auto-bio

I started doing sex work in June of 99, after a series of unfortunate events left me with no place to live. I was told I would have to move out in a week, so I looked at newspaper ads for some ideas. I came across an ad for girls to work on an adult website, living in a house in Tijuana, Mexico. The pay was listed as 1100 a week, plus being able to stay in the mansion by the beach. After a few meetings with the corporate-types that were running this venture, they hired me and I moved down there from where I'd been living in San Diego. The mansion was sparsely furnished but pretty big. It was in a gated community by the beach. It had like eight bedrooms and servants quarters downstairs. They talked big plans like having 20 girls in there and cameras in every bedroom, but there only ended up being like 5 girls before the whole thing got shut down two weeks later. I worked eight days straight and didn't even fucking get paid. I had a place to live for two weeks and all the food and alcohol I wanted, though. What happened was that (they said) the house got foreclosed upon. They had been renting it and so had to leave immediately. Those motherfuckers wouldn't even let me have any food to take with me. Then they jerked me around for weeks, saying the check was in the mail when it wasn't. The name is Mike Honda, from Santa Monica. Son of a bitch.
So I learned my first and lasting lesson in the adult entertainment industry: Money Talks, Bullshit Walks. Show me the fucking money, or get the fuck out of my face.
At this point I was still homeless, so I couch surfed until I could track down more jobs doing nude photo shoots. I also did a little amateur porn with my boyfriend. The pay ranged from 200-375 per session, but the money was too far and between so I decided to get more steady income at a Strip Club.
Nitelife in North Park, San Diego was the first strip club I actually worked at starting July 1999. It was a topless club that had lost it's liquor license for thirty days and so was totally dead. All the regular girls had left for the month so they placed an ad in the paper for more girls, which I answered. Because they weren't serving liquor, they were allowed to have fully nude girls on stage. For lapdances and walking around on the floor we had to completely cover our asses either with shorts or with -get this- opaque tan pantyhose cut into shorts under "t-bar" g-strings that were safety-pinned by the House Mom in the dressing room. I had two weeks to get accustomed to dancing in a mellow and sparsely populated club before the liquor ban was over and they had a "grand re-opening" one Saturday night. The place was totally packed, all the regular girls and customers were back, and now we had to wear full opaque pantyhose under our g-strings. It was a pretty clean club (not that I knew any better at the time), no touching at all whatsoever. As in all the clubs in San Diego there was a six foot rule-if you took anything off on stage you had to be six feet away from the customers. Also there was a six inch rule in lapdancing; you had to be six inches away during the lapdance, no grinding, no touching, no sitting in laps. At other clubs in San Diego people kind of overlooked these rules but at Nitelife they were fucking Nazis about it. In retrospect I totally understand why: after all, they had just had their liquor license suspended because a girl briefly touched *herself* on stage over her underwear and tights, so why would they tolerate for one second any customer touching a girl when all the dances were out in the open for anyone to see? Once I did a dance for a drunk Mexican and as he was struggling up afterwards he grabbed me around the waist for support, which threw me off balance a bit. Next thing I knew the no-neck 300 pound monkey-suited "doorman" had the guy in a headlock and was maneuvering him out the door before I could even get my money. When I naively followed them out and told the manager that I didn't get my ten dollars yet (that's how much "couch dances" cost, table dances were five, and of course I had no clue how to hustle for tips yet) the doorguy turned on me, saying to the manager, Roger, "He had his hands all over her! She was letting him touch her!" At that point I gave up and considered it a lesson learned. Two lessons, actually: 1) Always, always, ALWAYS get the money before the dance and 2)you are on your own. Never assume anyone will take care of you, it is not necessarily in the interests of the security to protect you. Their job is to protect the club. It is YOUR job to protect yourself, and you are usually better off being your own security. As the years went on I learned a lot of subtle ways to do that.