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Archive for March, 2008

Ken

I met him on a slow, rainy Tuesday in December.
The club was nearly empty. There was one guy in VIP, surrounded by 3 very haggard-looking strippers, and a couple of depressed gentlemen in the corners, drinking themselves into oblivion. No one wanted dances. I could hear the rain pounding into the roof and the thunder [...]

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Though strippers are required to perform on stage, they’re paid exclusively by customers for private dances.
The way it works is, once you’re offstage, you walk around, chatting people up. Most strippers get really flirty right away, jumping into laps, straddling customers before they even agree to a lapdance, but I found this hard to [...]

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The next morning, as the crackhead climbed out my bedroom window, I lay motionless in bed, nursing the worst hangover of my life. Wondering how the fuck I was going to deal with this new curveball, where I could go to make so much money so fast.
And I knew what I had to do.
Fighting back [...]

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Fall in Texas is beautiful, but between attending school, attempting not to get fired from my part-time job at the costume shop, and selling plasma for rent, I wasn’t able to enjoy it.
The worst thing about poverty is how isolating it can be. One of the hardest, fastest rules of social etiquette is that it [...]

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Is nothing like donating blood.
You come into the waiting area, sign yourself in at the counter, and sit down to wait. You’re SURROUNDED by poor people. People with ugly clothes and ugly haircuts and ugly children and sunburnt, expressionless faces entirely devoid of hope. The desperation in the room is palpable. Eventually one of the [...]

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On Tuesday, October 30th, things had reached a boiling point inside Lucy’s in Disguise Costume Shop in Austin.

Although it was only two hours into my shift, I was already exhausted. A man had jerked off in the dressing rooms at 11, under my watch, frightening a group of children; in response, Gwen, my angry, overweight, [...]

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