GIRL UNREAL: a Stripper Story

I once was a two-footed creature with a swimteam tan and sunshine bleach-job.  Blood and years stained me, in my rapine beauty.

I once was a woman with so much money stuffed in my purse that I couldn’t zip it, making daily deposits after being up all night, dancing.  After work, in the southern dark of sweaty gardenia, the pavement sighed.  I counted my money while waiting for the bank to open, engulfing footlong tuna-melts, watching Truffaut films and The Valley of the Dolls, with the sound muted, playing Joy Division or New Order or some other pop-nihilistic band, still dancing in my heels, always pissing off my downstairs neighbor.  

I once was a woman who danced away my grievances.  Now I fantasize about being like the women I once danced with, the career strippers.  The ones who give 150%, snort all the coke they can find and have the most expensive tits.  I once was a woman afraid of other women, these extreme women, these career strippers. Our reasons for dancing seemed different, like they were cheerleaders, choosing it. 

Circumstance chose me.  I was always about to quit.  Going from club to club.  Somehow, I danced my way in and out of a decade.  To defy the years, I treated it like it was life experience.  I thought my dance was temporary, so I tried to remember: everything. I imagined writing about my nights, all the potential spent crawling, eyes begging attention, in the red glaze.  As I counted my money at the end of the night, I imagined: New York and poems. 

My journals become escapist folders for stories about men.  A racist cop in Atlanta chooses me as his favorite, and I dance for him out of fear.  A southern college boy tells me he’s gay and asks if he’s going to hell.  I tell him hell doesn’t exist, and we drink pink champagne in the VIP Room to celebrate.  I buy a sequined costume.  I move to different states.  Dancing pays for everything.  I count each dollar with the moon sifting in through the nightshades, casting a pattern like pebbled beaches, on my crumpled bedsheets.

There is a man with no legs in Oregon, legs lost in some war, legs lost in a war no one can remember anymore.  He tells me I am like the woman on the front of a ship, a figurehead, as I let the antique yellow silk kimono fall dead to the stage.  I like this idea, as I sail around the pole.  I imagine my drunken sway to be that of a sailor’s.  I dance for him closely, straddling ghost legs in his lost lap, my eyes wanting answers from the grey of the fog.  

I once was. A woman, once.  Once, a woman, once.  Two chances, one life.  A woman with two sides.  Two, two.  Two rivers lost.  Meeting in salty sea.  Split seams, split-seamed stockings, rivers, snaking like open, like mouths moving to vulva, shaping in the rapidity of the club, the circular nature of the pole, eyelids shifting, backbone glazing, thigh quaking, circling the circumference of the stage and back.  Prowl.  Garter; stuffed, and still hungry. The scent of competition and sweat, cheap perfume.  Hunting.  Hungry women, like gators or raptors, with hungry beaks, between legs.  Strong jaws.  Pretty teeth.  

I buy a redhead wig and claim all that is furious.  Nails, the curve of click-clack, adhere to my fingers, and my hands become wasps.  The sting of money soothes me.  The hot-temper is tempered; I become sweet and I purr.  I paint purple, then orange, then red: birds of paradise.  Red is my mainstay, it is where the money lies, in the red of the mouth, saying “YES.”

I once was a.  Woman, once, I was.  A woman.  Once, I was a woman.  Once.

The runway echoes, like my past and I start curling hairs.  Frying each piece into the perfect mouth-shape, oh...  I wear my real hair like a wig now, it is all going to pieces, the blond is even blonder, more unreal, girl unreal.  The hair tatters to pieces.

Was I once a woman like all women, or am I different now?  In lily-white socks, I lost my virginity before I even knew I had one.  Years later, I choose my sexuality and become someone else, wearing frilly-whites and black Mary Janes, onstage.  The club is always dark, and in the constant night of anonymity I wear nude masks of identity.  Changing my stories, lying like I have hidden teeth; these identities are my memories, and become my histories.  Years pass, and I’m a woman with many versions of a self, a different person, each night; with the same siren song. I was once a woman like all women in the mirror; we moved in the same reflection.

Later in the dark, while wearing my silk kimono, I am bigger than I used to be.  Years have passed and my hips have grown sideways like thick cattle;  I have grown into the body I have become.  In the mirror, within all these women, we move in the same reflection. 

I’m dancing, again, after a short break with no heels, because of rent, always those four letters.  I get into it in a burlesque way, with hair like a bombshell, all jazz-bells in my head, dollars to infinity.  It’s harder to get hired, the pounds, like a signal to the owners that it’s not my career.  That my body’s just a body.  

My body, just my body.  My body, my body.

Still, I am hired.  A man offers me my rent, and a job for two dances.  He tries to make me.

I don’t.  But, still, he hires me.  

I wear the kimono, but I shed it onstage.  Mirrors pull the very past out of me, I see all the tomorrows and love the stretch-in-my-thighs-feel as I bend over for the money, again.  It is nice to wear these sparkly shoes.  

Cities change, and I buy an even-blonder wig, like I’m going Barbie.  I start to take it seriously, my new job at The Lusty.  I love the pink peep show, I join the union, I am a part of this new thing.  Everyone’s a feminist.  I feel free to own it.  I name myself, again.  It’s San Francisco, and suddenly I feel so vanilla; compared to everyone around me, I’m saintly.  Sexuality and this culture fascinates me, and I enjoy my body, moving within it.  I feel like a healer, full of the mercy of sisters, united workers.  The sex is elegant now, the money pure in its own right, and I try to not attach to the stigma.  I feel proud in the mirrors.  It’s my body, it’s a right that no one can take from me.  But mirrors shatter, like bones, and the night always remembers.

Now, I think of the women I danced with and wonder if they had it right all along; did they see the potential in their willowy thighs, their barely-broken-in bodies?  Bodies, not affected by pain, or years of gravity?  Bodies, young like children, wild like silly string, bendy like Gumby; bodies made for trampolines, jungle gyms, cannonballs?  Bodies so young, they still remembered how to teethe, how warm our sweet mouths were; what it was like in the beginning?  To have a childhood, unstained?  Was it just innocence for them, this beauty game?  Did they see it as a way to opt out?  Was it another version of running away?  Some future I just did not see?

Would I have seen this too, this future, if my reasons were different?  Would I have wanted to carve out a different space for myself now: a savings account, retirement, a house, maybe a car?  The universe spins and spins, years on my hips.  I dance, my tendons weaken, muscle fades, life changes texture.  My body, broken like a soldier.  It is hard to come home into this.

Girl Unreal was published in 2014 in Prose and Lore: Memoir Stories About Sex Work #4. Later it was anthologized and reprinted in Prose and Lore: Memoir Stories About Sex Work Collected Issues #1-5. The version above has minimal edits, for clarity. Thank you to The Red Umbrella Project, Aimee Herman and Audacia Ray for your mentorship, editing and support.

[NOTE]

Re-reading this, it was a different era. I wrote Girl Unreal under a pseudonym: “Julia L.”

I am not Julia L. anymore.