3 naked ladies talk about their view from the stages and laps of the 70′s, 80′s, 90′s and today.
For as a long as there’s been music, women have danced for the entertainment and titillation of men. Scheherazade. Minsky’s Burlesque. Cage dancing go-go girls in the psychedelic 60′s. Times Square strippers, pole dancers and lap dancers. Women dance….Men watch.
Naked Ladies get around! Look for the 3 Naked Ladies and a new topic every Wednesday on laurishaw.com, $pread magazine online or thedirtygirldiaries.com
Rachel Aimee: Stripping can be a really difficult job to do sober: dealing with rejection from assholes, struggling to make back your house fee, working till 4am every night, and all the while having to act happy and flirty with each new guy.
Jodi Sh. Doff: Tried it sober. Couldn’t do it.
RA: I know plenty of girls who’ve gotten seriously into drink and drugs because of the pressure of the job.
JshD : Zoe Hansen mentioned a girl who couldn’t get work because of her track marks.
Lauri Shaw: I had plenty of friends who did dope. You could usually spot the junkies, they wore evening gloves or dozens of bracelets. Or you’d get tight with someone and realize she was going home and shooting up between her toes.
RA: At the same time, I hate to propagate those stereotypes about stripping messing up people’s lives, because I also encounter plenty of Wall Street bankers whose jobs are clearly driving them to drugs too.
LS: Listen, stripping doesn’t make girls into addicts, but it’s an environment where it’s more acceptable to be off your face than, say, an office. It’s also easier to procure your favorite high there than it would be in the 9-5 world. That combination can be the tipping point for someone who already has tendencies.
JshD: I discovered heroin working at the Mardi Gras. I sniffed the first time thinking it was coke, but within a month I was fixing with one of the floor managers. He taught me about saving the twist tops off the champagne to cook the doojie. But coke was all over the place. A few of the girls dealt coke but no one was dealing dope in the clubs–too scared of serious mob consequences. Smoking pot, on the other hand was like smoking cigarettes & everyone smoked cigarettes.
LS: Yeah, pot was de rigeur. Coke was harder to find, you’d be more likely to get it from a customer than another girl. Girls who went to after hours did Ecstasy and “Special K.” But usually not at work. And drinking? A girl taught me about bringing vodka to work in a Sprite bottle, and I immediately started making more money. You wanted a small buzz on while you worked, but not enough to make you careless. I saw this one girl at a fairly upscale club pass out onstage. The “house mom,” who was actually a gay guy, came out of the dressing room, lifted her up and carried her off. Someone else got on in her place, and no one said a word.
JshD: I remember a dancer, Jessie, ODing in the basement locker room of the Lollipop Lounge on West 46th. The other girls robbed her before telling management she was unconcious. I didn’t occur to anyone that she could’ve died. She didn’t, but no thanks to the “Sisterhood of the No Pants”! It sounds awful, but stripping was a tough girl’s game.
RA: I’ve seen a girl pass out onstage too, but at my club it’s quite common for us to just lie around on the stage if the customers aren’t tipping (it’s a dive) so nobody really noticed until she was supposed to get down!
LS: Management didn’t care if your liver fell out of you, so long as it didn’t happen in front of the customers.
JshD: Oh no, you could be fucked up, but you were being paid to hustle. Once, when I didn’t want to dance, I sniffed a little extra dope and threw up right in front of the manager. It got me off the stage for the night, but not off work. You hadda be dead to get the night off.
RA: Unless they were looking for an excuse to fire you, right?
LS: I don’t recall anyone ever getting the sack for being too wasted.
JshD: More than anything it was the booze for me and clubs watered down their liquor. I always cracked a fresh bottle of vodka, just to be sure.
RA: Did you get commission on the drinks? I’ve never worked where dancers got paid to drink but it sounds like a really bad idea.
JshD: It was a great idea!!!
RA: In most clubs I’ve worked at, you have to accept a drink if a customer offers to buy you one but it doesn’t have to be alcoholic so there’s no pressure to get drunk if you don’t want to. Except sometimes from the customer. Sometimes I’ll order a real drink even if I don’t want it because I think the customer will stop tipping me if he thinks I’m boring.
LS: Girls who wanted to stay sober drank juice. We let the guys think we were getting drunk. In the nude joints, they didn’t serve alcohol, just fake beer and fake champagne for the customers, both of which tasted god-awful. You brought your own booze. In some clubs they kept vodka behind the bar for the girls who got their customers into the VIP. If you were the thirsty type, it was one more reason to go back there.
JshD: I loved the fact that I could drink & drug to my hearts content and get paid for it–commission on every drink. You could get a non-alcoholic drink, or use a spit glass, but what was the point of that?
RA: I never really let myself get too drunk at work, even though I know I’d make more money if I did. I just don’t want to be out of control in that environment. Although the few times I worked at high pressure clubs with big house fees I’d get so stressed out I’d sit with customers just to get a drink, even if they weren’t buying dances. (Another reason I don’t work at those clubs anymore!)
This entry was written by , posted on September 30, 2009 at 9:00 am, filed under three naked ladies and tagged drinking, drugs, strippers. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
The cat’s whiskers tickle my face until I wake up. It’s dark. Uh,oh I’ve slept and missed a whole ‘nother day. I push her away, jonesing for just a few more hours of nothing, but she’s curled up beside me anymore.
It’s roach feet. Not cat whiskers. Roach feets. Roach feets crawling across my ear and onto my cheek and as I realize that last night swooshes in and slams into my head in Technicolor. Surround Sound. 3D. Last night slams me into the wall and I realize that this is no hallucination. These fuckers are real & they’re everywhere.
Look, I freak out when the cat drags a half-dead waterbug up into the loftbed and now I’m sitting in the loft surrounded on all sides. Mwaha-ha-wha-wha flies out of my mouth. What is that you say? It’s the sound you make to keep from losing your fucking mind, that’s what that is. Some ancient Ashkenazi tribal mojo spitting through my fingers pfeh pfeh like those roaches are the evil eye and like somewhere there must be something I can do to make them go away.
A roach wandered into my microwave oven once just as I was about to warm up a biscuit. I thought, gotcha motherfucker, slapped the door shut, turned it on high and I listened to him snap, crackle and pop. At the end of six minutes I opened the microwave. The biscuit had turned into a rock, but that little roach shook himself off and toddled away like it was nothing more than a cockroach tanning booth. Nothing I do or say is going to change the fact that you can nuke a roach long enough to cook a hamburger and the roach couldn’t care less.
I know this as I’m in the loftbed, flailing my arms around, batting them off my face, shaking my hair and whoop whooping until I totally freak the cat out. She runs down the ladder and out of the room. The roaches are non-plussed and continue to scuttle about.
They’re everywhere. Have I said that? It’s surreal and not in that oh, isn’t that interesting Salvador Dali kind of way. In that I think someone spray painted my apartment with cockroaches way. I shake my head out, back and forth. I’m convinced the key is to keep moving, if I keep moving they can’t get me.
This is my general goal in life, to remain a moving target.
I shake my clothes out–a dozen roaches drop to the floor on top of dozens more. Arms, head, legs & hair all flying in different directions to keep the roaches off me while I pull on the same clothes for the third day. This is an impressive feat in the confines of the loft bed, but I don’t want to go down. I mean I do, I want to get out of this bed of roaches, but there are more…down there. I brace myself, hop down the ladder, grabbing my dance bag as I run out the door crushing families. Entire cockroach generations and future dynasties die beneath my feet.
The cat is on her own.
Outside, the cool night air calms me down a little. A few final shakes and shimmies just be sure there are no stowaways in my hair or my ears or my pockets. When I was little, kids used to say that earwigs would lay eggs in your ears, the babies would be born in your head and then eat their way out. I’ve never gotten over that image.
An old checker turns the corner; I jump in, grateful for the big leather backseat.
Maybe this is my lucky. There’s not too many of these big old cabs left. It’s a sign. Yesterday the bus showed up in the nick of time, today, this cab. If I can just make it to Lola’s everything will be OK. I can shower and change and figure out what to do next.
Lola was the one of the few things worth remembering about the two years between the Mardi Gras and Red Wolf. She was real life. We’d met when I was drinking my way through junior college and she was dreaming of stardom. She was the love child of Brenda Starr, Mae West and Etta James. The things that happened to me didn’t happen in her world. She was…a civilian. I wanted to be in her world just long enough to catch my breath.
I close my eyes and remember to breathe, in, out, in out. I’ve almost got the rhythm down as we pull up in front of her building.
I know there’s a couple of bucks in my bag to pay the cabbie. It occurs to me, slowly. I look at the dance bag, sitting next to me on the seat. Innocently sitting next to me in this cab and I realize, it probably wasn’t a good idea to leave my bag on the floor last night. It probably was not a good idea at all…
This entry was written by , posted on September 24, 2009 at 8:04 am, filed under the diary and tagged 1979, East Village, roaches. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
For as a long as there’s been music, women have danced for the entertainment and titillation of men. Scheherazade. Minsky’s Burlesque. Cage dancing go-go girls in the psychedelic 60′s. Times Square strippers, pole dancers and lap dancers. Women dance….Men watch.
Naked Ladies get around! Look for the 3 Naked Ladies and a new topic every Wednesday on laurishaw.com, $pread magazine online or thedirtygirldiaries.com
Jodi Sh. Doff: I was always either in the clubs or after hours. I never met regular people, I was always fishing in polluted waters. Everyone in my life was shady. My guys were loan-sharks, bookies, bikers, gangsters. Anyone I slept with for free was my “boyfriend.” But truthfully, I slept with a lot of men who didn’t think twice about me.
Lauri Shaw: I had a DJ thing for a while. They didn’t even need to be all that attractive, just charismatic. Bouncers were standoffish (and usually too burly. At the time, I liked my guys corpse-thin). The managers and owners treated us like property. If I was going to screw around with anyone in the business, a DJ seemed like the best choice.
Rachel Aimee: I’ve never dated customers or anyone in the business, not on any kind of principle but because I act like a different person at work and couldn’t imagine how I would relate to someone I met at work if I saw them outside the club. Also, I found that the only customers I liked enough to consider dating were too cool to think a stripper would want to date them so they never asked!
JshD: Occasionally, for someone special, my heart opened along with my legs. There were two guys who weren’t in the business. Gabe was a comic book artist, slightly shady, insane and kinky in ways I liked. Hank was a handsome troubled drunk—him I wanted to save. I was crazy about them both. I couldn’t imagine dating a real civilian. Civilians made assumptions about who I was that weren’t necessarily wrong, but I hated the presumption and condescension. That slick act just made me want to rip you off.
LS: I didn’t go near the slick guys unless I was working, but that’s not to say my head was screwed on straight. I had horrendous taste in men. Dancing did not help. I picked some phenomenal creeps and losers on my own time, simply because they didn’t behave like the average customer. It probably goes without saying that my self-esteem left a lot to be desired.
RA: So many strippers have problems dating because most people—not just men—who date strippers either want them to quit the business…
JshD: Oh God, save us from the Captain Save-A-Hos of the world!
RA: …or want to take their money, or both. I know it’s a stereotype but I’ve seen it again and again in the relationships of women I’ve worked with. Dancers hustle all night then go home to a guy or girl who makes them feel guilty about how they’re paying the bills but doesn’t have a problem with spending their money.
JshD: That was my husband! Abusive, even violent at times, over the work. But he didn’t get a job so I could stop and had no problem with me paying the bills. Obviously, that was a very short marriage. When I fell in love, L.U.V., it was a hustler named Bear who worked at O’Neals, a gay bar in Times Square. We thought we were Bonnie & Clyde, but we more Sid & Nancy. We were so in love, neither one wanted the other to work anymore. He’s what finally got me out of the business.
RA: I’ve seen lots of dancers quit the business for partners but, they usually come back when the relationship goes bad.
LS: I knew this girl who had a deal with her hubby and never went near those back rooms. She was the hardest working stripper I’ve ever seen—she did 25 lap dances a night while everyone else was taking their shoes off in the VIP. On any given night, two thirds of the girls were making twice as much as she did. Yet, she had a great attitude. She must have been married to an awesome guy.
JshD: I’m amazed when I hear about married dancers. You have to have your guard up when you’re working or they’ll eat you alive. How do you open your heart in your life and close it in the clubs? I can’t turn it on and off like a light switch.
RA: I know plenty of women who have been married for 10 or 20 years and dancing that whole time. It’s just how they support their families. I don’t know if hearts have much to do with it after a while.
JshD: 30 years later I still struggle with keeping an open heart.
LS: I felt that way too. I solved it by deciding intimacy was to be avoided at all costs. It took me ages to unwind from that mindset. And my libido was the first casualty. I was barely out of my teens, my hormones were climbing the walls 24-7. Stripping solved that problem. Within a year of becoming a stripper, my sex drive was in a coma.
JshD: Oh, I rarely had sex for pleasure. Except for those three guys, it was mostly a currency, a power struggle or a way to kill time.
RA: I’ve always put up really strict boundaries between work and “real life,” mostly for the sake of my sanity. I don’t even take customers’ numbers to ask them to come and see me at work because I can’t handle the emotional labor it takes to keep the hustle up outside of work. It’s a trade off though: the girls who really make money are the ones who throw themselves into the hustle.
Editors Note: Gabe, my crazy comic book artist is saving kittehs out in Indiana. If you can adopt one, great. If you can’t please donate a buck or two.
http://www.powerslamcollectibles.com/PowerslamPowerpussycats.html
This entry was written by , posted on September 23, 2009 at 9:00 am, filed under three naked ladies and tagged dirty boys, strippers, Times Square. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
courtesy of nick vail
I smelled the smoke before I noticed the charred walls, the remnants of ash, the damp floor or the wooden planks nailed up where the apartment door used to be. All my life I was looking for a way out and now there was no way in.
I have a tendency to live in just-get-through-this-moment survival mode. Each bit of chaos pushes the previous bit out, so it’s hard to see connections. When there’s a lot of crazy in the air, it’s all I can do to just make the noise stop.
The screaming in my head went from 0 to 60 so fast it came flying out of my mouth.
“Oh my god, oh my god, ohmygodohmygodohmygod.” I’m yanking at the boards with my hands. That crazy fuck came back and burned up my apartment. Fucking Red. Fucking Red Wolf. Fucking animal. “Ohmygodohmygodohmygod Ketzel! Ohmygodohmgodohmgd”
I’ve had Ketzel since I was 16. Mom named her, it’s Yiddish for kitten. It was what she called me until the cat showed up. I don’t care what happens to me really, but taking care of the cat, that’s my job, my real job. That cat is the only place I feel safe.
I pull at the boards harder, faster, bloodying my fingers, tearing my nails. Broken bits of plywood and door clatter wildly on the sooty mosaic floors of the hallway. Where is everyone? Why isn’t anyone coming to help me? I don’t feel like I’m crying, but my face is soaked with tears. If he hurt the cat I’ll kill him, I’ll find him and kill him.
I’d opened enough of a hole in the door to reach through and let myself in. My apartment was untouched. It wasn’t Wolf at all. I’d find out weeks later that an electrical fire had devastated my neighbor. The fire department had broken down my door. The apartment was fine, except for the door… and the thousands of cockroaches that covered my floor.
A hundred shades of black, brown and red glittered on the floor, not an inch of white linoleum showed. My ears filled with the crisp rustling of hundreds thousands of cockroach wings & shells brushing against thousands of cockroach shells & wings as they stepped over each other, searching for food and a little personal space. Every single roach in the building, every roach on East 7th Street, all huddled in my apartment for shelter from the storm, safety from the fire. Their delicate exoskeletons tinkled against each other as they climbed tables and chairs, devouring Ketzel’s food, body surfing across her water dish. Ketzel, normally happy to chase, catch and devour any and all comers, watched from her perch on the kitchen sink. Baffled by their overwhelming numbers, she looked to me, confusion on her small furry face, for further instruction.
One minute I’m walking down the wild side, next thing I know I’m ankle deep in cockroaches. How could that possibly happen? Obviously, I thought to myself, it is not actually happening. This is stress, a hallucination. You’ve had two really bad days, Red Wolf, the beating, the police, losing your job, the motel window, no food for two days. This is normal. Just relax, calm down. None of this is real. There are not this many cockroaches in the city, no less in one apartment. You just need to sleep it off, hit the reset button.
I dropped my dance bag in a corner and wedged the remains of the shattered door closed, crunching roaches beneath my feet with every step. Vomit rose in my throat. Audio hallucinations. It’s fine, just part of the package, nervous hysteria. Just calm the fuck down. Climbing up into the loft bed, Ketzel tucked tightly under my arm whispering her best Scarlett O’Hara into my ear, “Don’t think about this right now. If you do, you’ll go crazy. We’ll think about this tomorrow”. I kick off my boots, peel down last night’s clothes, dropping them onto the bed with the others already piled there and curl myself around the warm cat fur and escape into sleep as she purrs into my neck, “Home. You’re home. And after all… tomorrow is another day.”
Perhaps I should’ve questioned why the cat seemed to share my hallucination, but I didn’t. I did, however, wonder where she’d picked up that southern accent. We were, after all, both Long Island pussy.
This entry was written by , posted on September 21, 2009 at 11:19 am, filed under the diary and tagged 1979, East Village, the abyss. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
The hungry was making me dizzy. So was the not being able to breathe. Yesterdays comfortable pants had somehow disappeared between the Porkpie and here. I peeled off the tight corduroy jeans and lay down. Just for a second. Just to get my head together.
I woke up drenched in sunlight and alone. Lightfoot hadn’t come back, but Jane Pauley was yakking it up. Good Morning America. I’m not part of that America. This is not part of that America.
Rolling over, I grabbed the phone, with no idea who one calls when one finds oneself stranded in a cheap roadside motel in New Jersey. Answer me that Jane Pauley, answer me that. Who do you call when this happens to you? It doesn’t, does it? This kind of thing doesn’t happen to Jane Pauley. I dialed “0″ to ask for an outside line. My folks didn’t need to know I’d fucked up, again, the very next day. Red Wolf was gone. I’d call Lightfoot, yell a little. Sorry, the voice says, no outside calls.
Shit. I remembered a payphone downstairs in the parking lot but, the door is locked, from the outside. Shit. Shit. Shitshitshitshitshit.
I stood in front of the big window in a T-shirt and panties watching New Jersey Transit buses pick up suits, on their way to work in New York. Every five minutes or so, another bus. I pull a pair of black spandex pants out of my dance bag. They’re not mine but they’re comfortable. That kind of thing happened all the time. My things disappeared, someone else’s show up in their place. What happened during the blinks, after a while, the not knowing just became part of who I was. I wiggle into them, bang on the wall and pace the room. After a few minutes, a skinny guy shows up at the door, a little bit fidgety, kinda dodgy. I’ve never seen him before, this nervous little Negro sweatball in cheap polyester pants the color of camel shit, high waisted, like that might make him look taller.
“You Lockey?” He nods.
“You’re supposed to stay and wait for Doug.” Lockey says, shifting from side to side.
“I waited.” I pick up the phone. “How come I can’t call out?”
“I’dunno.” He flinches, like he thinks I might throw the phone. I hadn’t thought of it, but I might, I just might.
“The door was locked…”
“Didn’t want no one to bother ya.”
“…from the outside.”
“Yeah, yeah, okay. In case you, like, walk in your sleep or sumpin’.” Lockey’s shuffling like he’s got dog shit on the bottoms of his shoes. He’s the posterchild for “someone get me the fuck out of here”, like I’ve got some contagious disease. He’s scared of me, but he’s probably more scared of Lightfoot.
“I’m hungry,” and I need a drink, I think to myself, and a way outta here. “Can you get me something from the diner across the street?”
Lockey lights up, relieved. This is something he can do, an easy out, no more questions he doesn’t have the answers to. I heard him lock my door from the outside. Motherfucker. He’s got the key, of course he does. I watched him go down the stairs. I’m locked in, I say into the phone, to the stranger on the other end. Yes ma’am, Mr. Doug has the key. You have to wait for him, the phone says back to me.
I put the phone down, stuff my new corduroy jeans into my dance bag and sling it over my shoulder.
I try to be stupid only a little bit of the time.
I watch Lockey crossing the parking lot, the highway, dodging cars, headed towards the diner. I turn to see what’s up the highway. Lockey opens the diner door and goes in.
Taking a deep breath, I close my eyes, turn my head & heave the chair through the big plate glass window over the desk. I’m half way down the stairs before heads start popping up to see who made the big noise. I’m just stepping onto a bus as Lockey comes running out of the diner after me. From my window seat I watch him as we pull away; first throw down the food he had bought for me, eggs, toast, homefries, coffee–damn it, I was hungry–then run back across the highway yelling at the old man who ran out of the office – the disembodied voice on the phone. Both of them flapping their arms, hopping and squawking at each other, two crazed chickens in the parking lot. Spittle flying as they yelled at each other and pointed from the room upstairs to the retreating bus.
I settle back in the upholstered seats, breathe in the cool conditioned air, close my eyes and feel the adrenaline still pulsing through my muscles. I just want to go home and sleep. And I could really use a drink.
This entry was written by , posted on September 17, 2009 at 10:25 am, filed under the diary and tagged 1979, blink, New Jersey, pimps. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
For as a long as there’s been music, women have danced for the entertainment and titillation of men. Scheherazade. Minsky’s Burlesque. Cage dancing go-go girls in the psychedelic 60′s. Times Square strippers, pole dancers and lap dancers. Women dance….Men watch.
Naked Ladies get around! Look for the 3 Naked Ladies and a new topic every Wednesday on laurishaw.com, $pread magazine online or thedirtygirldiaries.com
Lauri Shaw: In 1997, I averaged $2200/week, four nights. Good hustlers could make $1000/night. Never mind what they promised the customers or did in the back rooms — we’re only talking about money, right? The money was there.
Jodi Sh. Doff: Barmaids made $15/shift in ’75. I’d been making $80/wk in an office and suddenly $85/day in tips, plus shift pay, just being behind the bar in a leotard! When I left in ’84 dancers made $75/shift, plus tips & commission, but rent was only $200/month and cigarettes, less than a dollar. Two shifts a week was more than enough to make crazy money.
Rachel Aimee: Unfortunately those days are over. Money is still better than your average office job, and really good hustlers or girls at high end clubs can make a LOT, but there are also girls struggling to make $50 or $60 for an eight hour shift. And even those clubs charge the dancers to work now! The introduction of house fees has been an awful development in the industry.
LS: Every club I worked in charged a house fee or tip out. Topless clubs made money off house fees and the bar, so they didn’t take a cut of your dances. In nude clubs, house fees were low ($15 – $35) but then they’d take a large percentage from your sales: 50 – 75% of your lap dances, drinks, and champagne room money.
RA: Some of the high end clubs charge $300 a night! I can’t imagine having to do fifteen dances just to break even. I’ve worked at semi-upscale clubs that charged $100 a night — I spent the whole night in a panic, terrified of going home in debt to the club.
JshD: I love that I worked before house fees, tip outs or fines. You showed up and got paid. The options were make money or make more money. Even on a slow night you left with cash. I averaged $150-$300/night and was never expected to give anyone bribe money. My best night was bartending at a club called the Butterfly. Barmaids hustled the same as dancers. I sold one guy the same bottle so many times I lost count. He spent $5000 that night on half a dozen girls, finally, at 3:45am, he went upstairs with me and a girl who looked just like me–we played off the sister angle. Five minutes into that bottle it was last call and they hustled everyone out. I left that night, 1983ish, with $1000 in commissions & tips.
RA: Damn, I wish I could go back in time and work in the 80s!
LS: On top of house fees, tipping the DJ was mandatory. And more than minimum, or he’d cut your throat next time. Cashiers tried stealing. They’d run someone’s card, then swear to your face you’d never been in the VIP room with him. They say they made “mistakes” while cashing you out. I always stood my ground and got my money, but it was not a pleasant working environment.
JshD: Dancers and barmaids got commission on drinks, bottles, shift pay and tips. All the clubs had multiple girls on stage–the DJs just tried to keep things moving. Places like the Mardi Gras, the largest topless bar at the time, there were half a dozen girls on stage at the same time, but if you could get someone to buy you a drink, you could come down.
LS: You faced social consequences if you didn’t tip everyone. The bouncers wanted a cut. The champagne hostess expected one. Bartenders, waitresses… even the janitor had his hand out, refused to do his job unless the girls tipped him. Every night, cabbies waited outside — they expected you to double the meter. Costume ladies sat in the dressing room like vultures. Absolutely everyone got a piece of us.
RA: That stuff still goes on. At my club, the tip out is low and I don’t get hustled to tip out managers or anyone because I’ve been there a long time, but I know other girls do, especially if they’re new or the manager doesn’t like them.
LS: We made our money asking men for large tips — up front — on everything. A $20 dance was really $40. If you got your tips, you could do very well. But on a slow night, you took whatever you could get. The house made more than you did, which was the best case scenario. Worst case, you went home broke and owed money.
JshD: I was an awful hustler, just awful, and even so, I was making rent any night I worked. We paid for our costumes and you did your best to get a tip for the barmaid or the waitress, but that’s it.
RA: The stigma around dancing really fuels the clubs’ ability to charge house fees. Dancers exaggerate how much money they make, because we have to justify doing a job that most people think is degrading. It’s more difficult to justify stripping for the amount of money you could make bartending or working an office job, so we play up the good nights and play down the bad ones. When everyone thinks we’re making hundreds of dollars every night, nobody really believes it’s a big deal for us to tip out $100 or so for the privilege of making that money. It takes a lot of courage to say “I paid $100 of my own money to spend eight hours grinding against strange men and had to go to the ATM to take out money to get home.”
This entry was written by , posted on September 16, 2009 at 9:17 am, filed under three naked ladies and tagged dirty money, strippers, Times Square. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
Skin tight. Not exactly eating pants and all I was thinking about was food.
I took a baby sip of the vodka, unzipped and took a grown up sip. I peed, trying for a little bit of extra room. I hate peeing when I’m drinking. I paid for the booze, I want to hang on to it, to keep it inside doing its dirtywork as long as possible. It’s mine, mine, mine, mine–even when someone else is paying. But, sometimes, like it or not, I have to pee.
Doug was on the pay phone when I came out. I pirouetted once or twice through the crowd for audience reaction–pimps are notorious appreciators of a good pirouette–landing in front of him just as he hung up.
“Now? Dinner…?”
“We gonna get Donna Rose first, she’s coming with us, you don’t mind, right little girl?”
I stomped an imaginary foot. “Ack! Stop that.“ Smiling, he threw his arm around my waist, lifted me off the ground and spun me around planting a soft kiss on my cheek. “I don’t give a shit who comes, I’m starved. I’m ready to pass out.”
I did mind, though. Donna Rose was a dancer and from the first day we hadn’t spoken outside of what was absolutely necessary. She acted like she was better than me, that’s why I didn’t like her. I had no idea why she didn’t like me. When the Caddy pulled away from Guys for the second time that day, I was in the back seat, alone. Donna Rose rode shotgun next to Lightfoot. I’d been replaced by the pretty girl. I was not liking her just a little bit more than before.
When I was little the pretty one was my mom. I was never pretty enough. I was never going to be. That shit makes me go just a teensy bit blind, like a blackout without the fun of the booze or a long slow motion blink. It feels like a split second, but I close my eyes in one place and when I open them again, everything’s changed and I have no idea what happened between then and now.
I blinked while we were still in the Porkpie. Then again when I found myself in the back seat. When I finished, we were somewhere in Jersey, some highway, some anonymous roadside motel. Lightfoot had the car door open and was helping me out of the backseat. I hadn’t been paying attention. I was busy being hungry, angry, tired. Busy feeling sorry for myself. In other words, I blinked. I’d lost entire days that way.
“Look, it’s getting late. I’ma get you a room, little one. You sleep here, safe and sound. We’ll have all day tomorrow. Then I take you home’n make sure your old man ain’t hanging around. Make sure no one can bother you.”
“So, wait. What? What happened to dinner? I gotta eat.” It was dark for the second time since I ate last. Thirty-six hours since I’d put something other than vodka and Newports in my stomach. I hate menthols. “Take me home, Doug. Take me back to the city, anyplace. I’ll find my own way. I’m so fucking tired.”
Radio Rover 2007
“You’ll go upstairs. Donna lives a few minutes from here.”
She sat in the front seat, still wearing her sunglasses even though it’d gotten dark. Smoking. Not looking at me, like I’d never even existed.
Doug kept talking and moving me along. “I’ll drop her off and be right back for you. We’ll get a big dinner. Steak, lobster, anything at all my girl wants. We can bring it back to the room if you want.”
We were halfway up the stairs before I even noticed. Blink. I was so tired. He unlocked the door. Double bed, color TV, fake oil painting, stiff white towels and a single glass wrapped in wax paper, coarse carpet and that whiff of mildew. Not the Bates Motel, but not the Waldorf either. The picture window overlooked the parking lot, the highway and a diner across the street. All I saw was Donna looking up as she flicked her cigarette out the window of the Caddy.
“If you need anything, Lockey – you remember Lockey? He’s right next door, just knock on the wall.” Lightfoot tossed my dance bag down on the bed–I’d forgotten I had that with me–and flipped the TV on.
Come and knock on our door / We’ve been waiting for you
Where the kisses are hers and hers and his / Three’s company too.
Irony is usually lost on me.
“Twenty minutes. Thirty tops. Relax, freshen up and I’ll be back before you know it.” Doug bent down and kissed me on the lips.
I stood in the middle of room watching as he closed the door behind him. Watched through the window as he got back in the Caddy. Watched as they pulled out of the parking lot.
I had no idea who Lockey was. I had no idea where I was.
This entry was written by , posted on September 14, 2009 at 9:18 am, filed under the diary and tagged 1979, blink, Guys & Dolls, lonliness, New Jersey, pimps. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
I had that nice sleepy feeling you get after really good sex with someone you barely know. Except I knew him and we hadn’t had sex. Lightfoot was on the phone making deals from his king sized bed, arranging things that needed arranging. I lay cuddled into one arm smoking cigarettes, drinking cold beer, picking imaginary lint off his spotless cowboy shirt and trying not to think about the night before. Or about being broke. About being bruised. And unemployed. Again.
But, Lightfoot had things that needed taking care of. We headed back into the city for a some drinks and some business. The Porkpie looks like any sleazy Times Square bar, with windows so dirty you can’t see in from the outside, lights so low you can barely see in from the inside. But the Pie operated as the unofficial pimp union hall. They hung out, traded secrets, perfected their game, bragged and showed off new stock. It was the place to size up the competition, make alliances, trade stock, kill time. Just a short dark bar with a worn green felt pool table and a bank of black pay phones, the Porkpie was the place to go if you were looking for a new pimp. Or had a bone to pick with an old one. Every man there had girls on the street.
Every woman there was a whore.
Except me.
Baby pimps hung around the thin edges, worn copies of Iceberg Slim’s bible sticking out of their back pockets, soft, from handling. Kids with nothing more than attitude, the dream, an ill-fitting three piece suit, some hair relaxer and a stupid girlfriend, trying to learn by observation and eavesdropping, hanging around hoping to sweep up crumbs, bits of wisdom and experience from the Sweet Daddys and Gorilla pimps. They’d all seen Superfly a dozen times or more. The Porkpie offered a sort of apprenticeship program.
A few vodkas in, the swag man shows up rolling a 7th Avenue clothing rack piled with dresses, g-strings, gold chains, rings and frilly things that had fallen of the back of a truck somewhere. Doug hands me another vodka & a pair of rust corduroy jeans that match his shirt. We’re going to look like one of those ridiculous couples that coordinate their outfits. But we’re not a couple, really. I was married, I had a husband I wasn’t really available up until yesterday. He’s trying to cheer me up. The vodka cheers me up. Always.
“It’s almost eight, Doug. I’m hungry. Didn’t I hear something about buying me dinner earlier?”
“Relax, little girl.” He ran his hand over my ass.
“I thought we were gonna drop the little girl thing.” He smiled at me.
God, he looks good.
“What’s the rush? If you still had a job, you just be closing up now.”
“Yeah. But I don’t have a job, or any money and if I did still have a job I woulda ordered something to eat during my shift.”
He slipped his hand down my ass, to the space between my legs and gave me a gentle push. “Go try those on for me, then I’ll feed you.”
“Doug…”
“Go on, little girl, I want the boys here to see how good my girl can look. They gonna eat their hearts out.”
I was sore and cranky from the beating I took from Red Wolf. Was that only yesterday? There was a nice strawberry bruise on my right cheek. I wasn’t sure a pair of pants was going to make me look good. Really, I needed food. Sleep. More Vodka.
I went into the bathroom to change.
I took the glass of vodka with me.
Nothing really ever changes.
This entry was written by , posted on September 10, 2009 at 7:00 am, filed under the diary and tagged 1979, dirty money, pimps, Times Square, whores. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
For as a long as there’s been music, women have danced for the entertainment and titillation of men. Scheherazade. Minsky’s Burlesque. Cage dancing go-go girls in the psychedelic 60′s. Times Square strippers, pole dancers and lap dancers. Women dance….Men watch.
Naked Ladies get around! Look for the 3 Naked Ladies and a new topic every Wednesday on laurishaw.com, $pread magazine online or thedirtygirldiaries.com
Jodi Sh. Doff: Lauri, you worked in the 90′s, by then there were house fees and implants were a big thing. The top shelf joints of the 90′s seemed like an Evening Gown Barbie factory. I know it’s a response to public demand, but some girls considered implants a reasonable work expense, like a uniform. I couldn’t have gone to those surgical extremes.
Lauri Shaw: I mostly avoided those evening gown clubs. I do not look like Barbie. I’d need more than just a boob job to look like Barbie. Among other things, I’d need to have my skull reshaped, and longer limbs sewn onto me like a Frankenstein monster, if I ever wanted to look like Barbie. I couldn’t relate. By contrast, the nude clubs were an easier environment. I went into Scores once, not to audition but with some guy, and the place just felt cold to me. Emotionally sterile.
Rachel Aimee: Most of the high end Manhattan clubs hire girls that all look the same: 90% white, 70% blond, always skinny and a lot of silicone. It’s possible to get hired at the semi-upscale clubs just by being reasonably attractive if you’re white, but women of color have to have really “perfect” bodies and be absolutely stunning. The divey places hire a more diverse mix and some of the outer borough clubs hire exclusively black or Latina dancers, depending on the neighborhood and clientele.
JshD: I felt the same about Scores but was also fully aware that there was a LOT more money there. It’d take me a week to make what they make in a night.
RA: There definitely is the possibility of making a LOT of money in those high end clubs, but you don’t just need to look the part, you need to hustle like crazy too. They schedule as many girls as possible every night because they want their house fees, so even if you did look like Barbie, you’d be competing with 60 other Barbies. Personally, I find it easier to make money at the more diverse clubs–there are always the guys who will like me by default just because I’m one of the few white girls.
LS: I auditioned for VIP once and it was incredibly humiliating. It felt like a cattle call — they had me put on a costume, strip down to my g-string, and stand in a line with three other hopefuls. The manager, or whoever he was, told me to turn around once, then he said “Okay, thanks. You can get dressed.” I said, “That’s it?” And he said, “We have too many girls,” which of course is code for, “You don’t have the right look.” I took it to mean, “Get the hell out of my club, you butt-ugly skank.” I went home and cried.
JshD: Ouch! An 80′s “audition” was the same strip and spin, but just to be sure you could be naked and not freak out! Clubs still had a generous idea of what a real woman should look like.
LS: There were middle-brow clubs too. Places like Private Eyes or Legz Diamond. Not everyone was drop-dead gorgeous, although most of the girls were attractive in some way or another. And all types of girls — black, white, Latina… not usually many Asian girls… but tall, short, chunky, and skinny girls, as old as forty-five and as young as eighteen. They would check ID. They were not fucking around with that.
JshD: The class system wasn’t around when I was working, that grew out of Cache Escorts & the Mayflower Madam. We had no high end/low end, no questions, no ID (I was 17 when I started) just real live girls in all their glory. I don’t recall any Asians and only one black dancer in ten years.
RA: Do you think the clubs were more segregated back then? I’ve gotten that impression from customers who have been going to strip clubs for years and say that back then all the girls were white. I wonder where the black girls used to dance, or if there were just fewer black girls in the industry in those days.
JshD: In the 70s, generally, black girls worked the streets, white girls worked the bars. We were Latina, white, occasionally transgendered (aka ‘sex change’) and all shapes, like the Armour Hot Dog jingle? Big girls, lit-tle girls, girls who climb on rocks, fat girls, skin-ny girls, ev-en…well, even Grandma Peggy, probably only in her 40′s but her daughter danced too.
RA: I’ve definitely worked with women in their late forties, grandmothers and mothers who worked alongside their daughters, as well as women of all (or at least most) body types, although I’ve never come across a club that hired transgender women. I think the myth that all strippers should look like Barbie comes from the media focus on the upscale clubs. It makes the industry seem more glamorous than it really is.
LS: But if a Barbie girl goes slumming at a lower-tier club, she makes bank.
JshD : Some men are looking for a specific fantasy and status of the unattainable woman, they’re willing to pay high. Others want a “real” girl and frequent smaller clubs. People pay for what they want. That said, the mentality of the men who pay women to dance for/ drink with them is so much more complicated and convoluted than just one or two lines can cover.
This entry was written by , posted on September 9, 2009 at 9:00 am, filed under three naked ladies and tagged strippers, Times Square. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
For as a long as there’s been music, women have danced for the entertainment and titillation of men. Scheherazade. Minsky’s Burlesque. Cage dancing go-go girls in the psychedelic 60′s. Times Square strippers, pole dancers and lap dancers. Women dance….Men watch.
Naked Ladies get around! Look for the 3 Naked Ladies and a new topic every Wednesday on laurishaw.com, $pread magazine online or thedirtygirldiaries.com
Rachel Aimee: I think there’s this myth among dancers that the industry is “going downhill” and that dancers across the board are expected to do more than they used to do. I know women who have been working since the 90s and refer to that decade as the “golden age of stripping,” when dancers got paid tons of money just to dance on stage and didn’t even have to touch the customers, but it seems, from what I’ve read on both your blogs, that dancers have been doing more than just dancing for a long time.
Lauri Shaw: Yes, and in the 90s there were girls who said the same thing about the 80s. Jodi, in “Lele” (your story from Soft Skull anthology Hos, Hookers, Call Girls, & Rent Boys), a customer is going down on a dancer while she sits on the stage, collects his money, and otherwise ignores him. Was it common for dancers to allow so much contact?
Jodi Sh Doff: In the late 70′s there was a lot less regulation. It was years before AIDS reared its ugly head. Tourists, particularly Japanese men, could come off the plane at Kennedy airport, hand a cabbie a slip of paper with just the word “Cookie” on it. Places like the Cookie Jar and Winks were standing room only, bottomless, with stages no higher than, well, than your dinner table. Girls were there for your dining and dancing pleasure, hot lunches they used to be called. The money was insane and there was no hustle. You couldn’t sit and drink with a customer — there was no room. Unfortunately for me, I got my first close up look at a vagina that was not attached to me and took off on the first day. Had I known, I’d have gotten real comfortable, real fast. By the early 80′s the Alcoholic Beverage Control (ABC) code called the shots and if a club served booze, the girls had to be a minimum of six feet away from the customers and they had to have g-strings. No pulling aside the g-string (although girls did), no touching yourself or them (of course we did that too). That’s when a lot of stages moved behind the actual bar. Diamond Lils was a renegade bar, hence the lack of register tape or financial records of any kind.
RA: Yes, you couldn’t get away with anything like that at clubs I’ve worked at, but I think it’s the norm for lapdances to be pretty heavy contact and sometimes include “extras” (hand jobs, etc.), especially in private rooms. Then of course there are plenty of dancers who just dance and don’t do anything illegal.
LS: All of that’s true, in fact last year Scores lost its liquor license after getting busted for prostitution in 2007. But in the 90′s, blatant tricks didn’t happen out in the open like that, out on stage for everyone to see. The rule was generally “no touching the girls onstage.”
RA: I’ve also heard cops arresting dancers just for allegedly agreeing to perform an illegal act. In cases where dancers get busted, of course the clubs never take any responsibility, even if they knew perfectly well what was going on and may have been making money off it.
LS: I do remember one place where a scenario like at Diamond Lils might have flown — the Harmony Theatre. I was only there once. They kept it really dark and made no pretense of being “entertainers.” I don’t think they even bothered serving drinks. I do not remember there being a bar at all. Men sat in those theatre seats and haggled with the girls over the price of a lapdance, which was often a euphemism for a hand job or more.
JshD:The original Harmony was uptown, on 48th Street, right by the Gaiety Burlesque. The Gaiety was an all male dance house with live sex shows and a lot of action going on back stage between sets. Working girls used to hang out in the back rows just to get off their feet for a while. It was a blast, I had a few guy friends who worked the Gaiety. But the Harmony used to be specialty acts, old school star strippers and girls that could pick a dollar up off the table with their cooch. Very impressive if you ask me. I believe the name was changed to the Melody Burlesque and then the Harmony re-opened downtown and it was that free-for-all you’re talking about. All lap dancing, no pretense of being “entertainment” at all.
LS: Exactly, it was a free-for-all. Men could buy anything they wanted at the Harmony, and working girls could buy the freedom to give the men whatever they wanted. There wasn’t a bouncer in sight. The shift manager sat in the coat room, away from all the action.
RA: I’ve never worked at a place that was that free and easy, but I’ve definitely preferred working at clubs where management was more hands-off. At some of the big corporate “gentlemen’s clubs” that have taken over modern day Manhattan, management are constantly micromanaging everything the dancers do, policing lapdances and pressuring dancers to take customers to private rooms (because they make a huge cut). I think most dancers prefer the freedom to decide for themselves what they’re comfortable with. But in general I find it’s very difficult to have open conversations about who does what in strip clubs because it’s so easy to offend people. There’s so much stigma attached to sex work that it’s easy to unintentionally make someone feel bad if you’re not willing to do something that they are willing to do. Everyone has different boundaries, so I think that tension is always going to exist in the industry.
This entry was written by , posted on September 7, 2009 at 2:24 pm, filed under three naked ladies and tagged strippers. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
It was still early when I finally got to Guys & Dolls, but I was still late. Once they understood I couldn’t go home with them, my parents tried to drive me to work, but sometimes I know better. I dragged them in for the crazy but they didn’t need to see all of the crazy, they didn’t need to see this place, not even the outside. It could in no way make them feel better about my life.
When I got there Rocco and Lightfoot were the only ones at the bar. Lightfoot came almost every night and every night he was there, we talked. I liked having someone to talk to. Wolf didn’t really talk to me, unless you counted when he spoke Spanish, which I didn’t count since I didn’t understand Spanish. Or when he was telling me how he could kill me, which was not technically a conversation. The dancers were busy with the suckers, the suckers were busy with the dancers and the floor managers are all hustle, hustle, sell, sell. I’m still not a good hustler, I’d rather drink and shoot the shit. I shoot the shit here, with Lightfoot.
Michael Douglas Lightfoot has a business card that says he owns a recording studio. Every pimp has some sort of business card and none of them say “PIMP”. Hookers are interior decorators and models, pimps like the recording industry cachet. It sounds legit if you don’t know better and explains the money, the drugs, the flash, and the lifestyle. I know better, I just don’t always know better.
I don’t know if he fired me for hanging out with Doug (does everyone hate pimps?), for missing half my shift, or because he finally had an excuse. Either way, when I got to work, Rocco let me know that Lightfoot was the only thing waiting for me. Sitting at the bar, handsome as ever in his cowboy hat and alligator boots.
“Asshole.” I stared at Rocco. “You fuckers really get a kick outta firing me don’tcha?”
He swung the door to the street open.
“Okay. Just let me work tonight. I’m busted, Rock, broke. My old man flushed it all down the toilet last night.”
Rocco shook his head, and hand on hip, he leaned against the open door. “Tough life.” He wasn’t smiling. “Go. Take the pimp with you.”
Lightfoot’s Caddy was parked outside, I filled him in as we walked, leaving out anything about my parents. I don’t talk about them to anyone. It’s the only way I can think to keep them safe. I climbed in, taking the lit Newport Doug passed to me. I hate menthols. They all smoke menthols dammit, but I wasn’t in any position to be choosey.
Michael Douglas Lightfoot, wearing his big white Stetson hat and pointy toed alligator boots instead of the usual feathers and rainbow pimp wear. It didn’t make him look anymore like the Indian he claimed to be, or any less like a pimp. He was black to the bone, but it accentuated those Sidney Poitier good looks and he knew it.
“Next move, little girl? Want me to take you home?” He murmured softly as he slipped his key into the ignition.
“Yeah, okay. No. I don’t know. I don’t wanna go home. I don’t wanna be alone. I’m still freaked out. There’s like all these bad vibes bouncing around my house, in my head, like I’m going crazy, Doug. Can’t I just stay with you for a while?”
I flicked my cigarette out the window and looked up at him, giving him my best please take care of me I need someone to take care of me eyes. He was my handsome spade cowboy. I liked that. He had a big white Cadillac convertible to match his big white cowboy hat. He knew the original JJ, JJ Huntsberry, my JJ. I liked that too. It all felt safe.
“Okay, little girl,” he slipped his arm around me and pulled me close. I snuggled into his Ivory soap smell. “You don’t worry now. Lightfoot’ll take care of you tonight.”
“Little girl,” I pouted, fiddling around with the radio till I found an R&B station, more for him than for me, “I really hate that ‘little girl’ thing. You’re not my father.” I tried to sit up, to move back to my side. I felt him smile as he held me tighter, so I snuggled in closer, exhaled and watched the city speed past.
“No, baby girl, not your father,” he whispered into my ear, “but I’m your Daddy. Remember that, girl. Never forget who’s looking out for you.”
Good guys wear white hats. Everybody knows that.
It was all going to be okay. I’d find another job. Lightfoot would take care of everything.
This entry was written by , posted on at 10:27 am, filed under the diary and tagged 1979, dirty boys, family, Guys & Dolls, pimps, Times Square. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
I don’t remember calling my mother, risking their lives by exposing my parents to this crazy man, but honestly, it wasn’t the first time I’d brought real live crazy into their lives.
She remembers being absolutely frantic, racing in from Long Island, running every red light in the hopes of getting stopped by the police, in the hopes the police could fix it all, make the crazy man stop beating her little girl. I picture my dad, knuckles white from gripping the steering wheel, silent, stone faced and focused; my mother, small fireworks of nervous energy exploding in the seat next to him, pressing her foot to the floor as if there were a second gas pedal on the passenger side and she could make the car go even faster.
It hadn’t occurred to me to call the police, but somehow by the time we all got back to the apartment on 7th Street, they were there.
He’s still asleep when I come back an hour later with my mother, father and two large uniformed police officers. That’s how I like my cops, bigger than me & on my side. I wait in the living room, prying a dead cockroach out of the blue shag rug with my toe, while they go into the bedroom to wake him. Their voices are muffled by the walls & the city noises that slip in through the cracked windows. His voice is muffled by the blue serge of their uniforms & the thickness of their bodies as they hustle him past me, past the holes he punched in the wall when he missed my face, past the bathroom where he flushed my money down the toilet. But his voice echoes off the cold tile & dirty marble of the hallway where the dump him confused, naked & very angry. The smaller of the two large blue men, huge in his own right, grabs a pair of jeans from the back of a chair.
“His?”
I nod & hand him Wolf’s black Chinese slippers as well. The cop tosses them into the hall, smiling as he watches Red Wolf climb into the jeans. Yelling, cursing in Spanish, then begging and threatening in English, Wolf leaves the building, bare-chested and broke. The cops stay while I gather the rest of his clothes & the offending Bible, everything he brought with him. Everything except the rug and the tv. I’m keeping those. Wolf stands across the street watching, shooting me the evil eye as they dump everything he owns on the stoop and start to leave.
“Hey, wait up,” catching up to them at the front door, “I’m going with you to file charges. I want the son-of a bitch locked up.” Two blank Irishy cop faces stare down at me. “What? I want him locked up. He tried to kill me.”
The smaller one is staring down at his shoe now. The other one focuses somewhere over my shoulder.
“You’re not bruised, not enough,” he says to his highly polished black lace up, “It’s a waste of time to do the paperwork.” He looks up, not directly at me, but sideways.
“A waste of fuckin’ time? Not enough bruises? Are you fucking kidding me? Do I hafta wait until he breaks my fucking arm? Or my neck? Would you find the time to do the paperwork if he had killed me? I mean, come on here…god-dammit.”
“She’s upset,” my mother apologizes to the short cop, to both of them. Touching my arm to calm me down, “He’s gone. You’ll stay at the house, in your old room. I’ll make stuffed cabbage.”
Stuffed Cabbage. Chicken Soup. Brisket. Chocolate Pudding. It’s the way she says ‘I love you’. But my old room is my father’s office now. Some parents keep their kids rooms like museum exhibits the last day they lived there. Mine got turned over the minute I left. She doesn’t like me cursing at the police, it’s not the way I was raised. But then my life isn’t going exactly the way she had planned, not even a little bit. I’d completely forgotten they were there.
“There’d have to be more bruises than you got,” the big cop one says. “Sorry, but it’d be thrown right out. No witnesses, nothing broken, no case. Sorry, but I’d get the locks changed if I was you.” He glances across the street, but Wolf is gone.
I watch them walk out of the building and think I know where not to go next time I need help.
“Come, we’ll pack a few things and…,” my mother steps up next to me, so close I can feel the warmth of her body and get a little whiff of Jean Nate. Her everyday summer scent. I smell her sweat too, a little bitter, tangy even. Nervous sweat.
The cops couldn’t look at me.
I can’t look at my father. I know she blames him for a lot of my mess, him and his wild stories.
I can’t look at my mother. I can’t handle her fear.
I can barely manage my own.
It’s not right, what I do, dragging them into the mess of my life.
“I gotta go to work, Ma.” I don’t tell them he took all my money. I don’t tell them we had sex last night. I don’t tell them I miss him even though I’m scared.
I tell them to go home.
This entry was written by , posted on September 3, 2009 at 6:37 am, filed under the diary and tagged 1979, dirty boys, East Village, family, Guys & Dolls, lonliness, love. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
