Papa’s Hoes

I don’t know what quite led me to these circumstances. This sudden, catastrophic shift in career paths. One minute I’m battling letterboxes and rowdy chihuahuas for minimum wage, and the next I’m employed at a strip joint called Papa’s Hoes. Yes. That is the actual name. Not ironic. Not retro. Not even cleverly trashy. Just… Papa’s Hoes. The sign outside flickers like hope in halogen form. Sometimes “Papa’s” cuts out entirely, leaving only “hoes” glowing in the dark like a neon prophecy. Which feels strangely appropriate. I’m not a stripper myself. No, I merely clean the place. Living the dream. Every night I shuffle through rooms thick with perfume, sweat, glitter, nipple tassels and dwindling dignity, mop in hand, clearing up suspicious puddles while trying not to think too deeply about their origin story. The carpets squelch beneath my shoes, which never feels like a promising sign. The dressing room is a mist of spray tan. Feather boas hang from broken lockers like moulting tropical birds, half-drunk WKDs litter every surface, and in the corner sits a stiletto heel solemnly cradling a pile of sick like modern art. Somewhere in the background someone hollers, “GET YOUR TIT’S OUT, BECKY!” I have become invisible here. Overshadowed by beautiful women with impossible waists and lashes you could get lost in. At the centre of this terrifying glitter-covered hellscape stands Amy. Of course she is. My arch nemesis. Queen of the pole. She towers over me in skyscraper heels, all glossy lips and sharpened cheekbones, while I’m crouched beside a bin trying to scrape chewing gum off the floor with a plastic knife. “You missed a spot,” she says coolly, pointing one wolverine nail towards a puddle near the stage. The puddle itself physically makes me gag. “Thanks for that,” I mutter. Amy smiles the way rich villains do in films moments before plunging a knife into their victims, then stalks away on heels sharp enough to puncture concrete and possibly multiple internal organs too. You learn a lot when nobody notices you. People speak freely around cleaners, like we’re merely stains on a wall. And lately, the things I overhear have started settling under my skin in uncomfortable ways. The girls here are treated terribly. Papa — whoever he is — takes almost all of their money. The clientele mostly consists of hillbillies with nicotine-yellow moustaches and aggressively misogynistic opinions about women. Boundaries are crossed constantly. Hands wander. Voices rise. Bouncers pretend not to notice. Underneath all the glitter and laminated confidence lives something heavier than sadness. Fear. Real fear. But I keep my head down. I have one job: clean up messes. That’s it. Only… Papa fascinates me. Nobody ever sees him. His office door is permanently locked, a brass plaque hanging on the front reading: DO NOT DISTURB Naturally, I disturb it routinely. Sometimes I linger outside pretending to polish nearby surfaces while pressing my ear lightly against the wood. And every single time, I hear music drifting from inside. Not sleazy club music either. A trumpet. Or maybe a saxophone. Something soft and melancholy floating through the walls like smoke. It’s beautiful. Almost achingly so. A strange contrast to the ugliness breathing outside the office door. One evening I find a girl crying in the changing room while I sweep around her feet. Mascara streams down her cheeks in thick black rivers as she stares blankly into the mirror. “Are you okay?” I ask quietly. Technically I’ve been forbidden from speaking to the dancers under any circumstances, but rules start feeling flimsy when someone looks that broken. She lets out a weak laugh. “I just never imagined this for myself,” she says. “Working for pennies. Letting strangers grope me. Smiling through it.” “You can leave,” I suggest. She looks at me like I’ve suggested we tunnel out with teaspoons. “I can’t.” “Why not?” She leans closer, lowering her voice to a whisper. “I signed a contract.” “A contract?” “In blood.” I stop sweeping. “Oh wow.” “And at night,” she adds quietly, “they shackle us up.” She lifts a pair of fluffy pink handcuffs into the air. I stare at them solemnly. The fluff somehow transforms them from mildly ridiculous to genuinely sinister. Something shifts inside me then. A tiny fracture beginning to spread. Because beneath all the absurdity and glitter, something genuinely rotten is growing here, and suddenly I want to help these girls. I want to drag them out of this sordid little nightmare by their fluffy cuffs if I have to. Unfortunately, that exact moment Amy walks in. “Amanda,” she says. I immediately resume sweeping. “We’re a dancer down.” Oh no. Absolutely not. Every cell in my body reaches for a cardigan. “You think you could fill in?” I laugh instinctively. Pure force of habit. But Amy blinks those giant lashes at me and somehow, against all logic and self-preservation, I hear myself saying: “Yeah… sure.” What the actual fuck. I cannot pole dance for shit. For one, I have the upper body strength of a soggy breadstick. Also, I haven’t shaved my legs in over a week and I’m as pale as a vitamin-deficient ghost. Too late. Amy throws an outfit at me. I say outfit. It’s more like three bits of aggressive string held together by prayer. There’s no logical way this garment remains attached to a human body without divine intervention or industrial adhesive. Still, some deeply embarrassing part of me wants to impress. Mascara Girl helps with my makeup while Amy wrestles me into what can only be described as a cheese-string bikini. She steps back afterwards, squints critically at me for a long moment, then sighs. “It’ll have to do.” “Thank you, Simon Cowell.” When I finally catch sight of myself in the mirror, horror washes over me. I look awful. Not remotely sexy. I look like somebody dug up a substitute teacher and forced her into burlesque against her will. Then the music starts. And suddenly I’m onstage beneath blinding pink lights, gripping the pole like it personally offended me. The first few attempts are catastrophic. My skin squeaks violently against the chrome, and at one point I slide down so fast I briefly achieve friction-based enlightenment. But somewhere between the humiliation and adrenaline, something shifts. Not grace exactly — let’s not get carried away — but confidence. The crowd erupts anyway, apparently thrilled by the spectacle of a woman wrestling a chrome pole. Men start throwing money at me. Fistfuls of it. Notes rain around my body while a toothless hillbilly tucks a twenty-pound note into my thong with the reverence of placing flowers on a grave. And horrifyingly… I sort of understand the appeal. The attention. The power. The strange intoxicating rush of being seen. By the time I stumble offstage, sweating and half-concussed, thousands of pounds are hanging from my body. “Wow,” I breathe. “That was strangely invigorating.” Amy bursts out laughing. “And now,” she says, “I’m about to un-invigorate you.” She strips the money off me note by note, like feathers plucked from a chicken carcass. Every last pound disappears into her manicured hands before she finally stuffs a crumpled fiver back into my palm. “Don’t spend it all at once.” There’s something sinister about the way she says it. I stare at the note in disbelief. Five pounds. For public humiliation, partial nudity and what I strongly suspect is third-degree inner-thigh burn. No. No, this is wrong. Something finally snaps inside me. I follow Amy down the corridor, fury fizzing beneath my skin. Her stilettos stab sharply against the laminate flooring while I trail behind clutching a spray bottle like it’s a makeshift weapon. As Papa’s favourite dancer — or The Pole Princess, as he apparently calls her — Amy is the only girl allowed private meetings with him. She disappears into the office. The door doesn’t close fully. Naturally, I pretend to reorganise a completely unrelated fridge sitting outside the office like it has business being there. Inside, Amy giggles. “We’re making so much money, Papa,” she purrs. “Soon we’ll have enough to start our new lives together.” Excuse me? Then I hear wet kissing noises which make’s me physically shudder. “What about the girls?” Papa asks. It’s the first time I’ve heard his voice properly, and it is not what I expected. I’d imagined something deep and intimidating. Barry White territory. Instead it’s alarmingly close to David Beckham after a minor throat injury. But worse than that… I recognise it. That voice. The trumpet. Oh my God. Not a trumpet. A nose trumpet. Suddenly all the pieces click violently into place. I burst through the door. “Nick?!” Sure enough, there he is. Kylie’s ex-husband. Nick. The human equivalent of a damp dish rag. A man so aggressively beige he once made porridge look exciting. Except now he’s transformed. Gone are the sensible fleeces and apologetic loafers. In their place: fur coat, gold chains, cane, tiny sunglasses. Amy lounges smugly across his lap. “Amanda,” Nick sighs. “haven’t you got cum stains to scrub?” I’m so stunned my g-string gives way. “You’re Papa?!” Nick shrugs beneath his absurd fur collar like this is all perfectly reasonable behaviour. “The girls prefer mystery.” “You’re exploiting them.” “I’m employing them.” “You’re shackling them!” “Symbolically.” “The contracts are signed in blood!” “Printer ink ran out.” I stare at him in utter disbelief. “You need to let these girls go,” I snap. “All of them.” Nick laughs. Or squeaks. It’s genuinely hard to tell with Nick. “You can’t tell me what to do,” he says smugly. “I’m your boss.” Then he points his cane towards the corridor. “I think there’s a fridge that needs deep cleaning.” Something red descends over my vision then. Not anger exactly. Something older. More volcanic. One singular thought pounds through my skull: Get these girls out. And somehow… I do. Not all of them. That part hurts worst. Even with the doors wide open, some refuse to leave. A few sit silently at their dressing tables staring into mirrors beneath harsh bulbs while the club pulses around them. “Where else would we go?” one girl asks quietly. Another shrugs. “At least here we know our place.” That sentence lodges itself somewhere deep inside me and never fully leaves. Still, I manage to lead some of them out through the back alley beneath flickering neon lights and pile them into a battered old van. Mascara Girl cries the entire time while Amy screams after us from the doorway and Nick blasts his nose trumpet furiously somewhere in the distance like the world’s saddest jazz musician. For one glorious moment, I genuinely think we’ve won. Until the police pull us over. Blue lights flood the van. An officer approaches slowly. “We’ve had reports regarding Papa.” I actually laugh. “Oh thank God,” I say. “You’ve finally caught him.” But the officer just stares at me strangely. Then at the girls. Then at the bags of cash shoved beneath the seats. One girl lowers her eyes. Another starts crying. And suddenly… I understand. Amy and Nick have set me up. “No,” I whisper. The handcuffs click around my wrists. Cold. Final. “I’m rescuing them,” I insist desperately. The officer sighs tiredly. “They all say that.” “But I’m literally a woman!” “Means nothing these days.” “I’m not Papa.” And somehow, that’s how I end up in prison for crimes committed by a glorified penguin in a fur coat communicating primarily through nasal-based instruments. Life truly is extraordinary. Now I sit alone in my cell most nights staring at damp walls that smell faintly of bleach and boiled cabbage. Sometimes I think about the girls who escaped. Sometimes I think about the ones who stayed. That part haunts me most. Even with the doors wide open, some people still couldn’t imagine life outside the cage. Maybe because the cage had become familiar. Maybe because freedom feels terrifying once somebody’s spent long enough convincing you the cage feels safer. And maybe the bad guys really do win sometimes. Maybe they put on fur coats and continue collecting money while somebody else takes the fall. Late at night, when the prison finally quietens, I sometimes hear faint music echoing through the pipes. Soft. Melancholy. A trumpet. Or maybe just somebody snoring strangely. Either way… It sounds exactly like freedom slipping further away.