Candy Girl Read online

  The seven of us handed our personnel files to the DJ (I had filled mine out in haste after completing Destinee’s) and headed down the breakneck staircase to the main floor. The dubious contest was about to begin, and the natives were restless, advancing on the hitherto-abandoned tip rail.

  It all happened so fast: I went second, after the surprisingly poised Destinee (who appeared to have successfully staunched her bleeding). I inhaled sharply and cantered onstage to “Ragdoll,” by Aerosmith. I was concerned about my balance in the pink death-stilts, so I clung to the pole and gyrated like Gypsy. I whipped off my top right away to get it over with. The audience at the rail seemed entertained, in a looking-at-boobs sort of way, and a few of them pushed dollars onto the stage.* As I gamely swung my feather boa over my head, I stared down at my bare tits, almost disbelieving that they were still there. I had half-expected them to disintegrate upon exposure, like vampires pried out of their coffins at high noon.

  I shimmied out of my vinyl mini with some difficulty, kicked it to the rail, then strode the length of the catwalk wearing nothing but my Kevlar thong.

  “Meet Bonbon!” the DJ boomed over the music. “It says here that her hobbies are PARTYING and GIVING HEAD! Her favorite sexual position is ALL OF THEM!”

  I smiled sheepishly at the leering crowd and shrugged as if to say, “What can I tell you? I’m a wayward nympho!” A shabbily dressed man crept up to the tip rail and placed a five-dollar bill onstage. “You should win!” he hissed through his ZZ Top beard.

  Newly emboldened by this itinerant fellow’s praise, I decided to try a pole trick. I’d seen the veteran strippers doing cool Flying Wallenda-esque moves earlier, and I assumed it couldn’t be that difficult. As you may recall, however, one of the Wallendas eventually died in flight. As I tried to wrap one leg around the pole and spin, one of my stiletto heels got caught, the pole wedged in the cleft between the heel and the sole. I spent the next frantic seconds (felt like a year, actually) trying to disentangle myself from the pole while the crowd and the contestants guffawed. Shazbot!

  I finally managed to free my heel from the pole, and finished my set flushed pink with relief. It felt so bizarre to be standing onstage nearly naked, seeing as I’d always been the kind of girl who fucked in the dark. There was a Jiffy Pop smattering of tepid applause, and I scurried off the stage, shielding my breasts from onlookers as if they were celebrity babies.

  The rest of the contest seemed to transpire quickly. I realized as I watched the other girls that I had been hopelessly ignorant about the trends in exotic dance. For one thing, the other contestants reclined on their backs and spread their legs wide enough to impersonate a water-damaged filmstrip about female reproductive organs. This was referred to as “floor work” (a term that seemed unsuitably Olympian for such an unskilled display) and provoked appreciative whistles from the penis gallery. Also, none of the other girls smiled onstage, opting instead for expressions ranging from Ambien-induced semiconsciousness to searing hate.

  The judging was conducted with a disappointing absence of pageantry (I had imagined myself with my arms filled with yawning pink peonies, a rhinestone diadem pinned to my smoky hair). We lined up onstage, and the DJ ordered the crowd to applaud for the girl they wanted to win. (I stepped forward to lame applause, threw a kung-fu kick for a last shot of redemption and still heard the plaintive tweeting of crickets.) The swanlike Hmong girl won handily, since she’d brought a cheering section worthy of a Bruins game. The other girls pouted briefly and marched offstage, hip to the drill. I didn’t much care about defeat. I just wanted to put on some clothes and go somewhere that didn’t smell bad.

  In the dressing room, young Kayla was irate. The girl’s mug had gone steam-whistle red, and she stomped her plastic hooves like a horse trained to count. “I’ve never lost an amateur night,” she fumed. “I should’a done more floor work. Normally I wrap my legs around my head and lick my crack. The guys love that. But I ain’t got no Vicodin tonight, so I couldn’t do it.”

  “Don’t worry. You can lick your crack next time,” I said.

  I changed back into my usual uniform of business casual (which someone had unceremoniously scrunched up and hurled into a corner), went outside and hailed a cab. When I returned to the ecru womb of my apartment, Jonny and his daughter were asleep in their respective rooms. I could hear her uneven toddler breathing and his bonesaw-like snores. Girl-specific toys littered the living-room rug, including a naked Barbie orgy that had ended in partial dismemberment. A juice box with the air sucked out of it had been left on the kitchen table, the perfect totem of innocence. I felt shaken, but safe, like I’d fled to an underground bunker after a harsh explosion on Bikini Atoll.

  When I was little, I had a detailed world globe that could occupy me for hours when there was nothing on TV. I’d finger the little bas-relief countries and dream of the day when I could travel to places like East Germany, the U.S.S.R., and Beirut, Lebanon (where I mistakenly believed Baby Ruth candy bars were manufactured). The equator was represented by a narrow band of scarlet tape that spanned the circumference of the globe. When I asked my dad about this, he explained that the equator was very hot, and that the closer one lived to the equator, the hotter one could expect to be. As a result, I inferred that everyone who lived directly at the equator was dead, their blistered corpses sizzling like Steak-Umms. How was I supposed to know otherwise? I’d never been anywhere near that ominous red stripe. To me, Carbondale, Illinois, was south.

  The Skyway Lounge was kind of like that. I’d never considered the reality behind the black windows, because it hadn’t been real to me. Now that I’d been inside and seen real live girlsgirlsgirls, walking and talking and surviving and smoking Kools, the strip-o-sphere was no longer as foreign as Brazil (though the two worlds had pubic-hair trends in common). These girls were living directly on the red stripe, and they were still alive. Still fierce. I knew I’d be back.

  * * *

  The Ten Best

  Songs to Strip To

  1. Any hip-swiveling R&B fuckjam. This category includes The Greatest Stripping Song of All Time: “Remix to Ignition” by R. Kelly.

  2. “Purple Rain” by Prince, but you have to be really theatrical about it. Arch your back like Prince himself is daubing body glitter on your abdomen. Most effective in nearly empty, pathos-ridden juice bars.

  3. “Honky Tonk Woman” by the Rolling Stones. Insta-attitude. Makes even the clumsiest troglodyte strut like Anita Pallenberg. (However, the Troggs will make you look like even more of a troglodyte, so avoid if possible.)

  4. “Pour Some Sugar on Me” by Def Leppard. The Lep’s shouted choruses and relentless programmed drums prove ideal for chicks who can really stomp. (Coincidence: I once saw a stripper who, like Rick Allen, had only one arm.)

  5. “Amber” by 311. This fluid stoner anthem is a favorite of midnight tokers at strip joints everywhere. Mellow enough that even the most shitfaced dancer can make it through the song and back to her Graffix bong without breaking a sweat. Pass the Fritos Scoops, dude.

  6. “Miserable” by Lit, but mostly because Pamela Anderson is in the video, and she’s like Jesus for strippers (blonde, plastic, capable of parlaying a broken nail into a domestic battery charge, damaged liver). Also, you can’t go wrong stripping to a song that opens with the line “You make me come.”

  7. “Back Door Man” by The Doors. Almost too easy. The mere implication that you like it in the ass will thrill the average strip-club patron. Just get on all fours and crawl your way toward the down payment on that condo in Cozumel. (Unless, like most strippers, you’d rather blow your nest egg on tacky pimped-out SUVs and Coach purses.)

  8. “Back in Black” by AC/DC. Producer Mutt Lange wants you to strip. He does. He told me.

  9. “I Touch Myself” by the Divinyls. Strip to this, and that guy at the tip rail with the bitch tits and the shop-teacher glasses will actually believe that he alone has inspired you to masturbate. Take his money, then go masturbate and
think about someone else.

  10. “Hash Pipe” by Weezer. Sure, it smells of nerd. But River Cuomo is obsessed with Asian chicks and nose candy, and that’s just the spirit you want to evoke in a strip club. I recommend busting out your most crunk pole tricks during this one.

  * * *

  Against All Odds

  Spoiler alert: During the year following that fateful Amateur Night, a lot of things about me were radically altered. I started to resemble a stripper. I started to move like a stripper, all loosey-goosey and leading with my hips. I earned some serious lettuce. I even learned a few enviably cool pole tricks that could make certain girls black out or thump their melons. But one thing remained the same: I stayed a dork. An outsider. The last kid picked in a gymnasium full of Larry Birds.

  When I think of stripping, I’m always reminded of the movie Almost Famous. If you haven’t seen it (and you absolutely should), it’s the story of a teenage journalist named William Miller who tours America with a rock band in 1972. (The story is based on director Cameron Crowe’s own experiences as a kid reporter for Rolling Stone.) Anyway, William is absorbed into a clique of exquisitely cool people, from the ego-driven band members to jailbait groupies with names like Polexia and Estrella and Penny Lane. Even though William is privy to some mad shit on the road, he still retains his essential pie-eyed sweetness (much to his disgust). He wants desperately to be an enigma, to be Brian Jones or Jimmy Page rather than the kid with the notebook.

  Stripping, I always felt like a bargain-basement William Miller. I was terminally uncool, surrounded by twisted sisters with fantastic made-up names, wanting to be just as assured and mysterious as they were. Like William, there were moments where I felt at home, like I was born to watch these glittering freaks and hope they threw some light my way. But I never stopped feeling like the kid with three left feet, a millennial icon: the spastic chick.

  True to habit, I didn’t tell anyone at work about my one-nighter at the Skyway Lounge. There was nothing to tell, it seemed. I came, I went public with my nipples, I made nine bucks and change in tips. No great shakes, no headline news. There was a lot of copy to type at the agency, and I didn’t have time for revealing small talk about my perverted hobbies. I simply did my job, drained cup after cup of (free!) oolong tea and wrote in my blog during the odd pockets of downtime.

  The problem was that I was now obsessed with stripping. I had assumed the Amateur Night adventure would slake my thirst for that intangible buzz, but it only made me pant for more. The impossible plastic shoes. The gloriously imperfect buttocks thunderclapping beneath the strobes. Tan gooseflesh braced against brass. The folded dollar bills made onion-skin fragile from years of club circulation. I wanted to feel the way I had felt onstage again. Agitated. Afraid. More vulnerable than a newborn fawn still mottled with placental muck. If I could have recaptured that feeling by parachuting or finding God or backpacking to Marrakech or anything, I would have. But only one thing would hit the glory spot, and that was stripping.

  From a logical standpoint, this perplexed me. My night at the Skyway hadn’t been particularly fun. In fact, it had been kind of gopher-guts gross. Any glamorous delusions I’d had about stripping had been swept away on the crimson tide of Destinee’s menstrual flow. I’d seen dancers being manhandled by customers, their faces twisted with misery (or worse, excruciating expressions of forced pleasure). I’d seen girls mincing from the bar to the stage on grotesquely swollen feet. I’d eavesdropped on the Dickensian hard-luck stories that burbled from the dancers like industrial waste. It was clear to me that real stripping was not all mirth and marabou. You could choke on that lolly if you weren’t careful.

  However, I knew from watching HBO that not every strip club was the same. Hadn’t Mystic declared that I could make money at an upscale cabaret? Hell, I was no Kate Jackson, but I was pretty comely for an egghead. I convinced myself that I’d be a smash on the high-class circuit, the most popular stripper in Minneapolis, sipping Veuve-Clicquot with an amusing Yakuza and pocketing diamonds the size of ostrich eggs. (There would be diamonds, all right. Girls named Diamond, seemingly a new one every week. There were also Rubies, Emeralds and a sapphic Sapphire. No real jewels to speak of, but I had high hopes in the early days.) Yeah, that would be more my scene. I’d get to experience the teeth-grinding adrenaline high of stripping, while still clutching a crumb of dignity to my bosom. It was hip to be a topless entertainer, I reasoned. It was practically camp! Best of all, I might make enough money to finally buy the Toyota Corolla I’d dreamed of since childhood.

  The Entertainer

  I walked to Schieks on my lunch hour several days later. The so-called “premiere showlounge” in Minneapolis was housed in an incongruously stately, historic-looking building. (Pillars, even!) Reading the striped awning above the front steps, I was struck by the hilarity of the name. Schieks. On one hand, you had the swarthy, exotic implications of the word sheik, but the spelling was pure Minnesota. It sounded like a falafel stand in Duluth. However, Schieks was considered the most upscale topless “cabaret” in the Twin Cities, so I wasn’t about to let a lame-ass name dissuade me from inquiring within.

  The smell of cigars hit me like a sledgehammer before I even walked through the door. The cigar was king at Schieks; it was like the place was run by frustrated tobacconists who had accidentally acquired a strip club. In addition to being displayed open-casket style in the vestibule, cigars were periodically offered as “incentives” with the purchase of lap dances, and most of the patrons mauled cheap stogies while they enjoyed the overpriced lager and overpriced lap-sitters. The stench nauseated me from the first, but I had to get used to it. Everyone eventually did. As long as I didn’t end up with a smoldering Camacho in my birth canal, I could cope with middle-class vice.

  At first glance, the club was obviously miles ahead of the Skyway Lounge in terms of quasi-Vegas glitz. I walked up to the front desk, which was staffed by a well-dressed, officious teenager, her lips heavily lined with scat-colored pencil.

  “May I help you?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Are you hiring at the moment?”

  “Waitresses or entertainers?” she asked.

  “Uh, entertainers,” I said. I was beginning to notice that no one in the industry used the word stripper, with the exception of some actual strippers (and even then only the toughest, bitchiest girls). Exotic dancer was more popular, and showgirl was common parlance at most clubs, though we were a long way from Vegas. Invariably, the official term used by management was entertainer, as if we were pulling struggling doves out of our sleeves and telling jokes about Nixon and Passover.

  “When can you start?” the girl asked.

  “Right away, I guess,” I said.

  “Fill this out,” the girl said, handing me an application attached to a clipboard. “You’ll need to come back tomorrow when the manager is here, and she’ll go through the hiring paperwork with you. Did you want to start dancing tonight?”

  “No,” I said, startled. Had I actually been hired? I’d expected a complex and potentially demeaning audition process, complete with nipple-inspection like in Showgirls. Instead, they were simply asking me to show up.

  “Well, you can work tonight if you change your mind,” the girl said, straightening a display of cigars.

  I wandered farther into the club to fill out my application. It was a cavernous, unabashedly opulent space that appeared to have been a ballroom or theater in an earlier incarnation. There were tiered crystal chandeliers, polished brass rails, even a so-called “library” stocked with leather-bound books that I doubted had ever been cracked. The stage was wide and plain, with a mirrored back wall and no pole. Apparently, pole tricks were the domain of down-scale titty bars. This was a relief to me, since I was obviously deficient in that area.

  I settled into a leatherette throne in the library and filled out the app. When I came to the line for “Current Employer,” I scrawled “PLEASE DO NOT CONTACT.” I could only imagine the react
ion at the agency if they discovered that their copy typist aspired to be a high-priced go-go dancer.

  I handed in the application, headed outside and winced at the sunlight glancing off the brackish snow-drifts. The sole feature that Schieks had in common with the Skyway Lounge was the lighting, or lack thereof. Strip clubs are almost always kept dark and at uncomfortably cool temperatures, much like big sexy meat lockers. This ensures that the strippers will look awesome (since any imperfections will be rendered invisible in twenty watts of flickering blacklight) and will be forced to huddle together for warmth (creating the illusion of lesbianism, which managers encourage). Flesh stays taut and cool; private parts remain as fresh and florid as tuna sashimi. All the strip joints in town served their blondes well chilled, though it was hardly necessary during a long winter in the White City.

  When I returned to work and was safely ensconced at my desk, I telephoned Jonny’s office. Jonny’s workplace was similar to mine: bright, modular furniture, free beverages and lots of hoarse marketing girls with French pedicures.

  “Guess what?” I said in a low voice. “I got a job dancing at Schieks.”

  Jonny was impressed. “They hired you on the spot?” he stage-whispered. “You are so hot! You’re ablaze!”