Working the Peep-shows

In this series, I am presenting slices of life as a strip dancer in Portland, Oregon, pretty much as I hear it or see it or experience it, but it is through the eyes of a fictitious dancer named LemonDrop. LemonDrop does not exist. LemonDrop is silent, invisible, the wraith in the pervasive smoke of every club I worked in. She observes me and every other dancer equally. She tries to make sense of the barrage of stimulus coming through each day or night on shift. Her role is to help us see life inside the walls of the dressing rooms, or the view from the stage, or hear the interactions with the customers at the rack or at the bar. And she never uses real names, not even real stage names. Sometimes she tells the story; other times she is a silent character in the story.

Working the Peep-shows

It was a slow day and the only two dancers on shift were sitting in the dressing room, dressed in bra and thong. There were two customers out in the bar, both of them perched at the bar with their backs to the stage, and they had been the only two customers for the last hour. The dancers talked, smoked cigarettes, scraped resins from a pot pipe, and talked some more. The conversation turned to juice bars.

“I worked a juice bar once, and I’ll never work another one,” Lazer said, rolling a cigarette while she talked. “I didn’t last long. I walked out.”

“Really? Why? What happened?”

“It was early in my shift. A customer came in and watched all three of us dance a set, then he went to go sit at a table after I finished my set. I asked him if he would like some company. He said yeah, so I told him, ‘Hang on… I’ll be right back. I’m going to go freshen up and change and I’ll be right back.’” So I ran back to the dressing room and changed real fast. I took some extra time because I wanted to be sure I presented well. It took me about a song and a half. It wasn’t like I was going (and here she made a motion of firing up a pot pipe) or anything. I was just making sure I looked good for him.” She paused to light her rollie. She brushed some ash from her lap. “So when I went back out, he was gone. I guess he drank his $5 energy drink and decided it was time to go. But the manager came over then. She was SUCH a bitch! She asked me why he left. I said, ‘I dunno. I went back to change and freshen up and when I got back out he was gone.’ She started to yell at me. ‘He doesn’t give a shit what you have on you dumb bitch! You just took money out of my hand while you were fucking off back there! And one of these girls could have made forty bucks if you had let one of them have him!’ She was really pissed! I just thought, ‘Bitch! I don’t need this kind of shit!’ So I left. I went back and changed into my street clothes and I just left. I never went back.”

“Wow. That sucks.”

“Yeah. I didn’t like that place at all.” She giggled. Carefully she scraped the pile of resin dust into a pile. “Nice!” she said. “I have enough to get me a good high!”

“I used to work the peep-shows, though,” she continued. “There’s a big plate of glass in between us and the customers, so they can do anything they want.” She took a drag from her rollie cigarette. “So one day I’m in there doing my thing and this customer comes in. He was a Mexican. He wasn’t very big.” She stopped the story to scrape some of the resin powders into the bowl and light them. She took a big toke, held it, blew it out with obvious satisfaction at the big cloud it made. “Damn. I got a lot out of here!” she observed. “So anyway, I was dancing for him, and just kind of watching him through the window, when he pulled his thing out. It was HUGE. I mean, it was like my arm!” And here she motioned to her forearm. “I was like ‘Oh wow! I bet you never get laid! As soon as someone sees that they’re all (and here she shielded her eyes behind her hand, turning away from something she would rather not see), ‘Uh… I gotta go! Sorry… I hear my kids calling!’’ You know what I mean?” They both laughed at the image.

“So then he starts stroking himself, like this,” and she makes a motion as though she is washing a fence post. “Then he starts to cum, splatting on the window pane. I’m thinking whoa! ‘cause it was a lot. Then he says, ‘Oh that’s just pre-cum!’ And he’s stroking himself and all of a sudden he just cums all over that window. I couldn’t believe it! It was everywhere! I just kept thinking, ‘Oh, that poor clean-up guy! He is going to have his work cut out for him on this one!’ It almost made me laugh out loud!”

At this point the bartender popped her head through the door from the bathroom and hollered for the “next bootie on duty” to get out on stage, because a customer had just come in. Lazer took a last draw from her rollie, handed it to the other dancer to finish, and stepped through the curtained doorway to the stage. The music started to blare from the jukebox, and soon LemonDrop could hear her big plastic stripper-heels clunk against the floor as she moved around the stage for the lone customer at the rack. In the smoky dressing room, LemonDrop watched as the other dancer took a drag from Lazer’s rollie and adjusted her hair, waiting for her turn on stage. Three songs on, three songs off. It was going to be a long shift.

May 4, 2008