I’ve been working in earnest on my stripper ghost stories, but as I try to connect the dots of an authoritarian regime that gets off on cruelty, I had a thought: I need a little more levity. I won’t trouble you with the details, but suffice to say this past month I’ve been moving through a lot of grief, and last week, well, to quote the title of my lovely friend Raechel Anne Jolie’s recent post, “I cried every day.”

Amid the ongoing brutalities of state power, and a political order that might as well be weaponized early Windows wingdings or animatronic killer dolls, which is to say, a regime oriented around engineered chaos, I am drawn to dreamers who insist on other ways of being in the world, here and now. To laugh together not as mass distraction but as collective sustenance for imagining a life beyond survival. And, despite sounding like a little Victorian ghost boy (even and especially when I attempt an informal tone), I swear I don’t take myself that seriously.

Moreover, so much writing about sex work tends toward either of these extremes: the neoliberal empowerment narrative of TikTokified stripper entrepreneurism, girl boss blah blah space barf, on one hand—and on the other, the reactionary Vance vibes of anti-porn peddlers who equate all sex work with abject misery, victimhood, trauma, and trafficking (unless as pertains to tradwife influencers or Andrew Tate).

Despite social media lore, most strippers are working-class femmes trying to make a living in a world inhospitable to their minds and bodies in a million different ways, not millionaires in the making. Strippers often exist in the shadowy spaces of ambivalence, dissociation, and healing, across shared experiences of strategic maneuvering and unlikely intimacies that connect and exhilarate us. I thought I’d create a column that exists in this messy in-between.

Not every interaction is soul-crushing. My nights don’t actually revolve around some kind of sick dick worship. I’m not discounting the fury I feel about the club’s hierarchy, the mundane misogyny and the professional managerial pimp payout to the ones profiting off my exhausted body (so, like, any job), all of which of course demands scrutiny. But as a former professor who resigned in the face of escalating whistleblower retaliation making my job not to mention life unbearable, another thing that bugged me about academia—aside from its fealty to the old boys’ club gaslighting survivors of sexual violence—is its minimizing of mundane interactions that defy grand narratives and statistical soundbites.

I had a girlfriend in grad school who joked that academics can be an awful lot like the pouty heiress, in that Pulp song, who “wants to live like the common people,” who is so disconnected from reality she thinks groceries a novel concept. Like politicians using people as pawns in a rigged game of chess, like rich girls from Orange County cosplaying feminism for social capital. When Gwen Stefani appears on a prayer app backed by anti-abortion extremists, the public gasps that its projection of higher purpose onto celebrities does not, in fact, reflect the will of the people but the powerful interests of those profiting off us.

This column is about the stories with unmarketable plotlines, the wrinkles I refuse to iron, the absurdity and tenderness I want to celebrate in the face of an endless news cycle’s fueling of apocalyptic aloneness. A reminder to find pleasure in places that extract our alienation for profit, abstract our bodies for wage theft, distract us with fake idols.

A couple years ago I got a banana with boobs tattooed on my left calf to commemorate the fact that I revel in ridiculousness. Whenever I get called ‘brave,’ for auditioning at a strip club without a single pole skill and a penchant for dancing like a Fraggle Rock Muppet extra, for example, or prancing around in adult beginning ballet, my go-to response is that I simply have no shame. Case in point, when I returned home from ballet class this week, I realized that in my mad dash out the door, I forgot to secure the little crotch clasps of my ruby red leotard. If you’ve never worn a bodysuit you might not know what I mean by crotch clasps but the lower part of my leotard was dangling, undone, unbeknownst to me, over the waistband of my sheer mesh wrap skirt. Being late everywhere doesn’t often result in flashing laundry day panties under pale pink tights, but when I noticed this blunder upon returning home I wasn’t even a little embarrassed. Instead, I laughed.

It’s not that I haven’t struggled with shame—it nearly led me to delete the next two paragraphs. But in the wake of the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services proposing an autism registry, it’s hard to ignore the ableism of it all.

The current popularity of treating neurodivergence like an imaginary Instagram fad exists on a slippery slope with the science-denying officials calling it an urgent public health crisis. Both positions deny people’s lived experiences. According to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and I quote, “autism destroys families, destroys our greatest resource, which are our children.” The concept of children as resources might ring some alarm bells, but his speech gets even more sinister. First up on his catalogue of horrors is “never pay[ing] taxes.” This singular human experience is the most tragic to him, prioritized over how “they’ll never write a poem.” Gotcha, dude. You might want to avoid arguing with a group of people who, as children, were likely reading the encyclopedia for fun. I sure as hell did, but we’re not a monolith, either. Science!

Aside from the truly devastating effects of struggling to regulate our emotions and to be in our bodies, neurodivergence by and large only becomes a ‘disorder’ insofar as it fails to conform to capitalism’s demands. More worrying to me is that neurotypicals prefer the world’s worst coerced subscription service—like SiriusXM as an administrative grim reaper—to poetry. Even so, for most of my life I blamed myself for the struggles associated with my then-undiagnosed AuDHD, which is not merely additive but a unique neurotype distinct for how ADHD drives ASD (and everyone else) absolutely nuts—an inner brawl bouncing off skulls. I still tend to spiral after social interactions that remind me how lonely I have felt living with some fundamental yet ineffable difference in how I process the world, how draining it has been to try to hide it. It takes an enormous amount of energy to approximate normalcy through perfectionism, to blunt sensory overload, overwhelming emotions, and hyperverbal processing without numbing out.

Lately my answer to this exhaustion is refusing to perform. So, I’m a witchy little weirdo, a dirty napkin who’s grateful for wonderful close friends who affirm they love me because not in spite of my weirdness, who embrace the me behind my mask. Working at a strip club requires another mask, but a lighter one. My entire life doesn’t rest on this performance. The stakes are selling dances, not surviving a world hostile to your way of experiencing it.

If one of my core values is to be goofy, another is to be genuine. I may protect parts of myself at work, but the little slivers I selectively reveal are real. After all, I’m a scrappy entertainer, not a trained actor. Stripping makes clear how entertainment is at its core about honest connection, not technical prowess. Beneath the glitzy surface is human vulnerability. A desire to be seen. To be witnessed.

Stripper wisdom says that in every interaction you’ll find a bid for connection. Sometimes it’s quite explicit. Other times it’s subterranean. I would argue that either way, an entertainer’s undertaking revolves around shared vulnerability and collective possibility. The real striptease: to expose the titillating fact that the latter requires the former. That they, we, need each other.

At the risk of revealing how cheesy I am, maybe the leotard was a lesson—showing your ass, metaphorically speaking, is perhaps the only way to truly be seen.

Good thing I have no shame, because here goes my first Comic Strip Club bit. It’s no stand-up routine, but a recent lap dance encounter made me laugh. I’m hoping that might mean it’s funny.

***

It’s the end of the night and I’m annoyed that a loud man keeps shouting “I think I’m kind of in love with her” to his drunk friends after I storm off dejected with nothing but lost time and three crumpled bills padding my boobs like the lumpy foam of a push-up bra. My dignity is intact, but the obliterated economy has fucked up everyone’s money at the club. Tonight I’ve made about $200, minus the house fee, also about $200, depending on the day and time of arrival. My diagnostic paperwork literally says I have, and I quote, “medically significant deficits in mental math,” which isn’t even the rude part, but I’m pretty sure the above equation amounts to zero.

So I’m seething about bosses, taxes, tariffs, and a man who paid me $100 to bemoan the massive amount of money he’s lost in the stock market. The loss is massively unfathomable to me, as out of reach as a job with a six-figure salary. Most of my jobs have paid minimum wage, and the starting annual salary of my first and only tenure-track position was $56,000, which I was ecstatic about since it tripled my income at the time. I like the guy, I really do, but he’s a little out of touch. He proclaims he’s a self-made millionaire and minutes later, casually mentions his million-dollar inheritance.

I sit close to him, my hand resting on his knee, with a smile slapped across my face, attempting to hide the fact that I am living off ramen and rage. I’d be thankful for the $100 except at the moment I’m in debt to the club. Before I can work to pay my bills I have to pay the club to work. We’re at-will W-2 employees without benefits, so basically independent contractors who can’t claim our expenses. I was praying (sans the app) that Elon’s path of destruction would at least shutter the IRS before they bankrupted me last week, but desperation drives delusion. If during the Cold War my mother hadn’t witnessed the FBI in her home asking questions of my suspected communist grandfather, maybe I wouldn’t be so paranoid about the government’s watchful eyes.

***

I lean against the bar with crossed arms. I know I look dejected but I’m way more preoccupied with not crying than making last-minute money after last call. My glassy eyes blur strobe light streaks until Cherry pops up out of nowhere to say the dude loitering behind her wants to do a double with us, two redheads.

Once a customer approached us to say as much and she interjected, with gusto, pointing first at herself then at me, “Yes! A real one and a fake one,” which I resented until a friend explained she’s neurodivergent, which immediately changed my perspective. I get it. She was just being accurate, as I’m a natural brunette, maybe with auburn undertones if you squint but it’s a stretch. This experience cements wisdom a bestie recently dropped in casual conversation: refusing to extend a little grace in everyday social interactions is not only unkind, but likely ableist too.

I agree to the dance, but in the short span of our conversation he has meandered off like a child drunk on sugar and mesmerized by pizza-eating robots at Chuck E. Cheese. I can still hear the mechanical whir of anthropomorphized animals singing a song in no key. Then my mind wanders to the absolute fucking legend of a stripper recorded eating pizza on stage, when the man who disappeared down the hallway leading to the smoking patio reemerges and, making a big to-do of his attempted discretion, scoops me.

“Let’s go!” he whisper-yells in a Southern accent, looking like Jesus in a cowboy hat pounding draft beer. I assume his reasoning has nothing to do with Cherry, who has nailed the girl next door vibe, which men tend to adore. Variety is the Spice Girls of life, or something, as people who have built their existence around suburban homogeneity say, and I’m less Baby, more Scary. But two dancers will double the price, and It’s Two Dollar Tuesday, so customers come looking for deals.

I escort him into the main dance room, unfazed that my usual price point in the VIP has been reduced to two songs for $40. Beggars can’t be choosers, as my friend once advised when I searched for reasons to not submit yet another god forsaken job application. “But Old Dominion University,” I said, “just sounds so racist.” It was, in fact, so racist and sexist and all the things, but what did I expect. It’s an educational institution, after all.

I tend to romanticize the plight of Sisyphus. For two years I yawped at little gray boxes on my Zoom screen, Suicide or laughter!, like Robin Williams in a comic jag. This the two years the English department punished me for not shutting up about Blake Bailey apologists. One manifestation of that retaliation was to push me out of the major, replacing my usual teaching load of advanced undergrad and MA/PhD topics seminars with Introduction to Literature for non-majors, which fulfills a GE (general education) requirement. Despite the snobbish disdain with which research faculty tend to regard GE curricula, I enjoy teaching such classes. The lack of variety was killing me, though. So I relished in presenting this existential dilemma for dramatic effect before unpacking Sartre. What is there, really, but a choice to embrace the absurdity of the human condition as a tiny rebellion against normalizing coercion. You can only roll a ball up a hill for so long before hurling it toward the heavens, hoping it won’t crush you on the comedown.

***

The club is about to close so the dance room smells like a boozy Bath & Body Works. From a distance under dim red lights, the room looks orgiastic, stripper limbs every which way like leggy lampshades tripped over bodies. Dancers avert our eyes to offer the illusion of privacy while customers gawk at a vertigo of grinding hips. I direct the dazed man into a corner, the most private sectional lining the circular room. The booming speaker hangs over our heads, too loud, always too fucking loud, but at least we’re not in earshot of other dances. Time is ticking, so I skip the slow seduction and lower myself onto his lap, which feels tiny under my towering body. Sometimes, during a dance, I will sit my ass down on the cute little haunch below someone’s chest instead of their lap—forgetting the heels make me eight inches taller.

Earlier this evening a man in his early 20s asked my age during a dance, and when I fibbed and said 33, he replied, “Oh, a MILF! Hot!” I am neither Jesus nor a mother, although I desperately wanted to be for most of my thirties. A mother, to be clear. My age is one of my only ruses, as the time I got tired of deflecting the annoying question about “what else do you do?” and tried to insinuate I had a mysterious job in government, I got grilled out of my lie. Some bureau agent I would make. Ten-gallon-hat Jesus reminds me of MILF man, in that the older I get the younger people in their 20s look. I feel like Gulliver encountering the Lilliputians.

I’ve barely straddled him, trying to close the awkward gap between my thighs and his lap, when he gently grasps my biceps and whispers something I must angle myself down to hear. I’m already convinced he’s going to tell me I’m crushing him, so I am more than a little surprised by what he says next.

“Be still,” he repeats, slowly, for emphasis. “Be still.”

He is as earnest as he is soft-spoken. I freeze, assuming this is a boundaries thing, wanting to respect his needs. Remaining motionless but a bit confused, I try to get a read on the situation by peering into his eyes. They are hazel, soft, kind, with fluttery blonde lashes that would cast shadows on his lightly freckled face in direct sunlight. He’s wearing an earth-toned waffle henley with three tortoiseshell buttons and that timeless color of denim that’s somehow always and never in style, the blue jeans bellwether. His rugged boots match the hat he’s politely placed by his side. I swear he’s not a day over the legal drinking limit. I could quite literally be his mother. As if I don’t feel odd enough.

“Oh, okay! Sure,” I affirm in my most soothing, nurturing Dommy Mommy voice.

I’m a bit bewildered, but not stressing it, as bizarre shit happens all the time here. I’m also not entirely sure what he said, so I feel compelled to ask again.

“Be… sorry, what?”

He gestures for me to curve my torso closer to his mouth. His hands cup my right ear, as if in a game of telephone, and against the throb of house music he whispers the words once more.

“Be still.”

“Be still,” I echo, almost in unison, as what he previously said had just sunk in.

He looks up at me with pleading eyes. “Do you know why?”

“No…” my voice trails off as the first song fades into a Bob Marley classic the DJ plays at closing time. I think of how my former club manager favored a more direct approach, N Sync’s “Bye Bye Bye.”

He interrupts my thoughts to ask, “do you want to know why?”

The first verse of “Three Little Birds” urges the frenetic tempo of wriggling bodies to not worry about a thing. “No…” I nod, thinking he repeated the previous question.

Undeterred, he declares, “Because the most beautiful things in life are still.”

“Are what?”

“Are STILL!”

“Oh?” I question, hearing him for once but confused about his meaning, which strikes me as a bit morbid. I was, after all, tasked with dry humping him. “Like what?” I say a little prayer he doesn’t say something murdery.

“Like the…” He pauses for dramatic emphasis.

“STATUE OF LIBERTY!” he booms, voice raised emphatically.

My voice is timid by comparison. “Like the Statue of Liberty?”

I am reminded of Chappell Roan at the New York Governor’s Ball, Lady Liberty drag making visible the violent erasures propping up the nation’s “melting pot” mythology. This sartorial protest pissed off the single-issue gay contingent willing to brush off genocide for a right-leaning Democrat, but what else is new.

“Like the Statue of Liberty!” he confirms, victorious.

I’d sooner burn an American flag bikini than wear one, but this is a bid for connection and my job is to honor that bid without sacrificing myself. There’s no harm in playing along, I must have thought, before I hear myself respond without missing a beat.

“Like the one that greeted my Russian ancestors on the shores of Ellis Island?”

My delivery surprises me with its seriousness. I am indeed Russian on my maternal side but never have I expressed such reverence toward a sculpture, much less a national monument. I’m more into Medusa, the high priestess whose spurned beauty turns men to stone after Athena, goddess of war, blames and banishes her for surviving Poseidon’s supposed divine right. The curse offers a certain protection.

And with that, bright overhead lights switch on to signal closing and we all exit the flooding florescent room in a cloud of human scents, clutching clothing and smoothing hair like a collective walk of shame absent the shame. We’re just a mess of people mopping up desire’s remainders, sticky memory.

He continues his cryptic statue comparison after the music cuts off, shifting from command to compliments. I’m amused, paying no mind to the chorus of sideways glances.

“I’m melting,” I cackle in my best Wicked Witch of the West impression, breaking the spell with silliness, which offers something far more playful than projection, something like delight—an unexpected desire that doesn’t require lack, just hope for connection in a place that capitalizes on all we’ve constructed to keep us apart.

Our brief interaction wasn’t deep, to be sure, but I leave the club feeling a little lighter. And I hope my quirky dance partner might feel a little lighter, too.

♡♡♡