Amateur Night at the Bubblegum Kittikat Read online

  “I don’t have shoes!” I said, “Or a dress!”

  “See if something in the Goodwill fits,” Velouria said and went back to unclogging the nozzle on her airbrush gun so she could fresco a new face on top of Diana’s natural one.

  Velouria waved her free hand generally in the direction of a beat up cardboard box by the backdoor and Lizzie dragged it across the floor to paw through it.

  The Goodwill box, as it was jokingly called, contained several pairs of secondhand stripper shoes in various conditions as well as a few unwanted spandex gowns. I fished out a black dress and it mattered not that the thing had been wadded up in a box for God knows how long because that stuff just will not wrinkle and size wasn’t particularly an issue either because the fabric stretches so much. The shoes were a different story though. Not a single pair of clear heels fit me. Like a trashy Goldilocks, I tried on every set in the box. This one was too small, that one too big but not a one was just right and when you’re trying to strut around on a mirror balancing on top of eight inches of plastic, you want your shoes to fit. Safety first and all, but I decided to disregard that bit of good sense and prance gingerly in a pair of sixes. My shoe size is seven. The shoes killed and the straps were so tight that I had muffin top of the feet, as if that was even possible, but I assure you it was and it didn’t feel very pleasant at all.

  When I was done I checked myself out in one of the several full length mirrors because come on, I had to and you know, the shoes really do suck in your gut and define your calves and even though I was teetering precariously and could barely stand up, they made me a statuesque six foot two. In the floor length gown, still heavily made up, I looked like I was on my way to a skank ho prom for Amazons.

  I’d never been to my actual prom, having dropped out in the junior year before the dance was held and I always regretted not going. I felt like I missed out on some great milestone. The prom is our culture’s coming out party where teens debut into the world of adult debauchery –overspending on tacky dresses, getting wasted in the back of a white limo and fucking all night long in a cheap and by then, trashed, motel room along with six other couples who are doing the exact same thing. Yeah, I never got to do any of that. I don’t remember what I did when all of my friends who stayed in school were posing for tacky portraits in puff sleeved taffeta but I’m sure my evening involved a Pizza Hut pan pizza and a V.C. Andrews book like all of my other weekend nights. So nearly ten years later, here it was. This was my prom or as close as I would ever get. My second chance to get dressed up in a stupid looking gown and act like an ass had finally come.

  “Don’t forget a thong,” Velouria called out as I left with my encouraging entourage.

  “Shit! She needs a thong!” Lizzie said as if this were a serious emergency.

  “You’re not wearing a thong?” Milla, another cocktail waitress, asked in a tone that conveyed utter shock and disbelief, like my God, what woman would be caught dead without a thong? Can you even imagine such a thing?

  “What’s wrong with these?” I asked, pulling aside my slinky slit skirt and looking down at the red silky underpants I’d been so proud of.

  “Dancers can’t wear those granny panties!” Milla said.

  “I don’t know who your granny is,” I said.

  “Come on, come on, we’ll get you a thong. It’s no big deal. We have a ton of them around here,” Lizzie said and I half expected her to unclip her garters and slip her own thong off for me.

  I stopped in my tracks. We were in the construction area in between the dressing room and the main floor of the club, where still no progress had been made on the future steakhouse.

  “I’ll wear a second hand dress and I’ll even borrow some old shoes, which is pretty gross in and of itself, but I am NOT wearing a used pair of underwear,” I said.

  “Eww, of course not. All you have to do is take a thong out of your display case,” she said with her hands on her hips.

  Duh. Why hadn’t I thought of that? Probably because in the seven months that I hostessed I never once actually sold a single thing out of the case of Kittikat merchandise.

  The thong was about the size of a hair scrunchie, neon pink and edged in scratchy white lace. The lace was so abrasive that I swear it had been tatted out of steel wool. Wearing that thing, if I could get it over my hips, was going to remove skin, no question, and my God, have you ever tried to pull a Barbie sized thong over eight clunky inches of platform heels? I ended up thrashing around on the floor of the lobby like a freshly hooked catfish with three cocktail waitresses and Lizzie the bartender looking down at me with great pity and bewilderment.

  “This might not be a good idea for her,” Milla ventured, but Lizzie wasn’t swayed.

  “She’ll be fine.”

  “No look! I’m fine! Look, I’ve got it to my knees!” I called from below.

  It was a proud moment when I finally got that thong on and was able to stand up. My butt crack itched and I longed to pick at it every two seconds. Wearing a poorly fitting lacy thong is like suffering from a permanent wedgie and as if that weren’t bad enough my crotch now advertised in white, iron-on letters that I was official property of the Bubblegum Kittikat, but hey, I did it. I had the whole gear on and I was ready to go and the club opened in five minutes.

  Brooklyn, Valentina and Destiny had already taken their spots on the main stage and were waiting for the DJ to fire up the speakers. Tech had the lights going already and the buffet was steaming by the bar.

  “What do I do?” I asked Lizzie.

  She shrugged.

  “You can walk around and ask customers if they want a table dance when they come in or you can take Stage Three here by my bar.”

  Chris was managing that afternoon and I had to let him know I was dancing. Thank God it wasn’t Brent. If it had been Brent I highly seriously doubt I would have been able to do what I was about to do and even Chris didn’t believe it.

  “Really?” he said and then laughed, “Whatever. I’ll put you on the list. What, um, do you want your name to be?”

  I paused, pursed my lips and looked around, wrinkling my forehead. What was wrong with me? I had the most perfect stripper name ever, so why was I embarrassed to say it? Vixen had seemed genius back when I came up with it but now that someone was forcing me to say it out loud I felt like a moron. The name sounded stupid. Cheesy. Idiotic on all levels.

  “I don’t know. Just. Whatever. My real name. My real name’s fine.”

  “You know the drill. See me at the end of shift to pay your house fee,” he said and walked off leaving me blinking in the glare of the spotlights that flashed around the club like searchlights around a prison looking for escapees. Where was the barbed wire and the German Shepherds, I thought.

  Big Mack unlocked the front doors, The DJ spun Garbage’s “Queer.” I could do this. I could. I could dance to this song. It was perfect really and I was pretty sure he’d played it for me because it suited my look and my personality. The song was low and slow, slinky, vampish and easy. Like me? But at that moment I wasn’t feeling as sexy as I had a few minutes earlier. I might have an asthma attack, I thought. I’d never had one, but right now wheezing and gasping for breath seemed like a real possibility and if that didn’t happen, I was pretty sure I was about to shit myself.

  Stage Three wasn’t really a full stage, not like the main stage, which was. Stage Three, where Angel had OD’d all those months ago, was a round platform, maybe only a few feet across, barred in by four poles. It was more of a cage really, about four feet off the ground. You had to go up three steep little steps to get into it and it was right smack, dead center in front of the main bar. I stepped on the hem of my gown trying to get up the steps and into the damned thing and almost fell, but I caught myself by grabbing the poles and once I had my hands around that cold metal I wasn’t about to let go. I knew if I did, that would be it. I’d stumble. I wouldn’t know what to do with my hands. Everything would start spinning and I wouldn’t be abl
e to stand. But the poles. They’d keep me steady. Maybe that was why they were there or maybe they were to hold you in.

  We had no customers yet, not even Free Buffet Guy, so I just stood there and gazed out over the room. Empty chairs, empty banquettes. Air free of smoke for a few moments longer. Tables cleared of drinks, clean ashtrays, crisp napkins, a vacuum striped carpet. Cocktails unpoured and tabs not yet run up. A silent register and a different door girl, the newest hire, hunched over a Jackie Collins paperback.

  When you’re high up you can always see more, like from a plane the way you can see the patterns of cul-de-sacs and yards and how many houses have pools and where the city limits end and a quilt of fields begins. You can see it all from above and everything seems more obvious and you wonder how, living on the ground all that time, you never realized this was how the world was laid out and you’d been living in it all this time, never knowing that this was how it actually looked. Seeing the club from above, from Stage Three, was like looking down on your town from an airplane.

  I stayed with that for a minute, looking into the dark emptiness before me, not realizing that I gripped the poles so tightly that my fingers were starting to cramp. I looked outward until the second verse of the song started and she sang the lines “This is what he pays me for” and I realized I wasn’t dancing and something very huge shifted so that instead of looking up and out past the bars, I was looking at them, and looking down at myself reflected back from the floor, reflected in the dull shine of my transparent shoes and reflected distorted, funhouse style in the poles so that I looked like a freak with a taffy- pulled face and long, purple eyes.

  When I was in the second grade, my class went on a field trip to the zoo and this was the first time I had seen animals in cages whose purpose was solely for viewing, for the entertainment of humans. I was a child so I never questioned the morality of this – of keeping animals in cages for our pleasure. I never thought of how the animals felt, only how I felt looking at them, which was scared and safe at once. Looking at their wet mouths and red asses, watching them shit and eat, seeing their hanging nipples, their long tongues stroking mats of fur, their claws, they frightened me but the fear was a thrill because the animals were separate from me as I stood out of harm on the opposite side of the bars zipped into my windbreaker, laced into my Buster Browns with a juice box in hand. Outside of those bars, humans could look in and convince themselves that they weren’t animals too and that they weren’t part of all the filth, slime and stink of bodies. We were the dominant species. As long as we could cage the animals we were in control. We could leave when we’d had enough fun, when we’d pointed and laughed enough for one day and wanted to go home and watch reruns of Gilligans Island and The Brady Bunch.

  I wasn’t one of the kids who ran to the front of the group, shoving to get the best views, hanging over the walls of protective moats or pressing my hands and face against glass enclosures. I hung back with the chaperones. But when we got to the mountain lion’s cage, I wanted to linger as I was hypnotized by his swinging, slouchy gate and the agates of his eyes. The mountain lion never rested from pacing back and forth between the corners of his cage and as he walked, he switched his dusky head quickly from side to side, predatory and alert. Full of dangerous energy, the mountain lion was a creature that must be contained, and even as a child I understood acutely that to unleash something like that, something that wild, that horrible, unspeakable things could happen and that was why this magnificent, terrible animal must be penned. For years after and sometimes even still, I had nightmares about big cats escaping from cages and roaming freely, disrupting dinner parties and waking sleeping children in soft beds.

  Everything changes when it’s you inside the cage. You understand finally that the creature who is truly afraid is the one on display behind the bars. The pacing, the growls – it’s all an act to mask the terror and the agony of living in captivity.

  I had been in a cage long enough. For years, I’d been locked up afraid to let myself out for fear of what could happen: failure, rejection, ridicule. Being a drop-out was a cage, staying in an abusive relationship was a cage, dressing like a frump was a cage, shyness was a cage. I thought that by stripping I could finally break free, but that life would be nothing more than just another cage and one with even stronger bars. Get out before the door closes behind you and the lock clicks shut forever, I thought.

  I turned around and shook my head “no” at Lizzie, who’d returned to filling her fruit trays.

  “I can’t do it,” I said.

  “Why not sweetie?” she asked.

  “The shoes don’t fit,” I said and I had those things off before I even got down the steps. The relief of walking barefoot on the cool, slightly damp carpet was downright euphoric.

  I returned the shoes and gown to the Goodwill box. Someone else would need them a lot more than I ever would. Some down on her luck Cinderella would come along and slide her tiny feet right into them, but me? I wasn’t about to slice off my heel or my big toe to fake that those shoes were meant for me.

  The thong? I threw that in the trash. Property of the Bubblegum Kittikat, my ass.

  I buttoned up my plain white shirt, slipped on my broken in jeans and scuffed my feet into my most comfortable flip flops.

  “Changed your mind?” Velouria asked, almost done with Diana.

  I nodded.

  “It’s not for everyone,” she said.

  It wasn’t for me.

  Velouria wrote me out a three hundred and seventy-five dollar check. That was my pay for appearing in the calendar. I cashed it on the way home and dropped the money off at the travel agent as the deposit on my upcoming Jamaican vacation. Then I went home and went to bed. I needed a nap after so much excitement. I undressed, threw my clothes on the floor and snuggled under the covers with my kitten who was happy to join me and as I took off my underwear, I saw that inside the cups of my bra were two pink circles. The lipstick had rubbed off of my nipples.

  53

  Remember those Time Life book sets they used to sell on TV? You had to call an eight hundred number to order them, pay in twelve monthly installments of only nineteen ninety-nine or something and then every month you’d receive another book in the series? These books fascinated me. I never actually got to read one though. I mean I was fascinated by the idea of them and I wanted them desperately, all of them. Well, except maybe the Civil War one. That didn’t look half as good as The Enchanted World series or even better The Mysteries of the Unknown set, of which there were thirty-three entire volumes, none of which I ever got to read. My parents would have never bought me something like that. We didn’t have the money for one and two, we never stayed at one address long enough for thirty-three books to arrive one per month. Thirty three books would have been almost three years and we never lived anywhere that long so I had to make do with the books in the libraries of whichever towns we were living in.

  You can imagine then, my absolute sheer unadulterated joy when I found a whole set of Time Life books in Brent’s office. It was better than finding money. I had plenty of that, but the Time Life Books True Crime Series? It was out of print and they didn’t sell it on TV anymore. I’d hit the jackpot. My dreams had come true. I mean, I’d rather it had been The Mysteries of the Unknown naturally, but True Crime was almost as good, because, well, Serial Killers! And Mass Murderers! Crimes of Passion! Unsolved Crimes!

  Brent thought I was nuts, but I didn’t care what he thought because anyone who had broken up and gotten back together with a stripper named Jamesina James as many times as he had by then (I had lost count in the teens) had to be a little touched himself.

  “You are such a nerd, and can you please pay attention? Maybe if you weren’t so concerned with books your register would add up once in a while,” he said.

  We were in his office trying to reconcile the damned Bubblegum Bucks receipts again and it was giving me a headache.

  “But look Brent, how can I concentrate when Dea
th and Celebrity is sitting right here in front of me??”

  I hugged the book. Brent rolled his eyes and took a swig of Pepto. I suggested he see a gastro-enterologist and he gave me the finger.

  “I don’t know where those books came from, but they’ve been here ever since I started and no one’s ever touched them. As far as I’m concerned you can take them up front and have a party with them,” he said, once he’d swallowed.

  “But god dammit, can you please pay better attention to your transactions?” he added.

  I squealed in delight that I could read the books and promised I would try to do a better job with my addition.

  “All you have to do, for the love of God, is write down the exact numbers of Bubblegum Bucks you sell and the exact number you cash in and the amount you have left in the safe at the end of the night should match. It’s not rocket science!” he said, for about the eight hundred and ninety-fourth time.

  “I know, I know. I know how it works. I don’t know why it keeps messing up,” I whined.

  We recounted the stack of fake money.

  “Do you want to go to Dunkin Donuts?” I asked.

  “Do I look like I do?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Well I don’t,” Brent said with a scowl.

  “I do,” I said, “A blueberry cake donut is calling my name. I can hear it. Listen.”

  I cupped my hand around my ear and pretended to hear the donut’s lonely voice.

  “We have to finish this.”

  “Come on Brent, It’s five ‘o’ clock in the morning. I have to be back here at one in the afternoon,” I griped.

  “Fine, get your ass out of here.”

  I was out the door before he even finished his sentence, and although I was only going to get maybe five hours of sleep, I couldn’t wait to get back to work so I could start reading my new Time Life Books.

  As soon as I clocked in, I flew to my stool in front of the register so I could start reading, and I know this made me a terrible employee and that it’s generally frowned upon to get excited to go to work just so you can read on the job but I was filling in another mid-week day shift and nothing was going to happen anyway. All I had to do was look up every fifteen minutes or so to ring up someone’s five dollar daytime cover charge or smile and wave in a VIP, so what was the big deal? I was itching to read about Ted Bundy, who looked disturbingly like Dennis Miller, and I wanted to know about his killing spree up at Florida State so badly that for the first time in weeks, I didn’t even care that I had to work another shift with Patty breathing down my neck. Normally when I’d come in and see her, I’d be like, well, there goes my day and since I’d gotten on her bad side when Brent promoted me to Bubblegum Bucks instead of her, if we worked the same shift I’d have to try to ignore her dirty looks and snide comments for the next seven or eight hours.