pretty dumb things

tattoos numbers 9 and 10

Yesterday I met with Stephanie Tamez, the woman whom I refer to as my tattoo artist, to consult about my new tattoos. Stephanie is a tiny, quick person with the affect of a highly tattooed sparrow, if sparrows were themselves tattooed and rather than more often being tattoos themselves. I walked into the studio with a general feeling of befuddlement tinged with resentment that I had to have a consult at all, but Stephanie, it turns out, is a much wiser woman than I when it comes to the decoration of dermis. She quickly talked me out of my initial concept and she, being both an artiste and a merchant, convinced me to get a completely new design around my existing, raw, and kind of ugly tribute tattoo and to put the two textual tattoos elsewhere.

So I've now an appointment on 4 May for the work around the existing tattoo, a frame that will take the form of some Victorian filigree, which will be, according to the infinitely more expert Stephanie, both "organic" and "visual." I'm on stand-by for the two textual tattoos. The Addams Family quote will go on the inside of my forearm right under my inner elbow so that it is balanced against my Joyce quote on the inside of my wrist. The Buffy quote will be placed between the already existing Joyce quote and the to-be-added Addams Family quote so that it wraps around my forearm, more or less bisecting my forearm horizontally, and such that the phrase "love's bitch" features on my forearm. If you can picture that, which I can because I spent a good forty-five minutes taping paper to my arm, you're doing better than I suspect. Pictured below are the graphics of the two textual tattoos. I'll post pictures when I get them done.

Who doesn't love new skin art? No one I want to have lunch with. I'll make an exception for my parents because, you know, they raised me and all.

For no reason that I can think of, the Addams Family quote (it translates to "we gladly feed on those who would subdue us," not just pretty words) is the actual size, but the Buffy isn't. I guess you can click to embiggen it.

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.

dispatches from Strip Nation, part 2, nearly naked joy

Last week on Halloween, I wrote a post that questioned the recent trend of fetish-wear inspired  Halloween costumes for women, and in doing so I introduced my notion of Strip Nation. Not surprisingly given the intense media hype surrounding “Slutoween,” the post garnered some attention, both critical and laudatory.

To be honest, I’m a lot less interested in what women wear to Halloween parties than I am interested in what their choices are, how media interprets these choices and what these choices mean in terms of culture at large. In my mind, the proliferation of “Naughty” and “Sexy” Halloween costumes is neither something to chastise and wag my finger at nor to celebrate and raise the big foam finger to; rather, it’s an opportunity to look at our culture in general, and our attitudes toward sex in specific. We may not be what we wear on Halloween, but what we wear gives us something not just to look at but also to think about.

Strip Nation, as I suggested in my earlier ramblings, is the dissemination of the go-go world of gentlemen’s clubs, strip bars, and burlesque into dominant culture. From the rather innocuous pleasure of body piercing to the unquestionably dangerous pursuit of perfectly pink and perfectly sculpted labia, from the pursuit of pole-dancing to the wearing of Lucite platform shoes, from the girl-next-door to the Girls Next Door, we are a country permeated by a new strip aesthetic. It’s everywhere you look, and as I suggested previously it’s problematic.

But it’s not all bad.

There’s a lot about Strip Nation that looks pretty rosy. Empowering. Celebratory. Even, and I hate this term for its near-emptiness, Sex-Positive.

Power comes from the choice to objectify one’s self for money, and strippers know this. From the day we are born to the day we die, we are all of us objectified, every day that we come into contact with other humans. Objectification is just something that we humans do. We look at others, we evaluate them, and we ask our selves: would we fuck them? We base these fuckability decisions based in no small part upon their looks (we often don’t, or can’t, act upon finding a person fuckable, but that doesn’t mean we don’t constantly weigh  people’s attractiveness). When you make the choice to perform this objectifying dance as your livelihood, you take control of this dynamic. In taking control, you assume power.

So the women who select the Red-Hot Devil costume for their Halloween party can temporarily appropriate this power for themselves, and when they choose a Sexy Cop or Hot Corrections Officer or other costume that erotically reinterprets an already inherently powerful cultural symbol, they’re increasing that appropriated power. Sexy Nurse may be powerful, but Hot Doctor = power(X)2. It’s almost algebraic.

It doesn’t have to be Halloween, though, for women to embody an empowering strip dynamic. Parties like Cake, a New York-based roving nightclub, offers chicks who want to try on sexual liberated behavior—from dancing in a bra and panties to making out with strange chicks to finding like-minded others for threesomes and moresomes—in a friendly environment are deeply imbued with stripper ethos. Strip clubs serve up the fantasy of sexually joyful girls, girls who are adventurous, uninhibited and eternally ready. It’s as intoxicating for a woman to imagine being one of these erotically free beings as it is for men to imagine being with one. Parties like Cake create a space where buttoned-up women can be unhinged girls, if only for one evening every couple of months.

Similarly, when chicks take pole-dancing or other strip exercise classes, they come to embody strippers, and it can be a profoundly transformative experience. I used to teach a strip work-out class. In the months that I taught, I saw this group of women comprised of mostly middle-class mommies learn how to move differently. Women who lived their lives in frozen pelvises, their shoulders hunched around their ears, found movement in their backs, found length in their necks. After the class ended, more than one husband thanked me profoundly. More importantly, though, these women did. I felt gratified to know that I’d made a difference in these people’s lives by teaching them how to access their inner stripper.

Nothing suggests the freedom, the power, and the erotic transgression inherent to stripping like the recent phenomenon of democratic burlesque. This topic deserves its own post—if not its own book—but the explosion of modern burlesque suggests exactly how powerful getting naked on stage can be. From the porcelain perfection of Dita Von Teese to the comic, carnivalesque, and culturally critiquing form of lesser known, and often more local, burlesque idols, burlesque has attained a popularity unequalled in its history.  Moreover, the reappropriation of burlesque by women of wide-ranging body types and sexualities has given the art form a fresh and cheeky political power.

Strip Nation has absolutely granted no small power to American women. It has allowed women to be all the best a stripper can be: visibly and proudly in charge of her own sexual self.

But being the person that I am, I can’t look at all this celebration of Strip Nation and ask what it means. What is it about our culture that makes women embody the stripper, however briefly, in order to access their own sexuality? What does the need to assertively become a sex object suggest about all the other moments when aren’t choosing to be one? What does the public performance of erotic availability mean about our private understanding of erotic availability? And why do we need to look to the most two-dimensional figure of female sexuality—the stripper—to find our erotic power animals?

These are just a few of the questions I’m interested in considering, living here, as I do, in Strip Nation.

now on newsstands near you, december edition

The December edition of Penthouse, along with my article on being a moral manwhore is now out and available at a newsstand near you.

It's all kinds of illustrated.

Go ahead, pick one up and let me know how you like it. Honestly, I hope you do.

kissykiss,
chelsea g

dispatches from Strip Nation, part 1, halloween

If the general media hue and cry is to be believed, there’s nary a girl over nine or a woman under ninety who is not dressing like a whore this Halloween. In recent days, there’s been a tremendous amount of media attention—both that of conventional media and that of its alternative counterparts—spent on how the range of female costumes has ranged widely from the mildly naughty to the downright fetishistic, with hardly any choice left for those chicks who want to dress up and not look like they’re selling hand-jobs for crack or taking a break from La Maison de Latex down the block.

It’s not like the sluttification of Halloween is a new thing. In season two of Buffy first aired in 1996, Buffy tried to convince her then very straight-laced best friend Willow to bare a bit of skin for the holiday.

“You're missing the whole point of Halloween,” says Buffy.

“Free candy?” Willow asks.

“It's come as you aren't night,” Buffy says, “the perfect chance for a girl to get sexy and wild with no repercussions.”

Oh,” says Willow, “I don't get wild. Wild on me equals spaz.” And then after gamely donning the navel-baring rock chick ensemble, hides her hottie light under a ghost-costume bushel, unable to follow through with the public performance of her inner wild girl.

I’m not particularly interested in getting my panties in a moralizing wedge over the choice of a fully-fledged adult woman to dress as a naughty nurse, or even over an uninformed kid’s choosing to wear some garb that’s age inappropriate. As much as I’m disinclined to suggest that this Ho-rrific trend is the second sign of the apocalypse—we all know the first was Xanadu, the Broadway musical—I am, however, interested in looking at what it means that the go-to Halloween garb for adults seems to be some variation of streetwalker.

I briefly attended a Halloween party this past weekend. In attendance was a Sexy Cop, a mini-skirted Marie Antoinette, a Gold-Digger, a Naughty Nurse, a Hot Devil and a woman with a deerstalker cap dressed as Sherlock Ho. (There was also a Tinkerbelle, a Marilyn Monroe, and a denim cut-offs wearing Amy Winehouse, but while those costumes may have some kind of intrinsic erotic charge, none of them were designed with sheer T&A-showing titillation in mind, so I’m not counting them.) Not including me, who dressed as a homicidal maniac, which meant I looked like everyone else, over half of the women at the party had dressed to thrill.

I have to wonder if women who choose to costume themselves in Fritz the Cat-esque appropriations of fetish and streetwalker wear do it for the facile reason that most people give: that Halloween gives the repressed a big Get out of Jail Free Card for their repressions. It just seems too simple an explanation for me, that old chestnut about how, as cultural philosopher Mikhail Bahktin suggested, the carnival give people the big fat transgressive blank check to live lives, however briefly, opposite to their own. Frankly, looking around me on Halloween, I’m not buying that.

Because for one thing, women have a limited lip service granting permission to be sexual. More than any time previous to our current millenium, we women own our own sexuality in a variety of ways never previously possible. We can talk about it. We can engage in it. We can attend workshops about it. We can educate ourselves. We can rightfully expect a life full of lots of orgasms of various shapes and sizes and colors. And most importantly, we can decide when or if we will ever reproduce, at least in most states and under most insurance plans. We certainly have the appearance of feeling joyously empowered with our own _____________ (insert favorite term for vagina here).

So perhaps this donning the fishnets and vinyl cowgirl gear has more to do with that pussy power (“pussy” remains my favorite vaginal term; don’t expect me to use “vajayjay” anytime soon), but I don’t think so. Because there’s something about this kind genre of costume’s use of excessive sexual force that gestures less towards empowerment and more towards something else.

To me, when “good girls” dress “bad” on Halloween, they are drawing the line in the sartorial sand between they, who have never chosen to support themselves by stripping in front of, talking on the phone to, or having sex with complete strangers, and those of us who have. They are, in effect, putting on these salacious clothes once a year to show that they have never had to be bad; therefore, they can choose to wear their badness as negligently and temporarily as a cheap Ricky's costume. And then once the cold, hard light of 1 November hits the sky, they can revert, like a showered if hungover Cinderella, to their properly chaste and culturally upright positions. No harm, no foul, no lasting memories of a stray hand, a cruel word, or an unexpected sex act tying the body, the money and the feeling into one greasy knot.

But even that explanation is a bit facile, even if it is correct, and I think it is, however unconsciously for the lion’s share of Sexy Hogwarts Students tipping over tonight in their Lucite platforms. Because this trend wherein women are dressing like they should be called next on main stage, as much as it speaks to their defining their 364-day selves against their Halloween fantasy, also speaks to the seduction of what I’ve come to call Strip Nation.

Strip Nation is the place where little girls wear body glitter for fun, where pole dancing is a fitness pursuit, where chicks have standing appointments for monthly Brazilians, and weekly tans, French manicures and matching pedicures. It’s the place where women purposefully show bra straps and g-strings. It’s where average women have the lower-back tattoo, body piercings, and t-shirts that read “Diva.” It’s the where women get breast implants, labiaplasty and anal bleaching. It’s a place where family restaurants have waitresses wearing orange short-shorts, and where drag-queen restaurants have banana deep-throat contests, and where eighteen year-old girls win them.

Strip Nation is where we live now. It’s not a bad place to live. Strip Nation gives us Carmen Electra and body butter. Strip Nation lets us shake our booty with abandon. Hell, Strip Nation, combined with Hip-Hop Nation—it’s a unified country of dual principalities—has given us the word “booty.” Without Strip Nation, we’d still be pogoing and wearing flat shoes and high-waisted pleated pants.

Strip Nation can be a lot of fun, but it’s a deeply problematic kind of fun. I am proud to have been a stripper, but I know that stripping is best kept in the strip club because stripping is about serving up a fantasy based on the most simplistic heterosexual male’s formulation of an uncomplicated woman. Most simply, Strip Nation provides a dreamscape based on a model of a two-dimensional woman and men’s desire for them. And while that is all well and fine for an eight-hour strip shift, it has major issues when it goes rampant, out into the streets, and disseminates like a virus into the culture at large.

I wonder how much women choosing to dress like a stripper for Halloween—whatever the flavor of the specific fantasy—isn’t centered on an unquestioning slide into the happy amnesia of Strip Nation: a place where men will be men, women will be girls, and no one need have a thought cross their untrammeled brows. I wonder how much the Naughty Nurse, the Sassy Satan, the Wanton Witch, the Reform School Drop Out, the Pirate Wench, and all the heaving bosom, exposed thigh rest, has more to with the prefeminist nostalgia that Strip Nation embodies. I wonder how much the naughty Halloween costume hasn’t less to do with getting one’s freak on as it does with doing so in a way that feels like you don’t have to think about it when you do.

Tomorrow, Halloween will just be a bunch of garbled stories and memories, gone for another year, But we’ll still be living in Strip Nation. Look around you, it’s everywhere. Fun, yes. But at what cost?

spandex & lucite shoes: part 42, on how a good man is hard to find

As I close in on narrating the final days of my strip life at FlashDancers Finishing School for Young Ladies, I feel the need to take time to wrap up some odds and some ends, and some odd ends. What follows is a kind of character sketch of a kind character, a man called Nunzio. If you're interested in reading more about the strip life, here's the whole index, and here's the very first post.

Nunzio was the night manager of FlashDancers, but that statement really doesn’t give the full import of the man. The other two managers for day and for weekends were the brother and the sister of Barry, the sometimes corpulent and always visible owner of Flash. To them, Barry’s flesh and blood, his betters, educationally at least, for they both had an M.A. in something less lucrative than the running of a titty bar—and what isn’t, really, Barry, who left school in tenth grade to mop jizz in Times Square jack-off booths,  gave the management of the lesser shifts at Flash. The greater shifts, those of the moneyed weeknights, went to Nunzio. This division of labor alone speaks to the importance of  this man.

To Nunzio, Barry gave the important shifts: Tuesday through Saturday nights, five nights a week, from around 7:00 p.m. until the money was counted in the wee hours of the morning, a time by which we strippers were snug in our beds or discoing around Manhattan whacked out on coke or whatever it was we did after work and before daylight broke a new day.

Nunzio always looked as if he had been styled by John Gotti’s classier cousin. He was invariably impeccably dressed in a suit, a discreet pocket square in his breast pocket, a subdued shirt, a coordinating tie. His white hair was always exactly the same length, as if it was groomed so often that it neither grew nor was cut. He always looked the same: unruffled and unflappable, a calm grandfatherly eye in the lurid Flash storm.

Nunzio had come to Flash a package deal with the property. He had been bought by the oft-times muscular Barry and his posse of invisible backers when they had purchased the club. In an almost mythic union, Nunzio had begun his relationship with the subterranean night club in the 70’s as a manager when it had been a disco, had stayed manager through its days as a gay dance club and was now the feckless captain of its strip-bar incarnation. I imagine that he will always be there, no matter what the club becomes in the future, a form of some epic penance for enraging some small demi-god of the semi-underworld, or some fairytale reward for doing some small sprite a tiny happiness.

In any case, Nunzio seemed attached to the room itself. Watching him work, I’d see him glide with unfathomable poise through the crowd; it parted compliant before him. I’d see him emerge from the secret room walled behind the row of tables in the back, a fortress of shiny black plastic and mirrors making nearly indictable its existence next to the Champagne Room, and wonder what secrets he was privy to. What he knew from watching monitors, from reading ledgers, from unearthing the undoubtedly hoary secrets of FlashDancer’s murky depths.

I can only imagine, really, for he would never be one to tell me.

Nunzio’s voice sounds a lot like Robert DeNiro’s as the kindly father in The Bronx Tale. He has those Bensonhurst-Mulberry Street-Arthur Avenue flattened vowels, those tell-tale dropped final consonants. He sounds like he has lived a life looking forward to a pot of gravy and pasta on Sundays, and he has. I, unlike most of the Flash girls, took time to talk to Nunzio—I talked to Barry too, and to the DJs, and to anyone who would tell me his or her story—and so I learned the bits and pieces. I learned his Flash history, found out the bare bones of his family (one of his many sons graduated from the school where I did my Ph.D.), discovered where and how he lived, as much as I could, which wasn’t nearly enough.

One thing I knew: Nunzio had an unshakeable faith in aspirin. No matter what ailed you, Nunzio advocated aspirin. Headaches, heartaches, backaches: aspirin. Aches of the spirit, bouts of nihilistic darkness, clouds of ambient anxiety: aspirin. Occasionally, he would also advocate a drink, but mostly his go-to panacea was aspirin. Which I suppose speaks to the generation that Nunzio was from more than anything else—he may have been dragged along for the new millennium ride, but he was clearly a man of the pre-counter revolution 60s. Nunzio was a very sexy man, but he clearly didn’t swing.

A good thing, too, for more than one strip club has lost its bearings when its manager has lost his lust, or his control over it anyway. No one knew if Nunzio found any one girl more attractive than another, for he treated all of us pretty equally. Clearly, he liked some of us more than others, myself included. He liked me quite a bit.

“CeeCee,” he’d tell me as I had come to him once more to advocate my going home early, or to present my side of some inequity I’d suffered at the ham-fisted hands of patron or bouncer, “you should be a lawyer.” And then he’d smile indulgently.

Once I remember I came to him, one very boring night when I was just not making any money and my feet hurt and I couldn’t, just couldn’t, play the strip game any longer, not one moment longer, not one second, and I raised my hands in front of my chest like a begging dog and whined.

Hmmmm…. Hmmmmm… I pleaded, making a puppy face.

Nunzio looked me up and down. Pulled his head back, raised an eyebrow. “All right,” he said, “you can go home provided you never do that again,” and in one sentence he both gave me what I wanted and communicated his deep personal disappointment in me, so much, in fact, that I felt shame as I packed my dance bag and tripped off into the night.

Not that Nunzio was always fair to me. One time, during my body of death phase, when I had arms that made gay guys ask me how I got them and a six pack of abs, he waved me over to the Manager’s podium. “CeeCee,” he said, a grin twitching his lips, “Some guy just asked me if you were a man.”

No way, I said.

“Really.” Nunzio said, “he took one look at your arms and thought you were a man.” And then he laughed. I never was sure if it really happened, or if he just thought, early sixties Kennedy-era Italian grandfather that he was that I was getting a bit too butch for my own femmey good.

Another time, I was dancing for this older man at a table of just awful Israeli men. They were all talking about me in Hebrew, cackling and barely hiding rude body gestures. I kept my distance, my dancer radar going all haywire, but when I turned my back and bent over, a standard move in my table dance repertoire, the nasty man I was dancing for slipped his finger inside my g-string and ran it down the back, along the cleft of my ass, brushing his knuckle along my anus, my vulva, my clit.

In one motion, I stood, turned and slapped him across the face. Tony, the big and ugly brick wall of an Indian bouncer, saw the whole exchange—the evil group, the nasty grope, the ensuing slap—and yelled across the room, “Nunzio, CeeCee slapped a guy.” I was spitting with rage. He was supposed to be protecting me, this misogynistic lump, and he was tattling on me? What the bloody hell?

I grabbed my dress and stomped off to Nunzio in a nearly naked huff. Tears were spitting from my eyes, I was so angry. I had been grabbed before. I had had my breasts mauled. I had had my ass bitten. I had been pulled by the hips to sit on a naked erection. I had had men spooge through their khakis and onto my back. I had never, ever, felt the unwanted touch of finger on my genitals. And to have my protection tattle like a Nelly Larson was just foul icing on the already putrid cake.

“CeeCee,” Nunzio said, “you can’t slap people.” In his calm face, I blurted out what had happened, this incoherent story of abuse and betrayal, a foreshortened inarticulate tale of epic emotion. Nunzio listened and then said, “CeeCee, slapping is not the answer.”

I stared at him levelly. I could see in that moment the toll this job took on him, his self control at having  to battle his own sense of decency in this mock universe where regular rules did not apply, the endless and ceaseless sound of girls whining, the long hours, the wife’s mistrust, the children’s embarrassment, the nocturnal life of an essentially decent man who happened to be the manager of a subterranean titty bar.

I narrowed my eyes and said nothing. “Go have an aspirin,” Nunzio said, and I did.

One Sunday in Chelsea, while sitting outside eating brunch with Wiley, a stripper pal, I saw Nunzio by daylight. He was wearing a polo shirt. He was wearing shorts. He was, as ever, dapper, each garment pressed within an inch of its life. Accompanied by two of his sons and one of their babies, he recognized us, smiled a big genuine grin and came over to talk.

We made small talk. He handed me his grandson to hold. Not because I’d asked to—babies always make me feel a bit uncertain what to say; I want to make conversation, but there is so little we have in common—but because he wanted to see me with him, I think. Maybe to make me uncomfortable, but maybe too to make me part of his normal life, his sunlit life, if only for a moment, if only until the baby’s mother came, and seeing me for what I did, all supertan and extrablonde and Russ Meyers busty, whisked her child out of my arms, as if I would somehow harm it by association.

Nunzio, though, he had no fear of me. He knew me for what I was, which was what he was too, a good human, regardless of where we worked. He knew the job did not make the man.

Rather, the man elevated the job, if he was a good man, and Nunzio was always and ever the epitome of a good man.

spandex & lucite shoes: part 41, in which we find our heroine's days numbered

My stripmemoirs slowly, slowly wind to a close. This version of them does, anyway. Though who knows what the future holds, for strippers never die, they just move on to another stage. Want to see what came before? Here's the previous post in the series. And here, too, is the first, should you want to see where it all began.

My final days at FlashDancers lingered. CeCe, my strip self, languished as if afflicted by a terminal illness, which, if you consider my knowing full well and with certitude that the CeCe days were numbered, the metaphor of terminal illness is less morbid and more mordant. Almost cheeky, in its nose-thumbing in the general direction of death. Fitting, anyway.

My final days lingered and I languished. I found myself suddenly unable to remember what it was I used to do when I did well. I found myself stuttering in word and deed, unable to get out full phrases, complete sentences, whole thoughts. Like a stroke victim, I found myself suffering from a strange aphasia. I could recollect how I used to be able to do this—this whole strip game, this approaching strangers, this idle conversation, this empty flirting, this minor seduction—but I could not now for the life of me actually do it.

I would see a table of men. I would see their eyes dart around the room in happy expectation. I would see a gaze flicker and land on me. I would see a slender smile before the smile’s owner was distracted by a buddy’s ogling nudges and words. I would see it all and I would recognize it for what it was: the invitation to cash. I would walk toward the table, compelled by strippery instinct, I would get close, closer, closest…and then I would turn and walk away.

It seemed an act of unimaginable difficulty to speak to these men, to present myself, once more, as CeCe, to offer them a chance to purchase my magic, to do it, to do it again, to do it once more, over and over, and to do it each time as if it were something new, something special, something worth paying for.

I had, I found, hit the wall. I had hit it hard. I had hit it and I had been splattered like a jar of pasta sauce on its impenetrable surface. I had hit it and I had lost it. The wall had been hit, and there was no getting around it, or over it. It was just suddenly there, like the monolith in 2001, and I knew it and I counted my days.

I counted other things too. When I am stressed, when I don’t know what else to do with my nattering mind, I count. I count steps. I count bricks. I count and count and count. Sometimes I make calculations, of ceiling tiles, for example. Then, back in the subterranean strip club, back in the land of flash, I counted beats, I counted men with red ties, or blue hats, or bald heads. I counted how often the DJ said “champagne room.” I counted how many times Annie from Deer Park changed her dress. I counted the money in my garter. That didn’t take long, for I wasn’t making much of it.

I tried and I tried to reinvoke the glamour of my past CeCe self. I would painstakingly recall my ancient and arcane money-making rituals and I would faithfully replicate them. I would get up at noon. I would drink a non-fat latte. I would go to the gym. I would tan and when I would tan, I would lie in the booth and I would recollect all the dead people I knew and I would thank them by name.

Thank you, Grandma, I would say, for having tea with me. And thank you, Grandpa, for taking me camping. Thank you, Will, for letting me and Spencer live with you. And so on. And I’d imagine them each in their separate glory, backlit and white-bordered. And when I was done calling them each by name, I would ask them for help. Please, I would say, help me make $600 tonight. And then I would thank them again.

And as I performed this gratitude invocation ending in supplication, I would turn and twist in the bed, always being careful to tan each side equally. I would have divided the time into equal parts and I would attend to each side as carefully as if I were roasting a suckling pig for a banquet. To which no one would come.

The ritual would continue. I noted what I ate and what I wore when I had good nights, and what I ate and what I wore when I did not. I kept strict mental track of it all. The magic lavender tummy dress. The risky brown halter. The pernicious aqua tube dress. Some dresses I could trust, but to trust them too often was to wear their luster to dullness. Other dresses were risky. I never knew if they would be magic, or if they would leave me cold, limp and despondent as last night’s fast food.

It was exhausting. It was a lot of work, all that counting, recollecting, recreating, and reinterpreting. It was tough to keep it all straight, and I don’t think I did a very good job, for each night, I seemed to make less money. Less and less. Smaller and slimmer the wad of cash. Thinner and bleaker the final days. Tick tick tick.

And yet, at the same time, I glimpsed the wonderful possibility beyond the walls of Flash. Sure, I had been in graduate school for the past two years, but this year, I would be teaching. My own classes, with my own students, and my own time and space to stand and walk and talk and have an effect on these people, possibly good, possibly bad, but also potentially for the rest of their lives. And it was very exciting, those final depressing lean nights at Flash. It was very exciting indeed to contemplate.

In tarot cards, the “death” card signifies change. That last, long, malingering summer at Flash, my CeCe self hovered somewhere between life and death on its spandex and rhinestone gurney. I tried to revive my interest, I tried to step lively, I tried and I tried, and in my way was the certain knowledge that this was the end, and I wanted to be so very okay with it.

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.

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.

spandex and lucite shoes: part 38, lasses in passing

As I come closer to narrating the death of my so-called strip life (and how many people get to tell of their own deaths?), I find these small shards stuck in my head. Nothing to do but grin and bare it and pull them out, as painful as it might be. Want to read the whole nearly naked body of my strip self? Go here. Or just read this one.

Sometimes my unconscious presents me, apropos nothing, a parade of lasses past. They come and they go, like contestants in an apparitional beauty contest, these girls I knew, if by “knew” you can take to mean anything from “was best friends with” to “saw on an occasional basis.”

The past few days I’ve been seeing this chick I used to dance with at FlashDancers. I don’t remember her name—if indeed I ever knew it. But for her exceptionally large and paradoxically full and pendulous tits, this woman was an unusual stripper. Her hair was the nondescript color of dirty sand, her skin a hue that might be made if you mixed milk and sand and a few drops of beets for color. She wasn’t tan, wasn’t blonde, wasn’t made up, wasn’t anything, really, that defined “stripper.”

Her beatified brow had the uncreased calm of ironed sheets; she looked as if she’d never troubled an emotion in her life. Her hair hung in straight sheets, parted in the middle, framing the face that looked like nothing so much as a Renaissance portrait of the Virgin Mary. Her body was thin, but not stick-skinny, neither toned nor flabby, and her expression rarely varied from one of a mother nursing her baby—contented and slightly wistful.

As unspectacular and natural as the rest of her was, her breasts defied comprehension. It was a formidable bosom—these two giant, pear-shaped breasts tipped with browning petal-pink nipples. Men would sit and stare at them—we all did, you couldn’t not, they were breasts that mesmerizing—and then whisk her to the musk of the champagne room, where she would remain until she emerged, hours later, her aspect unwaveringly placid as a sacred cow, and it would all happen again.

This dancer with the hagiographic face and swaying bosom always seemed to me a mystery. I know nothing about her—I don’t think I ever shared a word with her, except maybe an “excuse me” in passing somewhere at some time. Which was odd for me, because I tend to collect information about people. I’m a narrative sponge: I receive information and I retain it. I knew where most girls were from, what they wanted to do in their “real” life, if anything, if they were drug addicts or single mothers or both, whether their hair was real or a weave, their breasts real or silicone, their bisexuality new or ancient.

I know nothing about this pendulous-breasted Madonna. And that makes it all the weirder that her image has been lingering in my mind like a vagrant, like a partygoer with nowhere else to go, like she feels afraid to leave.

Other women have and do populate my mind for clearer reasons. Two in particular. One of them is Rita, real name Susie; the other is Rica, real name Veronica. Both of them were close friends of mine—in fact we were all three close friends—and both of them are no longer my friends.