Baring it all but revealing little
DIABLO CODY was slogging away at her entry-level, post-B.A. advertising McJob when she answered the call for amateur night at the Skyway Lounge, a downscale, downtown Minneapolis topless bar. "I found myself drawn to the bay of blacked-out windows," she writes in "Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper." "I wanted to be in there, part of that spangled corps of women who knew better but walked in anyway
Cody buys herself a slutty outfit, dubs herself "Cherish" and takes the stage at the Skyway. Though she doesn't win, she is seduced by the thrill of stripping and goes back for more. "I wanted to feel the way I had felt onstage again. Agitated. Afraid. More vulnerable than a newborn fawn still mottled with placental muck."
Cody quickly leaves the low-rent Skyway Lounge for greener pastures, the green, of course, being cash. While keeping her day job, she works at a series of flesh palaces -- each one only nominally swankier than the last -- where she struts, grinds, shimmies and takes notes.
Many details and tidbits emerge, such as how lap dance patrons frequently wear sweat pants for enhanced pleasure, and why strip clubs are kept so chilly, "much like big sexy meat lockers. This ensures that the strippers will look awesome
Cody's prose snaps like a garter belt. She tosses around metaphors like a bachelor with a roll of singles. A leering guy is described as having breasts that jiggle "like silken tofu," and her colleagues working the room are characterized as "thin, tawny cats, their legs like jointed drinking straws, their protuberant breasts leading the parade."
There is an unmistakable Gen X backbeat to her rhythm and a heavy reliance on pop culture references to illustrate her points. Though it's mostly good, frothy fun, sometimes she uses a metaphor as thin as a G-string to hold up a weighty idea, to wit: "Love is mysterious and rad, like Steve Perry from Journey."
During her titular year she transforms herself from someone "looking like Dorothy Hamill learning to walk on solid ground after seventeen hours at the rink" into a tanned, shellacked, taloned pro stripper. "It wasn't enough to be a nude girl
For all her brass, what is missing from Cody's spicy memoir, ironically, is her own sexuality. There is a sense that she isn't taking it all off for us. Toward the end of her book, she gets spooked by a bed dance with a Russian that goes too far. She confesses to having been terrified, but the details of that terror are absent.
