Page 79 of Things We Do in the Dark
“Hey, girls,” Joey said, placing her takeout bag at an open spot at the long vanity table that ran down the center of the dressing room. She dropped her knapsack on the floor and shrugged out of her parka. “Where is everyone?”
“Already on the floor.” Dallas, a platinum blonde of indeterminate age who was dressed as a Cowboys cheerleader, was carefully applying her strip eyelashes two spots over. “A lot of big groups coming in tonight. Money, money, money.”
“Not if they’re snaking,” Candie said from the other side of the vanity. This was the new Candie, with an-ie. The previous Candy, with a-y,had gotten a boob job and left to work at the Brass Rail downtown. Richer clientele, better tips. “And let’s hope they’re not all rocks. Last Thursday I barely made enough after the house fee to cover my babysitter.”
It had taken Joey a while to learn the lingo of the club. A customer who watched the lap dance someone else was getting was “snaking.” “Rocks” nursed their drinks all night and didn’t pay for lap dances at all. The “house fee” was what the dancers paid to the club just to work there.
Joey had done the math. In order to earn a comfortable living after the house fee and the nightly tip out to the DJ, bouncers, and other staff, she had to earn at least six hundred dollars a week. It was expensive to be a stripper.
Fortunately, Joey made much more than this. On a regular night, she earned about five times what she used to make working for minimum wage at the video store. On a good night? Double that. It was also lucrative to be a stripper.
“Bump?” Dallas said under her breath, offering her a small vial of cocaine. “Just stocked up.”
“Nah, I’m good.” Joey opened her Styrofoam takeout container, and the heavenly aroma of jerk chicken wafted out. “And hide that shit until everyone’s gone. Cherry will kill you.”
“Ewww, what is that smell?” a voice said, and she looked up to see a dancer named Savannah staring at her food as she spritzed perfume all over her body. “You shouldn’t eat that in here. It stinks.”
“No, you stink.” The quick response was from Destiny, who was rubbing homemade glitter lotion onto her brown skin. Joey had the same mixture in her bag, which was just unscented Jergens mixed with gold glitter from the dollar store. Under the stage lights, it made your skin shimmer. Destiny’s eyes, which were bright blue tonight, flashed. “You smell like a five dollar hooker with that cheap perfume.”
“It’s Liz Claiborne,” Savannah said, offended. She spritzed herself one more time before putting the cap back on her perfume bottle.
Obviously the Cherry didn’t have a human resources department, so the dancers had created their own zero tolerance policy for ignorant comments. But Joey was in a good mood, so she let it slide. Savannah had only started a week ago, and the newbie would learn soon enough what would happen if she said the wrong thing to the wrong girl.
“These new girls are so stupid,” Destiny said after Savannah left. “She might be fresh as a daisy with nineteen-year-old tits now, but in a year, she’ll be a cokehead trying to save up for a boob job.” She touched Dallas’s shoulder as she headed out. “No offense, girl.”
Here at the Cherry, they were all referred to as “girls.” Even Dallas, who could’ve been anywhere from thirty-five to fifty, was a girl. And Destiny wasn’t wrong. The job changed you. It had to, or you wouldn’t last. Nobody working here had listed “stripper” as their career goal when they filled out their guidance counselor’s questionnaire in high school. Though they all came from different backgrounds, it was a universal truth that no one here had expected to end up a dancer at the Golden Cherry.
The Cherry was where you landed when life didn’t go as planned. It didn’t have to be a bad thing. But it wasn’t really a great thing.
One of the bouncers poked his head into the dressing room. “Hey, Betty.”
“Fuck off, Rory,” Dallas said. “No men allowed.”
“I just need Betty for a second,” the bouncer said. “Hey, Betty.Betty.”
Joey swiveled to face him, her mouth full of chicken. “Sorry, wrong Asian stripper.”
“Shit.” Rory deflated when he saw her face. “You know if Betty’s coming in tonight?”
“Don’t know. My Filipino telepathy isn’t working at the moment.”
Beside her, Dallas snorted. After Rory left, Joey turned to her with a grin, but saw that the other dancer wasn’t laughing. It was just a line of coke going up her nose.
“Okay, where’d you score that?” Joey glanced back over her shoulder to make sure no one else was around. “You know you can’t do that shit inside the club. Cherry will fire you.”
“Betty hooked me up.” The dancer adjusted her breasts inside her blue crop top. Because she was so thin, her breast implants made her boobs look like bolt-ons (even Dallas called them that), but it worked for her. Onstage, when she untied her top, they’d burst out, and it always got a loud cheer. “This batch is cut with too much shit, though. Two hits and I can barely feel it. Usually she gets the good stuff.”
Joey sighed and finished her dinner. She’d tried so many times to talk Mae out of selling, but the money was even better than dancing. The two of them had opposite personalities—Joey was the calm, while Mae was the storm—and it was impossible to tell Mae what to do. Still, they balanced each other out, and their friendship had become meaningful. A few months earlier, on a whim, they’d gotten matching butterfly tattoos, which made the people at the club mix them up even more. Everybody already thought they looked alike, though Mae and Joey couldn’t see it.
Lately, though, being mistaken for Mae had become a problem. Her boyfriend was part of the Blood Brothers, and Mae was now the club’s main dealer of illegal narcotics. She could get anything anyone asked for. Cocaine was most requested, as it kept the dancers going all night.
The first time Joey met Vinh—who went by Vinny—he was picking Mae up after work one night. She was surprised at how tiny he was, five four at most, his skinny body drowning in jeans and a sweatshirt three sizes too big for him. He looked like a teenager who played Nintendo all day, nothing like the gangster he was reputed to be. Mae’s voice fluctuated between pride and fear whenever she told Joey about the violent, crazy things Vinny had done to the people who crossed him and the gang. And apparently his older brother, a high-ranking member of the BB, was even worse.
More than a few times, Mae had come into work with bruises, and once, even a sprained wrist. When Joey expressed concern, her friend shrugged it off. “I hit him, too,” Mae said. “This is why body makeup was invented.” It didn’t matter how many times Joey encouraged Mae to break up with Vinny, her friend had to get there herself. And Joey was worried that if she didn’t get there quickly enough, he would kill her.
Yet Vinny was always polite. “Nice to see you, Joey,” he would say, andhe and Mae would offer her a ride home in his souped-up Civic any night she wasn’t going home with Chaz.
“Girls,” a commanding voice said from the dressing room doorway.
