summon Sue from the corner posthaste and move on down the road. As we leave the club, one of the touts out front looks at Barb and Jeanette and says, "Why are you leaving? Come back! I dance Chippendales for you!"

On the street, the air is warm and thick with music—from the disco bars, the mariachi bands, the stores. Auditory chaos comprised of the Bee Gees over marimbas over Casio drumbeats. A fat-kneed woman waddles by with a huge donkey pinata and her husband, bald and sway-bellied, drags two steps behind. He looks longingly into the stairwell of another strip club. "Come in, cowboy," the touts entice, but he shifts his gaze quickly and shuffles his feet to catch up with the missus.

We drop down the stairwell and find that this club is a little more upbeat. The ceiling is covered in helium-filled red-and-white balloons. The stage is very high—about eye-level with the men who sit around it. Dancers stomp back and forth along the length of the stage, occasionally spinning on the ring or twirling on the pole to unbearably loud heavy metal, their expressions a murk of grim determination and efficient, blasé sexuality that could pass for submission after several beers. The club is purportedly topless, but when taking tips, dancers indifferently pull their g-strings all the way down in front to allow the men to tuck their tips. If a few digits linger, they don't swat them away.

Just like the other bar, it's all big American boys being entertained by small Mexican women.

We order a scam-free bucket of
cervezas
and ten tequila shots for twenty-five bucks and settle in to watch the show. The beer mixed with the almost overpowering scent of air freshener makes me a little queasy, so I trundle up the trash-filled steps to the restroom, which has no running water and is so filthy it makes the nausea worse. I go back downstairs and suck on the limes from my untouched tequila to calm my stomach. The television in the corner is tuned to
Simpsons
reruns.

Around the perimeter of the room, girls are doing topless table dances for the men seated on the vinyl upholstered bench seats along the wall. A plush-bottomed girl with slightly deflated breasts is leaning over a table in the middle of a group of young, loud men in hip-hop clothes. As they rudely grope her ass and dare each other to press their crotches near her mouth, she keeps a patient face, like a noble old cat getting its tail pulled by children and lollipops stuck in its fur.

After dinner, we end up in a humid basement cavern that looks like a medieval dungeon with a stage and a go-go pole in it. A very pretty young dancer gets onstage in thigh-high red vinyl boots and a red bikini. She never looks at the audience. Not once. She dances well, but joylessly. When her set is done, she gets off the stage without so much as a smile or a glance back. She even leaves her tips onstage.

To the left of us sit a couple of retired military-looking guys. They're right at the edge of the stage, resting their elbows on the railing. The younger one pays more attention to his beer than the stage, but the older one, a thick-necked bruiser with a gray flattop, watches the dancers with a mean, rheumy eye. The corners of his mouth turn down sourly. When a dancer comes around to him and bends forward, presenting her buttocks for admiration, he rolls up a dollar and sticks it under the portion of the thong that covers her crotch. He tries to twist his finger inside of her.

He does it over and over, with every dancer.

"You know the fucked-up thing about that," John says, leaning over the table, speaking conspiratorially, "is he doesn't even look like he's enjoying himself."

He's right. The man might as well be putting quarters in a vending machine.

At the table to the right of us is a puppy pile of fresh-scrubbed, freckle-faced teenagers. J. Crew goes South of the Border. Liquored up and ready to roar, one of the girls hops onstage. She tosses her long blonde curls around and dances over to her group of friends. The stripper onstage stays on the other side, collecting tips.

Fists holding dollars thrust into the air from her friends' table. Men all around the bar are craning their necks to look at her. They want to see what she's got. She shyly unzips her jeans and shinnies them down to show her leopard-print thong. Her torso is thick, her hips narrow.

Her friends egg her on, so she takes off her sweatshirt. Her bra matches her panties.

"Oh, Victoria's Secret," Sue says, approvingly. Jeanette leans over to me. "Now did she wear the matching underwear because she knew she was going to get up and do that, or does she always make sure she matches anyway?"

After the song ends, the girl joins her friends at the table. On my way to the bathroom, I tap her on the shoulder and tell her, Good job.

One of the guys in the group says, "Hey, when are
you
gonna get up there?"

Next thing I know, I am on a strip club stage in Tijuana with a stripper who hates my guts. She is not pleased to share her turf with an interloping
gringa.
The minute I get up there, she stalks over to me, unzips my jeans and yanks them down, then pulls my shirt off over my head. Not exactly the most effective way to embarrass me, but she has a point to make. Her hips switch angrily under her zebra print minidress as she dances to the opposite side of the stage, where she stays for the whole song.

I don't know why she didn't just say no when the manager asked if I could come up with her.

My jeans won't come off over my combat boots, so I pull them back up and keep dancing. The American kids are laughing and clapping. My bra and underwear don't match, but they tip me anyway. I work my way over to our table, where Jeanette, Barb, Sue, and John take turns stuffing dollars down my pants. I dance away, crunching with every step.