10

“You can’t be a bald stripper,” Claire said.

“Why not?” I rubbed my newly fuzzy head. My hair was short and blonde. Bianca painted the walls of our apartment seven times and finally settled on battleship gray with burgundy trim. I decided to buzz my hair off.

I wanted to feel the rain on my scalp. I wanted to look like Sinead O’Connor.

“Put this on,” she said. She handed me her curly brown wig that smelled like it had been held captive in a bucket of Downy fabric softener since 1985.

“How does stripping work?” I asked.

Staple guns and fabric swatches covered the floor from our reupholstering frenzy that morning. Now Bianca was repairing the dryer. I thought about Claire and her girlfriend working together. They did girl-girl shows at strip clubs in the Tenderloin and made good dough.

“Can I just walk in and audition?” I asked her.

“You should come work at New Century,” Claire said.

I offered her a free line of crystal on a glass block, like I did for most of Bianca’s customers who were also friends.

“Do they touch you onstage?” I asked. Claire snorted the thin, white line then thumbed through Bianca’s tower of CDs. I handed her Rickie Lee Jones’ version of “Rebel Rebel” and Sinead O’Connor’s “Stretched on Your Grave” extended remix.

“Something more upbeat.” She handed me the Breeders CD. Pointed to “Cannonball.”

“What do I wear?” I asked. I heard scratching inside a wall. I pulled back curtains and there were construction workers digging a hole in the ground with a jackhammer. I pulled out my entire underwear drawer and emptied it onto the bed. I grabbed a vintage white veil, held it in place on my head, and marched around the room. Maybe I’d pull a string of pearls out of my pussy. I thought of it as performance art, after all.

“Here.” She pulled a striped, soft, ankle length T-shirt dress out of a vintage bowling bag, tossed me some scuffed plastic heels and a pair of tight, spandex black shorts. Shadows moved across the streaked walls. “You need a g-string underneath,” she said.

I tore through the pile of panties and fished out a black one.

“Take it off on your last song,” she said, matter of fact.

I pulled on the baggy, unflattering dress and the too-big shoes and slunk over to Bianca who looked up for a sec then disappeared into her toolbox. Claire nodded. I peeled it off and shoved it in my backpack with a ripped pink lace slip then I poured two long, thin white lines from a Ziploc and offered her a straw. “Lady lines,” I said. She snorted it and cringed. A single fat tear fell from her eye. “What if I don’t get hired?” I asked. I snorted my line and sniffed hard, then swallowed bitterness. Numb all over.

“They’ll hire you. They need girls.”

On the bus with my three CDs, and my scraggly wig, the tick-tick-tick sound of mice echoed behind me.

I studied Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae and embraced her shock tactics. I’d rebel against male desire and straight attractiveness. Yet, I was going to make my body available to men. Sure, I’d dance, convince them to part with their money, then laugh all the way to the bank. In queer circles, stripping was the solution to the rent problem.

That was the plan before I knew anything about golden handcuffs or hustling, when stripping was art. Making three or four hundred bucks in five hours would give me plenty of time to study for my midterm exams. Of course I should strip. I needed rent, and I was getting bored hanging around the house all day with sketchy tweekers camping out in our room, singing Throwing Muses songs. Still, the thought of it made me so nervous I wanted to throw up—which was no reason not to try it.