Sera Gamble

Xmas Weather

’Twas the night before Christmas and only three girls showed for their shifts at Tassel’s, LA’s premiere topless dive nestled between a shoe warehouse and school bus graveyard in a smoggy nook of the textile district. There was January, a tall, aggressively-rounded 22-year-old with dyed-pitch hair and an entirely purple wardrobe, adult film star Nikki Temple, and me, Cassie.

Cassie is a bad stage name. It sounds like “Cathy” when shared with a drunk vending-machine repairman over pounding Cardi B, and I’ve always hated the name Cathy. My babysitter when I was 7 was named Cathy. She divided the hours between 2:30 and 7:00 PM, when she was supposed to be watching me, between popping zits in my parents’ off-limits bathroom and making her boyfriend Joey quiz me on the graphic, embarrassing nature of how babies are really, really made.

Once I realized my mistake, I wanted to ask Jesse to change my name on the board. But he was out of town and his brother Bobo, subbing for him in between sojourns to the parking lot to cherry-vape while scrolling biohacker forums, refused to make changes in Jesse’s absence. By the time Jesse returned, tan and showing off a forearm tattoo depicting Jesus’ face streaked with a Korean-horror-film amount of blood, everyone knew me as Cassie. So.

My actual name is Tracy, but that doesn’t figure into this story.

Dizzy, the DJ, yelled “Thank Christ!” into the microphone when I arrived, lugging my duffel through the maroon velvet curtain into the club. “Cassie’s here, people, new girls arriving by the second, you see?” The half-dozen customers watched me make my way back to the dressing room, ignoring January, who was lounging center-stage in her g-string, shaking her glitter-dusted tits to the music and otherwise not moving whatsoever.

“About fucking time,” January called, over the head of a customer who’d been watching her nipples with the begrudging interest of a sullen kid at the zoo. “And they’re not fucking tipping!”

Yay. It wasn’t so much that it was Christmas. I’m Jewish, not that it’s a big part of my life, but I’ve always felt slightly above the tacky tinsel jolly of it all.  It wasn’t even that they weren’t tipping January, as I can generally squeeze a few dollars out of even the cheapest dude by applying the nearly unheard-of tactic of smiling at them. It was more the ennui of working on a night when the only customers would be loners with nowhere else to go. Depressives, orphans, drunks, displaced East-Coasters bitter because it’s 70 degrees out and LA’s attempt to decorate starts and ends with stringing banners emblazoned with unravelling film reel cannisters across the Walk of Fame. It’s the opposite of being in the club when the Lakers win and a giddy, champagne vibration seems to connect everyone. The vibration of Christmas Eve is a lone sweat sock.

The first thing I do when I get to the dressing room is trip over a ragged patch of carpet and skin my knee. Jesse, walking by scowling at an invoice, notices me on the floor and gets Bactine and a baggie of ice. I sit at the mirrors, ice balanced on my leg, heeding a capitalist instinct to go with green glitter eyeshadow and red lipstick. Once my knee is numb, I throw on green velvet lap dance shorts, a red halter top that says HUSTLER in sequins, eight-inch white platform stilettos, and an extra-large band aid.

January slumps in to change out of her purple bikini and into her purple tube dress. “You’re not celebrating Christmas?” She asks.

“I’m Jewish,” I tell her.

“Oh.” She fucks with her hair in the mirror. “Can I ask you a personal question?” I shrug. “I’m Christian, right? So I know it’s wrong for me to be here, but is it wrong for you to be here?”

“No,” I say, brushing lint off my fuzzy Hello Kitty purse.

“I mean, in the Jewish religion, is it wrong to be here? ‘Cause, like, I know I’m being really… really, really wrong.” Something crosses January’s face, and for a second, despite her hair extensions and lash extensions and lip ring, she looks very young.

I tell her Orthodox women are supposed to practice modesty by wearing long dresses and covering their hair. “But I don’t think there’s anything wrong with dancing in your underwear,” I say. “I think it’s more silly than anything.”

“Hey, I’m here too, you know, you don’t have to defend yourself to me.” She throws me a pitying look and heads back out to make the rounds.

According to television, attractive young women used to be employed by department stores to stand in front of makeup counters, offering to spray perfume on the wrists of passing shoppers. As the shoppers sniffed, the spritzer would beam with so much patient confidence, like she’d invented the idea of perfume and just knew the customer would love it once they caught on. That’s the smile I use on customers. I introduce myself, giggle, then work my call center list into the conversation. Then I lean in, like I’m about to tell a secret, and say, “You… should buy a dance with me.”

I learned the concept of a call center list when I was working at the Alumni Fund in college. That list was a series of facts about the university – the specialness of the library, the tenaciousness of the research hospital – engineered to lubricate alumni into donating. We always said the list in the same order, asking a question in between each fact to create the illusion of natural conversation. My Tassel’s call center list adds up to a portrait of a former high-school nerd in the sexy-girl-with-glasses tradition – this appeals to white collar guys and gamers –now cheerily dancing my way through law school while supporting my little sister. None of it is true.

What I am is more like a recently-deceased soul in the bardo. Waiting out my 49 days to find out where I’m meant to go next. Except those days have turned into four and a half years of working at a topless bar in a city that is everyone else’s ultimate destination. Every table at every Starbucks is full of people saying their dreams back and forth to each other. Everyone has their laptops open, a freshly dry-cleaned tux, a manager, a business coach, a big meeting, a callback, a looming deadline, a Kickstarter page.

On my last birthday it occurred to me that I was waiting for my dream the way girls wait for their prince to come. I decided to take the magical thinking out of it and just choose something. I got up the next morning and opened Word on my laptop.  But I had nothing smart to say. Worse, it felt fake-noble – trying to be a writer just to justify living a 45-minute drive from the beach while not freezing my eggs or going to grad school or investing in anything I can do when I’m old.

The truth is, it’s nice to live in LA. It has a glamorous history that’s essentially frivolous, so you can dive in or ignore it completely. You can purchase anything you can think of – sushi, roller skates, human hair, labradoodles – in any of a hundred strip malls on Santa Monica Blvd. In N Out cheeseburgers are good. So are Roscoe’s chicken and waffles. These things are true even if you’re here for no reason. Limbo’s not so bad if you lean into it.

I’ve just finished a round – two lap dances, five versions of “circle back a couple drinks from now” – and am heading back to change for my next set when Nikki Temple stops me to ask for a ride home when our shift is over. This is the first time Nikki has spoken more than an “oh, hey” to me. We smile to each other in a friendly enough way, but she spends her shifts smoking cigarettes in the bathroom and sitting at the bar, playing games on her phone. When she was 20, Nikki was voted Adult Video News Starlet of the Year. She featured all over the country, flying from club to club to dance for six grand a weekend before tips and sell Polaroids of her naked self in the laps of adoring fans for fifty bucks a pop. On the wall of the corridor to the bathroom are framed promotional posters from a now-classic series of films called Nikki Temple’s Temple of Ass. My favorite of those is Temple of Ass 5; the story took place in a castle so she’s wearing a corset and Marie Antoinette wig, a heart-shaped mole on her cheek, skirts pulled up with a shepherd’s crook to expose a lacy thong. Next to that one hangs a publicity photo of startlingly young, flat-chested Nikki: shining spirals of blonde, pink patent boots, pearlescent nails, a whip and a cheerleader grin.

Nikki now has 5 months’ worth of brown roots, chewed-down nails, large random tattoos on her lower legs – an ice cream cone, an infinity symbol trailing stars like exhaust smoke, a maybe-outline of the state of California – and a criminally bad boob job, her nipples walleyed, the left breast creased underneath as if partially deflated. She doesn’t do porn anymore, and tends to her OnlyFans at best sporadically. I think she is paid an actual salary to be at the club five nights a week, because she is a former sex industry celebrity or because the owner of Tassel’s is unusually kind to her.

When I agree to give her a ride home, Nikki offers me a cigarette. “I should quit,” she mumbles when I refuse, shaking her pack joylessly.

January has a bad attitude, and Nikki spends half the evening in the bathroom, so I make $998 in five hours.

After Dizzy kicks out the last customer, I head to the dressing room. My knee, now haloed by dark bruises, has bled through the band aid. Nikki, sucking a candy cane, sits on the makeup counter in her sweats, watching me change.

“You’ve lost weight,” she accuses.

I actually lost ten pounds five months ago. I’d read that you’re supposed to walk 10,000 steps a day to ward off depression, so I started doing that, and then I started running because I wanted to get through it faster. So I lost weight, and not a single girl mentioned it. I don’t know why that surprised me -- I’ve just worked an entire shift and no one even noticed my leg was bleeding. Then I realize she is asking if I have drugs.

“I’ve been working out,” I say. She sighs, crunches down on her candy cane.

We are the last ones out of the parking lot.

“Thanks for the ride,” she says, pushing empty soda cans off the passenger seat and scooting in. She directs me to a freeway onramp, the opposite direction from my own way home.

The mist turns to fog, and the fog gets dense in a matter of moments. I have never driven in fog, real fog, before. Nikki stares out the window, unfazed. She is telling me about her dog, how she had to board it while she’s crashing at her friend’s place and she really misses it, how her friend was supposed to pick her up from work but he’s been drinking all day.

“It’s foggy,” I mention.

“Oh, yeah, the fog comes in sometimes,” she says, as though we haven’t driven into the inciting incident of a Stephen King novel. “Whatever you do, don’t run your brights.”

I have been driving with my brights on ever since I slightly read-ended a Honda in traffic three weeks ago, knocking one of my regular headlights out. Without the high beam, I have one weak headlight vaguely illuminating the wall of gloom surrounding my car. I clutch the steering wheel, eyes fixed on the reflective bumps of the lane dividers. I turn on my hazards. My palms get clammy.

“Exit here,” she instructs. I am amazed that she knows where we are.

I drop Nikki off at what looks like an abandoned warehouse. I notice that I have no gas.

“Just turn right on La Brea,” she tells me. “There’s a gas station right there.”

Without her in the car, I feel suddenly completely enveloped by the fog. I pull cautiously into the street, driving ten miles an hour. Solitary cars, hazards blinking, swim past and are lost again. I make it to the corner, pull into a gas station, scraping my fender on the lip of the unseen curb.

Two men in gold shirts and cowboy hats stand at the cashier window, where a handwritten cardboard sign warns NO LIQUOR AFTER 2 AM DON’T EVEN ASK. I only have cash, so I have to pay at the register. The air feels icy wet and immediately penetrates my clothes. Christmas weather, I think, staying several feet back from the men.

A tall, square-jawed man in a green pinstriped suit and Lakers jacket joins the line. He tosses the keys to his BMW from hand to hand, misses, curses loudly as he bends to retrieve them from the damp cement. The cowboys exchange a look. I nonchalantly take another step to the side.

The cashier returns with several bottles wrapped in paper bags. The cowboys, drunk already, throw wadded bills onto the sliding metal tray in exchange for the 40s. “Hold on,” the cashier says. “I got more.”

The Lakers fan barks at him to hurry the hell up, it’s freezing. The cashier just shrugs and ambles back into the darkness of the convenience store. Lakers Fan stomps up to the window and pounds the bulletproof glass so hard all the cigarette packages tumble off the wall.

“Relax, man,” one of the cowboys suggest. I wait for the violence begin, weighing whether I should get back in my car, but Lakers Fan just kicks at the pavement with his shiny loafers and mutters, “Can’t a guy enjoy a drink on Christmas Eve? Can’t a guy get some service?”

Now, there’s a jangly camaraderie between him and the drunk cowboys, which doesn’t actually feel like an improvement – more like everyone’s on the same team now except me. I’m shaking fiercely from the cold and my whole body wants to get away from these people, but the thought of my car dying in the fog is even more frightening.

When the cashier returns with an armful of six packs, I take a determined step toward the window. I may be wearing a turquoise 70s housedress from the thrift store and my ex’s grass-stained denim work shirt, but I still have on a full face of stripper slap and hair to my waist, and I spent six months of slow nights studying the way this tiny redheaded waitress named Moxie would stride up to correct men who weren’t tipping – like a dominatrix with a knife in her sock. The men back up in an exaggerated show of deference.

“Whatchu need?” The cashier asks me through the glass, grinning a mouthful of railroad-track braces at me. Another car full of partiers pulls up. Clearly, he’s running an after-hours speakeasy at this Mobil station.

“Gas,” I tell him in a tone that ideally limits future conversation.

He clucks his tongue, says, “Aw, be nice.” I put two $20s on the tray. The men all watch me as I head back to my car. I slip my fingers through the Pussy Protector on my keychain, a sharp, double-spiked steel rape preventor in the shape of a happy green cat face. Though these guys seem more intent on getting shitfaced than attacking me, the two activities do tend to go hand in hand, and the fog provides near-perfect cover even right here on the corner of La Brea. I fill up fast, lock myself into the car, turn my one headlight on, and ease back onto the road, scraping the curb again.

My heart’s pounding now, like I just escaped something. But there’s no relief, because visibility is so low it seems like an impossible phenomenon out of a movie, it seems like a joke. I miss the freeway entrance twice, double back in series of mega-dangerous illegal u-turns. Cars attempting to cross onto La Brea from smaller streets hover at corners, unable to gauge whether they’ll be bashing into someone if they brave a left. I merge onto the freeway at 18 miles an hour.

In the moments that I hit thinner fog, I see a trail of slow-lurching cars, some trying to keep a wide distance, others pulling up wildly close, like this is some ordinary traffic jam and hovering will make the car in front of them move faster. Then I am plunged into the dim, and I can’t see past the soupy red glow of the taillights directly in front of me.

I lean forward in my seat, white-knuckling the wheel. This is it, I think. I’m going to die on Christmas Eve. It seems unbelievably stupid to have gotten on the freeway, but all I can think is that not driving didn’t feel safe either.

I can’t see the road signs. I stay in the right lane, ready to merge onto the 405 North should it ever appear. Now I’m really a ghost, I think. And then I hit a stretch of freeway that must be mid-repair: no reflective paint, no raised lane bumps, no visible markers of any kind. No, now.

I’ve drowned. I’m in the sky. An erased drawing. The bardo. My own head. Nowhere.

That’s when I start laughing. The fact is, if you live in LA long enough, you die on the freeway. No one tries to hide this from you when you move here. And now would be a decent time to die, in terms of repercussions. Except for the money I owe several credit card companies, no one is expecting anything of me. I don’t have kids, and with my young and healthy brother safely taking the train in San Francisco, my parents will still have one kid – the one with a job they can brag about, even. The $828 in small bills in my fuzzy purse is all the money I have in the world. I gently nudge the accelerator pedal up to 35. Not because I want to die. I just want whatever is supposed to happen to happen already.

At the risk of blowing the suspense, I live. As soon as I hit the 405, the fog lifts like the ultimate reassurance that moving to the valley was the best decision I ever made. My heart unclenches and I smoke a cigarette out of the pack Nikki Temple left on the passenger seat.

I really want to say I feel something positive – a rush of, if not enlightenment, clarity. Because I survived. I earned it.

But what I actually feel is angry. Because it’s so clear in this moment: the answer is never going to come. If four and a half years didn’t do it, if a legitimate near-death experience didn’t do it, what exactly would?

Other people know why they’re here. They know why they get up and take their vitamins. Their life has a headline, a book title, and that animates them and gives something they can always point to. A reason, an excuse, a religion.

Or they don’t know and nothing sticks, no matter how many tattoos they get. They just get more and more lost.

I’ve been holding on to the idea that not having a Thing is fine, that it’s more silly than wrong. But I’m not sure that’s true. I’m taking up this space, ordering Postmates, buying new velvet lap shorts when the old ones get holes and relegating the old ones to the landfill. In a way, thinking of myself as a ghost, some kind of untethered soul, is generous. I might be an invading species, a parasite guzzling gas and electricity, making mountains of holey stretch velvet and coffee grounds and nonbiodegradable-body-glitter ocean runoff. I have no good justification for any of it.

The rage feels deep and sharp and familiar. It’s that feeling of being alone on the playground, while all the other kids play industriously together in the sandbox. You don’t even want to play with them anymore, you just want to destroy their stupid sandcastles.

I pull into my driveway at around 3 am, my eyes exhausted from the strain. The next-door neighbor kids, Maria and Silvita, are sitting on their front lawn in pajamas with attached feet like little fleece spacesuits. Maria, the younger one, wrapped in a Little Mermaid sleeping bag, dozes with her head in her sister’s lap. Silvita has a flashlight in her hand. “Merry Christmas,” she whispers loudly.

“Why aren’t you guys asleep?” I whisper back.

“We’re watching for Santa. Mom said we could. You wanna?”

I remember second grade Christmas break: all the other kids in the neighborhood were waiting for Santa, creating altars of Oreos and milk. I believed in Santa Claus, a vaguely anti-Semitic philanthropist shoving his massive belly down chimneys or, in the case of the Roberts kids who lived in a one-bedroom apartment behind the 7-11, parking his sled on the fire escape. The same babysitter, Cathy, told me there was no Santa Claus.

“I know, he doesn’t visit us ‘cause we don’t believe in Jesus Christ.” I felt no loss at this. It seemed much simpler to just put in a request for a certain toy with Mom and Dad, and all trek to the mall together. But I was also happy for the Roberts kids, that they got visited by something magical once a year.

“No, there is no Santa Claus, period.” She smiled, teeth mean. Apparently, the revelation that guys put their thing in your mouth as well as your thing to make babies was not enough for her. Revealing that “putting a dog to sleep” means murdering it was not enough. Bashing childhood fantasy was this babysitter’s primary joy.

“I’m kind of tired,” I tell Silvita.

“Well, duh, we’ll probly fall asleep. But out here we’ll get waken up by the reindeer hooves on the roof.” Silvita points to her own sleeping bag, folded on the porch. “You can share with me if you get cold.”

“We got cookies,” Maria adds without opening her eyes.

I look at the sisters, imagining their faces when I stand there, hands on my hips like Cathy, and tell them the truth. There is no Santa, kids. And your dog is never coming back. And I lied to your parents about the job at the spa; I sit on men’s laps to pay rent on this ugly valley duplex next to the ugly valley duplex that is all they can afford but far less than they’d hoped for. All over LA tonight men are putting gifts under trees, then driving headlong into the fog to pick up a 40, and some of them will decide not to go back. Adult Video News Starlet of the Year 2007 is sleeping on a couch in a warehouse. If she ever gets to sleep.

“Come on!” Silvita hisses. If I don’t lay the truth on her, someone else will soon enough.

I walk over to them, and Silvita immediately takes my hand, tugging me down beside her.

“Your turn to watch,” she orders, handing me the flashlight and nestling her head on my shoulder.

I have the thought her hair is incredibly soft and that’s when I realize I’m stroking it. I’ve been stroking it for a few minutes. She sighs, perfectly content to be right where she is. She can barely keep her eyes open. “Wake me up if I fall asleep. I can’t let Maria sleep through it, she’s been talking about meeting him for weeks.”

“You got it,” I tell her.