REESE PIPER
I woke up to the sound of my phone ringing. Half-awake, I rummaged through the blankets and clothes on my bed. After a moment, I found it nestled under my eyeliner-stained pillow. “Hello,” I answered, groggily. My sister’s voice echoed through the phone. “I’ve been trying to call you. Are you okay?” I threw the covers off my twin bed. I was staying in a hostel dormitory in Austin, Texas. I walked into the shared kitchen. “Yeah, I’m fine,” I mumbled. A pause. Trying to sound more upbeat, I added, “Everything has been good. How are you?”
Head pounding, I poured myself a glass of water and gulped it down. My sister chatted about the politics at her office job, how a male colleague kept invading her personal space. I was only half listening: the previous night’s champagne had settled in harshly. The morning light filtered into the kitchen and dappled my face. I closed my eyes to alleviate my headache. “That’s awful. Can you talk to HR?” I asked without much emotional inflection.
She discussed her options for a few more minutes and then moved on to me. I stood up and paced around the kitchen, picking at my acrylic stiletto nails. She asked about the hostel I was staying at, about my travels, but mostly about the strip club. She was eager to know how work was going.
“Did you find a club to work at?”
I bit off the nail from my index finger, drawing blood. The night before, I auditioned at two different strip clubs. At the first, I walked into the foyer with an eager smile and asked if they were hiring dancers. A beefy manager dressed in a gaudy gold suit looked at me with indifference. He asked me to undress in front of him. “H-here?” I stammered. He shot me a frustrated glance. I stripped down into my bra and underwear as gawking customers walked past. “You have to take off your top,” he said. I unhooked my bra, exposing my tiny breasts. He stared for a second. “Okay, you’ll do.”
I made a quick excuse to go back to my car and darted out of there. I had been working in clubs for a little under two years and that was the first time I had been asked to strip down in a waiting area. In the past, some managers have asked me to audition on stage, others have hired me on the spot. I expected a bit of callousness during the audition process, but examining me with such an air of indifference left a sour taste in my mouth. But I brushed aside my annoyance and took out of my bag a list of strip clubs that I’d culled from the internet. I drove to the next place on my list.
I pulled into a parking lot of a quaint building with a flashing neon light hanging overhead. It was smaller and less crowded than the other club but the manager greeted me with a smile and immediately showed me to the dressing room. “Whenever you’re done getting dressed, come find me and I’ll show you around the club,” he said, exiting the dressing room.
“I FOUND A little club to work at. I liked the manager a lot,” I said to my sister.
I pulled a piece of bread from the toaster and slathered butter on it. My stomach heaved as I brought it to my lips. I threw it away and reached for a glass of water instead. “How were the customers?” she asked, her voice dropping. I walked out to the balcony and lit a cigarette, my hands shaking.
AFTER CHANGING INTO my lace teddy and platform heels, the manager showed me the stage, the communal lap dance room, the private rooms. I quickly got to work, approaching customers, selling dances, pushing rooms, excitement flowing through me. It felt good to make money. At around midnight, I sold a half-hour room to a middle-aged man with silver hair and a wide grin. I led him into the room, closing the red curtain behind us. As I settled on his lap, he reached into his pocket and shoved a key of cocaine into my nose. I pushed back with surprise. “You don’t want it?” he asked, slightly annoyed. I took a deep breath in and smiled. I didn’t want to lose the sale. “No, no, I do. Can I have another bump?” He smiled and we took bump for bump for the remainder of our time together.
The rest of the night was less clear. I remembered taking multiple shots, sipping various mixed drinks, selling another half-hour room to a man who wanted to snuggle, but memories flashed across my mind like flipping through pages in a comic book. I took a drag from my pink Capri cigarette and sat down on a tattered lawn chair as the end of the night surfaced into a clearer picture.
At around three a.m., I took two young men back into the champagne room for the last hour, my body draped across them as I enjoyed their four hands caressing me. We laughed and joked and drank but they grew restless. The younger of the pair kept inching his hand near my vagina. I swatted it away a few times until he forced his fingers in me. I stiffened. I tried to maintain a mischievous grin when I told him that I would get in trouble while I wiggled his hand out. I looked up at the cameras, wondering if the manager would come in and scold them, and realized that there weren’t any.
“THEY WERE EASY! I met two guys at the end who just wanted to hang out and drink,” I said.
“I wish I had your job!”
I mumbled a few “uh-huhs,” eager to get off the phone.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” she asked.
“I’m just really tired. Can I call you when I get to New Orleans?”
She agreed but then hesitated, her voice dropping. “Are you safe?”
“Yes, of course. I’m always safe.”
AFTER WE HUNG up, I packed up my things and checked out of the hostel. I took a taxi to the bus station, looking out at the dark clouds rolling in while sipping a jug of water, and boarded a Greyhound bound for New Orleans, bright-eyed and enthusiastic. Although I was hungover, I was proud to be traveling on my own, thrilled to be earning more than a livable wage. As the bus turned onto a highway and headed east, I willed myself to forget about the man’s fingers and pushed away any uncomfortable thoughts. With each mile, my energy surged and little by little the images from the night before ebbed away until they unwove from my memory.
Later on in the evening, a tornado ripped through the Louisiana countryside. Rain pelted the windows. The bus passed an overturned truck and I cried out, my hands shaking in fear. “Don’t worry child,” an older woman next to me cooed, wrapping my hands in hers. I thought of calling my sister to tell her that I loved her. But I didn’t want to worry her. I gripped the woman’s hand.
My older sister is the only one in my family who knows about my job. When I first started dancing, I crawled into her plush king bed one morning. I took a deep breath, almost balking. “I have to tell you about my new job,” I said. She stiffened. “What?” she demanded. When I told her I had been working at the strip club she refused to meet my eye, her body turned away from me. She stood up and ran her fingers through her brown bob. “It’s surprisingly a great job,” I said, growing panicked. She shifted uneasily. “Most of the customers just want to talk,” I continued. She turned her body toward me, her face softening.
“Is it safe?” she asked.
“Very.”
She was silent for a moment and then asked, “What happens if a guy gets too pushy?”
“There are cameras everywhere,” I said with confidence.
She smiled and climbed back into bed with me. “Wait, where did you learn to dance?” she asked in a lighter tone. We giggled over my childhood clumsiness and incoordination and I let out a sigh of relief. I knew that in order to gain her acceptance and support I had to make stripping palatable; present it as a job free of any hardships. She would be happy for me to be a sex worker as long as I was happy to do it.
For a while, I slept on her couch and worked at a nearby club in Manhattan. After each night of work, I tiptoed carefully into her apartment, trying to make as little noise as possible. I didn’t want her to wake up and see how drunk and exhausted I was. I didn’t want questions. When we both awoke, I relayed stories of amusing customers with their vanilla demands. I never lied but I never told the whole truth, painting only the shiny top layer of the industry, like oil on the top of salad dressing. The less she knew the better.
We interacted this way until I stumbled through her door one evening and fell on the hardwood floor. I stood up and darted into the living room. “You okay?” she asked, walking toward me. She saw my pupils, enlarged from a night of cocaine. “Yeah, I’m fine,” I slurred. I slumped on the couch. She went into the kitchen and brought me a glass of water.
“How was work?” she asked
I looked up at her. “Terrible.”
I sat up and gulped the water. “This fucking guy kept pushing me for a blow job,” I said, my voice rising in anger. I ignored her shocked face and continued to tell her how he threw a tantrum like a toddler when I refused to do more than a dance; how he undid his pants, yanked my hand, and placed it on his dick. Even in my drunken state, my thoughts became clearer, the weight of my silence lifting. It felt good to unload. “I hate when customers enjoy the pull and tug on my boundaries.”
My sister looked horrified. “Why didn’t the bouncers come in?”
“They don’t always watch the cameras.”
She tried to speak but kept stumbling on her words. Eventually, she said, “You know you don’t have to be there.”
I sighed, lay back down, and turned away.
“It was just one bad night.”
The next afternoon a silence lingered between us. I beat myself up for opening up to her and she struggled with how to address me. She asked if I wanted to watch television together. I suggested something easy like Friends, and we watched without laughing. I picked at the edges of my fake nails.
“Are you heading to the nail salon later?” she finally asked.
Relieved, I saw her bait and took it. I looked down at my hands, the acrylic chewed down into jagged mountains, and held them up for her to see. “I have to—I can’t go to work like this.” We laughed and the tension between us broke.
Feeling more emboldened to speak, my sister asked tentatively, “Is what happened yesterday normal?”
I hesitated. I could defend myself by bringing up her grievances at work. A few weeks before, her male colleague stalked her outside of her office, demanding changes to the roster. Since it wasn’t the first time it had happened, she went to HR but they seemed wary about taking appropriate action. We stayed up late and brain-stormed ways to handle the situation without causing a spat, or worse. No, I thought, that’s not a good idea—she might use that against me. I could hear her retort: That’s not the same. I thought maybe I should just be honest but if I admitted that customers sometimes pushed and violated my boundaries, then I risked feeding into her newfound wariness about my job. Everything she had been taught about strip clubs was negative, and I tried to challenge those lessons with my positive stories, but we grew up thinking clubs were dark pits of exploitation, hard and dangerous places for women to work in. From the media, we believed strippers were dirty people, beneath us. I had begun to unravel that stereotype, so if I admitted anything that verified her initial viewpoint, then I risked confirming it forever.
But my sister was my best friend, my confidant. If I kept a huge part of my life from her, I risked ruining our relationship, isolating myself.
“It’s not common.”
She looked relieved.
“Promise me if it ever becomes common then you’ll look for another job?
“I promise.”
I moved out of her apartment a few weeks later.
THE BUS ROLLED into New Orleans in one piece. I thanked the woman who held my hand through the storm and headed to a nearby hostel. I dumped my things on the floor next to my small bed and passed out for a few hours. When I woke up I got ready for work, using the cracked mirror in the dormitory to curl my hair and paint my face.
The air felt heavy and tense when I hopped on the tram and walked to the club my friend had suggested, a tiny dilapidated house with flashing neon lights nestled in the middle of Bourbon Street. The bouncer looked at my ID as the sky broke. Water dripped from the ceiling in the club. Lightning flashed. Within an hour or so, I discovered the rooms didn’t have cameras, or if they did, they weren’t being watched. The first private room I went into, the customer immediately tugged at my thong. “I’ll get in trouble,” I whispered. “No, you won’t.” He slipped his finger inside me. I pulled away and tried to wiggle his hand out of me, but he locked it inside like a claw. “I’ll get fired,” I repeated, my voice firmer this time. He pulled away. He grabbed his things and stormed off. “What am I paying for?”
I laughed at him and brushed his words off. Nothing a drink wouldn’t ease. I walked downstairs and told myself to stick to the communal dance room. But as I headed to the bar, I slipped on the floor, falling flat on my butt. I approached the DJ booth.
“I just fell. Do you think you can put a bucket down or get someone to clean up the floor?” I asked, sounding more annoyed than I’d intended.
He ignored me.
“What’s your name?” he asked, his eyes narrowing at me.
“Piper.”
“We already have a Piper; you can’t be Piper.”
“Well, she’s not here now. I’ll change it when she gets here.”
He laughed at me. “I’m telling you, you can’t be Piper. This isn’t a discussion.”
I laughed back at him. “All right fine, it’s just a name,” I said, walking away. “I’ll be Reese.”
He played “Bohemian Rhapsody” every time I went on stage in retaliation. I sighed in annoyance and drank heavily into the night. After work, I slumped against the side of a cathedral in the French Quarter, watching the sky lighten, waiting for my anger to cool. I was tired of putting up with people clawing at my vagina, and even more tired of management’s disregard for my safety. I didn’t want to just forget it happened. I wanted it to change. A sob caught in my throat.
I called my sister, knowing she’d be getting up for work.
“It’s so early. Are you okay?”
For a quick second, I was furious that I couldn’t just tell her about my night. Why did she get to complain about work and I didn’t? How come her complaints were met with solutions and the only solution to mine was to quit? But my annoyance quickly drained into sadness. I broke down, feeling the weight of my unspoken experiences. I hadn’t realized until then that without the outlet to speak, I had deprived myself of the space to feel.
“I had a really bad night,” I said.
I didn’t have the energy to hide, but I also didn’t have the energy to bridge the gap between us. I knew she wouldn’t have words to offer solutions to my concerns, partly because I had hidden the reality of my job from her for two years, but also partly because solutions to sexual harassment and neglect on the job are not offered to sex workers. Stripping is viewed through the lens of sexuality, not work, and, thus, trauma is seen as more grave and glaring. Even if stripping is just a job to me, even if I have no intention of quitting, the only answer to neglect and trauma is to walk away.
“What happened?”
Anything you say will incriminate you.
“I just struggled to make money.”
“I’m sure tomorrow will be better. You always turn your bad nights around.”
“You’re right.”
“Are you sure you’re okay? Are you safe?”
I touched the pavement underneath me, listening to the muffled bustle of the dwindling night. A few people scurried across the Quarter. I looked warily at my bag with my night’s wages tucked in the pocket. I should have called a taxi but I wanted to walk back to the hostel to blow off steam.
“Yes, I’m always safe.”