to do.” I had never said this to anyone before.
Carl returned back to the room. He smiled at me with surprise, a condescending kindness. He didn’t tell me anything, but he kissed me deeply. He put his hands on my hip bones and pressed while he set me back, which made me feel tiny and invincible. My blood rose again.
We had sex until my body was battered. Until my pussy was so swollen the only thing to make it feel better was to get it wet all over again, until a single finger in me felt as huge as a giant cock, until uncertainty was obliterated. He staggered off to work the next morning after a single hour of sleep. After a few more, I wobbled down to see Reba at work.
“I thought you two might get together,” she said to me calmly, perhaps even coolly. She coaxed a ball of ice cream from the vat and then glided down the counter to give the customer their cone and take their money.
There might have been a recent history of perceived betrayals that each of us was retaliating against that summer, the confused pain of separation that is part of youth and love and growth. Was she leaving me behind as she became more big-city punk rock? Was I snubbing her in favor of snooty college intellectuals? Maybe a little of both. We were both horny girls who had a fierce attachment that we’d never explored physically. Between Reba’s sexual enlightenment and my own and our need to differentiate, the main times she and I talked privately during that fervid June and July were the few occasions when she got off work early and, having an hour to kill before Cantanine came to get her, accompanied me to the Bounce Babe Lounge.
There was no cover, no doorman. No one batted an eye when we walked in, underage and in ratty clothes cadged from laundry left too long in communal dryers. Most days, I sat alone at the far end of the bar, watched the girls dance on the tiny stage behind it. There were just a few on shift at a time. I had started coming at the invitation of Maerene, a young Irish expat who squatted in West Philly and hung out on the porch of the anarcho house. She wore wigs over her shaved head, bobby socks with her stilettos, and a kimono in between sets. She was gently pear-shaped, and her long limbs had little discernable muscle tone—the exact opposite of the other woman I recall easily, a petite heroin addict from outside the anarcho-punk clan who had breasts like pesticide-plumped red apples and the taut musculature of a gymnast wrapped in waxy, bruised skin. She was fine-featured and wore her hair in a tight ponytail. Her boyfriend famously let her dance as long as she kept her bra on, but some afternoons she’d show up desperate, begging to be let on the shift, and she’d strip down to pasties for the bigger tips while nervously keeping an eye on the door. The girls chose songs from the jukebox when it was their turn on the stage—mostly Top 40, hard rock, and funk. They danced each in her own style, and they were good. I liked to watch them.
I watched the way Maerene and the other new girls, all of whom were my new housemates and neighbors, adopted the stripper moves and then made them their own, the Americans adding touches whose provenance I recognized from childhood dance classes and MTV music videos. I watched the heroin addict execute pro stripper moves like a machine, kicking up the pole into an upside-down straddle, bending at the waist, ass towards audience, jiggling her butt cheeks so they slapped together rhythmically (I was astounded that such firm butt cheeks could do that). She rotated vigorously through half a dozen of these operations with no worry about adding flow in between them. On the other side was loungey Maerene, who was nothing but flow. I watched her strut on the eight-foot-long platform and twirl languorously, letting a gauzy scarf slip off her shoulders, slinking her arms free of her bra straps so that the soft cups flapped below her budded breasts like an unhooked garter belt. She never broke a sweat.
Neither did I, surprisingly enough for a young women’s studies minor who just a month or two earlier had penned a writ-in-blood paper about the pernicious effect of sexed-up photos of women in Rolling Stone, and who had lacerated her boyfriend for the small collection of ass shots he’d clipped from old copies of Penthouse. I boiled with feminist rage that year; it pounded in my blood like fists against a wall. When my boyfriend sat on my dorm room bed with his guitar and sang an angry song he had written about me—or was it about another girl? It hardly mattered; my reaction was the same when it was my turn—my vision of kicking the instrument to smithereens was so intense I blinked when he finished, as if emerging from a darkened theater, surprised to find I had not moved from my cross-legged seat on the floor. I wanted and hated having a song written about me. I wanted and hated how transported he was while he played it. I loved and resented how intensely certain live music made me feel, and how that intensity of feeling wasn’t translatable in the boy-rock world, where factual knowledge and expertise were the currency. These passionate contradictions combined with my sexual shame—for my hunger, for my clumsiness, for my secrets—and with the salt of the disregard and violations I perceived as having been inflicted upon me due to my gender. All this I was pouring into a new pot, splattering as I did so, where it stewed in the context of histories I was learning about, of cosmologies and systems. I was trying desperately to sort out the feelings and the theories, to read enough and think enough and write enough to name them, but that’s hard to do at a full boil. My sophomore year in college was wonderful and important for me, but I was pretty much the opposite of chill.
Yet there in the neighborhood strip club, I found some relief. My efforts to suppress the nervous mix of arousal and misgiving I felt when pushing open the heavy black door were so easily successful as to be eager. The permission I gave myself to be there (and received from the indifferent establishment and the West Philly milieu), along with the beers I drank and the chain of Camel Lights I smoked and the aftershock endorphins from the prior night’s long fucking, sedated me into a narcotic repose after my couple years of tension. In the presence of so many available women, the occasional man who sidled up to me never pressed the issue when I demurred attention. Hey, I was just there to see my friends. I was just another lazy afternoon patron, if with a funny little twist—escaping from my job search and internal unrest, letting myself be soothed by watching pretty, nearly-naked women dancing.
THE WOMEN ALL told me the vibe was different at night. Even in daylight, their enchanting performances on stage didn’t yield the dancers any tips, and I wasn’t so sedated that I didn’t notice how they had to labor and grind for those, hop down, work the bar, make eye contact while shimmying their tits and brazenly pressing for money. The calculated exchange, callous and begrudged on both sides, that was the part I felt embarrassed to be seeing, but I looked hard at it, even if through lizard eyes. The lizard eyes of a stoned anthropologist. I collected raw material for my sense-making project and for catching my buzz. In between their sets and tips-rounds, I’d chat with my housemates. It made me feel special, because they’d talk to me for free.
It seemed that every day another West Philly girl was taking up dancing. Many of them encouraged me to give it a shot. They were sure I’d be hired. The owner of the Bounce Babe liked skinny white girls with long dark hair, they said. They were confident in the knowledge of his preference, which he’d offered in a tutorial about how every man had them and how to divine those of clients without taking it personally. But despite fitting his bill, I didn’t jump. Why not, they wanted to know—it had become almost de rigueur among the unemployed in the house, and they all knew I was looking for a job.
“You’re there all the time anyway,” Maerene pointed out to me.
“I’m not the stripper type,” I said. I pointed at my chest. “Tiny boobs.”
“I’ve seen your nipples!” she cried. She was well into her forty-ouncer and who knows what else. “You can do it. They’re cute!”
They were probably flashing as she spoke, because another girl was behind me giving me a shoulder massage and my tank top had loose armholes and I seldom wore a bra. I was not ashamed of my small breasts. I liked them fine; I liked the freedom they gave me, and it seemed almost incidental to me to cover up. But although
