Stripped (standard:drama, 4809 words)
Author: The Munny	Added: Jun 24 2002	Views/Reads: 3178/2416	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
A young stripper finds out that she is losing more than her garments as she indulges herself in her new found profession.

Stripped 

By Travis Wright 

Some days, it's pretty damn hard to look back upon the days of my life
and find anything good.  Unfortunately for me, today is one of those 
days. 

I'll probably be sorry. 

But anyway, I can always make my mind shuffle through memories of a time
when I was about seven or eight and my drunken mama staggered slovenly 
down the rain-slicked streets of Cross Town.  She made me follow her, 
threatening me all the way and snatching on my small, skinny arms as we 
made our way to the ole' skin house down on Parramore and South Street. 


That night I was so damn hungry, that even at the young age I was, I
thought I was going to die.  Regrettably, there were a lot of nights 
like that one.  My mama never seemed to be able to keep enough money to 
buy me food; she always had to be able to buy a bottle of whatever to 
douse the flames of her raging alcoholism.  But any fool knows that 
once you throw alcohol into a flame that it's going to get worse. And 
that's what happened when my mama drank, it was just like she was 
blindly trying to drench her flame with an accelerant that always made 
it swell. 

Therefore, my stomach forced me out into the streets to hustle for my
survival.  It was plain and simple to me even when I was that young:  
That if I didn't hustle, I didn't eat. 

But sometimes I did come up short and had to cry myself painfully to
sleep because of the agonizing knot that hunger had balled my stomach 
up into.  I would be mad at ole' Joyce, because at school the teachers 
once told me that mamas supposed to feed their children, and my mama 
found everything else to do with her money but feed me.  And when I 
sometimes built up the nerve to ask Joyce about some food the only 
thing I'd end up with was a sore face, where she'd flattened out her 
fat hands and had whacked me across my cheek. 

But on this particular night, I'll never forget that cheerless little
wood-framed house that barely stood erect on concrete blocks.  The 
rotten wood and the worn-out dingy brown paint made the place seem even 
more depressing, even though the atmosphere was a bit more animated on 
the inside. 

There were always the older kids that sat outside on the front steps
drinking their 40's and passing a pin-sized joint between the group.  
They were always drunk and saying mean things to my mother when we came 
up.  My mother didn't care though, she'd just stumble right though the 
middle of the bunch and proceed right on into the house, dragging me 
carelessly behind her. 

When we got to the inside, the air was always suffocatingly clouded with
reefer and cigarette smoke.  There were many vociferous men standing 
around a long table in the front room that had a large blanket thrown 
over it and cards scattered everywhere.  There was always this one 
older man dressed in a three-piece suit topped off with a matching felt 
hat that was pulling cards out of box and slamming them onto the table 
forcefully, and making a loud grunt to be synchronized with the slap of 
the cards.  The other men would be standing around with their eyeballs 
wide and gleaming like shiny silver-dollars, waiting to focus in on the 
card that had fallen to see if had catapulted them into the ranks of a 
big-city baller', or had sank them into dungeons of poverty. 

With every pull of a card, the entire gamut of human emotions were
blatantly present in the room, which sparked a lot of confrontation.  
But mostly all of the time they straightened up when they'd seen the 
really enormous, super-dark brother that I assumed served as the 
bouncer, sitting way up in what seemed to be a stolen life guard chair, 
sticking his head down out of the clouds of smoke and giving them a 
hard, cold stare; looking like Jehovah himself ducking his head down 
out of the clouds of heaven. 

My mama walked in and left me behind as she approached one of the


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