TAKING IT OFF: STRIPPING IN THE NEW MILLENIUM

Stripping. A world of glamor, romance and riches? A world of drugs and prostitution? Just a job like any other, that happens to require make-up, high heels and nudity? I set out to find the answers to these questions. I conducted painstaking research, forcing myself to frequent dark, steamy strip bars, dragging myself to the homes of beautiful barely dressed girls, listening to far fetched stories of nudity and promiscuity, all for the sake of uncovering the naked truth about the strip tease industry. Rough work, but it had to be done.

I met Xyla, Amber, Kitty and Ginger, and I found many things. (Most of them were rather shapely and had nice nipples, but I digress). I learned that the girls have a bond of secrets and complaints shared in the dressing rooms; I learned that the girls deal every night with situations that run the gammut from funny to twisted and sick; and I learned that stripping in the new Millenium is just not what it used to be.

PART 1: A FAT MAN'S DICK

It's seven o'clock in L.A., and the girls of the Hollywood Cabaret are arriving for work. They walk in wearing sweats, pulling the handles of wheeled luggage that all strippers waddle along with, and head for the dressing room. There they will put on costumes, make up, primp, share nail polish and secrets and life stories, and bitch about the customers waiting at the stage to see their every mole, wrinkle and dimple. Xyla laughs and says "it's a back stabbing environment."

Xyla is a beautiful girl with green eyes and a long, sensuous waist. As she laced up her trademark knee high black boots, she told me "The dressing room is where you hear everything! It takes a good hour and a half to get ready for this, and during that time, the girls talk about it all." The biggest topic of dressing room conversation seems to be the customers. The guys sitting out there in the club who have come to see these girls get stark raving naked. The guys on whom these girls depend for their living.

"We always give the heads-up" Amber, a small, lithe girl with Cupie Doll brown eyes told me as she fixed her lipstick. "If a guy is or isn't tipping, if he's grabby, if he's drunk, every girl knows it by the time they go out there." She smirks as she tells me about 'the buisness card'. "You walk into the dressing room and say 'this stupid guy gave me his buisness card' and everyone holds up the same buisness card."

That's the biggest problem the girls face. The huge number of guys who come into the club with unrealistic expectations of getting a date, getting sex, getting romance of some sort or another. Xyla says "We appreciate the guys who come in to spend money. Even though we appreciate them, they're still just dollar signs in our eyes." Kitty, a blond fetish girl, seconds that. "Don't touch us, don't ask us for sex. If we're not being motivated by money we're not going to perform!"

Still, some girls admit to being excited by their work. Amber tells me "I like dancing for a hot guy. I get hot and bothered and all turned on. I get into a really good song and I get off on being a tease. Is that wrong?" When I assured her it wasn't (with a lecherous look in my eyes), she smiled and admitted to me "In the past one and a half years, I have probably felt well over a thousand different penises."

Xyla and Amber admit "some girls will go home with guys from the club. Maybe forty per cent of girls will." But Xyla and Amber are tired of dealing with guys who expect to get sex. "Guys think they can change you. They ask 'do you have a boyfriend?' Then they say 'I don't mind if you have a boyfriend. I'll take you out anyway'."

"They say they love you," Amber says. "I say 'you don't even know my real name! How can you say you love me?' "

It's seven thirty. Amber is called to the stage, where thirty men wait to watch her take off the neon bikini she wears (it'll be thirty one guys when I get out there). Xyla goes off to hustle lap dances, where she will grind into a man's crotch for twenty dollars. She leaves me with one last gem of wisdom. "You get these really fat guys and you have to sort of get under them and push up on their fat to find their cock. Some day I'm gonna write a book about stripping, and I'm gonna call it 'How To Find A Fat Man's Dick'." 

PART 2: TATTOOED FREAK GIRLS

It's eleven o'clock, and at the Cheetah Club on Hollywood Boulevard, things are jumping. Kitty, a fetish girl who wears leather corsets and extreme high heels, just finished her best dance of the night. "It was great. The stage was full [of customers], everyone screaming 'Who-oo!' "

She sits down next to Ginger, her best friend, roommate, and co-worker here, and counts dollar bills. The two are together constantly. "The cool thing about me and Ginger is we chase each other around the club, we slap each other's asses. I'll say to a customer 'get a dance with her', she'll say 'get a dance with her,' and we'll say 'get a dance with both of us!' They get the whole kinky fantasy of us together."

I wonder myself about the truth of that fantasy. "We met at the Seventh Veil [another strip club]," Kitty smiles. "I said 'come with me, Ginger, I'll take good care of you!' "

"We have matching tatoos," Ginger says. She shows me the matching cat's paws on their ankles, lost in the swirl of tattoos each of the girls has. The Cheetah club does not hire blond bimbos. Their specialty is pierced, tattooed freak girls.

"People are bored with the porn star look," Ginger says. "for a lot of conservative older gentlemen it's a big fantasy to have a dance from a tattooed, pierced girl."

Are conservatiive gentlemen their only customers? "We get a lot of bisexual women and women couples," Kitty purrs. "And I rock their world!"

I'm curious about the funniest or grossest experiences they've had. They both laugh.

"This guy came in drunk," Ginger says, her mile long legs resting on the table in front of me, her roman sandles tied from her perfect feet all the way up those yards of calves. "I took him back to the lap dance booth. I had just gotten off his lap and the guy ralphed all over the place. He missed me by inches! It was the grossest thing that I'd ever had happen to me."

Kitty chimes in. "The shoes that I wear, really high heels? I drag things out of the bathroom with me. I've gone onstage with toilet paper or cigarette butts stck to the bottom of my shoe."

"I've heard stories of girls swinging around the pole and they get diarreah," Kitty says. "They get it all over everyone!" The two girls grimmace. Ginger: "Once while giving a lap dance I accidently farted on this guy. We fart a lot on stage. You hope the guys don't smell it..."

"We're women," Kitty grins. "We have a lot of personnal hygeine things we take care of. Baby wipes are a big thing. But I make a lot more money on my period. Cause you have these pheremones, and the guys sense it."

I had asked Amber and Xyla the same question at the Hollywood Caberet earlier. Amber talked about the first lap dance she'd ever given, at a club in Rhode Island. "It was this little old guy, and he whips it out and says 'it's okay honey, they let me do this.' I was ruined for that day, I was in shock!" I laugh, because I know there's no clubs that let guys whip it out.

Xyla chimes in "Guys are in shorts and their schlongs are hanging out. And guys want to touch you. They want to touch your feet, smell your feet, lick your feet." The two grls make their "e-ow-oo" faces.

Xyla talks about how vulnerable a girl can feel while dancing. "You have your crotch in a guy's face, and you never know what he may do!" Amber agrees: "I was holding onto the beam above the bar once, and this guy licked me!"

What do the girls do when guys offend them? Amber: "One guy said 'I'd love to poke your beaver'. I had fake nails and I just poked him in the eyes! He went flying back and his money went all over the place." "Hey, we're strippers," the two beauties say. "Don't f-ck with us!"

"I do like dancing for a hot guy," Amber admits. "but I'm turning into a bitchy stripper. I'm jaded by the buisness, but I'm totally addicted to it. I'm really f-cked now. I'm not gonna make money any other way faster than stripping."

Meanwhile at the Cheetah, Ginger hits the stage. She spins on the pole, her roman sandles and long tattooed legs worshipped and adored by conservative gentlemen, bisexual women and tattooed freak boys. I watch and fantasize, but I've been warned. Adore her, tip her, but expect no romance. Her heart belongs to a certain tattooed kitten, gentlemen, and three's a crowd.

 PART 3: SUCKING SUCKS

It's two in the morning, and Hollywood is winding down. At the Hollywood Caberet, Xyla and Amber are getting out of their costumes and into street clothes. Xyla wears overalls and a Cosmic Angel tee shirt, Amber throws on shorts and a little tummy top. in a few minutes they will tip the deejay and the club manager with money they've earned doing lap dances and stage shows. That's how stripping works, men prey off of the beauty of women. Then they will meet their boyfriends, and go home to their real lives, their real names, and their debts and needs.

Stripping in the new millenium is not what it used to be. "The eighties were the height of the stripping industry," Amber tells me while she wriggles into her short shorts. "We'd work for three or four hours and go home with three or four hundred dollars. We had customers who would buy us gifts all the time."

Now she says girls who make money are doing things that the club officially bans. "The girls we call the 'dirty girls', girls give a blow job in the lap dance booth and the club gets a cut. These girls are favored for bringing in more money. If you do clean dances and you don't let guys maul you, you're not bringing as much to the club."

"Stripping was more rock-and-roll in the Eighties," Amber goes on. "The girls used to put on a show. Girls now think you can just look pretty and make thousands of dollars. They don't know there's an art to it. Then, it was glamorous."

Xyla agrees. "Sex clubs were big in the Seventies. It was a spin off of the Seventies."

Even in the Nineties, gilrs made better money than they do now. Amber: "I used to be more aggressive in my lap dances. Oh my God, nineteen years old and you're making four or five hundred dollars a night! I'd do day shifts and go home with over a hundred dollars a day. Fridays were easily $500. Now its hit or miss. You can't depend on stripping anymore. It's sad, but girls go home with less than a hundred dollars. House fee, deejay, the money you have to tip out adds up."

The good old days. Amber shows me a photo, THE photo, of the stripper girl who broke her heart. "I loved her, but she was a little heroin addict girl. We'd strip all night and get high all day. If you start doing drugs and stripping it f-cks you up because you can afford your addiction. I'm glad I'm over it, but I wish I could still hustle like that."

Kitty and Ginger had talked to me about the slack off in stripping as we'd sat at the Cheetah club. Kitty said "It used to be happening. It wasn't rare to find twenties and hundreds on your stage. But it's not as taboo anymore. Everyone's been to a strip club, everyone's seen a naked woman. It's like going to the beach."

"It's a gamble now," Ginger chimes in. "We'll leave here one night with two hundred bucks. The next night we leave with twenty bucks, and we won't be able to eat the next day. And that's sad."

And what about the 'dirty girls' who sell themselves in the lap dance booths? "Girls are desperate and they're doing whatever it takes," Xyla tells me. "The internet and escort agencies have made it easy to have a naked woman in your living room any time."

The Dirty girls, Xyla and Amber agree, are often the girls who are not as pretty, not as desirable. "The club where we work has become a total ghetto club," Xyla says. "If you're a fat girl, you can get a job here. Girls are overweight, pregnant. These girls need to do more, so they let men touch them to make money. If these girls are gonna sell themselves, why not just be an escort?"

As the last few girls leave the club for the night, dragging those wheeled suit cases behind them, I ask Kitty and Ginger: how you score a pretty girl at a strip club? Ginger: "Girls go home with customers everywhere. When you see girls who are driving brand new Trans Ams, you know something else is going on!"

Hmm, Trans Ams. I guess I'm SOL there.

Kitty: "The Deejays get the most play. There's a lot of play that goes on between dancers and deejays."

Ah hah! Where the hell did I put my turntable?