Hard love to me

The weirdest thing customers say to me isn't, I think the way your ribs stick out is sexy, or, how much is it to buy your panties?

The answer to the first one is a big smile and thank you, because I thank people when they compliment me, that's how I was raised. The answer to the second one is no, you can't do that, and by the way that's fucking weird.

But the weirdest thing I get told is, you don't look like a stripper. They say it to explain why of all the girls working the floor at Le Secret tonight they picked me, small, scrawny, flat, tattooed, pink-haired me, pale and pasty like the watery Minnesota peach that I am. Apparently that's not what a stripper is supposed to look like.

At first I thought it was insulting, then hilarious. Now, like most things, I don't give a fuck.

I also get asked my "real" name a lot. No one buys that an exotic young thing like me could really be called Sky. That's why I have a fake real name, Alaska. I lean over, letting the bleach-fried tips of my pastel hair brush their shoulder just so, and whisper it in their ear. And just like that, I'm their new best friend. They love me and that means they'll gladly hand over the entire contents of their wallet, so for me, it works.

I also have fake biographies for myself that I thought up during dead Sunday nights while sitting at the bar dangling my six-inch heels into emptiness. Sometimes I take them farther, test their limits, see how much bullshit I can get away with. You'd be surprised.

My real biography is boring as fuck, just like my real name.

Maybe one day, one hypothetical day that I'll probably keep putting off till I'm old and too wrinkled to strip—one day I'll quit and change my plain old name to Blue, for real.

For now I'm just trying to make the best of the late-August slump. The weather's still good, the hockey games at the arena adjacent to the downtown core haven't started yet, it's a Sunday and the club is so dead I wonder why I even showed up. I could have stayed home except the manager would have given me crap or threatened to fire me. Maybe I should have stayed anyway—fuck him. But I don't want to have to get used to a new club, to learn everyone's names and shit. I have other things on my mind. School starts tomorrow, and I haven't set aside quite enough for tuition over the summer.

I've been slacking. The apathy of not having to wake up and be somewhere at a specific time every morning, of not having things to hand in and deadlines to meet, has sucked me in like a black hole. I killed the summer away day by day in my empty loft, sweltering with the faulty AC—she makes several bills a night and she can't afford a new AC, that's what you're thinking, I know. I just wasn't in the mood to go to the hardware store. I'd need a car to bring the new AC back home, and for that I'd have to go and be nice to someone who has a car.

I'd rather lay on top of the damp bedsheets, fan directed right at me, and only crawl out at night when the heat had abated.

Tomorrow is August 31st, and I have to get my ass in gear for another year. I'm ready to embody the cliché of the stripper-paying-for-her-education.

Although no, for that cliché to work I'd have to be in med school, or law, or at least engineering. And I'm in the Fine Arts program—it's at Mackay, which is prestigious enough, but still.

Almost two years have passed since I filled out the online application forms and mailed my hopeful portfolio, which I was still convinced was pure genius, to every school in North America with even the smallest art department. My grades had slipped in the last semester, with all the shit that went down, so of the slew of applications, only one fat envelope came back: Mackay University, Montreal.

My mom threw a fit. She wanted me to stay home and reapply to the local college or at least one in Minneapolis. She threw stuff and threatened to cut me off. But I went. I still went because I knew there was no way in hell I was staying in that town for even a heartbeat longer than I had to.

So here I am, the embodiment of all her worst fears about me come to life.

The truth is, I've been toying with the idea of dropping out. The school, the art program, even independent life in this city of a somewhat deserved debauched reputation—it didn't bring me back to life the way everyone said it would. The art program was my last-ditch attempt to get back to the thing I used to love the most, painting, but instead it killed the little drive I did have. The classes were either too restrictive or too liberal; the tyranny of total freedom of medium and subject made it impossible to put anything down onto the blank canvas. And suddenly I found myself surrounded with Quebecois girls, barely eighteen, with more talent than me in their manicured little finger.

The only reason I have yet to go down to admissions and fill out the pink slip of withdrawal is because I don't want to be any more of a cliché than I already am.

So here I am, on a Sunday before my first day back. It's nearing midnight and only two tables are taken up. Two more people at the bar. One of them is that regular all the new girls trip over, like a rite of passage. Makes you talk for hours, flashes his cash and then doesn't get a single dance. The other looks so ancient I'm afraid he might die right in the private booth.

I pause in front of one of the full-length mirrors lining the club walls and adjust my two-piece outfit. Today it's my least favorite one, because no point in wasting a good outfit on a Sunday night. It's an off-the-shoulder tank top cropped to just below my boobs and matching French-cut panties, all made of a cheap gilded fabric that has already lost a lot of its luster in the wash. But in the dim lights of the club, no one can tell—not that anyone cares, anyway. Guys never notice stupid stuff like outfits, or jewelry, or whether you had your nails or your pedicure redone within the last month. They come here looking for one thing, and that ain't your airbrush nail designs. If they wanted nice lingerie, they'd stay home and jerk off to their wife's Victoria Secret catalogue.

So I go see one of the tables. Two guys, Typical Strip Club Patron prototype: middle-aged, not in great shape (that's being generous), and since it's Sunday, jeans and ratty sweaters.

"Hi guys," I say, and lean over the table seductively, giving them a view down the plunging neckline of the tank top. That means pretty much everything short of my nipples. Subtlety has no place here either.

They both glance up at me, with those lazy evaluating looks that roam me, unsubtly, from head to toe. I say one of my generic go-to phrases, how's your night or where are you from or whatever seems fitting. They answer with something equally generic, unenthusiastic. I ask them if they want a dance, as a last-ditch effort: it's clear the answer is going to be no.

"Sorry. Maybe in a little bit?" offers up the one closest to me. That means no. But still he feels the need to reach out and put his hand on my forearm.

I give him a smile that never reaches my eyes. "All right, I'll drop by after you've had a few drinks."

I start to stand up, extricating my arm from him. But then he grips my forearm tighter and adds:

"Sorry, sweetie, but that's probably not a good idea. No offense but you're just not my type."

Okay. I intend to walk away without acknowledging him—all part of the game, no accounting for taste and all. But he pulls on my arm, so abrupt that I teeter on my heels for a fraction of a second, and whispers loudly:

"Is there anyone here who's not so flat-chested? I mean, a girl with big tits. I really like a girl with big tits, could you call her up?"

I yank my arm free. The clasp of his watch scratches my skin, enough to leave a burning trail.

"Find her yourself. I'm not your secretary," I snap.

He stares at me for a moment, jaw agape. "Sheesh," he says as his face returns to its default lazy, cocky expression. "Just asking. I mean, it's your job."

"My job is to dance," I say through my teeth. "For people with money who want dances. So fuck off."

I don't wait for his answer, I just turn around and walk away without a backward glance. At that moment the song playing overhead starts to fade out and I hear him mutter:

"...anorexic bitch."

I wonder if I should tell the manager they were trying to take pictures or asking for sex or something. Have them thrown out. But part of me just refuses to give a fuck. Insults that would have had me crying in the bathroom for an entire period back in high school, that had me simmering with rage and humiliation for hours when I first started, now fade within seconds with nary a memory. It's always something. Anorexic bitch. Fat bitch. Flat-chested bitch, fake-titted bitch, bottle-blonde bitch ugly bitch, tattooed bitch.

After working here awhile, it becomes impossible to ignore how much most men really hate women.

Not that I didn't already know that. These days you don't have to be a stripper or a call girl or a porn star to realize it.

You can just be an ordinary, slightly dorky girl in a small-town Minnesota high school, the one in the back, the one no one notices.

You just have to be a girl, period.