A baby stripper and the trauma that enters the club
I hope that you’re proud
Cuz I gave it my all
But I’m not where I promised
I would be by now
Leroy Sanchez — Proud
That’s what played as I twirled a pirouette in my final practice run. I wasn’t alone. A few young women, who clearly have been doing this for a while, chatted away like an incessant buzz.
I looked in the mirror, the whole wall a reflection of dancers. “No,” I said to no one at all. Maybe to the wind to whisp away my degradation and shame. “They wouldn’t be proud of me. I’m not proud of me.”
Sexy silk draped over my shoulders and wrapped around my body but showing a peek at my torso. The expensive black lace thong hugged me too tight in all the wrong areas. One wrong move on the pole and there I’d be, but then again, I’d be there soon.
It almost seemed silly. I was half a boy pretending to be a full woman. It felt like dress-up. Look at my boyish haircut. Look at this feminine body. Look at the boobs I want to remove. Look at my vagina that doesn’t cum.
I was on next. I clunked down the steps in my high, high heeled boots. There was no side stage for auditions, no house moms to help me. As I approached the main stage, the manager instructed, “Topless by the first song and nude by the second.”
Confusion washed over me. Clearly this was a miscommunication. “In my emails, I said I wasn’t comfortable being topless or nude.”
His young face wrinkled. “You’re not gonna find that in Portland.”
Oh… It was a fast decision I had to make. I need fast money to pay next month’s rent. I need money to pocket so I can get the fuck out of Portland, a “city” that has treated me so poorly over the past nine months. I need out ASAP. I do what I have to do because I’m a survivor. I’m resourceful. I’m desperate.
“Yeah, let’s do,” I said, visibly shaking.
I’ll cut to the chase. I didn’t pass the audition. I was so worried about how I looked naked that I couldn’t do the pole moves I can do in my sleep. I even fell on my head once, prompting the manager to check on me. I wasn’t hurt; I was embarrassed. At what I was doing and my ineptitude. It showed in my awkward transitions and sudden stillness, like I was buffering Mitch McConnell style.
Confidence. That’s what the manager told me I needed. “It’s very sexy, but it’s not there yet. Come back in a month.”
I pleaded with him over something I didn’t feel comfortable doing. “Please, I need this. I’m in a tough spot right now.”
He gave me two weeks. I thanked him and went to change and start my Walk of Shame back home. Two weeks of practicing taking my clothes off. Two weeks of practicing fake confidence. Two weeks to bury my gender dysphoria.
Two weeks of learning how to pretend I didn’t see all the men who hurt me over my lifetime. All of them leering at me from different parts of the club. They were watching how I moved and the shape of my body. They were judging how fast I’d fallen — 3 master’s degrees, and here I am, naked, my pussy on display, my legs spread for them again. They told me to do this. They told me to act this way. They told me to show them what I could do.
I don’t want to be an exotic dancer. I love pole as a sport and an art form like ballet. I’m good at it. I don’t want to use one of my rare talents that I love for something for which I’d be trading it for PTSD and dollar bills.
This isn’t forever, I tell myself. This is just for now. But how long is now?
Now has come on the brink of me leaving, when the metaphorical ground that is life crumbles beneath me and I’m holding on to sanity with one hand. The hand that reaches out to save me is another talent of giving generously: sex, pleasure, experience.
I use it to get me from Point A to Point B and for all the basic needs in order to exist in this country. The money helps me to keep running. But everything I want to leave behind comes with me, mostly in my head. One even followed me to the west coast. All the shower demons; the shadows that kept me from Jackson Heights, Midtown, and the Brooklyn Bridge; every school; and holidays spent alone.
As I stand at Point B, I realize I’m alone. We imagine this great place where no one knows us, maybe a New Zealand landscape or another busy city. Point B is a storm cloud, and it rains a lot in Portland.
Portland has taught me to not trust people even less than I did before and that I really can’t outrun trauma. There is no starting clean. There is no erasing of the past. There’s denial, but that is only a boomerang. It’ll all catch up to me, whether by something someone said or when I wrap my legs around a pole or when I’m lying in stillness.
The people are different here; the culture is different here. I am but an “aggressive and loud” outsider, who finds themselves here again, trying to get to Point C. I cannot find solid ground. The metaphorical land crumples beneath me. I reach out my hand because I’m really trying to live.
Sex. Pleasure. Experience. That’s what I offer. And here, where there are so few Asian women, I offer exoticism. Let me dance. Let me show them. Let me pay my rent in singles. Dance, baby. Fuck, baby.
To California dreaming. Dance, baby. Fuck, baby. Scared, baby.
