Thoroughly Exhausted Thursday

I tried my darnedest when I came in Thursday, but some nights are insurmountable, regardless of effort. The night started off relatively smoothly with a three-in-a-row string of three-sets. I was running to the bathroom every thirty minutes to check my menstrual cup to make sure I wouldn’t leak blood on anyone. I checked every guy’s pants before sitting on them, to make sure they were wearing black or some color dark enough nothing would show. My stomach was bloated, but I was trying not to feel self-conscious about the situation. I’m intimately aware of any minuscule body changes, but the average guy at the club is not. We’re strangers, and they only know me as I am at that immediate moment.

I bumped into my regular, “Carlosinho” as I affectionately call him. He was one of my first regulars at my current club, and he is certainly my most consistent. He’s a short Guatemalan man who was once a professional soccer player on his country’s national team. Now he runs a warehouse that handles imported goods from Latin America and drives über when business is slow. For a while he was bringing me keychains he wanted me to keep on my person. One was a studded gold colored Hello Kitty, another a blue and pink flip flop with “Florida” written on the sole. Carlosinho likes to correspond with me throughout the week, sending me “dirty old man” prank videos in Spanish. A memorable one featured a young mother sitting in a park breastfeeding her crying baby. The baby cries, the mother offers the baby her breast. An old man is watching nearby, so he starts pretending to cry, while he stares at the woman’s breasts. The most recent one he sent was set in a strip club. Two women were dancing on stage. One bent over to allow one of the customers to touch her breasts. The customer touches her, then another person comes up behind him and smacks the man over the head with a large frying pan. I don’t respond to these videos because I don’t think they’re funny, which Carlosinho doesn’t seem to notice, because he continues sending me clips in the same lewd humor genre.

This evening he had tried to sneak in without telling me. Normally he texts me when he wants to visit, but this time I caught him with his mug of lemon tea in hand. Every time I see him he’s wearing the same thing: a black jacket with pockets, a black baseball cap, and black sweatpants. Tonight is no different. I sit with him and we catch up while I wait for him to be ready for a dance. He teaches me Spanish and I teach him Portuguese. He feels about as confident speaking English as I do Spanish, but we trade off speaking our second languages. For a year now, we’ve been following the same ritual. I sit with him while he sips his cup of tea with honey. Then he gets a three set, and he tips me the same $40, usually, unless he thinks he’s fallen out of my graces. We’ve been in rocky territory lately, especially after one night where I stayed later than I’d intended, waiting to see him only to hear that he wouldn’t be able to make it. Tonight he tips me $100. The hundred is an apology I accept.

When we’re in the back and I’d dancing on him, he whispers to me

Him: Feel it, baby.

I’m pretty intimately acquainted with all my customers’ boners. Some a big, some are small, some are micro. His is on the smaller side. I don’t know what he thinks about his own penis. I think he’s proud, as most men are. I don’t know if he thinks I’m erotically enjoying dancing on him. Is it a fantasy he’s verbalizing? Does it matter how little I play along? I’ll never ask him these questions, because I don’t hate him or want him to feel ashamed of his body or desires.

Me: Sí papi.

———

Around my period I get stinky. I sweat more, I can’t sleep, my piss smells different, and there’s not much I can do about it other than ride out the discomfort and hope I find some customers who are down with smelly chicks. It’s not for everyone. My manager confronted me after a customer complained after I left his lap, my armpit odor remained on his shirt. In that moment, I died a little inside, but in retrospect, I love the idea of leaving my stank on some guy who probably didn’t buy a dance with me. If I’m right about the snitch, the guy was probably a stressed out kids baseball coach who I’d mistaken for a friend. I’d danced a set and immediately plopped onto his lap, only to realize a moment after I’d picked the wrong lap. He wasn’t a charming businessman named Joe from New York, he was a sad bro from the South Bay. When my manager confronted me, he apologized.

MGMT: I don’t smell anything wrong, but I had to let you know.

Me: It happens. Whatcha gonna do?

I shrugged, then sniffed each of my armpits. One side smelled neutral, the other was, admittedly, pungently acrid. I put on more deodorant. It helped, but the incident threw off my mojo.

Sometimes I feel like a shark. Not in the sense of being a vicious predator, but in the way that if I stop moving, I’ll suffocate. Not all sharks must move to breathe. I learned that little tidbit doing a cursory google search, but in this simile, I’m the kind that must continue swimming or die. That night, I was winded after every stage set, which is unusual. Normally, dancing is second nature to me. I don’t sweat, I don’t have trouble breathing. But every part of me was a little off, and I was ignoring the signs of my body giving out because I had a monetary goal for the week and I was determined to reach it by the end of the night. And I was so close, just $200 away, possibly less after I added all my tips. But I just wanted to cry. I felt the end of my nose prickling, anticipating tears, but I swallowed down those emotions and trudged on. If you’re not balanced and exuding confidence in the club, you’re dead in the water. People pick up on your nonverbal cues. You win clients by convincing them to buy into the experience of You, but if internally you’re sad and exhausted, that experience will only be appealing to predators, the kinds of men who want a woman who’s vulnerable.

There’s a German man who comes in regularly and believes that we’re friends, even though he has never purchased a dance with me. He was there that night, trying desperately to get me to sit with him and have a conversation. After sulking about for a while, intermittently talking to customers without making any sales, I went over to vent to him. Earlier, he’d been searching for blow. I’m not the girl with any connects or a supply, so I waved him away. In the meantime, he’d acquired a little baggy, and was extra chipper.

Him: I really like you, so I want to buy a dance with you, but I need to know what I’m getting.

Me: What do you mean?

Him: C’mon! I need to know, before I buy a half-hour with you what exactly you do.

Me: I don’t have sex, I don’t give hand jobs or blow jobs.

Him: Can I eat your pussy?

Me: No.

Him: Why not? I’m good at it!

Me: I don’t want you to. Also, that’s just not safe sex.

Him: What do you mean?

Me: Oral sex without barriers is not a safe sex practice.

Him: What do you mean, “barriers”?

Me: For oral, a dental dam.

Him: If I had a dental dam, you would let me?

Me: No!

I don’t understand why I continue having to have this conversation with men. So many men want to eat pussy; will pay lots of money to eat pussy; but know nothing about dental dams or the risks of oral sex. Once, I had the same conversation with a biologist. He badgered me, trying to convince me to allow him to taste my feminine dew, the elixir of life tucked in my lady forest.

Me: That’s not safe sex! You should know better, you’re the scientist here!

Him: I know, but—

Me: Arousal makes us all act irrationally.

German guy pursed his thin lips unhappily.

Him: Well then, I can’t buy a dance if I’m not gonna get anything out of it.

I had neither the patience to try to convince the man, nor the willingness to lie and promise he could eat me out. The whole conversation had been primarily disheartening. He was the second man who had wanted a half hour with me that night in exchange for giving me head. If I’d lied or compromised, I would have made $350 on the two of them, even without tips. But the whole situation bothered me more than anything. It’s great, men want to be my pussy slaves, but sometimes a girl just wants to give a regular degular lap dance with no extras. Unfortunately, that can be incredibly difficult to sell.

Strip clubs exist because brothels are illegal. What most customers want is a brothel. What they get is an in between space where the legal and illegal live side-by-side. We all know you can find sex at the club, but most dancers have no interest in selling sex unless the price is very high. You badger enough dancers, you’ll probably find whatever you want, but you probably won’t get it with the girl you want, the way you want it. Men run amuck searching for these unicorns, and serve as an annoyance to the rest of the dancers who aren’t selling what they’re buying. It gets to us. In the back we rant about bad customers, warn each other who to avoid, and disclose who’s looking for what. You may think that your inquiry stays between you and that one dancer you spoke to, but word travels like wildfire.

There’s a terrible guy who comes to the club with wide eyes full of compliments for each and every one of us. He’s in his 30’s, paunchy, has brown hair, looks mixed white and latino, wears cardigans and khakis. He can’t keep his hands to himself, and never seems to have a dollar handy to tip anybody. So many dancers have dedicated too much time to this predator. I saw a girl walking toward him as he gave her a “come hither” finger, but I intercepted.

Me: He’s a creep with no money.

I whisper this into her ear.

Her: Oh god, thank you.

She made a beeline away from him. I’m protective over new girls. Everyone must learn for themselves, but a little guidance here and there helps to form new friendships and alliances, and also allows me to spite some of these clowns.

I should also mention that the night before this shift, I’d stayed up until 4 a.m. drinking and doing drugs at a party. My endorphins were not at their normal levels. I hadn’t gotten proper REM sleep. I’d been up all day running errands instead of resting for my shift. I hate emotional hangovers. One of my friends offered me blow to pep up for the rest of the night, but I didn’t want any more pollutants in my system. Plus, I was getting my wisdom teeth pulled early in the morning and I didn’t want any interactions between the party drugs and the anesthesia they were using to knock me out. It wasn’t an easy “no”. I felt like a cop saying “no” to drugs. Or maybe, if I was acting like a cop, I would have said “yes,” because cops are crooked and enjoy drugs as much as everyone else.

An hour before close, I made my decision to leave. I never leave short, but I knew I wasn’t in a state to meet my goal. The only thing I wanted more than the money was to go home and watch Bob Ross paint happy little trees. So I left, and let out a sigh of relief as expansive as the heavens above.