STRIPPERS ARE PEOPLE TOO

Night Lives

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When I was 21, I was living in the subculture underbelly of the Lower Haight Ashbury with two co-workers with dyed black hair that, I eventually figured out, hated me.  We all worked at a big nightclub and were living that kind of life: working until 4 or 5 in the morning, having breakfast at the 24-hour diner, sleeping late into the afternoon.  Everybody in the club scene wore black all the time, because none of us had washer-dryers.   It was a tribe of people with exciting hair in Doc Marten boots, riding around in the middle of the night on vintage rat-patrol motorcycles — old kick-start Triumphs and BMWs.  There was a certain rock starness to being a club worker, and, apart from my treacherous roommates, a certain tribal fidelity.  Club workers took care of all other club workers — when we went out, nobody paid for anything. 

I dated “Tony” (I use no real names) the bar manager, for a while.  He was a 35-year old bodybuilder. He gave me a Cushman metermaid cart, which I drove around as my primary vehicle for a while.  It had a 4-speed clutch on the left side of the driver’s bench, and a flashing yellow police light on top, which I usually covered with a plastic pumpkin.  

The night after the Loma Prieta earthquake, Tony, in a disaster induced display of machismo, brought a rifle to my place I shared with the roommates, just in cast the shit came down. 

The more squat and shrieky of the two girls took major offense. 

“I don’t like guns, and I don’t like bimbos,” she said, referring to me. 

“I’m not a bimbo,” I said. “You take it back. You take it back right now,” I told her, in a voice serious enough that she took it back. 

That was the 2nd closest I have ever been to being in an actual fistfight.  The awful roommates both slept under a table that night. 

Tony and I ended up taking the pumpkin off of the Cushman, turning on the light, and cruising around off-limits areas damaged by the earthquake, because it was assumed we were an emergency vehicle. 

There were some local stars of the club scene — “faces,” as it were. “Hurricane” was one of them.  She was a tall, gaunt woman some ten to fifteen years older than most of the club workers, who had been a model at some point.  She had the sides and back of her head shaved, and a waistlong tangle of yarn and color-infused dreadlocks. She had a wonderful sense of style, flair and drama. 

I went to her house in the Haight, once, that she shared with an incredibly handsome gay artist.  The apartment was expertly decorated and filled with light and beautiful art, particularly her roommate’s bedroom, which featured a carved bed with a head and footboard with clusters of fruit carved into the top that looked like something a Duke would inherit. “He made that bed in his high school shop class,” Hurricane whispered to me, pointing out one of the large marble male torsos he had also expertly carved. 

We walked down the hall of this lavish apartment and Hurricane opened the door to her room — and all of a sudden, I knew where she’d gotten her name.  It was dark, airless and dusty — and there was no furniture at all; nothing hung on the walls, no decorative effort whatsoever.  Clothing and papers were strewn all over the floor. She seemed to be sleeping on a pile of laundry.  Walking over to one pile of rubbish, she produced a particular Penthouse magazine from around a decade earlier, and showed me her 9-page spread and centerfold.  It was suddenly so graphic it was not unlike getting hit in the eye with a wet steak. 

 “Boy, were my parents mad at me,” she said.  It amazed me that someone so well-put together was living like a homeless person. 

I dumped Tony and started going out with Dolph, another club-working tribesman with a BMW motorcycle.  He and I ended up launching a few events together, which we found out we were not very good at when we hosted an absurd event called “Pantytown,” which essentially was a runway parade of about a dozen of my friends in strange underwear.  The club patrons were entirely bewildered. 

There was a strawberry blonde French chick who had been a dancer in Pantytown.  We didn’t know her very well, but we both thought she was graceful, and very sexy.  She told us she was a dancer, I  assumed modern or ballroom.  Hurricane hired us to provide “entertainment” to the club for $50, so we hired Frenchy to do some lite GoGo dancing. 

Hurricane called me the next day, a gale force of fury. 

“What the fuck was THAT?” She screeled. “You should be ashamed of yourself. That was disgusting.” 

I did not know what she was talking about. 

“That stripper you hired!” She barked.  “What kind of club do you think this is?  She was showing her inner labia!  It was so wrong and so sleazy. It was appalling.  And she wouldn’t stop.  Every time we asked her to shut it down, she got up and was worse. ”  

I couldn’t stop laughing, although I found Hurricane’s extreme reaction highly ironic considering she had been Miss October.

Uninvited labia is all about context. 

Around a decade later, I was married and sitting next to my husband poolside at the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas.  

“Oh my God,” said my husband.  “You’ve got to take a look at this unbelievable jackass.” 

I looked across the pool, and there was Tony, the bodybuilder I used to date, wearing an electric green speedo, doing absurd exhibitionist  yoga moves by the pool, locking his ankles behind his neck, and behaving altogether like a wet steak himself. 

“Oh my God. I used to date that guy,” I said, in a sentence that probably kicked-off the process of my eventual divorce.   I’m sure my husband never quite saw me the same way again. 

Full service editing: cintraw@gmail

Artwork: “Salt Marsh” (in progress), oil on canvas, Cintra Wilson 2023

Actual invite to “Pantytown”