Episode 10 ❤️🩹 1975 : whirling curvish
The first time I was pretty, I was under a mirrored ball, naked in front of strangers
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I’m here for the money. That’s what I say to anyone who asks.
I’m here for the money, that’s what I’d told myself. Maybe that first day, but after the first super-dopamine hit on stage, I was hooked, a junkie, an addict like any other kind. I wouldn’t find another place I felt as safe, as attractive, loved and desired for the next twentyish years.
There wouldn’t be another place I felt worse about myself, either.
Times Square strip clubs are my Alpha and Omega.
For the first time, my body is an asset, something that’ll make money. But in the go-go bars the long green is on stage. Dancers are the dime everything turns on.
They’re glamorous, far beyond my grasp, a spectacular range of what a woman can be, what a man might find attractive. It’s like walking the beach collecting shells, sea glass, and smooth pebbles; they’re different and somehow the same, each one beautiful in a way that sets her apart from all the other beautiful things here.
My mother will one day comment that I wasn’t burdened by having to be pretty.
The Men
The women of Robbie’s Mardi Gras are a virtual Crayola 64-pack of sensuality—the men, a handful of #2 Ticonderoga pencils badly in need of sharpening. Working stiffs drinking their lunch and rent—they come to watch, talk, to sit with, to forget their own lives. Show up at lunch and forget to go back to work. Forget to go home.
Barmaids, we keep the booze moving. It loosens a man’s wallet and turns care-free into care-less.
They resent us making them weak with wanting, for having control of, for withholding something they want. Unremarkable men with nothing interesting to say outside of “Can I buy you a drink?”
A rhetorical question if I’ve ever heard one.
Owners and managers don’t seem to like any of us. We’re a means to the money & they resent that we earn for what we were born with.
Punch-drunk bouncers, old pugs with nowhere else to go, pimps and thieves, they’ll take us out in public. That’s as far as it goes, no one wants to marry a stripper, a b-girl, a barmaid.
Men don’t marry girls like me.
I borrow a g-string. A cheesy blue number. A triangle of coarse material that shimmers, barely, held together, barely, with three strips of elastic. I cover what I can of with this swatch of blue and march out into the bar, pubic hair exploding from all sides.
Surprise kids, women had pubic hair in 19751
Center stage, teetering on heels borrowed from Lisa for luck, I dance and everyone watches.
Everyone.
Suddenly
I’m that woman men want to touch, to own, to be with; my body is buzz-zing. My nipples are hard, my skin jumping with electricity, my mouth’s gone dry, the world spins faster and faster.
I’m free.
I’m powerful, out of control, out of my body. My reflection shatters in the mirrors, dances with me, two of me, three of me, dozens of me jump from mirror to mirror, jerking, spinning, twirling in a storm of pounding disco. Me, smiling back at myself, I’m the pretty one now.
I’m the pretty one.
Fuck that. I’m beautiful. I matter.
I’m the only thing in the world that matters.
I’m untouchable.
Ralph throws a brick through the plate glass window of my new world. “Let’s see some floor work!”
—I don’t know what that means.
“Pretend you’re on top,” he barks.
I’m 17. Or 18. I’ve never been on top.
The spell is broken, I’m slammed back into my body, into the skin suit of a chubby girl in someone else’s shoes doing naked push-ups while everyone watches.
Ralph never asked me to dance again.
I never want to be in my skin again.
Never.
2025
The first time I was beautiful, really beautiful, I was on stage, in a borrowed g-string, an isosceles triangle of rough blue tinsel I’ve since learned is called metallic eyelash fringe fabric. Held together by a couple of strips of quarter-inch flat black elastic, the crotch had a residue I guessed was someone else’s vaginal discharge. Probably more than one someone.
Sticks and stones ...
It’s a lie. Bones heal. Words stick.
“Let’s see some floor work! Pretend you’re on top.” The words that shattered my illusion.
A memory loop: Ralph was midway down the south end of the horseshoe bar, standing near one of the cash registers. Looking up at me on stage. It’s been stuck in my head for thirty plus years, the memory camera behind the eyes of someone standing in the far, far south corner, near the street. I can see the whole club.
The girl on stage looks young. And alone.
The girl on stage is, of course, me.
The someone standing in the far south corner watching it all unfold, is also, of course, me.
Were there any borrowed shoes? Did I go onstage barefoot?
Who would care?
Fresh fish. Fresh meat.
The new girl.
But I was beautiful for that moment. I can feel that glory, still.
Years later, I will accidentally have my first taste of heroin in the bathroom of another strip joint, a block away, also named the Mardi Gras - Paul’s Mardi Gras, and I will have that same incandescent moment. An intake of breath, a feeling of wholeness, one with the universe. A minute in the ebb & flow when I wasn’t hollow and empty. A moment.
Snap of the finger—and it’s gone.
That fast, that fleeting.
I don’t remember taking it home with me, that shitty little g-string. Or ever wearing it again; a memento, like a pebble you pocketed after climbing up a rugged mountain, or a matchbook from a restaurant where something momentous happened.
I let important things get away from me.
Frankie. The necklaces. Gone.
I hang on to things and people I probably shouldn’t.
The pin, a plastic cat with a broken hasp and peeling gold paint—it looks to’ve been run over by a car. My“boyfriend” gave it to me, was it the same day he brought me into the grocery store basement to make out, his friend waiting in the dark.
I kept the broken pin.
I kept the blue g-string
A black and white braided piece of a horses lead, a rolodex card with his name, phone number and address—all surely out of date—that says “this man kidnapped me,” an answering machine tape with messages from my stalker.
Things that should have been turning points, red flags, that I probably wouldn’t forget, but I needed archeological, tangible proof of my life, my story. Proof—to myself—I wasn’t making it up, that it really happened, that thing, whatever that thing was.
Proof of my existence.
The kidnapping and the stalker—we aren’t there yet.
This is where we are: I’m 17 or 18, in the bathroom of the largest topless bar in the country, changing into a borrowed blue g-string, getting ready.
The women are gorgeous. Everything glitters. The music is loud. So many mirrors.
I’d been pretty. For the very first time.
“Can I buy you a drink?”
I knew then, I was never going to leave.
I worked in a bar filled with beautiful women, and they acted like I was one of them. That meant more to me than money whether I knew it at the time or not.
I’m sure I didn’t.
I borrowed a G-string.
Thirty years and I could pick that G-string out of a line-up, if I had to and there were such a thing. A small corner of coarse material trimmed in black lace and a milky stain from bodily fluids that had leaked out of the anonymous girls who had worn it before, it shimmered—a little. I’d changed in the bathroom, covered as much as I could with that scrap of blue and emerged—thick, dark, tightly curled Ashkenazi Jew pubic hair exploding from all sides.
I stood center stage as everyone watched. Everyone. Dancers and barmaids smiled and nodded, one or two covering their mouths, the way you do to suppress a giggle.
I’d climbed on to that stage with nothing but a borrowed G-string and chutzpa. I couldn’t do a striptease. I was nobody’s Gypsy Rose Lee, but mostly, because I had nothing on that could be teased off.
For a second, I freeze.
Then, I heard the music. Filled my lungs with it. I started to dance, floating high above everyone, machine guns exploded out from my nerve endings, sparks from my finger tips.
Faster. And faster than that. My shattered reflection smiling back at me, I was pretty.
I’m the fucking pretty one now.
Fuck that. I was fucking beautiful in that minute. Dancing, spinning, twirling. Pulsing lights sent me reeling this way, the disco bass pounded and sent me flying that way. Dancers watched me. Men were watching me. Everyone was watching me.
For the very first time, I was capital-b Beautiful. I mattered. I was something more than just available. My skin sizzled.
I was free.
I was powerful, and there was a big red S on my chest.
For Sexy. Or unStoppable. Or Super-something or other.
I was out of control and out of my body.
I was in control and in every inch of my body.
The wanting to be wanted, hoping to be noticed, afraid to be seen, slipped away.
I was
simply,
gloriously,
and undeniably
Desirable.
I’d wanted a do-over, to go back to before Ralph yelled at me, back to when I was blissed and the focus of everyone’s attention, in the good way. Not in the way where a bar full of strangers were watching a chubby, half-naked, awkward girl on stage.
I’d never been on top. Thirty-four boys had climbed on top of me at some time in the past four years (although not all at the same time, thankfully), but what was being asked for was quality and a little theatricality, style, not quantity and a familiarity with the back seats of a dozen different makes of cars.
For half a song, the name and tune of which I wish I could remember, I was in every inch of a perfect body and it was mine. It was rapturous and I was pretty.
Then reality and expectations I couldn’t live up to came rushing in. I couldn’t admit I didn’t know what to do, I was my father’s daughter.
Lesson Number Six: Never, ever admit you don’t know.
A Daddy’s girl, and we’re fake it ’til you make it kind of people, we’re fake it and keep on faking it and never say you don’t know kind of people. Lie with a straight face kind of people. Never admit you’re wrong, or ignorant, even when the undeniable proof is right there on the kitchen table in front of everyone.
I’d inherited the genes of a dyed in the wool baffle ‘em with bullshitter. Although her intention was elegance, my mother’s advice, “When you don’t know which fork to use, watch the person next to you,” was just a nicer way of saying, “Don’t ask, fake it.” In other words, when in Rome, look around for someone else doing floor work and do what they do.
I looked; no one was on the floor. Everyone was looking at me.
My sexual experience had so far been limited to backseats, public bathrooms, and things I was expected to keep secret. The cowgirl and the reverse cowgirl weren’t yet part of my repertoire. I didn’t have a repertoire.
I was a one-trick pony.
I was easy and I kept secrets.
Okay, I was a two-trick pony.
I remember trying to imagine being on top. My best imagination had me doing push-ups, center stage.
The spell’d been broken, I’d been forced back into the reality of my skin, and in the mirrored column—a chubby girl with unruly, dyed red hair and swamp green eyes, doing sissy push-ups on a wooden stage in front of strangers.
Push-ups. Because I didn’t know any better.
Push-ups, the girl kind from the knees because I had no idea what being on top looked like and I’d never paid much attention to what boys and men when they were on top of me.
But there’d been a minute of abandon
when I was out of my body and yet inside my own skin,
inside the invisible bubble, the secret society,
hanging with the in-crowd,
part of the us in Us against Them.
A minute, or two, no more.
But in that short span—how long can you hold your breath?—not much longer than that, I’d been beautiful, free and lovable.
I’d stumbled on the secret to being invisible and being seen.
To being here and not here.
I never wanted to be trapped in that chubby girl’s skin again. Ever.
Another girl might have had that epiphany and followed it up by taking dance classes. That didn’t occur to me until the very second I wrote that sentence.
I went back behind the bar, kept dancing in my head and hustling champagne.
Would you rather be the center of attention, or be completely invisible?
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- Adventures in the Alaskan woods and the sex industry
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- Former stripper, ex-English professor, and lifelong artist telling tumultuous true stories from my wild life.
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Forty years later, my life looks completely different, but I had to go through all of that to get here. ⬇️
Historical footnote: Pubic hair has a purpose, it’s a natural barrier for pathogens. It also gives off the invisible come-hither scent—pheremones. Some cultures hate it (Islam forbids growing it for more than 40 days), some see it as a sign of fertility (Africa and South Seas). At one time a full bush was a sign of health since Syphilis often resulted in pubic hair falling out prodding some women (mostly sex workers) to wear merkins to appear healthier—and it was easier to get rid of lice from a merkin. The Germans, who have great words for lots of things, pubic hair is Schamhaar. Literal translation? Shame Hair. So that’s who they felt.
In the 60’s and 70s in the States, most woman had a naturally hairy bush. Pubic hair didn’t start to disappear here until the 1980s. Then came the Brazilian, the landing strip, Sex and the City and now it’s making a bit of a comeback. Thank you Lady Gaga, Doja Cat and Cameron Diaz!
Once again you suck me in. So much to unpack here. But just want to say that I hope the narrative in your head has changed. You are beautiful and always have been - no stage or G-string needed.
Beautiful and relatable.