Strip City: A Stripper's Farewell Journey Across America Read Online Free PDF Page A

look it, but he's really very intelligent!"
    "Mom, I'm serious. I made a vow to never date anyone politically to the right of Barry Goldwater. Besides, he hunts."
    "He's very handsome, though."
    "Mom, he's married."
    I can't blame my mom for agitating on my behalf, since I am certain she views my dating criteria as highly suspect. The only person I ever dated with whom she had any prolonged contact was my druggie high school boyfriend, Peter Doylan. Peter played guitar in a rather awful punk band and had a dyed-black mohawk. He also had a pretty big nose, so in photographs taken from head-on, with the mohawk showing up as just a centrally placed black tuft and the nose being what it was, he looked a lot like Bert from "Sesame Street." His greatest mortification was having the middle name Francis, so when anyone asked about the F, he said his name was "Peter Fuckin' Doylan." During the year that we were together, Peter was in and out of crash pads and in and out of work, so my mom must've been thinking that any musician with an actual job would be an improvement. She was probably right.
    But Ted Nugent? I mean, really.
    "Wy-O-ming?" my friends in New York exclaim when I tell them that I've decided I'd rather relocate to Cheyenne than attempt the formidable task of carving out life a deux in the city. "Why the hell are you moving all the way out to Wy-O-ming?"
    I don't quite know what to say. How to explain to them that ever since I returned from my crosscountry trip, Manhattan seems different? Less exciting and more confining. Plus, I am becoming increasingly annoyed with my New York self. I lived there for a couple years as a punky teen dropout, and the city then seemed scary and magnificent. But now, after having returned as an ambitious twenty-something media-type-in-training, I find myself looking around at everything with an unsatisfied sniff. I'm too easily irritated and bored, and I'm disturbed by the arrogance that that implies. I feel as if I've gotten to the bottom of the New York mystery that has enchanted me since I was a small child. So if it is indeed true that I know everything that is worth knowing, and I have solved the metropolitan puzzle known as New York City, then why stay? I want to be someplace, and be surrounded by things, that I don't immediately recognize and greet with contempt.
    Randy told me he proposed in order to show me that our time together wasn't for naught. I decided to move to Wyoming for the same reason. That, and the roaches. Sometime during our torrid crosscountry affair, the roof in my Chelsea apartment building cracked and sprang a leak, fostering an infestation of two-inch-long flying cockroaches. While having a phone conversation with Randy, during which I had to put down the phone three times to chase—shoe in hand—after a giant roach, I decided that Wyoming had to be better than this. I didn't want the halcyon days of new love queered by clouds of Raid.
    When I move in with Randy, we don't attain immediate domestic bliss. I have to kick and scream a little. I wish I were an easier person to live with. I can effortlessly go all giddy and foolish over a throwaway affair, because there's no compromise in a dead end. But I'm thornier when there are future prospects, because I get nervous.
    I want to fall in love but I don't want my life to be subsumed. My independence is the key to my sanity, and I'm loath to see it jeopardized even though I long to be held and kissed and fussed over and to do the same for someone else, too. I know you can have it all, but how?
    I've seen countless smart, inspired women slip under their mates' feet—in terrific haste or by attrition, but always to the same sad end—and I am scared of that happening to me. So I try to strike that critical balance between love's submission and personal autonomy, but my execution is pretty hairy. When I dated an artist, it turned into a constant battle over which one of us was Yoko (not me!). When I was involved with