Free The Year of Yes by Maria Dahvana Headley Page A

against one wall, loaded with metal trays of anonymous fried objects. It would’ve been the kind of place I’d often ended up at during family vacations, had it not been for the fact that it was strewn with naked women.
    Freaked out, I looked around for the Boxer. No sign of him. I went and got a dangerously bargain-priced glass of wine, averting my eyes from a woman who was sitting with her essentially bare bottom on the bar. I surreptitiously wiped my glass with a cocktail napkin, drank it down, ordered another, and fled to a table for two, hoping that the Boxer would appear quickly. Maybe he’d misunderstood what kind of place this was.
    I’d only been to one strip club, and it had been in Idaho. I’d been dragged by some vagabond acting intern who’d thought it was local color. He’d neglected to understand that I, too, was local color, that these were my people, and if those things were immaterial, that I’d also been drastically underage. The strip club had been converted from a finger steak restaurant, but the vinyl booths and sawdust floorremained intact. The strippers had gyrated piteously around a PVC pole in the middle of the room. “Gyrated,” though, was too strong a word. Most of them had looked to be on serious drugs. They’d alternated between nodding off and racing about like wild ferrets. Sometimes they’d served as waitresses, bringing paper baskets of finger steaks. People ordered them. People ate them. People went to this place on purpose. There was a prominent sign posted: the torch lounge assumes no responsibility for consequences of viewing. I didn’t blame them.
    The only other stripping I’d seen had been with Zak, at a downtown cabaret that had been wildly, briefly hip. There’d been a woman dressed in a couple of plastic holly leaves and a tutu, shaking her thing to an Ani DiFranco song. Another woman had dripped hot candle wax all over herself while chanting Hail Marys. A woman dressed all in white feathers had brought out a guitar and sung a country-western ballad entitled “Did I Shave My Vagina for This?” Most bizarrely, there’d been a woman who’d billed herself as the Last Burlesque Show. (“Oh no,” Zak had whispered. “Oh no, oh no, oh God no.”) She was in her eighties, and fully dressed, at first, in a Dale Evans cowgirl suit. The Last Burlesque Show did scary things with a baton. By the time she’d gotten down to her tasseled pasties and spun them in opposite directions, Zak and I were both paralyzed, I with wonder, he with horror. The next act had been a belligerent woman who’d held a flashlight beneath her chin, campfire-ghost story-style, angrily reciting Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy.” When she’d finished, she’d trolled the audience for tips, and, discovering Zak, shone her flashlight on him, and demanded his wallet, yelling that she’d noticed he was cheap. We’d fledinto the night, Zak fumbling for his asthma inhaler as we hit the street, me suspecting that it had been the last time he’d trust me to take him anywhere.
    My glass stuck to my table. My ass stuck to my chair. I didn’t want to stand up and walk out because I was hoping that I’d become invisible. I was completely embarrassed. If this was not just a miscommunication, if this was intentional, it was because the Boxer had assumed me to be wilder than I really was. I regretted that red dress. He probably thought that I was this kind of girl. What kind of girl was this, though? I had no idea. I was on my third, desperate glass of wine, and I’d graduated to drinking it with a straw to avoid touching my mouth to the glass.
    I was the only woman in the room who wasn’t a stripper. Not that the strippers were really stripping. They were dangling from poles, looking bored. They all had boob jobs. Breasts the size of cannonballs. My imagination launched to images of enormous false bosoms being shot at enemies. Civil War-era costumes. Screaming men. I squinched my eyes shut and tried not to