Stripper Girlfriend

by Christine Naprava

Enzo Boulet

Stripper Girlfriend is not a long cool woman in a black dress. She is a glittering, neon spectacle with bones and breath and three-hundred-dollar lash extensions to complement her four-hundred-dollar acrylic nails.

She is the poster child of why you should never attend community college. She didn’t, but her father did, and in a remedial math course, he met Francesca Hernandez, Franny for short. Franny with her crunchy curls, Franny with her impossibly fat ass, Franny who barely made it past his shoulders was into white boys and squat riding before squat riding was a thing. Stripper Girlfriend’s father was into anyone and didn’t know nor care what Franny did to him in her abuelo’s wood-paneled basement. He only cared that it felt good and that it never stopped.

It stopped eventually, the clothes-on sex, the clothes-off sex, the kisses kept brief and close-mouthed in an effort to ward off love. Franny was a Catholic. The baby wasn’t going anywhere. On weekends, the baby was brought to Stripper Girlfriend’s father’s house.

Stripper Girlfriend’s father lived with his father. The father and son both voted red. The house was power-washed white with jalousie windows and a green lawn so perfectly kept, the neighbors swore it was sod. Stripper Girlfriend got to know the outside of the house very well. She was never allowed any farther than the living room, where she slept on a pull-out couch beneath a painting of waterfowl about to take flight.

The house had a large asphalt driveway and a pole barn equipped with an indoor/outdoor stereo system. Stripper Girlfriend’s father and grandfather liked to spend whole weekends with their heads bowed beneath the hoods of 70s muscle cars. “Long Cool Woman (in a Black Dress)” played a lot. Even when Stripper Girlfriend was brought back to her mother and placed gingerly, as though she might break, on the racecar bed that had once belonged to Franny’s dead brother, the song played.

The father and son had a dog named Cricket. The dog liked to catch and kill crickets and scratch and bite the hell out of Stripper Girlfriend’s ankles. She’d return home to her mother and her dead uncle’s racecar bed with puffy surface scratches on her legs and shallow, halfhearted bitemarks all over her fingers. The dog only behaved in public, and the father, son, and Stripper Girlfriend rarely ventured out in public together. On the rare occasion that they did, the unholy trinity would patronize a local food stand and bring the cricket-eating ankle-biter with them. It was okay to eat there and be seen eating there because the owner’s daughter had not one, but three children with a black man.

The dog and Stripper Girlfriend shared the center of the Chevy’s bench seat. At a picnic table in the shade, the father and son would discuss how, much like America, their once honorable family was going to shit. Stripper Girlfriend’s second cousin, Mandy, had recently gotten kicked in the stomach and lost her baby. She was fifteen and the father of the baby had done all the kicking. Mandy’s situation took some of the heat off of Stripper Girlfriend’s father, but that didn’t make what he’d done with Franny Hernandez right or any better.

Stripper Girlfriend, too tan for early May, was still here, still her father’s part-time responsibility, and she was sneaking bits of hamburger to Cricket underneath the picnic table.

*

According to Stripper Girlfriend’s mother, the human body rejuvenates itself every seven years, but at seven, Stripper Girlfriend feels no newer than she did at six, and at fourteen, Stripper Girlfriend feels no newer than she did at thirteen, and twenty-one passes uneventfully because what’s twenty-one when you’ve been drinking since thirteen, and now, at twenty-seven, one year away from her fourth supposed rejuvenation, Stripper Girlfriend wishes that her skin and brain would team up and shed together.

Stripper Girlfriend’s boyfriend is the lightest in his family. He’s Q-ball bald up top, but his beard is all Brillo pad. He’s white passing and never uses this to his advantage. His favorite aunt lives behind a soul food restaurant located across the street from a Mexican taqueria.

Every spring and summer weekend is a barbeque, and a barbeque is not a barbeque unless there’s crabs cooked down in Old Milwaukee. Stripper Girlfriend can’t eat a crab alone because of her four-hundred-dollar acrylics, and as soon as her boyfriend’s ten-year-old niece learns of this, she’s stuck to Stripper Girlfriend like glue. His niece cracks open the crab, exposes and extracts the meat with tiny fingernails painted in pink glitter. She’s lost in Stripper Girlfriend’s fake nails and eyelashes, her occasional braids, her natural curls dyed Dolly-Parton blonde, her Rainbow brand spandex dresses with her panty lines always visible, nipple piercings like two uncooked Kraft Mac and Cheese noodles. Stripper Girlfriend thinks that it doesn’t get any better than to be worshipped by your boyfriend’s niece.

But where’s Danae? This is her boyfriend’s first cousin. Danae’s husband is here with their kids but he hasn’t heard from his wife in over a day. Over a day? Over two days. They’ve been having “marital issues.” A dark cloud looms over them all for the rest of the afternoon. The crab doesn’t taste so good anymore, and the worship, it makes Stripper Girlfriend’s stomach swirl. She shivers on the car ride home. Even the air conditioner, on a ninety-degree day, is too much. When the cops find the cousin face-down on her male co-worker’s couch the next day, Stripper Girlfriend calls out of work, claiming food poisoning. You don’t want me shitting and vomiting all over customers, do you? she asks when her boss gives her hell for calling out.

Stripper Girlfriend likes her job most of the time and likes that she’s not one of the three girls dating their boss, Mike. She likes that she doesn’t need to draw in new customers by posting tongue-out emojis over her breasts on Instagram or keep old ones by slipping fingers where they’re not allowed. She likes that she’s talked about, good and bad, long after she clocks out. Her palms are always itching, her ears perpetually ringing.

I don’t need this, Stripper Girlfriend says to any customer who rubs her the wrong way, My boyfriend is better than you’ll ever be. My boyfriend knows how to fix cars better than any mechanic.

Car, only one. A broken-down Benz, an embarrassment to German engineering. Stripper Girlfriend does not dream in Cirque du Soleil sex, as her customers love to assume. She dreams of trips to Germany with her boyfriend, the Benz the heaviest piece of luggage they’ve ever owned. They approach a stone-faced German with the Benz/luggage in toe, and in American, Stripper Girlfriend says, We’re having quite a time with the Benz.

The German twists up his face. You can keep it, he growls, that piece of shit, that hunk of junk, that garbage.

Stripper Girlfriend’s boyfriend zones out and zones back in at the exact wrong time. He hears garbage and thinks the German, now a Nazi, means Stripper Girlfriend. He socks the Nazi in the mouth. The Nazi produces a weapon stronger than any fist.

Stripper Girlfriend awakes in a panic and pats down her sleeping boyfriend, checking for bullet holes. She pops two melatonin gummies and slips into a coma-like slumber. In a nightmare, it’s the year 2000 and her boyfriend is Flat Stanley. She claws at the beach towel they use in place of curtains and holds his paper-thin body up to the moonlight. He’s all holes.

From that day forward, Stripper Girlfriend holds onto her boyfriend while he sleeps, intertwining her legs with his. She stows her body pillow in the closet for better days. She can’t dig her fingernails into his chest−the acrylics don’t allow such close contact−but she does press the pads of her fingers into his skin. When her fingers begin to cramp, she reminds herself that this is the only way.

Stripper Girlfriend believes in the art of canceling out. On a Wednesday of no significance, a regular sets her on fire. He grabs at her ass too hard, and his grip spreads across her bare flesh with the swiftness of a flame. Ouch! she yelps, springing off of his lap. The pain is too distracting for her to slap him in the face. She rushes to the bathroom and pokes her ass at the dirty mirror. She wets her palm and presses her palm to the flame. The flame spreads.

The digital clock in her Accord blinks 2:04, which means it’s at least 3:10. Leaving work abruptly and hours early will get her fired. This will be the last time she tears out of this parking lot in an ombre one-piece. In pursuit to the half-double she rents with her boyfriend, the fire tunnels deeper. Ironically, she passes a firehouse at sixty-five MPH. She lifts her ass off of the cloth driver’s seat, up and down, side to side, hoping to produce air flow strong enough to put out the flame.

Her boyfriend’s head is bowed beneath the hood of the Benz when she rounds the corner. She stomps on the brakes, places the Accord in park, and leaps from the driver’s seat, tripping over her feet.

Everything all right? he asks, grease up to his elbows and all over his Metallica T-shirt.

Some asshole and I feel like I’m on fucking fire are the only words that make it out of Stripper Girlfriend’s mouth. She darts over to her boyfriend and takes his hand in hers, affixing it to the flame. They’re in a parking lot across the street from a liquor store. Their half-double is within walking distance. On the corner, two neighborhood kids on bikes watch them, their hands forming visors over their squinted eyes. They see a woman wanting it bad in the parking lot.

Stripper Girlfriend doesn’t see them. The flame doesn’t expand beneath her boyfriend’s palm but it doesn’t cool either. I think I’m having a goddamn panic attack, she says, her speech slurred. Half of the sentence never makes it to her boyfriend’s ears. He’s here to catch her, but his arms aren’t everything. She welcomes the black dots that increase in size, the swirling in her stomach now the swirling in her head. Stripper Girlfriend slips away gracefully beneath a summer sun. She’ll be back very soon.

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Christine Naprava is a writer from South Jersey. Her work has appeared in Contrary Magazine, Spry Literary Journal, Flash Frog, Overheard Lit, Kissing Dynamite, and The Friday Poem, among others. She tweets @CNaprava and Instagrams @cnaprava.