Grace Undressed

You know it's going to be a hot one when the cicadas get started before noon. Scarlett is back in Texas, home from New York on the advice of friends like me who said sometimes the smartest thing you can do is bail on a bad time. In the weeks since her return she's been abject and elated by turns, her bad days just bad enough to scare the people who know how bad things can get.

Twice a week she comes over and eats lunch with me, which is good for me because I am at the point of obsession with work that I will forget to eat if I'm not reminded, and good for her because twice a week she gets free food. For the first few weeks she surfed from couch to couch, but now she has a part-time job at a coffee shop and our friend Lorna cleared out her junk room to give her a place to stay. So, that's good.

This afternoon she comes over for lunch, and I know she's not happy almost before I hear her feet on the porch. She's sad, she says, because of all the boxes sitting packed in her room, and nothing to put them in. "I feel like I'm living in a fucking squat with my mattress on the floor," she says.

I listen for her breath and hear it where I knew I would, high and rapid in her chest, making her heart beat like a pair of desperate wings. Her voice shakes with the effort of containing herself.

We get on Craigslist and find someone who is giving away a futon frame. The post says it's out by the curb, free to the first person to roll up and take it away. Scarlett has borrowed her mother's car for the afternoon, so we drive over to the address in the listing, a blank little street in a treeless part of town. It's right in the hottest part of the day, and the air-conditioning doesn't work in the car, so we drive with the windows down and say as little as possible.

Last week I had to sit Scarlett down and say Listen. You can't come over to my house in the middle of the day and yell at me. I'm too busy and too tired and my patience is at too low an ebb.

And she said, but I'm not even mad at you.

And I said, but when you're mad, you're mad at everyone. You're an equal opportunity hater. I might not be the one you're yelling at, but I'm the one you're yelling at, so chill.

She did chill for a few days. Around me, anyway. And I let myself hope, again, that this meant she was feeling better and now everything was going to be OK. When you love someone, you have to hope for things like that.

I read the address out for her and sure enough the futon frame is still there by the curb. It's a nice one. Well-made, substantial. Too substantial. It is never going in the back seat of the car. We try for a bit anyway, putting the back seats down and trying to twist the frame this way and the other way. The sun is right overhead, dead hot and mercilessly bright. We give up and put the frame down by the curve, stand wiping our faces off in the alley with the tails of our t-shirts.

"Nope," Scarlett says tightly.

"Nope."

We get back in the car. "This is such shit," Scarlett says as we pull away. "I'm so sick of not having things I need."

Scarlett's never been good at hanging onto things. She loses apartments, jobs, lovers, friends, and she never takes it lightly, the way some people do who've been losing things so long they've got the knack of it. For Scarlett, it always seems to hurt.

"I guess it's back to the shake joint," she says now, knuckles white on the steering wheel. "That's what everybody keeps saying. 'Why don't you just dance?' Why does that always have to be the answer to everything?"

"It's not the answer," I say, carefully. "It's an option. It's quicker and easier than some of the other options."

"But it's not always easier."

"No. It's not always easier."

"I need glasses. I need my filling replaced. I have warrants. I don't know what else I can do."

I don't know either. It is convenient to walk off the street and get hired and make a few hundred dollars the same day. The convenience is undeniable. But.

"It's almost too convenient," Scarlett says, reading my mind. "It's like...this pretty little toy with sharp edges."

"It's a compromise. You have to understand the compromise before you make it."

"I don't think I'm very good at compromises."

It's true. She's not. Sometimes that's a good trait. Myself, I tend the other way. If my ends seem to be in sight, I will endure far more than there is any point in enduring. I've lived years of my life that way. Scarlett knows this. There's a reason we're friends.

"If you start dancing again, you should know exactly what you're doing it for," I offer. "Dancing for survival is the worst. That's when you really feel stuck. You have to have one thing in your life that you really love. At least one thing you care about so much that it makes everything worth it. You have one goal and every day you do one thing to meet that goal, and as long as you do that one thing you can feel OK."

Some of this I believe to be good advice and some of it I know is superstition, but I still believe it and it's all I've got so I hope it's something. She frowns like maybe she's listening. "Look," she says, suddenly excited.

"What?"

"A dresser!"

We pull over. There by the street, a five-drawer bureau stands next to a row of garbage cans. It's sadder than it looked at first. We walk around it, fingering the peeling veneer until a sheet if it pulls off in our hands.

"This is trash," Scarlett says. "Somebody is throwing this away for a reason."

We stand there for a second longer, trying to make the dresser into something it isn't, trying to make it into something somebody could use to make a life. The sun wants to melt us like wax.

"Oh, well," Scarlett says. "The last thing I need is another sad piece of trash in my room to look at every day when I wake up. Oh, well. Oh, well."

We get back in the car.

I tell her we'll figure it out. I don't know what I mean by this. I don't know what it is, even, let alone how we are going to figure it out. I just know that sooner or later things will be better and sooner, probably. Sooner than she thinks.

I've seen so many things slip through her hands. I've seen her start her life all over more than once, except you never really start your life over. Those cardboard boxes drift from house to house, from friends' garages, from the backs of cars, from rented storage rooms, and there never seems to a place to put everything away. I don't really know why. As old a friend as I am, I don't really understand why her life is made of the scraps of other people's lives. I don't know when she'll be happy, but I do hope it's soon. If you love someone, you have to have hope.

I've been trying to teach myself to sleep again; I seem to have lost the knack. I get tired, but when I lie down my eyes don't close. I practice breathing: in for four, out for four, hold out for two. It works like a charm, but only if you remember to do it, and keep doing it. My mind tends to skip off like a stone. I have a lot to think about.

One day a while ago, I get a text from the Satanist. "Want to go for a walk?" Sounds fun, so I bike over to his house in the late afternoon. I think we'll stroll around the block a couple of times and call it a night, but he's got these graphite walking sticks and headlamps and we are going for a Walk.

We cut through the neighborhood a long way, and onto the municipal hiking trail and across the river. We get into the trees and the sun goes down and it is quite dark. I don't remember what we talk about. My mind keeps wandering and I am probably not saying much, but I'm having a nice time. It comes out of the blue when the Satanist tells me he fantasizes about fucking me in front of my boyfriend. He says it so casually it takes me a second to think about it, and then I say, "Yuck."

"What?"

"Yuck."

I want this line of conversation to end, and I don't want to return to it. I don't want to be riding the brakes on sexual tension all evening, and especially not out here in the dark, in the woods. I'm not scared, but it sounds like hard work, and if I'm going to work I want to get paid.

Everything changes after this and it keeps getting darker, because that's what happens at night.

"Where are we?" he asks, after a while.

"What?"

"You were leading."

"I was?"

"I'm following you."

"Oh."

So now we are lost, but I can still see the lights from downtown and we keep heading towards them. We cross a bridge to the right side of the river again, but once we're on the bank nothing looks right. We're by a busy road that I ought to know but I don't see any signs, and I could swear there was no road here. I must have been here in the daylight a thousand times, but it doesn't feel like it. To my right I see downtown, closer and brighter than before. So that's good. To my left I see a stretch of dark highway and lights and cars that could be anywhere, any city, any time. The Satanist points left. "This way," he says.

When I look left I don't know where I am. I feel dizzy, like the sky is pressing down on the top of my head and my knees are going soft. I point to the right, towards beautiful, glowing, comforting downtown. Once we get there there'll be other people and all the streets will have names. We'll know exactly where we are and his house is just a stone's throw away. We'll say goodbye on his front porch and I'll get on my bike and ride home and everything will be OK. "This way," I say.

He grabs my hand. I pull back. We look at each other the best we can. It is dark now, completely dark, and the only lights are cars on the road zooming past, too bright and then gone again. "You're being weird," he says. "You've been somewhere else all night."

I start to nod. This is true. I've been somewhere else for weeks, actually. But he's not done. He's raising his voice, and this is the first time I realize that we are actually fighting.

"You're in fucking space and I don't even want to be around you right now but I can't get away from you."

I feel a sweet relief. If what we both want is to get away from each other then it's easy. I point back to the right again. "I'll go that way."

"Fine," he says. "Give me my shit." He snatches the walking stick out of my hand, and the lamp. He's angry and rough and it's the first time I really feel scared of him. I feel like a big dog just snarled at me. I'm glad I'm going my way, not further into the dark with him. I turn around and don't look back.

That was weeks ago. We haven't talked again, and I don't know if we will. I don't think about it much. I have a lot on my mind. I still can't sleep.

A few weeks ago I was offered a short-term consulting contract in an area not unrelated to my current pursuits. The woman who offered me the contract is a contact I know through the dayjob. The only job, now, I guess. The Job.

I respect her enormously. She is not much older than me, and she has a very difficult job. She is ambitious and straight-forward and concerned for the welfare of mankind, and I am flattered that she wants my two cents. On Monday we meet for lunch. I have a stack of papers, two notebooks and a clipboard.

She arrives 20 minutes late and frazzled. Hard week, she says. Crunch time. We exchange expressions of sympathy.

I circle things and underline things and ask questions.How about this? I say. And, Let's be specific. Can we say this?

I notice she isn't eating, hasn't touched a thing, and then abruptly, she pushes her plate away. "Let's go my house," she says.

I say yes, although this is not a particularly good idea. I haven't been sleeping well, and I am running on coffee and enthusiasm purely. On her sofa, my thoughts, so carefully arranged, begin to unravel. We are no longer talking about the particular job I am here to do, but about the nature of the work itself, and the nature of things in general.

"It's hard," she says. "It's hard to get taken seriously. Don't you think? When you're younger than everyone else and you're a girl, and people think you're attractive? It's awkward. It's weird. Doesn't it bother you?"

It probably used to. A lot of things used to bother me about the way I might look to other people. Being young and a girl was part of it. I didn't worry about being attractive that much, I guess, because I didn't think I was. I worried more about my scruffiness, my way of always looking like I just rolled out bed, after sleeping in my clothes. I worried somebody important would look down and see the heels of my shoes held together with duct tape and upholstery nails and know I was a fraud.

"You must know what I mean," she says.

I nod. Maybe it was stripping that cured me of that particular strain of self-consciousness. At the club, it mattered what I looked like, so I learned to put on make-up. I grew my hair long and learned to curl it in big, loose waves like a centerfold. I learned to know which looks from men meant they thought I was pretty, and which looks meant they thought I was pretty but not pretty enough, and which looks meant I was an ugly cow they wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole. I learned that their opinions were worth exactly what I could extract out of their wallet, and no more.

When I do the work I do now, I have no age and no gender. I want to look whichever way will get me in the door fastest, which generally means neat, demure, and slightly frumpy -- a look I call Sunday School Teacher Applies for a Bank Loan. As long as I get where I want to go, people are free to think I'm pretty, or not, or smart, or not, and if they under-estimate me, well, that's not necessarily to my disadvantage. Age and sex are just masks, anyway. Not masks we get to choose, but still, masks.

"I pretend I'm a forty-year-old dude and I'm just tricking them into thinking I'm a 28-year-old woman," I tell her. "Then I feel sneaky and smart."

She laughs, which is good. I want her to laugh. It's nice that she likes me.

"You want to get high?" she asks.

"Sure."

It's a bad idea, and I know it. I'm so tired, my thoughts are held together with string. Seven seconds and the THC hits my brain, things start to unravel. I tap on my clipboard with the butt of my pen and we try again. It's useless. The problems we are supposed to solve start spiraling outward. The solutions retreat. Before I know it she is telling me the plot to The Golden Compass and we are talking about organizations of people as living bodies, with individuals as their genetic material. Then I am explaining the multiple-mutation theory of inherited cancer susceptibility -- a gene has to mutate a number of times before it becomes cancerous, but you can inherit an already mutated gene that is like a tiny ticking bomb, so that only a single mutation is required, just one, and then: oncosis.

"Oh my god," she says. "My boyfriend is a cancerous gene. He's mutated too many times, I think. He's broken."

I know her boyfriend. He is a charming drunk who goes home with the hottest girl from every party. I respect him tremendously as a professional in this field that we are all in. As a person, less.

I excuse myself and go to the bathroom and when I come back she is crying. She takes her glasses off and wipe at the tears with her fingers. "I'm leaving him," she says. "He'll never be OK. I thought I could fix him, but I can't."

I nod. I have had my own share of unfixable men. I am myself a pre-cancerous gene, probably. Too many more divisions and my structure might begin too change. But all cells are pre-cancerous, I guess. Given enough time, enough adverse events.

"I'm proud in a way, I guess," she says. "I held everything together with hope for years, but I don't have any hope any more. I really thought I could help."

She bows her head. Later I will wonder why I didn't just hug her. It's not like I'm averse to hugging. Hugs are cool. But for tears I hold still, like I would hold still for a hummingbird. It doesn't seem to me that grief always needs to be comforted. So often the pro forma gestures of comfort seem like the would-be comforter's own discomfort. Here, pat-pat, everything's fine, stop crying, please stop. And then the crying person is suposed to say, yes, OK, thank you, I feel better now. And stop.

Other people's crying doesn't bother me. The tears we weep from grief and joy are chemically distinct from the tears we cry when we get dust in our eyes -- they have stress hormones in them, and endorphins, and birthing hormones and orgasm hormones and falling-in-love hormones. Which is to say what everybody already knows, that crying is how we squeeze the pain out, deliver ourselves, and gain release.

I hate to see people get hurt, but I think I might like seeing people cry. Crying has always been hard for me. When I was sixteen or seventeen I learned to induce tears by inflicting pain on myself. It was an accidental discovery, a blind instinct. In certain states of unbearable feeling I found out I could cut my thigh with the tips of a pair of nail scissors. The pain alone didn't bring the tears on; it was the sight of the blood that never failed to shock me, and then I would cry. I would be wracked with crying, and afterwards I would feel dreamy and sweet and usually fall asleep. You can still see the scars. When I started dancing I was afraid people would ask me about them, but no one ever did.

Sometimes the best comforter is to see the pain and know it's there, that bright streak of blood that says, yes, you are hurt. Some hopes have to die. Sometimes the structure of our hope becomes malignant, and it had better die than keep dividing.

I try to hold the space. I sit quietly and give her all of my attention. She cries and cries, and then she takes a long breath as the endorphins kick in and do their work, and I see her shoulders settle down, I see her chest rise and her belly soften and then she smiles.

I don't leave right away, but I put my stack of papers and my two notebooks and my clipboard back in my bag. We go onto the patio. She shows me her plants, names them for me. We take her dog outside and throw a ball. But I don't stay too long, because people who have cried need their rest.

I worry she'll feel self-conscious about it later, so I'm happy when I get an e-mail that says, "Sorry we didn't get more done. Next time. I had a good time, though."

I had a good time, too.

Ok, this is it -- the closest thing to a virtual lap-dance that I can devise for you. After extensive taste-testing with my friends and loved ones, I have discovered The One True Perfect Brownie recipe. (And its companion, the One True Perfect Blondie Recipe.) I now make the baking mix available to you online through my Etsy store.

These are seriously, truly delicious. I've been taking them everywhere I go for the last month and no one has failed to freak out over their dense flavor and preternatural gooiness. The chocolate brownie is dark, intense chocolate and the blondie is an incredible butterscotch flavor.

All proceeds go toward my basic expenses so I can keep working on the dayjob for another month or two and not have to look for honest work. If there is anything left over after my basic expenses are covered, I will pay off the hospital in Colorado where they cut my tummy open last summer. (Insurance took care of most of the costs, but alas, not all.)

Mention the blog at checkout for $2 off purchase price.

XOXO,
Grace

Whoops. I accidentally published a comment on the last post that had some contact information in it. Privacy is important, so I'm taking down the post until I figure out how to erase comments. Anyone out there who already knows how, please spill it and we will return to your normally scheduled programming.

Outside the window of the truck the night goes by in a flat plane of blue-black. Inside, the GPS unit lights the curve of Josh's cheekbone, a green crescent. The GPS says four hours to our motel room in the middle of Ass Nowhere Texas, where we can sleep until almost sun-up. Tomorrow will be a long, hard day.

Josh and I have history. We worked together on a different job one summer a long time ago, when I was twenty and he was 26 or so. I'd been there longer, which technically made me his supervisor. The job ended at the end of the summer, but we stayed in touch. The day after Halloween we kissed. By Thanksgiving we were lovers, although I had a boyfriend already, a sweet Catholic kid who cried and swore suicide any time I broached the possibility of breaking up.

Josh pulls the truck over at a gas station in the middle of darkness. We are nowhere near anything. I'm surprised the gas station is open, but it's not as late as it feels. Inside I pay for a tank of gas and a six-pack of Coors. Back in the cab I pop a cap. It's hot, even with the sun down. Sweat pricks along my hairline and my upper lip. The beer is just cool enough.

Josh and I haven't worked together since that first job. I didn't even know he was still in town til January, when I got stumped by a technical question in the Dayjob Project and sent a message to his old e-mail address. I didn't exactly expect to hear back.

Last I knew he was living in New York. He had called me three or four years ago, to ask if I'd been tested for AIDS lately. "I'm getting tested," he said. "The Health Department called and told me one of my previous partners tested HIV positive. I was hoping it was you, cause we always used condoms. I thought maybe you'd become some kind of junkie whore by now."

"Sorry. Can't help you."

"I'll be in Amarillo next month," he said. That's a really long way from here.

I asked him to call me back when he got the test results. He did. The test was negative. Congratulations, I said. We rang off. That was it.

But he did e-mail me back in January. "I'm in Texas again," he wrote back. "Call me. I'll help you any way I can."

We met for coffee. I saw him the second he walked in, and then he took his sunglasses off and I felt a pang, because he looked older, which he was. I am, too. He never was a handsome man, with that sullen, feral face and cheap swagger like a drugstore cowboy -- jaw a little too thick and mouth a little too tender, as though any second it might quiver like a child's.

I told him what I was doing and he offered himself to me, to work for free, even though he was busy. He's some kind of contractor now, working in the dirt and making all kinds of money. Guy knows how to hustle. I always liked that.

I said, "Are you sure?"

He said, "Sure I'm sure. I want to do it. You can make it up to me later, when you're big-time."

I was glad. When it comes to work, I trust him absolutely. He's good at what he does. So last week I called him up and he said yes and I told him what the score was: we leave at night, wake up at dawn, work an 18-hour day, drive home. And I needed him to drive. He said, "Kick me in the balls why don't you, while you're at it." But I knew he'd come.

The beer is just cool enough and the night goes past the window mile after mile of it, and it feels like we've been driving for days. The air inside the cab is soft with a humidity that the truck's old A/C barely dents and I can smell his sweat. He was the first man I ever loved to fuck. I remember it so well, in memories as precise and precious as souvenir postcards -- his hands around my waist, his sneer of concentration, his body between my legs like a furious machine. I could put my hand across the cab of the truck and it would be like eight years had never happened.

I shake my head to clear it and take another sip of beer. "Pass me one of those, would you?" he says.

I take a look at him and decide that it's OK, he's a big guy. One beer is OK. Or maybe not, but we've always brought out the stupid country kid in each other, the dumb and bored and desperate part that just wants to get fucked up and ruin something.

So much history. Before we ever met we had a history -- the history of Sunday mornings in little country churches in the summer, tiny wooden buildings with no air-conditioning so the sweat weeps down the backs of your knees and the crease of your neck, and someone saying something that's supposed to be important, but the words buzz around your heads like flies and out the open window. You smell the fields, hot dust and drying hay. Those who take pleasure in unrighteousness will be damned, and your ears prick then and you squirm your sweating thighs against the hard pew and you know they're talking now about you and all those unspeakable, exciting things you do, and want to do.

The history of bus-stops outside trailer parks, going to school every day in the wrong clothes, trying to make the walk to the cafeteria take all lunch period so you won't have to talk to anyone, so no one can look at you and there will be no name-calling, no shoving. A history of dads with angry hands, with hands like knots of oak, a history of lying in bed telling yourself you're the best, the best ever, you are fortune's only child and they are all fucking losers, all of them, you are getting out of here and you will show everyone you are the best, the best, the best. Because this is the only way you can go to sleep at night and the only way you can stand to wake up again.

I spent Christmas alone the day that I was 20, and I remember nothing about the day except gray light through the windoe and the absolute peace of absolute solitude, so light and free, like I could float away. Three days later, Josh and I caught the train to El Paso in the middle of an ice storm. We crossed the border in Juarez and spent the day drinking 25 cent beers, and the night in the Hotel Rio where for hours we lay awake and listened to women and children crying and laughing through the wooden walls. We took the bus down to Chihuahua and then the train again -- Divisidero, Bahuichivo, Creel. We were headed to the beach, La Paz, for New Years, but then some bad things happened. I fell off a horse and hit my head hard enough to forget where I was for thirty minutes, and spent the night drinking Mexican Benedryl in our bed in the hostel, praying that it would keep my brain from swelling up, praying that I would not die in this strange country with this strange man, so far from home and from anyone who loved me. Two days later we read the map wrong, got off the train at the wrong stop, and spent a lost few days hitch-hiking between tiny mountain towns with our high-school Spanish, two dumb-ass gringos on a half-doomed vision quests.

I pop the tab on another beer with a gentle hiss and hand it to him. "Beautiful," he says. "We should have gotten married."

That was never close to happening. I always knew when we got back to the border it was over. I figured he knew it, too. Once, as the bus drew back towards Juarez, I tried to bring it up. It was dark, like this, and we were almost sleeping. I turned my head towards him on the seat and he was watching me, his face inches from my face. He smiled at me, mouth drawn up sweet and wry. He said, "Your hair smells like cotton candy."

I said, "When we get back to town, it won't be like this. I still have a boyfriend. Of course. You know."

His face changed so fast it took my breath away. He looked at me with what seemed like the purest hate, eyes like two wide black holes. "Why did you say that?" His voice was a low hiss. "Everything was perfect for a minute and you ruined it. Why did you have to say anything?"

"I'm sorry," I said. I felt awful, and alone, the ruiner of perfect things. "Just stay with me to the border and you can leave. I can get the rest of the way by myself."

"What are you, retarded? Don't even say anything else, OK? Just shut up. Shut the fuck up."

Silence. Our history is the history of loneliness.

We got over it. By the time we crossed into El Paso we were compadres again. And for a few weeks after that everything was like it had been. We drove around in his truck, made up reasons to get out of the city and onto the back roads, like motion was our natural element.

But finally we stopped. Nothing happened. I just stopped calling him. We had plans to go to Galveston for Mardi Gras, but I never called. He left one message on my answering machine, annoyed and bitter and final. I wouldn't hear from again till he called me from New York.

I stayed absent-mindedly with the Catholic boy for another year. Josh turned out to be the first of the long, long line of boys I cheated with. It was like something had snapped in me, some component in the mechanism of my self-control. I lived in a universe of suspended consequences, until in the end I broke up with that sweet boy anyway, and told him everything, and saw his face smash like an egg.

History is collective. You have to share it with someone, or it's just a story. And that feeling, when someone knows your history, really knows it, that sense of being so instantly and so deeply recognized, is a lot like love, or maybe it is some kind of love.

That first time we kissed, I remember that as clear as anything I ever have remembered. Late on rainy afternoon, sitting on the bed in the bedroom that was also his kitchen, my cheek pressed against the window and the coolness of the drops running down. It was fall and in my memory everything smells like dark, wet leaves. His hand at my waist and his face so close to mine, I feel the heat from him, I smell him, and he says, "Let's just kiss. That's all I want. Just kiss me. Please. One time."

Liar. His lips tasted like salt.

Our history was the history of flight, from home and everything that felt like home. The history of love and hate and love that feels like hate, and pain squeezed down inside so tightly and so long that it becomes a diamond, hard and bright.

I could have left that Catholic boy for you. In the end I left him anyway, and in the end he didn't kill himself. It all still would have ended like it did. It never would have ended any other way. But I could reach my hand across the cab tonight, snake down between your thighs and it would be like eight years never happened, and like you never left and like I never found a better man, a man who is not a game I could never win.

I had to leave you to keep you. You know that.

We roll into the tiny town in the middle of nowhere, a little cluster of lights in the darkness. We pull into that motel parking lot. You kill the engine and for a second the silence is fierce, but I already know what will happen, which is nothing. We'll take turns undressing in the bathroom and lie down in the separate beds, turn the lights out and turn our backs on each other like two nuns. Our self-control is excellent these days. Congratulations.

You might as well be inside of me. You're in my skin as much as you ever were. For two or three mornings I will wake up twisted in my sheets and sick to the stomach, wanting your body like a drug. I will scrub you off my skin for days, the way I used to do.

It's m'birthday! My mom sent me this card, with a note that said, "This looks like your smile."




I am 28. If I were a Vulcan, I would have to mate, but instead I will celebrate the growing influence of Saturn by distributing prizes. I was recently given the Arte Y Pico Blogging Award, which looks like this:




The significance of the award isn't clear to me, except that (a) it was very nice of fellow Austinite mapelba , a fine writer in her own right, to give me an award, and (b) I am now empowered to give awards to other people and how fun is that? So, without further ado:

River City Kitty. Duh. As far as I'm concerned, this is where stripper blogging started, and it's still the premier online repository of photographs of weird-ass signs in strip-club dressing rooms.

Hobostripper. Double duh -- an unbeatable one-two punch of down-to-earth sultriness and over-the-top stripping stories worthy of passing into the cannon of club legends, alongside Girl Who Went Into Labor Onstage and Customer Who Named Stripper As Life Insurance Beneficiary and Died. If I were a junior executive passing through the midwest on an expense account, this van-dwelling siren is the one I'd pay by the hour to pet my hair and make me feel like a human-being.

Star Light Ministries. Among strippers I know, the mere mention of a "Christian outreach organization targeting exotic dancers" is enough to make us shit and run. The last thing I want when I'm naked and tired is to be judged by a fully clothed person waving a heavy-looking book. Lia Scholl of Star Light Ministries is a whole different breed, however. Her ministry emphasizes understanding and acceptance of exotic dancers as they are, an approach that demands at least as much change and growth from missionaries as it does from the natives Her post on "How to Pray for Women Who Are Exotic Dancers" is how I'd like to be prayed for by anyone who is thataway inclined. In fact, if you want to celebrate my birthday with me, maybe you could make a donation here to support her outreach efforts.

Boomtown Boudoir. This sometime fellow stripper ostensibly writes semi-autobiographically about perfume. In actuality, her blog is about everything that smell invokes -- sensuality, nostalgia, and gut-level experience. Somehow her writing manages to be about what it is like to be a girl, or at least to be the certain kind of girl that she is. I can't get enough and only wish that she would write more often.

Lord of the Barnyard. This one epitomizes everything I've ever liked about well-educated farm boys. Factual and tender, he writes about weather in a way that expresses hope and frustration and relief and despair with elegant economy. I guess the farm blog is dead and he lives in town these days. Still one to watch.

So there you have it. I would like to give out more awards to the many awesome bloggers out there, but I am limited to five. Now, if someone else will hurry up and give me an award, the distribution of favors can continue. (My foot is tapping.)

Mei the waitress has been at the club for 15 years. She is fifty, plain-faced and shrewd, with a me-love-you-long-time accent that 15 years in a titty bar have barely touched. She has a million regulars and probably makes as much money as anyone there. She is funny, too; her occasional dark asides can make me spit a drink, but it takes a long time for her to warm up to you. She sees so many dancers come and go.

One of my last nights waitressing, Mei and I are perched on an empty side stage looking over our shoulders at an empty club.

"Bad night tonight, baby," she says.

"Tell me about it."

"Even last year was not this bad. Last year, on a Thursday night we have customer at every table. Every table, baby."

"Things are tough all over, huh?"

"Bad time," she agrees. "We not going to make no money tonight. You should have keep dancing. Me, if i could dance right now, I do it."

She throws her hands in the air and does a little boob shimmy in my direction. I crack up.

She's not done with me, though. "Baby, why you stop dancing? You don't need money no more?"

"Something like that." I don't like this question. I don't like it from civilians, who like to assume that I've stopped dancing because I finally acknowledge that dancing was evil all along. I like it at work even less. But Mei is cool, so I clear my throat and give it a shot. "You know, my boyfriend's tuition is saved up, so I don't have that pressure anymore. I want to do other things. I guess I'm just done for a while, you know?"

Her eyes narrow. "You pay for boyfriend's school?"

Shit. "Um, yes."

She starts shaking her head, goes on shaking it. "Bad idea. Bad idea, baby. He get through school, he going to leave you. I know. I see it, so many times. Girl is helping man and man is just take, take, taking. Men don't care. They don't care about you."

"Well, uh, I've known C. for a while. We've been together for five years. I really trust him. He's a good guy."

She's still shaking her head. "Yeah, you say that. You think that now. Maybe you right. Maybe you will be lucky. Me, I have never been lucky, so now I don't trust no-one. I don't trust no man no more."

"Well, you can't be too be careful. But this guy is a good guy."

"OK," she says. "OK, you say so." She looks over the club and then back at me. "But you never know. It happen when you least expect it. He leave you, baby. I say this because I care. He leave you with nothing."

People say this kind of thing to me all the time. And other things. I've been told that I lack self-respect. People who don't know either of have called my boyfriend a pimp. I guess because I'm a girl and he's a boy, and probably because I'm a stripper.

I get it. I know where it's coming from. When you trade in affection as a commodity, your ideas shift. You see how money can tie a person to another person, how it creates complacency. You see how you can put a dollar value on every gesture, and how money can stand in for gratitude, for admiration, for approval, for joy, for love.

You can think that someone who isn't paying you doesn't really love you. You can think that giving something away means you must be one of those losers who has to pay for love.

I think this way only at my worst, my most frightened and desperate. And then I think: you don't deserve this. It will be taken from you. You are not loved. You never have been loved. Tricked again, stupid. He will use you up and leave you dry as a husk. He will leave you with nothing. He will leave you.

When I am well, medicated, rested, stable, I don't believe these things. I think: You love him. He loves you. You are lucky. You are a good judge of character. He will never let you down. He would rather die; you see it in the set of his shoulders, the set of his lips. You will never let him down, either. You would rather die, too. You will have a long and wonderful life together, with many adventures, and one of you will be next to the bed when the other one dies, telling them it's OK, go ahead, go, I'll catch up with you later.

This is not to say that we don't have our differences:

C. is optimistic to the point of insouciance. I am apprehensive to the point of madness. When I am in the grip of my worry and I look over and see him smiling, I think he doesn't care. I want to yell at him until he cares.

When I met him he lived in someone's basement and owned two pairs of jeans and several thousand dollars worth of musical equipment. He was the happiest person I had ever met. He has that rare quality -- yogis would call it santosha -- where whatever he has at the moment is always enough. He has never had a bank account.

I opened a bank account when I was eleven, after I made my first serious money selling my bottle-raised show-lamb to slaughter. I've always been a hustler. All the worry about having things, nice things, enough of things, those are all my worries. I am a predator. I love the chase. I love the kill. And I am afraid. I am so afraid of running out, so afraid of dying.

Be calm, C says. And I say, You don't care. You don't care about me. You don't care about anything.

We have argued and given up and tried again, and in the end we have compromised for each other like neither of us has ever compromised for anyone else.

But then the questions. I hear my own answers and I know how ignorant they sound-- I love him. He loves me -- like I don't even know that people who say "I love you" are fucking over the people they say it to left and right all over the world right now.

I know that. I do. It's just that I think I'm different. I am sheepish, but I can't budge. I wonder if other people are asked to explain their love as much as I am.

On a night like any other night, I am talking to a guy like every other guy. We are negotiating a business transaction.

"So," he says. "Married?"

"Silly. No one in here is married."

"Engaged?"

"Why, are you proposing?"

"You have a boyfriend though. Every girl in here has a boyfriend."

Shrug. "No one serious." I lie without a second thought. Not because I don't care about my boyfriend, lying in bed at home waiting to hear me pull into the driveway. Because I don't care about this guy. In fifteen minutes his face will be a blur. By the end of the night I won't remember his name.

"That's good," he says, approving of me. "I hate to think of all the girls here...supporting some man."

"Uh-huh."

"If you were mine, I'd take care of you. You'd never have to work in here again. You could just stay home and take care of me."

Oh. Joy.

"A woman ought to be at home," he says. "A woman ought to have a man to look after her. I think that's right. I think that's how it ought to be."

C. doesn't bat an eyelash when I quit my third job in two months. I tell him, I tell myself, I'll find another job, pronto. Piece of cake. Nothing to worry about. And oddly, I don't worry.

Together, we went online and applied for a Pell Grant to pay the rest of his tuition, which would mean I could take the fat bankroll I've saved for that purpose and buy groceries. The application is so easy I'm shocked it took us this long. That was just two weeks ago and his college already contacted him and told him he should have money by the end of the month.

One morning I sit down and invent a resume that says I am bright shining star of the food service industry and the best damn waitress and/or cocktail server your upscale establishment could desire, and then I go downtown and paper all the nice restaurants and hotel bars. One bar manager tells me to come back after the 4th of July. Everyone else says they'll call me. I'm waiting.

Late one afternoon my phone rings with an out-of-town area code and I pick it up and the guy who introduced himself is the public face of the biggest and most elusive of the institutions whom I have contacted on behalf of Dayjob Project and importunately demanded money. I have been in and out of touch with this man for a year. He has requested documents. I have sent them. I have waited. I have called. I have talked to secretaries and interns. I have waited. I have called again. I have left messages. Now he is on the phone with me and he's using words like "awesome" and "perfect." He's telling me my project is great, and needs to be done, and he's saying "I think we have everything we need to move forward" and he's telling me about the Process. The Process is long, and involves a lot of other people doing things, while I just sit tight on my little ass and wait for a decision. This will take until, oh, say November.

At which time they might or might not send me what I've always wanted: a big bag of money.

A big bag of money means the project can go on. If there is no money, I do not know what I will do. I don't seem to be worried. The project will go on, or maybe it won't. But probably it will. It has momentum, now. A lot of people want to see it happen. I myself will go on, regardless. I always go on.

I find I'm not scared, not at all. This little boat is on the ocean now and the only thing to do is make for the far shore. There is no point in thinking about how deep the water is, or what might be down there. The water is deep and the monsters are down there whether you think about it or not.

I only worry because I am not alone. If it were just me I would have quit dancing a long time ago. I would sleep in someone's garage and live on tortillas like I did when I was twenty, and it would be OK. But C. didn't ask for anything of this, and he trusts me, and I don't want to let him down.

I tell him that we're going to be poor for a while. I tell him I'll do my best, but times are tight. Like he doesn't know already. He does the shopping; he knows the grocery budget is half what it was at the beginning of the year. But I want to know that he knows. I want him to tell me it's OK. I want that so much.

"So you get it, right?" I want to know. We are in the car on the way home from somewhere. C. is driving. I am talking. "You don't mind that we're going to be poor?"

We pull up at a red light, which is good because he can take his eyes off the road and look at me. "How poor?"

"Poor."

"Poor like 'I might have to drop out of school and sell a kidney so we can afford medicine' kind of poor?"

"Poor like 'we might have to eat a lot of beans' kind of poor."

The light turns green. He turns his eyes back to the road. Quietness. He smiles. He reaches over and gently squeezes my thigh.

"Baby, baby, baby," he says. "Baby, you know I love beans."

Dear Grace,

Are there many customers who don't seem creepy?

I've only been to a strip club once. There were some things I liked about the experience, I'd like to go again, but if I'm going to be perceived as creepy, or if the experience is negative for them- I don't want that.

Are there 'good' clients, and if so, what does it take to be one?

Mitch

Dear Mitch,

Excellent question. Yes, there are many, many pleasant, congenial, non-creepy strip-club customers. I could roughly break it down like this: 25% of guys were super-nice; 25% were various degrees of pain in the ass; 50% were pretty neutral. So, pretty much your normal bell curve.

How to be a good customer? I'm so glad you asked.

First of all, you should be prepared to have a good time. As an entertainer, my job is to facilitate that good time, but it helps if you give me something to work with. For one thing, if you do not feel like going to a strip club, please don't go. It is no fun as a dancer to run across someone who hates strip clubs, hates strippers, and is only there because he is afraid his friends will think he is a big old homo if he says no. You are not going to have fun. I am not going to have fun with you. You are going to open your big mouth and say something mean to me and I am going to give you a weird look and leave and you are going to be ever-more convinced that strippers are gold-digging harpies, while I am going to be ever more convinced that you are an asshole. So, just don't come.

If you DO want to go to a strip club, go ahead and go. Go ahead and check your judgements about sex and money and who is exploiting who at the door and just relax. It is OK to want to look at girls naked, and the girls at strip clubs are there for that exact purpose. If you were not there, they would be getting naked on stage for nothing. You are in one of the very few places in our culture where it is OK to start a conversation with a girl by telling her you love her ass. Enjoy!!

Secondly -- and this is very important -- you must choose your dancer well. Look for a Happy Dancer -- one who is standing up relatively straight, making eye contact, and smiling. This girl is having a good time, or is at least willing to evince good-will. Avoid Crazy Dancers, Sad Dancers, and Angry Dancers. They are not smiling, and often slouch. They will not make eye contact with you, or will lock eyes and refuse to let go. Basically, they will give you a weird feeling when you interact with them. When this happens, throw 'er back. (If you cannot tell a Happy Dancer from an Angry Dancer, you need practice. You should go to strip clubs more often.)

When you turn a girl loose, do it promptly, without wasting a lot of her time, because time is money to dancers. Do it politely, too, the way you would appreciate having it done to you. Tell her you are not interested in getting any dances at the moment, but you will let her know if you change your mind. Be courteous.

As long as you follow this formula of promptness plus tact, you are totally at liberty to refuse the advances of any dancer. However, you should be prepared to buy dances from a dancer who takes your fancy. It is NOT appreciated when customers claim to be in the club "just for a drink" or "just to watch the game." This is a lie, and we know it. Cover charge to the club is $10, and the drink prices are a gouge. You did not "just happen to stop in." You are here to peripherally ogle us while we work, and we hate you. You know it, and you don't care. You want to look at us naked anyway. There is nothing creepier than being ogled by someone who knows you hate it and does it anyway. If looks could kill, you are dead.

Also, do not come in with the plan of talking a dancer into going home with you so you can get her services for free. I can't say this will never work. I can only say that I have never, ever seen it work, and the shit talked about these guys amongst ourselves should make their ears burst into flames. Of course, you would never do this, but I state it for the record.

Now, assuming you have found a Happy Dancer whose looks and personality are to your liking, it is time to ask her if she would like to dance for you. Depending on the club you are at, there may be a variety of services for purchase, and a range of prices. Ask her to explain, if you are interested.

Different clubs have different rules, which may vary widely from the actual laws regulating clubs, and even from the rules at other clubs in the same city, let alone state to state. If you are unsure of the rules -- i.e. how much you get to touch her and where -- ask her. Different dancers also have different limits. Just because Chantal let you touch her wherever does not mean Crystal will be OK with it. When in doubt, err on the side of caution. You might not get to squeeze as much jellyroll this way, but you will not end up being the guy all the dancers talk about back in the dressing room for being such a gropy, annoying clueless butt-plug. Some guys don't care, but you do, or you wouldn't have asked the original question.

After the dance(s), thank her and pay her what you owe her, promptly. If you enjoy talking to a dancer and take up a lot of her time, consider tipping her. In most clubs it is not required, and a lot of guys don't do it. If you do, you will certainly set yourself apart. Should you return in the future, the dancers of your acquaintance will be more likely to remember you and make time for you.

In summation, the Golden Rule goes a long, long way in ensuring a happy strip-clubbing experience for everyone. Dancers are not really so different from other people. They are likely to be annoyed by things that most people would find annoying, like being condescended to, groped after repeated request to cease and desist, and cheated out of money. They are pleased by the things that please any vendor -- a simple, pleasant transaction and a fair price for services rendered.

So there you go. It is really pretty simple after all. Go forth and enjoy! We need more customers who WANT to be good customers, so get your asses in the seats.

Love, Grace


Grace,
What do you like to read?
Antonio

Dear Antonio,

It's hard for me to believe how little I read anymore. When I was a kid, I read all the time. All the time. I had this little set-up with the bath-caddy where I could read while I showered. These days I am lucky if I finish three or four complete books in a year. It is largely a factor of time. When I do have time to read, it tends to be non-fiction, and generally something practical. I like books about how to do things and make things. I also like books about the body and the brain.

One of my favorite books is "Listening to Prozac" about brain chemistry, depression, drugs, and the role of medication in the evolving definition of mental illness. The last novel I read was "Stardust." It's about faeries and stuff. Not necessarily my thing, but one of my customers gave it to me and I felt kinda obligated. I read it while I was in bed with a back injury in March. It was pleasant and escapist.

I'd like to think that at some point in my life I will have more time to read. If you think of a book or author I ought to know about, please suggest!

Love,
Grace


Dear Grace:
Quick question; When your satanist said

'"What are you doing?" he says. "Why do you do that? Why do you tell everybody what they want to hear? You're so transparent it's ridiculous."'

I felt really scared because I've heard a lot of people have that misconception about strippers, that everything they do it fake and that they are transparent. Have you found that happens a lot in your life?

Thanks!!
Lucky Luxie


Dear Luxie:
Most of the people in my life know me as myself, not as " a stripper." So honestly, I don't deal with that issue a lot, except at work.

When a lot of people around you think you are full of shit, you start to wonder yourself. This is why I always found it really important to keep pretty strong boundaries between my life at work and my personal life, and I would urge anyone starting out in dancing to do the same. It's important to have some relationships around you that are based entirely on mutual appreciation, and not at all on an exchange for goods for services.

To this end, I gave my customers an only-for-work e-mail address, never a phone number. I did not encourage them to contact me too much, and never met up with them outside of the club. I never encouraged people I knew from my civilian life to come to the club, and didn't share the fact that I was a dancer with many people, either.

Now, if the question is, "do guys at the club think I'm full of shit", the answer is, Sometimes. Some of them are really insistent about it, too, which is annoying. I mean, gold star for figuring out that I'm not really in love with you, buddy. Now do you want a dance or not?

On the other hand, some of them believe you for the moment, just like you go to a movie and enjoy the plot without worrying about whether or not it actually happened.

Still others really, really believe you, which is actually a lot more stressful.

The guy I call here the Satanist is an exceptional case, in that he is one (of two) customers with whom I ever made the transition from stripper/customer to sorta kinda friends.

Both transitions were weird and involved many leaps of faith and unwarranted extensions of trust.

What I'm saying is, it's not easy.

Does that answer your question at all?

XOXO,
Grace

I push through the swinging doors into the dressing room. I just want to sit down for a minute. It's a lousy night. There are twenty waitresses on the floor and probably about that many customers in the whole stupid club.

The club's response to an ever-weakening economy has been to jack up cover prices, which has run off a whole tier of customers. They've also hired more dancers, so that the house can collect more fees from them. I don't know why they've hired a bevy of new waitresses and scheduled twenty of them on a Tuesday night, but if I had to guess, they're trying to turn them into dancers. In a week, the youngest and prettiest of the new waitresses will complain to the managers that they aren't making money and the managers will say, "Why don't you dance for a night and see how you like it." The older, uglier waitresses will just drift away.

I always had a feeling if I knew too much about the runnings of this bar I'd hate it. When I was a dancer I came and went like a ninja. I made my money and got out, keeping interaction with management to the bare minimum possible. This is harder now that I'm waitress. Now that I have to sit in meeting with the managers for thirty minutes after the shift starts and thirty minutes after we close and wipe the tables down. Now that I have to ask the managers permission for everything I do, and report every dollar I make. Something in me that does not love a boss. No wonder I've been fired from half the straight jobs I've ever had.

I just want to sit down. Unfortunately, the waitresses' corner of the dressing room is occupied. The shift manager lounges in the ass-sweat-saturated wheelie chair, legs spread like a pasha. Waitresses perch around him, and one brand-new little blonde teenager crouches at his side with her head on his knee. He has one arm draped heavily over her neck, a lordling posing with his favorite hunting dog.

I get just a flash of this as I walk past, back into the dancers' space, where girls are re-curling their hair and bitching in familiar ways about familiar things. I want a cigarette. I even carry them on my tray, for customers to buy from me. But I don't smoke any more and I'm proud of myself.

I can't shake it. I can't shake my distaste for that frat boy gone to seed, with his white-blond hair spiked up and his pink-pink skin. His baby-faced smugness, eyes opaque as marbles. I can't shake my distaste for the whole stupid scene and I'm not sure why. I hope that little blonde girl has an epiphany some day soon and realizes that even if crawling on the floor for men's approval is her thing, she could be doing it for somebody a lot more worthwhile than the little oinker in the chair there. For fuck's sake.

Later in the night the same manager comes up behind me and raps my tray with his knuckles. "That's one," he says. As in, that's one strike.

"Huh?"

"Don't put your tray there."

My tray is sitting on a wide ledge that lines the ramp down to the main floor. It looks pretty safe there to me, especially since I am standing next to it with my hand on it.

"Really?"

"Yes, really. Because someone could come along and just do this."

He puts his hand on my tray and gives it a sharp shove. It flies. Matches and lighters and cigarettes and ballpoint pens scatter while cocktail napkins and credit card receipts drift down slower, like snow.

We look at each other. "Really?" I say, finally. "But, who would do a thing a like that?"

He doesn't say anything and he doesn't have to. He folds his arms. I stoop to pick up my stuff, and here I am, on my knees, at his feet. He wins. I lose. I've been out-pissed in this pissing contest.

I sort everything back onto my tray. I go back to the dressing room. The chair is empty. I take one of my rescued cigarettes and roll it lightly in my fingers, put it to my mouth and light it with a kiss. It tastes like, fuck you. And it tastes like, enough.

I never was a Superstripper. I never had the strategy. I just smiled a lot and hoped that would take me where the money was. It often did.

I have a big smile, open and full of teeth like happy dog. My eyes crinkle shut when I smile, too, which according to some eastern diagnostic traditions means I am destined for a happy life. Here's hoping.

I still smile a lot now that I am cocktailing at my old strip club. I think it's the only reason I make money, not that I'm making that much. Note to self: working for tips during a recession is shit.

I smile all huge at the guy I'm talking to now. "Can I get you something?"

He's all sprawled out in his chair and now his eyes roll up at me like bloodshot eggs. He probably doesn't need another drink. I ask again if I can bring him something. Water, perhaps?

"Just bring me your tits."

"Okey doke," I say. I turn and walk away.

Why are you waitressing? All the waitresss ask me this. Like there's going to be some big dramatic reason. I tell them I just needed a break, but they look at me like they don't get it, so after a while I start making up stupid reasons. I tell them I was tired of shaving my pussy. I tell them I developed an allergy to men's pants.

The dancers don't ask me why I'm waitressing, not the ones I've known for a while anyway. They know dancing can get old.

"I wish I could be a fucking waitress," Ronnie says. "I can't do it though. I'm a horrible waitress."

Ronnie's been here longer than most of us, and yet she never quite looks like a stripper. Her hair and make-up are haphazard, as though she's never quite got the hang of them. Clumsy in her shoes, she sidles crab-wise across the club, awkward and stoop-shouldered. Her pupils are no bigger than a pencil-tip and when she talks to you she stares right through you. Drugs, maybe. Or she's really crazy. I really don't know.

My regular, B., told me she once offered to give him a blow-job after the club closed. She wanted a couple hundred dollars and she gave him her phone number and promised the meet up with him. He says he didn't call her. I can't think of any reason he would make this up.

Everyone sort of knows that Ronnie is a whore, but everyone lets it go. In theory, strippers hate girls like this because they drive up customer expectations and undermine the market for the dancing-only kind of entertainment. But it's hard to hate Ronnie. She isn't hurting anyone.

"I tried to be a waitress," Ronnie tells me, staring right through me at a spot six feet behind my face. "I couldn't do it. It's hard."

"I hope I make it," I say. "I'm sick of dancing."

"Right on," says Ronnie, nodding. "Right on, right on."

And she squirrels away. I'll see her later at the end of the night in the dressing room, where her locker is two down from mine. I'm supposed to use the waitress lockers in the waitress part of the dressing room now, but I don't. Waitresses here are as cut-throat and mean as dancers are sweet and laid-back.

Or maybe it's just a sign of the times. No one's making money any more, and for some obscure reason the club keeps hiring more girls. More dancers, more waitresses. Flooding the floor with girls even as the pool of customers shrinks till we are like angry sea-birds around a vanishing tide-pool. I did OK tonight, but barely, and only because I smiled at the right people at the right time.

Ronnie is cursing next to me and I don't want to know why. "She's so fucking stupid," she says. "She thinks she's all that, but she's not. That's the funny thing. She is not. She is NOT."

She's slurring. She might be a little drunk, but then again she always slurs. It's hard to tell. Maybe she's always drunk.

"You OK, baby?" I say, only because I feel like I have to say something.

"She is a fucking god-damned piece-of-shit cunt whore is what she is,"Ronnie says. "And she thinks she's so hot. Fuck her! Fuck her, right?"

"OK, baby. It'll be OK."

Not because it will be. Just for something to say.

She slams her open palm into the closed door of the locker next to her. And then she does it again, and again, and again. "Fucking fuckingfuckingFUCK!"

I stuff my things in their bag. I pull the zipper shut. I take another look at her, but I can't think of anything I'm supposed to do. I'd rather just not be involved. I imagine a lot of people feel this way about Ronnie. I wonder if anyone loves her.

I back away, and really I don't turn my back on her until I am at the dressing room door and then I go out. The last thing I see is her pitched forward, with her face not quite pressed against the locker door, not quite crying.

I think that's the Egyptian. I've seen him here twice, at my favorite downtown coffee place, the one I stop at on the way home from meetings with my Dayjob Project partner and her team. Meetings start early and run long. I'm tired by the end, every time, but excited. Things are going so, so well. On the bike ride home I stop for coffee to balance my thrill out with my exhaustion.

I've seen him here twice now. I think that's him. He's quite distinctive. Tall, with a ridiculous, matinee idol face. Dark eyes and Rudolph Valentino lips. So nicely dressed, too. Lovely shirts, expensive belts and shoes. We met at the old club, when I'd been dancing for a couple of months. He doesn't look any different out here in the light. I wonder if I do.

"You should be called Layla," he used to tell me, and his accent reminded me of heavy perfume. "Layla means night. Not just any night, but a night in the desert, under the sky. A beautiful night. A romantic night." He really talked like this.

His fingers were always digging into my crevices, trying to creep between my thighs, or my ass cheeks, or my armpits even. Like he was going to put his hand right into me, the way you thrust your hand up in the warm guts of a chicken and neatly twist them out. He didn't stop when I asked him to stop. He didn't even stop when I would grab his wrists and try to force his hands off of me. He was stronger than I was, much.

He would come in in the middle of the afternoon lull when there had been no customers in the doors for an hour or more, and it was sit with him and make money or sit by myself in the dressing room and go home broke. I sat with him every time. And I didn't scream. I didn't go and get the manager. I didn't do the things that I would tell someone else to do in that situation. I stayed and silently fought his hands, and then I took the money and went back to the dressing room and folded and straightened all the bills and put them in my locker. I took his money, and so, I am sometimes reminded by voices in my head and commenters here, I have no right to complain.

Who's complaining? I'm just remembering. I sit here at my table with my coffee and remember. I remember everything. I remember pulling at his fingers and saying please stop, and I remember the obnoxious strength of him and the hairs on his wrist like black wires. He was a big man, with big arms. It was one of the things you would find attractive about him, if you met him somewhere.

"Baby, you're beautiful," he would say. "Your face is a doll face." And he would brush his hand across my cheeks, finger-tips jabbing lightly at the openings of my ears and eyes. "I love you so much, you know that? Run away with me, darling." Then he would laugh fondly. He had a wife. He told me he had a wife. But there was...something. Some real or imaginary problem. I don't remember, if I ever really knew. Then he would dart for my crevices again.

I took the money. I sold my right to be shocked, and maybe my right to be angry, too. Some people would say it wasn't worth it, but those people put a higher price on innocence than I do. I'm not sorry I know the things I know now. I'm not sorry I know that there are people out there who will touch you even if they know you don't want to be touched, and that some of those people are attractive, well-spoken, and nicely dressed. I always had my suspicions that this was true.

I sold my right to be angry, maybe, and that's OK. What I feel now isn't anger, anyway, just a great and unbridgeable distance. Such distance that I don't care if he sees me or not, if that curl of lip is recognition of me in particular, or just of the woman-shaped thing I also am, with eyes and hair and a mouth.

I don't care.

I don't care. He is just a shape. There's nothing he could say or do to me now that would matter to me at all. He could stand in front of me and block my way and I would walk right through him, because he isn't really there.

I am on the phone with Scarlett. It is 99 degrees outside and humid; clothes are impractical in this weather, so I am in my underwear in the middle of the afternoon, on my back, on the couch, on the phone, sweating.

I hate how dark this apartment is. There are no windows that face the sun, at any time of day. The light is always murky, and you don't know what time it is. Scarlett's voice sounds like it's coming to me from the moon, and my own voice sounds that way, too.

"I don't want to be touched anymore," I say.

This is not kind of me. Scarlett went to New York City and went straight, got a straight job and an apartment and some friends, and came back to visit this winter looking sleek and blooming. But things can go downhill fast in a city that big, and this week she started at dancing again, at a "private club" with beds in the VIP.

"I convince guys I'm going to fuck them for fifteen minutes for $160 and then I don't do it," is what she says.

Fifteen minutes is a long time to spend in a closed room with someone who thinks they just paid to fuck you. Everything about that sounds bad. Body-in-a-dumpster bad. I don't want to be that bitch who gets out of dancing for three weeks and comes back and tells all their friends they are Ruining Their Lives, but I am scared for my friend. I want to put a fence around her eight miles high.

I noticed the strain in her voice as soon as I picked up the phone. She launched right in, talking fast, spinning plans for the future, and I hear how she is pushing herself. I know my friend. I hear her brain scrambling in all directions, heart burning at a high heat.

I soothe her, like I know how to do, and when she simmers down a little she asks me what I'm doing, and I say I've left dancing, which is no surprise. I told her my reasons months ago. I try to be cautious about what I say, because there's too much tinder on the ground to go throwing out sparks. But like the good friend she is, she puts her finger right on the sorest spot and presses down.

"What does C. think?"

I tell her I don't know. I tell her he's playing along, but that I'm not sure he really understands, which might say more about me and my lack of faith than it says about him. He hasn't said a harsh word to me, or even rolled his eyes. He tries to live peacefully with me, the hurting monster lurking in the bedroom. He doesn't complain.

But I don't know if he understands. I don't know if anyone who hadn't spent too much time in titty bars could understand how you know that it's been too much time. I don't really understand it myself, not the exact mechanics of it. I don't know why a few months ago it was fine and now it's not, or why I can't conceive of getting my things together and driving to the club. The whole routine -- the coffee I buy at the drive-in on the way there, the parking lot I pull into just at dusk, the front desk where I pay my house fees, the dressing room where I apply my make-up ritually, every stroke, every day, the same -- seems foreign, like something I've heard about but never done myself.

I'm sure C. wishes I could suck it up and go back and make a thousand dollars in a weekend like I used to do. I am sure that he wishes this because I wish it myself. If there were just some actual reason why I couldn't do it anymore. Like, if my leg were broken. If I had a reason to give him, one that I'd know he could understand.

Scarlett understands.

"It's a tough job," she says. "You've done it for a long time. You got a lot of good things out of it. You're tired. It's OK."

She sounds pretty tired herself. I should stop, change the subject. We don't need to talk about how much stripping sucks right now, when she has to get off the phone and shower and shave her snatch and catch the subway to the private club with the VIP and it's waiting beds.

It feels so good, though, to know that someone understands, to be sure of it. And that's when I say it, about not wanting to be touched any more.

The pause is taught.

"Well, it doesn't get any simpler than that," Scarlett says.

"I can't do it. I really can't."

"I know. I know."

Her voice sounds tired. More tired than before? I wish I could see her face. I want to hug her, and be hugged. I wish she were here. There's not even a phone line between us, in a proper sense, just two thousand miles of electrified ether. It's not really quite enough.

I don't do a lot of re-posting on here, but this is the funniest thing I've ever seen. It really is.

So, a couple of people suggested I put up a link to accept donations and after some though I am doing so. There is absolutely no expectation or demand that anybody contribute. Having a reader is an awesome thing for a writer, and you do more than enough for me just by being here.

But in the instance that you enjoy the blog, and wish to express your appreciation through monetary means, then far be it from me to deny you. Give me whatever you woudl slide in my thong if I were on stage, or whatever you would spend to buy this if it were a book, or whatever you would give to a busker in the subway.

I think PayPal will let you include a "message to seller" or whatnot. If you send me an e-mail or an address I will send you a thank you note, because I try to be well brought-up like that.

Peace.

So, this is what I was about to publish when all the crazy people from the Internet showed up and I got paralyzed by self-consciousness. Oh, well. Here goes nothing.

C. and I woke up so suddenly that for a flat second we didn't know what was waking us. Then we heard the sirens all around the house, so many of them, and deafening. From the bed, I pulled the curtain back and saw sparks raining from the sky. We hauled ass into our pants and I snatched the money from the special money drawer and stuffed it in my bra before we ran out into the street.

Fire was rising from the next block over -- a column of it, spiraling into the sky forty or fifty feet, whirling and throwing off sparks which were landing all around us, but thank God it was also raining and the ground was moist.

"It's that house they just renovated," said James, the neighbor we share a wall with, who was also standing on the porch and had had time to put his shoes on and light a cigarette. Fire trucks kept arriving, and showers of sparks kept blowing. Then there was a whooshing sound as the trucks turned the water on, or the foam, or whatever it is. And just like that, the chimney of fire collapsed out of the sky and there was just a red glow.

C. and I went back to bed, where I tried like hell to fall asleep because I had to get up at 9 a.m. to go to work. That's right. After four years of working whenever and wherever the hell I felt like, I had a job to get to. I fucking hated it.

No, not a "real" job, and I know what you mean when you say that, even if I don't agree. Just cocktailing at another titty bar. It's the kind of job you can walk into and make money that day, plus my friend Valerie worked at the club, and she's fun. If this dayshift was anything like the dayshifts I remember dancing through, it'll at least be nice to have a friend around during the long lull between the lunch crowd and the Happy Hour crowd.

So I drove there in the morning in a white top and a black skirt, asked to talk to the manager, and was clocked in to work by 10 o'clock. That part was awesome. Having Valerie trotting around in a Victoria's Secret camigarter and feathered hair like some kind of sexed-out Sixties go-go pin-up girl was also awesome.

Everything else blew. I'd almost forgotten this about the dayshift -- it sucks. Well, it sucks for me. For a certain kind of dancer it is like candy from babies, because all you have to do is sniff out the handful of rich old dudes who come in every day, and avoid the wannabee gangsters who wander in after lunch and sell or pretend to sell drugs all afternoon. You find those couple of customers who really, really like you --because they like redheads, because you remind them of some other girl, or maybe, just maybe because the two of you really get along. That happens, too.

Then you give them your phone number and call them every couple of days and they come to the club and give you a bunch of money to sit with them all afternoon and do whatever it is you do. Which is sometimes nothing. I have literally seen willowy blondes fresh from high school prom sit next to old men with banker's faces all day long, saying nothing.

Some girls are so good at this that they dance for the same five-to-ten guys for years. Not me. I'm really bad at this, it turns out. I have had a few loyal customers over the years, but there's a point in the pseudo relationship where I have to draw a line. I can't chat on the phone. I can't go out to lunch. I can't depend on any one guy too much, because if you do, they know it and they pull the plug. They can't help it, almost. They have to know if you really love them, and of course then it usually turns out that you don't, but if you want the money, you have to find a work-around. You DO go to lunch, or you swear that you will but then you cancel at the last minute, or you DO but then you immediately try to get him to go to the club with you afterwards and give you a bunch of money. It goes from there. I hate that stuff.

Sometimes you don't want to be anybody's fake girlfriend. You just want to take your dress off and be sexy and fun for a few minutes and get a couple of bucks and on to the next.

But this new club is not an on-to-the-next kind of establishment. Most customers who spend any kind of money have their favorite waitress up in VIP already. If you don't have one of those customers, you are stuck in the rotation where you simply get whatever customer walks in the door next, and if it's the homeless guy who comes in and buys an iced tea (the only drink that comes with free refills), tips you fifty cents and crouches in an empty dance booth all afternoon rocking back and forth and oggling the stage, well that's your fucking luck.

In two days I made $72. And on the third day I called the manager and told him I appreciated his help and wouldn't be back. I didn't really have to call. Most girls just disappear without a trace but for some reason I was inclined to be professional.

I spent the day aimlessly, but not a peacefully. I'm like a cow dog. If I don't have enough to do I chew on the furniture. Finally, around midnight, after a solid day of watching me pace the floor and whimper, C. got sick of me and threw me out of the house. "Come back when you've worked it off, whatever it is," said my sweetie, and locked the door behind me.

I rode my bike around in the dark for a while, and then I called the Satanist. He was home and said I could come by, so I tooled over through the steamy streets and we sat in his midnight garden and smoked a joint. It hasn't been the simplest thing to make a real friendship out of our stripper/customer relationship, but we have made some progress, and it's been worth it.

I like the Satanist because you don't have to downplay the drama in things to get him to take them seriously. He believes in karma and chi and magic and the collective consciousness and all that shit. So I can tell him about the apocolyptic vision, fire falling from the sky, and see it catch in his eyes behind those Grandad glasses. I tell him how my mother stood dumbstruck in her yard one day last month and saw the funnel of a tornado lift into the sky and pass over the farmhouse in a rain of leaves. We talked about the storm that tore through town a few weeks ago, blowing over trees and plowing up graves in the cemetery, cracking the plot-stones in half and up-ending them.

I lay on my back on the patio playing with the leaves of the rubber plant. I said, "Is the world ending?" and he squinted at me like a medicine man and said, "Dying people always think the word is ending."

So I told him I couldn't dance anymore, and I didn't know why, and it wasn't dancing that had changed, of course, but me. I couldn't blow the bad stuff off any more and my compassion was exhausted and I didn't think I gave a damn anymore about a single person in the whole world. And he said "Garbage in, garbage out, honey. How much shit can you take in without putting some of it back out?"

"It didn't used to bother me so much. I thought I could take in all the bad and make it good."

He nods. "You did," he said. "You did have that. But it's gone."

I tell him my chest is so tight it feels like a fist is squeezing my heart, milking my adrenal glands into my bloodstream till my body is a factory that never shuts down. I haven't really slept in days. And he doesn't ask me what I mean, because he knows what I mean, and he doesn't say he's sorry, because this is just life.

And then we smoke some more and he takes me around and shows me the holes that the hail made in the garden. He doesn't touch me once, and I am so grateful I could cry. For a minute I get confused and try to tell him how much I like him and why, but he frowns at me and things get weird for a second. "What are you doing?" he says. "Why do you do that? Why do you tell everybody what they want to hear? You're so transparent it's ridiculous."

It's too late to argue and I'm too stoned. I try to smile and not too long later he kicks me ever so gently back out into the night so he can get back to the work of whatever it is he does in his haunted house all night long. I take the hint and hug him and go. He locks the door behind me and I point my bike back towards home pushing myself up the hills and sweating and when I get home I feel so quiet and good, it's like it rained inside of me.

So, I've been through to archives and taken out the couple of things that could have been incriminating to myself or someone else. All in all, I've been pretty cautious through the years -- I've used fake names for people who were already using fake names -- but I had to double-check. I think we're good.

So welcome, new people. Nice to have you here, even the folks participating in the backlash and counter-backlash like I was Paris Hilton's new hairdo, and even the ones who think I'm not a real stripper because real strippers don't use semi-colons or whatever. It's an interesting experience so far and of course, this too will pass.

For those of you who just got here, you are arriving in what may very well be the twilight of this blog. After four on-and-off years of stripping, I am actively looking for a way out, or at least an extended break. For those of you who read my recent posts and think I sound like a bitter cunt, well yeah. The past four years have not been without their difficulties and they have left their mark, for sure. Once upon a time I had a magical ability to transform other people's misery at least temporarily into happiness, and as a dancer I banked off that for a long time, but it's gone now, and there it is.

I'm not at all sure what the fate of this blog will be. I'm pretty busy trying to get famous for something besides being a stripper, so not looking for a book deal or anything like that. I could really use a big bag of money, though, so if you want to send me one that would be awesome.

For now, I'm probably just going to pretend to ignore all of you like I have lovingly pretended to ignore Nathaniel and Anna and the other long-time loyal readers. So, back to our regularly scheduled programming.

P.S. If you are writing to me about something specific and want a response, like a few have, you gots to leave me some contact information. I won't publish it, and if what you're saying interests me I will respond.

P.P.S. Dear Stripper Haters: You are in my house, so please behave accordingly. Your comments will not be published unless they contain unusual insight or some sort of unique expertise beyond "my friend's sister was a stripper and in my opinion she is all fucked up now so you are too." The garden variety of ill-informed vitriol will be deleted with a light heart. I don't have the time or inclination to respond to you individually, but perhaps you will enjoy this.

Who are all of you people? What are you doing here? Why are you yelling at me? Last thing I knew I was in here in the dark talking to Tara and Diopter and maybe Sixty, if he's still around, and now all you guys are here and you're scaring me.

So it's been almost a month now that I've had this sore throat. In that time I've danced four shifts. I caught the cold, or imbibed the allergin or whatever, on a Friday, which I know because the Historian and I had a date.

Our dates are always for Friday. We sat together through the tail of the afternoon and into the evening and the night. Thew range of our topics of common interest is brief, but there's a genuine appreciation of each other, too. An awkward fondness. A few hours in I started to notice the burning in the back of my throat, and by the time he left and I could get back to the dressing room my nose was just beginning to run full force.

It was a nasty, salty, rough, wet cold and it lingered. The coughing didn't really set in til the fourth or fifth day, and then refused to go as whatever it was colonized my respiratory system with terrific efficiency. On day six I felt a little better so I went to work and that night I coughed myself awake all night. And every night I've worked since has been the same.

The problem is my smoking. Obviously. When I dance, I smoke. And when I'm smoking, I fucking smoke. Chain-smoking, really, and if I don't know where my next cigarette is coming from, I get a little wiggy.

I'm killing myself. Sure thing. Every smoker knows this. You can't avoid knowing it. But it doesn't even matter, and that's how come tobacco companies can print right there on the box that this is going to turn your lungs to tar and pound on your heart like a ballpeen hammer on a little rubber ball and your babies will be born stupid and ugly with two heads and forked tongues and we still don't even fucking care. We're still ripping at those little pull-tabs, peeling the wrapping back and, cursing if your fingernails slip because the body wants the nicotine now, not three second from now now now nownow now NOW.

Outside of the club, I don't think about smoking. A pack of Camels sits in my backpack all week long, forgotten. I don't need them at home anymore, in my daily rounds, than I need six-inch stilletto heels.

I've made dancing poisonous to myself is the thing, I guess. Like I don't want it to be too sustainable. I've built in a kind of a kill switch, so that I don't think I'm going to be one of those girls who strips into her forties, much as I admire them.

When I didn't know anything about dancing, I thought a forty-year old stripper was the last word in sad, and I think most people who don't know much about dancing assume this, too. But the woman who's dancing at that age is a rare and finely-honed machine. The ones I've known have been almost universally shrewd, savvy, and hotter than shit. They have to smoke the competition, and they usually do. They've got an intensity, too, each one with her own version of the eight-mile stare because they've seen a lot of shit. In this particular little crevice of human culture and behavior here at this intersection of sex and commerce, they are the only experts.

I don't think I'll make it. I think I'll be out of the game long, long before I reach that level. Or so I say right now. We'll see. But right now no way, and hopefully not in two weeks when the rent is due, either. For now I've got to find another way to pay the rent. I need out and away from the club for a little bit. It's hard to breathe in there.