The first customer I had that paid me for time in a significant amount was quite young and wearing one of those damnable shell necklaces all too common among a certain subset of young white guy. He worked for a company that supplied cities with fire hydrants and fire hoses, large-scale equipment that was correspondingly expensive. Some friends had dragged him to a nudie bar for his first adventure.

He was on the chubby side, but nothing I would have rejected outside the club. He came up to my stage and threw a wad of ones down after asking me how to tip.

Oh you just toss some ones down, I said, laughing at his newness, not him. I was only a month or two past the sixmonth mark on dancing myself.

I came and sat with his little group, chatting and drinking a beer he provided (the club was BYOB) and we came around to discussing VIP. I told him about the fee and that all other pricing was negotiable by time or song, as he chose.

He took me to VIP and threw down some 100s for us to just talk. I didn't have to get naked, but I preferred to. So I sat on his lap naked for an hour, with a few random pauses to dance for a few seconds, and told him about myself including my porn preferences at the time. It was very relaxing to chat with him about whatever. He tossed me questions and i lobbed them back, basking in the warmth of already having his money and likely getting more, which i did.

Then he gave me his number, he felt i was a normal sort of girl who just happened to be naked and likely could obviously be employed at his work earning similar money only clothed. Also he wanted to date me.

I never called. For some months I wished I had, not so much for the money he gave, but his combination of earnesty and cavalierness about our paid interaction. He was so polite and interested and amiable, and spent more on me than other girls were getting for sex in the VIP.
Guys like him are what made me think i was doing something good or kind or benevolent. And those were the guys I often ended up getting, even to the larger than average sums of cash.

If I could be Christian and strip, I would, but I can see why it is not allowed, because even a situation like that wonderful young guy with plenty of ready money is not really healthy, not when you pare it down to its essence. I was happy because he paid upfront and asked only to talk and didn't harrass me for sex. It is easy to be sober and 'dance' for such customers, but it's a bit cruel, though of course they never know. And the fact that they never know is why I left Stripperville ultimately.
Fantasy:
"I was walking around, you know, trying to sell them dances, and this guy pulls me over and says, 'How much for...more?'

'More what?'

'You know, more than a dance. What do you charge to play?'

'OH YOU MEAN SEX IN VIP!'

'Um, yeah. How much?'

'10,000, half up front.'

'I only have 2,000, is that ok?'

"Of course I had to turn him down, not like I was going to do it anyway. But wow, 2 g's sure would be nice. Too bad I'm not a prostitute."


Reality:

You are making your rounds of the club. Customer pulls you over.

"How much for sex?"

"1,000"

"Wow, you think very highly of yourself! Sorry to have wasted your time."

If you work in a really divey dive, the amount is 500$ and the customer laughs instead of apologising.

Stripperville is not an expensive place in this sense. When girls say they reject vast sums of money to have sex, they are quite often running a very special layer of stripper game on whoever they are telling the tale to.
One has to begin somewhere, so I am starting at the early middle. I'd been a stripper for a while, but not quite long enough to reliably make big bucks.

It was a Sunday night, historically a slow night at this particular club, a nude BYOB spot. I was still a bit of a newb and was worried about how to pace myself for the night since almost nobody seemed to be coming in and there were about seven girls working (weekends tended towards twenty or so). I wandered around smiling and asking for dances after my stage sets and hoping some guy would make it happen, because I just was not closing sales.

The other girls were feeling much the same way. They milled around in the dressing room for extended periods of time complaining about the cheapness of the tiny crowd. Halfway through the night, round about ten pm, we all got a surprise-- an older white guy came in, first one of the night. The other girls were on fire, because older white guys equalled $$$ for them. I was more cautious, because they did not tend to shell out money on me in large amounts.

He was an LSU alum, wearing a stained and filthy LSU shirt and sweatpants. Sadly, this is a norm for older white customers of downscale stripclubs. He turned down any requests for dances on the floor, opting to purchase a wristband for private dances in the private roomlets at the back of the club. This made dollar signs appear in everyone's eyes. He took one girl in the back, came out one song later.

He took another girl in the back, came out one song later.

He took another girl in the back, came out two songs later.

Every single girl came back grumbling about how he only got one or two dances. The girls who did more than dance grumbled that he didn't want 'extras'. Finally he chose me.

We were back there for seven songs.

I was of course asked what on earth went on and how the f&!$ did I get money out of him and did I *really* just dance for him and nothing else? I said 'He wanted to dance for me, it was really creepy, but whatever, he paid for each song. I just couldn't stay back there any longer.' I was not believed and the whole shebang was written off in bafflement that customers could prefer me for any reason at all.

But there we were, in the back. I did one or two dances and he kept saying he wanted to dance for me, so I let him sway in front of me, his sweatpants looking dangerously thin and his dirty LSU shirt occasionally brushing my legs as I sat back. He'd failed to tuck the thing in. When he started doing lean ins and trying to grind on me, I had to call a halt to the proceedings, money be damned.

He left shortly afterwards, but I was up 200$ or so, and felt like I had a chance of earning a decent living for the night. And I did, so the LSUfreek did ultimately put a smile on my face as we turned up the lights and headed out of the club at 2am. I had a pocket full of money from customers later in the night plus LSUfreek, and the other girls had grumblings.

So despite running into the ever-classic denizen of Stripperville, Sweatpants Old Guy, it worked out pretty well for me as a clumsy, bouncy newb with perky everything, including persona to approach customers/clientele with.

That night, incidentally, was when the other girls began to dislike me for my earning ability rather than my newness.
I am never sure where to begin, nor quite certain how I will speak about how it was *then*, and how it can be in Stripperville.

Still, at the least, we will consider this a beginning.

I danced because I felt that I wasn't being offered decent jobs. Stripperville was a world where I could make money in cash, which is very countable. I have a love of counting items, and counting so many bills was quite soothing aesthetically.

Plus, Stripperville is a place where women can feel that they really control men, like that moment you claim to like them so well has deep meaning because they gave you five hundred dollars.

Life in Stripperville is strange and it seems completely reasonable while you are inside its borders, but once you set foot outside, you realise how crazy that land is. That doesn't make it easy to forget or not resist wandering back into.

I miss how it was then, sometimes. I do miss falling in love a new way every night. I miss my overly wide smiles and my brittle giggles. I miss the way they looked at me, like I was the only water for a hundred miles and they were thirsty desert wanderers.

I miss the girls as well, all the madness and sadness and wonder and beauty and shame and love and just all of it, those wonderful ladies. I miss my ersatz angels more than somewhat.

But this is what it means to leave Stripperville physically.

Your soul never does once it goes through that lucite gate.