Punked, a Little

I’ve been making the assertion that the strip club industry is dying a long, slow, excruciating death for some time now. That’s not to say there isn’t still money to be made, not to say there aren’t individuals that still love us and shower stages with monetary appreciation, not to say that we still don’t have jackpot nights that capture the glittery decadence of the Clinton administration era. But everywhere I go, everyone in the industry keeps searching for some alternative Shangri-La Stripper Land where the money flows through generous fingers, like water through clenched fists. Once commonplace, the customers willing to donate to our breed are an endangered species.

When the economy tanked, when the Missouri legislature crippled the industry, the search moved to border states . . . Kansas, East St. Louis, Iowa. There, I overhear the same conversations: “There’s money in Alaska, when the fishing boats come in. There’s pipeline money in North Dakota. There are always spenders in Vegas.”

My general attitude has changed since I went broke. I don’t buy anything anymore, not because I don’t want to, but because I can’t. I’ve purchased two articles of clothing in 2012. I don’t get facials or manicures anymore. Every penny counts, is accounted for, before it even comes into my possession. Meanwhile, the emerging standard is the bargaining customer. If a dance is forty dollars, they try to negotiate to thirty. They want us to throw one in for free. They look at the dwindling crowds in the bar and harness a buyer’s market mentality. I argue that while you can negotiate the price of a car or a five-piece dinette set, you don’t stand at theatre box offices trying to shaft the kid selling tickets for a reduced price. Ultimately, the endeavor is really insulting. This mentality suggests an underscore that says: “You’re not worth your asking price. I want to cheapen you.” In an environment like this, hustling more money out of customers requires multilayered creativity, tactical maneuvers, trenches-style. A dancer has to manipulate the contents of the wallet at the precise moment when the brain-to-penis blood ratio is skewed enough to make idiots out of even the wisest men.

Despite preparation and foreknowledge, sometimes the strategies backfire. Sometimes you get punked.

So, for example, let’s just say I’m dancing for a man we’ll call Jim. Jim seems nice. Jim pays for three dances. Jim is friendly. Jim, also, is a little person, a factor I account for, a factor suggesting that Jim perhaps has faced some obstacles in his life. A factor suggesting that because of the general attitudes of average Americans towards those of differing abilities, that Jim might be the kind of individual who has good intentions for the rest of humanity, that Jim wouldn’t do something unkind to a gal who has been nothing but nice to him, even if he’s paying her forty dollars a song. Even when I give him a 3-for-100 dollar deal.

At the end of the third dance, I turn on the charm, nestled on Jim’s tiny lap, his child-sized shoes barely poking over the edge of the couch.

“You don’t want to stop now, do you Jim? We’re just getting to know each other. One more?” I ask, the words like syrup, honey-dripping whispers from my mouth to Jim’s ear.

“No, let’s keep going,” he says. “I’ll go to the ATM afterwards.”

And so I keep going, for another three songs. And Tiny Jim heads for the cash machine as I stop to pay the ‘house’ their cut of my dances. And then I notice that Tiny Jim has, in fact, walked right past the ATM, headed for the exit door. I’m still wearing just stilettos and a G-string, stripper clothes draped over my forearm, but I take off to catch him, my long legs making strides that are at least the length of Jim’s height, long enough for me to catch the collar of his shirt just before he slips through the tinted-glass doors. He jerks away from me, laughing in a panicked sort of way, squeezing through the door. I stand on the other side of the glass, mostly naked, and watch Jim’s teeny-tiny legs shuffle in a blur as he runs through the parking lot, his head bobbing with each miniature tread. Jim runs faster than he’s probably ever run in his life, away from his tab.

I briefly consider running out after him, imagine the cinematic scenario . . . a topless stripper in heels and thong underwear hauling across the parking lot behind a dwarf who dashed out without paying her. Would I yank off a stiletto and hurl it at his head, knocking him to the ground? Would the parking lot attendants start chanting “JER-RY! JER-RY! JER-RY!” because I can’t fathom a more Springer-esque episode than the one the universe has delivered to me just now. If the whole thing weren’t so god damned hilarious, I’d have been really pissed off.

In retrospect, as I counted my paltry winnings at the end of the night, I did get really pissed. I got punked. By a little person, no less. A dwarf jacked me for $100 that I really, truly, honest-to-god need right now. In the end, it all just seemed sad and pathetic. Even the people in our society who’ve likely been the subject of persecution of some kind or another don’t have enough respect for me to pay me what they owe me. Maybe that was the plan Jim had all along. I’ll never know. He’ll never come back. He’ll tell his friends how he heisted a hundred bones from a stupid stripper.

And this is the world I inhabit. It’s becoming the world we inhabit, because if I’ve learned nothing else in the last 15 years, it’s that the strip club is a hyper-exaggerated microcosm of the world at large. We’ve become a society of takers . . . take from whomever you can, step on the shoulders of anyone on your climb to the top, leave the world in your wake, care only for yourself, have zero respect for strangers, fuck everyone else; a dystopic, Ayn Rand-ian paradise where the individual wins and the whole world can suck it. This is the disheartening part . . . not that I got punked, not that I lost out on a hundred bucks, but that the general tone of humanity today seems so inhumane. It seems there are fewer and fewer people who possess the ability to think about how their actions affect everyone they encounter. It appears that empathy has taken a back seat to individualism. While I can laugh at the idea of me running naked through an East St. Louis strip club parking lot, nearly naked, throwing my stiletto and chasing after a little person who owes me money, the sentiment behind it hurts. Jim is the individual, like all the other individuals, taking what they can, and I’m the rest of humanity, suffocating in the wake of his tiny legs kicking up dust in his escape. And if I weren’t a writer, constantly reading metaphor in even the silliest events, this whole story would just be one I’d tell around the ghetto fire about getting jacked for a hundred bucks by a little person. But in the end, I am a writer, and everything means something.