07: in which Michelle takes it off
The Caribou was much father away, darker, and scarier than Michelle remembered. To her fully sober eyes, the entrance appeared sinister, canopied by an awning and beckoning her like a dragon’s gaping mouth. The exterior had not been painted in some time. She walked in wearing jeans and a university sweatshirt, her stripping outfit in a pink shopping bag at her side. The same bouncer stopped her.
“I.D.?” he said, barely glancing in her direction.
“Oh, uh, yeah.” Michelle produced her card.
The young man glanced at it. “Tonight’s amateur night, it’s a five dollar cover. Are you meeting anyone here?”
“No, I – uh…” The bouncer didn’t remember her. Maybe it was better that way. “I’m an amateur,” she completed. The words stung.
The young man, Jordan, made eye contact with Michelle for the first time. “Ah, well, no cover for you then. The dressing room’s in the back. Ask Lucy to show you where it is.”
“Thanks,” she said quietly and stepped into the dark club.
She was a lost innocent puppy wandering in a dank pit of loneliness and desire. The club was less crowded than it had been on New Year’s Eve, which somehow made it seem more despondent. The men she saw sitting at the bar, around the tables, around the stage perched like vultures waiting for an errant bit of flesh to fall at their feet. She shivered.
Lucy. She remembered Lucy, the tall, dark-skinned waitress. She scanned the club for her silhouette. There was no one she recognized; not even Sam showed herself through the meager crowd of foul carrion creatures and their prurient, piercing stares of power. The air smelled of booze and smoke and sweat. It was a jungle, and she dodged her predators’ gazes behind the cover of tables and couches. Finally, she found Lucy weaving in and out of the foliage like a hummingbird and followed her, catching up just in time to collide with the waitress as she stopped to take an order.
“Damn, girl, what you on?” said the waitress. She adjusted herself nonchalantly.
“Sorry,” Michelle managed, gripping the bag that held her costume. “Jordan said you’d show me the dressing room.”
Lucy seemed to ignore Michelle as she bent down to take a young man’s order. The vulture, the jackal, the man ordered a Miller Lite. When she finished she motioned for the amateur to follow as she made her way to the back of the club.
“You gonna dance tonight?” she asked without looking back.
“Um, yeah.”
The waitress turned around as they reached the rear of the main room. “Good luck,” she said stoically. She raised her hand and pointed down an ominous, dark hallway. “Dressing room’s back there. Don’t you let anybody give you any shit.” Then she breezed past Michelle back into the body of The Caribou.
The young dancer took a deep breath and began to walk down the hall. It was lit by Christmas lights strung along the walls on either side. At the end of the hall was a door that read Dancers Only! Another deep breath, and Michelle opened the door.
She recoiled momentarily at the shock of seeing so many girls naked, half naked, or in the process of becoming naked, but she persevered into the room, keeping her eyes upward and proud. No one could make her feel uncomfortable if she didn’t want to feel that way. The mind is its own place, and in itself can be made a heaven of hell, and a hell of heaven, or something like that. She walked to the back of the dressing room and sat on a bench.
If she couldn’t take off her clothes in front of these girls, how could she do it in front of all the vultures – no, all the customers in the audience? She began with her sweatshirt and stripped off her street clothes, trying to look as comfortable as possible as nude bodies moved around her like a volatile cloud of flesh. Everything was fine, perfectly fine until she came to her jeans, the absence of which would reveal white cotton panties. Glancing furtively around her, she gathered her bag which now contained her stripping costume, a sweatshirt, a t-shirt, and a purple faux satin bra and stepped toward the bathroom stalls. The stall door lurched open at her touch, and Michelle looked down to find the blonde dancer with the kanji tattoo crouching over the toilet. At first, Michelle thought she was throwing up (one sees one’s share of vomiting girls in ballet programs) and was largely unfazed until she noticed the rolled-up bill hanging out of the girl’s nose. The stripper glared up at Michelle and growled. Michelle closed the door as the girl bent over a line of coke prepared on the toilet seat. The ballerina quickly slid into an adjacent stall and locked the door.
Michelle choked back both tears and the impulse to vomit. The liquids in her stomach railed and raged. She felt herself begin to hyperventilate and shook her head violently. Think think think think think. You’re fine you’re fine you’re fine.
She was fine, she was strong, she was able. She knew this. She stopped shaking her head. Her jeans fell off smoothly and her underpants followed. Before she knew it she was into her lingerie, heels, and wrap. She ran a small, sweaty hand over the costume. Three, two, one, you’re on, baby.
Michelle threw open the stall door prepared like a tiger to conquer the world or stare down anyone who tried to give her any shit, but her vision was eclipsed by Samantha standing with her arms crossed, completely naked except for a thong.
“You better get out there, they’re setting up the order now,” she said.
“Oh, okay, thanks.” She stepped past unsteadily in her heels.
“Are those the shoes you’re wearing?” asked Samantha, arched eyebrow creeping upward.
“Um, yeah. Are they okay?”
“Oh, no, fine,” said the stripper. She flipped her hair and it fell straight in an instant. “They’re just sort of old-fashioned. Younger girls – girls your age – they wear modern stripper shoes, the ones with high platforms. You can tell older girls, like thirties or forties, ‘cause they wear shoes like that. Traditional high-heels.” The pale woman took a bra from a series of pegs on the wall and hooked it over her small breasts. “But it’s cool. Follow your own drummer. Create your own image. Just get out there, or you won’t get a shot at all. What name are you dancing under?”
Michelle hadn’t thought of that. “It’s a secret,” she said as she flew out the dressing room door. Her mind raced as she did down the dark corridor and out onto the club floor. A loosely alphabetical list of possibilities began to form in her head, but she reached the center of the main room too quickly. Before she was aware of it, a man was asking for her name and she was answering.
“Isadora,” she said. Her voice cracked on the is and the dor.
“Classy,” said the unidentified man. “You’re on fourth.”
You’re fine you’re fine you’re fine. She saw the jackals, the thin, beautiful other girls, the spurious luxury and decorative kitsch that masqueraded as the classiest club in town. You’re fine you’re fine you’re fine. The lights became disorienting. She saw the bar. It beckoned her with a comforting glow.
“Straight scotch,” she called to the bartender with her hand placed performatively on the counter, “a double.” Mina poured the drink and the amateur dancer downed it, then made an unpleasant face.
“Honey, if you’re dancing tonight, I don’t think you should get trashed,” offered the bartender.
“Thanks,” said Michelle. “Can I have another?”
Mina shook her head and poured the drink. “Suit yourself. I guess I can talk when I get up there and start shaking my ass.”
“Why don’t you?” asked the dancer, trying to recover from her first drink in order to vanquish the second.
Mina squinted and leaned in. “I lack confidence.”
Michelle started on her second drink just as she was beginning to feel the warmth of the first. The contest had begun and a girl named Heaven was on stage. The scotch caught in Michelle’s throat. Judging by Heaven’s dancing, she was no amateur.
She sipped more steadily as she watched Heaven spin on the poll, her eyes sporadically scanning the club for Samantha. She saw women everywhere, but no Sam. Her gaze moved to a short Asian woman in a glow-in-the-dark bikini sitting close to a very large man. She tried to eavesdrop, but before she could grasp what they were saying she glimpsed Samantha out of the corner of her eye and waved. Sam joined her.
“If you’re dancing tonight, I wouldn’t get wasted,” the stripper said.
“I’m fourth,” Michelle told her neighbor, turning to hide her blush.
“Are you ready?”
“Um, I guess so. But, I mean, this girl’s really good. If they’re all like her, I don’t think I have a chance.”
“Well, I think you’re the only one who’s never danced before. Most of these other girls are professionals from somewhere else. As long as they have another job – like student or pizza deliverer or something made-up – they can dance at amateur night. But don’t worry, the audience will know you’re not used to it and they’ll cut you slack. Besides, you’re a lot cuter than most of these girls, and that matters.”
Michelle swallowed and pointed. “What about her?”
Michelle’s shoulders dropped. “Thanks.”
Three drinks churned and rumbled in her guts. She watched as Heaven finished her set, then Cadence, then Victoria. She was tipsy and had never been very good at math, but she knew that was three, and after three came four. The man who had taken her name stood up on stage clapping as a skinny bleach-blonde stepped down into the crowd.
“Great, great, that was Victoria. Let’s get a round of applause for the lovely office assistant.” The crowd clapped compulsively.
“Alright,” said the MC, squinting to read off a card, “next up is Isadora. She’s a bartender and this is her first time dancing. Let’s all show her some love and remember, tipping is always welcome.” While stepping down off the stage, the man momentarily tripped over a loose shoelace.
Michelle felt her heart jump into her throat and her stomach take its place. She searched frantically for Samantha, but she was nowhere. There was a much-too-long pause. A few faces in the crowd looked around to see who Isadora was. She saw the MC motioning her onstage. The next six minutes were a blinding, sweaty blur.
Her chest pounded. She felt like she might have a heart attack walking to the stage, and that it might not be such a bad thing if she did. As she made her way slowly to the center of the room and up the steps she saw jackals, hyenas, and filthy rodents lining her path, to the left and to the right. She reached the stage floor and stood over them – the queen scavenger, or the carrion.
When the music started she just stood there for a moment. This is it, she told herself, and started to sway her hips as rhythmically as she could. She knew the words to the first song, and hummed the tune quietly to herself to try to keep time. It’s just you in your bathroom, that’s all. No one else is here.
She danced at first with her eyes closed, then opened them gradually, one at a time. Half the people in the bar weren’t even watching her. She dropped to her knees and started crawling up the stage like a cat. A few men on the edge of the stage held out dollar bills. She sashayed up to one of them and held out the strap of her garter as he slid in her tip.
Just pretend you know what you’re doing and they’ll never know. She slid off her gauze wrap and let it fall onto the stage, trying her best to exude the sexiness she wanted to feel. If anything, this should be good for my self-esteem. She started to roll around on the stage floor, then she remembered the pole.
She had no idea how to work the metal shaft growing vertically out of the stage floor, but she had seen it done in movies, and she had the unconscious fatuous belief of most people of her generation that any act seen in a movie was as fully grasped as one actually practiced. Grabbing onto it with one hand, she started to writhe like she imagined a stripper should. If the flies and ghosts from her apartment had been there, they would have found it hilarious, but fortunately for her the men in the Caribou were all too horny or too drunk to care about little things like rhythm and ability, and were mostly just happy to see such a pretty girl willing to take her clothes off for them.
When the second song started, she closed her eyes and unclasped the hinges of her bra, dropping it at her feet. She supposed there was something liberating about all this, but at the moment, she couldn’t think of what it might be.
The adrenaline rush of attention and the three whiskeys in her blood helped her feel more at ease, and she collected her tips with a cocked hip and a smile. When the last dollar was securely tucked beneath her garter, she stood up. The second song was nearly half over. She shimmied, she swayed, she did everything and anything she could think of that could possibly be construed as sexy. The more she did, the more men seemed to look at her, so she did even more. With her ballerina flexibility, she bent over at the hips and waved at a group of customers through her legs. They hooted and pounded their tables with fists.
Her set was almost over. She looked around her and saw the customers now not as vultures, but as pious devotees come to pay homage to their goddess. Chest thrust forward, hips thrusting sideways with each step of her heels, she walked back to the pole, grasped it, and leaned back as far as she could. Then she started spinning around and around. A few scattered voices rose whooping over the music.
The whiskey was strong in her, but the rush of performing was even stronger. The feeling was familiar; it threw her back to her days in high school and college dancing in ballets. Everyone in that room, at that moment, adored her. She swung herself faster around the pole.
Her hair flew straight outward from her head as she leaned back and twirled. Years of training had given her balance and strength, and she handled the speed masterfully as she went round and round, faster and faster. She closed her eyes and imagined this was a dream, and found a little bit of that freedom she had hoped for when first stepping up onto the stage at age four. She was a glorious goddess of love and beauty.
An instant after this brief, transforming moment of clarity, her balance and strength became overwhelmed by the sweat on her palms and the power of centrifugal force, and she slipped, flying off the stage into the crowd and landing on her back in the lap of a middle-aged man in front of a half-empty glass of beer. He choked with surprise and sudden impact, and accidentally dribbled a mixture of beer and bubbly spit onto Michelle’s supine belly.
She was bent backwards across the dribbler’s lap. If she hadn’t built up such strength and flexibility all her life, she quite probably would have broken a bone or two (perhaps faced paraplegia, which would have ended both her career as a dancer and this story prematurely) but as it was, she faced only a thousand pops and cracks in her spine as she straightened up, and a debilitating soreness in the morning.
She came round and looked into the face of the man who had broken her fall.
“I… just wanted to be closer to you,” she said, but it sounded more like a question than a statement. The man wiped the spittle off his chin and coughed an airy, embarrassed cough.
As she stood up and managed to brush herself off, she heard the MC asking the audience to give Isadora one last round of applause. “What an exit!” he was saying, and she couldn’t tell if he was making fun of her or not.
She tried to make her way back to the dressing room. As she pushed through the hyenas and bright lights, she noticed half-heartedly that the crowd was applauding.
Photos by Mitchell Greene: http://www.ninestepsstudios.com