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

a Marxist fanzine publisher, we always bickered over what I considered to be his oppressive politics. I don't want to be a battle-ax, but I always feel I have to resist being squashed and I'm not sure how to refine my approach. Is this a typical modern woman's dilemma? I don't know, but it's certainly my dilemma.
    I'm not nearly so bad with Randy. I'm more confident now about how to keep Stepford Wifery at bay. But there's still this defensive thing that I do. Every so often I have a hiccup of New York-style snobbery about some bullshit matter, like not being able to find the MC5 in the record store, or the fact that salads in the restaurants around town are still at the no tengo arugula stage. One time when we were driving somewhere in the truck I rolled my eyes because he didn't know who Eustace Tilley was. It was the first time I turned that attitude on Randy, and the last.
    He came completely uncorked. "Do you know the difference between a two-by-four and a two-by-six?" he yelled.
    I sat there dumbfounded. I'd never seen him lose his temper before, at least not with me.
    "Well, do you?"
    Silence.
    "I didn't think so! So don't treat me like I'm stupid, because I know plenty of things that you don't!"
    In Wyoming, they call that fixing someone's wagon. Thereafter my wagon was suitably fixed.
    Most of the time, though, we have a pretty great time. We travel back East together now and again, and I introduce Randy to museums and restaurants. So far he likes the low-key Mafia hangout in the West Village best. When we're home, I spend the day at the desk in the spare bedroom working on articles, while Randy goes to the job sites to line out his men. Come summer, I ditch work and tag along whenever he goes to a rodeo for a wild horse race. Even though I spent the first rodeo with my hands clapped over my mouth in fright watching the mugger and shank man on his team steady the untamed horse as it burst into the arena so Randy could saddle it and attempt to ride it across the finish line, I find them fun. The only thing I actively dislike is the steer wrestling—men grabbing the animal by the horns and twisting its neck until it falls—boomp!—in the dirt. I appreciate all the rest, though—the God-fearing cowboys with crosses stitched into the flank of their chaps, the mud, the rodeo queens with their satin sashes and sky-high lacquered hair, the bulls milling around in the stock pens and firing from the chutes, snorting and spinning.
    Love can't sustain solely on "exotic other" confectionery. For it to last there has to be more—a singular quality that makes it a love that not just intrigues but lets you sleep better at night. In an interview, a well-known CEO described what he'd sought in a mate back when he was single. He said he wanted a woman so resourceful that if he ever found himself in a Third World prison, she'd know exactly how to go about getting him freed. To him, the most prized characteristic is capability. To me, it's bloody-knuckled devotion. The moment that I really believed Randy and I would make it in the long run was when he said to me, "I may not win every fight I'd get in to defend you, but I'd die trying." I realized in an instant that this streetwise chivalry was what I'd been looking for my whole life. Not because I need so much to be protected by a m-a-n but because that's also how I feel. My loyalties may be few, but they are not subtle. He would go to the wall for me, and I for him. No one would dare try to disrespect or harm either of us in the other's presence. Not if he valued his windpipe.
    One can list a hundred reasons why our relationship could work, and a thousand more why it shouldn't, but what remains is that it does. It works. We're both always ready to charge at the world, yet we've managed to hollow out a restful pocket to retreat to together. This is the real deal, even if to the rest of the world we just look like two souls joined at the attitude problem.
    Now it's mid-January, six