26

Two years passed like this, living somewhere between stripper and social worker, when I met Ian.

Ian was an olive-skinned, tattooed hairdresser who worked at the beauty salon where I’d made an appointment to get hair extensions. I figured he was queer—like everyone else who worked there—so, when he asked me out, I laughed in his face and went back to my magazine. I figured one of the girls had put him up to it. He came back again, caught my eye in the mirror and said, “Seriously, what do you say?” Offers weren’t exactly pouring in. The only men I spoke to were customers in the strip club and clients at the Polk Inn. In my mind, men weren’t for dating, they were for money. Boys were drug addicts for whom I doled out HIV and psych meds. If I wasn’t dating anyone at all, male or female, didn’t that make me simply available?—Okay, why not? I thought.

“Sure,” I mumbled while Sparrow tugged at my tangled weave.

It was just dinner. And dinner didn’t hurt, much, though I spent most of it with my arms crossed, wondering what the hell I was doing. I’d forgotten how to begin with a guy. When he dropped me off where my motorcycle was parked outside his house, I got flustered when he leaned across and kissed me. He didn’t have the over-cologned, under showered customer smell. He had ample soft lips and smooth skin that smelled like donuts and weed. I jerked back, afraid I’d be repulsed, afraid I would throw up in his lap, but that’s not what happened. The kiss lingered through several Massive Attack and Radiohead songs on a mixed CD. Cars honked and were forced to weave around us. I hadn’t enjoyed a kiss this much in a very long time, maybe ever.

Ian was smart and poetic in a way that made perfect sense to me. He played the harmonica and wrote lyrics about smoking and pot saving the world from corporate greed.

“Do you want to come upstairs and see my shoe collection?” he asked.

I followed him upstairs to his room where he kept his bong and we fucked until I was sore and it was morning. Six months later he was my boyfriend, a year after that I moved in with him. On one of those days, I realized I was falling in love.

Then one day, on the way out the house, Ian just announced, “I’m moving to L.A. with my band.”

Hating L.A. was in my Northern California DNA. We even had a burl plaque that hung on our living room wall that read, “We Don’t Give a Damn How it’s Done in L.A.”

“You go there, it’s without me,” I said. He grabbed his black bike messenger bag and hoisted the strap across his chest. Smoothed out his black Dickies.

“Move into the band house with us,” he said. I pictured moving into a communal hippie house with dirty floors and full ashtrays; the smell of stale bong soaking into my clothes; nonstop rap music. “L.A. wouldn’t be bad for you.”

“No way.”

He shook his head, gave me a limp hug, and walked out my front door.

Maybe he was right. Maybe I could find another nonprofit organization to work for and never strip again.

We broke up when he moved, but it didn’t stick. I didn’t know how to stay broken up, especially from Ian, so I gave my two weeks at the Polk Inn and decided I’d find another halfway house to work for. L.A. was teaming with them. I packed up my two bedroom Victorian apartment on Folsom Street, shoved everything into a U-Haul, and drove off to L.A. He moved out of the band house and we hunted for an apartment together.

Our dinky shitbox was right off Sunset, walking distance from a cathouse called Paris Nudes that I hoped I could stay away from. Our apartment building was neon green and had a concrete balcony where Ian kept his bong. It had a view of our parking lot. I woke up to the sound of Russian immigrant senior citizens hocking loogies out the window. If I looked out I could catch a spit tail freefalling like a sparkler, landing on my motorcycle. When I saw them in the street they glared at me like I was smoking crack with their Babushka. I turned away, afraid they’d spit at me if I stared too long.

I’d come to L.A. hoping to quit dancing and start fresh. I missed my old life, the quick access to cash, and the feeling of being desired. Without it, I felt ugly, useless, and numb. I’d been stripping so long, it had become innate.

I dreamed about stripping: I was in a stadium in front of thousands of men, like at a Mötley Crüe concert. Instead of the band playing, there I was, topless. Swinging from poles that reached the stars. I came to, angry and full of dread. I didn’t belong in L.A. I missed stripping.

My chubby thighs stuck together in the demonic August heat. I pestered everyone I knew in an effort to find a job that wasn’t stripping, but none of my leads returned my calls. It was weeks before I landed a job cleaning houses, cash in hand, but it wasn’t enough. I’d have to find something else, learn something new. I was persistent, open to anything. I hoped I could reinvent myself overnight but, even though I had a degree from Mills College and some solid direct service counseling under my belt, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was nothing but a thirty-something ex-stripper with no kids and no husband, desperate for a gig.

The motorcycle couldn’t always get me to the houses I cleaned—though occasional, it does rain in L.A.—so I parked it in the garage and bought a bullethole-ridden, crap brown 1978 Disco Nova from a guy named Clyde at Rent-A-Wreck for three hundred bucks. I’d heard about a job in the valley testing porn stars for HIV, but I had to learn to draw blood to do it, so I signed up for the required course. A skinny blonde taught me how to tie a tourniquet and locate veins. It wasn’t stripping but it was still working with sex workers. I studied plasma, platelets, and cells. I administered the HIV tests that allowed porn stars to stay on the payroll—in this job I could keep helping people and be surrounded by sex workers without needing to be naked. At least it wasn’t Paris Nudes.

I named my crap brown nova Cricket, for the clicking noise. Her AM radio played two radio stations: Christian talk shows and oldies, so I chose Frank Sinatra. When that faded, I listened to murmurs about sin and redemption on the fifty-minute drive from Hollywood to the HIV clinic. The sun baked my arms by 8:00 a.m., so I arrived wilted and sweaty in maroon scrubs. I made small talk with clients while I searched their forearms for juicy veins; spun their purplish blood and siphoned their piss while they told me about their kids, spouses, and upcoming scenes.

Phlebotomy was supposed to be my transitional career out of the sex industry, but it became my gateway back in.

Ian hit his bong each morning and sold pot out of a yellow seventies Tupperware container he kept in our closet. When he was asleep I snagged five dollar bills from that container for gas or lunch money. We were scary broke. He cut hair twice a week and had band practice three nights per week. While he was at band practice, I collected our change and poured it into the machine at Vons that made a sound like slot machines in Vegas. It spat out a coupon for money that I used to buy four-dollar turkey meat I stretched into meatballs in an effort to make it last. I would squirt ketchup into the leftover meat to make spaghetti sauce. Once, a famous drummer I had a crush on raised his eyebrow at me as my change clanked through the machine at Vons. I’d forgotten what it was like to be this broke. I glared at him the way my Russian neighbors glared at me.

At an interview for a bartending gig in Beverly Hills, standing in line with about eighty people who’d also seen the post on Craigslist, a guy a hundred years younger than me with fake blue contact lenses asked me about my work history.

“What about the ten-year gap here in your work history?”

“I was a nanny” or “I was in school” or “I lived with a well-off boyfriend,” were my answers. One of the porn actors I befriended gave me a list of catering companies that he worked for when he was between movies. The catering company was in San Gabriel.

They didn’t ask many questions, they just told me to show up in black pants and a white tuxedo shirt to bartend a wedding. When I wasn’t drawing the blood of porn stars, I bartended Bar Mitzvahs, baby showers, birthday parties, and weddings all of which were intrinsically sad to me. I’d settled into a life of crab cakes and chicken skewers and mini cupcakes that I passed around on brown plastic trays. My boss didn’t allow us to accept tips directly, so I shoved dollars into my tube socks and counted them in my lap during my drive back to Hollywood.

My radio was often drowned out by the flashing sirens and helicopters that are everywhere in L.A. and especially near my apartment. It felt like there was always something horrible happening in Los Angeles.

First, there were fires. Thousands of acres were swallowed in orange flames that reached the sky, scorched the hills of L.A., and leveled homes. I was hypnotized by the destruction. Children were abducted; men dressed in Santa suits shot ex-wives in the face. Night stalkers and grim sleepers rose to kill again, and abandoned babies were found in trash cans behind Del Taco. People held signs and begged for money near freeway entrances while gang wars raged.

A couple of months later, on the way to bartend a baby shower in San Gabriel, the Nova died on the 210 Freeway. I called Ian.

“I’ve got to get to work and the car just died.”

“Good luck with that,” he said, and hung up. Sitting there on the freeway, at that moment I knew that it was over. I would end it before we’d ever really begun—he had done for me what the orchid breeder had. He had helped me escape something—but he couldn’t help me do more than that.