On the complexities of DJing with a naked stripper in the booth
Chapter 3
Girls aren’t supposed to be in the DJ booth. It says so right there on the torn and curling sign duct-taped to the wall next to the mixing board: “No dancers in the DJ booth. Don’t distract the DJs!”
And yet, here comes Naomi. She pops up the booth’s two steps, then hurls her khaki duffel bag into the dusty blackness beneath the desk. Naomi then peels off her sheer, red bodysuit as well as the matching eye patch that passes for her panties.
I’ve narrowed my eyes on the stage and the iMac screen in front of me. It takes me a beat to notice she’s naked. Naked in the DJ booth. Naked – with me in the DJ booth, which is little bigger than a coat closet.
I am the last to carry a nun’s ruler. Still, I’m inclined to note here that Naomi has, in a matter of seconds, trampled not one, but two of the commandments rolled off a laser printer long ago by Sizzle Haven’s management. First, Naomi, a dancer, has indeed set foot inside the DJ booth. Second, she’s naked – which is absofuckinglutely distracting the goddamned DJ.
Why is this happening? Because Naomi is Naomi. She’s too preoccupied to notice that sign above her head. Like just about everyone else in this club, Naomi’s trying to manage her own personal Fukushima nuclear meltdown, which unfolds day after day inside her skull.
Which is to say Naomi’s not trying to be an asshole. She’s trying to get the job done, in her own way, the best she can. I get it. Some days, I can’t be bothered to read the fucking sign either, no matter what it reads or where it’s posted.
Naomi is one of Sizzle Haven’s biggest earners. That’s why she gets away with these shenanigans. It’s all the more impressive because she’s not one of those 22-year-old gazelles, all legs to their armpits, who too often pass for conventional beauty in strip clubs like this.
No, Naomi’s made entirely of hips and bust. It’s as though she rolled off a Detroit factory line in the early ’50s – all curves, raw power under the hood. The whole package has a way of pinning men to their seat backs until they can’t help but crack their wallets. The woman is unstoppable.
I’m trying to accomplish three things at once: Keep one eye on the stage. Keep the other on the song counting down in the DJ app. And make sure my finger’s on the crossfader corresponding to the correct channel. If I get any of this wrong, the club could go silent. Dead. The only thing worse than dead air in a strip club is a police raid. I’m a little preoccupied.
“Is she… Oh God, she is – she’s growling,” Adrian said. “She’s actually growling.”
Naomi (still naked!) is shining her iPhone’s flashlight into her duffel bag, digging for a pair of black fishnet stockings. “Aha!” she yelps, then begins picking apart the fishnets from a sinewy tangle of stripperware.
She glances my way and winks. “Costume change,” she says. "Got a little sweaty.”
Then Naomi bends over and begins to pogo on her left leg while wrestling her freshly unknotted fishnets over her right ankle, calf, thigh. Up and down she goes, bobbing and wobbling in a space where there’s no room at all to bobble and wobble.
With each leap, her right tit brushes my bare elbow, which is sticking out of a Sex Pistols t-shirt. The fishnets will be followed by an equally toilsome battle to stretch on two thigh-high, stiletto-heeled boots of the glistening PVC variety.
It’s starting to appear Naomi, still topless and ricocheting around the booth, could go either way. She may teeter straight out of the booth, tumbling down its two steps to the hard floor. Just as likely, a mostly naked stripper may be about to land on me as I start barking into the mic while switching songs. Either way, there’s little I can do. I’ve run out of hands.
Against all odds, Naomi finds her center. Still bouncing into her boot, she explains, in huffing fits and starts, how she came to be here with me in the booth.
“I’m ADD as fuck,” she says. “I can never remember my padlock combination. I always, always forget it. At the end of the night, someone has to come in with these big-ass bolt cutters and chop the thing off my dressing room locker.”
“It’s so fucking embarrassing!” Naomi continues, “I keep buying new locks, but I’ll never remember the combination. Never! So I hope you don’t mind – I’m just gonna keep my shit in here for now.”
It occurs to me that I don’t mind a bit.
Naomi and I have come a long way since I started DJing at Sizzle Haven. Only two weeks ago, Adrian, the club’s head DJ, had been training me. I unwittingly played the wrong song during Naomi’s stage set. Adrian and I glanced up from our iMac to find her staring us down from the stage, lips peeled, fists clenched.
“Is she… Oh God, she is – she’s growling,” Adrian said. “She’s actually growling. Get her off the stage, man! Get her down!”
I grabbed the mouse and dragged a new song into the deck. Adrian leaned across my lap and pressed his lips to the foam microphone cover.
“Ooookaaaay!” he offered, half exasperated, half resigned. (This, I’d later learn, eventually becomes the default mental posture of every strip club DJ.)
“There’s… Naomi! Let’s give it up for Naomi, yeah?”
An anemic and uneven applause pattered across the club’s floor. Naomi, still snarling, made her exit stage left.
Now, with Naomi’s pink and blurred body bouncing in my peripheral vision, I’m grateful we’ve moved past that difficult moment.
I tell her I get what she’s saying more than she knows.
“I’m ADD as fuck, too,” I say. I’m still staring at the screen. My finger attacks our rattly Amazon Basics mouse wheel until I find the songs I’m looking for.
“Locker combinations are my sworn enemy,” I offer, I suppose as some kind of reassurance.
“Jesus, anything like that — since I was a kid,” I hear myself saying. “Passwords, too. Six months after I move to a new house I’m still checking a note on my phone to make sure I’m not fucking up my own address. I had no idea what was going on until a doc clued me in a few years ago.”
Naomi nods like she’s listening to a Southern Baptist sermon. “Yup!” she says, flashing a satisfied grin as her foot – finally! – settles into the right boot’s heel. She rolls its zipper up her thigh.
Her tongue’s tip pokes sideways as she begins the fight again, bouncing her way into the left boot.
This won’t be the last time Naomi and I bond over common neurological quirks.
Having Naomi in the booth while I run stages is far less distracting than I’d expected. Her insurgent boob, still occasionally tickling my arm, has somehow receded into a distant part of my consciousness, the way the club’s pounding hip-hop drowns out most of the girls’ chatter beyond the booth.
You get to a point in this job where you don’t notice the boobs and other body parts so much as the people they’re attached to. I’m new enough around here to find myself amused by the naked woman pulling on thigh-highs here in my tiny workspace. Maybe that never goes away. And yet, what once would have dropped the jaw and imploded the mind has become a new normal.
People arch an eyebrow when I tell them working as a strip club DJ isn’t half the sexy gig they make it out to be. Perhaps you have to be there – not leering at the stage, but cranking music night after night. All these exposed personalities, attached to exposed bodies, swirling around you.
Naomi pulls a black, sparkly and sheer fishnet bodysuit over her head. Its neckline plunges past her belly button. She adjusts her tits, readying them for battle.
Then she leaps from the booth, turns to me and smiles.
“Thanks again for letting me hang out and keep my shit here,” she says before vanishing into the club’s dark void.
“I’m gonna go make some fucking money.”
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