Free Strip City: A Stripper's Farewell Journey Across America by Lily Burana

I'll take what she said under advisement. There's an oft-quoted adage: "When you go to a strip club, you might get screwed, but you won't get fucked." I finger the hundreds wrapped around my garter, feeling scuzzy and superior at the same time.
    What surprises me about tonight is not how slow it is or how quickly I get back into the swing of things, but how I feel as if I never left. So many years away and I realize now that I still feel, have felt all this time, like a stripper. Like I fit in. Everything is strangely similar to what I remember, like a childhood home that has remained exactly as it looks in my memory or an old acquaintance whose face has been untouched by time.
     
    All the dancers start filing into the dressing room to get ready for the full-dress introduction. This would be a good time to clear out for the night. Since I just dropped in for an audition, I doubt the manager will care if I want to leave early. The girls crowd into the locker room, zipping each other into dresses and complaining about what a waste of time it is to put on evening gowns and parade across the stage when there's no one out there to be introduced to.
    "Ouch!"
    I look in the locker room and one girl has another pinned to the floor with her knee and she's biting her ass. The pinned girl is roaring with laughter while her grappling partner tears at the hem of her blue polyester gown with her teeth.
    The bitten girl rises up off the floor, grinning and twisting around trying to see her butt cheek. "You fucker," she shrieks, her eyes alight with glee, "you left a mark!"
    The stage fee is twenty-five dollars a shift. On my way out the door, I settle with the manager. He asks how I did tonight.
    "Okay. But not great. Is this a typical Friday night for your club?"
    "It's been slow," he says, apologetically. He opens a notebook ledger to mark down that I've paid.
    I steal a quick look at the ledger and see that a number of the girls are running a tab on their stage fees, some as high as a hundred dollars. That means four shifts when they didn't earn enough to part with twenty-five dollars. Assuming it's always this bad, or this bad even half the time, a girl might be better off working at McDonald's after all.
    I see it before I even know what I am seeing. The accident, I mean. In the southbound lane of the freeway on the outskirts of Pueblo, the traffic sits at a complete standstill, pale yellow headlights queued up as far as the eye can see. The scene of the crash is eerily still. No sirens, no horns, just the loud diesel chug of a generator running an overhead bank of blinding blue-white disaster lights. The highway is lit up like a football stadium. An unintelligible voice crackles over the radio in one of the squad cars.
    All three lanes are covered in broken glass. A red sedan, every window smashed. The front end accordioned almost to the backseat, it faces backward in the lane. A tow truck waits on the side of the road to load and haul it away. A silver hatchback, the rear and passenger side totally crumpled, rests on the bed of another tow truck. In the center lane, stretched horizontally across, a putty-colored tarp drapes over a long, narrow form. I squeeze my eyes shut for a second and clutch at my chest. That's a body under there.
    I want to get off the freeway immediately. I spot a motel with a VACANT sign a couple hundred yards ahead so I take the next exit and double back on the frontage road. I sign in and drive around the outbuildings scanning for my room number. Just my luck, the building with my room in it is located at the very end of the long parking lot—right across the highway from the crash site. Half the motel room doors stand open, and a group of children gathers at the concrete guardrail to watch the emergency crew clean up the wreck. Standing in a row, barely tall enough to see over the divider, their faces are blasted to a featureless white by the intense light, their heads like turnips lined up on a garden