Bottoms Up
by Josephine Lyss-Williams
It is 1 am on a Saturday night in May.
Cade’s last weekend in St. Louis before he moves to New York City to sell his soul to corporate America.
He needs a proper Midwestern goodbye.
Nothing says proper Midwestern goodbye like a strip club across the river in East St. Louis. It is a lawless land. The last of its kind.
We pile into the back of Violet’s Jeep.
The road to Brooklyn Illinois- population 750, is dark and winding.
I’m talking no street lights or stop signs. Just us and the road. Lana Del Rey’s back is arching like a cat over the car speakers when we arrive. As if mimicking us, the neon sign features the outline of a woman’s body with her head thrust back followed by the words: Bottoms Up.
We all take tequila shots in the car except for Cade, who takes a shot of Deep Eddy Peach because he is a baby with a sweet tooth. We wash it down with pineapple juice.
In line ahead of us, there are three women in shapewear with perfectly laid weaves. Dancers,
Violet informs us.
The entrance fee is twenty dollars, cash only, unless you have VIP status.
Jessie slips through the metal detector without the bouncer seeing her.
Lil mama, lil mama, come back here.
I point to the bouncer’s empty bag of Haribo Z!ng Sour Kicks.
Doll food, I tell him.
Doll food, he repeats.
Violet distributes a stack of cash amongst the four of us, she is our sugar mami.
I feel like Chief Keef. I make Cade take a photo of me with a stack of crisp ones, smiling like a Cheshire Cat.
It is still too early for anything really insane to happen.
The dancers wander aimlessly with their plastic bags of cash in tow.
Cade and I perform a lackluster hype routine for a girl who is lazily twerking on the side of the stage.
Some of the dancers are completely naked.
It is easy to tell who has a BBL and who doesn’t. The girls with BBLS don’t have any back fat.
Cade is the tallest and whitest person in the building. He might be the gayest. A dancer named Cookie sits on his lap. It’s her first night working. They share an awkward exchange before she wanders off.
I receive my first ever lap dance when Violet tells a dancer that it is my birthday. I don’t
remember anything, but there is a video where my mouth is agape like a fish, my eyes bulging
out of my skull.
My purse falls on the ground. I cannot stop laughing.
The lap dancer stops what she is doing to pick my bag off the ground and issues the warning to,
KEEP YOUR PURSE CLOSED
Bottoms Up is blurry, awash in neons purple, green, red, blue.
Cash is raining from the sky in the VIP section.
Jessie is close to falling asleep in her chair.
It is 3:30 am in Brooklyn, Illinois.
The night has only just begun here at Bottoms Up.
The dancers we saw in line, the ones with the perfectly laid weaves, are storming the stage.
A woman stands on her head while a man slips dollar bills into her panties. She starts to lose her
balance and is forced to execute a flawless back handspring. .
We cheer for her. This is like the Olympics.
A guy takes one look at Cade, who is so tall and white and gay and asks
WHERE DID HE COME FROM?, before flashing us an all gold grin.
This is our perfect Midwestern goodbye.
From the windows of the Jeep, the Arch arises over the river.
The Gateway to the West, glimmering and rotating on its axis. An optical illusion or a performance, just for us.
Have you ever been up there?, Cade asks.
Hell no, says Violet.
I look at Jessie, she is asleep.