Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In An Aqua Storm

“No. I manage a club. The money in stripping's good, but you get tired of that eight-hour bump-and-grind.” She looked at Temple, then puffed on her cigarette. “You ever see strippers work?”

“The... topless hotel shows.”

“No, not those hoity-toity, touch-me-not walking department store dummies loaded down with eighty pounds of feathers and rhinestones. I mean real working strippers, who get down and get dirty with the guys in the front row. That would help you understand the life more than bumbling around upstairs. Come on, I'll take you.”

“Where to?”

“Where else? Kitty City, my alma mater.”

While Temple contemplated objecting to the word “bumbling,” Lindy crushed her cigarette in the discarded lid of a makeup tin. She strode from the room with such surety that Temple clicked along in her silent wake, her high heels echoing eerily on the concrete floor.

In no time the pair was jostling through the stream of incoming crowds until they hit broad daylight outside the Goliath. Shocking. Lindy and Temple stood blinking in the bright, blazing heat that drenched them the moment they left the entrance canopy’s shade. The Goliath’s massive desert white exterior trimmed with scarlet and gold almost outdazzled the sun.

Temple paused to don her prescription sunglasses. “My car’s in the ramp way out back. We’ll have to take a cab.”

“Fine. We’ll put it on Ike’s tab.”

“Ike?”

“Didn’t I mention it? I manage Kitty City for Ike Wetzel.”

“And run the show over here, too? The Kitty City crowd has a lot invested in the competition.”

Lindy squinted down the sidewalk and made a face. “It’s our job. Look. Now, there’s somebody who really should take a walk on the wild side.”

Temple followed Lindy’s gaze to a sign-carrying figure pacing in the hot sun twenty feet away. She could read this block-letter message better than Crawford’s. RESPECT, NOT RHINESTONES: STOP STRIPPING WOMEN OF DIGNITY AND CUSTOMERS OF MONEY. The letters “W.O.E.” underlined the sentiment.

“Ouch,” Temple said. “Politically correct’ protesters could use the murder to justify their position, and draw the press’s attention to it, rather than distracting the media from it. Are many picketing the competition?”

“Only one at a time, so far, but the signs suck.”

As if overhearing Lindy’s pronouncement, the protester’s measured walk brought her within speaking distance.

“You don’t know what you’re complaining about,” Lindy yelled in a disgusted tone.

The woman came nearer. She embodied everything that gave feminists a rap as ugly man-haters—minimal makeup... short, serviceable brown hair... thin gold hoop earrings... unexciting clothes. Only the fact that she remained pretty despite, and perhaps because of, her pared-down style ruined the stereotype.

“Do you know what I’m complaining about?” she asked Lindy quietly.

“You bet I do, kiddo.” Lindy threw Temple a knowing glance. “Say, I was heading over to a strip place to give this PR lady the grand tour. Want to come along and see what you’re stalking around mad about?”

“Degradation doesn’t require a microscope.”

“Degradation! What about the degradation of working a minimum-wage dead-end job and supporting hungry kids? What about being too beat to have any kind of life but drudgery? Hell, strippers aren’t downtrodden. They’re doing the trodding down for a change.”

“To make money from men, for men.”

“And for themselves! More than they’d make waiting on some Snob City bitches in a restaurant.”

The protester blinked at Lindy’s fury, but visibly counted to a commendable ten before she tried replying.

Temple leaped into the opening. “Lindy used to be a stripper, but I know from zip about it. Why don’t you join us and see for yourself?”

The woman hefted her sign uncertainly.

“By the way, what does WOE stand for?” Temple asked.

“Women Opposing Exploitation.”

Lindy hooted. “Why oppose it? Why not use it?”

“Then that would be WUE,” Temple said promptly. “Women Using Exploitation.”

“That's ridiculous,” the protester retorted.

“Sometimes that’s the way it is,” Lindy said. “What’s the matter, don’t you want to see the truth? Chicken?”

The protester twisted her poster stick, looking around for rescue.

Temple remembered her own reluctance to ride the Hesketh Vampire. Visiting a strip joint wasn’t as dangerous, but might seem just as intimidating.

“Leave the sign with the parking valet,” Temple suggested with such certitude that the protester did as she said.

The parking attendant graciously accepted the sign and a tip, but leaned the sentiment facedown against the Goliath's white stucco side. The protester cast an unhappy look back at her abandoned principles as the trio stepped forward while the bellman whistled up a cab.

In two minutes flat the three women were crammed black leggings to pale pantyhose to blue jeans in the backseat of a white Whittlesea Blue cab, headed for Kitty City.

Temple, of course, sat in the peacemaker’s middle—blessed are they—and eased tensions by asking questions. The protester's name was Ruth Morris. She was thirty-something, and a paralegal for a divorce lawyer. Lindy's last name was Lukas and she had been divorced three times. Neither Temple nor Ruth admitted to having seen a stripper do her stuff except on television.

“I see enough gyrating seminaked women in the background every time a TV or movie private eye goes into a bar,” Ruth said darkly.

“I've seen some seminaked gyrating men on the talk shows,” Temple admitted, “and women. But those acts must be cleaned up for Oprah and Phil and Sally.”

Lindy didn't comment, so a short silence lengthened into a lull. Garish La Vegas daylight flitted past the taxi's closed windows as the air-conditioning hummed. On the far horizon the hazy blue mountains snagged a crown of clouds.

“Will there be women in the audience?” Ruth asked finally, sounding less enthusiastic about the expedition by the minute.

“Sure,” Lindy answered. “It's now an ‘In’ thing for women to go to strip joints with their dates.”

Ruth's unstyled hair shook with her head. “That's putting a stamp of approval on their own sex's subjugation.”

“What's subjugated about making a hundred to two hundred and fifty bucks a night?” Lindy demanded.

“Too many women are well paid for doing things that harm themselves—making porno movies, prostitution. The pay wouldn't be so good if the work weren't demeaning.”

“Wait a minute!” Lindy sounded righteously indignant. “Only a few strippers moonlight in that other stuff. Most are strippers, period.”

Temple jumped in before she got caught in the cross fire. “What exactly are most strippers, period?”

“Dancers,” Lindy answered. “Erotic entertainers who work hard for a living. Some are also ex-cheerleaders, good-time girlfriends, girls you went to high school with—”

“And abuse victims.” Ruth leaned past Temple to address Lindy. “Physical and/or sexual abuse victims with damaged self-esteem who have a sexually unhealthy need for the distance and control the stage gives them.”

Lindy’s eyes darkened, but she didn’t respond with her usual hair-trigger answer.

“Is that always true?” Temple asked Ruth.

“Pretty much so. A lot of girls are runaways from abusive fathers. If sexual abuse was involved, they’ve confused intimacy with exhibitionism and self-display, and sometimes even pleasure with pain.”

The scratch of Lindy’s lighter sounded like a derisive tsk-tsk. She defiantly lit a cigarette and puffed a stream of smoke into the crowded cab. “Big words for someone who’s never seen the real thing in the flesh.”