Oh no, you’re going to write about me, aren’t you?

Hi everyone,

It has been a very eventful week. The strippers at Star Garden are picketing, advocating for a safe workplace, and Strippers United has been providing auxiliary support. I will share their petition for those interested in a separate post. I suggest you read their demands. They are not outlandish by any stretch, and yet their club has locked out the dancers who signed the petition. Star Garden has fired two strippers for their affiliation with Strippers United and labor activism. These brave dancers have been standing outside for the duration of 12-hr shifts, unpaid, because they demand to be heard. If you can contribute, there is a strike fund you can donate to at http://donorbox.org/stripper-action-fund. If you’re in LA, follow @stripperstrikenoho on IG for updates on the action. If you can physically picket Star Garden Topless Dive Bar North Hollywood, the strike will continue every evening this week from 6:30p-1:30p until a manager responds to the petition.

And now back to the story

***

A steadily empty club is demoralizing. Thankfully, this week things finally seemed to return to normal. Over the past two, slow moving months, when customers asked me for my schedule and then followed up baffled I only work Tuesdays and Thursdays, while normally I have my quips or flippant responses, instead with the painful slowness, I began questioning myself: Have Tuesday nights ever been good? Has a two day work week ever made sense? Have I just settled for less money without realizing it? I started to forget the abundance: the ease of making a thousand dollars, the steadiness of clients I recognized. The consistent flow had slowed to a trickle. Of course, there is no way of knowing why these slow seasons happen. Maybe it was the cost of a gallon of gas. Maybe it was lingering fears about premature relaxing of pandemic precautions. Maybe it was tax season leading everyone to tighten their belts. Maybe there was no reason? It could have been entirely random–as random as the sudden rush this week. Why all of a sudden were there so many conferences going on? Why did all of my regulars appear this week all at once, out of nowhere after a year or two of absence? Probably just because. Probably just vibes.

Danny was the first. He texted me right as I began my commute to work on Tuesday.

Hey u.

Hey you.

Whatcha doing?

Driving to [my club’s name omitted]. You?

Driving back from Laguna. Let me see if it’s on the way lol.

Would be nice to see your face.

Likewise - let me see - Haven’t rocked an early strip club in a while lol.

I knew he wanted me to skip work entirely and spend the evening with him, but I had customers coming by, and while Danny is generous, I didn’t want to choose. Danny’s a creature of the night anyway. I knew he would be down to hang after I finished work, even if his impatient little heart didn’t want to wait.

Will it be empty?

Probably.

Perfect.

To my surprise, Danny made a beeline over to the club.

Disclaimer: Danny hates that I write about him, but simultaneously he enjoys my writing. Recently one night when we grabbed drinks he joked that he unsubscribed from my blog because he “got bored not reading about that Danny fella anymore.”

“I always used to wonder what you were thinking about when you were with me. I’d see your eyes do all kinds of things, but you never said anything. Now I know it was because you were taking notes.”

Maybe lately I’ve taken fewer notes. I’m still a sober stripper, so I can’t help but notice details, particularly annoying ones that break the choreographed flow of my work. Ideally each interaction is as simple as mindlessly asking the four or five questions all strippers use before pitching a dance, dancing for however long the customer can afford, and repeating as many times as one can muster while maintaining morale.

One of my regulars asked me why every stripper asks the same questions:

What’s your name?

Where are you from?

What work do you do?

Have you been here before?

Do you want a dance?

They’re undoubtedly the least interesting questions one could ask. They are the distilled essence of small talk, and in regular life, I hate small talk. At the club it’s the bread and butter of getting the necessary information to pitch the correct dance. The questions rattle around in my brain, not tethered to any genuine desire for an answer. They’re the defaults when I feel more acute social anxiety or brain fog. They support my natural awkwardness and usually smiling takes care of the rest.

It’s been hard to even retain these basic details lately. I have a regular who I’ve affectionately started to refer to as “Mr. Tuesday Night”, because I cannot for the life of me remember his name. The problem is I have at least four different John’s, Chris’s, and Michael’s in my phone, and I can’t keep track of all these generic names. While I don’t remember Mr. Tuesday Night’s name, I do remember that it wasn’t a memorable name. I tried my usual name game to remember it, and even my phonetic tools failed me. He’s been doomed to his moniker for the time being.

The problem is, not all customers are characters. While I must write about Danny when

he visits, he’s more of an exception than a rule. Sometimes I get customers who bury their face in their hands when I tell them I write about my work, in an expression of “Oh no, you’re going to write about me, aren’t you?” They get bashful, but underneath I usually sense a bit of intrigue. They are curious how they might be written, and there’s something about being seen vividly enough to be written about that is gratifying. But the reality is most customers are unremarkable. They answer the five questions, pay me, and never enter my consciousness again after we conclude our dance. There’s nothing wrong with them. There’s just nothing particularly interesting about them. While Danny is a mess who has gotten on my last nerve, nobody could accuse him of being boring.

That evening, he walked into the club in his vaguely stylish man-in-tech look, with his eyes slightly glazed over from a long day courting investors. I flagged him down, only too aware that if I didn’t act fast, another stripper would pounce smelling blood in the water. Danny is the ideal strip club customer: rich, impulsive, easily captivated by beauty, indulgent without hard limits, and happy to indulge his vices. He’s also kind and generous, and genuinely funny. Though he has his faults, he has never pushed my bodily limits or made me feel guilty for setting boundaries. Sure, he’ll pout or hem and haw about extra time, but he’s a decent person.

I pulled Danny into a quick hug. It was nice to see his friendly face. I could tell he was still thawing out from work. It’s rare for me to catch him so early, before any drinks or party favors. He was harder, more conscious of his surroundings than I was used to him being, which made me a bit self-conscious.

I peered at his blazer, unsure of what I was seeing.

“Is this a blazer or a sweater?” I pinched the fabric, “Oh! It’s a sweater-blazer, a Swazer.”

“And I look very nice in it. Gotta be ready for anything.”

He scanned the mostly empty room, then looked at me, “Was anybody here before me?”

“There were. A bunch of people left before you arrived.”

He eyed the drinks behind the bar.

“Does John still work here?”

“No.”

“I know they don’t sell alcohol here, but do you know where I could get a drink?”

“We have a guy who sells drinks, but he isn’t here yet. I can ask around though.”

Axel stood bent over the cashier station, putting on his tie. I tapped him on his shoulder and he spun around to look at me.

“Ms. Selena! What can I do for you, sweetie?”

“I have a customer who wants something to drink.”

“Is he buying a room? I can take care of him if he buys a thirty minute room with you.”

“He will, he’s good for it.”

Axel looked Danny up and down, “I can’t sell him anything, there’s no “quid pro quo” if you understand what I mean. Now, he can tip me and I would appreciate it, but I can’t sell it to him.”

“I get it. No “quid pro quo”,” I nodded.

“I’m not trying to rob the bar either. If he pays for another drink, just have the bartender fill it three-quarters of the way and I’ll fill the rest.”

California’s prohibition of alcohol in full nude clubs has done nothing for the safety of strippers. Some do-gooder probably came up with the idea without any input by dancers, naively hoping removing alcohol from the equation would stop bad actors. Or maybe they didn’t even concoct it with any good intentions, maybe the authors just wanted to make strip clubs less fun. Regardless, I’ve never met a predator who was inhibited by sobriety. I was raped while sober by a sober man. The majority of assaults I’ve experienced have come at the hands of sober men. If I’m generous, perhaps the lawmakers thought forced sobriety might take away a common excuse for bad behavior. “I didn’t know what I was doing, I was drunk.” Assaults happen because we aren’t taught consent on a societal level. We aren’t taught to express consent or to revoke it, how to ask or how to know for sure that it’s been given. Alcohol is just the scapegoat, and the reality is no club truly obeys the prohibition laws. Instead, every club tacitly allows a middle man to sit and quietly sell booze in some corner, packaged in empty water bottles or bottles that once held apple juice or some other ambiguous, amber colored liquid.

I brought Danny a whiskey and coke. He swirled the janky cocktail and took a sip, cringing.

“I don’t usually drink whiskey. I’ve gotten sick off it too many times.”

“I’m that way with gin. Can’t drink it anymore after so much cheap college gin.”

Danny began to thaw as the drink settled into his system. It was strange seeing him in my club after years of him refusing. He hates paying the club when I’m doing the work, and I appreciate that perspective. I hate it too. I deserve to make more than half of every dollar I earn, and yet I do not. But I’ve made some level of peace with the situation. After working alone for a year, being not only the service provider but also my own security and price negotiator, I appreciate having the structure of a workplace. I appreciate having coworkers around. It is entirely possible to have these benefits while also not splitting everything halfsies with the club, but this is the system and I’m not ready to picket and lose wages bargaining with the behemoth.

I learned recently that my club might be in the process of being sold. The news came unexpectedly by way of a group of Northern California cannabiz bros. They’d all driven down to talk shop with their friend, a low-key Vietnamese drug kingpin named Lam. As soon as Lam walked into the club, management was all over him: offering him free food and drinks, popping over “just to say hi”. One of the bros had whispered to me that Lam was in talks to buy the club. I couldn’t tell if he knew what he was saying, but the way the current owners were coming over to have private chats with Lam made me consider he might not be full of shit. Maybe we were about to become the money laundering center of a Vietnamese drug cartel. This news didn’t bode well for labor activism. You don’t bargain with cartels. You obey or leave. I heard rumors that Mike, the owner, owed Lam money. I could believe it. Nobody could accuse Mike of being a sober man. He had the bloodshot eyes of someone who snorts blow for breakfast.

“How’s your coke?” I asked Danny.

He blinked confused.

“The Coca Cola,” I clarified.

“Oh!” he snorted, “I thought you asked me if I wanted some coke, and I thought to myself… ‘Yeah, I’d like some coke’. Do you know anybody?”

Danny was up to his old tricks. While I prefer Danny drinking lite beers, I also have no qualms enabling bad behavior. However, this time I decided to be strategic.

“Are you going to want me to visit you later?”

“Yes.”

“Pay me now, before you get too fucked up. You know I’ll keep my word.”

“How much?”

“You know how much. Do you think I’m less valuable after all these years?”

Danny reluctantly sent the money. I’m not cheap company. I’ve brought my prices back up to my pre pandemic level and taken full service out of the equation, because I’m really not trying to make outcalls a regular occurrence. If someone is willing to follow my rules and pay me, sure I’ll leave the club, but otherwise I can take it or leave it.

I went searching for party favors while Danny sipped on his drink.