Chapter 1
Cages aren’t for everyone. Some people enjoy their freedom, and my cage is only a 4x4x6 enclosed area. Some people don’t like to be put on display, but the metal bars around me are wide enough to get a glimpse of everything the silver bikini I’m wearing doesn’t cover up, which is almost everything. I wear only that without shoes or jewelry. My hair is long and brown and cascades down my back in a sheer curtain. My makeup is dark so you don’t know it’s me. In my cage I am safe and ironically free. Hands touch the sides and sometimes fingers make their way in, but it’s not intended to be invasive. I am merely a prop off to the side of a concrete dance floor. There are six others like me, two suspended from the ceiling and four of us around the floor. I am close to the DJ booth where I feel the bass vibrating the metal in the cage. At the end of the night, the sound will still vibrate in my ears and pulse through my head even though the music is long over.
I’m actually getting paid while I do this, and while $400 a week isn’t anything that will buy me a race horse or summer home anytime soon, it’s really all I aspire to do for now. I’m not hungry or homeless, so I can’t complain. Obviously this isn’t something I can do when I’m sixty years old, but long term plans really aren’t my way of living. That’s how I feel about things for now, despite people who are more responsible than I am warning me of severe consequences, like my brother Devin. I’m twenty four years old, I smoke a pack of cigarettes a day, and often a bottle of hard alcohol fits into that equation. Clearly I’m not thinking too deeply into my future.
The Appleseed, the club where I dance, has no clocks anywhere since they don’t want you to realize what time it is or how many drinks you’ve managed to purchase in the span of one hour. Since I have no idea what time it is, it’s always best to just lose myself in the music and dance. I can use my cage to veer my movements, as I hang, suspend, climb, cling and feel the bars around me. A pole in the center of the cage helps me gravitate myself off the floor, around the pole, and slide down. My arm muscles have improved drastically in the four months since I’ve started working here. The floor manager, Alicia, says I’m good at what I do, completely uninhibited. That’s because no one is here in this cage but me, and I let it show. Other girls who do this are conscious of what’s going on around them, from the sleazy guy who’s watching you with his dick bulging in his pants as he verifies that you managed to wax your bikini line to Alicia’s husband, Carlos, who works the bar and tries to fuck anyone except his own wife. It can be intimidating when you pay attention to that stuff, but I don’t think about or notice my surroundings. Then before I know it, its 4:00 am and I can get out and go home.
I change in the back dressing room into worn out skinny grey jeans and a black Saigon top with a loose black summer sweater on top with holes in it. When I found the sweater at Goodwill, it had holes in it as the designer intended, but as I’ve made it mine, the holes have gotten larger and more numerous. I slip black flip flops on my feet since I hate wearing constrictive shoes. It was warm outside when I came in to the club but the temperature drops in May in Chicago when the sun goes down. I want to go to the beach this morning. I head for the red line stop at Clark and Division and light a cigarette on the El platform, even though the signs posted everywhere tell me not to. I cup it in my hand and relax as I inhale it. The first smoke in six hours is always a relief.
On the train I stand, leaning on a vertical bar that is intended to be held onto. There are seats available on the El, of course, at 4:16 am, but standing means I am not sitting in a puddle of urine or semen. The red line is disgusting, and every time I ride it, I vow to move someplace closer to the brown line, but East Riverview is what I can afford on a cage dancer’s salary, and its prime real estate that’s close to the beach. Never mind the countless crack houses and gang activity that encapsulates the area. There are a few other people on the train car. One is a woman wearing about fourteen layers of clothing who looks like she rides back and forth professionally, having no other place to go. She has one of those mini shopping carts people who live in the city use for groceries and it’s full of all sorts of junk, from a Bart Simpson doll to a painted portrait of David Bowie, I think. There are four very loud younger men wearing identical striped collared shirts with jeans and loafers and a sickening wave of bad cologne that get off at Fullerton, likely college kids coming home from a night out. For all I know they could have been at Appleseed, but I am unrecognizable and usually don’t pay attention to the crowd. They talk loudly during their short ride and even make a few rude remarks in my direction, but I have headphones in my ears and ignore them, despite the fact that I’m not listening to any actual music. I can’t deal with music after I dance for so long. The silence and discernible voices are a welcome change.