I used to think that I could leave a thing behind by declaring it so and walking out, whether it was a job, a lover, a room, or a drug. But I was wrong. Not wrong about all of it— but I was wrong about stripping. You never asked me what it’s like, but I want you to know how much I love the grip of the scotch-drenched heat of the club and how it holds me long after my shift; how it feels to glide from lap to lap, to be a bedazzled hunter in extravagant display, languid and sleazy, to feel the way that smoke is beautiful, the way scars are beautiful. I love the way the red pleather barstools shine in the sickly yellow light as dayshift drips into happy hour. I love strutting across the maroon zig-zag carpet, whipping my hair around, smarting from the blow of being observed while dust particles float in the air. I love counting my tips in whispers, spinning into a dismount from the top of the pole while licking my red lips—the red of riots, betrayal, blood—a demonic ballerina in a black sky. I love knowing it will never happen the exact same way again and because of this, I love leaving stage abruptly in a violent cloud of glitter.
I loved how my spine buzzed from the hot lights after my shift, and how I peeled the grimy bills from my sweat-candied back and scanned the room for the person who threw them. I used to think I’d simply quit. I’d develop a taste for bath bombs and sandalwood incense and energy work. I wanted to feel done. I wanted to feel triumphant after my last shift at Knockouts, but 4 a.m. came and went without giving a fuck. When I stumbled out the exit, I didn’t have the night I hoped for. Not even close.
At first, I couldn’t see my motorcycle and thought it was stolen or towed away, then I spotted it parked between two boxy cars. I hoped I wouldn’t have to jump start it, but she started easily and we floated through the thick fog with Rob Zombie still pulsing in my ears and a rhinestone pastie rubbing my nipple raw. I parked in front of a remote ATM somewhere south of market, stood with my back to the wind, eyeballing the empty street while depositing my stack of damp bills. And then I sped through the still, wet night to my apartment on Folsom.
I’d left my cell phone at home, buried in blankets, on purpose. I’d lied to Dean about working that last night at Knockouts. We’d made a deal that I’d quit stripping and we’d move away from San Francisco to start fresh in Los Angeles. I told him I quit weeks ago. I’d told him it was not a big deal and I’d be much happier and less numb and all the things I said that I believed at the time. I’d tell him my phone had died.
To be fair, my loved ones always wanted me to quit full contact lap dancing: girls, boys, dykes, friends with benefits, my mom. Even a handful of my regulars tried to lure me into retirement, thinking they knew what was best for me. But it was really what was best for them. What was best for me was being great at a thing and doing it until my body was ruined—and then to keep doing it. What I didn’t know then was how the adrenaline hurricane of stripping changed my cells, and I couldn’t change them back. Maybe I didn’t want to. But for a while, I tried to want to. That’s the thing about addiction. It hides in plain sight, promising to quit. At first it itches, and then it hurts a little, but then it just becomes who you are.
November 13, 2004, the day after my last night at Knockouts, I pulled my stripper life down the 5 in a fifteen-foot U-Haul. Technically, Dean, my stoner boyfriend, drove with his black tattoos on his knuckles that spelled out “Beer Only.” We were moving from San Francisco to Los Angeles with my boxed-up overpriced candelabras, about 200 neon Lycra bikinis, and Halloween-themed kitchen appliances like my set of mint green Frankenstein plates and spider-shaped salad tongs. We were not too far from Los Angeles, but Dean was so baked he saw vampire bats and people standing on the side of the road. He jerked the steering wheel a little.
“Did you see that?” he asked.
His eyes were long and red. When he wasn’t high, Dean’s eyes were the color of Humboldt moss and if he stared at me long enough, he could get me to do anything. But when he was jonesing and angry, his eyes turned a dull gold-brown hazel and he lashed out at me, and then we’d fuck and forgive and start all over again.
“See what?” I asked.
We were in the middle of nowhere. I glanced at him, and then back to the black wet night where there were only gas stations and soggy cows. I opened a small bag of Fritos and popped a few in my mouth. I didn’t smoke weed. I was sober and had been in recovery for nine years at that point. He shifted in his seat. “You didn’t see that?” he asked again. I wanted to help Dean not see what he saw, or at least see the road while he drove away from my stripper life and away from his phantoms. But we were—I was—in a horror film.
I wiped the steam from the windshield with my shirt sleeve, but a clean window didn’t wipe away Dean’s fear of flipping the truck into a ditch that night on route 138. I closed my eyes for a few minutes and drifted off to the patter of rain. When I opened them, Dean pulled off an exit ramp and drove fast toward an ugly blinking sign promising WIFI and HBO. I dreaded Motel 6. Some of the most horrible things that have happened to me have happened in a Motel 6, but Dean didn’t know about those things, and I didn’t plan to tell him.
My secrets were buried back in the Tenderloin strip clubs beneath the grimly filthy theater seats. I was moving to Los Angeles with a clean slate. But we weren’t in Los Angeles yet.
“Do you have to pee?” I asked.
“I need to chill for a bit,” he said.
Dean tossed a black Hefty bag full of his white t-shirts and Black Dickies in the corner of room 216 and peeled off his wet things. It all smelled like weed: the room, the bag, and Dean. He blasted the heat and sat cross-legged on the peach floral bedspread, turned on the TV and found South Park. He spread the buds out on the bedspread next to his white plastic scale and his sandwich baggies. He often used our bed as his workspace. We didn’t fight about sex or whose turn it was to take out the trash. We fought about money.
“I spent all I have on the room. I need to move some product for gas,” he said. He looked down at his product and rearranged his baggies.
“What the fuck, Dean?” I was pissed off. I didn’t want to be in this shitty room in fucking Lancaster. If he hadn’t hit the bong so hard in Emeryville when we filled the tank, we’d have kept going. I paced by the window. I pulled the heavy orange curtain aside and looked outside to make sure one of us remembered to lock the padlock on the U-Haul. It’s not like it was full of treasures, except my custom bed frame I bought on a layaway plan that took over a year to pay off, nothing was too precious. Nothing we couldn’t sell if we needed to. The parking lot was half empty. The padlock was intact. Rain still pissed down.
“Don’t be so neg,” he said.
“I’m not neg. I’m hungry.”
Dean sucked his bong long and hard, while the bubbles gargled slowly. I hated that sound, I hated the bong, I hated everything. But I didn’t hate him. And that was part of the problem. A cloud of smoke escaped his mouth, and he sexily waved it away.
He reached for me. We fucked on top of the synthetic, smooth ’80s bedspread and then he popped a Xanax and drifted off to sleep. I didn’t use Xanax and so could not sleep. I pulled on my raincoat and walked across the street to the Denny’s. A woman with magnificently orange hair and a name tag that read “Dolores” handed me a plastic menu while I slid into a booth for some breakfast all-day. Some folks in a booth nearby were talking shit about Denny’s not serving alcoholic beverages. They were giving Dolores hell and she was taking it in stride with the poised resolve of a server who knows the art of getting disgruntled assholes to tip her while wishing she could spill water in their laps. I looked over and smiled at them. The two guys were deep into their burgers, but the woman with a dark front tooth was eating breakfast hard: like her food angered her. I looked at her plate.
“Get the huevos rancheros,” she said, locking eyes with me.
“I think I will,” I said.
Maybe they’d want to take some of Dean’s party favors off his hands. If so, I wondered how I could approach the topic without sounding desperate and creepy. Dean grew up in a cult in Hawaii. His mother eventually left the cult after losing all of her money. And then she moved to California, she found heroin, but lost her life: she died of an overdose when Dean was thirteen.
I wondered, while considering the huevos rancheros, if kids who were raised in cults were more likely to find refuge in drug culture and the sex industry. Both industries skirted the law in some ways, while also being lucrative. Dolores approached my booth, with her pen aloft. “What’ll you have?” she asked. I ordered steak and eggs. I was pouring too much salt on my hash browns when the woman with the dark front tooth sat down across from me and introduced herself as Monique. Turned out, Monique’s best friend and coworker’s bachelor party was underway, and the bachelor party was missing some professional entertainers in case I was interested.
“Are you asking if I’m the type who’d like to make a little money?” I asked.
“I am,” she said.
“I was just going to offer you some of my boyfriend’s weed.”
“Never touch the stuff,” she said. “I don’t like the munchies.” And then Monique offered to drive me to the trailer park herself, but I declined. I knew better than to get trapped in some Nissan Sentra with a nut. That’s how people I know disappear, then turn up dead a year later on a desolate stretch of highway. Monique wrote down the address and directions for me on her Denny’s receipt. She also wrote down her number.
“Call me when you get there,” she said. “Say you’re here for Tony.”
The lights were off when I opened the door to room 216. Dean was asleep.
I rummaged around the room for the U-Haul keys. I rinsed off. I dusted my cheeks with pink shimmery blush, and applied some eyeliner and glitter to my lids. I liberated some emergency Lycra from my luggage. It always surprised me how little I actually needed to prepare for most bachelor parties. In general, guys were grateful if the performers showed up at all. Dean sat up when I opened the door again to leave.
“Where are you going?” he asked. His eyes were flashing, angry amber.
“This is my fault,” I said.
“What?”
“You’re used to me being a rich stripper.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You’re used to me being a cash cow. It’s my fault.”
“I’ve dealt with shitty women, but you are the most drama.”
“Whatever. There’s a bachelor party up the street with a bunch of vets. I’ll be back in a few hours with gas money.”
“Don’t come back,” Dean said. He turned away and covered his head with a pillow.
I held up the U-Haul keys, dangled them in the air. And then I left room 216.
I blasted my stripper playlist on the way to the trailer park in Lancaster. I’d dance to AC/DC or maybe Danzig. Or I could ask for recommendations. The trailer park was exactly where Monique said it was. I parked a block away from the address. Other than the orange glow and distant muffled chatter coming from the party, the rest of the park was eerily quiet. I sat silently. I considered not walking outside, not rummaging in the back of the U-Haul for my scuffed Pleasers, not calling Monique, not knocking on the door. I could stay here for a while in the warm truck. I felt sleepy and serene. Circle marks from my sleeves made tracks on the steamy window. Through them, outside, the rain finally stopped.
I thought about my boxed and taped stripper life in the back and how impossible it was to grieve it. I wasn’t ready to yet. A massive divide opened up between my life now and the one I would have to build anew. Boxes of my mother’s old life were back there too—her faded, olive-green Tupperware containers with lids that fit tight and held vestiges of her deviled egg life and her chocolate chip peanut butter cookie life. Eventually, my mom threw out her faded Tupperware and moved onto Pyrex and gave me several glass pieces that fit tightly inside of each other to ensure I had something in my apartment besides raisin bread and a coffee maker.
My mother’s voice still yells from the intercom of my soul, “Dry the sink! Make your bed! Or you can’t watch TV or ride your bike!”
My mother’s orderliness was love. It made me feel contained when her first marriage crumbled, and her new marriage became loud and dangerous. I hid in her big, walk-in closet full of mustard yellow blouses, her dark jackets and Redwood brown suit pants, pressed and color coordinated.
My mother was no stoner, but she’d party once in a while. She did coke. She got drunk. The smell of weed was the smell of my childhood. It leaked in through the vents. Pot smoke faded the wallpaper. One Thanksgiving, a couple years ago, after my mom died from an aggressive cancer, Dean and I drove up to Humboldt to meet my father. My dad and I were in the garage where he showed me his coffee roasting process. It smelled deep and heavy with tones of burnt chocolate and tobacco. My dad informed me that he’d smelled weed the night before, and that he knew that smell. It must have been when we were standing on the deck watching the trees wave their mighty limbs in the windy night. Dean smoked as usual. My father is a country lawyer who enjoys busting pot growers. He remarried quickly to a younger, born-again Christian, so he became one too. I suppose it was easier for him that way. When he was with my mom, he was into hot tubs, cocaine, Hawaiian vacations, and Huey Lewis and the News. Now that he’s born again, my dad slumps over when he walks as if his bones hurt. He’s had multiple heart attacks. He no longer picks up his tennis racket and plays whenever he feels like it. During that visit, the last time I brought Dean home for Thanksgiving, my dad asked me how serious Dean and I were.
“I guess we’re as serious as it gets,” I said.
He poured coffee beans into the roaster. The burnt smell filled the garage. It was a great smell, like the fruit-flavored loose tobacco he packed in his pipe when he read to me when I was a toddler.
“The world needs dreamers, but you don’t,” he said.
I hated my father for saying that but it’s the wisest thing he’s ever said to me. But fuck his cynicism. Everyone needs dreamers, especially me.
I climbed out of the U-Haul. My scuffed Pleasers were not that hard to find. I’d packed them in a box labeled “Work Shoes” with a fat blue Sharpie. That box was the last one I carried out of my apartment back in San Francisco. I shoved the shoes into my purse and walked up to the address Monique gave me.
“I’m outside,” I whispered.
I walked through an open wooden gate onto a paved path with wet grass on both sides. I knocked on the door. One of the guys from Denny’s opened it.
“Hey Tony, looks like the party’s here.”
He opened the door and gestured me inside where about a dozen men sat in various positions on a brown, sectional couch in a living room. At least two of them had artificial limbs. Beer cans, cigarettes, and empty bags of Doritos cluttered a table. They were probably all younger than me, but their suffering weighed their cheeks and eyes down. They were all lounging uncomfortably, the way people can lounge when everything hurts. The light was too bright. I told Monique. She walked across the dirty beige carpet with force and turned the dial down until the beer cans softened in a smoky amber glow. Off to the side was a kitchen table with cans of mixed nuts, Ritz crackers, and little salt and pepper shakers in the shape of mice—the same ones I collected and packed inside the U-Haul.
“You wanna beer?” Monique asked me.
I shook my head and asked for a bathroom where I could change my shoes. Monique followed me and handed me an envelope full of money. I think it was about $300. It was not a huge amount of money, but it was enough to get me to leave the bathroom.
All sounds became a cluster of one sound: laughter and mumbling among men. Music played. Aerosmith. I looked in the mirror and wiped the black mascara that trickled down my cheeks. Three songs. Three songs and I can go home.
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In the middle of the cramped living room, surrounded by his drunk friends, Tony sat on a wooden kitchen chair with his legs spread wide, waiting for me. I strutted over to him slowly, baring my teeth, never breaking eye contact. I unbuttoned his Levi’s, egging the guys on to yell and clap. When they were finally loud enough to cause inner ear damage, I unbuckled his belt, slid it off, and whipped it around the air like a rubber snake. Steven Tyler’s raspy voice commanded we dream on. I tied Tony’s wrists together behind the back of the chair and then yanked his jeans down to his ankles, exposing his hairy legs and tighty-whities. The men exchanged surly lion glances and tossed singles at me, and then banged their fists on the glass table, knocking over the full ashtrays, spilling cigarette butts and beer everywhere.
I dove between Tony’s legs, and, using his calves as two steady posts, I pulled myself into a handstand, with my legs secured around his neck. I caught a whiff of cat pee and sour milk, clacked my heels together, which is stripper lingo for “tip me” and flipped right side up again so I could breathe freely. After swinging my fishnet bikini top above my head and slingshotting it across the room, I straddled Tony, spreading my Barbie pink fishnet aura onto his face, knowing even as I bounced topless from lap to lap, that Tony would not only dream on, but he would move on: to his coked-up friends, tequila shots, and, later—to marriage, but Aerosmith’s stoner power ballad burned into my body permanently. Every time I heard it from that moment on, I saw myself crawling on the cat pee and beer-stained rug, scooping dollar bills that had drifted under the couch, looking around at the drooping faces as if I knew how I got there, and what to do next.
Outside, the wet air jolted me awake, and the moon hid behind a thin wisp of silver clouds. I drove passed the Motel 6 exit, because, in the distance, a Circle K gas station glowed. I paid cash to fill the tank and grabbed some gum on the way out. I was going to Los Angeles, and we’d leave in the morning.
I did what I had to do. I’d have to carry that truth inside me forever now, but first, I had to carry it back to room 216. It didn’t matter what I thought I’d left behind. Stripping wouldn’t let me go yet— but Dean might.
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Antonia Crane is a queer writer, sex worker, activist, and filmmaker. She’s the author of the memoir Spent. Her essays have appeared in The Nation, The New York Times, LA Public Press, Buzzfeed, Bustle, and most recently in: Whorephobia: Strippers on Art, Work and Life, edited by Lizzie Borden and Voices of a People’s History of the United States in the 21st Century: Documents of Hope and Resistance. PRISM International magazine named her the grand prize winner of their 2019 creative nonfiction contest and was awarded the Outstanding Community Service & Activism Award from Antioch University for her stripper organizing work at the Lusty Lady that resulted in the first stripper union in the world. In her writing, films, and her studies, Crane continues to make substantial noise in the ongoing fight for the human rights of sex workers. She’s a PhD candidate at USC in Los Angeles.
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nat raum (b. 1996) is a queer disabled artist and writer based on unceded Piscataway land in Baltimore. They’re the editor-in-chief of fifth wheel press and the author of you stupid slut, random access memory, pool paintings, and others. Their artwork has been exhibited at the Griffin Museum of Photography, ICA Baltimore, and Blackrock Center for the Arts.
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