La Diablo

I should forewarn that there is some mature subject matter in the blog to follow. Though I will be carefully choosing my words—my blog is already blocked on my local library’s general use computer for some unknown reason—today I talk about the business of stripping. Oh, the lengths I won’t go to support the blogging community.

Diablo Cody is up for an Academy Award this Sunday for her first screenplay, the movie Juno. I’ll be rooting for her. Diablo is a long-time blogger, having chronicled on-line her days as a stripper in Minneapolis. She even wrote a book about it—Candy Girl-A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper--which I read recently out of curiosity, so I thought I would review it here.

Upon completing the 200 or so pages, I have a great deal of respect for Diablo Cody the writer--very fluid writing, colorful if sometimes overly explicit detail, eminently readable even if her vocabulary is interspersed regularly with the type of words that would challenge the final round participants of the annual Scripps Howard spelling bee.

No kidding! Here are three such words which can be found on the final page: adamantium, frisson, and detritus. Even my spell-checker only recognizes one of the three. Obviously between sets on the runway at Deja Vu, Cody either was breezing through the latest New York Times crossword puzzle or reading James Joyce.

But there is nothing titillating or erotic in the way Cody describes the exotic entertainment business that includes private peep shows and lap dances. Her nightly escapades in the exotic entertainment district are described in minute, unflattering detail, much like those guys from C.S.I. might describe the experience for an official police report, if they knew the big words.

The book reads like an extended blog, a journal of sorts mostly set in the bordello-like atmosphere of the local clubs. The only background Cody relates from her own past is recounted almost as an afterthought in a final chapter, as if suggested by a would-be publisher for those readers wondering why an obviously bright, college-educated young woman from a respectable Chicago family would suddenly lose her scruples. Cody seems to blame her strict Catholic upbringing.

Diablo begrudges respect for the women who sell their nakedness to “bank”, earning their daily pay only to give up a large percentage to the men who run the business. These women ingratiate themselves to delight even the most perverse of male customers. It was all in a day’s work for these women, from high school age to pushing middle life.

Whether they are the managers or the customers, men are generally treated unsympathetically throughout the book, especially the young college age men. They were “abominable tippers” and desired the whispery-voiced airhead strippers “who could make them feel intelligent by comparison.”

Oh, oh. You’re supposed to tip strippers? Uh, didn’t know that. Once I was dragged by my old college roomies to a bachelor party that wound up at a strip joint. This was before lap dances were de rigueur, when stripping meant customers paid exorbitant cover charges and sipped extravagantly priced drinks to stare wide-eyed by the runway’s rail. Cody called it a tip rail, something else I learned.

I remember my old college roomie putting, instead of a greenback, a few credit cards on the edge of the runway once as kinduva joke. It would have been the kind of joke ole Diablo wouldn’t have appreciated had she been working. And our stripper didn’t appreciate it either, gathering up the credit cards and flinging them to the far, darkened corners of the room. We were lucky the rest of the patrons in that hole-in-the-wall were honest and returned them intact.

Now, after reading Cody’s book, I understand why that stripper did that.