You know, that novel you've been writing...?

**Well, it's been more than "3 years, hmm?" for me, but I thought I'd bring this pile of verbal bile out for the day, again about strippers. More of a newer draft, and it will change again and again, but here's draft part {}**
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Lucky was a candy cane stripper who Ryan and Louise had come across in Indiana somewhere, just outside Gary. Not much of a strip joint to speak of, but these places were scattered wildly all over. The less people, and less things to do, it seemed, the more of these little shacks rose up with no fury, only garnering a drink license and sometimes just the guilty grey promise of one. Calm driving by, not while inside.

On the trains, Lucky would soon be known as the one who shifted her eyes too many times when listening to Ryan and Louise talk of their rememberings -- the last town, the mean outskirts, the horror of the center place. Lucky's eyes keep forcing themselves to shutter closed -- back in the strip, back to working. She didn’t have a real problem with the job to tell the truth. Since Lucky was little, which was a time hard to believing, when she wasn’t exploding out of her sequined t-shirts...she pretended to be a stripper in her upstairs bedroom. All by herself, she’d dress up in her mother’s shawls and wrap herself in scarves like a Pompeii whore and she’d undo it all in perfect sweeping arpeggio time in front of her parents’ mirrored closets. No one ever came to find her, or caught her there in all those years. She’d make it with her stuffed animals without knowing what slots and tabs were involved in all that raucous motion or the particulars; it just felt comforting, good, less lonely. Or she’d do up the whole soap opera of the date, the affair with the boss, quite lewd for a girl of five, as her father stood outside, in the backyard below, making hamburgers. She had asked for cheese on hers, she could smell the bland, processed American square melting onto the burger, steaming, as she victimized her teddy bear, black and white dog, took them all to heaven with her. Within five minutes of meeting Louise, Lucky would animate these childhood tales to her, and top them off with the idea that she blamed television, the nighttime soap operas, but that she enjoyed the experiences, even then.

Lucky had been running after the train. Ryan was in the middle of falling asleep in Louise’s lap, mid-afternoon. It was one of those perfect moments, when the leaves were catching sun and you could smell it and they were swinging with just the proper amount of aggression. Ryan was too. He was a simple boy, but the way that his fists had of cupping like the angry infant he was onto Louise’s knees minded her well, and he slept wildly, still needing to touch when he was fast asleep. The breezes were kissing their foreheads, as the railway car door was open – in this territory, no one was around and seemed to care and they could meet up with some of Ryan’s old school mates down in Illinois. Like always, there were people passing, here and there, but when she finished running, Lucky knew she had found friends for sure. On a mission.

Louise was always watching for the world as it printed itself across people's faces. Lucky was no different. Out of breath when she joined their train car, Lucky was dressed in her pink undersized t-shirt, not washed properly. She was a mound of matted shit brown hair, too light for richness, spreading out from the corner of the picture frame. Pants jacked up, loose only at the shins. Tiniest loose bag on her shoulder and face still made up with drug store cosmetics on sale for this her premiere appearance in the world of the trains.

After she flashed the most desperate squeaky smile onto them, Lucky climbed into the railway car. Ryan awoke, manners instinctual, and helped her in, though the train was crawling like the dead as it usually did when passing through the lowlands. Lucky wasn’t flirtatious, though. She clearly thought Ryan a sweet looking boy as Louise did, but it was as if they were five years old and he was one of her father’s friends. Not proper. Lucky had declared to Louise that they were sisters from the get-go, with Louise not knowing why she needed to have one in a place such as this. She told them of her time in Gary, as they all had just come through. The strip club where she had worked since she was fifteen. All these places were like libraries, Lucky had convinced herself, as she chattered to Ryan and Louise at three hundred miles a minute. Yes, they were small town libraries, and these men that came were all scientists of a certain sort who paid their tuition to come into darkness and research.

They could find out all sorts of things from a girl like Lucky. She was an Aries, as so clearly worn when she had on nothing else. Her paganesque sign of the Ram planted in the beaded sweat droplets that nestled her neck when she did the deeds. They could see she was of German stock, her build, her bosom, the dangerous clarity between her wide-set blue eyes. It was Americana at work, Dresden style. A disarray of voices from the pills the other girls would give her sometimes made her dissociate like she were in front of a painting, but in the space that it occupied, the murky sorts of fields and thick figures blending more and more the closer you stepped towards it. The female form is like a painting, she said, becoming another girl every new day, and there were no paintings to look at in Gary. So, these men came to Lucky like a Greek Goddess of old, to study her form, to be true to the darkness clouding up in rotten smoke and to stay with her while she danced right past them in that darkness, following the paint as it spilled to the floor and tripped the goddess for good, twisting her ankle on the way down like always happens when little girls try to dance in their momma’s oversized shoes.

After more than an hour of this bullshit verbiage, Ryan stared off one too many times, forcing Louise to look Lucky straight in her wide eyes – Louise told her about the one time she went to a strip bar, when her older brother’s friend was getting married and they had no babysitter. She had used the bathroom there almost immediately, though would have preferred to hold it in, probably. She found her way and all the girls were most obliging, since she was girly enough in her big funny, fake fur coat, like a twenties do-gooder slumming it for a change in the night. She crouched above the dirty toilet to pee and heard two strippers, one asking the other if she wanted one of those pills. Lucky’s face sank with recognition at this phrasing. The only other thing that Louise remembered in that bathroom was the mound of colourful, cheap, used underwear that was piled outside the stalls like the stinking defeated dead from a roman battle of some kind, as the girls adjourned in the backstage/changing area. It might have been three feet high; all meshed together, worn like gypsies gone to hell, or some dark basement in Florida, whichever fell closer on that day.

Ryan squeezed Louise’s hand and Lucky looked outside the car for the first time, at the passing streets of the next town, and another strip bar, as cheap and bright and tiny as hers must have been. Lollipops. Lucky preferred the 1950’s vintage flair of Calendar Girls. Lucky’s eyes shifted to Ryan. He was fixated on Louise’s forearm, which was stretched across her lap, while she sat Indian style. It was as if Ryan was looking for a vein. But he then only held Louise's wrist. Ryan's eyes were testing some grand ideas to gently bite her wrists, his teeth shifting slightly, as he swept his fingers across and down Louise’s forearm, again, slowly, and again. Methodically, as he cracked a smile. Louise couldn’t help being in a state of sermon-like calm at this, as she looked straight with compassion through Lucky’s dubious policies, no light gesture as Lucky was still looking over at Ryan's artful game. Lucky wasn’t really looking at Ryan all this time, but at the kind of attention he gave. It wasn’t like a man’s, or any she’d seen recently. Those darling, infantile boys like him, they never made it in to Calendar Girls.

Lucky grew up through teenage weeds like a rotten rose pushing and showing itself to any available light, seeing again and again those boys after they gave up and became repetitive, lewd old men; or, what’s worse, those silent, morose types somewhere in between in age, who were trying to calculate their love of losing inside the blankness of a mind’s page, while watching Lucky strip down to her childhood limbs, swinging the umbilical shoelaces of her gaudy costume at their deadened, dim eye-lights. Fumbling for change, they would only see the girls’ supposed power over them in terms of vulnerability calculated through lack of age that would play out in years to come, when the obviousness of the change bouncing off the liquor-stained floor would grow complacent, silent in the taciturned dollar bills that work provided to them as they grew older. Their dollars silencing their minds, their tongues yelling audacities at any young thing to shake her ass in their faces. Their mouths would be silent no more. Lucky just sat there facing the air, turning occasionally back to Ryan and Louise, just letting them be. Louise sat, calmed by the tremor of her fertile boy’s silence, which still spun verses through fingers softening, lips touching;and any right-minded girl will tell you, there’s nothing more soothing than a young man’s vibrancy – brown fists of hair and the furtive conquer of his beating heart galloping towards the maze of oncoming towns.