Epilogue

The Last Dance

By Thomas Hawk

In the years after I left the Lusty, San Francisco changed dramatically. Once most of the sex industry moved online, draining the Lusty’s clientele to a trickle, the internet came for what was left of our city. Silicon Valley had been thriving just thirty miles south of San Francisco since the early 1980s—about as long as the Lusty itself. For the most part, it had been a world unto itself, a land of geeks and nerdy tycoons who lived and breathed algorithms and code, and generally kept to themselves in the office parks and McMansions of the peninsula and south bay. They’d sent a platoon on an exploratory raid into the northern territory in 1999, an era San Franciscans now call “the first dot-com boom,” and had briefly colonized the artist lofts and warehouses of the SoMa District for start-up offices, but when they’d burned through their investment capital in a year or two without turning a profit, most of them shut down and left.

The cease-fire lasted just long enough for the artists, queers, misfits, and runaways to emerge from the rubble, look around, and begin reclaiming the city. But around 2007, the true invasion began. Tech companies began running luxury charter buses from San Francisco to their Silicon Valley offices so they could recruit a new generation of young employees who wanted to have their cake—corporate jobs, outsized salaries, suburban safety—and eat it in trendy loft apartments among San Francisco’s artists, immigrants, radicals, and queers. Google, Facebook, and Twitter stomped through San Francisco like Godzilla, tossing city buses and taxis out of their way, crushing once affordable neighborhoods like the Mission, the Tenderloin, and the Bayview, ripping up run-down, shared Victorian houses, SROs, and warehouses by their foundations, swallowing them with a great gnashing of teeth. Ordinary house hunters lost bidding wars to tech workers offering twice the asking price, in cash. Real estate speculators began buying up whole apartment buildings, evicting the tenants, and then selling off the one-bedroom units for half, then three-quarters, then a full million dollars each.

San Francisco became overrun by twenty-four-year-old project managers and team-building workshop facilitators and branding consultants in bushy beards. They scrubbed the streets clean of donut shops, taquerias, boho coffeehouses, and greasy spoons, replacing them with artisanal, gluten-free donut bakeries, taqueria-themed small-batch tequila bars, coffee roasteries decorated with ironic, cold war Soviet iconography, and self-consciously greasy-spooned diners whose menus read as a burlesque on the diet of the American poor—macaroni and cheese balls deep-fried in house-cured bacon fat, or a trio of house-jelled Jell-O cubes in passion fruit, breadfruit, and papaya, topped with house-whipped “Cool Whip.”

I too had changed since leaving the Lusty. I’d completed and defended my PhD dissertation and had begun teaching, part-time at first, eventually landing a full-time job, then tenure, at a local college. I’d moved into the dining room of a seen-better-days, two-bedroom, four-roommate flat. (In San Francisco Victorians, it’s a given that you stuff a third roommate into the formal dining room, a fourth behind the antique pocket doors that divided the “split parlor” so fashionable in 1895.) In addition to the multiple roommates—a history doctoral candidate at Berkeley, an avant-garde filmmaker, a gay-famous transgender rapper—the lease (and with it the original rent) had been passed down through several roommate “generations” since the original crew signed on the dotted line in the mid-1990s. After years of multi-roommate living and rent control, I’d saved enough to afford the down payment on a sunny apartment in the Mission, where, in the summer of 2013, nine years after stepping off the Lusty stage for good, I was working on an application for a year’s sabbatical when I saw a message from Princess, the dancer who had taken over operating the Lusty in recent years: “Dear Ladies and Friends in the Community: It is with shaking hands & tear-stained cheeks that I write to say, The Lusty Lady San Francisco is CLOSING.”

I wasn’t surprised. With the competition from the internet, and from unregulated clubs pushing dancers to do more and more for less and less, the Lusty’s market share had dwindled.

The Lusty had become famous for being unionized, and then worker owned, but the people who thought that was cool in theory were not the same as the people who wanted to go to peep shows.

My contact with the Lusty had faded, yet now and then I heard little whispers that amid the crushing colonization of San Francisco, our plucky little peep show had soldiered on. But the vicious downward spiral that had begun with Déjà Vu’s takeover of the Broadway strip continued; dancers’ wages fell perilously as the theater’s gross sales plummeted. In the past, the Lusty had attracted dancers avoiding the exploitative conditions, physical contact, or constant hustle of traditional clubs. Most had chosen the Lusty as the best option among many, while others picked up shifts at the LL as a reliable backup to jobs at other clubs where the money was more plentiful, but less steady. But by 2013, wages had fallen so low at the Lusty that the club was having trouble hiring dancers. As a result, performers were dancing twenty or twenty-five hours, spreading themselves thin to keep the place staffed and their own rent paid. At the same time, because of the invasion of overpaid tech industry workers willing to pay thousands a month to live in dry-walled cubicles, rents soared. When I’d started dancing in the mid-1990s, nearly all the dancers lived in San Francisco, sharing 3:00 A.M. cabs to the Tenderloin, SoMa, the lower Haight, the Mission, maybe the Western Addition, but by 2013, almost all the dancers commuted from Oakland, where rents were substantially lower.

I’d been troubled to read in 2011 that the LL board of directors was looking for “investors” to save the club from financial ruin. Why, why, I’d fumed, would they seek out what we’d worked so hard to escape—a boss who’d never done a pole dance or pushed a mop? If they couldn’t pay themselves, then an investor wasn’t going to be able to do that for them. I held myself back from getting involved, but wished I’d done better, set things up to last, prepared for the changing tide I’d seen rising years before. I wished I’d created a webcam and a source of online income, forged formal agreements with other local co-ops so dancers who had burned out or aged out could transition to other fields. I reminded myself that I had done the best I could at the time, even if I’d known that it wouldn’t be enough.

But now, almost ten years after I’d left the Lusty to the stewardship of my comrades, I was reading an announcement that our beloved, filthy little cave, dug into the side of Telegraph Hill, would close for good in two weeks’ time. Alumnae were invited to come out on closing night and hit the stage for one last dance, one final swing around the pole.

So, on September 2, 2013, I walked up the east side of Kearny Street, just past Pacific Ave., just south of the glowing Broadway strip, and looked across Kearny at the theater. The sidewalk was crammed with former dancers posing with the neon Lady, who continued her obsessive-compulsive three-step, unaware that tonight we would disconnect her from the life support that had pumped red through her veins for thirty years. The Lady was all that remained of the theater’s original signage.

I watched the little scene outside the theater, scanning the crowd for faces I’d not seen in years. The public was there too, strangers at the graveside. I walked skittishly across the street, invisible to the new dancers. Generations of strippers turn over quickly, but when a Lusty left the business, others remained who’d known her, worked with her, recognized her as belonging. But for me, even dancers who had known those who’d worked with me were gone. They were all rank strangers to me. Then I saw Miss Muffy. She’d been helping with the closing preparations for the last month and had kept me abreast of the developments.

“Jamie!” I called her real name.

She turned. “You came!”

“I had to.”

“I’m so glad.”

She led me through the crowded lobby and hallway, to the backstage area and the dressing room, also crowded. The current workers had set up Tony’s old office as a tiny dressing room for alumnae. Crowded inside with drinks were Julep, Tami, and Kitten. Decadence, Jane, and Cinnamon walked through the hallways bunched together, as if making their way through a haunted house. It was an ambivalent reunion, like any funeral.

At 8:00, support staff carried a wooden coffin through the red-light district, surrounded by a scruffy, ragtag funeral procession of women carrying red parasols, wearing filmy veils or whored-out widow’s weeds, cleavage thrusting out of black lace and tulle. Some cried, hugging each other—both for comfort and for balance in their stiletto heels—some laughed, drank, shouted. At each of the clubs on Broadway that had been taken over in the past fifteen years by Déjà Vu, Inc., the mourners stopped and shouted, “Fuck you, Déjà Vu!,” arms shooting out of the crowd in every direction with middle fingers extended, like some great, churning, multi-limbed machine.

The event announcements had invited alumnae to take one last turn onstage, and now Julep and Tami, both in their forties, were undressing and putting on heels. I hadn’t planned to dance. In the nine years since I’d retired from the stage, I had gained twenty pounds, and fine lines winked around my eyes and forehead. Gone were my six-pack abs, my long blond hair, my stylized bikini wax.

And yet, as if by compulsion, I stripped down to my high-heeled boots and followed Julep and Tami up the stairs to the stage. Air blew against my belly, my breasts, my naked haunches, as strangers breezed past me in the hall and stairway, a familiar if distant sensation, exposed and vulnerable, but unnoticed, unremarked among all the other nude bodies.

I found myself once again at the entrance to the stage, blinking in the lights. As I stood there, years of memories rushed into me, and I moved onto the stage and began to spin around the pole and bounce from window to window. My moves—Polly’s moves, Delinqua’s—returned to me like I’d been doing this every day these past nine years. The other alums, all in their forties, looked gorgeous, vital, sexy, energetic. Tami, now a librarian and mother of a twelve-year-old, was initially self-conscious about her age and C-section scar (a tiny, pale line I had to bend over and squint to see when she pointed it out). She danced timidly at first but was soon strutting the stage with confidence in a chain-and-leather corset. Julep, now an attorney but still just ninety pounds—most of it in curly red hair, huge, laughing eyes, and wit—flew through the air on the brass pole at the south end of the stage.

As on that May day years before, I stayed on, unable to leave, not because I didn’t want to miss the fun, but because I knew this really was the end. I didn’t want to see its doors close, this grimy little pit where I had become my grown-up self. Perhaps it wouldn’t close after all, I thought. It had been open around the clock for over thirty years. No one even had a key to the front door.

I did finally leave that night, crying salty, bourbony tears of goodbye to Polly, to Delinqua, to the neon Lady, to this dirty, glamorous little box, stinking with the smell of my youth, my love, anger, pride, shame, fear, loss, and triumph.

And close it did. That night, the Lusty Lady stopped tapping out its neon telegraph to freaks from far and wide, those bold, angry, brainy girls in Frankfurt, Indiana; Tallahassee, Florida; and Gillette, Wyoming. She stopped beckoning them to the whore-haunted south slope of Telegraph Hill, to spin amid an unlikely sisterhood of women called Octopussy, Amnesia, Justice, Peace, and Chaos, women who burned brightly and hotly and briefly in that grubby, sleazy little dive, then cooled and ossified back into Allisons, Stephanies, Lauras, and Megs. Late that night, after thirty years of endless motion, we pulled the plug, and the lusty lady we thought would dance forever finally ceased her waltz and slept.