Dream On

"I don't like girls in the daytime," he said shortly, and then, thinking
this a bit abrupt, he added: "But I like you." He cleared his throat. "I
like you first and second and third."
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald, "This Side of Paradise"

My horsie bag and stripper gear...



Today the "What the hell are you doing in a place like this?!" factor reached critical mass. Everyone thinks I'm 18 and just fell off the milk-truck, including the manager, who photo-copied my ID three times already. Then I start talking and the heads start to shake.

Finance Guy: "Were you an English Lit major?"

Me: "Uh, haha, no I'm just an avid reader, sometimes, when I'm not here taking my clothes off. You want a dance?"

But eventually it always comes down to:

"Seriously, you're too good to be true. Would you ever date a guy you met here?".

God bless all of us. It's so weird.

I know I set myself up for this, and that I have, by the deftest subconscious maneuvers, put myself in yet another fish-out-of-water scenario to garner attention. Nobody is special, though. I am not. We are all equally deserving of love and attention, and the day I can walk in the strip club and fit in will be the day my ego really is shed like the outmoded lizard skin it truly is.

A guy came in, for the second time ever, apparently, after meeting me on Monday and bought a few dances from me with my clothes on (this is how you know a guy REALLY likes you). He wants to date me. I don't think it's going to happen, because he met me naked in a STRIP CLUB and I have serious doubts about the odds of that sort of meeting panning out into an awesome relationship. He knew how lame it was, he mentioned it, yet he couldn't seem to help himself.

I talked about Camus and Vonnegut with some customers when it was slow (chatting with the tightwads who don't buy dances is something I do when only I'm bored of talking to the Ukranian cocktail waitresses) and got some tips from Lexi, the Bronx hustler who often makes me cringe even though she's got the hang of the money-making part of this business. Behaviorally, she's a totally different human animal than I. I observe her keenly. Her nose looks as though it's been broken at least once.

"Don't talk with them for more than one song, and if they don't buy a dance, bounce to the next guy," she told me.

Then she volunteered some personal information:

"I don't have no boyfriend or parents, so I have to take care of myself. I used to have a guy who supported me, but that ended, and now I just have to do everything. I don't got no one, so I just do it."

She doesn't have to be nice to me, or tell me anything. I appreciate it.

PS The other day I went on a date with a thoughtful lawyer who gave me some vegan cupcakes and a book of Marilyn Hacker poetry. It's so nice to have a man do all the simple things like pay for a cab home, email the same night to say he had a great time, etc., which I haven't put myself out there to experience in awhile. I forget the positive aspects of dating sometimes. Funny to be on yet another date at Wild Ginger with the latest in the series of conservative men interested in me and well-off enough to take me off the meat grinder circuit yet still balk at the prospect of being kept by someone who doesn't electrify me attraction-wise from the get-go. NEWSFLASH TO SELF: Apparently Mr. Right with a career in the arts doesn't marry strippers/ ex-dominatrixes!

PS2 It's so slow at this club. I'm not making very much money at all, though I'm doing as well as most of the other women. Being new doesn't help. Neither does the economy, but my living expenses are VERY low, so I'll be ok by next week, money-wise.

In The Flesh

All life is just a progression toward, and then a recession from, one phrase—'I love you.'"
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald

Out of the blue I've been thinking often and fondly about my friend Paul, a brilliant young lawyer I met in East Hampton this summer. A friend of his-- a beautiful dominatrix I worked with at the time-- brought me to his marathon birthday celebration at his vacation home with every expectation of seducing me, which fell flat when she discovered I was totally infatuated (needlessly, as it turns out) with someone else.

The upside of all of this was being introduced to Paul, who was and is, a kindred spirit of the sort one does not meet every day. Dashing, charismatic, and almost brutally intelligent, his self-assured smile made me feel welcome-- even coddled--immediately. At the time we met, he was in an open relationship with a girl I thought was very sweet but possibly a little bit too reserved for my tastes-- she was, however, of the same redheaded, fair-skinned white girl variety as myself, which I suppose must be Paul's type, based on the scant amount of time he spent dropping hints that he was very attracted to me also.

Surprisingly, he was charming, rather than vexing, in his attempts at seduction, never pushing me or pouncing, but playfully ruffling my hair or teasing me-- which I secretly loved-- and always carefully gauging my amused but distant reactions with his sparkling brown eyes.

In short, he is a bon vivant rather than a libertine, which I never do mind.

I found every conversation with him to be memorable, but our physical rapport was probably even more so. Every time we touched I felt my body relax, and every instinct told me, despite the way he openly flouted monogamy, Paul didn't have a truly mercenary or vulgar bone in his body. When we hugged it was so heavenly that I can still recall the press of his slender waist against mine, my head resting briefly against his lean but powerfully built shoulder. I wonder if he remembers my body as warmly?

However, although the sight of the sunlight dappling his dark, roguish curls as we sat by his backyard pool made my heart race, I kept things between us strictly friendly. I was hopelessly smitten with another man, and he had a girlfriend.

After all, to me a man in a relationship-- ANY kind of relationship-- becomes unappealing-- almost inhuman-- romantically speaking. Taken men are forbidden fruit of the strictly rotten variety in my estimation-- at least when it comes to cheating with them.

Anyhow, he let me know as soon as he broke up with his girlfriend, although, at the time, he was back on the West Coast where he works and lives with as much good humor as he can muster while still longing for New York.

After our summer encounters I saw him briefly in October, after he showed up-- to my delight-- at my friend Pearl's birthday party. He met the person who had been the object of my infatuation over the summer (whom he knew by name and openly loathed on sight, which shocked me) but I kept the fact that there was, after all, nothing going on between the two of us to myself. Paul just assumed otherwise, and I was somehow reticent to disabuse him of the notion.

Maybe it's the disparity in our social classes that makes me so wary-- after all, he can't even join any social-networking sites because of the gossip blogs that constantly try to unjustly portray him as a rich, reckless party animal in order to paint his endlessly Forbes-featured father in a bad light, and I'm... a stripper (at least for now).

When I told him that, in addition to my ghostwriting job, I was working as a dominatrix, he hardly cared. He was more fascinated with my religious beliefs and having conversations about ethical quandries, astral projection, etc. I suppose it's the same way I feel about him, unless I'm much mistaken, or a fool-- our occupations are only so much stage business compared to the lively affection we feel for one another. I don't really want to tell him I'm stripping just yet, though.

Anyhow, he recently invited me "Come see him in the flesh" on the west coast. I'm considering it. Since he's now fully aware I'm saving myself for marriage, he can't possibly imagine I'm an easy lay, not that finding willing girls has ostensibly been much of a problem for him. Yet, in my mind, regarding an in-person encounter, all roads lead to his bed, and I can't imagine that he feels much differently. However, I'm sure it would be very frustrating for him to take things back to junior high in terms of physical intimacy, which is my basic M.O. In fact, I get so dizzy just thinking about the possibility of his lips brushing mine that I wonder if a weekend spent together wouldn't be more like torture for both of us, really.

I've accepted that my ideas about virginity are not the only valid ones. I wish other people would do the same... it's difficult enough to be divided from such a critical aspect of human life without being thought of as backwards. What Paul will say at the critical moment, I do not know, and slightly fear.

Even so, I'd be lying if I didn't admit the half of me that still believes that romance with a man is possible, despite all my previous strike-outs, longs to find out. I would love to give him my finest attempts at intimacy and partnership for a few days and see what happens.

Would he break my heart?

Would I end up becoming as frozen and out of control as I fear and say or do something cruel to him, as a coping mechanism?

Should I go?

I wonder...

PS The way Paul signs his emails with a single capital X makes me bite my lip.

PS I got so much paint on my clothes they were starting to actually drip. Consequently, after stripping them off to finish I got so splattered with paint my skin began to look as mottled as Zartan's in the swamp (Remember that villaneous changeling from GI Joe?). It's even in my hair.

I Love Lawyers

Although it’s true every man who comes into a strip club is a potential source of income, and therefore somewhat of a mark, it’s impossible not to like some of the customers. Occasionally I’m even attracted to them. I asked my old roommate if she thought I’d ever meet a man to date who would treat me like a lady if we met at a strip club, and she replied:

“No. Never”

I believe she’s right, so I have decided to simply settle for dropping the pretense of hustling the men I really like in exchange for a few minutes of honest conversation and not expect or court anything else. Nobody wants to bring a stripper home to mother, right? Even if she’s a published writer and a virgin it’s too much stigma for the average man. It makes my soul bleed to admit it, though. I’m not a nice girl anymore.

I’m not a nice girl. I’m a sex worker. Repeat, believe it, stop the denials.

Saturday night I met a really amazing young lawyer from Colorado , in for a friend’s birthday party, who asked me,

“You’re way too well-adjusted to work here. What’s really going on?”

When I explained I write for a feminist magazine and I’m on the last leg of a journey of exploration into the sex industry, focusing on the apparent duality (particularly when one considers my religious beliefs) I experience, I could see his expression change in such a way that I would have believed his eyes had alighted on a goldmine in any other situation. However, because I’m a stripper and ex-dominatrix, and not doing this experiment strictly for the sake of investigative journalism or as a private sociology experiment, I simply asked him what he was doing in a profession notoriously full of people who go to extremes since he, too, seemed very even-keeled.

I explained the known phenomenon of raging sexually dominant and submissive men in law, and how my time as a dominatrix was mainly spent with lawyers. I also told him because I like staring down submissive men on the street and am looking for a dominant man in my private life I’m a lawyer magnet, since so many men attracted to codified rules gravitate to the law as a profession and seem to sense that I’m pretty kinky, too. I haven't even dated a non-lawyer in quite awhile.

He was pretty wonderful, and even though he looked pointedly and with a lot of longing at me as I ducked out of the club in my street clothes, I knew there was no point in giving him anything but a smile in parting. You can't tell me someone that fabulous is single. I refuse to believe it.

C’este la vie beautiful boy.

You know you dodged a bullet, anyway.