3nl : Lush Life

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!)

Posted September 30, 2009 at 9:00 am, filed under three naked ladies and tagged drinking, drugs, strippers. Bookmark this post. Follow any comments @ RSS feed for this post.