Moll Parts
By Molly B’Damn
This is a work of truth but not necessarily of facts. This story showcases industry-standard gendered violence and fatphobia. Please read with care.
I
In Storyville I was Molly III. MOLL-Y. It’s easy to enunciate over the shrieking soundscape that’s honking from the DJ booth. Young customers thought it was a cool drug reference and older ones just thought I was Irish. Every baby stripper tries to name herself Persephone or some shit like that. Isis changed her name eventually but you’d be surprised by how long she doubled down for. Name yourself something easy to scream and try not to rhyme with the other girls, though at times it can’t be helped.
Molly I was Entertainer of the Month until she got cut up into little pieces by her boyfriend and was said to haunt the filthy dressing room of the scrotal beige-pink double wide known as The Treehouse Club. Bambi even had a séance there for her once.
Molly II made bank when she was pregnant. “Pregnancy money!” The girls excitedly buzzed around her, in turns dabbing her vaginal discharge behind their ears like it was a fine fragrance. “Pheromones I guess,” Harley shrugged when I raised an eyebrow. “It’s a thing. Just like ovulation money.”
She kept putting off the abortion. “What? Can’t I just make some more money until then? We can’t afford to take time off for the recovery yet anyway. Just a little longer… It’s not like it matters,” she slurred over her third bottle of wine and second pack of cigarettes and gestured at her abdomen. Her loser boyfriend didn’t drive but he kept her pilled to the gills so eventually I packed her into the car in the last possible week and we made the long journey to and from the clinic. She told her boyfriend, her ex, and her side piece that they were the father. Eric offered to send her money from his prison commissary fund and Pablo from his earnings as a street musician, and even Emil, who she’d never slept with, inquired about donating his bartending tips. She wouldn’t take any of it. Her boyfriend didn’t offer her shit-all except a shift meal from the hippie pizza place so I took $40 for gas and a Valium out of his bag while he was in the bathroom. Fuck him.
Molly II was Entertainer of the Month until she came out to her first generation Irish Catholic family that she was a gay, abortion-having slut for satan.
Molly II was Entertainer of the Month until she came out to her first generation Irish Catholic family that she was a gay, abortion-having slut for satan. I think she just wanted them to love her anyway but her dad told her never to mention it and she disappeared after that. Brandi once took all the caps from Molly II’s lipstick and wrote MOLLY = BABY KILLER on the mirror with her most wanton shade of red.
When I moved states and changed my name to Molly too, I came in second in every contest at every club I entered but I always still got hired. They liked my “face and vibe” but I needed to lose ten pounds or else get demoted to dayshift. First I lost to Brooke, who technically was banned from working there but since it was open to the public they couldn’t stop her from cleaning up on “amateur” night once a week. Then I lost to Dahlia, who honestly had the best moves. Good for her. The Candy Club girls see me nursing a slice of pizza after my stage set and have Opinions about my Priorities. Fancy is engaged to the manager, but her sister caught him cheating with another dancer (again). They ambushed him outside his office and the police and the fire department came.
Crystal had white dreads and called herself “the Stripper Professor.” She told me I just needed to have positive energy and money would come to me. Unfortunately she was right. I saw sixty-year-old Talia leading a young sailor by the pinky into a Skybox with a wink. Elena and Sasha were a mother/daughter pair from Moscow whose only dance move was fist-pumping to techno but at least they knew how to have fun. They chattered excitedly at me in Russian when I squeaked out a “Kak dela?” Lucy had just turned twenty-one and her regulars were waiting outside to take her to champagne rooms. Felony danced by her real name there. I cried into my Rumple Minze.
On stage, Brandi and Roxy broke a bachelor’s nose with their pubic bones the night before his wedding during a move called the “see-saw.” I guess it was fucked up that Brandi got all that blood on her but I felt like she deserved it after the BABY KILLER thing. After Lola ODed and died The Treehouse Club was “double haunted,” Bambi drawled, between drags on her Misty Slim Menthol. She got a portrait of Lola tattooed on her leg so I guess she would know.
The dressing room at Daisy Duke’s was in the “slave quarters” of a historic property. The house itself they had made into themed VIP rooms - a hunting lodge, a honeymoon suite, a beachside cabana, all playing softcore porn on the ubiquitous built-in flatscreens. The things those velour walls have smelt. You had to go up the external catwalk in your civilian clothes to the dressing room through the courtyard which is now the stage and bar and back down the winding rail in your heels. Rosie picked me up in their ambulance. They even let me turn the siren on to part the drunk stragglers still meandering through the pre-dawn miasma of the Quarter.
The old DJ would play anything I wanted but he went to jail for child pornography. The new DJ would play anything I wanted but he kept asking me for my number. The new new DJ was a robot. GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS IT’S SHOWTIME C’MON DOWN TO THE STAGE MAKE SOME NOISE HERE’S MOLLY SHE’S GONNA POP THAT LITTLE TOP FOR YA SO GET TIPPIN!
II
It was Thanksgiving at The Treehouse Club. The Church Ladies brought catering, plus gift bags with cheap jewelry and perfume samples and Chick Tracts. Kylie was applying rouge to her nipples while the church ladies fawned over us and the state of our souls in the dressing room. “It’s not too late to accept Jesus as your lord and savior” they said as Kylie adjusted her thong: 1” regulation pu$$y coverage, just like the court ordered. “Thanks, I’m okay for now but appreciate ya,” Kylie said as she put turkey and stuffing on a plate. She had a look on her face that said she’d be giving the jewelry to her sister. It still had a price tag on the back: ninety-nine cents. A diamond from one of her regulars glinted in her nostril as she slithered through the curtain and out onto the stage for her six minute set. As was the rule, she removed her top by the second song despite the yawning emptiness at the “rack” - the stagefront seating.
A club’s House Mom, conceptually, was a complicated figure. Many superstar Moms reigned over the Storyville dressing rooms, with tampons and safety pins and eyelash glue and granola bars and they gave pep talks better than Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson. In this particular corner of the rural south though, the House Mom was there mostly to make sure you didn’t fuck anybody and weren’t fucked up, which is ironic. Late enough into the night you knew she was gonna be yelling, “I’M GONNA SUCK A DICK ON THAT GREY GOOSE TONIGHT.” Dancers can’t drink alcohol in the club in this county but the customers didn’t know that. Ordering a dancer a drink came with “well vodka” aka water and earned you an extra couple bucks on the side from the bartender. Once we had a new waitress who didn’t know the laws though and got us all fucking tanked. They ended up firing her but not for that. Dancer-Management Liaison Harley ran into the New Waitress meeting club regulars at the nearby Waffle House after hours. The pro tip was to drive across town to eat at the diner at three am with your depressed taxi driver friends and there wouldn’t be a customer in sight when you peeled your eyelashes off at the dinner table.
Alex used to bartend but looked just like dancer Daisy. Daisy was dating the club owner (they always are) and could sing like an angel. Daisy moved on and after that the drunks howled for Alex to sing them a song until they were pacified by the tits bouncing on stage and the UFC Pay-per-view fight on the TV and the $17 Budweiser in their hand. The club owner was now dating Yuki, who was the only stripper I’ve ever seen get a Craigslist missed connection. She wore a lot of glitter which is a faux pas. Customers do not want to go home to their wife covered in glitter. Yuki taught us our first pole movements moments before the club opened. “Shower and don’t use lotion the day you work,” Yuki told us sagely, “Slippery!” She gestured to the spinning pole. “We had a college girl make $1000 on her first night here just last week.” The managers were telling the truth for once. Ava had a champagne room with a butch dyke who fell in love with her at first sight which is the dream but rarely happened in reality. Ava was Entertainer of the Month but you don’t get a Walmart gift card for that anymore, just your name on the wall.
III
Dancer-Management Liaison Harley had a staff position created just for them. What I knew that no one else did was that they were fucking the DJ in the booth during their shift. “But you’re such a beautiful girl” the DJ groaned at them when they corrected him for misgendering. On weekends there was a cookout on the smoking porch, weather permitting. Hot dogs and hamburgers. I was vegetarian so Harley just gestured vaguely and passed me a bag of chips and a cigarette.
Anna had the deepest fake tan I’d ever seen and was Entertainer of the Month. “What are you talking about?” she said when she rolled in after midnight, “I’m so pale!” I saw on the camera that she gave ****jobs in the VIP but I was told “that’s just how we do it now.” I ostensibly didn’t have a problem with that but I wished there’d been a memo or something. My car was fucking totaled because I went off my meds and crashed it into a bridge so Emil picked me up on his motorcycle. My sandals broke so I was wearing a bejeweled pair of 7” Pleasers until we decided to eat a breakfast of lukewarm bar food on an abandoned rooftop and I shed my shoes entirely as the sun started threatening to peek above the horizon. We went so fast on the gixxer that I couldn’t keep my eyes open. “I saw God,” Emil panted when we got home. “We blew right by that motherfucker!”
At The Cougar Club in the city there was no pole, we wore floor-length gowns, and the restaurant inside had a Michelin star. It was a full nude club though and Molly II and I had been informed we’d be needing labioplasties if we wanted to make any REAL money. We made some walkin’-around-money off of a few neckbeards in sweater vests who loved how “natural” we were (read as: hairless, but with original vulvas intact) and never went back.
The bartender at Exquisite in the rural deep south used to be a dancer but she threw her back out. She would still get on the bar and drop it low when no one was there, which was basically all the time since the raids. There was a swimming pool in the courtyard and a cop car parked outside. You could swim with a dancer for an hourly fee, in the club’s provided swim trunks. The entire Friday night shift was me, an eighteen-year-old girl named Ellie who’d never left the immediate vicinity, and a fifty-year-old battleaxe named Chevelle who taught me to drink her signature beverage, the “Small Hot Mess,” which was all the clear well liquors with Red Bull and a splash of Blue Curacao. Two customers came in the entire night and the cop car had its lights on the whole time. We made off with $12 each and a drunken sense of kinship by closing time. No one gave a single lap dance but they were done in concrete rooms with a folding chair and a dirty mirror and I honestly felt pretty happy with my $12 and sisterly solidarity.
I was motorboating her face with my tits when she said
“My friends said you’re not even that fit and I told them that they have no idea how hard it is.”
Back in Storyville the pole princesses had successfully shamed me out of eating pizza for dinner. “Are you sure that’s really a good idea, Molly?” A female customer came up and tipped me. “I used to be a dancer, I understand how hard of a job it is” and I smiled as she slid me $5. I was motorboating her face with my tits when she said “My friends said you’re not even that fit and I told them that they have no idea how hard it is.” My smile faded. The dressing room was empty except for Foxy, who was like, full body sobbing. We’d never met but I brought her some Sprite and eventually she told me why she was crying. “I just love Dolly Parton sooooo much,” she wailed into my shoulder. This went on for half an hour until she got in one of the dressing room’s resident tanning beds to calm herself. I could hear her hiccuping softly over the drone of the UV light bulbs. “Molly, you’re on stage right now!” a hostess clucked at me. Shit shit shit shit shit! I stumbled down four flights of stairs and rolled my ankle on every platform. Eloise was killing time on stage to one of my songs and just glared at me as I hobbled over to the pole to relieve her.
Tatiana sent a selfie of her holding the day’s newspaper to her boyfriend when she clocked in every night.
I tipped out the DJ, the bartenders, the waitresses, the bouncers, the valet, the House Mom. The manager reminded me and Coco to “watch our figures.” Coco could bench press that dweeb and I could see the urge to do so brewing behind the fans of her giant mink lashes. I counted my singles while Andi picked us up in the turbodiesel and we crammed five strippers into the single cab like the world’s sluttiest clown car. “Nine-hundred and ninety fucking nine!” Foxy tucked one last dollar into my bra to bring me up to a grand. “For good luck and because I hate prime numbers!” I didn’t correct her. The sun was coming up and the cobblestone streets were full of piss but mostly clear of people at that point. Coco smelled like tobacco and waffle cones and had made all her money the previous night off a yankee army boy who had just wanted her to roll him cigarettes and purr about how she was gonna “fix him up some cornbread” all night long, like a wholesome mommy who also twerked upside-down to Nine Inch Nails. “I hate The Candy Club,” she said, snapping her gum. “The lapdance booths give me a rash.” We lamented the fact that we couldn’t get hired at the most upscale club because of our tattoos, plus Nikki had a gold tooth on top of that. “Who wants Waffle House?!” somebody yelled over the grinding of street-sweeper trucks. “HASH BROWNS!” we chanted in unison. “HASH BROWNS! HASH BROWNS!”
Molly B’Damn enjoys smoking weed and directing pornography. She’s live, nude, and waiting for you: mollybdamn@proton.me