A Stripper's Favorite Client
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https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/09/opini…
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https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/09/opini…
7 comments
Opinion
A Stripper’s Favorite Client
It wasn’t love. But it wasn’t just business either.
By Lily Burana
Ms. Burana is a journalist and a former stripper.
Nov. 9, 2019
Credit...Na Kim
The return address on the letter was from a Connecticut prison. Typed neatly over the address wasn’t a sender’s name, but rather, an inmate ID — a hashtag and a string of numerals.
I tore open the envelope. The letter was from M., my old strip club regular.
Within the taxonomy of strip club customers, M. wasn’t Captain Save-a-Ho, the type who thinks telling a stripper, “You’re better than this” is a compliment, and seeks to whisk you out of this hellhole. He also didn’t view dancers as a dating pool and hang about, lovelorn, like a Stage Door Johnny from vaudeville days. He greeted me exactly where I was, and in that spot, affection bloomed. I sat in his lap during a night shift in my San Francisco home club when he was in from the East Coast for work; we started talking, and couldn’t stop. When he laughed at all my jokes, the connection was sealed.
M. was gloriously larger than life, and also, well, gloriously large — a jovial bear with a classic Brooklyn accent. An up-from-nothing success story, he sounded like Jackie Mason and made it rain like Jay-Z.
He grew up poor, made a fortune, partied hard, and struggled with addiction. He had his own spiel about his hard-knock life.
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“I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor. Rich is better.
“I’ve been drunk and I’ve been sober. Sober’s better.”
But M. would trip over the verdict on “I’ve been married, and I’ve been single.” He’d pause before saying, “Single’s better.” He was embroiled in a contentious divorce, and his ambivalence about romance was a sore spot.
That’s where the women came in.
He’d call me “sweetheart” and regale me with anecdotes about fancy golfing excursions that involved dalliances with stratospherically pricey escorts. His preferred agency hired women who looked like supermodels, and they earned like it, too, he said.
I played along. “Really? Like, how much?”
He held up his hand in a “stop” signal. “You don’t want to go messing around with that stuff,” he said.
Somewhere in his admonishment was a protective impulse I admired. “It’s O.K. for you, though? Just not me?”
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He chuckled.
“Oh God, M.,” I sighed. “You’re trash.”
He roared as if I was the funniest woman alive.
M. would tell me what his three teenage daughters were up to, and what opera he’d seen lately (he was a huge buff). Often, he’d mention work, some murky finance gig, that, as he told it, had recently attracted the attention of the authorities. “I’m stressed out,” he’d say. “The feds are breathing down my neck again.” Or “The S.E.C. is after us.”
Whatever.
Strip clubs are built around flattering the male ego, and the customer’s own aggrandizement was often part of the package. Many a Steve from Middle Management became Steven the C.E.O., sometimes right down to the fake business card. Honestly, I thought M. was full of it.
But there I sat, in the privacy of my own home, with a letter from him, addressed to me in my real name. I was touched, amused and really weirded out. I hadn’t worked at that club in six years and had moved across the country.
I’d come to trust M. enough as a customer to step out from behind my stage persona. (Why do I call him M. here? Pseudonyms are customary for strippers; I extend a similar discretion to him as a courtesy.) He knew my ambitions, my age. And, thanks to Google, he knew I had a P.O. box. The letter, typed up and printed out, started with a bombshell: The S.E.C. had, indeed, caught up to him. He’d been arrested on charges of fiscal malfeasance and was partway through a multiple-year sentence.
What do you know? That son of a gun wasn’t lying.
Memory is protean. I haven’t forgotten much about stripping, but the significance of things has shifted over time. I recall an evening spent sitting in the restaurant section of Scores listening to a dancer describe her financial plan. She told me how she managed to put away $12,000 a month into a Charles Schwab brokerage account and, widening her blue eyes, she recited what she’d told a chief executive client who wanted to give her something special: “I’d be honored if you’d give me some of your company’s stock.”
I also remember seeing a dancer at my home club frowning at a thick gold chain a customer had just given her. She had it in a Ziploc bag, puzzling over what to do because she couldn’t bring it home. Her husband hated these gifts — didn’t like being shown up by expensive goods, and certainly didn’t appreciate the material intrusion of other men into their lives. I used to see these gifts and the labyrinthine relationships around them as “just business.” But in retrospect, they are more than that. It’s not just stuff that’s exchanged; it’s energy. The cash and trinkets become bonding agents.
Some people carry the imprint of others around with them. For the libertines and polyamorous overachievers among us, it’s probably no great shakes. But for those conflicted about monetizing certain things — romantic bandwidth and emotional access, to say nothing of bodies — such messy connections create a problem. You can’t not know what you know, and you can’t unfeel what you feel. A gift can have a certain psychic stickiness to it. So, too, I learned, can a letter.
As a rank-and-file stripper, I sometimes let professionalism smooth down the discomfort of certain dynamics. After all, a true pro must be sex positive! But there’s nothing sex negative about admitting that this enterprise can get very tangled, very quickly. The workplace imperative to be accommodating had me stifling my own misgivings. The hustle seems more insidious the more time passes, the interactions-as-transactions more freighted. I recall F. Scott Fitzgerald: “They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered.”
“When you’re famous enough, we’ll date,” M. once said. The notion was preposterous, simultaneously flattering (you got a future, kid!) and insulting (but you’re bupkis now), and notably left out any consideration of my feelings on the matter. It was also perfectly … him. My site-specific veneer of malleability led him to believe he might shape me in a way that would please him most and thus grant us real-world potential — an Eliza Doolittle in Lucite heels groomed by an irrepressible Wall Street wolf.
Sometimes the supportive “Sex work is real work” sentiment gets coupled with “It’s a job like any other job.” Is it real work? Lord, yes. No other job I’ve held required as much labor, physical or emotional. Strut, spin, flatter, serve — the constant flex of thighs and white lies. But a job just like any other job? Not in my experience. Not even close.
Stripping consists of all the ingredients of courtship: sweet talk, flirting, active listening, emotional support and, you know, nudity. But I put too much stock in the flimsy notion that it had a built-in limit. We all know this is just an act, right? And what happens in the club stays in the club? Everything packaged up as a transaction, neat and tidy and topped with a Benjamin folded origami-style to look like a bow?
The letter revealed to me the bright shining lie of compartmentalization. The glittery ribbons I’d kept tight as I earned thousands upon thousands of dollars were coming undone for the price of a postage stamp.
I could’ve visited M. in prison. I didn’t. I could’ve returned the correspondence. I knew I wouldn’t.
The letter sat buried in the mail pile on my secondhand dining room table until I finally decided to get rid of it. Throwing the envelope in the garbage, I felt lighter. I’d bid M. a fond, but final, farewell. Toss a letter, close a door.
As I hauled the bag to the curbside bin, I made one last joke I kind of wish he could’ve heard.
“See, M., you big goof? You’re trash.”
Lily Burana (@lilyburana) is the author of “Strip City: A Stripper’s Farewell Journey Across America” and, most recently, “Grace for Amateurs: Field Notes on a Journey Back to Faith.”
For all her suppossed admiration for her fave-custy, once he didn't have anything to offer her, she tossed him in the trash - in typical stripper reasoning, when he was a well-to-do cu$ty she supposedly saw him as more than a custy - now when he's down-and-out he's only good for the trash-heap - she doesn't seem to show any concern nor sympathy for this custy that "was more than a custy" when he had a lot to offer her - now he's not even worth a return-letter - and now that I think about it IDK what the point of the story is - seems the story was more about her than this "great custy".
I feel like there's a joke in here somewhere. What's a stripper's fav client? One with money...or something like that. That's what I got from this