lecherous death-eaters

So, there’s this girl who’s been getting on my nerves lately. On the second night that I knew her, she made the mistake of coming up behind me and poking me in the ribs. I yelled and threw an elbow without thinking about it—this is what happens when you come up behind me and poke me in the ribs, without fail. I turn to shoot her a look, and instead of apologizing like most people do when I inform them of exactly how much I hate that and how uncontrollable my reaction is, she goes, “Wow, you’re really high strung, aren’t you?” Oh man. Not the best foot to start out on with me. It gets better. She’s really loud and obnoxious, and never seems to have anything nice to say. Every time you hear the unmistakable sound of her storming into the dressing room, she’s whining about something at full volume. It’s really fucking annoying, to the point where I’ve had whole conversations with other women about it, and actually went so far as to say to her last week, “Girl, you don’t seem to be having a very good time at work lately. When was the last time you took a few days off work? Do you think you might be burned out? You might consider taking a rest.” She just stared at me. Or fired off some excuse, I don’t remember. But seriously, negativity turned up to eleven with vocal projection to match? It’s not something I want to be around every day, but I don’t really have a choice. Doesn’t help that her locker is about four away from mine.

Now I’m pretty sure she’s on drugs. Two nights ago she crashes into the dressing room doing her “Whhyyyyy doesn’t anybodyyyyy like meeeee” (Seriously, this is what’s coming out of her mouth—can you say ‘self fulfilling prophecy’? I knew thatcha could!) routine, but I’m in such a good mood it barely touches me. I’ve just spent three lovely hours messing around with someone I would date if he wasn’t married (I only get to see him about twice a year, and it’s always a treat. He can see the future. And he has fangs) and playing concierge to the rest of his roomful of work colleagues up in VIP. Naturally, my hair got a little messed up, so I’m redoing it: about twice a week, when I don’t feel like washing/drying/straightening my hair, I put it in a bun and throw on these hair pieces instead. They look like tribbles: they’re color-matched, mostly braided, hair “scrunchies” (no, not that kind of scrunchie). They’re an instantaneous updo, and the end result is rather messy and irreverent looking, and it accentuates my neck. I love them. Anyways, they got messed up (to the point of falling off) when I was upstairs having my neck bitten by a wise person, so now they’re laid out on the countertop for reapplication. I return from a bobby pin excavation excursion to my locker, to find whiner girl leading a team of two other women of color in making fun of my tribbles, literally pointing and laughing and throwing out comments about how only black chicks can wear those things. Whoa. I’m not a very confrontational person by nature, and I’m really not interested in spending two minutes applying my tribbles in front of these women who were just mocking them and me, so I grab my things and head over to the other side of the dressing room. A while passes, I can’t shake that feeling, and the incident is kindof gnawing at me. So when I’m talking to this really awesome fedora-and-three-piece-suit-wearing bar fixture, and whiner girl elbows her way in fishing for a drink, I confront her. I tell her that what I thought she said was rude, and it made me really uncomfortable. Now, if the situation was reversed, even if I didn’t mean it or give two shits, I would most likely have acknowledged the other person’s feelings and apologized and explained the miscommunication if one existed. She does no such thing. “Aw, come ON, we were only JOKING, and besides, that’s not what we said.” And I’m like, “Dude. You were making fun of the shit that I wear, right in front of me. Not cool.” And she persists: “Oh, come ON. Lighten UP. Here, let’s kiss and make up” and then, she grabs my head and slimes the lower half of my face with saliva and lipgloss for about ten seconds. I’m trying to pull away the entire time, I’m completely revolted (hell, even fedora guy walks off—and he’s one of the most perverted people I’ve ever met), and when she finally lets me go I shoot her this look of total disgust and stomp off to the dressing room to clean off my fucking face. I think she actually sexually harassed me. And that, my friends, is a really difficult thing to do.

So I did something I’ve only done once before in my four year career as a slutty independent contractor: I told on her. I talked to the house mom, who was horrified, and fetched the dance manager and made me repeat my story. I felt really weird, doing that. Flash forward to last night, and who do I run into at the back door on our way to sign in for the night? Yeah. I avoid her for as long as possible, thinking she probably got in trouble and she knows it was me, but I guess not, because she goes “sup bitch” and I’m like “you were off your tits last night” and she’s like “yep. Gonna do it again tonight.” Ugh. GROSS. I really wish she would go away. I’m going to see if I can get her fired for doing coke in the bathroom or something.

I manage to avoid her while we’re getting ready, and go to visit my favorite bartender to have a salad and a tasty adult beverage. While sitting at the bar, one of the fixtures is asking me about my academic career. I tell him I didn’t get my MA because I thought it would make me more employable, I simply wanted the knowledge. He had done something similar (finished grad school with like 180 hours), and we have a conversation about how education is so belt-knotchy these days. He says to me, “Consider yourself a particle that enjoys brevity in motion. You’re just bouncing through life.” I find this so awesome I run off to the dressing room to write it down, but end up just sending it in a text message to a new lover, a writer, who laid this one on me in return: “Bouncing slipping sliding bending writhing moaning spinning somersaulting gyrating lubricating motivating inebriating bifurcating licking sucking coming sighing and the bouncing all over again. Sounds about right.” Oh sweet lord in heaven, that’s a luscious thing to read right before going onstage to dance naked in front of a crowd. I am the goddess incarnate, and your souls hereby belong to me. Pay homage or die.

On stage four, I receive a tip from a rather muscley person and we talk about body modifications. He’s nice enough, so I sit down with him and his buddies once my relief arrives. I have a pretty good time laughing with this table, and muscle dude has some interesting things to say about tattoos. He won’t let me dance for him though, so his time is limited. “Look, I’d rather just pay you to sit with me, here’s ten bucks.” Ten bucks? That’s not gonna go very far, I’ve been there for like half an hour. Pretty soon I give up, and he’s cool about it—“I understand, go make your money girl.”

Off I go. I snag a lap belonging to someone who tipped me onstage, and end up giving him his first lapdance ever. I love popping cherries. Then I find Mazlowe (yes, her stage name is literally a reference to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, because she is that awesome), a burner friend who comes into town a few weekends per month to work at my club. I sit with her and the dude she’s working on, just passing time till the night gets busier. Somehow we’ve kept missing each other when she comes to the club, so I soon discover how awesome it is to work with her—I really like her attitude, jokes, and her positive yet berating disposition. We fuck around with her dude for about fifteen minutes before his buddy shows up. Buddy is taking a while to warm up to the environment, and we’re all talking more, cackling at her jokes. In fact, buddy doesn’t seem to like me at all, so I’m pretty sure my time at this table is also limited, just like the last. Somehow the fact that I went to grad school comes up, and Mazlowe’s dude asks me what my degree is in. I’m in a playful mood, so I go, “guess.” His first guess is “animal husbandry” and we all have a good laugh about that one. I give him a few more guesses before I finally tell him “women’s studies” and then, he goes, I shit you not, he says “that’s retarded.” Now, as I mentioned in the "men's studies" blog, it’s my personal policy to try and discourse with people who have misguided impressions of my field of study, but not this time. I feel like pouring my drink on him. Instead I just walk off without saying anything. The feminist outreach program is closed due to lack of funding.

Then I’m pissed. The club is full but not busy: there are lots of people sitting around drinking, partying, but not buying dances. This is typical for a weekend, but sometimes you can get lucky. Well, turns out one of my good friends happens to be making a rare appearance, so I go up to VIP and mess around with my two friends who are keeping him company. Seriously: he and I are so close that there’s no way I can dance for him anymore. It’d be like giving my uncle a lap dance. But I’ll mess around with Rhiannon, oh yes indeedy I will. She’s fun. We spend a considerable stretch of time trying to leave marks on each other’s asses. My time with these friends recharges my emotional batteries—I was having trouble playing the roles downstairs, so it’s really nice to just be myself with these people I’ve known for years.

He has to leave, so soon I’m on my own again, working the trenches. I’m making laps, not seeing much, when I pass muscley dude. He goes, “You should have stuck around, all of this could have been yours” and shows me about five hundreds in his wallet. WHAT THE FUCK. I say, “But you didn’t want dances, and you gave me ten bucks after about thirty minutes. What was I supposed to think?” and he’s like, “You screwed it up. I would have given you all of this.” Omfg, really? Does he feel so powerless in this place that he needs to taunt me with money? Does it get him off to have girls throwing themselves at him all night in hopes of being paid, and then teasing them with what “they could have had” if they had just gotten it right? Is there a right way to play this guy? I don’t really give a fuck, I’m so incensed, I have no desire to even think about what I “could have done differently.” I go, “whatever” and storm off. On my way back to the dressing room, I pass Mazlowe’s “women’s studies is retarded” asshat, who motions me over to the table. I flip him off and keep walking. Fuck this shit.

I sit in the dressing room. I eat cake. I read the book I brought with me, which happens to have been recently released by that aforementioned lover with the talented texting thumbs. His shit makes me laugh, and it's exactly what I need in that moment. I send him a picture of the book on my boot, thrown over one knee, with lockers in the background, and I tell him how nice it is to have him in my locker. He likes this. I’m on a particularly amusing section, so funny that I’m reading quotes aloud and nobody is getting them, which I find even more amusing and insist upon telling him in another text. I distract myself from this wretched night, and salvage what’s left of my state of emotions, I re-ground myself by indulging in the writing of someone with whom i shared a spectacular shag a few weeks ago. I tell him how nice that is, and regale him with quotes I hear coming out of strippers: just down from a (apparently pointless) stage rotation, one goes “well, that was a waste of lipgloss.” LOL. Whiner girl says, “I might throw up, would that help?” Wow. What an attention whore. But worth relaying nonetheless. Along with quotes, I send him increasingly provocative self portraits holding his book in my stripper gear. Soon they release us from this mirrored cage, and he instructs me to come hard when I get home. I thank him for getting me through the last part of my horrible night and tell him I’ll leave some wet spots on my bed for him. He thanks me and says that my sexiness will inform his dreams deliciously. How refreshing, what a contrast, what a beautiful way to come back to myself after being attacked by lecherous death-eaters all night. Thanks for that, sexy man. I owe you one.