spandex & lucite shoes: part 39, holidays with ice

Here you go, another frosty serving of my so-called strip life. Remember to tip your waitresses and bartenders and if you're feeling particularly empathetic and altruistic toward the sexworker, please go here and help out as much as you can. And finally, do have yourselves a joyous Festivus, a happy Channukah, a merry Christmas, and/or a lovely little Kwanzaa.

In my long and checkered service industry past, I have worked many, many holiday hours. I have served families their Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve dinners while missing my own. I have glumly brought cooing couples their Valentines Day meals while single myself. I have watched happy tables drunk on auld lang syne and questionable champagne toast to their rosy futures, while what I saw stretched out before me was endless servitude to tables like this one, like I was damned to bring the crustless sandwiches to an eternal Madhatter’s tea.

(One Christmas eve, while waitressing at this wretched industrial and legendary seafood establishment in Boston, I helplessly watched a covered and bubbling casserole dish of shrimp scampi careen off my large oval tray and directly into the silk-covered lap of the table’s matriarch. She was very kind, though I’m relatively sure she suffered molten butter blisters on her lady parts. At the same restaurant, one week later on New Year’s Eve, I was grabbed and kissed on the mouth by a giant manatee of a waiter. It was just about the nadir of my holiday existence,)

Bringing food to people for cash on the holidays is its own special level of hell. Nothing quite reminds you of the pure and unadulterated suckage of your life like the sound of other people having fun—or what appears to be fun, or even if it isn’t fun certainly isn’t running interference between people and their filet mignon and béarnaise sauce—on culturally mandated  days of fun-having. It’s no small wonder why waiters get bitterer than badly cooked broccoli rabe, given enough time. That loud rush you hear in your ears as you’re steaming the milk for that privileged bitch at table eight’s cappuccino isn’t the machine’s steam; it’s the sound of exactly how badly your life sucks ass.

But whereas waiting tables on holidays sucks, sucks unequivocally, sucks totally, sucks with a kind of gravitational pull usually reserved for dwarf stars, stripping on holidays is surprisingly not that bad.

“Not that bad” of course damns with the faintest praise. “Not that bad” has buried within it the inference that there is badness, no matter how diminished. The badness is there, but what is surprising is its relatively benign nature, or its relatively small stature; as bad as it is, it’s not as bad as you thought it would be, thereby illustrating exactly how much our experience—or mine anyway—is colored by our anticipations.

Stripping on holidays is not that bad. At FlashDancers, we were required to work one of a series of holidays—one of Memorial Day, Labor Day or the 4th of July; or one of Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve, or New Years’ Eve or Day (Flash is closed on Christmas Day, its only dark day in the calendar year). Later in my tenure, the Powers-That-Be raised the requirement of two of the winter holidays, to much gnashing of teeth and pulling of hair extensions and tapping of acrylic nails on the part of us strippers.

The summer holidays always felt like kind of a big-ass So What? to me. Granted, I like charred carcinogenic meat fresh off the barbie as much as the next girl, but who really cares about missing the joys of Memorial Day? It’s not like I had warm and fuzzy family associations wrapped around Memorial Day, all of us joining hands around a big American flag to exchange bits and pieces of relatives who had served in the Navy (we only served in the Navy; we are a family of sea goers). I wasn’t fussed at spending a summer holiday sweating to the disco oldies, airfucking for cash and mechanically placing tourists’ hands back at their hips because they would always, ever, infallibly try to touch my shiny round ass.

The winter holidays, though, working those seemed to me to be a monster sacrifice. In part, the emotional sacrifice emanated from my waitressing memories—all those hours spent with that rushing life-sucking sound ringing tintinnabulatory in my ears. In part, the idea of being in—not to mention going to—a strip bar on a family holiday just seemed so…sad. Sad, I thought, the girls slumped around the bar as the lights flickered wanly on our Toulouse-Lautrecian  garish faces and unappreciated décolletage. Sad, I thought, the empty tinker-toy honky-tonk of Christmas music wafting through the puke, beer, anti-bacterial wash and smoke-scented Flash air (have you ever tried to strip to “Santa Claus is Coming to Town”? Do, and feel my past pain.). Sad, I thought, the men who would drift in, all of us—them and us—bound in our island-of-misfit-toy solidarity, all of us condemned by grim necessity or grimmer inevitability to be there, at Flash, while the world outside held hands and sang.

It all seemed sadder too when I contrasted my imagined holiday at Flash with its Christmas part and the sparkly, money-crusted weeks that made up the month of December. Of all the months of the year to be a stripper, December is it. December is a fucking lucrative blast. Men are happy as financial hogs in December. They are rolling in the stink of their bonuses. They are inebriated and joyful with the end of the year and the many parties to which they are obligated to go. They are fun, they are funny, and they spend money like it’s going out of style, which given that January and taxes are just around the corner, it is.

December rules King Midas in the subterranean strip world of Flash. It was impossible to work a night and not walk out with fat packs of cash. Everyone was the It Girl at the Best Party on Earth, and everyone made fucking handsome cash. We made fucking mad, Brad Pitt money in December. And if December is the crack cocaine of the strip world, then the Christmas party was the freebase. The Christmas party was hot and cold running cash with jumbo shrimp. It was—if you were liked by the management, as I was—being invited into the special enclave of the usually invisible owners and being given money just to sit there for an hour, smiling and crossing and uncrossing your legs periodically, like you were auditioning to be Sharon Stone’s understudy.

Contrasted against the gilt background of December’s money craziness and my nihilist waitressing memories, the concept of working the winter holidays felt bleak as a Russian tundra. It felt like the gulag in a g-string, though granted only an eight-hour stint there. I hated the idea, resented it with a wet-wool irksomeness.

But, you know, it wasn’t that bad. Nights at the holiday Flash started late. So for about four hours, we sat around and gossiped. We talked about our selves and we talked about others. We danced goofily when we were on stage. There was an air of carnival camaraderie, like we sanguine freaks at the show knew the score and didn’t care. Then, first in little dribs and drabs, that then turned to a full-faucet flow, the men trickled in. Before we knew it, at around midnight, the place was full of guys who, having been constrained by being good boys in the family bosom, were ready to be bad, and to spend some serious cash doing so.

One Christmas eve, I spent drinking hot chocolate with a table of British dudes in the champagne room. They gave me and some other girl tall stacks of twenties to chat and laugh at their jokes. They were charming. One New Year’s Day night I spent two hours massaging the temples of a hung-over regular in the champagne room—he’d won the lottery a few years ago and would come in periodically to shed himself of money he apparently felt he didn’t deserve. He never got table dances, but he did get pleasantly drunk and talk in really abomniable and entertaining accents.

Mostly, though, the holidays were surprisingly like any other night, just with the money compressed into the few hours between midnight and 4:00 a.m. And except for the fact that the guys were really nice to us. They felt sorry for us, we fantasy dolls who were rolled out 364 nights a year for their viewing and sniffing pleasure, and for once that sympathy didn’t come with a serving of superiority. We were just all there, trying to make sense of the messed up, and having a little bit of fun in the process.

You know, it wasn’t that bad. It wasn’t that bad at all.

Comments

[efg]

I look forward to your tails at Flashdancers... and will be in line with the rest when it is finally published and you are signing copies at Barnes and Noble :)

Best wishes for a happy holiday and un abbraccio di cuore.

[pandora]

I don't know why it's taking me so long to come around here. Shame on me. You are exquisite. I will be back again and again and again. Congradulations on your good fortunes. Have a wonderful Holiday.

P

[The Fury]

I've been one of those fun loving Christmas Eve Flashdancer visitors. Me and my boisterous co-workers took over an entire section and shed pounds of money on all of you wonderfully beautiful women. We really appreciated the joy, you guys expressed even though we knew it was a tough day to be dancing and not at home with family.

[Lilith]

I worked last night (Christmas Eve), and loved it. This actually, in large part because of work, ended up being one of my best Christmases ever. December is NOT as good for money at my club as it was for you, but Christmas eve was really fun! Thank you for sharing your stories with us!