spandex & lucite shoes: part 40, the long summer of no

I am slowly shuffling to the end of my so-called strip life. Two more posts after this one, I think, might just about do it, might just put an end to my Ce-Ce self, put it all to rest. And it's been a long, crawling slog to this closure. If you want to see how it began, go here. If not, enjoy the tale of my end, part one.

I have a tremendous fear of rejection, so it might have been counterphobic of me to choose to become a stripper. Stripping is all about rejection. No one gets rejected as much as a stripper. Sometimes the sheer force of rejection causes a stripper into blank state of abjection. It’s not easy acting sleazy, and it’s not made any easier by the fact that you have to endure so many people turning you down in the process.

It amazes me still, even now several years after I let the door close on my swell ass as it left behind the subterranean world of FlashDancers, its spandex beats and swivel-pelvised dancers, its rank funk of an odor, its corpulent visible owner and its shadowy more mysterious ones, its avuncular if arbitrary management, its bright lights and dark corners, even now that I’ve left it all behind, it remains amazing to me how rude men could be to us dancers.

I recognize that patrons can feel beset upon by the avaricious advances of hordes of softly-scented, spicy-accented, barely-dressed strippers. I recognize that on slow nights—or on busy ones—men who frequent strip clubs can feel as if they are nothing but a sweating piece of meat holding a wallet. I can feel some small sympathy for their experience of not feeling distinctly indistinct when they see a girl tottering across the room, pausing at every table to stick a well, if tackily colored, manicured finger at every man and spitting out between her high-glossed lips, “Djewannadance? Howboudjew? Djew?” and turning on her heel when turned down only to spit the same question, rapid-fire, indistinguishable and indistinguishing, to the next table of men.

I can feel how that approach is not likely to make a man feel like parting from his hard-earned Andrew Jackson, especially when it is repeated in different colors, different accents and different scents almost ad nauseum. I can feel the patrons’ pain. I certainly can.

However.  When a man willfully chooses to enter a strip club, he is tacitly entering into a contract wherein women who would most likely never look at him any other moment of the day (if only because strippers have a tendency to date men as carnivalesque as they themselves are) will ask them for attention, if not money. When a man passes the red-uniformed doorman, when he gives the surly and/or cute counter girl his admission fee, when he is escorted by a corseted waitress to a table, when he orders a drink, when all of that happens in a strip club, he is agreeing, however silently, to the advances of strippers who, not surprisingly, want him to buy dances. Or just give them money. We’re not really picky in that respect.

I’m thinking that if a man does not want to be approached by strippers who will, as strippers will, ask him for dances, he ought not go to a strip club, and I don’t think that logic is unreasonable. Yet, as a stripper, I saw over and over again men who acted as if we were like the flies on his shit, and as if he could not shoo us away fast enough, hard enough, or often enough.

Which is a behavior that leads me to a couple of thoughts. Either the man, or men, in question does want to be in a strip club but does not just yet want to partake of that which denotes a strip club as a strip club, ie: strippers, or he gets off on being rude to women who would be hard-pressed to give him directions if he were lost, naked, covered in honey, and in bear country. For the former group, I have some advice. And on the latter, some thoughts.

If you’re a dude who is out at a strip club with a group of dudes and you don’t immediately want dances, you can handle it gracefully. You can, for example, stand at the bar. Men at the bar at a strip club are far less likely to be approached for dances. If you need to talk or to screw on your courage with a couple of rounds, the bar might very well be the place for you. When you’re ready for a table, you let the manager or a floorman know. Give him a twenty. He’ll get you a table. In the meantime, you can talk in relative peace at the bar.

If you really want a table right away, maybe because you have a group and want to be able to chat among yourselves with eye contact, you can finesse that situation too without unnecessary rudeness. You can, for example, pick one or two girls to sit with you. Give them a couple of twenties. Tell them you just want them to sit, and you’ll pay them to be your beards. We love a paid excuse to sit.

You can also—and I know this is shocking—just suffer the onslaught of girls with notable sang-froid by merely telling each and every one, “No thank you, not just yet. But check back in about a half hour.” Or whatever, just be nice. Don’t, as a stripper approaches, hold up your flat palm in the patented Jerry Springer “tell it to the hand” gesture. Don’t say, before the stripper in question has a chance to say a word, “We don’t want any.” Don’t yell, “NO!” at everyone who approaches. Just say, “No, thank you.” We appreciate politesse.

I am aware that we strippers can get grumpy. I myself pulled a Chevy Chase on the feet of more than one rude patron, stumbling accidentally-on-purpose over his toes while trying to impale as many as I could. I am aware that we can turn contentious, especially if we’re pissed off and/or drunk. On the part of all strippers everywhere and throughout time, I apologize.

One of the reasons why we get grumpy is from enduring the rudeness of the latter group I named: those who get off on being mean to us. A strip club is one of the rare places remaining on earth where women are supposed to be nice all the time every day. We have to suck it up and smile. And in this increasingly egalitarian world, this spaced of enforced female subjugation can become a haven for angry men. I understand and even sympathize with male anger. It has to be a strange experience to come of age in a time when you’re not quite so unequivocally on top of the food chain. You’ve been privileged for centuries, and you’re not any more.

Must be hard. Certainly, the songs of Eminem, the works of Chuck Palahniuk (especially Fight Club), the rise of sports viewership and the boon in cigar clubs suggest that it is hard to be a dude these days. I can feel your pain.

I just don’t want to suffer it. What fries my ass, or did when I was stripping, is how many  of you seem to take it out on strippers. It is one thing to suffer crude remarks about the relative size of our “poopers,” It’s one thing to have to smile the correct answer to questions about the reality of our breasts. It is one thing to have to put hand after hand after hand after hand after hand into the down and locked proper table-dance position. It is one thing to smile off unrequested queries about our marriage status/sexual availability/sexual preference/hotel rates.

It’s quite another to find ourselves time and time again the hapless angerbitch in some dude’s struggle to find his masculinity awash in a sea of estrogen. Especially when we really just want to make a buck. And when in order to do just that, we have to smile and accept their anger like a moth's kiss.

Stripping is all about rejection, as I said when I began this piece. A friend of mine adopted the mantra that went “Every No is a Yes” in an effort to cope with what feels like a ceaseless wall of negativity. For every man who did pay me to strip, sit, talk or some combination of the three, more didn’t. For every night that I walked out of the club with fat packs of beer-and-cigarette-scented hundreds in my wallet, there were as many that I walked out with just a handful of singles, especially that summer, my last summer, the summer that I quit, the summer I ceased to be CeCe, the summer I’ve been forestalling narrating for months.

The long, long summer of endless No.

Comments

[Al Sensu]

Strip Club etiquette is not difficult to learn by observation. When approached and I don't want a dance, I have two possible answers, both delivered with smiles: 1/"no thanks" if I'm sure I won't want one from that dancer or 2/"no thanks, maybe later" if I'm not sure.

But I would also say that many dancers need to do a better job of selling themselves. For some, the way they relate to you when you're tossing dollars by the stage does the job. Otherwise, I find a personalized approach will work, and gets me to accept dances from women who may not be my "type". My sense of whether I'm going to get the kind of dance I'm hoping for has more to do with the dancer's personality than her looks.

I remember my very first strip club visit. I was solo in a new town on business and had no idea how things worked. I sat and observed for a good hour without being approached. Now I was ready. A dancer walked up and sat next to me; started some small talk. Then she asked if I'd like a dance. This was 20 years ago, and "table dances" were $5. Before starting she leaned in close, licked behind my ear and whispered "Would you like the $5 dance or the $10 dance?" Naturally, I said $10, and got something close to a lap dance in a place where the $5 got you the girl dancing next to your table but with minimal contact. I've enjoyed similar sales techniques since. Some years later in the same town, I agreed to a dance, and re-confirmed the amount. She said "$30, but I'll do 5 for a hundred." I said, "let's start with one." Halfway through, it was so good I told her we were going for five. She squealed with joy and I really got my money's worth.

[Crotch Rocket]

"Just say, 'No, thank you.' We appreciate politesse." Some of you do. Others argue and try to convince the customer to change his mind. That annoys us to no end, and if it happens enough times it's going to test a guy's patience. After the tenth Miss Djewanadance hassles us in five minutes, we're not feeling so friendly.

You also left out two other groups. Some guys go to strip clubs thinking that the overpriced drinks are paying for their entertainment and that a girl dancing five feet away on a stage is just as good as one dancing two feet away on the floor -- and the one on stage is "free". Others just may not be into you for whatever reason; maybe he likes redheads instead of blondes, or natural tits instead of implants, or something else. No matter how incredibly hot you are, there's always going to be guys just not that into you.

Also, my experience is that the dancers that most men want are the ones that never approach anyone; the minute they get up from a table they're grabbed by another guy. The ones who have to walk around doing the Djewanadance routine are the ones that we _don't_ want, unless the guy's tastes are pretty far outside the norm.

"it remains amazing to me how rude men could be to us dancers." And it remains amazing to me how rude women can be to men. A strip club is the only place on earth a woman gets rejected the way men get rejected everywhere else. You in particular may be nice about it, but (a) many of your fellow women are not, and (b) you're still rejecting us. Rejection sucks, no matter what gender you are; men are expected to just deal with it, and when you take your clothes off for a living, you are too. It's your job. As someone once told me, if you liked everything about your job they wouldn't have to pay you to do it.

[The Fury]

I agree there's no need in being rude. The many "no thank yous" and "not just yets" I've spoken at strip clubs were always accepted (well except one) with graciousness. The one that wasn't so gracious yelled at me "you're just trying to be nice cuz you're sitting with these women. You know you want me muthafucka!"

She was right. Unfortunately, when I went looking for her later, she was no where to be found.

I've also found that if the girl isn't exactly your type, you can usually ask her and she'll find your type for you...proper etiquette requires you tip her for that as well, cheap skates!

It is interesting that you concentrate on the rejection, and I'm sure that there was plenty of it, but at the same time you had enough acceptance to make enough money to make it worth your while. After all you started every shift owing money to the house and others. You had to get enough acceptances to recover that and take enough money home to pay your bills. You did it and in your 30's. I'd say that was pretty damn good.
One of the things about stripping is that most every shift there are acceptances. There are many other jobs with the same acceptance/rejection ratio, but perhaps not as many where you can expect on the number of acceptances in so short a time.

I enjoy your writing
Kent

How about a piece on how a customer or a dancer moves the relationship out of the club?

[Walden]

As an occasional patron, I always try to treat the ladies with the same respect I would give anyone. "No thank you. Or maybe a Not right now." I am usually a sucker for a dancer that knows the secret of eye contact. The smoldering look or lick of the lip with a solid look at my eyes. I would rather get a dance from a not so smokin hottie that knew how to act interested than the most gorgeous robot in the place that obviously had her mind on what she was going to pick up at the store on the way home.

My pet peeve is the guys that sit away from the stage on a slow night when you know the ladies aren't doing well and watch for hours without tipping.