I danced at Billy’s for five years. I started a month after my twenty-second birthday and stopped a few weeks before the bikini-top rule came in, which I would like to say I quit over but the truth is I had finished grad school and got a job and that was that.

I want to say a few things about the place, because every time I read something about Billy’s online, the people writing it have either never been or have only been once, as a thing to do on a stag weekend, and the things they say are wrong in small ways that add up.

First: it was a job. It was a good job. I made more money than my friends with proper internships. I worked five-hour shifts and went home and read for school and nobody at school knew, not because I was hiding it but because it never came up the way bartending never comes up. Second: Milton was a businessman and not a saint, but he ran the place straight. The rules were the rules. If a customer broke them he was out, no second chance, and the bouncer was a guy named Carl who treated us like we were his nieces, which was sweet and also occasionally annoying.

Third: the regulars. There is a thing people get wrong about strip clubs which is that they imagine the customers want something from you all the time. At Billy’s they mostly wanted to be left alone with their beer and have someone occasionally nod at them, and the nod was the transaction, and the transaction was honored on both sides. I knew a man named David who came in every Wednesday after his shift at a hospital across town and we talked about books because he had read everything. He gave me a copy of The Moviegoer that I still own. He died in 2008. I went to the funeral.

Fourth: yes, the Joy Division conversation happened. It was me. It was not romantic and it was not weird. He was a longshoreman and he had opinions about Closer that were better than most music critics’ and we talked between sets for an hour. That was the night.

Anyway. I miss it. Not the way the men miss it — I see what they write and it is mostly about themselves — but in a quieter way. I miss the dressing room. I miss the popcorn. I miss earning a living in a room where everyone had agreed on what we were doing.