Jessica Pauline helps answer the question–
What’s a nice Jewish girl like you, doing in a place like this??
Happy Hannukkah!
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, or thedirtygirldiaries.com
Lauri Shaw: Female sexuality is practically non-existent in mainstream Jewish culture. We were invisible in the strip clubs when I worked. Yet, I know we were there… also that there are plenty of Jews in porn. So how does growing up Jewish prepare you / or not for a career in the sex industry?
Jessica Pauline: Well, it definitely prepared me to have a healthy dose of guilt both during and after my career in the sex industry. I didn’t grow up with any explicit values surrounding sex or sexuality, but I always knew that nice Jewish girls value their minds way before their bodies. Obviously, that’s a totally respectable value system, but because of it I always felt terrified that if anyone from my hometown (or home synagogue, God forbid) found out that I was stripping they’d think that I was doing something stupid, which is the cardinal sin for suburban middle-class Jews. You can have just about any flaw, but being or acting stupid brings the utmost of shame upon your family.
Jodi Sh. Doff: I don’t agree at all about the sexuality - it’s not like Catholics are all, Go ahead kids, screw around, it’s fun! I grew in Levittown, surrounded by Italian & Irish retired cops and fireman. We were one of the few Jewish families, although culturally only with no religious practices. I’d hear “The only way to stop a Jewish woman from fucking is marry her,” but I heard it from my own father. I felt like that was permission to screw around, although I’m sure that wasn’t his intention! Still, my house was the opposite of what you experienced. My parents were political activists, very open, free your mind kind of liberal Long Island Jews. My mother wanted me to enjoy my body and my sexuality. She was light years ahead of the curve on that one and while she hated the topless bars, Judaism was never the issue.
LS: I grew up in a fundamentalist Conservative Jewish home. In terms of ritualism and repression we had more in common with Catholics — or Jehovah’s Witnesses — than with the Reform Jews I knew in Great Neck. My father conducted Shabbat dinner every Friday night, made us go to synagogue every Saturday, and Hebrew school on Sundays. We kept kosher. I hated it ALL. At the age of six, I was already an atheist — I’d been told that women were second class citizens.
When I was 13, I had a Bat Mitzvah, after which I announced, “The rabbi says I’m an adult now; you can’t make me go to services anymore.” The only time I ever entered a synagogue after that, I was 15, sneaking in with my (recovering-Catholic) boyfriend. The ladies’ room on the main floor had this amazing lounge with sofas, mirrors on the ceiling. An ideal place for wayward teenagers to have sex. Come to think of it, it looked a lot like a champagne room!
JP: I think this issue is largely about how we see ourselves, and how much of that self-image is rooted in Judaism and/or Jewish culture. For instance, the first month of stripping for me was a complete revelation, because I was suddenly someone I’d never been before. I’ve always been kind of goofy — I love to laugh, I’m really friendly, I’m always the one who kills the joke by repeating it for hours. In short, I’m no seductress. So to see myself as objectively sexy — to the point that someone would pay me for it — was so shocking and awesome that I would say it was moderately addictive. But it did break from the values with which I was raised, values that — while not expressly religious — are very much associated with Jewish culture. By drawing lines between my value system and my culture’s value system, I was deviating from expectations, and that made me feel like I was somehow letting down the tribe.
JshD: When I was a kid I was hot for the JDL, so sexy in their paramilitary garb. And I conveniently identified when I’d hear there were no Jewish alcoholics, because we only drank on happy occasions. I was one happy Jew for a long, long, long time, but in-between, when I was working, Judaism never really influenced my actions or decisions that I’m aware of.
LS: It definitely had a big impact on my sexuality. I got pushed so hard in one direction, I exploded in the other. I reveled in being an outlaw slut. At the same time, I never admitted to anyone in the clubs that I was Jewish.
If you’ve been around Jews, you can tell I have Ashkenazi features. But when customers asked, I said I was Irish-American. This is a direct result of the completely schizophrenic way I was raised. My father’s religiosity reigned supreme in our household — I got my ass beat when I broke those rules. But then he’d take us on Navy bases — or anywhere outside of NY — and warn, “Don’t tell anyone you’re Jewish.” He saw anti-Semites hiding behind every bush.
I didn’t know if people would treat me differently if they knew, and in any case I’d left the flock. I had serious issues with my ethnicity-that-was-a-religion-that-was-an-ethnicity.
JshD: I’ve never denied being a Jew. I mean you get those idiots that have that “nice Jewish girl” image, but from what I’ve found, it’s mostly the Jewish men that have that. I worked for two different Jewish bar owners. Myron was harder on me than on the other girls - he had an element of hypocritical disdain towards me, a Jewish girl doing that work. Paul, however, treated me like an uncle–albeit an incestuous uncle–giving me extra privileges so I didn’t have to do what the “goyim” did for money. The Gentiles on the other hand, they’re all hot to get a Jewish girl. Wiseguys and mobsters were turned on by the fact that I was a Jewess, and so it was a big turn on for me. Why not, it’s where my curves came from!
This entry was written by , posted on December 16, 2009 at 9:00 am, filed under three naked ladies and tagged family, religon, strippers. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
There was no one else I’d even thought to call. Boyfriends & girlfriends came and went, but we always had each other. Michael was the original BFF, my go-to guy since that first hit of acid we dropped together.
I was safe with him around. No matter how much I drank, he’d never leave without me. He was the one who took me to the Raven’s Nest, my first topless bar. If my mother knew, maybe she’d have cut my father some slack in the “whose fault is it she turned out to be such a fuck up” department. Michael shot pool while I dropped shot glasses full of bourbon into mugs of beer, downing them in one gulp. I hate bourbon, but the long-haul truckers who packed the Nest every night thought it was cute. By fifteen, as long as you were buying, I was drinking.
He was with me at the Bon Soir too, charming underage Puerto Rican girls while I was getting ready to turn my first trick. He knew everything there was to know about me. If anyone could understand how I wound up broken, bloody and covered in flea bites on the floor of a garage in the Lower East side, it was Michael.
I wrap my arms around him and cramps shoot painfully through my lower body. It’s the beginning of a miscarriage, but I don’t know that, not yet. For now, I hold on to Michael’s waist as the spasms roll through me and he kicks the Harley to life. “Drive slow,” I whisper, “please, just take it slow.”
I spend a few days with my parents, recuperating from the last seven.
Communications are on a need to know basis and I don’t think they need to know much. They know I’m away from Red Wolf - I let him take the blame for all my bruises. They don’t know about the topless bars, the pimps or Havasha. No ones day would be made better by sharing that information.
They take the cat back to live with them. Apparently, I’m not responsible enough to care for another living thing. Truth is, I’m barely able to care for myself. My body agrees and a bloody worm is flushed down the toilet—the last traces of my storybook marriage, Red Wolf’s almost baby.
I’m tired. So fucking tired.
My father used to say “If you don’t know where your next meal is coming from, get a job in a restaurant,” which is pretty practical and it worked for a while. Lola gets me a gig with her at Mimi’s, an Italian restaurant with a piano bar, which keeps my belly full of lasagna. Lola keeps my tea cup full of Harvey’s Bristol Crème. I keep a used tea bag on the saucer & pretend no one can smell the sweet sherry on me. I sip at it non-stop and she refills it over & over.
But my bruises and flea bites heal. I forget that week and now what I remember is “If you don’t know where your next drink is coming from, get a job in a bar.”
Blink.
And just like that, I’m back to where nobody expects me to behave any better than I can. Where I don’t have hide my drinking in a tea-cup. I go back to where I belong. Home. Times Square.
And I still haven’t told you about my first trick, even though I meant to, that’s where this all was going. It’s just such a long story. And he was so very fat. So very, very fat.
This entry was written by , posted on October 22, 2009 at 7:01 am, filed under the diary and tagged 1979, blink, Bon Soir, drinking, drugs, family, Levittown, partners in crime. 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
This week on Three Naked Ladies, Essence Alexander sits in for Rachel Aimee.
Jodi Sh. Doff: Lauri, I loved your piece in Hos, Hookers, Call Girls and Rent Boys about coming out to your mom — but what was it really like?
Lauri Shaw: In Mother-Daughter Day, a stripper tries to win her mother’s love and approval by taking her out for the afternoon. Mom bulldozes over countless boundaries, makes a colossal pest of herself, and finally demands to know point blank what her daughter does for a living. When she gets the answer she never really wanted in the first place, she goes completely ballistic, and any warmth that was left between the two women unravels in full.
The story isn’t quite verbatim, but it’s close. After that day, my mother did her best to pretend the whole thing never happened. When I tried to bring it up, she changed the subject. If I persisted, she said, “I don’t want to hear about it.”
My father was a different story. He didn’t speak to me at all for several years. Which was a neat trick, since my parents are still married and living together. My father’s a complicated man–extremely religious and very controlling. He was also an officer in the military, a reservist, but I spent some time on Navy bases as a child.
I never had a good relationship with either of them. Stripping was probably beside the point. As a child, I got my ass beat for eating non-kosher food. So anything at ALL having to do with sex? Are you fucking kidding me? I was out of that house by the time I was 15.
JshD: Just the opposite, my dad had worked in the burlesque houses and the carnival side shows, so I somehow thought down ‘n dirty was my birthright.
LS: What sort of things did your dad say about strip clubs?
JshD: He’d always glamorized burlesque, Bettie Page, and even the underworld. My mother blamed all my wrong moves on his stories and truthfully, they were a bit of an inspiration. They knew I tended bar in a skimpy leotard, but not about the stripping until after I’d quit. Even so, they hated me working the clubs. They couldn’t separate my drug abuse and the strip clubs. But then, neither could I.
I’d wanted them to see that it wasn’t so bad, that the flames of hell weren’t licking up from the floor, so I forced them to come have a drink at the Mardi Gras where I worked. My mom had been a “good girl,” she’d never even sat at a bar before and here she was, music blasting, creepy men hunched over their drinks and naked women everywhere. I was all la-ti-da about it, but it was pretty traumatic for them. They saw seedy people & scary things. But, in the 80s, that’s exactly what it was: seedy & scary. It confirmed all their fears.
LS: Sounds like it was traumatic for them because they loved you.
JshD: My mom kept a Rolodex card listing my height, eye color, scars & tattoos — so she could claim the body when I was found dead in the streets. Seriously. She also worried about appearance. She didn’t want anyone to say anything bad about me. At 79, she still worries about that with my writing, god bless ‘er.
Essence Alexander: Writing was the catalyst for me telling my mother that I stripped. I had been writing my show about stripping. My mother knew I was working on a play, but I was cryptic about the particulars whenever she’d ask about it. When I was finally ready to workshop the piece, I told her the dates, not thinking anything of it. Then she told me she planned to come to the reading. YIKES! I knew I had to tell her now, but how?! My mother is the queen of good appearances from the conservative British West Indies. As a child, she went to church six days a week. This is a woman who didn’t allow me to have boyfriends until I was in college and she had no way of stopping me anymore. I gave the script to my “cool” aunty, her sister, to read first. “Uh, this is kinda my true story and I’m going to tell Mum.” Her first reaction was a concerned, “Does she have to know?”
JshD: I’ve totally used my writing as a way to let my mom know things. After spoiler alerts and disclaimers, she reads. Then if she’s up to knowing more, we talk.
EA: Yes, I wanted her to hear it from me and have time to digest the info before seeing the adventures of her first born in America as a stripper on stage. My aunt called me the next morning and said, “It’s your life to live and she’ll be OK or not. I love the script by the way!”
So I called my mother and said, “Soooo, while I was writing my show, I worked as a stripper off and on. But I don’t do it now.” My mother replied, “Well, why aren’t you still dancing now? Your legs broke?!”
LS: Ha! Your mom’s got serious character.
JshD: Amazing. Obviously, you expected worst…
EA: I wonder if my aunty padded my fall. I told my sister and she burst into tears because she had the movie Player’s Club as her only frame of reference. She came to work with me one night: watched, ordered Chinese food, got bored and went home. I’ve never told my father and I’m not sure my mother did either. I think parents can be OK with other people doing something but NOT their child. I would have taken it to the grave and not told my mother were it not for the show.
This entry was written by , posted on October 21, 2009 at 9:00 am, filed under three naked ladies and tagged family, 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 September 7, 2009 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.
onlythejodi