Candy Girl Read online

  I encountered my share of unique fetishes as well; Sex World didn’t have a monopoly on kinks in Mill City. One man came into the club on two separate occasions and asked me to punch him in the stomach and testicles as hard as I could for ten solid minutes. He explained that he’d been raped as a child, and that being jacked in the gut reminded him of the incident and, in turn, aroused him on a subconscious level. I’d never hit anyone, but I pummeled the shit out of this poor man per his specific instructions.

  “Ooh, you fucking bitch,” he’d squeal in a little boy’s voice.

  “You can trust me, sweetie,” I’d say in a sickeningly phony voice, caressing his tense jaw. “I won’t hurt you.” Then, bam! I’d bust him in the junk.

  It wasn’t as funny as it sounds. After he left the first time, I couldn’t stop shaking for an hour. Certain people give strippers so much power that they sometimes short-circuit.

  The best customers were the ones who attained strip-club nirvana, a state identifiable by a blissed-out smile and a slouching posture on the lap couch. They’re seeing the light, baby. Once I gave twelve dances in a row to a Buddhist businessman who beamed like a pageant queen and didn’t move except to nod emphatically when I asked him if he wanted another dance.

  “You are like the goddess Athena,” he murmured as I brushed the length of my torso along his cheek. “When you talk about media criticism, it gives me an instant hard-on.”

  My kind of customer.

  But nothing lasts forever in the strippersphere.

  Motoring

  Though I doggedly tried to ignore my gut feeling, all signs pointed to encroaching burnout. I knew I wasn’t going to be a nudie cutie forever; I was already on the ripe-to-rotten end of the age spectrum. It was obvious that my breaking point was fast approaching. I didn’t know when I’d finally snap, but I acknowledged the inevitability of the event. I’d been getting some freelance work at the local alternative weekly, which meant I could plausibly be a paid writer instead of a paid dickwarmer. I entertained these thoughts most nights when I came home exhausted and soaked my bruised body in a hot bath. Jonny could always be counted on to hang out tubside and listen to me crab about the day’s indignities.

  “Peanut and I had a good time tonight,” he’d say. “We went to the comic shop, and then we came home and colored for a few hours.”

  “Sounds wholesome,” I’d say, cranky. “I spent my evening bartering with a Mexican guy who wanted to pay $50 for my rag-stained Kiss undies.”

  “Well, did you sell them?”

  “Hell no! How else am I going to get Peter Criss’s face on my crotch?”

  “I can’t believe Peter Criss is your favorite.”

  On D-day, which was a Wednesday, I sat at the bar drinking a foul cocktail of cranberry and pineapple juice from the beverage gun. Onstage, there was a blonde with a heart-shaped ass dancing to “Barbie Girl” by the Swedish group Aqua. Actually, she was sort of marching back and forth in her hip-high vinyl boots, tipping her defiant little chin at anyone who looked at her sideways. I noticed a table of bored strippers watching her contemptuously. The girl had a leaden gait and and an advanced case of bitchface, but she did look like Barbie incarnate, and that was reason enough for the others to hate her. Even on a bad day, a yellow-headed bitch could mint, and this incensed the ethnic contingent. Plus, she had a fan club composed of dirty old retirees who paid big bucks to “feel her boobies,” as one of the men informed me as he waited for her one morning.

  The Aqua-torture ended, and the girl left the stage to get felt up by her senile minions. Business was brisk that day, and there were customers seated in every corner of the club, rejecting and accepting lap dances at will. A lot of strippers had shown up to work that afternoon, and the manager was still turning some away at the door. It was one of those days where there’s a subaudible buzz in the air and the club feels like a honeycomb crawling with drones. I should have put on my game face and seized the opportunity to make some money during what had been a slow week. I hadn’t had a dance yet, and it was two o’clock, prime time for hustling.

  And yet, I couldn’t get up.

  I could not get up. I heard the other dancers trying out their lines all around me. “Want company?” “Ready to play?” “Wanna dance?” (and the enterprising “Are you ready to go to paradise?” frequently intoned by a dancer named Paradise). The room was filled with their phony geisha chirping. More girls emerged from the dressing room in pairs and threesomes, splitting off like mitochondria to shill for their supper. So many of them, all enemies by necessity. It was like a local beauty pageant that never ended, with fresh delegates arriving daily from as far away as Wisconsin. I didn’t blame the girls for hating each other anymore. I was actually surprised no one had been killed.

  I’d always believed in the potency of women. I’d supported and participated in the sex industry even as it was buffeted with criticism from people who felt it objectified us. I’d felt like such a libertine dancing onstage to AC/DC or masturbating in a glass box for some civil engineer. I argued with any well-meaning friend who dared to insinuate that I was devaluing myself. There was a reason men paid ridiculous sums of money for the company of an exaggeratedly feminine creature. Because strippers are spectacular. They rule.

  It wasn’t the nudity or the grinding or any sex-phobic moral issue that was pinning me to my chair in a moment of blinding epiphany. It was actually the opposite. The one-on-one aspects of the industry made sense; it was the whole girls-in-bulk thing that repulsed me. Hundreds of girls on the floor at some clubs, all reduced to begging dogs for an army of smug little emperors. The rules of attraction were reversed at a strip club. Girls that could halt midday traffic at Nicollet Mall were rejected by fat guys wearing Zubaz. Joe Punchcard with $20 could toy with several dancers over the course of an afternoon, finally selecting the one who’d receive the dubious privilege of entertaining him for three and a half minutes. The rejected girls, regardless of how loved they were by husbands or paramours or infants at home, would feel worthless for an instant, and all because of ol’ Joe. Those instances multiplied, and soon everyone felt like creeping crud, regardless of how much ego they projected.

  It’s like a girl buffet, and no one really savors the brown goop at a buffet. You pile your sanitized plate with discount food and shovel it in as quickly as you can. It all tastes the same and has a sluggish mouth-feel. You don’t stop to weigh the relative merits of the chicken versus the spaghetti. You don’t notice the orphaned lo mein noodle in your blueberry cobbler. It’s all crap, but it does the job. There’s always more food somewhere, another steam tray being hustled out from the kitchen.

  I hated the the girl buffet. I deserve better presentation, I thought. We all did.

  I still couldn’t stand up. I wiggled my toes, but my legs wouldn’t cooperate. It was like the dial-up connection between my brain and my body had timed out. My chest tightened, and I could suddenly hear my heart playing a brutal Rick Allen fill. And then I started bawling.

  In the bathroom, I called Jonny. “I gotta get out of here,” I blubbered.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked, alarmed.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I just can’t do this anymore.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “Anything else, man.”

  “I thought you liked stripping. Isn’t that why you’re still there?” he asked.

  “Was,” I said, taking off my thong, using it to wipe the tears and eyeliner and weepy schmutz off my cheeks and stuffing it into my backpack.

  “I was here.”

  I’d hit the wall hard. It had been a year since I’d walked into Schieks dressed like a waitress—short-haired, knock-kneed in my new stilettos, looking like Dorothy Hamill learning to walk on solid ground after seventeen hours at the rink. Now, I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror. Hair extensions down to my waist. Fake tan. A faceful of MAC stage makeup. Acrylic talons, studded with anxious tooth imprints that betrayed my neuroses. Strea
ks of bronzer on my sternum to create trompe l’oeil cleavage. I didn’t even recognize myself. I only saw a tough stripper who looked like she might punch my face.

  I limped over to my manager, a sweet man who listened to Sam Kinison records to exorcise the demon of his bitter divorce, and begged off work for the day.

  “No problem,” he said. “I’ve got too many girls today.”

  I walked down the street, sobbing into my sleeve. I’m not usually one to cry, but the force of the revelation had pulverized me inside. I got in my car and drove all the way out to the house that Jonny and I had bought the week before, a sixties rambler on a tree-lined street in a small town that none of our friends had heard of. We hadn’t moved in yet, but the lawn was Levittown green and the facade of the house looked bright and inviting. Looking up at that little white shack in the suburbs, our own slice of Brady Bunch equity, I thought to myself: the house that jacking-off built.

  It was true. Were it not for a veritable army of erect penises in the warehouse district, I wouldn’t have been standing on the berm, staring up at my first house. Back at the apartment, there was a Bettie Page lunch box atop the refrigerator; most people assumed it was merely ornamental kitsch, but it was actually filled with thousands of dollars in cash. I’d never been able to sock away that kind of money when I was a salaried employee in a legitimate field. Stripping had pummeled me bloody, but it had also stroked me and spoon-fed me and twisted its tongue in my eustachian tube.

  But my gap year, my little rumspringa, was over. It was time to go back to the real world.

  Stephanie Says

  In stripper-ese, “retirement” can mean a couple of things. Usually, it refers to leaving the sex trade for a square job (see also: “going clean” and “getting off the pole”). In a few lucky cases, it refers to literal retirement from the workforce. I’d heard successful girls bragging about how they’d socked away half a mil and were planning to move to an ambigious region of Minnesota referred to as “up North” and breed Lipizzan horses for the rest of their days. Other times, retirement meant meeting a moneyed bachelor, moving into his mansion on Lake of the Isles, getting fat and becoming a stay-at-home mom to a passel of adorable future strippers. Neither of these options was realistic in my case, but I needed to keep myself in booze and cookies somehow.

  Unemployed, fairly unemployable and facing a thirty-year mortgage, I made the snap decision to become a phone-sex girl. You can’t beat the flexibility of that gig; successful phone girls boast about long, lazy days spent watching General Hospital while moaning half-assedly into a headset. Besides, after the five months I’d spent coaxing sperm out of inebriated bums at Sex World (“Come on, you can do it! I think I see a bead of pre-jack!), I assumed I’d be a natural at phone-fuck a go-go.

  Scoring the job was cake; after a brief audition with a company in Alabama, I was offered a full-time position. (“I’m really into S&M,” the kindly soccer mom who hired me confided. “My husband and master, Kevin, just bought me a new collar.”) I was mailed a disarmingly stodgy orientation packet that explained how to deal with various calls, and it was one of the funniest bits of unintentional comedy I have ever read. Seriously, it was brilliant. For example: “Black and Married: If you receive a call of this nature, you should pretend to be a large-breasted black woman. (Do not attempt to ‘sound black’ by affecting an accent or using jive talk.) Your husband is a truck driver or businessman, and he is rarely home. You are very horny and enjoy anal sex. Be sure to mention your large, chocolate-colored nipples.”

  Or this classic item: “Redhead: If you receive the ‘Redhead’ prompt, tell the caller you have red hair everywhere!” I mean, why was the verbiage so coy? The only people reading the thing are prospective phone-sex operators, so why not just say, “You have a flaming-red cooze that could singe the retinas of observers. You look as if you’re in the crowning stage of giving birth to Carrot Top. Call the fire department, Miss Thing, because your pussy is ABLAZE!” I wondered why I hadn’t gotten a job as an internal copywriter with the company instead. I could have written far superior orientation materials.

  I quickly had our new house equipped with a second phone line, and Jonny bought me a nice papasan chair so I could recline comfortably while entertaining my callers. (Unlike many phone-sex jobs, where operators receive calls at their leisure, I had to log in and remain tethered to the phone for my entire shift.) I couldn’t wait to act “Black and Married,” or to assume any of the other twelve-odd personae that callers could request. You can imagine my disappointment when I realized that a staggering majority of phone-sex customers opted for the “Barely Legal” option. Due to popular demand, I was forced to invent “Stephanie” and remain in character for up to eight hours a night.

  “Stephanie” was a teenage virgin who lived at home with her wealthy, frequently absent parents. She had dark blonde hair, green eyes, a voice like a slightly less-cerebral Joey Lauren Adams, 34C breasts, and a libido that raged like Dylan Thomas on his deathbed. She enjoyed tanning in her bra and panties, especially when she suspected her male neighbors were watching. (Aside from baiting voyeurs, “Stephanie” only had two other hobbies: reciprocal cunnilingus with her best friend, Kimberly, and, of course, phone sex.) Callers went bananas for Stephanie. She was so popular that I often found myself answering the phone, “Hello (giggle), this is Stephanie!” up to twenty times a shift. Oh, how I grew to hate Stephanie. I secretly hoped she’d grow up, get fat and smoke until her voice coarsened to a growl. Meanwhile, my callers grew increasingly enamored.

  “Way to go!” my shift supervisor Andrea enthused on the phone one night. “You’re doing great. Your average call-hold time is seven minutes!”

  “The only calls I ever get are ‘Barely Legal,’” I complained. “Can’t you direct some of the ‘Hispanic Amputee’ calls to my extension?”

  “‘Barely Legal’ is our most popular offering,” Andrea said in her Splenda-sweet Southern drawl. “Men like ’em young, dumb an’ thirsty for cum.”

  “I guess,” I said, but I was disillusioned. The sex industry had ceased to be novel. I was going to have to do the unimaginable: get a straight job.

  Armed with a mostly fabricated résumé, I somehow finagled a job as a claims examiner at an insurance company in the suburbs. It was a typical Orwellian cube farm, with each employee neatly parceled into a dove-gray compartment. This place was soooo square, in terms of both corporate climate and the workspace itself. It was so square it existed in the fifth dimension. I worked in a tesseract. My boss was a fastidious woman whose amusing diction and passive hostility embodied every stereotype about Minnesota. She forbade me to use the Internet for personal business (bogus!), but she did reward me when I behaved. For instance, when I occasionally performed beyond the scope of my assigned duties, she’d bring me a roll of candy and a laser-printed certificate that read “You’re a Lifesaver!” And so began my life as an upstanding citizen and lifesaver to the dimmest of stars.

  A Stripper Was Born

  Most sex workers (a classification that includes strippers) cite a past incident of sexual abuse in trying to explain the illicit path they’ve stumbled upon. I have no such justification. I was never molested as a child, probably because I wasn’t very attractive. Though my mother did her best to outfit me in the preppy armor of the era, I always looked disheveled and owlish. I had obsessive-compulsive disorder and facial tics. My gray eyes shrank behind oversized, Plexiglas-thick spectacles, and my teeth were fenced in by a glittering array of modern orthodontia (retainers, space maintainers, braces, all composed of silver wire, acrid cement and/or tongue-colored dental acrylic). I wasn’t a dimpled, curly-haired Campbell Kid ripe for diddling by an older relative. In fact, if I’d been called upon to endorse a product, it probably would have been a set of junior encyclopedias. Or bulk birdseed. Something boring. The point is, my formative years were entirely free of sexual trauma.

  That said, I’m not sure how I became a stripper and my brother became a misguide
d man-child with a jones for cocaine. Those kinds of fates are supposed to be reserved for kids of “broken” homes, kids who are reared on factory wages and whose lives are a pastiche of fake step-fathers, mobile homes and government dairy. By contrast, Marc and I were raised by an indivisible couple (Mom and Dad were both way too uncool to divorce).

  Like many children in our tiny suburb of Chicago, I went to Catholic school, complete with daily Mass, ancient nuns in dark habits, box-pleated jumpers, corporal punishment and the constant reassurance from my elders that I was going to sizzle like suet in hell. It was a fairly typical academic experience for Catholic children in the 1950s; however, this was the eighties. I was one of the last generations of American kids to receive a traditional, pre-Vatican II religious education, and predictably, it fucked me up and made me slutty.

  My home life, by contrast, was idyllic. We had a big house in a bucolic subdivision, complete with a finished basement, yards of blue Cookie Monster shag and a much-envied wet bar stocked with dessert liqueurs. My dad, a successful restaurateur at the time, drove a cherry Corvette with vanity plates. My older brother, Marc, and I were coddled to the point of asphyxiation. We vacationed in Orlando, wore infinite layers of Benetton and consumed enough steak dinners to give the average kid iron poisoning. Except for a gory incident around the time Gleaming the Cube* was released, in which I wiped out on a Nash skateboard, my childhood was a stainless suburban ideal.

  When we weren’t tearing down Eureka Street on our Schwinn tandem bike, my brother and I hung out at the Matterhorn, the German supper club my parents and grandmother owned. The Matterhorn was huge, gloriously tacky and, according to my father, a bitch to heat and cool. When you walked in the front door, there was a stone grotto with a tank that housed a single suicidal catfish, and a gift shop stocked with stuffed toys and Black Forest gummies. An immense moose head was mounted above the fireplace in the main dining room, and busboys could always be counted on to lodge lit cigarettes in the moose’s mouth.