=Me, with Grated Teeth=

When  I was twenty-five I worked as a stripper for about a week. My friend Holly talked me into it. She'd been working at this club on the highway and said it was easy money. "Well," she qualified, "easier money than working at Wal-mart."

"But I don't even know how to dance," I said.

We were both post-graduate students in English Literature at the time; the first glimmerings of the disastrous financial consequences awaiting us were just becoming obvious.

Holly made a face. "What dance?  At this place all you need to do is walk around the stage and bend over at the waist."

You wouldn't have thought this information would have encouraged me to give it a try, but it did.

What Holly had said turned out to be true. The gentlemen at Hot Pockets weren't there for the choreography. The biggest obstacle was to get over feeling stupid and worrying that your ass was too big and your tits not big enough.

The clientele came in four basic types. There were the ones that watched you with hawk eyes, as if ready to fall on you with spread talons. Then there were those that sat there looking dumbfounded and bemused, like they just found a hundred dollars on the sidewalk and didn't know what to do next. They tended to give you the most money, but clumsily, their hands fumbling around in your panties like small trapped animals.

Other guys sat there totally composed, watching you coolly, with sardonic, amused expressions, sipping their drinks, making out as if they were there for some other reason altogether and you were just incidental. They made a point of looking at you sideways when they stuffed your bra, like spies passing nuclear secrets.  Finally there were the idealistic ones who tried to catch your eye in order to communicate some important message, as if they wanted you to know that they recognized you as a princess lost in a postmodern fairytale and they were there to save you from this ignoble fate, your knight-in-shining-armor. Holly told me to watch out for this type; they were the most dangerous of all.

One afternoon, at the end of my first week at Hot Pockets, who should walk in but my thesis advisor, Dr. Franks. We exchanged one frozen horrified glance and then acted as if we hadn’t seen each other. I danced over to the other side of the stage and by the time I minced my way back I was relieved to find that he was gone.

The next day we were scheduled to meet to discuss the second draft of my dissertation. I had already decided to act as if the person he saw at the club wasn’t me; fortunately, this was made easier by the fact that he apparently had decided to pretend that the person I’d seen wasn’t him. Just before we wound things up, he mentioned that an associate of his was writing a biography of T.S. Eliot and looking for a new research assistant. If I were interested, he'd recommend me. The money wasn't great, he acknowledged, but it was better than "well, a lot of things a struggling poet has to do to make a buck;" he turned an alarming shade of red, I thanked him, and we hurriedly said goodbye. I ended up meeting his associate, a distinguished scholar, accepting the job and falling in love, not with him, but with the research assistant who I would be replacing.

Gary and I were married and, after four increasingly tumultuous scarring years, we parted, acrimoniously. 

That was nearly a decade ago. Whenever the subject comes up, Holly will still say, "I hate to say I told you so, but…"

She'll let the phrase hang there, like a glass set down perilously close to the edge of a table, where we both watch it. She with a shrug of the shoulders. Me, with grated teeth.