Strip

My stage name was Caitlin. It was a name I liked. I liked it better than Sapphire or Starr or Mercedes. My backup name, for when they said, “Come on, tell me your real name. Tell me what your mama calls you. Come on,” was Mary.

“Mary?” they said, laughing. “Oh, that’s fucking classic. Mary? Seriously? A stripper named Mary?”

Uh-huh, I said, and smiled.

No, you dumb fuck. Of course it’s not.

Buy me a drink? I said, leaning over the table. And they did.

There is the name, and then the name behind the name, and then the name behind that, which is the name my mama gave me (which is from a Chekhov play she liked, and is the name she wore in that role, so it is only my name many times removed, means nothing to me, means “bitter water,” means many women other than me)—but there are an infinite number of names I could say are my own. I could wear the names like the countless coats of makeup I paint on my face, like the layers of lace that come off and come off, almost never-ending, like a little Russian doll. There is the striptease of nominal signs, each one getting closer to the source, the crux, the one name, the woman, the place where her body and name are the same. Body I am entirely, and nothing else. Thus spoke Zarathustra, quoth Nietzsche. The trick is to try to get there: to the raw center, where signified and signifier do not pull apart but dissolve into oneness, into the unified thing that we long to believe is the self.

This is classic identity theory shit.

Here are the things this essay is not about: the sexually and psychically empowering qualities of stripping. Strippers as highly empowered entrepreneurs. Strippers as proto-, post-, or anti-feminists. Strippers as regular gals. Why strippers should be called dancers. Why stripping should be called sex work. Stripping as performance art. Stripping or strippers. It is not about the green-and-pink concrete strip club called Déjà Vu at the north edge of Minneapolis, called The Vu by the girls who work there and the college boys who tip poorly, across from Rick’s Cabaret and the cleverly named sex shop Lickety Split. It is not about the split shift, the night shift, the godforsaken morning shift. Not about the ten-dollar drinks, or the way you had to get 20 men to buy you and themselves a drink, totaling 40 ten-dollar drinks, or $400 straight to the house, or you had to pay the house $400 yourself. It is not about how that was a hardship; it was not a hardship, it was a pain in the ass. It is not about how many other things you could do with $400, how many hungry and homeless you could feed, because that $400 was going straight into your arm. It is not about your intimate knowledge of the brands and shades of face makeup that can be used to cover the tracks on your arm, and it is not about how those brands and shades are not the same as those that are needed to cover a bruise (green or blue) or a broken rib (yellowish orange), or the purplish print of a hand on a throat. It is not about Venus, the store where we bought our strip clothes, which is owned by a man named Alex, who is a nice enough man with an almost self-referentially sleazy smile, and when the $400 is not going into your arm, it is going into a pair of five-inch red patent leather platform stilettos that look ever so cute with your shortie Santa suit but are really quite versatile because you can also wear them with your satin Valentine’s Day teddy and, in the off season, your Victorian velvet bodice with the lace-up ass. It is not about the time you tried to write about it before, called it “Seven Nights in Paradise,” tried to pass it off as an immersion-journalism...