Meanwhile, Lily was perusing my application.
“Can I ask why you want to work here, instead of a downtown bar or a supper club or... ?”
Playing for time, I said, well, the location was convenient...
Lily squinted at me. “You live in Chicago.”
“Not right now. I’m staying with my sister for a while, to see if I might want to move here,” I told her quickly. “Our family’s from Wisconsin. I have a new, ah, boyfriend here. My sister’s in law school, just a couple of blocks away.” For the sake of verisimilitude, I added, “And I thought it might be fun. I’m a writer... at least, I want to be. I thought this place would be great for, you know, people watching. Like, working in a bar in an airport. Everybody has a story, right? Way more interesting than a frat bar.”
“Right,” Lily agreed.
She began to explain how each day and night worked at Ophelia. “The bar sets up at about noon. Can you do that, let’s try maybe Thursday and Friday to start, noon to seven?”
I nodded, still speechless over Dovey and Lolo. The place opened for lunch (lunch?) at one in the afternoon; shows began at three. Besides drinks, the bartenders were responsible for microwaving chili and pizzas, serving nuts, snacks, and pickled hard-boiled eggs. The cook came in at four, to replenish the chili, and to make the grilled rye-and-beer-cheese-with-sauerkraut sandwiches that the place was famous for. Fried pickles and vinegar-fried potatoes made up the rest of the menu. I tried to imagine Ophelia as a dining destination and failed.
The drinks menu was spartan: red and white wine, beer on tap or bottled, whiskey and tequila by the shot. In summer, there were frozen margaritas. In winter, there was Irish coffee.
“When do all the strippers get here?”
“Any minute now,” Lily said. “They come in three at a time. Sometimes four at a time. Kitty is always late, here she comes. These girls will finish up at seven. Kitty will change and be outof here like a bullet, she has two toddlers at home. The others might hang around and chat. Three more come at six, three more at nine. We close at one. There is a new person coming to apply, I thought you were her. Aurora.”
“How do you apply to be a stripper?”
“You dance for me,” Lily said. “And we don’t call them strippers. We call them exotic dancers.” When I wondered aloud if they were good dancers, Lily assured me that many of them were very good, some of them trained dancers. While every place had a different routine, at Ophelia the “girls” did five numbers each night, about five minutes or less each; the music and choreography and costuming was on them. The more I learned, the more I came to understand that this kind of place was its own specific world, with its own economy. Stripper costumes were dresses and skirts made for easy removal, sturdy, tiny, and immovable bikinis. They all wore high heels, but a special kind of high heels made for dancing. Most of them favored a brand called Pleasers, which also catered to pole dancing.
“Is that difficult?” I asked. “Pole dancing?”
“Very,” she said. “You have to be graceful and strong.”
That was the beginning of the time when I learned the secrets of a strip club. I loved learning those secrets, and I still love thinking about them. I took notes like crazy. I watched and listened. Someday, I thought, I would write a story forFuchsiaon what it cost to be a stripper, financially and in other ways.
High heels could cost two hundred dollars, and they wore out quickly, so most dancers had them resoled at least a few times. Many of them made their own costumes (I pictured a woman in her pajamas at her kitchen table, sipping coffee as she ran up a G-string on her Singer). Each girl got a hundred dollars a night from Ophelia and shared their tips. On a good night, like the night after a football game, or even a summer Saturday, they could still easily make a thousand dollars a night on tips. Three days wasthe standard workweek. Some of the dancers also were “bottle girls,” selling bottles of wine or champagne at many times their real cost and, dressed in costumes that ranged from sparkly miniskirts to cowgirls and soldiers and nurses, doing private dances with minitorches and sparklers for a table.
Club rules were clear: look but don’t touch, not even the privilege of slipping a bill into a woman’s costume. Ophelia was a topless bar but not a so-called nudie bar. The tiniest scrap of a bikini bottom, which must have weighed no more than a couple of ounces, comprised that distinction.
“How can they?” I asked. “It’s like being a... a geisha.”
“You make lots of dollars for pretty fun work,” Lily said. “That’s not nothing.” If someone misbehaved (or, as Lily put it, “fell in love,” and caused a fight with a dancer or another customer) that person was escorted out, out for good, after a quick photo was taken to ensure that their passage would be one-way only. I saw the bouncers arriving—men the size of water buffalo who apparently didn’t require coats even in freezing March. Police rarely needed to be summoned. Police, in fact, were steady customers.
Lily said, “The women who work here aren’t treated like, well, like lowlife, ah, Irene. They’re treated like talent. Like entertainers.” She added, “And Ophelia has high standards for them too.” They were the cleanest girls in town, she explained, more fully rouged and shadowed, plucked, tweezed, shaved, and scented than anyone. “You can see and smell the girl next door at the office, or at a bar. This is not the girl next door. This is the perfect girl. This is an unattainable girl.”
But, my mind spluttered, but... but... but... there was no way around the fact that they were on display... for men to ogle.
“I know what you’re thinking. It’s a weird way to make a living. I’ll say what I always say—lots of women put up with sexual remarks and put-downs working at an insurance office.”
A brief flurry of icy air snaked into the room and Lily looked up. A very slight blonde woman was standing nervously in the archway. This must be the foretold Aurora. Lily greeted her. She offered Aurora tea or a soft drink. Then she asked what music she would prefer. Aurora chose an old Rod Stewart song, shrugging out of her coat to reveal hip-hugger Lycra and a crop top.
Sotto voce to me, nodding encouragement at Aurora, Lily said, “I myself couldn’t get out of that with a crowbar.”
Aurora struggled as well. She was a good dancer, limber and agile. As she wriggled away, Lily interrupted her, reminding her to be more subtle. Finally, she texted the woman named Archangel, who strutted out of the back room like a supermodel on a catwalk and, without a costume, wearing just jeans and a fuzzy yellow sweater, proceeded, with an attitude that was somehow covert, even shy, to gyrate, thrust, her face a convincing facsimile of a woman surprised by her own lust. And I was surprised by the pinch I felt low in my pelvis. My sister used to say that everyone was a little bi—and when she did, I thought,Huh, maybe you are, Nell, but me?Now I wondered, was I? Or was Archangel just so alluring that she was like an irresistible force? (Her irresistible biology, I thought, remembering my chat with Ross, which now seemed to have taken place years ago.) When she finished, Lily asked the young woman to fill out an application and leave it on the bar; she would be in touch either way.
“So when can you start?” Lily asked me. I shrugged. She suggested, “How about tonight?”
So away I went to my sister’s place for a quick nap. I turned off my phone after leaving Nell a message to tell her I was sleeping in the erstwhile closet. But when I woke up, there was still nobody in the house except me. I ducked out for a quick shopping trip and then back for a quick shower, and at six that evening, I was fitting my car into the employee section of a now-packedparking lot, wearing what she told me to wear: black pants and a long-sleeved button-down black shirt.
The first thing Lily did was to hand the floor over to a cocktail waitress and pull me into the back room, where I beheld a hardboard wall with pegs hung with costume headpieces, crowns and cat ears and clown faces. The costumes themselves were arranged in neat racks farther back in the room. Framed like a bookshelf was a library of (very pricey) makeup. Clear instructions were given: “Please use sanitizing wipes on hands and containers before and after use. Replenish cosmetic stocks from the storage bins in the kitchen cool room. Wash or replenish brushes as needed.”
“Sit down,” Lily said, pointing to one of the chairs facing mirrors ringed in lighted bulbs. I sat, and she began to remodel my eyes and lips in shades of purple with smoky charcoal liner.
