After My Dream... and My Next Dollar...

So with me it always comes back to money.  I need money to get my manuscript edited and copy-edited, for starters.  I also need money to keep from having to decide if I’d rather go hungry or have my phone shut off for three days this week.  My tax return should be arriving around the fourteenth (only Valentine’s Day gift I’ve ever needed) but after I pay the city the taxes I owe them (last time I checked I was already paying to live here… five hundred dollars… every single month…) I’m only gonna have four hundred and some change… enough to pay off my school, either of my two bill collectors, or get some tattoos and start saving for my move this summer, not all three.

So I pray.  Dear God, please give me protection as I seek the money I want,

Patience as I survive off the money I have,

And faith as I  know that you will always provide me with the money I need

But how do those sayings go?  Trust in God but tie up your camel…  God helps those that help themselves…

So I plot.  I could do it the ‘fast’ way, but little white girls from the heights (Cleveland term meaning ‘not the hood’) don’t sell crack (or pills or heroine.)  People who don’t smoke weed don’t sell weed.  I could try boosting but everyone I know who’s ever done that got caught eventually.  So I’m left with the same two options.

Option one is the slow way, work two legit jobs.  I’ve done it.  From June to September, I worked six days a week, and on four of those days I would leave before seven a.m. and get home around midnight.  I put up with a ridiculous amount of bullshit… shouting matches with customers (do you know how hard it is to please some of these heights people?  We could suck their dick and hand them a balloon and some of them would still be complaining that the fries weren’t hot enough)  a manager calling me a cunt, another manager telling me to scrub the walls, which were not even dirty… and after all that, after those four months, I was able to pay my bills (and not all of them, not the utilities and certainly not the collectors, just the ones I pay on a regular basis) and save a little bit less than two thousand dollars.

Option two is stripping.  And this comes with its share of practical dilemmas, too.  I’m not thick enough for the black clubs, not quite skinny enough for the white clubs (but give me three days with nothing but some off-brand oatmeal and that might change.)  I don’t have a car so that means finding and paying for a ride, on top of paying the club, the DJ, and perhaps the floor guy for the privilege of coming to work each night.  Oh, and my family doesn’t know, and believe it or not I’m not exactly crazy about dancing naked on top of strange men. 

But when I was dancing I used to get money… not as much as the top girls and certainly not as much as strippers made back in the day (in Vegas I was cool with a girl who’d been in the game twelve years.  She said they used to easily make a thousand dollars on a weeknight before Bush came into office.)  But I got money though, on my best few nights, eight to eleven hundred, sometimes eight to eleven hundred in a week, on my worst weeks, maybe three or four hundred, but right now I’m getting checks for less than four hundred dollars twice a month.

And I hope this doesn’t sound like complaining… because it’s not.  I am thankful for my life, and I know that as long as I have life I still have a chance.  This is really just me thinking out loud, maybe it’s also me documenting my struggles so that when I do become rich (not if, when) I won’t be like those that romanticize poverty (I read in a magazine that Lady Gaga does this) or forget they were ever poor (like this girl I know was on public assistance until she married a rich man twice her age, and then had the nerve to talk about me stripping… but I digress…)

And I hope it doesn’t sound hypocritical, talking about God and tricks on the same page.  I can remember a conversation I had with this dude who had a Virgin Mary tatted on his chest.  He said he didn’t wanna be a hypocrite so he was gonna start going to church after he was done… doing what?  Selling just enough drugs to buy liquor and fake jewelry and take pictures of some money on a cell phone?  Messing with as many females as he could?  He sure wasn’t a G and still definitely aint, even though now he’s done some shit that’s got the streets, the law, and God ready to handle his ass… but again I digress.

As for me, I guess I’m gonna be working on getting some religion and at the same time working on my abs so I can get up in a good club and make some money.

Because if I don’t, I’ll only be able to juggle these bills for so long before something happens and I end up with an eviction notice on my door.

And if I do, I just might be able to see my name on the cover of a book… who knows.

Either way, I’m not staying here.