Book Excerpt: From Aimee Bushong’s Rock’N’Pole

“Some dreams are worth taking your clothes off for,” says Aimee Bushong in her recently published memoir, Rock’N’Pole. Born in Aurora, Colorado, Bushong dreamed of performing for crowds across the world. These dreams have come true, though maybe not in the way Bushong’s teen self might have envisioned it. Bushong embodies an adventurous mindset and the self-reliance needed to be a rock ‘n’ roll musician while succeeding at it. Starting as a stripper among other occupations, such as nude art model, ESL teacher, and ski instructor, Rock’N’Pole documents her experiences and adventures over the past 13 years—balancing financial necessity and self-preservation while pursuing her dreams.

Excerpt from Rock ’N’ Pole

Charmaine was by far the top grossing dancer at Desires. Although the dancers rarely spoke of how much they each made, it wasn’t hard to determine who the moneymakers were. If you paid attention, which I did, you could see which dancers made the most trips back to the private dance room with a customer in tow, and how long they stayed there.

I observed Charmaine with fascination for weeks, like an anthropologist studying apes. Her approach was always the same. First, she glided up to her guest of choice and straddled his lap, placing her arms around his neck. Next, it seemed she made some small talk, although I couldn’t hear what she was saying. Then, she would lean in close and whisper into his ear. Within seconds, she was dismounting his lap and leading the now-mesmerized patron by the hand to the private dance room. It worked almost every time. Night after night, that was all she did—shepherded inebriated patsies back to her little red booth of sin.

She kept to herself and stayed away from the cliques that formed amongst the other girls. I asked a few of the more approachable dancers how it was that Charmaine sold so many private dances. They told me that she did more than the typical lap dance protocol, letting guys suck and lick her tits. There were rumors that she even had sex with some of the guys back in the small booths, which seemed a bit outlandish to me. Even the stealthiest of strippers wouldn’t have been able to pull off full penetration under the watchful eyes of the security cameras. But then I noticed that Charmaine always used the same booth for her dances, the one in the corner. I never saw her deviate. In fact, she would wait with a client until the corner booth was free. “She uses the corner booth because the security camera can’t reach that far, so she can do other things and not be seen,” another dancer told me when I inquired yet again about her impossible earnings. Whether she was doing illegal things or not, I never found out, nor did it concern me. What intrigued me most was how she was able to get all those guys back to the private booths in the first place.

Charmaine seemed smart. She never drank and rarely spoke to the other dancers, and given the amount of money she was raking in, she either was doing illegal things or she knew something I didn’t. An anthropologist can’t ask an ape why it behaves a certain way, but Charmaine was no ape, and I needed to know how she was pulling this off.

I finally mustered up the courage to ask her how she was selling so many dances. “What do you say to them?” I asked. What she told me changed everything I had learned at the clubs thus far.

She could have told me to fuck off, which is how most of the other dancers probably would have replied. However, Charmaine was surprisingly nice and matter of fact with her answer, not catty at all. She told me that after she introduces herself, she asks, “Are you having fun?” No matter what the guy’s answer, she then asks, “Do you wanna have more fun?”

“What do you mean by more fun?” she said they typically ask. Then she’d wrap her arms around the guy and press her body into his, whispering in his ear with hot breath something along the lines of, “I want to take you back to the other room and get naked for you. Then I want to rub my ass all over your cock until it gets really hard and have you lick my tits. Baby, I want to make you come.” No wonder she sold so many dances. It was a brilliant sales technique I had never thought of.

She also told me to never say the words “private dance” to a prospective customer because that was an automatic turn off. Going up to a guy and blatantly asking, “Hi, do you want a private dance?” only demonstrated that all you wanted was money. While that was true, guys go to strip clubs to be sold on the fantasy that these beautiful (club-specific) women really want to have sex with them. It may be a fantasy that, unless you’re a rock star or professional athlete, will most likely never come true, but it’s a fantasy nonetheless.

Charmaine’s technique got the guy wondering if she really wanted to do those things to him. She also told me that she never sat with guests, ever. Sitting and talking to guests took time, and at Desires, time was money. Unlike so many of the other dancers, she had no regular customers. Having regulars was a decent way to make money, but that meant spending hours having to talk to the same person because he was paying for your time. Plus, it took weeks or months to build up those kinds of relationships. It was bad enough having to listen to the litany of sexual fetishes and whiny confessions of loneliness back in the private dance room, and that was only for a few minutes at a time. Spending hours with a regular and feigning interest in their mundane and sometimes sad life didn’t seem worth the money to Charmaine, or to me. She had enlightened me.

“You have to be aggressive,” she told me, which made me think of a cheer I used to do during high school football games:

BE AGGRESSIVE

BE BE AGGRESSIVE

B—E—A—G—G—R—E—S—S—I—V—E!

Despite the hordes of guys I had slept with, I had never been a fan of dirty talk in the bedroom. It felt out of character for someone like me, who preferred laughing and making funny faces during sex to reciting a series of pornographic preludes. But if it meant increasing my sales to even half of Charmaine-sized proportions, I thought I could muster up a few dick references. I used to be a pretty good actress. I had made a whole acting class weep once. Surely, I could pull off what Charmaine had taught me. Then I could quit this nonsense sooner and focus solely on making music.

The very first time I crawled up on a patron’s lap and professed my desire to get his dick hard and rub my tits in his face, he agreed to a private dance, then another, and another. He bought three in a row. One hundred dollars in less than ten minutes. That was Feed the Kitty with a dime kind of money right there, and I only had to talk about sitting on the guy’s face, not actually do it. Whether he came or not, I do not recall. I was having my own internal orgasm at how much money I was going to be able to make with Charmaine’s private lesson. I lamented not having asked her from the get-go about how she turned and burned so many dances, but better late than never.

I made four hundred dollars in less than two hours that first night using Charmaine’s technique, and I didn’t have to sit and chit-chat with anyone—only recite the few seconds of naughty banter whispered with hot breath into patrons’ ears. Gone was the rule I had learned at the Silver Lounge about not sitting for more than five minutes with a customer. I now snickered to myself thinking about those poor misinformed dancers who were wasting countless minutes politely inquiring about guys’ jobs or how unusually hot or cold the weather had been lately. With Charmaine’s modus, I spent no more than 60 seconds with patrons to determine if I was going to close a sale. It was a business doing pleasure with them.

After a few weeks, the other dancers took notice of my increased cash flow and trips back to the private dance room, but unlike what Charmaine had done for me, I did not divulge my technique when asked. I simply said, “I don’t know. I guess the guys just like me.” I was not about to share her brilliant sales pitch with a roomful of competition. I was unsure why Charmaine taught me her technique. Maybe she already made enough money not to feel threatened by me, or perhaps she just liked me. She later invited me to have a threesome with her and her boyfriend as his birthday present, so it was probably the latter. I politely declined. Don’t shit where you eat, and all that.

Week after week, with each new guy I approached, the silly sexual monologue grew easier and more comfortable for me to recite. Soon it became rote, and my mission was crystal clear. With my newfound sales technique firmly in place, I made it my personal goal to Glengarry Glen Ross the salaries out of every drunken businessman, coke-head, nerd, divorcé, gang member, and freak who walked through those dirty, opaque doors. My new motto: ABL—Always Be Lap dancing.

Aimee Bushong’s Memoir can be found here. If you would like to learn more about Bushong’s life or how to get in contact, this is her website.

All images are taken from Aimee Bushong’s Website