Candy Girl
Praise for Candy Girl:
“Cody’s prose snaps like a garter belt…. good, frothy fun…. Diablo Cody is the Mars Rover on the far side of the tip rail, sending back uncannily clear images of life on another planet. For those of us who have stared, transfixed, from a distance, wondering how the air is up there, Candy Girl is a bracing lungful.”
—Los Angeles Times
“[Cody is] a quick, erudite and funny writer…. One hell of a good story.”
—Time Out Chicago
“An inspiration to any woman who’s ever gotten her groove on sans clothes in front of her bedroom mirror, Cody’s memoir is a seductive thrill and a treat for all.”
—Playgirl
“…a tale alternately titillating, pensive, comical, and occasionally gross.”
—New York Post
“…flat-out funny and refreshingly devoid of moral conclusions.”
—Star Tribune (Minneapolis)
“[H]er greatest talent lies in her ability to expose the lowest of low-culture leanings in prose that alternates between the raunchy and the intellectual…. Even if Candy Girl lays bare some not-so-sweet realities of the seedier side of exotic dancing, at the very least, this highly readable, hard-gyrating memoir will certainly heat up a few frigid January nights.”
—The Kansas City Star
“…a glorious case of Too Much Information.”
—City Pages (Minneapolis)
“…a unique, eye-opening account of her one-year stint as a stripper.”
—Complete Woman
“[S]o alarmingly entertaining, readers will wish the book were longer….”
—Publishers Weekly
“Cody’s lively romp through the adult entertainment business is bound to appeal to those wanting a peek inside the inner workings of the sex industry.”
—Booklist
“Diablo Cody is to stripping what Chuck Klosterman is to pop culture and Sarah Vowell is to American History—an off-kilter visionary cynical enough to trust and talented enough to blister all that her mighty pen touches. Candy Girl is fiendishly funny, muscle-car fast, and frighteningly—and I do mean frighteningly—accurate. Lock up your daughters and get your lighters in the air, for Candy Girl proves Ms. Diablo to be a writer of rock-star caliber.”
—Lily Burana, author, Strip City: A Stripper’s
Farewell Journey Across America
About the Author
Diablo Cody is a freelance journalist and is currently the associate arts editor for City Pages, Minneapolis’s alternative weekly, where she writes articles on pop culture and film reviews. She’s currently working on three screenplays, one currently in production with Mandate Pictures, and two with Warner Bros. She lives in Minneapolis with her husband.
CANDY GIRL
A YEAR IN THE LIFE OF
AN UNLIKELY STRIPPER
DIABLO CODY
GOTHAM BOOKS
Published by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
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Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.); Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England; Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd); Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd); Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi–110 017, India; Penguin Group (NZ), Cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany, Auckland, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd); Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Published by Gotham Books, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Copyright © 2006 by Diablo Cody
All rights reserved
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ISBN: 1-4295-0234-7
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For Jonny and the three ugly ones
CANDY GIRL
Contents
White City
Take It Off
Ragdoll-for-Hire
Against All Odds
The Entertainer
Parallel Lines
Material Girls
Big Pink
Girls, Girls, Girls
Sugar Low
Fake Plastic Hair
Slippery When Wet
Some Girls
The Girl from Ipanema
Good-bye, Yellow Brick Road
Burnt Wienie Sandwich
Rawhide
Doll Parts
Tricks and Hos
Lick It Up
Dollhouse Girls Don’t Have All the Answers
White Christmas
Back in Black
Motoring
Stephanie Says
A Stripper Was Born
Coda
White City
Nobody comes to Minnesota to take their clothes off, at least as far as I know. This ain’t no nightclub. Here in the woebegone upper country, Jack Frost is a liberal, rangy sadist with ice crystals in his soul patch. Winter is the stuff of legend: stillborn, snow-choked, still as the ice floes on the ten thousand–odd lakes. The old mill cities are populated by generations of Scandinavian and German Lutherans, rugged souls hewn of blonde wood, good sense and Christlove. The prevailing gestalt is one of wry survivalist humor and thermal underwear with the pins still in the folds. Even the food is properly covered: Everyone’s favorite supper is a gluey carbohydrate-rich concoction known simply as “hotdish” and served in community Pyrex. Minnesota is like a church basement with a leaky popcorn ceiling and a bingo caller who’s afraid to amp things up past a whisper. A girl who would come to Minnesota to get naked night after night, to hustle for snow-dampened tens and twenties and Benjamins, well…that girl is what a proper Minnesotan euphemistically calls “different.”
The strippers here know it, too. Vegas, they say. I need to go to L.A. or Vegas. I could really bank there. But you sense they’re going to stay up north forever, incubating themselves in tanning coffins to create the illusion of sun exposure, frosting their hair.
In January 2003, when I was twenty-four and punch-drunk on city life, I moved to Minneapolis from my hometown of Chicago. Like many millennial lonely hearts, I had met my boyfriend Jonny on the World Wide Waste of Time (specifically, on a site devoted to the Beach Boys’s psychedelic output and Brian Wilson’s subsequent foray into radical therapy and pajama drama). Our courtship flowered into existence when Jonny sent me an intriguing e-mail out of the clear blue. Turned out he had possess
ion of a really choice Beach Boys bootleg, a rare instrumental snippet of “I’m In Great Shape” dating from late ’66. Only an elite klatch of tight-lipped fat guys had ever been privy to this recording, but Jonny gallantly offered it to me like a sonic gardenia. How could any virgin worth her vinyl resist? I accepted this token of geek love with an (encrypted, virus-protected) swoon, and a romance was hatched. Immediately, I pitched my then-boyfriend to the curb like a spent wad of Bazooka; he was an okay dude, but I had an incurable case of Jonny fever.
Soon, we began sending each other highly confessional mix tapes in padded mailers (nothing says true love like a smoke-colored Sony cassette with handwritten liner notes). Upon request, Jonny sent me photos of himself, his estranged wife neatly excised from each scene with the Photoshop crop tool. I racked up telephone bills that unfurled like the Magna Carta and hit the floor in tandem with my jaw. When a face-to-face meeting seemed imperative, we decided to jet separately to Los Angeles and rendezvous at the Whisky A Go-Go like true rock snobbos. Panicked, I broke out in hives mere moments before our scheduled meeting. Luckily, Jonny disregarded my itchy, eruptive face and stared directly at my tits. We spent the remainder of the day cruising around Hollywood, swilling Corona Extra, and holding hands, our clammy palms epoxied together with flop sweat. It was a first date for the record books, culminating in frantic nudity in a Marina del Rey hotel room. My mother, justifiably freaked by the prospect of my flying cross-country to meet a stranger, had predicted I’d come home in a body bag. But I’d merely bagged a body, and a fine one at that.
Shortly after returning from California, I decided to U-Haul it out of Chicago for good. Obviously, Jonny was sterling, primo, cherry, grade-A boyfriend material. My heart and genitals issued a joint edict that requested I immediately relocate to Jonny’s home state of Minnesota, and so I soon piloted a moving van across several states, stopping only for a dashboard smorgasbord of sodden fried chicken off I-94. I didn’t have much to leave behind in Chicago, save a low-level job at a bankruptcy law firm where a downtrodden woman named Louanne made me file things. My parents were flummoxed by the move, but I had to motor. Love is mysterious and rad, like Steve Perry from Journey.
Once I arrived in the Twin Cities metropolitan area, I moved into Jonny’s colonial-style suburban apartment complex, a vanilla variation on the “brick shitbox” school of architecture. The building looked municipal from the outside, like a White House ringer erected on the cheap. Inside our unit, we had white walls, white appliances, white noise and carpets the color of untrammeled sand in Kauai. In Chicago, I’d lived in a cluttered walk-up adjacent to a liquor lounge and a center for homicidal youth. My new lodgings, by contrast, were pin-drop silent. My life felt like a dry-erase board that had been wiped of all its past transgressions and left turns into sordid moral territory. In Minnesota, I could be the most anonymous girl in the world. I could reinvent myself as a lacrosse champ from Topeka if I wanted to. I could feign Mafia ties and carry a teacup Maltese about town. I could change my name to Lynn, get bulimic, and hork ZonePerfect bars into the talking garbage cans at Ridgedale Mall. It was like magic! I had erased myself, just like Lisa Loeb in that one supergay video.
After two days spent wandering shell-shocked around town, I s omehow got a job as a copy typist at a Kubrickian advertising agency walled with brushed steel and television monitors. As I filled reams of paper with dopey radio scripts (void where prohibited), I watched the snow fall past my twenty-sixth-floor window. The flakes plummeted so swiftly from the gray strata of clouds that they didn’t seem to be going up or down. That winter, I dubbed Minneapolis the “White City,” because the world around me looked like a blank answer bubble on a standardized test. I didn’t know I was destined to make my mark heavy and dark, and that Satan was my exam proctor.
I liked the ad agency okay. Among the benefits of working there were:
1. A wide selection of regular and decaffeinated teas, including apple spice and orange pekoe.
2. Copywriters on Razor scooters who provided much kindling for my internal scorn furnace.
3. T-1 Internet access, quick like a bunny.
4. Excellent porn shui.*
My Internet darling, Jonny, had high hopes for my success in Minneapolis. So I felt kind of bad when I caught some strain of mutant death-flu after only a week in the White City. The virus attacked my legs, and I had to army-crawl from room to room of our sparsely furnished rental. When I finally returned to my new job, I hadn’t quite lost my limp. As I hobbled back and forth from my desk to the copier, people stared at me like Who hired the crip?
Otherwise, the first weeks at my new home were bright and satisfying, as I’d hoped. I’d make kitschy suppers like fondue or shoe-leather pot roast while Jonny (a longtime fixture in the local rock scene) choogled away on his red Epiphone axe. Jonny’s three-year-old daughter, a precocious larva with child-star dimples, slept over a few nights a week and seemed initially unfazed by my sudden inclusion in her fissured family unit. When I was home alone, I doggedly tried to finish the heinous novel I’d been writing since college. Inspired by Jonny’s musical talents, I tried to learn to play bass guitar, but when I eventually auditioned for a local electropop quintet, the band members looked at me like I was farting the theme from Mahogany.
I felt sore about the rejection, and my bass soon acquired a thick patina of dust, which was really crappy, because I had been looking forward to posturing onstage like Kim Gordon or Kim Deal, or any of the assorted lank-haired bassists named Kim who had been my heroines as a teen. I didn’t know at that point that I’d wind up “fingering” for an audience countless times in the coming year, though not under the circumstances I’d imagined. (I did peel to Pixies songs on several occasions, so things came full circle, I guess. Thank you, Frank Black, for allowing me to indirectly reference Un Chien Andalou in the least intellectual environment ever.)
In retrospect, I had a pretty life. It was a B+ existence, an eight out of ten (two-tenths deducted for shit weather and death-flu). Still, I felt restless, desperately chasing a buzz like a kid sneaking a nip from Mom’s cooking sherry. I was approaching the dark side of my twenties, but I shook like a rattle, still felt like a teenager with fire ants in my Calvins. The big move to Minneapolis had provoked some kind of psychological agita, and I felt like I had been handed a final opportunity to raise some serious heck-ola without facing grown-up consequences. I say “final,” because I’d always been a well-behaved human female. Evidence: I’d never ridden on a motorcycle, not even a weak Japanese one. I’d never gotten knocked up or vacuum-aspirated. I’d received every available Catholic sacrament with the exception of matrimony and last rites. I’d completed college in eight tidy semesters (one nervous breakdown per). I’d never thrown a glass of Delirium Tremens in anyone’s face. I’d never even five-fingered a lipstick at the Ben Franklin. I was a drag, baby. I could feel my wild oats dwindling. My mid-twenties crisis weighted my gut like a cosmic double cheeseburger. I guess that’s one reason I ended up half-naked at the Skyway Lounge.
Take It Off
One evening, at the tail end of winter, I was trudging to the bus stop after another numbing day at the agency as a glorified steno bitch. I passed a topless bar tucked away on Hennepin Avenue (even inconspicuous titty bars glare like red rockets) and noted the marquee, which usually read: AMATEUR NIGHT $200 (and sometimes, CITY OF FUN, which I disagreed with). I had a tendency to hurry past the Skyway Lounge as if its molecular aura might give me an incurable case of pubic nits.* But this time, I paused and sniffed the cold air like a hound.
The phrase amateur night (relative to stripping) had always conjured a very specific image in my mind: I pictured a knock-kneed drunk staggering down a strip-club catwalk in scuffed bridesmaid’s pumps while her husband baits her at the end with a pack of Capri Ultra Lights. C’mon, baby! I got yer smokes right here! Just a few more feet, Deedee, and we get two hun-derd bigg’uns! Stripping as a profession sounded super-sparkly, but the idea of undressin
g on the amateur circuit smacked of cow-town desperation.
Still, I was intrigued. I had only been to a strip club once, in Chicago. It was a somber nude juice bar run by the Russian mob, and I’d felt sorry for the girls somnambulating from table to table, their mouths sewn into half-grins like pretty cadavers. My buddy and I each purchased a lap dance, and exchanged comic stares of titillation and panic while the strippers gyrated passively against our respective groins. My stripper, a shorn androgyne in a latex dress, was an indifferent and inefficient source of heat. When she bent over and spread her buttocks to flash me the ol’ Texas red eye, I said, “I like your boots.” The experience had been branded on my tender filet o’ psyche ever since, and I’d tried to picture myself naked in that crotch-scented hall of mirrors. I couldn’t. I was a card-carrying dweeb.
Suppose I were to summon some rare Cody gumption and walk into the Skyway Lounge: Even if I did acquire the guts to strip on a lark, I knew I’d have to answer to a small-but-disapproving female social circle. Most girls I knew hated strippers with the tenor of fury best reserved for serial rapists. They used “stripper” as an adjective to dismiss anything that was crass, blowsy or distasteful. For instance: “Those are stripper shoes, Jen. Get the Maddens instead.” Or “Kyle dumped me for some stripper whore who shops at Wet Seal.” The average girl in my peer group would sooner have her cuticles pared off with a Daisy razor than allow her significant other to associate with nude girls. This paranoia was bolstered by sensational stories of boyfriends getting their knobs slobbed by strippers in small Minnesota towns like Bemidji and Mille Lacs. It didn’t matter if the act was commissioned and paid for; it was entirely the stripper’s fault for daring to entertain another girl’s hard-won penis. Besides, lots of strippers had breast implants, which was considered treason against womankind, and wildly impractical given the local climate. “Don’t they freeze?” a friend of mine once wondered aloud. “I can’t imagine fishing for pike with my tits full of Slush Puppy.”