TALES OF THE CITY

A YEAR AGO Sherry sat in an Amarillo cafe, feeding a cheeseburger to her four-year-old son and wondering where a 20-year-old mother with no husband and no money goes next. Then as now, she had enormous oval eyes that seemed to plead for something just over your shoulder. They were brown and bottomless; men got lost in them.

Sherry hadn’t been sitting there long before a tall man walked over. “Is there something wrong?” he said. The crooked half-smile that plays around the corners of her mouth disappeared. “You name it,” she said.

An hour later she made up her mind to move to Dallas. The stranger was traveling there, and he offered to hook a U-Haul to his car. It was like most decisions in Sherry’s life-based on the casual advice of a man. On the way to Dallas, she poured out the rest of it-the father she grew up having sex with, the early marriage, the fights and arguments, the birth of Stevie and how he’d become the only thing she cared about anymore. She could talk about anything to a man. Her whole body, all 5-foot-l, 100 pounds of it, changed as she spoke. She gave herself up, looked at him with yearning and a hint of naughtiness and waited for him to take the offering. Sometimes, on rare occasions, the man would feign indifference. This would intrigue her even more, and her subconscious seduction would begin all over again.

Sherry was not beautiful in any classic sense. She was young and voluptuous and too vulnerable. Perhaps because of her father, who literally fashioned her into a sex toy when she was young, she was every man’s fantasy. Every soft inch of her said, “Only you can make me whole.” And she had a voracious sexual appetite, for therein she found a completeness she found nowhere else.

In Dallas she found work as a receptionist, but the second day on the job the boss asked her to perform an oral sex act. The request scared her, not because it was wrong, but because she had always had a fear that someday she would have to turn to prostitution. She promised herself she would never do that-for Stevie’s sake-and what her boss wanted was too close to sex for money. Her next job was doing auto shows for a local dealership; all she had to do was show some cleavage and ride around in convertibles at public events. But that stint ended when the owner offered her an apartment, an education for Stevie and a car in exchange for sex four times a week. The man was old and very married, and she promptly ran away from him and the job, but afterwards she told friends, “You know, I might as well go down to Harry Hines and sell it. It would be the first time in my life it got me anywhere.”

For a while she did housework in a North Dallas condominium development, but one of her clients took her to his bedroom the first time she went to his apartment, and this time she fell in love. He was young, wealthy and exciting. He took her to exclusive parties and fashionable discos and always had plenty of drugs around. Then, after six weeks, he got bored with her and vanished from her life. She was distraught and almost suicidal. She’d given up everything she had for him. She searched through the want ads, and all she could get were receptionist jobs, waitress jobs-nowhere jobs. She was tired of working for $200 a week, spending it all on day care and ending up with nothing.



THEN A FRIEND told her about topless dancing. It was easy, you could make good money and you didn’t have to “do anything” with the men. That was important to Sherry. She would not be a whore. But she trusted her friend enough to try it once.

She tried it, it so happened, at one of the largest topless clubs in the Bachman Lake area, a club that would sometimes pack in 800 rowdy males on a Friday or Saturday night, a club with a supersonic sound system where five girls danced simultaneously-one on the “showcase” stage and four on lesser platforms. When she saw the place, Sherry was afraid to go on. Her dancing skills were all but nonexistent. Her body had a few curves, but it was far from superstar quality. And suddenly, in this public place, she had an enormous fear of exposure. In private she was completely uninhibited in sexual matters, but she was no exhibitionist. She told her friend she didn’t think she could do it.

“Don’t worry; just take some of this,” the friend said, slipping her some crystal. And the methamphetamine worked its magic almost immediately, effecting a trance-like state that quickly made all her fears disappear. She gave the disc jockey a couple of Top 40 selections to play, struggled through one number, whipped off her blouse-and the adulation was immediate. The first night she made $75 in tips, most of them $1 bills slipped into her G-string by enthusiastic customers. Within two or three weeks, she would sometimes have nights worth $300, all of it in tips. She discovered she could make more by working the afternoon shift for businessmen, and that way she could be with Stevie every night. And, for the first time, she felt she was going to have enough money for a car, school for Stevie, an apartment of her own, everything she had missed since the marriage fell apart. Every night she would come home and dump a pile of wrinkled dollar bills on the bed, and every night she would put a certain number into a brown paper bag and hide it under the bed. That was the money she was saving for the dental work Stevie would need before he started school. In a few weeks the bag was full of money-$800 in $1 bills.

There was only one thing wrong with Sherry’s new life. Her fear of the stage didn’t go away after the first night. Never once had she been able to dance without first taking crystal. She would usually take just enough to last seven hours, the normal length of her shift, but she had to admit it was becoming a constantly escalating expense. Then there were the tips she gave her disc jockey-if she didn’t pay up, he would play music she couldn’t dance to-and the tips to the doorman and the day care, and every once in a while she would even spend some money on lunch. It wasn’t really a good idea to eat lunch, because she had to watch her weight now that she was dancing, but on the other hand she wasn’t very hungry anymore, either.

Fortunately for Sherry, she was eventually singled out by the manager. Of the 80 girls who worked there, she was the sexiest, he said, and one night she left Stevie with a friend and went home with him. He was attracted to more than her body, too. In just a few months, she had become one of the most popular dancers they’d ever had. It was something about the very innocence of her dancing, the amateurish way she could make them all feel she was just a girl off the street (which she was), offering them everything for the night. Even the best dancers usually held something back; they had a certain cool reserve that said, “Look, but don’t touch.” But when Sherry was on stage, the customers didn’t seem to be aware that other girls had larger breasts or shapelier bodies or more perfect smiles. She didn’t just uncover her body; she uncovered her very being.

And now that she was the “favorite” of the manager, she seemed to have it all. Most of her drugs were free now, even though she was taking more than she used to, and there was usually a car available when she didn’t have time to pick up Stevie. She became more and more confident of her effect on men, especially when she was asked to “table-dance” for one of her regular customers, which meant a guaranteed tip of $20 or more. She felt wanted, a part of the family-until the night she overdosed on crystal and cocaine and who knows what else, and, in the aftermath of a fight with her boyfriend, was narrowly saved from suicide by a few of her friends. When they finally got her to a doctor, her heart was racing erratically and they found she was suffering from acute malnutrition. Her boyfriend was afraid to go with her, for fear of being linked to narcotics trafficking.

A week later, after her friends had nursed her back to health, got her eating again and pled with her to stay away from the crystal, she started talking about her return to the stage. Her friends begged her not to do it- they knew she couldn’t dance without drugs -but she insisted it was all she could do. Any other job paid half as much. And besides, she needed to go back. She thought maybe, if she did, the manager would take her back as his “favorite.” And then Stevie would have everything he needed, and life for them both would be nice again.