Only when it suits them

Memoir, 2026

The club reopens in the valley a few years later.

They move into the space where Cyber City used to be, a late-night BYO Chinese restaurant where I would sometimes end up on nights out when I was nineteen, drinking Extra Dry and trying to read the menu while my vision blurred. Now it’s “the biggest strip club in the Southern Hemisphere”, or so the marketing is eager to point out.

I message the club on Instagram and organise an interview.

“The manager will meet you in a second,” the security guard says when I arrive.

Thirty seconds later a man walks around the corner, a button-up shirt tucked into his trousers. I recognise him instantly. At the old club, he was the owner’s creepy friend who would watch the dancers from the corner of the bar and whisper suggestive things to them whenever he had a chance.

Surely he’s not the manager, I think to myself, but he takes me into a room and tells me to sit down.

I don’t know if he recognises me and I don’t care, either. I’ve changed since the old club closed. I’ve lost weight, had hair extensions put in, and started using more expensive makeup.

He sits across from me, his legs crossed and his arms spread out on the chair. I sit in a smaller, more narrow seat.

I tell him I’ve been stripping for seven years, but he still explains everything to me as though I’ve never been inside a club before.

The customers can touch you. There’s a thirty centimetre distance between genitals. Absolutely no dancing without a controller in the room.

I stop listening to him, watching his mouth move as I zone out, thinking about the time I signed up for a sugar daddy site and saw his profile within the first two minutes, with “prefer not to disclose”, in the section where his income was supposed to be.

Eventually he starts talking about how every dancer is an independent contractor and I start listening again. The reason why I messaged the club in the first place was because I’d heard from other dancers that you could charge your own prices. Maybe it is true, I think.

“So if I’m an independent contractor, can I set my own rates?” I ask.

He laughs at me and shakes his head.

“No. No you can’t,” he says, as though I’ve just asked him the dumbest question he’s ever heard.

“Well I’m an independent contractor, aren’t I?” I ask.

“I wouldn’t allow it,” he says, leaning back in his seat and puffing his chest out a little more. “Besides, nobody would pay a higher amount than the standard.”

I think of how many customers have paid the rates I charge in Perth, or accepted the extra amount I add to each dance in Toowoomba. I’ve been setting my own prices for over a year now, and there are plenty of customers who pay it.

“I can guarantee that I’ll be able to sell lap dances for a higher price. I’ve been doing it for a while already,” I say.

“I don’t know about that,” he says.

I take a deep breath and look at him sitting so confidently in his seat, so sure that he’s the expert in this situation. This man who has never put on a pair of Pleasers, who has never sold a lap dance, who has never told someone how much it costs to get him naked.

“Well, how much are lap dances?” I ask.

“Sixty bucks for ten minutes,” he says.

Sixty bucks. The same amount it cost five years ago. My rent is more expensive, so are my groceries, and so are the outfits I wear to work. But somehow it’s reasonable for lap dances to still cost the same.

I press my tongue into the wire behind my teeth as he smirks at me, believing that he knows more than I ever could.