Stephanie Zavas
In Search of Lost Time
6 May 2015
The Midnight Ballerinas
Chapter One: The Place
The middle-class thread count of the sheets on her bed made an elegant effort to trace my skin, one of the only parts of my body which hasn’t aged the same as the rest of me. I make more money when I let them touch my skin; I learned about touch and its grace. Lovely, soft, there are tingles on my stomach and that light part on my… sides. Grace and disgrace. Foreign and foul, the beauty of something so carnal when it happens and leaves the lingering sting that makes me hope I dry out and crumble like dead laves underfoot because it is taken and not a gift, an asset of lust-slaking, faking moods to appeal to that throbbing I go to
grab
touch
A grace like women administering poison.
It’s dim inside because it’s lit up like midnight and sunset and Christmas lights. Wrapped around those old carpeted pillars, the ones you see when you’re broke and desperate for a place to stay to uncramp stiffened legs from driving and sleeping in the trunk of your car, those square beams always grayish mauve in centrally inconvenient middles of Super 8 motel lobbies, have dusty once-white rope-lights. Vaguely imply that they ‘wish you to execute caution when navigating through this toolshed cluttered space.’ It’s full of empty chairs, like flimsy cookware from the dollar store- new maybe, but looking so used they defy the natural half-life decay most elements possess, even though no one, not even the owner, can remember the time they were hauled in and displayed as furniture.
All we ever really remember about it is it’s small and dark and the airs is broken into levels of heavy and light, so that sometimes we get light-headed from how thinly we breathe and other times our limbs are pressed into ourselves, concentrated and unconsenting.
The green bar straw she twirls in her mouth always, as much a prop as it is a tool and no one has really noticed or cared that it gets shorter after each bathroom trip or the way she gently sniffs; the drips. Coke, she says, tastes a little like mustard powder or something, it’s bitter and sustains its flavor in the numb halitosis of the back of her throat. It gets thick there, coating her tonsils working like vapor rub, icy hot compress of conduct; [something]
I’ve only known new girls to remember their first day stripping. We don’t forget it but it blends into so many other times when there’s a first and then another and never an end. It’s cold or hot and hopefully you’ve gotten fixed enough to lie, first to those men and then to yourself. [Don’t you like it?] And with the buzzing tone of being stoned and such gourmet music you want to take everything off and no you don’t it’s gone and here is this dirty stage and that oily Mexican man with his sweaty palms, that thud and throb first heard in his chest but then is everywhere.
Green straw, bathroom stall.
Someone left their drink in there and now it’s empty.
Those Christmas lights are bigger and glow with angel’s halos and sparkles falling twinkling like God’s-eye smiles
I like it when you spank me hard– sometimes she thinks of her boyfriend, but not always. It feels good. Clammy hand that stutters, sticking touch glitches at the momentary friction…Because it finds that complimentary damp between those legs
Just victims of an in-house driveby
They say jump and you say how high
Want it?!
A groan. He likes knowing his lap is making her wet. That extra dollar for the jukebox was worth it because it pays off tenfold for a lie neither can tell is fake or not. Still nascent music channels through something like a straw into her head and the man is faceless and nothing and somehow everything she wants fits in the chair that is too small to dance for so you dance on it, within it, pushing the cushions so her knees fit in with a forgettable half-second protest
Yes yes yes turn it around wind it back down feel it all coming so close that she don’t remind herself or anyone of the love that we’re all missing out on
We all know love is what we’re missing out on.
Oh baby, you know I’ve always liked girls and touching them, feeling such soft skin
Lovey, you forgot the song, forgot when he spanked you again and I traced those lips,
Not the ones we’d all imagine.
[Please honey, let us do it again because we like you (I know I do)]
My notebook becomes a coaster in the back room. It’s very small and narrow and the electrical outlets don’t work and the one chair in there right in the corner is broken. So it’s like an old office chair that leans all the way back it’s either empty or full of a bunch of them getting ready and they’re getting ready in the best way they know how. It’s adjacent to the dance rooms, there’s two of them, private dance rooms
You can hear everything the guy is saying and the stripper is saying and it’s a private dance room. They can hear the slapping, the smacking, Don’t do this’, Do it more, hands on and if you don’t have your wits about you, shit goes south fast.
Chapter Two: The Sky
She starts off by telling me how thin the plywood is in the back room. She’s probably never said anything so politely before.
“Honey, you better watch out about what you say in those rooms because you don’t know who’s listening back here. You gotta be careful, you know?” She tells me this because she’s got the scoop on me now and she can relate to me. I’ve done bad stuff, she and I both share and keep secrets.
“Look at me, no I know it’s hard,” and then she mutters offhandedly, “something has happened before, but like, here’s the deal…” In the back room the lights on the vanity are mostly missing, we’ve got two or three bulbs maybe, and the rest are just empty sockets. The flashing lights from the stage illuminate most of the room; she and I look through the fiber optic field at each other. And she grabs my chin, starting, “No, you look at me and you listen. I’ve been in the industry for 25 years I hate this part because it’s poorly written. Sorry.