jenna

The first surprise is Jenna’s hipster style: thick-framed black glasses, dirty blonde hair cut in short straight bangs, some sort of vintage fur-type coat, and chunky shoes. I haven’t seen that look before in Springfield. 

The second surprise is that I am driving her to pick up her new Audi in Connecticut. I wonder what someone her age, dressed like that, living in that dilapidated building in that run-down neighborhood, might do for a living that she could afford an Audi. So I ask.

The third surprise was that she was a dancer. The few dancers I have known could never afford an Audi. I wonder what style of dance and if she performs with some well-known musical act or something. So I ask.

The fourth surprise is that by “dancer,” she means “stripper.” It never occurred to me. My one experience with stripping occurred when I was 18 years old at my brother-in-law’s bachelor party. I threw up. Stripping is not the first thing I think of when someone says, “I dance.”

The fifth surprise is that when she tells me she is a stripper, I catch myself looking up into the rearview mirror as she stares down absently at her phone screen and thinking, “Hmm, really? You? Wouldn’t have guessed it?” Other than noting her style, I hadn’t been conscious of taking in, let alone appraising her appearance in such a crass and shallow way. I wonder if I always do that without realizing it. But I say, “You must be doing pretty well if you’re picking up a new Audi.”

The sixth surprise is that, yes, she made $15,000 by stripping in November alone. Now, I am reeling, truly baffled, fully soaked in the fathomless ocean of my ignorance. What kind of stripping does she do to make $15K in one month!? What I say is: “You must be really good. Or is that typical?”

The seventh surprise is that, no, by her own account, she’s not that good. But she does know how to talk, and that’s something the younger girls don’t know how to do. It never occurred to me that talk was an essential part of successful stripping. I mean, what kind of talk? Like conversation? Or dirty talk? The gears jam in my mind. This question I cannot manage to ask. So, as our chat trickles to silence for the half-hour ride, I ponder what she’s told me.

I spent three decades as a literature professor, dedicated—I’d have said—to the power of words. But during that time, I encountered nothing that conveyed as vividly as Jenna’s story the depths of human need that can be satisfied only by words. Her customers may think they’ve come for nudity, but she knows they are paying for communication. A poet once wrote, “it is difficult to get the news of the world from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.” I’m not claiming my car conversation rises to the level of poetry. But people sure seem eager to talk and to listen, to float, free and weightless but tethered together by language. And so every ride presents a fresh, concrete opportunity to revel in and share that power of words I’d spent so many years circling in studious but passive admiration.  

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