In my quest to restore my body to its former healthy self (or an approximation thereof) I’ve been renting exercise DVDs from Netflix. To my surprise, the latest one turned out to be a striptease instructional video rather than a regular dance video.
Got me thinking about missed opportunities. I could’ve been a stripper, after all.
I was waiting tables the summer before college, bringing cheeseburgers and scrambled eggs to drunk people during the night shift at Perkins. I took a second job washing dishes and serving fake grits to the truckers at a motel/restaurant out on the highway. Sometimes I’d go from the night shift right over to the motel for the breakfast shift, navigating between the kitchen and the dining area, between a bipolar boss and an odd assortment of customers.
Sometimes prostitutes would come in and order breakfast for two. To go.
Once in a while I’d wait on a guy who I assume was The Pimp. He’d say charming things to me like, “Mm, mmm. Them jeans be fittin’ you good!”
When he found out I was squirreling away my singles for school, The Pimp approached me. “You’re savin’ money for college? I know a way you can make a thousand dollars a week!”
(Sadly, this is still better money than I’m making today.)
“Yeah, I know. No, thanks,” I said.
“No, no, no, no,” he assured me. “I’m talking about dancing!”
Now, this was interesting. I was a good dancer, after all. And two bucks an hour (plus tips) just wasn’t cutting it.
I like to think it was a wise decision to say no. But once in a while, I think, what if I’d done it?
Would I have gone off to college that fall with bags of money and a checkered past? Or would I have said, this is good money, I’ll go to college later? Would I still have become a writer? After all, Diablo Cody was a stripper and she’s got a frigging Oscar now.
Did I miss my chance at an Oscar!??! Did I ruin my life by
not becoming a stripper?
I have to go think this over. And maybe work on that DVD.
The trouble with writing science fiction is sometimes the future catches up with you. Not too long ago I wrote a dialogue between two characters who were bitching about the price of gas hitting $3 a gallon. Oh, hah hah hah hah hah! I crack myself up sometimes.
There’s this awful part in Mark Twain’s “Roughing It," a travel book about Twain's experiences with his brother in the Old West. He's been rooming with a bunch of guys who work out in the desert, supposedly surveying for a railroad, but they spend an awful lot of time chasing down and collecting tarantulas, which they keep in jars on shelves in the large room they all share.
“The poet lived along a lonely stretch of river, in overgrown orchards of apricots, alone in a two-roomed hut. He had been a teacher of literature in Buenos Aires. He came down to Patagonia forty years back and stayed. … His fingers gripped my arm. He fixed me with an intense and luminous stare. ‘Patagonia!’ he cried. ‘She is a hard mistress. She casts her spell. An enchantress! She folds you in her arms and never lets go.’ The rain drummed on the tin roof. For the next two hours he was my Patagonia.” 
