Mr. Pinup

Dancers always want to quit but rarely do. The cliché is that sex workers are stuck. But, it’s more complex than that. Dancers quit for years but always come back because leaving the sex industry is difficult. The lifestyle and the money are some obvious reasons, but there is something else at play. Dancers are efficient and opportunistic. They are non-committal and capricious. Most importantly, they untangle the messy knot that is desire, sex and money and get richer doing it. Like cigarettes and junk food, Laura Jackson wanted to quit dancing. One of her customers gave her twelve thousand dollars to quit. She didn’t.

The night I met Laura Jackson, we were working the late shift at “Papa Joe’s,” a bikini bar in Pasadena posing as an Italian restaurant. “Papa Joe,” owns the club. He’s a chubby, bald guy in his fifties, who smokes cigars and extracts money from our tips. He raised our stage fee again from $20 per shift to $25. We were all upset because it’s tougher than ever to get guys to buy lap dances. It’s a recession and the club is slow. The porn industry is slow. Recession dancers are making a fraction of the cash they were accustomed to even three years ago.

Laura Jackson danced on the tiny raised stage to “White Light/White Heat” by The Velvet Underground. Afterwards, she sat on a soft black leather couch with her regular, “Lawrence,” an eighty-year old alcoholic. Her knee brushed against his pant leg as she sipped red wine from a glass. She looks like a French film star with a delicate pale neck and long eyelashes. Laura is striking. She has long ballet legs and even teeth. She’s freckle-faced and milky skinned. She speaks conversational French. She wears a mini black lacy dress and thigh-high stockings. Her nipples can be seen through the lace dress. It’s her signature look. – Antonia Crane

via Recession Strippers 1: The Laura Jackson Experience – The Rumpus.net.

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