pretty dumb things

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.

spandex & lucite shoes: part 37, hairs and bits

I've been terribly remiss/reluctant/whatever about writing the ends of my strip tenure at The FlashDancer Finishing School for Young Ladies. What follows is just a snipped bit of my life as an ecdysiast, just some detritus that on any other day would collect in a little wet bristly pad on the floor of a shower. Read on, and if you want, read the whole body of work here.

Late in the spring of 1996, The New Yorker published an article on the design, creation and release of Gillette’s Mach 4 razor. No doubt some people read the article and thought about investing in Gillette. Others probably read it and felt some kind of compassion for the legions of aeronautic engineers who, unfunded by NASA, were compelled to make a living by building a better razor.

But I, I was enraptured, seduced by the technological genius that was the Mach 4 before the Mach 4 had even hit the market. So excited was I to purchase said razor that I marked its release date on my calendar. And when the day came, it was with a giddy joy I bought the razor; it was with elation that I used it.

I loved my Mach 4, loved it with a flamey passion, loved it long and loved it well, loved it until those unrequited aeronautic engineers at Gillette graced my depilatory routine with a yet better product, the Venus, a razor I use unto this day.

We strippers are often asked if we wax or shave. Now that I’m no longer a stripper, I wax those naughty bits when I can and shave the rest. But when I was stripping, there was no possibility of waiting for my hair to grow long enough to be ripped out by its little roots. I shaved every day I worked, like it or not.

I have the downy blonde body hair of the archetypal surfer chick. Not a particularly hirsute gal, yet I have the need to shave. I’ve shaved my armpits since my 7th grade Home Ec teacher informed our class that it helped to contain B.O., and my calves since shortly thereafter just to feel balanced. My bikini area has grown emboldened as I’ve grown older; it crossed the Rubicon of the modest swimsuit line at some point in my late twenties, so the topiary of my bush needs landscaping. I also get a rather unpleasant thatchiness that spreads down the backs of my thighs. One friend, well before I ever stripped, said it looked like I was wearing “hair shorts.”

The very first time I ever shaved my pubic area I did so because this guy I’d made out with had given me crabs. Then I had sex with my boyfriend, he in turn got crabs, and then he informed me that I’d given them to him. Horrified, I put all of my bedding in the wash and got into the shower with several shavers and a big can of shaving cream.

I just took it all off. And when it grew back, it itched worse than the crabs. And then I let it all grow back.

When you strip, though, you need to be as hairless as a prepubescent Indonesian boy.

Female body hair, as the 1917 riots that followed the public exhibition of Modigliani’s wispily tufted nudes attested, is highly erotically charged. It’s not merely where and how much hair there is; it’s that it’s there at all. In a lot of ways, a denuded body is a less naked body. When a body has no hair to demark you what you’re looking at, you’re less aware that what you’re looking at is a naked body.

It might be as simple as the fact that we associate a hairless body with a sexless body. It might also be what the crowds rioting at Modigliani’s feral females railed against: that a body with hair looks more bestial.

Strippers, in general, are not bestial. We are creatures of fantasy, and as fantasy we need to maintain a fantastical presence. Pubic hair is a reality. Razor stubble is even more pointedly so. When customers surreptitiously rub our calves while we’re dancing for them, they like to feel the glidey smooth lushness of hair-free flesh. They don’t want to the sandpaper of stubble to snag their fantasy. They want it to let it flow like silk, a feeling we strippers want too, for if their fantasy flows, so does their money.

When I became a stripper, I accordingly elevated shaving from a necessary and occasional evil to something of an art. I shaved my calves every night before I worked. I shaved my armpits, pubic area and the backs of my thighs every other day—in part because I got massive rash if I shaved too often and in part because only my calves grew back so quickly that they needed daily maintenance.

I’ve experimented with a lot of shaving creams and many shaving methods. The best shaving unguent, I think, is really cheap moisturizer. Nothing that foams, no gel, no menthol to make your tender bits go all tingly (unless you like that sort of thing). Just great heaping handfully gobs of something cheap and forgettable like Queen Helene or St. Ives.

In general, most strippers do not remove all of their pubes. In general, most strippers do what I did: shave a perfect small triangle in front, narrow the center to two thin labia-hugging strips, shave completely the meeting of the butt and the bits, and trim the remaining hair to a close quarter inch. Many of us get electric trimmers for the remaining strips. I didn’t. I just tweaked the hair and snipped the ends with scissors.

Some strippers, however, had more aggressive hair management methods. One German girl shaved her armpits, legs, pubic triangle and her arms. My friend Rica, who is Thai, and rather hairless, so this never made any sense to me, but then she also worked in Manolo Blahniks, so whatever, got laser hair removal. She’ll ease into decrepitude never looking as if she ever reached puberty.

And yet others had more idiosyncratic hirsute aesthetics. There was this girl who went by the name Selena. She was from Venezuela, and with her big floppy curly mop of hair that quivered when she walked or danced, she looked like the love child of Charo and a muppet. Selena seemed oddly boneless. Her body had a ripe-to-bursting fecundity without actually being fat. Her belly’s softness made it seem as if were you to poke it, your finger would sink knuckle deep without resistance, like you had stuck your finger in a roll of raw pop-n-fresh dough.

One night rather late in my strip career, I was perched in the stool in the dressing room, resting my feet, trying not to look at the lines in my face and wonder what the hell I was doing there. Selena exited the bathroom stalls, dressed only in her g-string and heels and passed by my chair. As she did, I could see quite a few long curly hairs glistening blonde against her toasted marshmallow loins.

Completely inappropriately, I reached down and pulled at the hairs, uncoiling them to their fullest length.

Don’t you want to tuck those in? I asked, aghast that anyone would show pubic hair.

“No,” Selena purred, “I like to show them. It gives the mens a tease,” and dress on, she flounced out the door.

Thereby explaining, perhaps, why I was sitting in the dressing room bemoaning the slenderness of my gartered cashwad, while Selena was surfing the crest of the crowd, shaking her boneless body, being paid lavishly for baring the promise of her lush flesh.

It always bugged me when other girls figured out the game better than I did. It still does.

spandex & lucite shoes: part 36, fred and the rest

I admit it. For months, I’ve been putting off writing the ends of my stripmemoirs. Like Penelope’s nocturnal unraveling of her weaving, I have been postponing the inevitable, but unlike the form of that Greek wife’s reluctance to put an end to her husband’s story, mine has taken the form not of undoing, but of doing. Not of postponing, but of prolonging.

There are more tales to spin, some small voice interjects. Tell them about the friends you lost, it says. Tell about the time you tugged on the Columbian girl’s stray pubic hairs. Tell about John, the toothless regular, and the Russian girl’s asshole. Tell about losing Sasa. Tell about the many uses of blow-dryers. Tell them, it says, just tell.

And perhaps I will and perhaps I won’t—I am writing a book, after all.

In the meantime, see this: me, the last summer I was stripping, my life circulating around the knowledge of inexorable change, the end of summer and the beginning of a new life, and the slow, silent, and inevitable death of CeeCee.

I had taken a few months off from stripping; from around February when I broke up with the cherubic and dim Dave until the end of May, I lived the glorious life of just being a grad student. Just me, my books, my classes, my hours I served as a T.A. No late nights in Lucite shoes. No ridiculous workout schedule. No regimented meals. No waking to the cloying eau de Flash—a promiscuous mixture of multitudinous perfumes, spilled beer, stale smoke, a hint of industrial cleaning solvent, and just a soupcon of human vomit—clinging to my still bleached-blonde hair.

No mandatory parading my female flesh like an optimistic contestant at a bovine beauty contest. No anxiety over the hue of my skin, the shape of my thighs, the bounce of my breasts. No inane conversation with drunks. No bearing witness to histrionic flights of fighting fancy. No bouncers not doing their job. No swinging on poles while hoping my tampon string remained safe and secure inside my g-string. No double life.

Just me, doing my day job and feeling tremendously free about it. And all of that holistic freedom coming to a screeching halt when I thought about my finances and the summer and its total lack of income. Once a sexworker, kind of always a sexworker, and so I decided I would cross back over to the Dark Side one more time and put in my final summer session at the FlashDancer Finishing School for Young Ladies.

I called Nunzio, the avuncular manager of Flash, one evening a week or so before Memorial Day and told him I wanted to return to work.

“How’s your weight, Cee-Cee?” He asked.

Great, I said. I’ve been working out. It wasn’t. I hadn’t been. I wasn’t fat, but I wasn’t fit either. I was decidedly human looking, less a upward spiraling fantasy than a moribund reality.

“You know I have to ask,” he said, a minor note of regret in his voice. And then we set a date for me to come back, a day or two after Memorial Day.

I spent the next few weeks working out like a maniac, trying, at 37 to recapture in under a month the body I’d spent a year perfecting at the age 33. I was anxious. I was unhappy. I was in an impossible place. I dreaded going back, and I spent most every free minute with my stripper pal Wiley, including the last weekend work in Vermont before we both returned to Flash, hiking punishing trails through ice-covered mountains, visiting my family, running along the lake and growing just the most tremendous zit.

My skin is very much a topographical map of my interior life. Along with my biological father’s mesomorphic physique and round ass, I inherited his skin afflictions. Psoriasis, eczema, and a predilection toward the very occasional giant bulbous zit are all in my derma’s bag of tricks. This weekend, the last weekend before my last summer of stripping, I got this giant, hard, resolute pimple on my neck. I felt like  the hapless executive played by Richard E. Grant in How to Get Ahead in Advertising.

I also felt scared effing fuckless about having to return to Flash and having to re-inhabit the body of CeeCee again, as scared as I felt about having to put her to sleep at the end of the summer.

The whole thing, the returning, the ending, the change, the summer and the impending fall was making me feel like I was fairly ready to explode with anxiety, and so rather than explode, I grew this enormous zit on my neck.

“It’s not a tumor,” my then-aunt, a nurse, said reassuringly after jabbing it with her forefinger, and then added, “but I don’t know what it is.”

“It’s a cyst,” said my mom across the deck, where the whole family and Wylie was gathered to try to determine what the Thing on My Neck was.

I think it’s a zit, I said. Or a boil. And then I felt my stomach lurch. I’m not very stalwart about my own body. I’m very bad, for example, about pooh. I have a horror of pooh. I’m not fond of mucous. I really hate sneezing and farting. I loathe getting a runny nose. I dislike any bodily detritus—not merely excrement or mucous, but also flakes of skin, loose hairs, even urine. Oddly, I have very little issue with blood. 

And all I could think about was this: when I go back to Gotham, I’m going to have to exhibit my body for cash and I’ve got thigh ripples and a giant zit on my neck. Bloody hell, I thought, or I would have had I then the pretension to Brit slang I have now.

I am not exaggerating when I say this zit was the size of a newborn’s fist. Ok, maybe I am, but it was big and scary, big and scary in proportion to having to return to the land of Cee-Cee. I asked my aunt if there was anything I could do about it.

“Not really,” she said. “It will go away in a couple of weeks.” I, of course, didn’t have a couple of weeks. I tried everything I could think of to deal with the zit, which my friend Wiley had named “Fred.” I iced it. I heated it. I iced and then heated it. Nothing did anything to it. It was a stubborn little fucker. I considered poking it with a sterilized needle, but decided that would probably make it worse. It was just there, obdurate, obstinate, and unavoidable.

It was a fleshy metaphor. I hated it with a passion.

The weekend did end, and return to New York I did, zit on neck only somewhat diminished, and I found myself once more on the stage at Flash. Once more, I stood in the madding herd of girls, all of us wrapped tight in fabrics never conceived in nature, all of us painted up, most of us implanted, many of us tanned, all of us hoping that the night would be good, or not bad at least, just please god not bad.

Once more I heard my name called by the DJ, once more I gave a little wave and trucked off down the steps of the stage. Once more, that Tuesday after Memorial Day, I was CeeCee,

It was the summer of 1999, the last summer I was stripping. The slow golden sunset of CeeCee, and even just stepping off the stage that first night back, I felt that kind of nostalgia that comes with knowing that This Time May Be The Last Time. The last time I went to the Champagne Room. The last time I wore the magic tummy dress. The last time I see the feature who shoots sudsy water from a greenish acrylic champagne glass with her twat. The last time I woke pie-eyed and blurry, my feet sore and pulsing as hammered cartoon thumbs only to get up the next morning, go to the gym, tan and do it all again. Thinking again, this night could be the last.

I was quitting because that September, I was starting teaching college, and I knew that there were chances that my students would have fake I.D.s and that this meant there were chances, however slimmer, that they might use them to go to Flash. At any rate, I was quitting.

Mostly, though, I was quitting because I’d hit the serious wall.

I’d hit a wall, and I knew it; I just didn’t know how big a wall it was. Not that first night, anyway. But it was a big one. You’ll see.

spandex & lucite shoes: part 35, what strippers want

I'm taking some time out of the chronological ordering of my stripmemoirs to step onto a little soapy box and rant for a bit. It's fun when I get self-righteous and everyone always says I'm beautiful when I'm justifiably angry. Read on...

One of the commentators to my previous post about the plight of young and cherry-intact Bo counseled young Bo to stay away from strip clubs because “Strippers, of course, have only one motivation: to make money. They are experts at telling men what they want to hear, and making them feel like they're the only guy in the world. As soon as the money is gone - the girl moves on to the next guy at the next table and then hangs on every word that the guy at the other table says.”

This commentator followed those remarks with these: “Even in those rare circumstances where the girls do develop a genuine interest in a customer (and they do everything in their ability to make the guy fall for them, so it's nearly impossible to tell the truth from the reality), you find out that strippers tend to lead really dysfunctional existences. Drug habits, ex-boyfriends in organized crime…, kids by former boyfriends or husbands. Almost all strippers are Bad News - almost all of them.”

You can imagine that these remarks made my blood molten in anger.

I don’t mean to single out this man, who gave his name as Mark, for any kind of vituperative rant, and certainly his very gracious answer to my comment that responded to his on the initial post suggests that he just had a little lapse in judgment when he first wrote. And so, Mark, this post is not at all an attack of you, but it is an attack at those attitudes you propounded, attitudes I have heard and heard again both when I was a stripper and now, long after I’ve hung up my Lucite shoes.

First, I’d like to look at the latter part of Mark’s comment—that strippers lead dysfunctional existences, that we have drug habits and mobbed-up boyfriends and passels of mealy-mouthed kidlets clamoring for their abandoned papa back home at our trailers.

The fact is that yeah, lots of strippers do have drug habits and children. Fewer have mobbed-up boyfriends, but even that myth perpetuates (after Catherine Wood was murdered, I received a letter inquiring if there was, to my knowledge, any truth to the rumor that her boyfriend was in the Mafia). But lots more have just drug habits. And even more have just children. And yet still more have neither.

I myself was in that last camp, as was the majority of my friends, though the very eclectic Alexis as well as the very apple-pie Susie were both single mothers. In fact, of my group of ten friends with whom I worked at FlashDancers, three of them never did any drugs, one of them smoked pot but never drank, and the rest of us drank minimally.

I’m not going to pretend that strippers don’t have a lot of access and a lot of reason to use drugs. We do. It’s hard work to stay awake and perky. It’s hard work to seem attracted to the great cologned madding manly herd night after night. It’s hard to sleep when you get home and it’s hard to wake up and do it again in the morning. Lots of women used everything from Winstrol to get them cut, X to get them that frisky loving feeling, to coke to keep them up and bouncy, to heroin to escape from it all. I know three women from Flash who died from drug overdoses.

But I’m still going to say that drug addicts are in the minority.

In the minority too were working mothers, but really, faulting women who strip to take care of their kids just seems blind and cruel. In what other way can a woman without much education make a few hundred dollars a night, have the days free to spend with her child, and do it all working a schedule more or less of her making? Until there’s daycare at Walmart and minimum wage quintuples, stripping is going to look pretty fucking good to the single mother.

There is, along with the drug thing and the working mother thing, a lot of credence to our living dysfunctional lives. If you’re a girl in this society that is simultaneously titillated by and condemning of female sexuality, and you’re making your money through selling sexual fantasy, how can you escape a certain level of dysfunction? You can’t. You’re constantly going to be editing yourself, assessing those people to whom you can tell the truth and those to whom to protect yourself you must lie. You must live a double life and a double life is, by default, going to be dysfunctional.

Add to the cloaked duplicity the hours, the heels, the nakedness, the comments, the weariness, the unremitting need to be cheerful, the oft-flagging self confidence, the inescapable injuries, and the general assumptions about strippers that I’m discussing right now—in addition to whatever it is you’re doing that you’re financing with your stripping—and you’ve got yourself a hot seething mess of dysfunction.

It’s more a wonder that there were any functional women in strip clubs, and I have to say that there were. When I was stripping, I maintained a 3.98 GPA. Another one of my acquaintances was consistently on the President’s list at NYU. Another couple of friends finished training as massage therapists and/or yoga instructors. Still others bought property all over the world, started businesses, or managed to raise children single-handedly. There were some pretty high-functioning women.

I’m not suggesting there aren’t a tremendous number of sincerely fucked up women working in strip clubs. There are. I’ve worked with a girl who had both parents die from AIDS, one at home and the other in prison. I’ve worked with too many girls who were sexually molested. I’ve worked with women who were in abusive relationships. I’ve worked women whose parents put them on the street at fifteen.

There’s a lot of dysfunction in strip clubs, no fooling. But there is a lot anywhere, and at least the women I worked with could talk about it with their coworkers. They weren’t working in a place where you had to pretend you didn’t have this hideous pile of pain, though of course you did. You could talk, but really you could only talk about this stuff to other girls.

It may be dysfunctional, but we absolutely had each other.

Which leads me to Mark’s first assertion, and this is really the one that kills me, and I’ve heard it so many times I wish I had a nickel for every time because then I could pay my overdue rent, and that is this: Strippers only want to make money.

Well, yes, we would be at work. You don’t go into a restaurant muttering, you know, they don’t really want to feed you; they just want your money. You don’t bemoan how the person who cleans your house doesn’t really love windexing, vacuuming and Lysolling your mess. You don’t go to pick up your laundry, wistfully and accusatorily gaze across the counter and say, “I know you only do this for the money.”

You don’t because there’s no question that the waiter, the house cleaner and the laundry person just want your money. Maybe they like their jobs, maybe they don’t. But when it comes down to it, you really don’t care as long as your food is good and timely, your house all fresh smelling, and your socks washed and mated.

Only in stripping do the customers care that the service is genuine. And you know, as I remember it, generally it was. I really wanted to give a quality table dance to the man or woman. I really wanted the patron to feel a good down-low tingle and for those minutes to feel as if he or she were the only person on earth. I really aimed to fulfill my part of the commercial exchange with quality product.

The thing is that strip clubs are selling fantasy, and if we do it really, really well, you believe. And then you get pissed off at us for your credulity.

Certainly, there are women who strip immorally. They make false promises, or they give out fake phone numbers, or they lie in whatever way to get the money (one woman I know was soundly castigated for collecting money for her child who was falsely sick with cancer; she lost all of her friends at Flash after that scheme surfaced). These strippers are, I think, very wrong. But the majority of us don’t do that.

A week ago I was out at dinner with a reader. He told me that he really liked my strip memoir pieces because they helped to “humanize” strippers so that he “could see them as people.”

I responded that strip clubs were all about not humanizing us. We’re supposed to be fantasies, and neither do strip clubs want us to be humans, nor do we. To be a human is to be vulnerable. And so we strippers create a human-like persona. It might walk and talk like a human. It might bounce and jiggle and joke and blush like a human, but it’s not a human. It’s a human-like simulacra.

I used to imagine that somewhere in the deep recesses of Flash there were big C-shaped hangers, and at the end of the night all of us would be tenderly, gently hung up, limp spangly painted dolls, our heads lolling in slumber, only to be taken down with care the next night, reanimated and sent off to do our humanly work.

Comments like these remind me why I did. Because it’s tough to wear the stripper sash in the real world, because no matter where we go, no matter who we are—wife, mother, student, entrepreneur, or customer ourselves—we are judged, and judged unfairly, and it’s a judgment with which we are complicit.

Because we can’t tell you the truth. The fantasy can’t handle it.

spandex & lucite shoes: part 28, my body of death

I originally posted this episod of my strippy memoirs in February, but then it was published for money and so I had to take it down to comply with the terms of my publishing contract. The required six months has passed, and now here it is again, my body of death.

Since telling about my three Twisteds, I have been reluctant to write the stripsteps I took, or the strippath I found myself on, depending on whether I choose to look at the things I did or the ones that were more or less done to me, at any rate, I have been reluctant to look at what comes next.

This syntax speaks to my reluctance.

It was painful, you see. There was a lot of pain. Pain was felt.

I felt pain, and a great deal of it I dished out in large loving/hating/loving doses to myself.

I hate to admit it, but the Feeder changed me. The Feeder made me wake up and smell my fatness. And after my experience with the Feeder, I gave myself a body to die for. It nearly killed me.

It was a gorgeous body. I didn’t really fathom its complete gorgeousness, this body that I whipped myself into shape for, but suffice to say it was a body that made photographers dream of lighting and heterosexual men dream of fucking. It made other women hate me (but not as much as I hated myself).

It made body building pros ask me if I was juicing. “Wistrol?” they asked me. No, I said, if I took steroids, I said, I’d really be something.

My body was so good that gay men stopped me on the street and queried me as to my arm work out.

It started out innocently enough. I woke up one morning in my C’s bed on the Upper West Side one block away from Central Park. I decided to go for a run. I hadn’t been running in years. I was 33.

I ran to the park and I ran until my lungs started hurting and my legs felt heavy and then I ran a little bit more. And then I gave myself the permission to stop, but I ran more, just a little bit more, I told myself, just a little bit. And little bit by little bit I ran all there was of it. I ran the park, ten k around the loop, my first time out running in years.

That night I went to work on wobbly legs, and the next day I was, predictably, sore. But I ran anyway. I kept running. Running, running running every day, or five days a week at least, four to seven miles every day, working four nights a week. I ran and I got thin and tight.

“You’ve lost tons of weight,” a customer said to me one night, intending, I think, a compliment. It wasn’t but in full-on CeeCee mode I smiled and said thanks and took his twenty. And then another and another.

I was in pain every day, all day, every night, all night. My knees swelled until I could barely squat on the stage to get my tips. I’d take Advil all day and all night. I kept bags of frozen peas in my freezer not to eat but to strap to my knees when I came home from a run or from a night of work.

My feet hurt. I had fantasies of buying two five-pound bricks of vanilla ice cream and sticking a foot in each until their throbbing, burning pulsations subsided in white creamy icy goodness. I never did, I don’t know why.

I would get up in the morning hobbled. If I jumped out of bed too quickly and hit the ground too jarringly, pain knifed up my Achilles tendons. My back hurt from the running and the dancing. I’d take more Advil.

C and I broke up and it hurt the inside so much that only working the outside made it match. Exercise was the Ritalin to my emotional deficit disorder. I just drove myself to run run run myself into the ground.

I took up with my rebound boy and for ten weeks we had wild fun sex. We ran together. I got a membership to his gym. I started lifting weights in addition to the running. Then he dumped me on the date he announced to me when we first started seeing each other, a date I’d kept in my mind and ignored.

I started smoking. I started going to the gym like it was my second job; I called it my Revenge Body Diet. This was the summer before I started graduate school. By the time I started that fall, I was spending and hour and a half to two and a half hours, six days a week in the gym, three nights a week stripping; I was carrying a full load of three graduate classes and I was a graduate assistant for fifteen hours a week.

Here’s the boring part; here’s my workout. I did 45 minutes to an hour and a half of cardio six days a week. Usually I jumped rope for around a half an hour to an hour, ran the treadmill, and/or the Elliptical trainer. Then four days a week I lifted weights. I had a three-day split, so that meant that I was working one body part twice a week, usually. I flagellated myself emotionally when I spent less time than this in the gym.

Was I overtraining? I was.

I had trainers who helped. I benched my body weight, or what I guessed it to be as I never weighed myself. I squatted in the hundreds, deadlifted in the hundreds, leg pressed in the 400 lb range. I was strong. I was fit. I was fitter than fit. My ass was 34 inches of pure muscle.

I did abs everyday. With weights. On slanted boards. You could have shredded ginger on my belly.

I ate five to six times a day, every two to three hours; I had 3-4 ounces of protein and a vegetable and a fat. And that was how I thought of it. Not as what tasted good. Not as what would be yummy, or tasty or even healthy. But what was the protein, the veg, the fat.

Once a week I had a free day, I would eat, sometimes, three pints of ice cream. I would eat a loaf of bread with butter. I would eat so much that my cheesegrater belly was rotund with the effort of forcing all the food I couldn’t eat the rest of the week in and down.

Sundays, my free day, I would sit on my couch and I would eat ice cream and tears would run down my cheeks.

I never weighed myself. Instead I took copious notes about my size. I measured my bust, chest, waist, hips, thighs, upper arms and calves every week. I would look at the empirical evidence of the numbers and mentally chastise or commend myself, but usually the former because even if I was getting smaller, it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t ever enough.

I spent hours of my little free time staring at my image in the mirror, lifting and dropping my ass and my thighs. Wishing that I could just slip off my fat like a flesh-colored, padded unitard. Imagining how free I would feel if I was just…smaller.

And the crazy thing is that I couldn’t, wouldn’t, didn’t appreciate my body or my work. No matter it was, it wasn’t perfect, and in my sickness I couldn’t see it for what it was.

Even now, you see, I can’t. I say “it.” I don’t say “me.” I spent hours, countless hours working on my body and I couldn’t make it my own.

But it gets worse, somehow. Because when you are a beautiful woman, and when your job is to have people look at you for money and objectify you for cash, you find it very hard to have people look at you at all. Ever.

In the summer, when the lithe long muscles in my arms and legs were apparent, when my washboard abs were visible under my cotton dress, people stared, and I had to touch my body to make sure I was wearing clothes.

Because I felt naked.

I felt naked all the time. I wanted to feel free, and all I felt was naked.

Naked, mewling, and in pain. Somehow, I think that I thought that when my physical pain matched my emotional pain that when I reached that point I would just go numb.

It didn’t happen.

The hard part is that now I find it very difficult for me to go to the gym, to exercise, to enjoy it, to do it, to do it at all without punishing myself for it not being enough, hard enough, good enough, long enough, perfect enough.

I’d just like to be healthy. Someday soon, I’d like to be healthy. Not perfect, just healthy.

spandex & lucite shoes: part 34, the wily one

I'm slowly moving out the door of the stripworld at this point in my stripmemoirs. Need to get caught up? Here's the previous installment of my so-called flash life, and here's the full freaking index, for those of you who need it all. We're closing in on the end...soon I'll be putting my clothes back on for good...

Her name in the FlashDancer world was Wiley. Like the coyote. Which in some ways was apt because she had a kind of lupine quality to her face, a sort of wary hungriness, a sort of wolfy skulking to her posture.

Beyond the cartoon association, Wiley was an euonym. Her choice of name should have warned me, but it did not. I have begun to reach the end of my strippy tale, and no story of how I quit dancing would be complete without my telling about my friendship with Wiley.

At the time I was gradually exiting FlashDancers, at the time I was beginning to hit the strip wall again and again in my strip/graduate school marathon, I met Wiley. She was a tall, willowy bottle blonde with a slightly pointed face, rock-hard architectural fake boobs, and long legs brutally scarred along the backs of her thighs from what she called “a fight with a shower door.”

Wiley was smart. You could see it in her eyes in a white moment. She was funny. She was engaging. She could remember battle scenes from Shakespeare’s Henry V and act them out with toothpicks and wadded up cocktail napkins while half-drunk at the bar. She had long hands that ended in long fingers, which she used to great effect when she spoke. She would answer the Flashpatron’s incessant question of what she did in her real life by saying, “During the winter, I drive a Zamboni, and in the summer I drive an ice cream truck. It’s seasonal, mostly”; or she would say, “I’m an improvisational dancer working on a piece I call ‘The Onion.’ It’s about layers.”

She was also a hot mess. Her hair often looked as if she’d slept in it and not brushed it. Her make-up seemed to slide off her face. She was habitually late to work, blowing in the door as the DJ was calling us to stage, dragging her dance bag that trailed pastel bits of spandex and fake ponytails. Barry, the visible owner of Flash, would pull her off stage regularly, telling her to get herself together and presentable, nearly reducing her to tears in the process.

When I met Wiley, she was pregnant. She was graduating Hunter College and she was getting ready to apply to law school—I offered her my typewriter for the applications and my company for the abortion; she took me up on the typewriter. She was in a frazzled, fragile place, and I opened my life to her, as I do occasionally, rarely, really. I am not a sucker. I do not feel the need to clasp broken beings to my breast and heal them. I am not one of those people who feels good about themselves because they’ve helped other people. I help people when I want to, because I like them as individuals, but I am a tough sell for a hard luck case.

Wiley, though, insinuated herself in my life quickly and but good. Before I knew it, we were best friends. Bosom buddies. We had favorite meals, favorite nail salons, favorite occupations. We had a routine. We went to kick-boxing class together on Saturday mornings and then went to Cowgirl Hall of Fame for egg-white omelets. We met each and every one of the men we were considering dating, and we just about held up scorecards.

We had private jokes. We imagined ourselves as Feature Dancers, but instead of calling ourselves “Wet and Wild” and oiling one another whilst simulating Sapphic loving, we would call ourselves “Blonde and Neurotic” and Wiley would sit on stage while I colored her hair, and then maybe we’d order in from Sargon and eat shrimp skewers. And that would be our act.

We were a “we,” as much of a “we” as I’ve ever been part of. Wiley came home to Vermont and met my parents. She told me more about her wretched childhood than she ever had told anyone. I knew about her mother the wire monkey. I knew that her parents had been Communists and that she had been taught the Communist National Anthem. I saw the youth home to which she had been consigned when she ran away one too many times.

She threw me birthday parties. We would traditionally kiss at them, usually while eating my birthday cake. She accused me of biting.

One day, I recall, she phoned me eleven times. I would feel, almost, like it was more than I could bear, to have to be available to Wiley when she needed me and to get my work done. For things always seemed arranged around Wiley’s schedule. She was almost always late, for one thing, thereby forcing me to wait for her to do whatever it was we planned to do. I called her “Princess Monkey,” in part because of her extra-long limbs and prehensile intelligence, and in part because she seemed to reign supreme.

In my test quitting from Flash, I kept Wiley as a friend. I knew that while I wasn’t working, she would tell me what was going on, what was changing, what wasn’t and who was doing whom. When I prepared to go back to dancing that Memorial Day weekend before my Last Summer of Flash, I took her back home with me. We arranged our schedule so that we worked together, always having the other one to lean on when it sucked hard.

Wiley was my last best friend. We acted like little girls together—we were inseparable and indistinguishable. We were a package deal. And then, as she got into law school, she began to pull away. She found other friends, she stopped having time for me.

To be honest, it hurt a lot. But with the clarity of space, I saw how often Wiley manipulated people and situations to her benefit, which given her totally suck-ass childhood made total sense. I saw how she played one ex-boyfriend against off against another, how she made sure that she had at least a couple of boys waiting in the wings for her. I saw how she had an affair with a married man, a man who over the six years since I first met him at one of my birthday parties—the incongruous sight of this old guy placing his bony hand proprietarily on my friend’s well-toned ass—has risen to political prominence. A Republican man, who helped Wiley with her law career, Wiley who loved Hilary Clinton so much that she carried a picture of her in her wallet.

I saw her use and abuse and to charm people with her avowed “playing The Sun Also Rises” as she opened another bottle of red wine. I saw myself cast off, only to be taken up again around 9/11, no doubt because I was comforting. Like mashed potatoes, like flannel, like the smell of wet dog.

If I sound angry, that would be because I am. I make friends skeptically. I have great marble citadels surrounding myself. I don’t trust easily, or well, or at all. I have a tendency to keep people a bit at arm’s length, even as warm as I am. Wiley got all my love and trust and she could have given sweet fuck-all about it. I could tell some stories, I could name televised names, but I won’t. Here you’ll have to trust me, and you’ll have to imagine some world-class deception and cruelty, if not to me, then to another friend of mine who became a casualty of hers.

And yet, in all that loneliness that swaddled my last days at Flash, I still remember my last best friend, how we would dance together, her angular limbs pointy and unaccommodating to the serpentine world of my hips. I remember our shared love of coffee, of oatmealy deserts, of black flippy shoes, of Kid Rock. I remember long, endless, curvy conversations, round and full as bosoms, and I remember how much I loved her, that wily one, she who seduced me and left me to dust.

spandex & lucite shoes: part 33. split/endings

Once more, with feeling, a delicious segment of my so-called strip life. In my last episode, I lost the hair. In this one, I lose something more. Read on, or read this, and read them all.

So I self-Samsonized. Lopping off my hair, I found, strip-wise was as bad a decision as it could have been. It wasn’t, as I’d hoped, so much an act of renewal, or remodeling, as it was a hirsute act of stripcareer hara-kiri.

My money plummeted, in short.

But to be completely naked honest, it’s hard for me to parse the causality here. Sure, I’d lost the mane that was the CeCe me, but around the same time I’d also lost that loving feeling for the strip life.

I had, for months, years even, delighted in the glimmer and flash of dancing at FlashDancers. I loved the feeling that I was the It Girl at the It party, of riding the well-paid surging crest, surfing the room to pause momentarily, dance a few dances, entrance a few men, make a fistful of dollars and glide on into the perfume-and-cigarette smelling, Lycraed night.

I had loved the girls. I loved the packed dressing room, the crush and press of female bodies, a hundred soft competing scents, and I equally loved the catfighting and the camaraderie both. I loved the strippery strangeness. I loved the weirdness of Annie from Deer Park who danced the same robotic dance table after table, night after night, her eyes dead and drifting, her jaws going chaw chaw chaw on her wad of bubblegum. I loved the incongruity of Siobhan, her roommate Bridget, and their best friend Kit, normal girls all, normal as milk, and the last girls you’d expect to see stripping, each more athletic than the last, and all supported by this wizened weird financier.

I loved the girls like the highly tattooed Audra and the excessively pierced Michelle who were part-time club kids and told incomprehensibly joyous stories of going into K-holes at Paladium. I loved the Brazilians, the Venezuelans, the Israelis, the Jamaicans—I loved them all with a kind of broad-spectrum Humanist benevolence, even if I didn’t always  like them as individuals.

I loved the clothes—the inscrutable art of finding a g-string that flattered, for example. The civilian might wonder that there would be two-inch strips of fabric that could make you look better and nearly identical two-inch strips of fabric that could make you look worse, but there were. I loved the tacit permission to wear fantastical clothes—dresses with the bellies cut out and adorned with a giant glittery gem pendant, or slit to the hip, or fluffed in marabou. I loved the lucite platform Ho-heels, the wicked platforms that felt so natural in the Flash denizen, but when I was forced to wear them home, as I was a couple of times when my real shoes were stolen, felt like alien bricks strapped to my feet.

And I loved the men, or at least the idea of them, or so I thought.

Then somehow, somewhere, I’d fallen out of love. The thrill was gone, it was gone away, and in going it had left me to drift aimlessly through the club night after night, trying to approach tables and failing. Miserably.

And miserable. I hit the wall, you see. As if I had suffered a strip-stroke, I lost the words for this exchange, I forgot the steps of the dance, I could no longer figure out the currency. I would, time after time, see a table, approach the table, and veer off at the last moment, pretending I was actually on my way otherwhere, only to turn around when I reached the end of the room and do it again.

It was a strange aphasia, wherein I know longer seemed to be able to parse the Flash Dance. I lost…something…interest? faith? conviction? and I found that this loss spiraled like a plane caught in a tailspin and made gravity’s victim.

To lose whatever it is I lost is to hear the death knell for the stripself: do not ask for whom the strip bell tolls, CeCe, it tolls for thee. Because if you are s