The itch started in my left arm, but gradually it spread throughout my body, going deep, as if it was in my veins. I was also having trouble breathing, still feverish and now slipping in and out of sleep.
A little after eleven at night, the TV switched from dead air to picking up NBC. I was too weak to look up, but I could hear it. Princess Diana had been badly injured in a car crash in Paris. Soon, Brian Williams was flickering in and out of my subconscious, his updates playing out in my fever dream. The itching under my skin intensified to a point that I reached for a cassette case, shook out the tape and insert card, and broke it in half. I brought the sharp edge to my arm to cut at the itch. I scratched myself up, and the pain masked the itch for just a few moments.
I was still in and out at 1 A.M. when Brian Williams returned to my little fucked-up, feverish universe to tell me Diana was dead. Andy came home at about two in the morning and found me incoherent. He’d heard the news about Diana at work, but I was telling him about it as if the whole thing was my bad fever dream. Like my mind and the world had somehow become porous.
Andy knew that he needed to take me back to the doctor, but he didn’t have the money. This tells you how desperate he was: he called my mom.
“She’s really sick,” Andy said.
My mom said something to him, and before he could answer, she hung up on him. I asked him what she said, and he didn’t say.
Andy had guns—it was Andy and it was Louisiana—so the first thing he did Monday morning was sell one for cash to take me to the doctor. They diagnosed the allergic reaction, and with the wrong medicine leaving my system and the right one doing the job, I began to feel better right away. I still have light scars on my arms from the cassette case.
“Hey,” I said, sitting back at home later, able to eat the cold pizza he’d brought from work. “What did my mother say on the phone?”
“It doesn’t matter,” he said.
“What did she say?”
He sighed. “She said, ‘She abandoned me and I fucking hope she dies.’”
“Wow,” I said. “I abandoned her? I abandoned her?”
In March 2018, just days before my birthday, my mother and father each gave interviews to a Texas newspaper about me and President Trump. My mom told the reporter, who probably believed her, “My friends all say the same thing: ‘I can’t believe that is the same sweet child—you took such good care of her.’” My father professed to be worried I might come to harm for telling the truth about Trump’s attempts to silence me. “You start rattling the cage of powerful people, and you don’t know what might happen,” he said. Right below his quote, mind you, the newspaper provided a photograph of my home and detailed the neighborhood where I live. You know, just in case anyone wanted to kill me.
I was hurt by my mom’s revisionist history—at least my dad was honest in his interview about being MIA all my life—so I posted the article on the private Facebook account I keep for my friends and chosen family. Without much prompting, my childhood friends had a field day. Travis, the boy who moved in next door when I was six, was one of the first to chime in. “If they want to bring up old memories,” he wrote, “let’s ask them how many times your mom would leave you all alone?”
Another childhood friend recounted how my mom had told her parents she was dying of cancer and needed money. My friend said her parents noticed she didn’t die, but she did have a new car.
Renee, who I used to ride with as a kid, wrote, “Some of us KNEW your mother.”
My best friend from high school, Elizabeth, added: “I remember your mom very well. Who could forget the Christmas Tree Incident?”
“I feel like I owe every one of you an apology,” I wrote after reading all those reality-check hugs from lifelong friends. “And somehow a fruitcake seems appropriate too.”
“How many?” Cinnamon asked me.
“I’m up to three,” I said.
“Six a night,” she said.
“I know,” I said.
It was a house rule that the girls at Cinnamon’s had to sell a minimum of six drinks a night. You were supposed to hustle the guys and get them to buy you the twelve-dollar double, with the house getting six bucks and you getting the other half. They knew I didn’t drink, and they knew I was underage, but it didn’t matter. The bartender would secretly make mine a virgin, and the lie didn’t sit well with me. I felt guilty making a guy buy a twelve-dollar Sprite and telling him, “Oooh, I love vodka.”
Sometimes the guys would check, and if they caught you, they would get mad at you. I was already thinking long game, and that customer would then be someone who’d stand with his hands behind his back every time I danced. Worse, I just have a thing about liars, and I never wanted to be one.
This was bugging me more and more going into fall, and one October night a steady customer at the club got handsy with me. I batted him away and waved at the bouncer, thinking he would say something. Nothing. This jerk grabbed at me again. I yelled, this time so loud everyone heard me, which wasn’t hard in a trailer titty bar. I looked right at the bouncer, imploring him to do something. He bit his bottom lip and glanced at the office.
He was too good a customer. I had worked there for nine months, lying to men about my Sprites to make the club an extra thirty-six dollars a night, but they wouldn’t do anything to help me.
I got emotional and I went to the dressing room, stuffing all my things into a bag. I left Cinnamon’s and I never went back. I am sorry to say that I left in anger, because I loved all those girls so much. Of all the women I have worked with over the years, they are the ones I still think about.
Right away, I knew who to calclass="underline" the Gold Club.
The Gold Club was the nicest gentlemen’s club in Baton Rouge. The guy on the phone said I could come in for an audition at two forty-five the next day, fifteen minutes before they opened. I met the managers, John and Larry, plus the floor guy, Casey.
The club was absolutely huge compared to Cinnamon’s, but the guys were very nice and put me at ease. John had to go up in the DJ booth to cue up my Mötley Crüe song because the DJ wasn’t even there yet. It was easier to do with nobody there, and I was confident I was a good dancer. That was always my saving grace: I could dance. I didn’t just wander around the stage and make my butt clap.
“Do you want to start tonight?” asked John.
“Oh, I am going out tonight,” I said. “I have plans.”
“Well, do you want to work for a few hours and kind of get to know everybody?”
Right there they gave me a locker and I worked from three to eight. I had been nervous about the place being so much bigger than Cinnamon’s, but I thought, Well, this isn’t too bad.
Um, Stormy, that’s because shit doesn’t happen until after that. The next time I came in, I worked a night shift and was overwhelmed. There were forty-five girls working when I was used to six or seven a night, and there were three real stages instead of one the size of a bed. Upstairs had real VIP rooms, and you didn’t have to sell drinks. If you wanted to do a private dance for someone in the back, you just had to raise your hand and the bouncer would run over with a box to stand on. Couldn’t forget, the floor was lava there, too!
If you walked in at ten, you were going in cold, trying to get the attention of guys when you were one of many to choose from. But that’s where the money was. There were three set shifts: three to eleven, eight thirty to two, and ten to two. Dancers had to pay a house fee for the two later shifts, with the last shift asking the highest house fee for the shortest time. A house fee is the “rent” you pay the club as a contractor occupying their space to offer your services. The same way hairstylists will often pay for their space at a salon. There was no fee if you came in at opening, because no girl wants to be there when it’s three guys.