They muttered and cooed over their project. “Try this on,” a blonde said, handing me a bustier. Another girl said they were going to just do a little something with my eyebrows, and they all nodded. One girl got to plucking, and it hurt so much, but I’m thankful for it now. You should have seen those brows. I’d never groomed them, because my mother didn’t teach me any of that stuff. They did my makeup and did what they could with my brown hair, which I’d always just worn long and flat.
“What’s your name?” Amy asked me.
“Stormy,” I said, looking at my transformation in the mirror. I smiled. Stormy.
My fairy godmothers talked me into doing a guest set. “It’s two songs,” said Amy. “The first is up-tempo and dressed, the second is slower and more sensual as you go topless.”
I told the DJ that I would start with “Looks That Kill” by Mötley Crüe and then do “Love You to Death” by Type O Negative. He turned to a virtual wall of CDs behind him, at least four hundred, and immediately grabbed what he needed.
“I’m Dalton,” he said. “I’ll announce you, so what’s your name?”
“Stormy.”
“You want that to be your stage name?”
“Well, my real name is Stephanie, but—”
“Stephanie Stormy,” he said. “Got it.”
“Wait…”
It was too late. The music started and “Stephanie Stormy” took the stage. I was already a dancer, so I was comfortable doing that and knew how to do little movements that would look pretty. The girls were so supportive and were cheering me on and tipping me through my first song. A few more guys had come in and had a look of “We’re gonna see new titties!” The bartender came from behind the bar and tipped me, and so did the bouncer. Andy looked very proud.
The second song started and I thought, Here we go. I took my top off and no one laughed. Hunh. Cinnamon, the owner, came out of the office to watch. She was so beautiful, like a young Madeleine Stowe, with long, long dark hair. When the song was over I did a quick bow and discreetly tried to pick up all the dollar bills. I made eighty-five dollars, more money in those two songs than I made answering phones all week at the barn.
The girls ran backstage to hug me, and Cinnamon came in, too.
“Do you want a job?” she asked.
“I have school, so I can’t work during the week,” I said.
“Well, can you do Friday and Saturday nights?”
Eighty-five dollars in nine minutes. “Yeah,” I said.
TWO
The first rule of Cinnamon’s—the only rule, really—was that you could not be topless on the floor. As the Louisiana State Legislature dictated, “Entertainers whose breasts or buttocks are exposed to view shall perform only upon a stage at least eighteen inches above the immediate floor….” No woman’s feet shall touch earth if she is showing her boobs for dollars. Amen.
At many clubs, if a customer requests a private dance, you could raise your hand straight high in the air and a bouncer would bring over a little box for you to stand on. But Cinnamon’s was so small that they didn’t even have room for boxes. If you wanted to give somebody a dance, you took them in the back room where they had a mini stage set up. There was a squiggly curve we could stand on next to each other, and the guys sat on rolling chairs.
My first Friday night at Cinnamon’s I heard this rule about ten times in the first ten minutes I was there. “It’s the easiest way for cops to bust up the place,” said Cinnamon.
“I get it,” I said. “The floor is lava.”
“Lava,” she said. “If you do a dance, you absolutely have to put your dress back on before you get down.”
I didn’t have good dancing clothes, so I had bought a dress cheap from the club. It was red velvet, and I paired it with white heels from home. It didn’t take long before a guy asked for a dance. He was okay looking, a skinny guy with brown hair. I led him to the back room and tried to look like I knew what I was doing.
I took the spot right next to Tracy, who was this total biker chick. She was the wife of one of the Banditos, a local motorcycle club. She’d been a stripper all her life, pretty but ridden hard and put away wet. Beef jerky in a slingshot G-string that went up top on her shoulders, always accessorized with thigh-high leather biker boots.
We were about three feet apart, and she had just started a dance for this shifty-looking bald guy. I started dancing for my guy, which was awkward enough my first time, but I was also watching her, sneaking looks to get a sense of what I should be doing.
I took off my dress, and the guy seemed so into it. Good start, but now what? What do I do with the dress? I didn’t want to throw it on the floor, so I wrapped it around my guy’s shoulders and played with it like a sexy scarf.
Right next to me, Tracy turned her back on the guy and bent over so he could see her ass. Noted, I thought. I’ll do that near the end. I had just returned my focus to my guy when all hell broke loose right next to me.
As Tracy bent over, her tampon string was sticking out of her G-string. Now, I have seen this happen twice my entire stripping career. But it was so much worse than that. The guy had tried to light the string with a cigarette lighter. Tracy saw it between her legs, and in one swift move of superhuman strength, she pulled her boot right off by the heel and repeatedly swung it down on her guy to beat the shit out of him.
“What the fuck?” I screamed, trying not to get hit.
My guy ran past me out of the club, a horny Wile E. Coyote escaping with my dress still on his shoulders. I had no dress, only a G-string, and I was three feet away from Tracy pummeling the fuck out of this guy. And the ground was lava.
Do you think Cinnamon’s had security cameras? No, they had a video baby monitor that the bartender would periodically check. It took the bartender, who was also the bouncer that night, a couple of minutes before he came in to pull Tracy off the guy.
“I’m sorry, I thought she was a firecracker!” the guy yelled as he was thrown out the door onto the gravel.
“Tracy, you can’t do that,” said the bartender.
“He lit my vagina on fire!” she yelled. “Kitty had a tail and he lit it!”
Meanwhile, I was still standing on the squiggle stage, covering my breasts like this scaredy cat.
“What are you doing?” the bartender asked.
“The guy took my dress,” I said, looking down at the lava floor.
“Oh, God, you can get down,” he said. “It’s not that serious. When there’s somebody getting killed, you can leave.”
“Good to know,” I said. Someone let me borrow a dress. And that, folks, was my first thirty minutes as a stripper.
I grew to love Tracy and every single girl who worked there. There were less than twenty total, about six girls working a night, which is nothing. You got to pick your own music, and to this day I will hear a song and my mind goes to seeing one girl dancing to it, all of her signature moves and favorite outfits.
Tracy only danced to Ozzy Osbourne’s “Crazy Train,” so you would hear it about twenty-five freaking times a night. She was all big and bad until her man would come in the club with all his bikers.
Then there was Amy, the one who I met at the concert. I think of her when I hear Heart’s “Magic Man.” She was this little tiny thing with a huge ass, and she would walk, not really dance. Her big move was to bend down so her hair fell forward, then arch her body to throw it back.