Hella Nation - Evan Wright [26]
Priscilla and I touch at the knees only. She talks at the rate of forty cents per minute. I have learned these facts about her: She was into punk rock back in the eighties (meaning she’s a few years older than she looks to be in the dimness of the club). She moved to L.A. from the South ten years ago. No particular reason brought her here, though she likes the nature—the desert, canyons and coast—which she seldom sees because she drives a beater that barely makes it downtown, let alone out of the city. She takes classes at L.A. City College, and would like to transfer to a four-year university to study a science subject that doesn’t entail too much math. She goes alone to Griffith Observatory once a week. She loves the view, the Foucault pendulum—contemplation of which makes her feel profoundly aware of the movement of the Earth—and the display of meteorites that have crashed through people’s homes. She finds the latter amusing, and it makes her laugh. Her favorite film is Once Upon a Time in the West; she’s haunted by the recurring harmonica riff that’s revealed at the end to be the song Charles Bronson played as a child when Henry Fonda hanged his older brother. She used to be a drug addict. She adores her father, an accountant, and has not told her parents that she has worked as a hostess dancer for three years.
“I thought I’d walked into Twin Peaks,” Priscilla says, describing her first impression of Club Flamingo. “But I’m one of those people that when it says, ‘Bubbly, energetic waitress wanted for sports bar,’ I know that I don’t apply for that job. There’s a lot of freedom in this job. The hours are flexible. You make minimum wage plus tips, which can go anywhere from fifty to two hundred a night. If I don’t like a guy, I clock him out. I don’t have to talk to a guy if I don’t want to. I used to cocktail at a shithole on Venice—you think a waitress can decide not to serve a table because she doesn’t like the customer?”
I remind Priscilla that on or about our fourth dance the night we met, she had begun to run her hand up and down my back. I ask her if such affection is normal with her customers, a question that causes her hand to recoil from my leg, where for several minutes her fingers had been tracing agreeable-feeling patterns above my knee.
“When I’m dancing, I like to feel like I’m at a gathering or a ball,” she says, shifting away from me. “I’ll touch a guy—I mean like just his back, when we’re dancing—because it’s kind of a nervous thing with my hands. If somebody is nice, it just seems natural. If somebody’s really gross, and I’m afraid they’re going to get a hard-on, then I don’t touch them. There are things I won’t do just to get a tip. I will not go and grind some freak in the corner.
“There are guys that come on real fast on the dance floor—grabbing your hips, centering you, trying to aim, thrusting. You know? I can’t handle the pseudo-rape scene. But eighty percent of these girls are supporting some guy or a kid at home. A lot of them are eighteen and very naive.