Calendar Girls

Jaycee didn’t have a real problem with the job to tell the truth. Since she was little, Jaycee pretended to be a stripper in her upstairs bedroom. All by herself, she’d dress up in her mother’s shawls and wrap herself in scarves like a Pompeii whore and she’d undo it all in perfect sweeping arpeggio time in front of her parents’ mirrored closets. No one ever came to find her, or caught her there in all those years. She’d make it with her stuffed animals without knowing what slots and tabs were involved in all that raucous motion or the particulars; it just felt comforting, good, less lonely. Or she’d do up the whole soap opera of the date, the affair with the boss, quite lewd for a girl of five, as her parents stood outside, in the backyard below, unaware, making hamburgers. She had asked for cheese on hers and could smell the bland, processed American square melting onto the burger, steaming, as she victimized her teddy bear, black and white dog, took them all to heaven with her. Within five minutes of meeting anyone, Jaycee would animate these childhood tales to them, and top them off with the idea that she blamed television, the nighttime soap operas, but that she enjoyed the experiences, even then.

Jaycee had worked at the local strip club since she was nineteen. All these places were like libraries,she had convinced herself, as she chattered at three hundred miles a minute. Yes, they were small town libraries, and these men that came were all scientists of a certain sort who paid their tuition to come into darkness and research. They could find out all sorts of things from a girl like Jaycee. She was a Virgo (oddly, the Virgin), as so clearly worn when she had on nothing else. Her picaresque sign of the Virgin holding a sheath of wheat was planted in the beaded sweat droplets that nestled her neck when she did the deeds. They could see she was of German stock, her build, her bosom, the dangerous clarity between her wide-set blue eyes. It was Americana at work, Dresden style. A disarray of voices from the pills the other girls would give her sometimes made her dissociate like she were in front of a painting, but in the space that it occupied, the murky sorts of fields and thick figures blending more and more the closer you stepped towards it. The female form was like a painting, she said, becoming another girl every new day, and there were no paintings to look at in her small town. So, these men came to Jaycee like a Greek Goddess of old, to study her form, to be true to the darkness clouding up in rotten smoke and to stay with her while she danced right past them in that darkness, following the paint as it spilled to the floor and tripped this goddess for good, twisting her ankle on the way down like always happens when little girls try to dance in their momma’s over sized shoes.

After more than an hour of this bullshit verbiage on the train, Jaycee spoke of the first time she went to a strip bar, just before her older brother’s friend was getting married (She didn’t want to be home all alone, even though she was a mature fifteen). She had used the bathroom there almost immediately, though would have preferred to hold it in, probably. Jaycee found her way and all the girls were most obliging, since she was girly enough in her big funny, fake fur coat, like a twenties do-gooder slumming it for a change in the night. She crouched above the dirty toilet to pee and heard two strippers, one asking the other if she wanted one of those pills. The only other thing that Jaycee remembered in that bathroom was the mound of colourful, cheap, used underwear that was piled outside the stalls like the stinking defeated dead from a roman battle of some kind, as the girls adjourned in the backstage/changing area. It might have been three feet high; all meshed together, worn like gypsies gone to hell, or some dark basement in Florida, whichever fell closer on that day.

From that day on, Jaycee grew up through teenage weeds like a rotten rose pushing and showing itself to any available light, seeing again and again those infantile, rough boys after they gave up and became repetitive, lewd old men; or, what’s worse, those silent, morose types somewhere in between in age, who were trying to calculate their love of losing inside the blankness of their mind’s page, while watching Jaycee strip down to her childhood limbs, swinging the umbilical shoelaces of her gaudy costume at their deadened, dim eye-lights. Fumbling for change, they would only see the girls’ supposed power over them in terms of vulnerability calculated through lack of age that would play out in years to come, when the obviousness of the change bouncing off the liquor-stained floor would grow complacent, silent in the taciturn dollar bills that work provided to them as they grew older. Their dollars silencing their minds, their tongues yelling audacities at any young thing to shake her ass in their faces. Their mouths would be silent no more. Jaycee just sat there facing the night air of the train, turning occasionally back in her mind to those first, innocent boys, the ones who never came into the strip club. The power that their once innocence had to blot out the rest of what went wrong afterwards. Thoughts of the initial will still spun verses through fingers softening, lips abiding; and any right-minded girl will tell you, there’s nothing more soothing than a young man’s vibrancy – dark fists of hair and the furtive conquer of their beating hearts galloping towards the maze of oncoming towns.

~ M. Lucia