On a Thursday night at six o’clock, the Catwalk Club is virtually empty. Four middle-aged bald men stare with thin smiles at the naked girl twirling around the pole. Maya, a 28 year-old stripper, evaluates them from her perch on a barstool. “Pervert. Pervert. Pathetic. Loser,” she says, sipping a cranberry juice and pointing. “But in five minutes I’m gonna go up there and act like I love them to get their money.” It is her second night at the Catwalk, and she is wearing her newest outfit: shiny black stilettos, fishnet stockings, pink panties, and a short black dress with a v-neck that nearly dips below sea level. “A good outfit is integral to the job,” she explains. “It makes you feel sexy, like when you’re driving a new car.”

The girl on stage wraps her legs around Loser’s head and shoves her pelvis close to his face, gyrating to Motley Crue’s “Girls, Girls, Girls” as he places a dollar bill between her breasts. “Look at this — what a whore — I’m not going to shove my vagina in your face for a dollar,” Maya says. “I’ll do it for twenty, but not a dollar.”

The song transitions to 50 Cent’s “In Da Club.” DJ Logic’s voice cuts in, “Neeeeext up: Maya!”

“Did he really just call my name?” she whines playfully. “Eh, I don’t wanna go!”

But she goes anyway, up the stairs to the right of the stage and then to the pole downstage center, as the naked girl bows to pick up her underwear and exits to no applause.

***

In 1994, Tom and Rochelle, a married couple, came to New Haven looking to open a strip club. At the time, the city had no adult entertainment codes. Tom and Rochelle leased an old factory in an industrial district that was rezoned to be “a restaurant with entertainment,” and technically, that’s what they opened.

“We told them we were going to have poetry readings, jazz singers, stuff like that,” Tom says.

First he built Hell, the bar next door, so that Rochelle could support the couple by bartending while he constructed the Catwalk. The two establishments needed to be separate because Connecticut law forbids nudity in a bar with alcohol (although most places with topless dancers ignore this stipulation). Tom’s dancers were going to get completely naked, so he had to be extra careful. Plus, the law requires a liquor establishment to close at 2 AM, while a dry club can stay open indefinitely as an after-hours hangout. As a result, the Catwalk Club still serves only juice and soda.

The Catwalk Club opened in 1995. Its first visitors were the New Haven police, who shut it down before the first article of clothing could be taken off. The next night the Catwalk reopened, only to be shut down by the same lieutenant. Night three was the same. According to the police, stripping did not count as “entertainment.” Tom and Rochelle’s lawyer secured a federal restraining order against the New Haven police for violation of first amendment rights. The lieutenant came for the fourth night in a row, insisted that the signature on the document was illegible, and shut down the Catwalk Club again.

The lawyer went to work. He discovered that the lieutenant had his hand in another club down the street under his wife’s name. The City of New Haven was embarrassed, and gave Tom and Rochelle a written apology with $30,000 restitution, half of it paid by the lieutenant. The scandal was in the newspaper. The lieutenant’s wife got fired from her job as a public school teacher. City Hall asked Tom and Rochelle’s lawyer to write the first adult entertainment code for the City of New Haven. Tom made copies of the letter of apology and the newspaper articles and hung them all over the Catwalk Club for its grand re-opening.

***

Maya starts her three-song dance at the pole, using it as the axis of her spins, before wrapping her thighs around it and slowly sliding up and down. She then saunters along the perimeter of the thrust stage, stopping at each customer to squat, spread her bent knees, expose her panties, and shoot a seductive grin that implies, “I want you,” but actually means “Pay me for a lap dance.”

It wasn’t until she was 18 that Maya said, “I want you,” and truly meant it. When she was ten her mother told her that she needed to respect her body and wait until she was in love to have sex. “Sex is like sneezing,” her mom said. “It’s very built up, and then there’s a release.” But in eighth grade Maya became friends with Amber, who convinced her to sneak out at night with older boys. Maya began to realize that she could use her body to get what she wanted: rides from 16-year-old boys, free admission to movies, and most importantly, inclusion in the popular crowd. Nonetheless, she always tried to reconcile her newfound agency with her mother’s values, so while Amber usually had sex, Maya limited herself to everything but.

Then, when she was 13, Maya got naked in front of a boy for the first time. She had invited Amber and four guys over her house while her parents were at work. Maya was unclothed in her bed with a boy when she heard her mom come home. As her mom brought in groceries, Maya told the boys to jump out her bedroom window: one, two, three. But the fourth boy was fatter than the rest, and he crashed through the windowpane, landing in the driveway just as Maya’s dad pulled up.

Maya was grounded for a year and forbidden to see Amber throughout high school. “I was a prude,” she says. At 18, she dated her first real boyfriend, and after three months she felt that she was in love with him. They had sex in Maya’s bedroom, while her mom was in the next room. After they finished, Maya came out and exclaimed, “Mom, I just lost my virginity!” Her mother was shocked by the announcement: she had been convinced that Maya had lost her virginity many years before that, and was surprised to see that her daughter had actually heeded her advice.

***

Bouncers at the Catwalk Club like Adam and Gary get to live every strip club customer’s fantasy.

“Yeah, of course we sleep with the girls,” they brag.

Adam holds the current record. Several years ago, he was arrested (supposedly he was carrying an old lady’s groceries across the street when she suddenly went senile and claimed that he was stealing her stuff). “I had two months before I was going to jail, so I became a man-whore,” he says. He slept with seven strippers before his sentence. There were Sarah, Brianna, the bartender with the lesbian girlfriend who got mad at him, and Christine, the stripper he lived with for a while. The others are nameless in his memory.

According to Adam, there are four key things to remember if you want to sleep with an exotic dancer. You’ve got to act like you’ve already slept with a fucking model; you’ve got to teach her exactly what you want her to do; you’ve got to fuck her harder — and better — than any women, because she’s seen it all; you can never, ever, mention money, because it makes her feel like a whore.

“And when you finally do sleep with her, it makes you feel so good inside,” he adds. “You know that fuzzy, warm feeling inside, like it’s Christmas in August!”

It is unlikely that an average customer will ever know that fuzzy feeling. The Catwalk has a strict “No Touching” policy, and the bouncers and management take it more seriously than a lot of Connecticut clubs. Adam and Gary see it all: guys who think they’re going to get some, guys who grab the girls, guys who pull out their genitalia, guys who employ their tongues. “The customers don’t mean shit to me,” Adam says. “I’m here to protect the girls.”

“Your job is not to stare at the girls, it’s to watch over them like you would a family member,” Gary adds.

“And you don’t look at anybody’s hands ever,” Adam insists. “Because you can see in a man’s eyes what he’s thinking or who he is.”

***

Maya likes to choose the music she dances to, sometimes to ironic effect. At this point in the striptease, Nelly chants, “It’s getting hot in here, so take off all your clothes,” and the chorus girls respond, “I am getting so hot, I’m gonna take my clothes off!”

Maya learned the art of taking her clothes off at a club named Keeper’s. Although they had no contact throughout high school and college, Maya and Amber reunited — by coincidence they ended up as graduate students and then roommates at the same school in New Haven, where Maya is working towards her masters degree in psychology. One day she saw an ad in the paper offering $2000 a week for exotic dancing. The girls needed money for their apartment, so in an eighth-grade role reversal, Maya pressured Amber to go with her to the club.

Keeper’s didn’t have a formal audition process: if you were female, attractive, and willing to dance naked, they hired you. Maya and Amber fit this bill, but they didn’t know the first thing about exotic dancing. They showed up in jeans, so the manager sent them to Penthouse Boutique to purchase appropriate outfits. Back in the office, Maya and Amber chose their stage names. “Hmmm, what’s my name gonna be,” she thought. “I always wanted to name my daughter Maya.” It was the only name that came to mind, and she liked it well enough, so it became her stripper pseudonym.

Maya watched the other girls at Keeper’s and did her best to imitate them. She tried to be seductive, but she was nervous. She rolled around on the stage. She danced too fast. She didn’t make eye contact.

There were cliques at Keeper’s, and the girls were competitive. There was the Brazilian clique, the clique that hated the Brazilian clique, the moms, the nice girls, the bitches and the-girls-that-thought-they-were-better-than-everyone clique. Some of the girls who worked there were legitimate prostitutes. Customers were allowed to touch the strippers during lap dances. They would usually grab Maya’s butt, and sometimes they would suck on her breasts or lick her neck. One Italian guy in his fifties would come in regularly for a game of pool and a lap dance with Maya. He reeked of bad cologne. “What do you want to do first?” he would ask her.

“All I wanted to do first was puke,” she remembers. He would lie back, take off his glasses, get comfortable and rub her buttocks while she danced in his lap.

Another time, Maya was dancing on the Keeper’s stage when a man who looked disconcertingly like Hitler started yelling at her, “Show me your pussy! Show me your pussy!” He grabbed her shoes and her legs, but the bouncers didn’t do anything. “Don’t touch me!” she screamed. Finally, when she wouldn’t go over to him, Hitler sneered and said, “I can see your hemorrhoids, I can see your hemorrhoids!” That night, despite making $450 a weekend, Maya left Keeper’s for good. She got a job substitute teaching and decided never to strip again.

***

Strippers are independent contractors. They make no hourly wage: they keep the cash they earn from the stage, lap dances, and VIP room. Most of their money comes from the latter two venues. This is why the audition process is so relaxed; the club has very little to lose if a girl doesn’t do well. Mecca, the manager of the strippers at the Catwalk Club whose leadership style involves unzipping the fly of her naval outfit and unleashing a large strap-on dildo, rarely turns down someone who wants to dance. It’s up to the girls to learn the ropes on their own, and those who are most successful use the stage to hustle lap dances and VIPs just as filmmakers use previews to get people in theaters.

A lap dance costs $20 for one song unless it’s “up-time,” in which case a siren goes off and all the strippers convene at the front of the stage. They walk around and hawk lap dances at a special rate: two songs for $30. A girl can make big bucks in the VIP room, where the sky really is the limit (under the watchful eyes of the bouncers and management, who look on through transparent windowpanes and hidden cameras). She can charge whatever she wants, as long as she gives $25 to the house. One VIP can take care of a car payment. (An infamous schoolteacher paid off her mortgage by hustling VIPs for a year.) As a result, the VIP room is the place where your fantasies can come true, if you’re willing to make it worth the girls’ while.

The VIP room is where many men have watched two or more girls pretend to get it on for ten minutes. It is where a man once ate an entire box of York Peppermint Patties off the feet of his girl of choice. It is where a Yale professor, wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase, paid two girls to look at him and say, repeatedly, “You are a beautiful man. You are so hot,” before taking off his shirt to reveal a woman’s bra and paying them to continue (all the while holding the briefcase). The VIP room is where one man routinely got on all fours and paid Clarice, his favorite girl, $150 to kick him in the testicles for 15 minutes. (“Best job I ever had!” says Clarice.) It is also where a man once paid a girl to beat him so hard with his belt that she accidentally broke his nose. He left the club, only to return after going to the ATM to get money for more.

After ten years of this lifestyle, Tom is sick of his club. His lucrative business has beaten the odds, but he is bored and burnt out. He drives all the way from his home in Westchester to sit in Hell, maybe go out for dinner and drinks, and then return home at 6 AM just as his execs-for-neighbors are going to work. Tom doesn’t know any of the five girls working tonight — Staja, Caprice, Fantasia, Ecstasy or Maya. Sometimes strippers will offer him a lap dance, and he has to tell them that he owns the place. He sticks with the business because of the comfort it affords him and Rochelle: a large home, an upcoming move into an even larger one, a house in Florida, a tenth wedding anniversary in Venice, and two dogs instead of children (“Kids — hell no! They would interfere with our irresponsible and reckless lifestyle!”). He remembers people by the type of car they drive, and always made it a point to drive a classy one. He used to drive an Audi TT with a license plate that said, “TT BAR.” Now, with a new mortgage to pay off, and the novelty of his occupation waning, he drives a silver station wagon with a generic plate.

***

Halfway through the second song, Maya begins to remove her panties. This is a minute-long ordeal in which she stretches the waist out, offers various customers a peek, and then lets them drop singles in there before it snaps closed. Eventually she sits on the stage with her legs in front of her and moves the underwear to her knees, where they stay for the remainder of song two as Maya twists her thighs in such a way that gives flickering picture-show glimpses of her crotch.

If Maya’s boyfriend knew that strangers were looking at his girlfriend’s naked crotch he would be incredibly upset. When he found out that Maya was stripping at Keeper’s, he threw his exercise bench against the wall and broke up with her. After that she told him that she quit stripping for good, and she thought she had, until she realized that there really was no way for her to make a comparable amount of money during graduate school. She works hard to keep in shape, and she doesn’t feel bad about reaping the benefits. Nonetheless, Maya has not told her boyfriend that she is stripping again, this time at the Catwalk. She justifies her secret by saying it’s only until her financial aid check comes, only until she fixes her car, only until she pays her phone bill. “If I wasn’t at work right now I’d probably be calling him,” she says. “But now that I’m making money, I don’t feel like I need him. It scares me a little.” Maya appreciates that she can fulfill her own needs by relying on her body rather than on her boyfriend.

Maya is bisexual, but for emotional relationships she is drawn only to men. She is not attracted to clean-cut guys: she likes some mess and disorder. “I don’t like muscular guys because you can’t grab a piece of fat,” she explains. “There’s got to be something special — I’m not attracted to perfect tens.”

Until she met her current boyfriend four years ago, Maya did not enjoy sex. “I just did it for the hell of it,” she says. She would lie on her back, nervous every time, even though she could orgasm only while on top. “My boyfriend and I, we love each other, but we don’t call it ‘making love’ — we have sex,” Maya whispers. They use everything in the book: role playing, fantasies, countless toys. She is even looking into having a threesome with another woman. “My boyfriend is just damn good at it,” she says. “I can finally relax and take what I want — if it takes me a half hour, that’s fine. He’s really big, too.”

Maya’s second night back is going well. Earlier there was only one man in the club, and he bought a lap dance from her. She showed him everything, looked him in the eye, and rubbed all over his body. She has learned that going slow and making eye contact are the most important techniques. “My job is to create the fantasy that I want the customers,” she says. “And I don’t feel dirty working here because at the Catwalk they aren’t allowed to touch me.”

Maya’s final song comes on: “Don’t cha wish your girlfriend was hot like me? Don’t cha wish your girlfriend was a freak like me?” She stands up and moves her underpants from knees to ankles to the floor. Her high-heels lead into stockings that stop mid-thigh; from there on up, she is naked. She crouches deliberately on all fours, her backside towards the man at the tip of the stage, the thin heels of her stilettos pointing at him like taillights. She holds the pole at its base and gyrates back and forth, up and down. She reaches back and slaps her rear end. Smack. Smack. The man slowly goes into his pocket for a dollar bill.

It is difficult to ignore Maya’s hard body. There is nothing squishy about it. Her stomach is flat and her legs are strong. The man stares at her firm, medium-sized breasts. He admires her buttocks, which make a sharp noise when she spanks them. Maya is naked, but she is not revealed. The man does not know that this stripper met her boyfriend working at a day care, that she adores children, and that she hopes to work as a school psychologist someday. He has not read her mock thesis paper, “The Effects of the Female Topless Dancer’s Occupation on Current Intimate Relationships With Romantic Partners.” He does not know that her favorite music is hip-hop, and that she chooses the songs to which she dances. He does not know that it has been ten years since her last vacation, that her favorite place is the White Mountains, and that she would prefer to raise her family in Europe rather than in America, even though she has never been there.

The man knows only that Maya is curvaceous from all angles: forwards, backwards, and sideways. Straight on, he notices that her pelvis is wide and her hips are curvy like a steering wheel; in profile, he notices that her rounded rear-end complements her bosom. She stands up and runs her hands along the contours of her body, over her breasts, finishing with a tweak of the nipples between forefinger and thumb, making him wish that her hands were his. She looks the man straight in the eyes. She gets on her knees and turns away from him, and a green Pisces tattoo taunts him from the swell of her back. Slowly she bends backwards into a crab formation, her head toward him, all of her muscles stretched. Her smile is upside down. Maya’s straight, jet black hair falls into his lap before she nuzzles her head between his left shoulder and ear. She whispers something that creates a fantasy for the man, “I want you,” or something like it. One thought must go through his mind: “In another world this girl might, just might, have sex with me.” He imagines himself on top of her at this moment, doing the crab, hoping that this provocative position will lead to something more.

And then she yanks the dollar bill out of his hand with her teeth before springing up, back towards the pole. When the song ends, she picks up her garments and carries them offstage in a ball along with the five or six dollar bills she has earned. As she leaves the stage, the four bald men applaud.