Chapter One
Carly
This is not what I'd planned for my future. I don't think anyone ever reallyplans to have this kind of life. I mean, really, what little girl is going to say she wants to be a stripper when she grows up?
Sometimes though, you just have to swallow your pride and suck it up. When you grow up in the Lower 9thWard, one of the worst neighborhoods in New Orleans, well, you have two choices. You either join the local 'gang', not that they were anything like the gangs you found in big cities like Chicago, or you do whatever you have to in order to move out of the neighborhood.
When I was sixteen, I found out I was pregnant. My boyfriend, Rico, was eighteen and mixed up with the wrong people. Still, he wanted to take care of me and our baby. He was going to get a full time job and find us a place to live.
He had big plans to marry me and raise our baby together. Those plans ended when he was killed in a drive-by shooting. Wrong damn place, wrong damn time.
His death left me heartbroken and facing single parenthood before I was even an adult. I dropped out of school and got a job as a waitress until I got too far along to work. As soon as my son was born, my mother made me go back to work. I guess I was lucky. She didn't kick me out when I got pregnant like my friend Gina's mom did to her.
For the first couple of years I tried to make enough to help with the bills and get my son the things he needed. By the time Eli was three, we were able to move into Hollygrove. It wasn't one of the best neighborhoods, but it was slightly better than the lower 9th. Still, things were tight. So often, I went without because there just wasn't enough money to go around. I was talking with my girl, Camille, about how hard it was to pay my bills on my crappy waitress job, when she told me about the job she'd just gotten as an 'exotic dancer'. Such a fancy word for stripper. She'd made more money in two days than I did in a week.
I did a lot of thinking after she went home. Was I willing to sacrifice my self esteem by taking my clothes off in front of a bunch of strangers? If it was just me, my answer would have been no, but it wasn't just me. I had Eli to think about. That little boy didn't deserve to suffer by going without the things he needed. He didn't ask to be born. He deserved better and I wanted to be able to give him a better life than the one I'd had.
I’d had to get a fake ID to work at Dangerous Curves. I wasn't twenty-one yet, I’d still had a few months to go, but the owner had accepted the fake ID and paid me under the table until my twenty-first birthday.
That was six years ago. Six years of taking my clothes off in front of mostly horny men who tended to get a bit grabby when they were drunk. Six years of putting up with a boss who thought just because we took our clothes off for money it meant he could grope us whenever he wanted to. Six years of not being able to look myself in the mirror, most days.
“Lola, you've got a request. Private lap dance.”
Lola was the name I went by here at work. No way in hell was I going to give someone there my real name. The lap dances were my least favorite thing but they usually got me a nice tip. Or, they would if our boss, Harry, didn't pilfer part of the money we made every night. He was such a bastard. But what were we going to do? It wasn't like we could go to our union rep about it, or complain to the Better Business Bureau. Most people looked down on strippers for taking their clothes off in front of strangers. A lot of those same people didn't mind flashing money to get some girl to shake her tits and ass in their faces though. Yeah, people were fucking hypocrites.
“Hello, lover. Let me guess, you're celebrating a birthday?” The guy who'd requested me looked like hemightbe old enough to drink. At least it wasn't one of the old geezers that came in here wanting a lap dance. Those make me fucking cringe. They think that, because they’re old, they can grope all they want and get away with it.
“Yeah. My twenty-first. A couple of my buddies said you give the best lap dances.”
“I do try.” I winked at him and got the music going. It was a dark, sexy song that helped me to forget about where I was so I could do the job and get paid. “Rules are, you don't get to touch unless you're invited to. Just sit back and enjoy.”
By the time the private lap dance was done, I was pretty sure the kid jizzed himself. I know, I'm not that much older than him, but the wide-eyed innocence on his face made me feel so much older. I don't think I ever looked that young or innocent.
