I Got Capatalist Survival Skillz (Becoming That Girl)

I’d been dancing for years before I met my first financially motivated stripper. I mean, obviously we were all there for the cash. But it would be trashy to act like it. We were the towns sweethearts, glamour and lust personified. We were performers, you know, dancers. We bore no resemblance to whores, and just to prove it we despised them.

Then there was That Girl. She was there for the money and she didn’t care. She was tall and skinny, almost lanky, except for her huge boobs. They had to be twice the circumference of her waist, so it was always kind of a shock when you first saw her. While I was busy listening to peoples problems and bad poetry, hoping to make five hundred a night, That Girl never made under a grand. How did she do it, I asked once when we carpooled the hour drive from Pennsylvania. I’d never seen her sit down and talk to a customer. She just walked up to them, whispered a few words in their ears, and off they went to the champagne room. But even when I was in the champagne room all night I didn’t hit a grand. She charged them extra, she told me, to touch. Once they got in there, while the champagne host was running the card, she told them they needed to tip $80 on the card if they wanted to touch her at all, and $150 to get some boobie touching. It was thrilling and sinful and whorish. I was fascinated but I could never be That Girl.

Back then, I was busy being focused on the sacredness of what I did. I sat in council. I channeled the Goddess straight into people’s laps. To rush it, or to put too much hustle into it, would disturb that sacred energy. I was like those people who need four perfect alters with all the right colored candles and an elaborate opening ritual before they can do any magic. It was good learning, but now I can do it anywhere.

Tonight I’ve become That Girl. The club here is packed, wall to wall people, most of them young drunk and rude. The music is so loud and pounding that you have to yell to be heard, and even with yelling people say “what?” more often than not. I put on my most attention getting outfits, and I stalk through the crowds, looking for someone over twenty five who isn’t there with their girlfriend. When I find them I shove my boobs in their face, giggle, play with their hair, take their hand and lead them back to the couches. Then I yell in their ear that we have contact dances for sixty dollars, or two for a hundred.

“Huh?” They say, “I can’t hear you.”

I’m still perfecting my sexy yelling. I hold out the side of my thong. “Here, put the money right here.” I make the little money sign with my hand, and they put in a five or a twenty or sixty, depending on their level of intoxication and cluelessness. “More.”

It’s not like a classy champagne room club where I break their credit cards with my sweetness. Sweetness can’t be heard above the music, here. The river is calling me home and it makes me insatiable. I am no longer the sweet, passive goddess I used to be. The Goddess was never that one sided, anyways. That is an ideal of monotheistic religious with jealous gods who promote dichotomies. The Goddess gives life and she takes life. She is love and she is destruction. I am the Black Tara and I am the White Tara and for sixty bucks I’ll sit in your lap for a song.

At the end of the night, when they turn the music off, it makes me dizzy and I lay on the cool stage waiting for HCH to fight her way into her clothes through the twenty girls piled into a dressing room that is sixteen feet square.

Later, in my van, I count the cash, sort it into envelopes to go in different bank accounts and investments. This one is for land. This one is bill money for the winter. This one is gas and food money for the winter. This one is for my friends medicine. This one is for car insurance. I want to stuff them as full as I am.

Sleeping in a WalMart parking lot I dream that we go to Vegas to be high class call girls: Hardcore Ho, Hat-Ma, and me. We are saving money to buy the forests from the tree-killers, and we are hiding from our fathers who have come to Vegas to try to kill us. At one point we hide in a circus tent and meet Davka’s grandmother, who tells us we each have less than a week to live. Six, maybe seven days, she says matter of factly. We aren’t upset, but we decide it might be practical to stop saving money and kill the tree killers before we die.