Anything but a wasted life

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When a writer slash photographer slash veteran stripper prostitute tells you they write about their life, take photos & post it all on the internet you know for sure you are in for a good time. But I had no idea that the first sentence would glue me to my laptop until my eyes stopped working.

Over my life I have read so much amazing text & also a lot of shit, so I guess I consider myself someone that can separate good shit from bad shit & baby dis good shit!

Anything But a Wasted Life is a candid, unapologetic, insightful 120,000-word memoir written by a girl that has seen & done it all & who isn’t scared to tell us about it… in great detail. You can only begin to imagine the scenarios that a veteran stripper, photographer, prostitute (self taught in all of her arts) who fakes intimacy for a living lands herself in. Her stories are vivid, witty & to the point… no bullshit… exactly how it happened & as you read you can picture yourself there in her moment.

In addition to writing she also knows how to take dam good photos that support her memoirs & draw you in even further as you read.

She goes by the name of @theuncensoredstripper & For your enjoyment I have inserted her first chapter below 🙂

Chapter 1 – Anything But a Wasted Life

It’s your typical night in the dressing room. Girls drinking, girls talking shit, one girl inserting a tampon. Another is on her cell phone. Two are speaking too loudly, and four are heavily spraying themselves with sickeningly sweet body spray. And me; leaning over the counter applying my ho-bag makeup. Two plastic vitaminwater bottles sit next to my Mac brushes, one with apple vodka, and the other, actual vitaminwater. I swig one, then the other. Total shit. I hate vodka, but it leaves my breath smelling less like a barroom floor. And it’s cheap.I apply shiny powder to my cheeks and over the thin lines around my eyes, to mask my experience. I’m a thirty- seven-year-old stripper. I’ve been dancing since college, more than fifteen years ago.

One of my roommates worked at The Lusty Lady in San Francisco, a female-owned and operated peep show, and another acquaintance of mine worked at The Mitchell Brothers O’Farrell Theatre, the city’s premier strip club. Having witnessed their lifestyle of glitz and financial freedom, I decided to give stripping a go. I was tired of being broke, working three jobs and having very little energy or time for homework.

I was pre-law. My goal was to re-design the prison system. Suffice to say, law school never happened. Within a year, I was making more money than judges in San Francisco, my hometown. The prisoners would have to wait. I’d never had that much money before. I was raised by a single parent and have been on my own since I was sixteen. Most girls (myself included) start dancing with the intention of doing it less than two years (in the beginning I thought I would dance through law school and then quit). Nearly all stay two to seven years. Only a few of us stay this long.

Stripping was incredible when I started. It was special and still somewhat underground, a unique adventure for the wealthy. Times have changed. I make an eighth of what I used to, and there’s practically a strip club on every corner.

I suppose I’m a bit spoiled. Wake up when I want, work when I want, get paid in cash. It’s not a bad life. And I’m good at what I do. Sometimes I think it’s a curse to be skilled at making men feel good. Funny thing is, most of them want to make me feel good. That’s the secret. Their wives don’t come anymore (or at least not with them), so they want to make me climax. It makes them feel like a man, I suppose. So I fake it, all night. The trick I’ve found is to make it seem like I shouldn’t. I hide my face in their necks while I grind my pussy on their leg and breathe softly in their ear. I build up the breathing in a believable way, then back off a little and say, “Wow, I think I could come.”
“Are you serious?” Big puppy eyes and wagging tail.
“That would be incredible!”
“No, I really shouldn’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s my job to make you feel good.” I say with a smile. Then I start up the slow movement with my hips again and rest my lips by the client’s ear. Sometimes I’ll go right into the act if we are close to the end of our dance and I know he won’t be getting another, or I’ll drag it out so that he’ll want to continue and pay more. After I’m “finished,” I’ll act all shy and hide my face in their shoulder.
“I can’t believe I just did that.”
“That was awesome,” is the typical response.
“How much do I owe you,” I ask with a wink and smile as I get up and start to get dressed. This usually gets a laugh and distracts them from the fact that they just paid good money for me to have an orgasm. One more delusional customer. He’ll be back.

There was a time when I actually did climax during lap dances. In fact, the first time I ever made myself come was in front of a customer. I didn’t even mean to. It was at The Lusty Lady, the peep show—jack-off joint. Customers stood or sat in small, Plexiglas-windowed private booths and put money in a machine, which caused the window to open for a limited time while they watch naked girls (like in Madonna’s video “Open Your Heart”). In addition to the live girls, similar coin-operated booths showing adult videos were also available. We got paid an hourly rate. The only place we could earn tips was in a separate, single booth called the Private Pleasures, which was down the narrow hall from the main stage. Dancers had to request to schedule this room. If given the OK, we worked the main room for two hours and then the Private Pleasures for two hours. The fact that the Lusty Lady was owned and operated by women was very unique, as most strip clubs are not.

One night I was in the Private Pleasures when a club regular solicited a private show. I had heard about this guy but hadn’t had the pleasure of meeting him yet. His thing was to have the girl turn off the lights, lie back and massage her clit while he rattled off some ridiculous sex fantasy. Pretty generic shit, like sex on a plane with a stranger, et cetera. So there I was, lying back on a bunch of pillows like genie in her bottle, fingers on my clitoris, trying to block him out. And suddenly, I came. I couldn’t believe it. I was shocked because, although I had been having orgasms with my lovers for years, I had never done so on my own. Apparently, it wasn’t convincing enough for him though.
“You just faked that.”
“Actually, I didn’t.”
“Yeah you did. I can tell.”
Not really giving a shit whether he believed me or not, I told him to piss off. I was twenty-three, and it was my first self-induced orgasm. I had tried a couple times when I was younger, but honestly I just felt embarrassed and gave up. My self-esteem was pretty messed up when I was young, and making yourself come is a rather loving thing to do. From that night on, whenever I worked the Private Pleasures room, I’d close the curtain and make myself come instead of going to the dressing room during my ten-minute break. My little secret. I could hear people milling around outside my booth. People who essentially paid us to fake orgasms, and here I was doing it in private for free. Unwittingly, that guy opened up a whole new world for me.

A year later, I got hired at Mitchell Brothers. The owner was a complete prick and always threatening to fire us. For a few years in the mid-1990s, he actually did fire about twenty girls a month for absolutely no reason other than to assert control, and make sure that we never forgot who held the power. Such bullshit, but he knew he was sitting on a gold mine and that he had us by the G-string. Women were flying in from all over the country (and outside the U.S.) in hopes of getting hired at Mitchell Brothers. This is a man who shot his brother to death and only did three years in San Quentin. Interesting to note: One of the former co-owners of my home club in Los Angeles is currently in prison for murdering the other co-owner. Guess it says something about the business.

During this period of unrest, I moonlighted at other clubs in the city. The money wasn’t even close to what I could make at Mitchell Brothers, but it served as job security. One of those other clubs was The Crazy Horse on Market Street, which was sort of a sleazy joint, but you could say that about most of the other clubs in the city at the time. It opened as a movie theatre in 1909 and then suffered a lowbrow conversion into a strip club in 1995.

The club had an eerie feeling that I can’t quite put words to. We lap danced in the original theatre seats facing a carpeted, T-shaped stage (carpet has no business on a strip club stage: it absorbs all the junk from the bottom of our heels, as well as lotion, oil, sweat, and lastly, our womanly secretions if contact is made…from doing the splits, for example) that came down the centre aisle. This main room was huge: long and narrow with impossibly tall ceilings. There were two other rooms where we could give slightly more private dances for a higher price. One of these areas was a room within a room in the huge theatre, closed off by walls that were shorter than the ceilings.

One night I was lap dancing for a guy in the room within a room on one of the long pleather benches. We wore bikinis during lap dances and I could straddle the customers, something we weren’t allowed to do at Mitchell Brothers. This guy was really nasty. His breath smelled like puke and he kept rubbing his finger in the top crevice of my ass, not something I normally let guys do. But there I was, straddling him, rubbing my clit on his crotch, allowing him to molest my butt crack. The more disgusting he got, the closer I came to climaxing. Don’t ask me why. And then I came. I didn’t tell him. I did it quietly, and our song was over moments after. I had mixed feelings about it. The orgasm felt good, but it wasn’t like me to come with someone I didn’t know. In fact, I rarely come with anyone until I feel comfortable and a trust is built. This was different. I didn’t give two shits about what he thought of me. I wasn’t worried about how I smelled, what my body looked like in the light, or how long it was taking. It was liberating.

The next time it happened was with a young Asian kid. He wasn’t gross like the other guy. He was nice, but I was hot and bothered and wanted to come. In fact, I wouldn’t let him leave until I did. We had surpassed the time limit he had paid for, but I didn’t get up. To be honest, he seemed a tad freaked out, but I kept him pinned under my body until I came. Poor thing. I stood up and walked away without a word. It was shameless and fun. Not in a vindictive way, but in a thanks-for-being-my-human-vibrator kind of way.

All that was early in my career. Now, over fifteen years later, I don’t try to come on them anymore. Nothing taboo about it. I suppose I could if I really wanted to, but fuck it. Why?

Continue reading Anything But a Wasted Life here.