Candy Girl Read online

  “I can’t do that,” Diamond said, blanching.

  “You’ll learn,” Mustache insisted. He turned to me. “What’s your stage name?”

  “Cherish,” I said. “Because I’m going to cherish every moment we spend together.”

  He shook his head. “Yeah, okay.”

  Diamond and I went up to the second floor stage to practice pole tricks. She looked Junior Miss–perfect with her seamless curtain of Marcia Brady hair and lawn-green bikini. I wondered if Mustache’s predictions for our respective successes held water. I didn’t think I looked mean. Withdrawn? Perhaps. Inwardly hostile? Deffo. But I had assumed my face was a convincing mask of beatific sensuality.

  Miss American Pie gripped one of the poles and tried to climb it in her white patent party shoes. She promptly slid down and lost her footing. With her downy limbs crumpled beneath her, she reminded me of Bambi.

  “Ow,” she said.

  “Let me try,” I said, executing an awkward spin. I was surprised by how difficult it was. The girls onstage always looked so light and languid when they worked with the pole; by contrast, my body felt like an anthropomorphic sack of wet cat litter. I could barely lift my own weight to leave the floor.

  “There must be a trick to this,” I said.

  A girl emerged from the upstairs dressing room and watched us, her lips curling in amusement. I thought she might introduce herself, but she simply cruised past in a cloud of Thierry Mugler Angel.* Deja Vu was even more impersonal than Schieks due to the volume of dancers who came and went weekly, often without comment either way. The management pressured girls to work as many shifts as they could physically handle, and as a result, there could be fifty girls working on any given night, sometimes more. Also, resting in the dressing room was emphatically discouraged (Vu girls were expected to maintain a continuous hustle), so it was difficult to socialize.

  Discouraged by the pole, Diamond and I went back downstairs to check in at the DJ booth. “I really don’t think I can do this,” she confessed after requesting a Basement Jaxx song. “I can’t go up to strange guys and touch them.”

  “You’ll get used to it,” I reassured her with all the false wisdom of a five-week stripping veteran. “It’s not that bad.”

  “I guess,” Diamond said, nervously fiddling with her clear plastic tip box. Since nude dancers don’t customarily wear garters, we’d both brought miniature boxes to carry our tips (as was the custom). Mine was a tin antique that bore the old “Candy Land” board game logo and a photo of two corpulent tots gazing up at a gingerbread house. It seemed like the perfect accessory for such an alluring, artifically sweetened environment. The strippers themselves looked like confections, with their frosted smiles and lollipop-hued costumes. But these were also girls who’d snap your knees like almond bark if you dared to cross them. I knew even little Diamond would eventually harden if she deigned to stick around.

  Thus began my tenure at Big Pink. The first thing I noticed was how differently the girls danced compared to Schieks. They didn’t just get completely nude; they did full-on gyno shows. I watched as girl after girl sat on the tip rail and pulled her legs open to expose her pussy in scientific detail. Some girls knelt and pulled mens’ heads into their expensive man-made cleavage; some picked up dollar bills with their dexterous buttocks, some thrust their crotches against customers’ faces and feigned orgasm. One girl dove headfirst into laps and flung her muscular gams over customers’ shoulders. The girls who behaved the most outrageously were rewarded with dollar bills, which the customers folded into miniature pyramids of Giza and placed on the tip rail. It reminded me of an auction. Vagina going once, going twice…SOLD to the fellow in the Timberwolves cap and the Manwich-stained fleece pullover!

  I spotted a blonde girl working the floor in an outfit so tight I could clearly see her nipples, labia, individual goose bumps, hair follicles and DNA helix. Her face seemed to have calcified in an expression of pure concentration. Occasionally, she took a customer by the hand and led him upstairs to the beds. The transactions were efficient and joyless, as if she were a bank teller rather than a sex worker. But she had amassed a huge pile of cash, which was bound with a tan rubber band and never left the palm of her hand.

  “That’s one of the Russians,” a passing stripper whispered fearfully, noticing my intense interest in the blonde. (I have what’s been described as a “staring problem.”) “The Russians always bank. They’re unstoppable.”

  My informant was correct; there was a tight-knit cabal of older Russian women working at Deja Vu, and they were all indestructible flesh-bots. They never accepted “no” from a customer, and they weren’t afraid to be pushy or stern. I’d minored in Russian in college*, and I could speak the language with some fluency. But I couldn’t work up the nerve to address the Russian girls in their native tongue. They were so baldly aggressive that one of them routinely shoved me from behind when she felt I wasn’t moving quickly enough across the floor. I wanted to turn around and snarl, “Go back to Kislovodsk, you mail-order cunt!” but I didn’t want my cheekbones shattered by Slavic fists of fury. So I kept quiet and pretended to not understand the Russians when they spoke amongst themselves, mumbling stuff like, “Let’s pretend to be sick and leave,” or, “I dislike the new girl with the brown hair. Did you see her large thighs? It is certain that she feels ashamed of their heft.”

  The other girls working at the Vu were mostly teenagers. In fact, a couple of them were still in high school (though they had obviously reached the legal stripping age of eighteen). One of them was a cheerleader, and she proudly carried her costumes in a purple-and-gold duffel bag bearing her suburban school’s name. She prattled on casually about homework, boys and her hopes that her friends would visit her at the club. To her, stripping was a perfectly acceptable part-time job, and with the exception of her parents, she didn’t care who knew about it.

  “I just broke off a really long relationship,” she told me earnestly as we scanned the floor for gullible types. “We were together almost six weeks.”

  I couldn’t help chuckling. “That doesn’t sound too long to me!”

  “How old are you?” she asked suspiciously.

  “I just turned twenty-five,” I said.

  “Are you married?” she asked.

  “No,” I said. “Not yet.”

  She looked at me like I was an eccentric spinster with birds’ nests in my hair. “Wow. I want to get married, like, next year.”

  “Don’t rush it,” I said. “Don’t rush anything. Enjoy being young and, um, being a stripper, and not having any crushing responsibilities.”

  “I don’t want to be all old and stuff when I have kids,” she fretted. “I want to have three by the time I’m your age. Two girls and a boy. I’m going to name them Brianna, Madison and Tyler, and I want to be a stay-at-home mom and…”

  I shook my head. She reminded me so much of myself and my chick friends when we were seniors in high school, plotting our adult lives down to the most minute detail. The only difference was that this girl routinely got nude and dry-humped guys her father’s age. I couldn’t blame her for longing to settle down already; she’d probably lived more than the average thirty-year-old. College had to seem like a crashing bore compared to Saturday nights in the Erotic Loft.

  “When I was your age, I wanted to be a poet,” I said stuffily.

  “But you wound up doing this,” the girl said. “Why are you here?”

  Her question stumped me. I still didn’t know what I was doing there. I’d gotten promoted at work, I’d saved enough for a down payment on a Japanese car, and my bizarre little experiment should have been coming to a close. And yet, it continued of my own volition. Quelle mindfuck.

  I rose from my bar stool and sauntered over to a man sitting by himself at one of the comically undersized lamplit tables. “How about a bed dance?” I asked, sliding comfortably into his lap as if I were greased in Crisco and utterly fearless.

  “Sure,” he said, stubbi
ng out his cigarette.

  I led him upstairs and into the jungle-themed bedroom. There was a large stuffed leopard on the bed, which I picked up and put on the floor, for lack of a better idea. The man lay down. I took off my top and straddled him, shoving my breasts into his face. His tongue briefly darted into my cleavage and I jumped, but continued the dance. I stared at the mirrored ceiling and watched myself moving rhythmically atop his broad, prone body. I knew I was doing something I never would have considered weeks ago, but I was in a different tribe now.

  The man reached into his jeans and adjusted himself so I’d be ideally positioned above his junk. He was frankly turgid. Watch it, Boner Stabbone, I thought to myself, but maintained my pained smile. I tried to avoid his erection, but it was impossible to do so without completely rolling off of him. So I pressed my thigh against the hard-on and humped it with my leg until he came. The rush of warmth, and ensuing dark stain, were unmistakable. He sighed with approval, clearly unashamed of the forensic evidence on his 501’s.

  The ordeal ended quickly, since Deja Vu also customarily faded out songs at the three-minute mark, regardless of whether they were over or not. This was a major rip-off from a customer standpoint, but I was pleased that it meant I’d never be stuck grinding against a guy for all seventeen minutes of “Kashmir.” The man paid me my $60 and mumbled a thank-you. Just as he was about to exit the bedroom, a cute waitress appeared in the regulation Deja Vu tank top and sneakers. “Would you like to buy the lady a drink?” she asked.

  “All right,” the man said, chafed.

  “That’ll be $9,” the waitress said cheerfully. I raised my eyebrows. Nine clams for a lousy glass of cola? The man paid without complaint, and walked away. The waitress handed me a blue ticket along with my soda, which was served in the special tulip-shaped stemware that only the strippers used.

  “What is this?” I asked, waving the ticket.

  “That’s a drink ticket. You turn them in when you leave. Every time a guy buys you a drink, you get a ticket. If you don’t have enough tickets by the end of the night, the club will charge you,” the waitress said.

  I groaned. “You mean I have to convince multiple guys to buy me a $9 pop?”

  “Unfortunately, you do,” the waitress said. “Some girls deal with it by refusing to give a guy a dance unless he agrees to buy her a drink.”

  “I can’t afford to bargain,” I said. “Thanks for clueing me in.” I slipped her a couple of bucks and made a mental note: Enjoy Coke or suffer the consequences!

  “No problem,” she said, pivoting in her white sneakers.

  The customers at the Vu were a different breed than the starched golf-outing types who’d frequented Schieks. Some of them seemed downright impoverished. I approached a crumpled fellow who wore a button that said ASK ME ABOUT MY RECENT WEIGHT LOSS.

  “So what’s all this about your recent weight loss?” I asked. He told me that since he’d joined a notorious vitamin sales cult, he’d gone from taking seven medications for depression to “only five.”

  “Only five,” I said. “Wowsers.”

  “I’ve made serious progress,” he said, knitting his fingers. “I’m down to just lithium and some other things.”

  “Want a lap dance?” I asked.

  “Sorry,” he said without a tinge of remorse. “I didn’t bring any money. But I have plenty of herbal supplements if you’re interested in a trial.”

  Another guy informed me that he was currently unemployed, but had enjoyed a wildly successful summer mowing lawns.

  “I was making great money,” he recalled wistfully. “Really mad cash. Too bad the season’s over now.”

  (But those were heady times, right, man? The hookers and blow, the Kobe beef, the magnums of Cristal at Emilio’s summer house? It seemed like the lawns would go on forever, but they never do, man. They never do.)

  By the time a guy described his occupation as “a skate-boarder, sometimes,” I was getting exasperated. Where were the businessmen? I longed to see a cash-flush zombie in a Zegna suit, or a rich geriatric or Bob Dobbs from the Church of the Subgenius chewing his pipe with a wink. Many of the customers at Deja Vu wore sweatpants (which was not only aesthetically unpleasant, but created an unpleasantly intimate friction during lap dances). I wasn’t elitist; I’d gladly perform for anyone who was willing to pay; but this was like trying to siphon blood from the proverbial turnip. I was beginning to understand why most girls preferred upscale clubs, though I still didn’t miss the chatty tedium of Schieks.

  At four-thirty in the morning, the lights finally dimmed. The girls who remained on the floor (many had disappeared to the Erotic Loft hours ago) crowded into the broken elevator and rode upstairs. I crept in among them, so tired that the crowd of girls shimmered like the Painted Desert before my eyes. I could smell their perfume and pheromones and hear them talking in soft, rusty voices about the night’s haul. When the elevator doors opened, they flooded into the dressing room, bowlegged from lap dancing, heads down, finally unraveling. Git along, lil’ doggies. Mellow jazz piano wafted up from downstairs; the DJ liked to play relaxing music at sunrise.

  I put on a pair of rubber thongs (which felt oddly collegiate; I hadn’t worn footwear to bathe since my freshman dorm) and headed for the showers. As I stood aching beneath the hot spray, another girl lathered up under the adjacent shower head.

  “Hi,” she said, soaping her fake breasts cheerfully. I almost expected to hear balloon-friction sound effects, like in Kentucky Fried Movie. “Did you have a good night?” she asked.

  “It was all right,” I said, rubbing the crescents of mascara beneath my eyes. “I got twelve dances.” To me, this was a decent evening.

  “I got twenty-eight,” she said casually. “I usually do better.”

  “May I ask how you do that?” I asked. “I mean, how do you get twenty-eight dances? I’ve never gotten close to that many.”

  “I look in the guys’ eyes,” she said simply. “I look at them real sexy, and then they always want to get a dance from me.” She shrugged as if the equation were kindergarten-simple.

  “I don’t exactly glare at them,” I said, toweling off my meager, pendulous breasts. (They were failing me, these tits. They were so damned anatomical.)

  “Hmm,” the girl said. “Well, I guess I don’t know how I do it.” She tossed her wet taffy-colored hair and grinned at me, guarding her secret like an amulet.

  Around 4:30 A.M., the girls reconvened on the main floor for the end-of-shift payout. They curled up like litters of puppies on the couches (greyhound puppies, all limbs), piles of worn-out girls in pajamas, yoga pants, tracksuits and hospital scrubs. Their closeness seemed less like a display of affection than unconscious learned behavior; they’d been snuggling with strange men all night and their physical boundaries were completely worn away. Even I found myself slumped against another girl, who clung to a teddy bear and wore a retainer on her teeth.

  Surprisingly, the night wasn’t over for most of the strippers. They made breakfast plans, and discussed what they’d do when they got home. “I’m going to have a Valium and take a bath.” “I’m going to watch a movie.” “I need to get my kids up for school, and then I might sleep a little.” Their endurance shocked me, until I realized that I was the most insane person in the room: I had to be at work in three hours.

  Which brought me to my next concern: Where the hell were the Mustaches? At Schieks, the payout took all of thirty seconds. You plunked down your share, tipped the floor guys and booked. Here, payout was apparently a complicated event. The managers had to tabulate how much each girl owed the house, a simple exercise in multiplication that mysteriously took forty-five minutes each night to complete. Strangely, no one commented on the excruciating length of this procedure.

  “What’s going on?” I asked the girl next to me. “Why is this taking so long?”

  “The managers like to get fucked up at the end of the night,” the girl replied, tapping her nostril. “That’s probably wh
at they’re doing right now. They don’t care if we have to wait around.”

  “I really need to bail,” I said. “I have another job that starts in a couple of hours, and I’m hoping to take a nap.”

  “Bummer,” the girl agreed. “I’m Frost, by the way.”

  “Hi, Frost. I’m Cherish,” I said. I’d noticed Frost onstage earlier; she moved with a stiff, painful gait. Her stage sets looked like physical therapy.

  “How old are you?” she asked me.

  “I just turned twenty-five,” I told her, “but right now I feel older.”

  “A lot of people in this business feel older than they are,” Frost said. “Look at me. I’m only twenty-two, but I have three kids.” She patted her soft, puckered stomach and chuckled ruefully. “I had my legs broken and my teeth knocked out last year when I was pregnant. I had to learn to walk again. I’m still getting the hang of it, as you might have noticed.”

  “You look great up there,” I said.

  “Thanks,” she said. “Want to see pictures of my kids?” I did. Frost thumbed through a stack of Polaroids, proudly pointing out her cherubic daughters. When we came to a photo of a beetle-browed thug, she kissed it raptly.

  “That’s my new boyfriend,” she said. “He’s a Slovakian Jew and has a ten-inch cock.”

  “Mazel tov!” I said.

  “Can you give me a ride to the Starlite Motel?” Frost asked abruptly. “I have to meet someone there in an hour.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “I’m taking a cab home.”

  Frost rose gingerly and began circling the room, pleading with the other girls for rides. I stretched out on the love seat and closed my eyes. But instead of darkness, I saw an afterimage of girls ascending the spiral staircases flanking the stage, a never-ending parade of marching insects in neon dresses, a lurid Escher. My eyes snapped open.

  By the time the managers emerged, lectured us for our lack of enthusiasm and collected our drink tickets and payout, it was 5:00. I climbed into one of the hundreds of cabs I’d take that year, and rode home in silence. I was starting to not feel tired anymore. I wondered if I’d be able to sustain the wired feeling and slog through a long day at the agency. When I got home and undressed, I realized that my legs were covered in violent-looking bruises, blue and yellow and flowering wildly down my calves like a Georgia O’Keeffe rendered in internal bleeding. Such were the risks of pole and floor work.