Chapter 2

Polly

1995: Stripper or Baroque-era composer?

Courtesy of the author

1996: Getting the hang of this

Courtesy of the author

1997: F*ck you, pay me.

Courtesy of the author

I arrived an hour early for my first shift because I knew it would take some time to transform from sedate, clothed woman to Live! Nude! Girl! Josephine had instructed me that if a dancer’s hair was shorter than chin length, as mine was at the time, she was to wear a wig, so I’d purchased one of long, unruly, ash-blond curls. I’d been going for a sexy, beach-babe vibe when I’d picked it, but in the dressing room of the Lusty, I saw that the celebrity it most evoked was not Pamela Anderson, but Johann Sebastian Bach. This is not a marketable look for a stripper, but wigs are not returnable, and I was too broke to buy another, so I bravely tucked my hair up inside Johann Sebastian and attempted to apply the false eyelashes I’d bought at the drugstore, which made me look like a small tarantula was nesting on my eyelid. I gave up and just applied some mascara.

Made-up, bewigged, and jacked-up on three-inch heels (high for me, modest for the girl I would become), I put my clothes into the locker Josephine had assigned me and waited nervously for the clock to strike 6:59, when I was to go onstage. At a quarter to seven, a tall, athletic woman strode into the dressing room on legs that seemed to extend from the floor all the way up to her neck and whose hair fell down her back in dozens of small braids. She dropped to the floor, opened a locker in the lowest row, and began pulling off her boots, jacket, jeans, shirt, and underwear until she was completely nude except for a pair of tube socks. She replaced the motorcycle boots with silver knee-high platform boots that zipped up over the socks, pulled a paper towel from the dispenser next to the mirror, placed it on one of the swivel chairs in front of the dressing table, and plunked her bare ass down. (The bulky packet with which Josephine had sent me home had cautioned me always to place a scarf, shawl, or other covering on any surface before sitting down nude, “for hygienic reasons.”) With the speed of a street artist busting out ten-dollar caricatures on Fisherman’s Wharf, she expertly slapped on foundation the exact shade of her medium brown skin, a shimmery powder, eyeliner, fake lashes, eye shadow, deep brown lip liner, and a reddish-brown lipstick. The scrappy, tough girl in torn jeans and motorcycle boots had vanished, replaced by a goddess.

“You new?” she asked, directing her glance at my reflection in the mirror instead of turning around.

Startled to realize she was talking to me, I met her eyes in the mirror and replied to her reflection: “Yes. It’s my first shift.”

Brushing shimmery powder on her collarbones, she said, “Cinnamon.”

I thought she was talking about the powder and wondered momentarily why she would brush herself with cinnamon. Then I realized that she was introducing herself.

“Oh,” I replied. “I’m Jenny.” She raised an eyebrow, and I realized that she had used her stage name, and probably expected me to do the same. “I mean Polly. My stage name is Polly.”

So it went in this house of illusion and mimesis. We stood together each day completely exposed, but we spoke to each other’s reflections, and called one another by made-up names. We hid and revealed, masked and unmasked, covered and stripped, moved easily between barest truth and most fantastic fiction.

When the digital clock on the dressing table blinked 6:59, Cinnamon closed her makeup box, stuffed it into her locker, and told me it was time to go onstage. I got up and followed her down the first hallway toward the prestage mirror—she breezed right past, but I snuck a glance at my new, nude self. Not bad! I felt a little puff of confidence, proud of what I’d pulled off. Polly wasn’t polished and powerful, like Cinnamon, but in her red lipstick, dark mascara, long, blond curls, and high-heeled shoes she at least looked like a reasonable facsimile of a stripper. Emboldened, I smiled in the mirror and headed up the stairs to the stage.

At the top of the stairs, Cinnamon pulled a time card from a rack and shoved it into the time clock, which made a punching sound familiar to me from fast-food and bookstore jobs. I searched the cards, organized alphabetically by last name, found my own, and punched in before following Cinnamon down the dark, narrow hallway to the stage. Our arrival triggered a quiet choreography: a dancer with dark, curly hair waved sweetly at the open windows and purred “Perm” as she slid past me to the exit. Hearing her, a slim, pale blonde in pink shoes floated silently offstage in her wake. Remaining in the little mirrored room with me and Cinnamon were a busty blonde with a beauty mark and sleepy-lidded Marilyn Monroe eyes, and a consummately ordinary-looking white girl in low pumps and understated jewelry. But for her nudity, she looked like she might be working at an insurance office.

Cinnamon approached one of the full-length windows at a corner booth and lay down on her back in front of it. I danced, but the windows on my side of the stage closed one by one, and the faces from those windows reappeared near Cinnamon, craning to get a better view. Soon, she was surrounded by five open windows as she slowly slid her legs open and closed, then turned over and knelt on her hands and knees.

Remember that moment in the Garden of Eden story when Adam and Eve suddenly feel shame at their nakedness? In that moment, I think I understood not just their shame, but its sudden coming on. The tiny shot of confidence I’d experienced looking at myself alone in the mirror drained away as the windows closed around me, and I stood among the fancy ladies, an inept object of desire.

Then I noticed a window shade near me begin to open. Trying to hide my inadequacy, I moved toward it, mimicking Cinnamon’s cool sexiness as best I could. I stepped up onto the platform that ran around the edge of the “stage” under the windows, looked down to see a man’s face, just inches from my crotch, staring intently as if a tiny action film was screening between my legs. How odd it felt to watch someone look so closely at my body, without having even looked me in the face. I felt slightly removed from my own naked body, not as if watching myself from across the room or from above (as survivors of sexual trauma have described the disassociation that accompanies that experience), but more as if I were a puppeteer, standing just behind my own body, operating it from above with marionette strings. I looked around and saw another dancer with the toe of her shoe on the ledge of the window in front of her, and I pulled the strings to maneuver my marionette body into this position. It was a posture I’d noticed dancers using during my “see-show” and audition, its purpose to expose their privates without touching their labia. (For reasons both hygienic and monetary, touching one’s genital area was reserved for the pricier, one-on-one shows offered in the Private Pleasures booth.) I copied this posture, then looked down at the window. The man inside the booth flicked his tongue in a gross licking gesture, looking up at me. I recoiled, indignant, shocked, angry. But then he looked up at me with eager, wide eyes and a proud smile, as if seeking my approval. I hesitated, nonplussed, then moved away, unsure what to do.

In the coming weeks, I would learn that this gesture, so appalling on the street, was the approximate equivalent of a neighborly wave at the Lusty Lady. When I was thirteen, and adult men had begun making sexual comments about me in public places, I’d understood it as a mysterious element of adult sexuality, something I didn’t get, but that seemed to come hand in hand with growing up, a sort of harbinger of womanhood. I’d responded to each instance with embarrassed passivity and ashamed silence, but in college, I’d learned to see such gestures as the licky-lou face—used so frequently by street harassers—as blatant, sexualized threats, expressions of aggression and contempt packaged as desire. Now, confronted with the gestural shell of this harassment, bereft of the aggression and contempt I’d come to recognize in it, my understanding was shifting again. Was I just being re-indoctrinated into accepting again what I knew to be abuse? Was this job demanding that I unlearn my hard-won feminist analysis?

Suddenly, there was a knocking sound, and in the mirror I saw three faces in one window, and six pointing, waving hands, beckoning Cinnamon. She ignored them, but the insurance-office lady snapped to attention. “Uh-uh. Nope. One to a booth,” Naked Office Lady announced sternly, shaking her finger at the offenders. The three nineteen-year-old boys in the booth stared dumbly, then smirked at her. “You and you,” snapped Naked Office Lady, pointing at two of them. “Out.” They stayed, laughing and looking unconcerned, so she stalked over to them, turned around, and slid down the glass, her back and shoulders pressed against the window, completely blocking their view of the nude women. I could hear them object noisily, until one of them yelled frantically at the others, “Get the fuck out, man!” A door creaked, then two more, and the windows on either side of the first opened to reveal the stricken faces of the two delinquents, no longer laughing. Mean Naked Office Lady moved away from the window she’d been blocking and nodded calmly: “That’s better.” I watched in awe as she danced sternly in front of the three boys, who no longer made a sound, but just stared, chastised.

This was a brave new world, where a nude woman could so efficiently disrupt a homosocial bro-fest and instill in a gang of unruly boy-men a state of near total obedience. This wouldn’t work with catcallers on the street, but the Lusty stage, I realized, was actually designed so that women could control and channel access to visual pleasure. This woman was using a very simple, but very powerful, carrot-and-stick technique to exercise power: our naked bodies—more precisely, visual access to them—were the carrot, and her back—more precisely its power to block visual access—was the stick. Observing this choreography of withholding and allowing, I ceased fretting over my possible loss of feminist consciousness, wondering instead how I might learn to exercise the power I saw Naked Office Lady wield.

Naked Office Lady noticed me watching her. “I haven’t worked with you before,” she said to me without taking her policing eyes off the troublemakers. “What’s your name?”

“Polly,” I replied.

“Hi, Polly. I’m Grenadine,” she said, finally smiling and looking my way.

“But we call her Grenade,” said the Marilyn lookalike, eyes on the windows before her. “I’m She-She,” said the blonde, placing both feet on a windowsill, then bending her knees, hands gripping the Lucite bars bolted vertically on either side of the window.

“Chi-Chi?” I asked the blonde. “Like French for fancy?”

“No, She-She, like English for lezbo,” she replied. When her window closed, She-She sidled up to another, wide-eyed, blinking and squeezing her breasts together. In a breathy, little-girl voice she told the occupant, “I want to rub my cock between your tits and come on your face!” She paused and listened as the man corrected her obvious mistake. I couldn’t hear him, but I could see his lips moving as he pointed to himself, then down at his lap, then up at She-She’s breasts, and finally at her face. “Nooo,” she replied in the same breathy voice, shaking her head, earnest and wide-eyed, mouth forming an O. “I want to rub my cock between your tits and come in your face.” She blinked and smiled artlessly. Looking flummoxed and a bit chagrined, the man shrugged as if resigning himself to take what he could get, and continuing to touch himself. She-She turned her ass to the window and winked at me.

A few minutes later, I noticed that She-She was no longer onstage, but the pale blonde who’d slipped past Cinnamon and me had returned.

“Where’d She-She go?” I whispered to Cinnamon.

“On break,” Cinnamon answered, rolling her eyes as if annoyed. She moved across the stage with a huge smile for the guy in window 9. “Hi, baby! What’s your name?”

Grenadine explained that dancers took ten-minute breaks in rotation throughout our shifts, so that one dancer was always on break.

“I’ll go after She-She, and Cinnamon will go after me, and you’ll go after Cinnamon. Watch the clock in the dressing room and leave when the last digit is on the ‘9.’ Don’t be late or you’ll short the person after you.” She lowered her voice to a whisper and tipped her head toward Cinnamon. “Don’t worry. She takes a while to warm up to new girls.”

The quiet coming and going recurred as Grenadine had explained, with She-She returning and Grenadine leaving. Then a new dancer appeared in the doorway misting a paper towel from a spray bottle and wiping off the bottom of her white, patent leather platform stilettos. Seeing her, She-She fluttered her fingers and winked at the man in her window, then strode to the stage door, murmuring, “Perm.” Hearing her, Cinnamon smiled at her customer and followed She-She offstage as the new girl stepped on, followed by Grenadine returning from break. When I asked, Grenadine explained that “perm” meant that a dancer’s shift was over, so the next one in line should start her break. If my break fell ten minutes before the end of my shift, Grenadine advised, I was to say “lucky,” instead of “perm.”

“Why don’t you just say, ‘I’m off’?” I asked, mystified by this strange cypher.

“Because we don’t want the customers to know when we’re leaving. That way they can’t follow us home.”

The girl who had replaced She-She was tall and statuesque with full breasts and a shiny, medium-length pale blond wig. After a few songs, she pulled up alongside me to dance for the window next to mine and whispered, “Hey, I’m Star.”

“Polly,” I answered, regretting my own feeble moniker. Why didn’t I think of a cool name like Star or She-She?

“Are you new?”

“Yeah. It’s my first shift,” I answered.

“Close your door!” Star yelled suddenly, startling me. I realized she was talking to a customer in the booth in front of her. He didn’t respond, just stared at her. Star pointed. “Your door. Close it.” Still no response. She knelt down in front of the window and spoke sweetly, maternally, as if talking to a cute, eager-to-please dog that wanted the treat but didn’t understand the command “Sit”: “Well, you’re just a big dumb-dumb, aren’t you?” Looking simultaneously chagrined and pleased, the man in the booth nodded, eager to assent to anything she suggested. There was a confidence in her technique that made it as effective and forceful as the Grenadine method I’d observed earlier. I was shocked at first, but then deeply impressed by Star’s display of condescension for a customer and amazed to see the man accept her insult as his due. Just like the gang of boys Grenadine had so handily corralled into separate booths, this hapless fellow seemed prepared to acquiesce to any petty directive, endure any trite abuse in exchange for the pleasure Star could either grant or withhold. Unlike in the service industry jobs I’d had—fast food, retail, waitressing—servility and friendliness might not serve me here, I saw. Indeed, to my surprise, the Lusty seemed to require the opposite—an air of mild but unconcealed scorn, an assumption that the customer was always wrong.

After the big dumb-dumb had finally closed his door, Star reprimanded another customer firmly for giving orders and banging on the glass. After several warnings, she barked, “Get out!” When he disregarded her and refused to leave, she placed her back firmly to his window, blocking his view like Grenadine had done. He smacked his open palm against the window in anger, then left the booth, banging the door open so that it hit the wall. I assumed he was gone for good, but about ten minutes later, he reappeared in a nearby window. Spotting him, Star strode across the stage purposefully, poised to enforce her edict, but he looked at her wide-eyed and announced, proudly and conciliatorily, “I’m back! With a new attitude! For you!”

Star looked cautious, skeptical. “You are, huh?”

“Yeah! I’m not gonna act up no more!” he declared, earnestly, like a child. “I’m gonna show some respect! Okay?”

Star broke into an amused smile. “Well, okay then. Let’s do this.”

I was astonished. Watching these women work shook my preconceptions about stripping and strippers. Here were Grenadine and Star, setting boundaries, commanding respect, and telling men exactly what they could and could not do. And there was She-She, inverting and mocking the power dynamics of heterosexuality by recasting herself in the role of desiring subject, and her customer in that of degraded sex object. This was a far cry from the degradation and sexism I’d understood to be at the heart of the sex industry, and as I watched these women work, I questioned my own beliefs. No, their actions didn’t right any real-world wrongs—they didn’t eliminate domestic violence or the pay gap—but they challenged these particular men’s assumptions. Sure, I knew that the sex industry was rife with exploitation, and that sex work wasn’t some magical site of feminist revolution and women’s total liberation. But neither, I realized, was it ground zero for women’s abject subordination, some black hole of agency in which women are robbed of all power to resist or speak out. Operating in a female-centered workplace in which men were quite literally peripheral—sequestered in dark little closets around the edge of our stage—I watched and learned from these Lusty Ladies, who exerted such calm and total power over the men who entered our domain.

Normally, women must choose between safety and vulnerability. A woman cannot, for instance, pick up a strange man in a bar for sex without risking her safety, or at least not without having to stop and consider it, for she knows (and more dangerously, he knows) that our world will excuse any violent act of his, and probably blame that violence on her. This makes anonymous sex—or any vulnerability in the presence of men—a dangerous terrain for women. But ironically, in this pornographic peep show, this temple of women’s objectification and these men’s lust, I found I could be as vulnerable as I had ever been before complete strangers, and yet at the same time be utterly safe. They could not touch me, could not punish me for laying myself so bare. On this stage, I could become a different girl, a girl unafraid, who dared to move with abandon. I had never before experienced a context that so perfectly afforded the twin protections of anonymity and physical safety. I was surprised to feel so free, so unafraid, so powerful.

After four hours, it was my turn to call “perm” and head to the dressing room, where I encountered an orange-haired woman wearing four-inch platform sneakers, rainbow knee socks, a purple ice-skating dress, butterfly wings, and a googly, plastic third eye on her forehead. She introduced herself as Honeysuckle and asked if I wanted to pick up a shift on Saturday morning.

I told her that I thought I was already working. She consulted the schedule pinned to the bulletin board and said, “So you are.” As I dressed, she looked at the bulletin board, where several little notes were pinned up offering to take, trade, or give away various work shifts. Honeysuckle made a few phone calls, leaving messages about the Friday shift. As I was pulling on my T-shirt, I noticed the sound of muffled voices above the mirror. Soon, low moans, grunting breath, and high, ecstatic screams emitted from the mirror. “What is that?” I asked in alarm.

“What’s what?” Honeysuckle looked at me, unfazed.

“That noise!”

She looked bemused for a moment, but then recognition crossed her face. “Oh, that! It’s just porn.” She explained that there was a bank of video booths just above the dressing room mirror and offered to show me. She led me upstairs into the theater’s lobby, past the doors to the live show booths, then around a corner and down a short, dimly lit hallway with numbered doors on each side. Honeysuckle opened one and waved me inside onto a built-in wooden bench. She squeezed in onto my lap and inserted a few quarters into the coin slot under a TV screen. I noticed a wall-mounted metal tissue dispenser to my left. Instead of a window onto a fishbowl of live nude women, the screen was showing a close-up of a man poking in and out of a fully shaven pussy. “Gah!” shouted Honeysuckle. “Too much information!” She turned a knob on the wall and flicked through a series of other videos—a pregnant woman sucking a dick, a woman squeezing her tits together around a penis, a woman licking another clean-shaven woman—finally landing on one of a woman fucking a guy in the ass with a strap-on. “Yee-ha! Ride ’em, cowboy!” Honeysuckle yollered. We laughed together at the apparent gusto of the lady in the video, but after a minute, the screen went blank.

Some guys visited the porn booths exclusively, others ignored them in favor of the live show, and still others spent the whole day traveling between the stage, the videos, the bathroom, the Private Pleasures booth, and the ATM machine in the lobby, like busy little hamsters in a pornographic Habitrail. Honeysuckle pointed out a white man with salt-and-pepper hair by the bathroom and told me he was a cruiser, a dude who hung out in the hallways, discreetly offering hand jobs and blow jobs to guys on their way to the booths.

Honeysuckle pointed out a glass case displaying the covers of the porn films showing on various channels: the “Ready to Drop” series featured pregnant actresses; “Barely Legal” featured underage-looking women wearing pigtails and plaid skirts; “Over 40” featured supposedly middle-aged women who to me looked about the same age as the Barely Legals; they just wore leopard print instead of plaid. There was some fetish porn featuring hairy armpits, adult babies, furry costumes, big butts, big boobs, giantesses, and run-of-the-mill BDSM. Honeysuckle seemed so unfazed by all this, I tried to take it in stride, but the sheer range of sexual acts and fetishes I was learning about for the first time was a bit shocking, and I began to wonder if I’d gotten myself in too deep.

Two weeks later, I slipped through the door from the lobby to the backstage area and checked the clock: 11:29 P.M. I had thirty minutes to undress and don one of my “costumes”—really a few simple signifiers—pearls and white gloves, red fishnets and a velvet choker, or a pleated microskirt and saddle shoes.

I headed for the dressing room and began stripping off my street clothes, damp with sweat after my ride up Telegraph Hill. As a bike commuter, I loved being able to undress the moment I arrived at work, overheated from the ride.

I plunked my makeup box—a repurposed metal biscuit tin—on the dressing table and went to work on my face. She-She was on the futon reading, but when she saw me putting on my red Wet n Wild lipstick, she shook her head and got up. “Lights onstage will wash that right out,” she said, gesturing at my bright red mouth. “Here. Let me, okay?” She paused, making eye contact in the mirror. I sighed, put down my shitty lipstick, and nodded my assent. She pulled up a chair next to me, opened her own makeup kit, turned my chair on its swivel so that I was facing her, and went to work, dabbing on foundation with her fingertips, then a sponge, then a fluffy makeup brush. She brushed shimmery, pale powder over my whole face, then traced a dark, liquid eyeliner around my eyes in an almond shape with a long, tapering wing at the outside corner of each. She used a white eyeliner on the inside of my lash line and a hot eyelash curler to make my eyes look huge and wide. I drew back when she took a brown eyeliner pencil to my lips. She-She pulled the pencil back, looked me in the eyes, and murmured, “Trust me”—part question, part command—and I nodded. She drew the brown line around the outer edge of my lips, then dabbed a tiny paintbrush into a shiny brown lipstick and used it to color in my mouth, carefully staying inside the lines. She turned my chair toward the mirror.

Under the merciless glare of our dressing table’s twenty-eight bare orbs, with my skin’s uniform pallor, my enormous, anime eyes, the brown crust around the edges of my mouth and moist blobs on my lips, I looked like the corpse of a Keene kid who’d died of shock while gorging herself on chocolate pudding without a spoon. “I know,” She-She reassured me. “But onstage, it’s gonna look great.”

“Isn’t it too much?” I asked.

“Nope,” She-She answered knowingly. She assured me that men loved the magic brown line because it makes you look like you’re puckering your lips, subliminally signaling a blow job. She shook her head and muttered, “Men are such semiotic simpletons.” She looked at the clock and jumped up. “It’s on the nine! Gotta go!” I turned back to the mirror and began carefully fitting my baroque-era wig over my real hair. Once onstage, I felt different from before. Before this, it had been difficult to play the sex kitten when mirrors on all four walls and the ceiling reflected back an ordinary girl in plain black heels and barely there lipstick. But now that She-She had tarted me up to look the part, I felt less fraudulent playing it. In my new face, I felt more at home in this human-girl aquarium among these brightly colored exotics.

With help from the other dancers I was learning the many tricks of femininity—that you could make your hair big by blow-drying it upside down, or that men will give you money if you just tell them to while not wearing pants. Piecing together these tips and tricks, I was beginning to develop a persona for Polly.

I watched the other dancers and tried on their various gestures, poses, and attitudes, mimicking She-She’s come-hither eye contact and wink, Grenadine’s stern scolding, Honeysuckle’s sassy flirtatiousness. I watched the man-heads in the windows too, noticing what worked and what did not. In their responses, I could see that I could never pull off Grenadine’s stern disciplinarian pose, nor She-She’s ultra-sexy pose. But I discovered that a playful persona seemed to work for Polly. I learned to part my lips and run my tongue over the upper one—a kind of self-fulfilling imitation of a stripper. I developed a facial three-step—flutter lashes, wink, lascivious lick—that gradually became one of those autopilot, workaday habits that get us through long, tedious shifts, a stripper’s version of “Welcome to Burger King. May I take your order?” I’d notice a guy looking at me while I was dancing for another window across the stage, and I’d do the come-hither lip-lick-eye-wink combo as a way of keeping him engaged while still performing for the first window.

Sometimes, as Polly’s sexy-lady mannerisms became more automatic, they would even creep into my outside life. One day, at the drugstore, I was waiting in line for a prescription, thinking about the other errands I needed to run, when the pharmacist made eye contact to signal it was my turn. Physically present, but lost in thought, I half smiled, winked, and licked my lips suggestively, then immediately recognized what I’d done and looked down at the floor, mortified. She-She later told me that she’d once squeezed her tits at a bank teller in the same absentminded way. When I step back and look at the process of creating Polly, I realize that it mimics the very process by which identities are formed outside the peep show. We watch, we imitate, we try things on, we notice how others respond, and we adapt to those responses until we land upon a way of being in the world that works. That way of being eventually becomes so automatic that we forget the trying on and casting off, the learning, so that we mistake it for the truth, a truth we call “myself.”

Once I’d mastered makeup and mannerisms, I began to work on my topiary skills. I’d previously thought little about body hair removal, except to reject it as another misogynistic practice that exaggerated sex differences and infantilized women by removing signs of adult female sexuality like armpit, leg, and so-called bikini-line hair. When I started dancing, I assumed that shaving would be de rigueur—that all the dancers would have hairless legs and underarms, and that their pubic hair would be trimmed and shaven to neat, uniform triangles. But I was wrong on several counts. First of all, this was 1995, and while Sex and the City had yet to usher the Brazilian into the mainstream, the age of the fully shaven pubic area was at its apex in the sexual underground of San Francisco. Paired with the silent war of genital piercing one-upmanship then raging among 1990s sex radicals, this meant that many of the dancers’ genital areas looked like ’80s punks—fully shaven and adorned with an impressive display of hardware piercing every imaginable protuberance. All around me, silver hoops, studs, and chains cluttered clitorises, labia, and perinea—several dancers clinked when they walked across stage.

More surprising than the fully shaven were the hair-etics whose legs, armpits, and crotches issued a resounding fuck-you to traditional femininity. Some legs were draped with hair like southern tree limbs dripping with Spanish moss. Brown, bunny-tail puffs peeked out under arms, and old school muffs were as common as the fully shorn. This follicular diversity set me free from my own commitment to smashing patriarchy through total depilatory resistance, and I settled on a sort of crop rotation under which legs, pits, then crotch took turns lying fallow.

At thrift stores and trashy shops on Haight Street, I gathered a little wardrobe of costumes. For my first few months dancing, I tried to maintain an impenetrable wall between my own clothes and Polly’s—mine were practical, mostly black, and comfortable; hers decorative, colorful, and often painful. But just as I sometimes inadvertently and inappropriately adopted Polly’s gestures and manners, soon the wardrobe creep began. I would spot a bright pink boa Polly had left in my room on the floor and wear it to a party. Or I’d wear a pair of her fishnet thigh-highs under my cutoff shorts for a date to see Bratmobile at the Clubhouse with RJ. In the pre-Polly days, I might have felt uncomfortable and overdressed in such flamboyant accessories, but now it felt playful, and a bit fun . . . And based on the enthusiasm with which she welcomed these little visits from Polly, RJ seemed to like Polly better than she liked me. I didn’t mind at all; it made me feel exciting and excited to be so desired.

Around the time that the boas and fishnets premiered in my private life, I went shoe shopping for a pair of coveted Doc Martens. Instead, a pair of ridiculous but seductive little gold mules with clear Lucite heels caught my eye. They were the opposite of what I was looking for, I told myself, as I picked one up and marveled at its wild impracticality. I wouldn’t be able to walk or ride my bike in them, I told myself. I’d never wear them. But then I heard Polly’s voice pipe up: Well, if you won’t wear them, I will!

I bought the gold and Lucite hobblers.

Polly was like one of those bad-influence friends from junior high who smoked, climbed out her bedroom window, and wore lots of eyeliner. Seduced (and sometimes bullied) by her confidence and defiance, I let her talk me into things I might not do on my own. But unlike those teenaged sirens on the rocks of my adolescence, Polly never left me stranded in the parking lot without a ride after a Van Halen concert because she’d gotten backstage by blowing a roadie. No, Polly gave me a confidence that sometimes looked like cockiness, a power that sometimes looked like brazenness. Polly showed me a new vision of myself and taught me to inhabit it, like the night I was walking down the street, fully clothed, and a man seemingly waiting for a bus turned to me as I passed, unzipped his pants, and exposed himself. I just glanced coolly at his crotch, unconcerned but sympathetic, and spoke to the flasher as to a little boy, in tones of maternal comfort, just like Polly would: “Oh honey, don’t worry. It might still grow.”

There was an unexpected confluence between coming into my own as Polly and coming out. When I’d dated boys, I’d shied away from high heels and sexy clothes, from anything particularly feminine. The costume just felt too seamless then, like I’d be too easy to mistake for someone you could treat like . . . well, like a woman. I knew that if I wore fishnets or heels on a date with a boy, he would accept them at face value, would find them hot, but wouldn’t understand that I was reclaiming a degraded expression of female sexuality and power, that I was being ironic and subversive. But now that I had taken my body out of heterosexual circulation, femininity felt different. With Polly, my sexy, confident alter ego, as my guide, and women like She-She by my side, adorning myself in the stereotypical drag of female heterosexuality no longer felt like putting a target on my back.

And with RJ, I didn’t worry that she would take my new drag at face value. She saw the artifice and the irony, but also found my new predilection for heels and slinky dresses sexy. I started showing up for dates in makeup and vintage dresses. In the back of a cab, RJ slid her hand up my leg as we made out. When she reached the top of my new thigh-high stockings, she stopped. “How do they stay up?” I played coy and refused to explain the unglamorous secret: garterless thigh-highs have a thick, tight, silicone band around the inside of the top edge that sticks to the skin, leaving a red mark around the thigh. Her curiosity piqued, RJ attempted to find out for herself. She made a grab for my thigh, and I pushed her hand away, laughing. One of the hose had slipped a bit, so I pulled it back up. The rubber squeaked against my leg.

“What was that?!” RJ asked with a laugh, wide-eyed and genuinely curious now.

“Nothing! Nothing!” I shrieked. The cab pulled up at her apartment building, so I jumped out and ran for the door front, pretending to be fleeing RJ’s advances, while she paid the driver. Upstairs in her studio apartment, I sat in an armchair and rolled down the stockings slowly while she watched from the bed, then sauntered toward her, holding eye contact just like I’d learned to do onstage.