~This essay was
previously published in Pivo (2003).
“So what do you do?” I ask, because
he already knows what I do, we’re at my work.
“I’m a musician,”
he says, and we both know that’s not all, that the twelve people in the private
room and the tension in the dressing room on his arrival don’t have a lot to do
with music. But we pretend it is, pretend we can have a normal conversation,
pretend there’s lots to find out about each other and that we both care.
He’s nearly forty
now, or perhaps on the far side, it’s hard to tell grey from blond. In the
poster on the wall of my rented one-bedroom, over where the funky part of
Dallas becomes a bad neighborhood, he’s thirty, or maybe a drugged-out
twenty-five, fronting a band that will be famous always but always a little
less famous than him. He’s drinking brand name gin and tonic, three green
olives on a plastic sword balanced on the edge. I’m drinking champale, which is
house code for a six dollar cranberry juice and ginger ale. I’m underage, my
Poloroid’s on the Do Not Serve board in the back hall, but I don’t drink
anyway. He’s either a boobs man or a brains man, because if he was an ass man,
I wouldn’t be here, being a little softer around the backside than the rest of
the Dallas girls. My bet is on brains. I’m hoping it’s brains. I figured out
pretty quickly I wasn’t a Barbie body, was never going to be the tightest girl
in the bar no matter how many reps I did, my money comes from conversation and
climbing – they’ll pay twenty bucks for the fun of watching me climb two
stories up, wrap my high boots around one of the cage bars, lean back and slide
down, squeezing my thighs to stop short when my hair brushes the platform. Sometimes
thirty.
We’re supposed to
do two sets in the cages after two songs on stage, but he’s had a word with the
manager, or rather, his manager’s had a word with my manager, and a girl who
never liked me to begin with and now is into full-blown hate is taking my sets.
Lock my locker for sure tonight, or better yet, take everything home, shoes,
dresses, makeup, anything that can be ripped or cut with nail scissors or
smashed on the tile floor. I learned in Florida never to leave money in a
locker, as fast as you can make a hundred and eighty bucks it still burns to
lose it. Dallas is better, there are house mothers who police the dressing room
and iron and bandage and pass out cups of liquid latex in the clubs inside the
city limits, where if the cops come in, your fake nipples have to peel off in
one piece and be opaque to a dollar bill. Here outside the city limits, we’re
bare up top, but in the Cabaret we’re also in dresses “appropriate for street
wear” when we sit with the customers and we don’t cross the invisible wall in
front of their knees, the barrier between us and their groins.