(21/32) “Every once in a while when I was dancing, guys would...

(21/32) “Every once in a while when I was dancing, guys would ask me if I did bachelor parties. And I always said ‘no,’ because I knew they wanted me to strip. But I wasn’t stupid. I knew that dancing wasn’t going to last forever. So when things fell apart with Carmine, I started saying ‘yes.’ It was all about money. A good GoGo dancer could make $100 in tips over a four-hour shift.  But burlesque paid $150, and your set only lasted eighteen minutes. My first gig was at a volunteer firehouse in Long Island. I was so nervous that I had to pee every five minutes. And I kept having to stop the performance while they drove away on calls. But I must have done something right, because they booked me again on the spot. And the captain drove me all the way back to New York with the siren going. I decided right then to make a career out of it. The first person I told was Oscar. We were having a drink one night, like we always did, and I told him I was thinking about doing burlesque. But there was only one problem: ‘Stephanie’ wasn’t sexy enough for burlesque, so I needed a new name. Oscar tried to help me come up with ideas. He kept sipping on his drink, and thinking real hard, but nothing was coming. Then after a few minutes, he slammed his glass down on the table and said: ‘Tanqueray.’ It sounded perfect to me. But that was the last thing that Oscar ever gave me. The next month he quit taking his blood pressure medication because he wanted to get a hard on for a stripper named Crystal Blue. And he ended up having a stroke. He lived for a few weeks after that. He couldn’t move much. And he could barely speak. But every day I visited him in the hospital. I put the word out to all the other girls, but none of them came. In the end I was the only one there. He started crying on the night before he died, because I think he knew he was close. And nobody had come to see him. All those years, all those chocolates, and all those silver dollars. They hadn’t bought him a thing.  He died completely alone.”
The Tanqueray Trust: https://bit.ly/2ZUjifW