The Stripping Game Started in the Yellow Pages

“Well hello book. This is my dancer’s book where everyday from here til the end, I will write a page about the club. Who am I? Butter. My real name is Kendria. Butter, my alter ego, has become a part of me that no matter what happens,  I’ll always remember. So here’s the start of what will hopefully be the end soon. 

~6.18.02”

I've gone back and forth about penning this blog. At first, I was ready gung-ho with excitement to post this. I like challenging how our 'normal society' views those who it has deemed an outcast. I had all the words loaded in my head, cocked back the login on my laptop and prepared myself to start typing my hollowpointed opinions, experiences, and facts. Then I got side-tracked on FB.

Forth-five minutes and a bunch of scrolling later, I had ended up on a page of a young lady who had recently passed. Her occupation was exactly what I was preparing myself to write about: Stripping.  Her death was a tragic accident and although the drugs appeared to be the cause of death, I would be lying if I said her occupation wasn't a potential contributing factor. As my eyes fought the tears of this young life lost and a son forever motherless, I started feeling like 'how dare I write about stripping as if to glorify it?"

I abandoned the idea and started toggling with a different blog topic. The next day yet another Facebook scroll would land me back on the page that originally inspired me to write about my experience as a dancer. It was an article about a group of church women who visited a strip club on a regular basis and one of the women's experiences in doing so ("I Went To A Strip Club"). My repost of this article sparked a conversation with a few different FB franz  about the auto-prejudgment of girls who work in this particular field (also referred to as Sex Workers). I was inspired to tell my experiences. But before I could, I ended up on Kami's page, the young lady who passed, and started to question if I would be doing women a disservice by blogging about my strip club antics from well over ten years ago? Then it hit me: That beautiful young woman came to my attention FOR this blog. It wasn't meant to hinder me or stop me from sharing but rather to push me to do it. I don't know her. I don't know her family. I don't know friends. I only stumbled onto her page and the news of her untimely passing by six degrees of FB separation; her father is also a poet who I've heard of but have never personally met. Her story hurt me deep. And for her, I pray this blog reaches and touches someone else. I am not glorifying my strip club experience. But I'm not gonna sugar coat it either. Some of it was a lot of fun, empowering and surprisingly loving; on the flip side, there were times I could have died, there were people who did die, there were drugs, alcohol, and everything else you assume. But I hope my first-hand account of the good, the bad and the misguided will do something beyond provide literary entertainment and let you in on my past. I hope this post will do SOMETHING to change how you view dancers. Not all of them are money hungry. Or whores. Or being pimped out, on drugs and out of control. Some folks just end up there. And have to dig their way back to the surface of Light. 

I started stripping when I was 20 years old. I had no rhyme or reason for doing it. In fact, it was all a big low-self esteem joke that I was playing on myself that essentially didn’t end up being a joke at all. It ended up being reality. On a quiet and bored day in my life, I grabbed the Yellow Pages for an odd but regular favorite pastime: Trolling the phone book. I would open it up and look through it for ideas, businesses I had never heard of, places I wanted to go, etc. On this day, I went to the strip club section. A conversation with an ex that was sparked from us watching Players Club together led me to believe that I would be good at being a dancer. There was nothing enticing about it from the movie but for whatever reason, him telling me that I would be good at it never left my head. I called several different clubs before getting someone to take my bait and invite me in to fill out an application. Honestly, I thought I would be too large and unattractive to to get the job. I had hangups about my stomach and I thought my face was boring. I had NO expectations of being hired. I had left my job selling GTE Credit Cards to college kids and had started working at Victoria’s Secret.

I hated it. I’ve always hated retail but it was always the easiest job to get. I was now living on my own, on the east side of Indianapolis and I had bills that needed to be paid. VS was barely covering everything.  So even though it was more a of self-inflicted joke, I did wonder what kind of money I would make if I was actually hired.

I remember sitting at the bar near the door filling out the application. I spoke with the night manager, Jesse after turning it in. Looking back, as innocent as I already wasn't, I still was. I was wide-eyed when a chocolate sister with full breasts tucked behind a bikini top walked to the bar effortlessly in crystal clear heels taller than anything I had seen in person. I asked her with my shyness, "You can walk in those?" She said they were easy. I asked how tall they were and she told me six inches.

"Six in heels

she walks in the club like nobody's business

goTdamn, she murdered everybody and I was her witness"

Her confidence was an aroma that preceded her. The application asked me what my stage name was. I looked around the room for something that was that stood out to me. Then I remembered the now ex-boyfriend who suggested I would be good at this. He had a beautiful Rottweiler dog that I loved to play with. Ever since I met her, I wanted my own Rottweiler and I wanted to take her name, Butter, with me. In that split second in the smoky, dark bar with the loud music and dancing women, I became my own bitch. I walked in Kendria; a young chick who never had a nickname but always wanted one.

I walked out as a dancer named Butter.

It was that simple. There was no pimp. No drug problem. Just a young woman with a lot of curiosity for random things and places. I didn't know what I was doing or getting myself into. I didn't even know why I was doing it. I was quite oblivious to the strip club world. It goes to show how being on the outside looking in with nothing more than an opinion based off of things you've only 'heard' holds such little weight.

In short, I stayed a dancer for four years, toggling between the only two local black clubs in Indy and hitting the road to go to ATL and East St. Louis. All hustles have revolving doors and stripping is no different. Many times I would see people quit and try to leave the life behind them only to end up back in the basement, standing in front of a locker and asking for ‘titty tape’ (can’t show your nipples in Indiana. It’s nudity. Lol.). My pride made me promise myself that I wouldn't quit until I was sure I wouldn't return. I wanted to beat the odds. I wanted to save 10K and quit and walk up in the job force like 'heyyyy, did you miss me?!!"

It went nothing like that. It went all over the place and around the world in 80 days but it went nothing like quitting with ten thousand dollars in the bank, a free mind and a job waiting on me. HA. #YoungMinds

Stripping empowered me...

...in ways I didn't see coming. It didn't happen overnight, but after awhile of popping and gyrating in little bikinis and bandage dresses, I couldn't help but fall in love with myself. Confidence was an unspoken prerequisite of making money. I hadn't experienced that before in such a way although I must admit it was all surface-driven self-love. It didn't go deeper than my outward appearance and I still thought that I had little to offer the outside world. I mean sure I had finally mastered how to use my thighs to move my butt and I had become pole proficient, but outside of those dark walls and g-string queefs, who cared? I wrote poetry all the time. I journaled almost daily. But still I saw no value in how I wrote. I've always had this artistic heart that wasn't driven by finances and it caused a disconnect for me growing up. My family was about that mighty dollar. If you go to school, you need to come out and be able to do something and make $$. "Engineers make good money" was an argument I got tired of hearing and I abandoned the idea of college by my sophomore year.  As a dancer, I was doing it! I was making the money and it was non-traditional, which spoke to the rebellion in me. It wasn't the ideal way but  when I was home straightening out balled up bills and laying them in one direction for simple counting, you couldn't tell me nothing!!!! When I left the stage and had money falling out of my hands because there so much to grab, you couldn't tell me nothing!!!! When I was walking around with the baddest chick in the club wearing my lesbian lies, you couldn't tell me nothing.

I left my shyness on the dayshift and switched to nights and when I would arise from that basement in pretty dresses and six inch heels, you.could.not.tell.me.NOTHING.

It was a life I lived with pride. The longer I stayed, the more I became content with who I was and what I was doing. I had found a way, a tax-free way at that, to 'make it.' I was able to pay bills, go shopping and indulge in my first plane ride: a trip to Atlanta to dance for Superbowl at the infamous Gentlemen's Club. Once I arrived, I realized that there were other places outside of Indiana and I found a reason and a way to start seeing them. Florida was supposed to be a stop I made but I still had major hangups with flying. I wasted two different RT plane tickets gifted to me because I was too scared to fly. #DoubleEntendre

I road to New Orleans in the back of a van and road the famous Lake Pontratrain highway on the way home. East St. Louis is where I saw my first live prostitute at work on the corner. It was also where I made the most money for doing the least work.

The basement is where the lockers and showers were and where you could find us congregating on slow nights doing everything from homework, talking on the payphone to boyfriends, arguing, fucking, fighting and sleeping on chairbeds. But it was also where I learned to not be intimidated by black women. See, I was scared about stripping - more about the women than the men. I had long dealt with the antics and disrespect and neglect of men, so maybe that's why I feared them less. Black girls and women were who intimidated me. I feared they would try to fight me for being new or just for being me. That's the way it seemed to be around my neighborhood growing up, so I had very low expectations of the attitudes and energy of all these black women. Shamefully, I expected the worst from my sisters.

I was wrong and we were all sisters. I find myself wondering if today's girls are as close as we were back in the early millennium. I used to secretly call us a sorority. The blacklisted sorority of course. It was weird how so many of us became friends and family and broke bread and fellowshipped with each other outside of work.

My life as a stripper didn't deter me from being a great woman. It didn't stop me from being  good to my friends. From offering a warm place to sleep to those in need. It led to me making some FOOLISH decisions, but my heart, this same heart that folks love today, was the same heart back then. My point is, how many hearts and minds full of intelligance are folks writing off today because of how someone gets their money???

You scared to sit down and talk to them so you would rather talk about them? 

Idk. 

I'm gonna end here.
This ain't even the real blog.