in which little miss morph-a-lot fails

Sadly, the book deal for the book that was to be my first book, although not my book but a book written by me, has gone south. Suffice to say that it was no one’s fault; I wanted more money; they wanted to give me less; we couldn’t agree on numbers; life goes on.

Though I can’t spill the whole pot of bubbling beans, the book in question was a collection of erotica written centered on the employees of a business this particular corporation would like to be known as “an upscale gentleman’s club,” but which I would term simply a strip club or, were I in a sassier frame of mind, a “titty bar.” It was, essentially, a book that splayed its fictionally tanned, toned thighs across the Venn diagram of erotica, journalism and corporate branding. The book’s agent, the corporation in question and I all agreed that I, being both a former “entertainer,” a writer of erotic fiction and an occasional journalist, would be perfect for the project.

As it turned out, the project wasn’t perfect for me, or I should say that the money offered for the project was much less than perfect, and so I chose to walk. I wish the corporation, the agent, and all involved the best.

I’m sad about this loss, but this post is less about the travails of my first Book That Wasn’t and more abut how bone-vibratingly surreal it was for me to go to the club of corporation in question, meet with the club’s P.R. guy and the book’s agent, and talk with the various employees of the establishment/gentleman’s club/strip club. Because what I found when I stepped through those double doors and into the inescapable shuk-shuk-shuk bass-thrumming atmo of every titty bar between Bangor and Beijing, was that you can take the woman out of the strip club, but you can never take the stripper out of the girl.

I quit stripping nearly ten years ago; it was the August of 1999 the last day I took the stage as CeCe at FlashDancers, the subterranean strip club where I danced off and on for six years. I quit because having committed to finishing my Ph.D. I was soon embarking on teaching Freshman college English, and I knew that I couldn’t both strip and teach. Plus, I’d hit the wall hard, and I could barely get out the phrase “HiI’mCeCethat’sagreattieandwowyou’reindescribablysexywouldyoulikeadance?” I had a strange aphasia and it was hurting my bottom line.

So I quit, rarely to look back, only visiting the club where I’d worked as a civilian once after my last night, a night I’ve yet to narrate here, most likely because to do so would put an artificial psychic nail into an imaginary coffin, because as I am coming to realize, hardly anything is ever really over.

There’s this Hindu aphorism that goes “Every dancing girl is seventeen.” I discovered this saying decades ago when I was studying dance with the kind of obsessional intellectual and physical fervor reserved for college girls. It’s something that I’ve repeated to myself over and over for a variety of reasons, but most often in my stripping days as a way to claim my right to be there in the land of Lucite and spandex and perfected bodies, a land of the perpetually young, and I a stripper who began stripping at the advanced age of thirty. All dancing girls are seventeen, I’d remind myself when I poured my hard-worked body into the candy-colored g-string; the stretchy, slitty, slutty dress; the absurd platform Barbie shoes.

While dancing, I had lived as if that Hindu saying was gospel. But when at the gentleman’s club/strip club/titty bar for the corporation in question to discuss the First Book That Wasn’t, and I met the club’s P.R. man and I extended my hand to him, and smiled ingratiatingly, and heard my voice go up a few uncomfortable notes, and felt my body language turn suddenly CeCe, the thing I realized in that slender moment was exactly how excruciatingly true it was. Meeting that man, immersed in the shuk-shuk-shuk thrumming bass, wrapped in the hyper-scented cocoon of the body sprayed and deeply tanned and aggressively depilated, I snapped back into full-on CeCe mode, and it was truly a fucking strange sensation. I was again a dancing girl and I felt seventeen; I was CeCe.

There were things I liked about being CeCe. Being CeCe meant escaping, however briefly and incompletely, the heavy psychic detritus of my every day life. Being CeCe, however much a beatified, bottled-blonde, lobotomized creation of my own self, meant embodying an uncomplicated life. And even if I oscillated between being CeCe and being myself with a strobe-light flickering of my identity all night long when I worked, I still felt a kind of relief in being her, rather than being me.

But at the same time, and because I am given to profound ambivalence (as I’ve said,  in the kingdom of ambivalence I wear the royal skort and eat with the royal spork), I also loathed CeCe. Her necessary submission to lesser creatures. Her cloying obsequiousness. Her spineless smile. Her seething anger and her pretty-pretty mask. I am not a sweet person. I don’t believe in the innate value of being nice. In the human race that is life, I’d gleefully run with scissors, even if when the race was run I’d feel great heaving piles of bad about it. And yet, when I was CeCe, I was sweet. Sweet as lemon meringue pie.

When I stepped into that gentleman’s club/strip club/titty bar, when I shook that P.R. guy’s hand—and indeed in every trip back there that I made, making contacts, chatting with managers, housemoms, hair dressers, coatcheck girls and everyone else—I morphed back into CeCe. I became sweet. I smiled and I batted my eyelashes. I would feel the sweet amnesia of CeCe flow over me like sugary lava, and I would hate it.

I thought that CeCe was dead and buried, resurrected only when I choose to write about her, to lay her out on the anatomy table of my analytic mind, to cut and dissect and probe her inert body for the etiology of…something. I thought I’d never be CeCe again, and I was damn glad of it.

Not so much: CeCe is dead; long live CeCe. For entering into that club, that day, a day that was—coincidentally? ironically?—my birthday, the strong, assertive, acerbic tasty bitch I thought I was took a powder, and in her place sat a dancing girl, a girl forever dancing, and forever seventeen.

Disconcerting isn’t the half of it.

Comments

[badinfluencegirl]

it's always funny to find yourself back in a person you thought you had outgrown. you see it on occasion with family or very old friends but i find i see it most among certain groups...

i become who i was and it's both strangely enjoyable and terrible to be so... there is a reason i am not she any longer... but she is still me.

[Lia]

Great post!

[Alana]

CG. I'm grateful for you. This, so timely for me. You're almost always timely for me. Sorry bout the book, obviously, because the world is in dire need of your voice without realizing it, but I get exactly your point here, and you know what? It will happen. Whatever we wish to happen. I said we. Yeah, good. :-)

[Karl Friedrich Gauss]

I've been thinking about your "more than disconcerting" experience flashing back to your dancing girl personna. Fascinating! I've wondered how much of that personna was acting and how much was simple possession (for instance by a discarnate entity). Not that this would have been the only instance of such possession, but that you were also maybe possessed before when CeCe was a more regular part of your life. I'm suggesting that maybe "CeCe" was actually someone else. People don't talk much about it nowadays but voodoo was all about creating a state of consciousness in which a "god" could take possession of one's body and "ride" it in ecstatic dance. What do you think?

[Rose]

CG, on behalf of all hard-working writers everywhere, thank you for realizing your worth and refusing to accept less. It can be hard, but it's so damn necessary. Cheers.