Tales of the City 07 - Michael Tolliver Lives

unapologetic about her own desires and her willingness to explore them in others. Previous columns have dealt with latex fetishists, foot worshipers, and people who like to fuck in clown costumes. Shawna isn’t always a participant, much to Brian’s relief, but her curiosity remains vigorous and laced with scrappy irreverence. Our little grrrl is nothing if not modern.
    I say our because I’ve felt like her uncle since 1988, when her mother, a local television anchor, left Brian and Shawna for a career in New York. Brian was a fretful single father but ended up, ironically, establishing his first successful relationship with a female. He lived with Shawna far longer than he has with anyone else, and even though she now rents a studio in the Mission, the two of them are still something of a couple.
    There are other ironies, too. First among them being that Brian, the longtime horn dog of the West, has bred a daughter so unashamedly free-spirited that she makes him feel like—and sometimes behave like—my fundamentalist brother in Florida. And it’s somehow poetic that Shawna’s vocation incorporates both her mother’s love of media exposure and her father’s love of…well, pussy. Not that Shawna’s a dyke. She likes dick as well. And lots of other stuff, believe me. They’re all just gadgets in her toy box.
    As far as I can tell, Brian rarely, if ever, visits his daughter’s website. He wants her to succeed and be happy, but he’d rather not know the particulars. Clearly this less-than-blissful ignorance will become more and more difficult to maintain, since Shawna has already signed a book deal, and the talk-show circuit can’t be far behind.
    “I need to talk to you about something?” she said outside the nursery.
    “Talk away,” I told her.
    She glanced at her watch. “Shit. I’m gonna be late. Raven’s gonna be pissed. Look, Mouse…why don’t you come meet me later?”
    That nickname always feels like a shout from the past. Shawna learned it as a child from her mother—the one who split for New York—and no one else calls me that now.
    “Where?” I asked.
    “What’s wrong with the club?” she said.
    “The Lusty Lady?”
    “Sure. We can talk in my booth.”
    I’m sure I must have winced. “I dunno,” I said. “I’d be there under false pretenses.”
    She chuckled. “Everyone’s there under false pretenses. We aren’t even allowed to use our real names.”
    I made a note to remember that. It would come as a comfort to Brian.

    I found the Lusty Lady on Kearny Street between Columbus and Broadway. I’ve passed the place for years, big queer that I am, without wasting a moment’s thought on what actually happens inside. A brightly backlit plastic sign now spelled it out for me in quaint Victorian block letters— PRIVATE BOOTHS—OPEN 24 HOURS —as if to invoke the halcyon days of the Barbary Coast. Women, after all, have been shaking their moneymakers at the foot of Telegraph Hill since the streets were sloppy with mud and the girls were paid in gold nuggets. The only new twist is unionization. The Lusty Ladies were recently seen picketing the club in pink Tshirts reading BAD GIRLS LIKE GOOD CONTRACTS while they chanted “Two, four, six, eight, pay us more to stimulate!”
    Shawna, I knew, was intrigued by this collision of the city’s two magnificent obsessions, sex and social justice. She liked the idea of women who embrace their libidos yet refuse to accept exploitation. The dancers had unionized when management installed two-way mirrors through which the girls could be videotaped for porn movies without their knowledge or consent—and certainly without compensation. They wanted the mirrors removed and new carpet installed and a guaranteed pay rate of twenty-seven dollars an hour. The money was crucial, the strikers insisted, since unlike lap dancers and other strippers, the girls who work the main stage are physically unable to receive tips; the Lusty Ladies (some of whom are domestic lesbians in real life) are shrewdly separated from their feverish customers (like Jodie Foster from Hannibal Lecter) by walls of protective Plexiglas.
    Shawna had already told me her nom de porn, so once inside the club I asked the door person where I might find Mary Margaret. I’d dismissed the preposterously dowdy name as Shawna’s way of being subversive in a strip club until I was directed to a Private Pleasures booth and Shawna appeared, moments later, grinning at her anxious gay