Dancing For Money
I am, in spite of the importance of uniqueness that was instilled in every child of my post-Boomer generation, like you, regardless of the date on which your mother chose life. While there are many things I have done in my life which I am alternately proud and ashamed of, there is also a short list of things I have never attempted, common things every other person I have ever encountered has committed with the same calm, human inevitability as taking a breath or shit.
This list includes:
Attending church services (while I have, like everyone else in the goddamned world, physically been in a church, I have never sat on a rigid, ass-challenging pew and listened to a man prattle on about how God can see me when I jerk off while covering my neighbor’s wife)
Riding a horse (they are as beautiful as they are terrifying; I’ve no interest in taming a “noble beast” that can unceremoniously nullify my existence with a kick to the head)
Tasted original flavor Mountain Dew (note that this does not include variant flavors, à la “Mountain Dew: Code Red,” which I have (sadly) tasted but (thankfully) only for the purposes of content creation
Patronizing a strip club
By virtue of the sheer number of decades in which I have existed without accomplishing these acts, I can’t help but feel a pressure to keep it up, to stay the course, for no other other reason but to abstain from the shared experience of the common man. But when Eduardo, an imminently charming kid from Salinas, California (the city of my birth, as the hospital in Hollister, the city in which my mother had become pregnant, was so podunk my mother didn’t trust I’d survive if cut from her womb there) who loves the weekly streaming show I’ve done for years so thoroughly he told his employer he could not work on Wednesdays, as that’s the day of the week on which my show airs, wanted nothing more than to celebrate his 21st birthday at Jumbo’s Clown Room, as it was the place in which my co-streamer also worked, I could not say no.
I had always operated under the assumption that strip clubs were dismal, impossible to enjoy, hellscapes in which women exposed flesh for the purposes of making the dicks of mouth breathers become semi-rigid — this is why I stayed away. I didn’t even habituate one in Portland, where the dancers gyrate to Joy Division and the whole scene is allegedly so inclusive, so progressive, it’s not beyond the realm of possibility to watch one pull an L7 and pull their tampon out onstage for the purposes of challenging the male gaze. A comedy festival used to take place in Portland wherein comics would traditionally patronize the city’s strip clubs en masse for the purposes of getting completely shithouse, something I used to love to do. In the years I attended, however, I always chose to stay in my motel room and get shithouse alone, my moral authority acting as the cherry on the sundae that was my righteous indignation. In my defense, I also used to think disco sucked — but then I grew up.
Side Note: The “Disco Sucks” movement was bred from nothing but hatred of the other and fear of the cis white male status quo being challenged by the acceptance and popularity of music created by and for people who didn’t fit said status quo. The flags unfurled by the mob who steamrolled LPs at Disco Demolition Night may as well have said “Minorities and Queers Suck.” The whole affair was very “You can masticate each other’s dicks behind closed doors, but keep your degeneracy out of my son’s face.”
Side Note to the Side Note: If you think about it (which you don’t have to, as I’ve already done the heavy lifting for you), Old Time Rock & Roll by Bob Seger is one of the most spiteful, xenophobic songs that has ever cracked the Billboard Top 100. The way in which he sneers “don’t try to take me to a disc-o” is done with the same virulent cadence of hate speech; he yearns for “old time rock n’ roll” because it is something he can accept without question, something that was stolen from blacks and made even better, as in monetizable. The modern world, to him, sucks because the modern world supposes that perhaps black people can speak for themselves, on their own terms — they can’t be used solely as fodder for white theft.
Side Note to the Side Note to the Side Note: Remember when whites started smoking pot en masse and it blew their collective minds? Take, for example, the whole “watching Wizard of Oz but listening to Dark Side of the Moon while doing so'' trope. Imagine being someone who has smoked weed, in spite of its criminality, to get through the nightmare called systematic poverty for generations, and then finding out your oppressor started also doing so and this is their takeaway? The fuck?
And anyway, you can’t routinely patronize pay-by-the-hour fuck motels and extol the virtues of your city’s last porno theater without also being open to the idea of patronizing a strip club.
My friend, who is a graduate of CalArts and can paint accordingly, is also a dancer, and while I’ve watched her off the clock and been impressed, I was even more so seeing her in her element. One cannot help but feel as though she put far more of herself into flexing each individual asscheek to the haunting “ohs” in O Fortuna than, say, Jackson Pollock ever did while drunkenly dribbling paint on canvas. It is beautiful, it is impressive, it is real, and I see it and I raise it a fistful of dollars.
I entered with one hundred dollars in twenties, which were quickly turned into ones, which were just as quickly turned into a memory. Having been on the receiving end of fiduciary lamentations from dancers I am proud to know, I couldn’t not tip. You give at least two or three dollars per dancer, they said, and I willingly obliged — I couldn’t help but notice that, in spite of the minuscule size of the venue in which I was sitting (I assumed it was huge — Courtney Love, after all, was a former employee), I was in the minority.
Emboldened, not that she needed further emboldenment, by her vodka soda, Lil’ Mama shook her damn head. “It’s fucked up how the people who can afford to tip don’t, so us poor people have to tip to make up for it.”
“Because we have empathy?” I asked.
“Exactly,” she replied.
My friend introduced me to a coworker who was going through a shitty breakup, and as a result wanted a cigarette. I gave her two. “I’ve never been in a strip club,” I told her.
“Bikini bar,” she brusquely corrected.
A rank amateur, there was much I did not know, like how there is a difference between strip clubs and bikini bars, where liquor is served therefore tits cannot be shown, and how dancers use fake names so creeps cannot, y’know, look them up on one of those myriad websites in which you can get copious contact information for any human being you’d like to terrorize.
Side Note: Said sites are like the phone book, on acid, in hell. As a woman whose personal safety has been threatened by strangers for daring to commit the transgression that is digitally positing the question “Does the movie Fight Club actually…suck?”, I have had to slog through the tedious task that is manually removing one’s address and phone number from said sites. They are morally corrupt, they have no-doubt facilitated the literal deaths of those who have no idea their personal information is on them, yet they are allowed to exist for reasons I cannot ascertain. There is absolutely no reason why I should know both the address of and what my old roommate paid for his house in Seattle, as no one could argue said information is anywhere near the realm of what can be construed as my fucking business, yet I do.
Side Note to the Side Note: Many moons ago I wrote, solely because the work was commissioned from me, a piece for VICE wherein I criticized the film adaptation of the novel Fight Club, a work of which I was previously, generally, apathetic. As trolling elicits engagement, in the years since it has been reposted multiple times and translated into multiple languages — at no point was I told this would happen, and at no point did I receive further compensation. In exchange for years of harassment, I received a lump sum of $200, which I’m sure I immediately spent on whiskey, my then-alcoholism being the primary aspect of my then-character my then-primary employer exploited for clicks. Ain’t new media grand?
I left devoid of my singles, yet infused with an actual reason as to why I, for years, abstained from patronizing bars in which women danced for money, the reason being that I, in a literal sense, cannot afford it. If you like it, prove it. Make it worth it. Eduardo dumped $100 of his Carl’s Jr. money within three minutes. What’s your excuse?