I sprinted down 8th Avenue with my stripper duffel bag on my shoulders. This really tested the structural integrity of the thick, padded shoulder strap, but the bag somehow stayed in place.

While I wasn’t in any danger of missing a morning round-table on the subject of bagels and multiple selections of coffee and juice, I did hate being late because it would mean that I missed sitting side by side with Melody as we transformed from Brooklyn locals to strippers. My home life was filled with chaotic cock-crazed obsession, and my work life was a whirlwind of highs and lows, glitter and nudity, and cash. The morning routine Melody and I had—caking on foundation and dousing ourselves in Rite Aid body spray—created some sense of calm in my nonsensical life. I’d say it was the calm before the storm, but it was more like a calm between two different storms, in two different boroughs. My impromptu morning craze for cum put me behind schedule, and now I’d be contouring my face alone.

Melody was always on time. She had her whole routine timed to the second. She woke up at the crack of dawn, she walked her daughter to school. She walked back home, gathered her things, without fail took the 8:43 G train uptown, then the 9:17 train across town. She got to the club around 10:05, ate some yogurt, put her makeup on, and then immediately went to the floor and started her hustle. My college graduate friends could barely make it to their jobs at the coffee shop on time, even when their shift started at 4:00 p.m. Melody had no formal education whatsoever, but was by far the most responsible person I knew. She made me want to do better in life, even if that life was inside of Club 42.

I plowed through the club’s door and ran up the stairs. The dressing room was empty. I stripped out of my yellow Maxi dress and flats, and I did an abbreviated version of my stripper makeup. Fortunately, with the vitamin C serum I’d been using, my glowy face required less makeup. Or at least, that’s what I liked to tell myself. I brushed foundation on my face, made a thick, distinct line of liquid liner on my eyes, glued long lashes onto my shorter lashes, highlighted my cheeks with a forty-seven-dollar shimmery stick from Rihanna’s makeup line, slid on some black thigh-high boots, a short red dress, a sparkly black thong, a leopard print garter around my thigh, and I took a deep breath. I proceeded to head downstairs, into the abyss of intermittent multi-colored lights, fake smoke, and nonalcoholic beverages.

I saw Melody on stage, doing one of her infamous boob tricks for a small crowd of mesmerized men, to the beat of “Talk to Me” by Peaches. There’s not a lot of music that makes just as much sense in a strip club with yuppies as it does in a warehouse filled with beards and tattered vintage cardigans, but Peaches successfully defied that. It was dance music mostly for people who weren’t strippers, but when an actual stripper danced to it, it was awesome.

Melody saw me from the stage, and it was as though her left boob was waving at me, going up and down and up and down.

I circled the room, and all the customers who weren’t hypnotized by Melody’s breasts were shacked up with strippers on their laps. It was a complete violation of all stripper codes to even glance in the direction of customers who already had a lap dance claimed. I walked up the ministaircase to TJ the DJ’s little lighthouse.

“Hey, get me on stage whenever you can. I’ll dance to whatever I don’t care—I just need people to know I’m here!” He half listened to me with his headphones on, and he scribbled “LeClaire” on his whiteboard. TJ nodded his head to the music, which I took as my cue to leave. Sometimes TJ seemed to want to indulge in small talk, and sometimes he seemed to really want you to get the hell out of his booth. If the headphones stayed on, it meant “go away.” But just as I was about to leave, TJ pulled one side of his headphones up.

“Why you late?” he said. I found that odd. I knew TJ had authority over what songs to play and held the power to make the stage purple or blue, wish someone a happy birthday, or announce drink specials, but I didn’t know he had any concern for what time we began our shifts. That seemed above the whiteboard’s pay grade.

“I . . . don’t know? Subway . . . um.” I stumbled on my words and TJ started laughing.

“Just playin’! Ruby just went to VIP, so I can put you up next?” Before I had the chance to reply, or thank him, or pretend to laugh at his horrible attempt at sarcasm, he erased Ruby’s name off the whiteboard. He put Ruby’s name down at the bottom, and then wrote a bunch of roman numerals next to it. Every time I thought I was coming closer to understanding the logistics of how this whiteboard worked, he would throw in an asterisk or a roman numeral, and I’d be back to square one. Regardless, I could deduce from this interaction that TJ and I were on a joking around basis, and that he was doing me some kind of solid by letting me skip the line while Ruby worked on . . . roman numeral seven. I appreciated this new camaraderie.

I waited on the side of the stage as Melody collected her dollar bills and her various pieces of neon string.

“Gooood morning everyone! Let’s give it up for MELODY! Put your hands together for Melody. She’s available for lap dances and VIP rooms. Coming up next on stage, it’s LeClaire! LeClaire, coming up to the stage.” Melody winked at me as she left the stage. While I wished nothing but the best for her, I hoped she’d had a truly miserable and empty morning without me in the dressing room. Okay, that might have been a bit dramatic, but I did hope she missed me a little bit.

TJ put on a Nickelback song. I have to admit that . . . I did not hate when this song came on. I had developed a unique relationship with it, where I fully acknowledged that my hipster friends judged it, but I found myself enjoying stripping to it. It took me some time to be honest with even myself about this, but I couldn’t deny the scientific phenomenon that occurred when it came on. The song starts off all slow, and then it kicks in, but not, like, too much. When the chorus kicked in, I flipped my hair, threw my legs up in the air, and found myself thrusting my pelvis. I got emotional and sensual, and I got a big rush of adrenaline that made all the customers infinitely more attractive.

At this point, I had become complacent about the fact that I was going to lead a double life forever, where hipster Naomi and Nickelback-loving LeClaire never needed to cross paths. My two personalities could exist on different planets, in different boroughs, without anyone ever knowing about my double life.

That was, until right now.

I was lost in my own moment, crawling around on stage, basking in the joy of the predictable guitar riffs that felt so comforting. I slid my short red dress off and slithered around the stage in my thigh-high boots. I wrapped my legs around a bald man in glasses who was sipping on root beer, and I pulled his tie toward me. From his expression, I knew I had pre-sold one lap dance. Everything was going smoothly, dollar bills were flying onto me. The big chorus was about to come up, and I was going to do an epic hair flip. This hair flip completely disrupted the slow and seductive tone of the dance and turned me into some kind of stripping sex goddess. I pointed my head down, strategically collected all of my hair to the front of my head, and then I would BAM, FLIP! It was almost time to get up, do a twirl, and tease my panties off—

“What the fuck? Naomi?!” I heard from underneath my own hair. It felt so bone chilling, so invasive, and so intrusive to hear the name “Naomi” in here. My two lives could not intersect. I was Superman right now, and Clark Kent wasn’t allowed in here. Naomi was sitting in a small bathroom in Brooklyn, happily content with a load of Rob’s jizz.

What the hell was going on? Was someone else here named Naomi? I couldn’t let this ruin my hair flip. At least four customers had been waiting for this moment, and more importantly, I had been waiting for this moment.

I flipped, and felt the ends of my hair fall back into place down my spine. And then I found myself looking straight into the eyes of Rob, standing near the stage with the rest of his band members and another guy who was slightly older, maybe in his mid-forties. Melody ran over to the guy in the suit—it was apparent that she knew him—and if she went out of her way to talk to him, he had to have been a regular customer of hers with multiple expense accounts and a credit card that matched the color of my thigh-high boots.

I stood on stage, frozen, missing all the good breakdowns in the Nickelback song.

“Hey Jerry! I was JUST thinking about you. You’re looking sexy today!” Melody said to the guy in the suit. Melody had impeccable selective memory. Anyone who spent over $1,000 on her remained etched in her brain, and whenever these big spenders made a return to the club, she could sense their presence, and she had always, without fail, “just” been thinking about them.

“Melody, this is the band I manage. I want you to take good care of them.” He handed her a fresh stack of cash, with hundred-dollar bills that looked so clean and sharp, I was mildly concerned she’d cut herself on them.

“This should be enough to get you started,” he said. I had no idea how much was in that stack ... but I didn’t have time to do the mental calculus at the moment. Rob was standing a foot away from mostly naked LeClaire.

“Are you fucking kidding me right now? Really? You’re a fucking stripper?” Rob ignored his bandmates and the other customers, and even Nickelback. I didn’t know how to respond. Was there a point in responding? Melody watched the exchange with concerned eyes, while shoving her tits in his band member Sean’s face.

I glanced up at the DJ booth, and TJ looked confused. I couldn’t let him down. I knew TJ took his whiteboard very seriously, and he didn’t just reorder names for anyone. If I messed this up, he might lose trust in me, and I’d never jump to the front of the line again. I crawled over to the other side of the stage, acting as though business was usual, even though there was nothing at all usual about this business. I was well aware that the chorus of this song repeats itself a few times, and I was going to do another hair flip—nothing was going to stop me.

The customers on the opposite side of the stage from where my life was crumbling to pieces were completely oblivious. They sipped their nonalcoholic drinks, loosened their ties, and made themselves comfortable. I did my flip, I squatted against the pole and bounced my knees up and down. I got down on all fours, I kicked my legs back and forth, I thrust my pelvis in the air and basked in the moment. This was my moment, this was my stage, and no one could take it away from me. That was, until the end of the song, when the moment would literally be taken away from me as TJ called another girl to the stage.

I felt like I was dancing harder and better than I ever had, like I had something to prove. I realized, I wanted Rob to see this side of me. I wanted him to gawk at me the way all the other customers here did. I wanted him to stare up at me like a goddess, I wanted him to get a lap dance where he could worship me but not touch me. I wanted him to clank his own bottle of root beer against his “manager’s” and say “That’s my girl up there,” while Digger and Sean showered Melody with money from that stack of cash they’d been handed. I played this fantasy in my head as I continued to shimmy my legs for the small crowd of customers in front, men who handed me bill after bill after bill until their own ministacks were done.

The song ended (and might I add, this particular Nickelback song does end rather abruptly), and I smiled at the assortment of men in khaki suits in front of me. A man with dark combed-over hair came toward me and told me to see him when I get off stage. I smiled and nodded and pretended to act like everything was completely normal, though it wasn’t.

I peeked back at the other side of the stage, and Rob was gone. Melody was sitting on the lap of the “manager,” and Sean and Digger sat with their arms folded in chairs, incredibly uncomfortable. I walked off the stage, threw my dress on top of my sweaty body, and sloppily rubber-banded the stack of singles around my garter belt. My hands were shaking, my stomach was racing—I wasn’t entirely sure who I was and what was real at this moment. This summer had been a whirlwind summer camp romance between me and Rob, and me and stripping. Rob showing up was as if my parents came to pick me up from summer camp a day early, before I had time to say goodbye to all my friends. But in this instance, was I saying goodbye to Rob? Or the stripping?

I walked aimlessly through the club in my existential crisis, and then Rob stopped me dead in my tracks, close to the nonalcoholic bar.

“You fucking liar,” Rob said. “I thought you worked at a coffee shop! What the hell was that?”

“I did work at a coffee shop. And then . . . I didn’t work at a coffee shop. And I don’t know, everything kinda happened so fast, and I didn’t know how to tell you. Does it really matter? What’s the big deal?” I looked up at him with pouty eyes, which on most occasions shortly led to his cock down my throat. “Did you like seeing me up there?” I asked.

“Do you know how fucking embarrassing that was? To walk in here, and see you up there looking like some dumb slut, in front of my band, and my manager? Are you fucking kidding me?”

My jaw dropped. I was in complete and utter disbelief. The same guy who’d fucked my ass on the floor of a public restroom and maybe changed his socks four times in the past three months had some kind of prejudice against strippers? A guy who relied on couches to crash on and pussies to penetrate in lieu of signing a lease and paying rent anywhere, ever, had just referred to me as a “dumb slut.” Could I even begin to explain that the dollar bills being thrown at me all summer had paid for everything, from the electricity that powered his Xbox to the Plan B pill I took just the other day?

No. There was no need to explain any of that. I had truly learned the power of my own body language while working here. I spoke to people through my movements on stage, and this conversation expanded to grinding our crotches against each other in a lap dance. Actions spoke louder than words here at Club 42, and for that reason, I decided that I should—

To see what happens if Naomi slaps Rob in the face, turn to page 212.

To see what happens if Naomi kicks Rob in the balls, turn to page 214.