Confessions of a Rose Girl

When my friend Allison, a women’s studies major, told me with her eyebrows wagging that she made eighty bucks in three hours with a most interesting night job, I was shocked. “How could you?” I cried. “I don’t care what Camille Paglia says— feminism and stripping do not mix!”

“Like I’d ever,” Allison sniffed and lifted up her gypsy skirt to reveal her hirsute calves to reassure me. “I’m selling roses in the bars and we need another vendor. Want in?”

That kind of money was three times what I made tutoring freshman English; who wouldn’t be intrigued? Allison introduced me to her boss, who assured me I didn’t have to wear revealing clothes or otherwise exploit myself, but since most of my money would come from tips, she strongly suggested that I find something else to wear than my daily uniform of old Dickies’ cutoffs and thrift store Superman t-shirt.

While I could handle the whole “looking like a girl” thing, I was not prepared for what I had to sell. After looking me over and asking me if I was a felon, the gruff woman we all called Boss Rose plunked down an enormous basket in front of me. It was stuffed with not only lush, long-stemmed hothouse specimens, but also artificial jobbies that lit up, pairs of panties rolled to resemble blossoms and—apparently a favorite among the bikers—leather roses. I understood that taking this job would mean I was purveying the hideously tacky.

Which is only one of the reasons I told my mother I’d gotten a job as a nighttime shelver at the science library. Another reason was that the summer before, when I’d worked at a pizza place, she’d sent me weekly newspaper clippings of every crime against a delivery person in the western hemisphere. Not that lying could calm her anxiety. “Do you know how may perverts hang out in libraries? Don’t talk to anyone!”

It wasn’t just being out at night in Tucson, AZ — a town not known for its clean, well-lighted places—that worried my mother about me. As a creative writing major in my second senior year of college, I had already given my parents worthy reason to fear for my future. If my mother knew I was spending my evenings sauntering in and out of fifteen to twenty bars a night, she would have insisted I come home and go to manicuring school like her friend Barb’s daughter.

“She has her own salon in Scottsdale now! With those fancy massage chairs! Is it so bad to have something to fall back on?”

Let’s make it clearer: Selling roses in bars just wasn’t a job for a nice Jewish girl from the suburbs. Except I already knew that being nice and from the suburbs was no way to become a writer. As a poster child for middle-class angst, I had always longed for experiences beyond the strip mall, to take risks bigger than stealing a four-pack of wine coolers from the back room of Safeway, to scuff up my white Keds in the parking lot grit of the real world. Even college, with its frat parties and endless lectures, felt like a holding pen. I wanted to be Jack Kerouac with ovaries, a straight female Allen Ginsburg, Emily Dickinson without the agoraphobia. But I also didn’t want to end up living next to William Burroughs in a fleabag motel. “You can always live at home. You already have a room of your own here!”

My new job was a gentle way for me to stick a toe into the scary, unknown places my mother had always warned me about. Wearing a floppy hat, hippie dresses and swinging a basket of flowers, I had entrée to places I didn’t belong: Cowboy saloons full of black-hatted couples two-stepping to Garth Brooks. Beer gardens broadcasting seven simultaneous soccer matches in as many languages. Biker haunts that I suspected doubled as meth labs. Other than conducting business, I didn’t make much conversation, not just because my mother had taken up residence in my brain (“Don’t you think you should wash your hands after handling that guy’s money?”) but because I was so busy observing how people interacted. I thought of myself as a sidewalk social scientist getting a crash course in street smarts.

A few things I learned in the rose trade: Fumbling with the change for a five on a $3.75 rose increases the likelihood of getting to keep it; Unless it’s beer, trying to sell anything to a man watching a football game is pointless; Promising to sing a song at the karaoke bar if the room buys a dozen roses is an excellent sales strategy (although next time you may have to promise not to sing).; Strip clubs are a fine place to sit down and drink a ginger ale without being hit on, since clothing makes you invisible; Giving a free rose or two to the bouncers and door people ensures that you can park illegally and make it back to your car alive.

If the scene in any spot was too sketchy and/or my wares were wilting, I simply left. I slid in and out of those worlds but was never of them, though I watched the drunks and hookers and drug dealers live out their dramas with both eyes open. One time, a man bought a dozen roses for his date only to see their heads ripped off and be showered by their petals seconds later. A couple of times women were so excited by their panty roses they shucked their drawers and tried them on then and there (why yes, as a matter of fact, it was at the strip club). I sold a pair of leather roses to a lovely couple celebrating their 30th anniversary, and colluded with a guy who asked me to hide an engagement ring in the petals of a blue light-up rose. I even accepted one date from a customer, an extremely hot tattoo artist with an Irish brogue who took me out for Mexican food on his motorcycle. (No, Mom, I didn’t wear a helmet. But I did meet him in front of the library instead of giving him my address.)

Although some nights were so slow I’d be lucky to cover my gas, the money I made kept me independent, and hanging out on the edgier side of life somehow gave me the courage to push my own closer to where I wanted it to be. Eventually I left the suburbs for good; my mother must have been terrified for me, but she let me go. I stopped talking about how I wanted to be a writer and started writing.

With two small kids I’m not often out in the bars these days, but once in a while I’ll see a young woman schlepping a basket or a bucket of roses and trying to keep a smile on as people jostle her. The price of hothouse roses have gone up, but it’s always still a figure that’s awkward and uneven. I buy two, one for me and one for her, and of course, I let her keep the change.

Jessica Leigh Lebos is the editor of skirt! Savannah/HHI, which is her absolute dream job. Her mother is really proud of her but likes to remind her that her own daughter will grow up and do scary things that she will not tell her mother about.

~Jessica Leigh Lebos