"Have you ever thought of stripping?"...

Rose put one hand on her hip and, drawing the other to her mouth, took a drag on her little brown cigarette. “It’s easy money,” she said exhaling clove scented smoke.

I was sitting on the front steps of my apartment building, sipping a bottle of beer and reading the July issue of Rolling Stone when Rose posed the question.

The reason I was drinking beer and reading Andy Kaufman’s rock-and-roll obituary at 10:30 on a Tuesday morning is because I was unemployed, having quit my temp agency job sorting bills of lading into neat but inexplicable piles.

I’d tried to come up with ways to make the job less tedious – listening to up-tempo tunes on my Walkman, taking umpteen trips to the bathroom, jotting down insipid poetry that described my angst – but the only thing that kept my head from hitting the table was the daily dose of White Cross speed a fellow temp-worker had convinced me was the perfect antidote to boredom-induced oblivion. That proved an expensive and, increasingly elusive solution.

I told myself that I didn’t move half way across the country so I could spend my days devising ways to survive the quarter hours between coffee breaks. So one miserable Monday morning, I walked away from my fiberglass cube for the10am break and never returned.

Three weeks later, I’d yet to discover for what I’d moved half way across the country, but then, I really hadn’t put forth much effort. Self-loathing was a lot easier to live with than I’d expected.

The way I saw it, I wasn’t officially slacking as long as I was out of bed by noon. Every morning my alarm went off – even if a little later each day -- so I could make sure I was up and on the other side of my apartment while it was still, technically, morning. Beyond that I wasn’t making any promises.

But try as I might to ignore the bothersome realities of unemployment, my dwindling savings and the upcoming first of the month were beginning to weigh on me. I knew my next six-pack would be a 40.

My neighbor, Rose -- an Australian whose words always carried the heft of certainty simply because she spoke with a self-assurance foreign to my Midwestern ears -- showed no sign of embarrassment at suggesting a sex trade career. Not wanting to appear unworldly, I nodded knowingly as though stripping was the next item on my to-do list, even as I felt the heat rise in my face.

Rose wasn’t fooled.

“Americans are so uptight,” she said. “Europeans? They have a much healthier attitude about the human body.”

Rose told me she’d been a professional Flamenco dancer and had filled the time between European tours with two and three month stripping gigs. I had no reason to doubt her story, having seen black and white glossy photos of Rose in a Flamenco dress casting a dramatic Flamenco pose -- so at least half of her story was true. Anyway, why would anyone's flight-of-fancy alight on a seedy strip-club stage?

“It’s liberating,” she said, “you’ll learn a lot about yourself.”

Imminent poverty and its’ ability to cut short my great Armistead Maupin inspired, San Francisco adventure, made me predisposed to seeing the logic in that statement. Taking my clothes off in front of strangers might, I reasoned, displace some of my Midwestern meekness. As an added bonus, I might become privy to some of the city’s most tantalizing secrets. When that happened I might begin to feel more like a wizened San Francisco insider and less like a wide-eyed, if slightly dejected, suburban interloper. It seemed a sound plan.

But then, I was a 23-year-old college dropout who’d arrived on a Grey Hound with $550, a few flimsy resumes, a bunch of college-radio airchecks, a boyfriend who was about to dump me and not a single job prospect. What the Hell did I know about sound plans?

“Call the Lusty Lady,” Rose said. “They’re in the book…”

“OK,” I said as the tingling sensation that had been percolating in my sacrum began to work its way towards my extremities.

I’d do it.

Well… the phone-call at least. We’d see after that.

To be continued....