I’m working in Chinatown today. They sell gigantic bags of oranges for 50 cents on Kearney Street. Asian oranges, too. My roommate Sue Lee grew up in Asia and has hands that intrinsically go into orange-cupping mode, like something left over from childhood. Like when you cup water, but tighter and closer to a sphere. And your thumbs are mobile so your thumbnails can cut through the orange grind.

Asian oranges are bigger than regular oranges, and the difference in color is more drastic between the peel and the fruit. But the thing about Asian oranges is just how cramped inside the orange slices are. The slices are growing into each other. They’re over-plump, oranges on steroids. The skin is bursting out from between the veins. The mini-orange at the top is trying to grow to take over the orange, and the regular orange is struggling back. You g et a tantric mess of orange limbs, entwisted and struggling for control.

There are three types of stores on Kearney: fruit stores, Pokémon stores and strip bars. even the strip bars are selling food, though. over half of them say in a single line on their signs: GREAT FOOD! GREAT GIRLS! or some kind of equalizing measure. i mean, we all know food and sex are linked, but why? and isn’t there something about waiting an hour after you eat to have sex, like swimming?

Never mind. I’m temping today.

***

There is no such thing as affordable housing in San Francisco. Assume the worst, and work backwards from there, ok? That’s how we deal with it. I can’t deal with the mundane full-time job trip, and I’m too poor not to, so I temp two weeks out of the month to pay rent and scale back on the food. My roommate Sue Lee is a stripper on Kearney Street. We each think the other’s job is despicable, but what are  you going to do? You need to pay rent. You always need to pay rent.

It’s one of these keep-moving-forward things. I don’t understand how Sue Lee can keep dancing. “Don’t you get tired of it, the same walls every day?” I ask, “the same boys jerking off to the same songs?”

“They change the songs,” she says. “We get to pick them. We make a mix.” Sue Lee loves to make mix tapes, even at home. She says she’s a musician who can’t play instruments. We have conversations where she’ll be making a mix of the conversation while it’s happening. You talk about the girl you like, she plays that Built to Spill song “Someone I Don’t Have To Talk To” (K Records, 1991). You talk about paying rent, she plays “Livin’ For the City” (Stevie Wonder, Motown, 1973). And when we talk about quitting our jobs and still maintaining a place, she puts on Laura Nyro’s version of “Gonna Take a Miracle” (live at the Fillmore West, Atlantic, 1968).

And when Sue Lee goes  to work, she wears this mask of mascara, and when I say mask I mean literally. She could be a super hero. She doesn’t look like herself when she puts all her make up on. She doesn’t even look Asian. French, maybe. At once very sophisticated and very sleazy. She could go in disguise to a Chinese restaurant and not get treated like a waitress, like she always does when we go out to dinner together and other customers are waiting for a table too.

I’ve been buying all my stuff in Chinatown lately. Buckets of oranges for fifty cents. I could live off oranges. I mean, I know. I have been living off oranges. Sue’s parents run a little kitsch store down the street from her strip bar. They don’t know she works there, of course, but also, we live in the Mission, a different neighborhood. It might as well be a different world. She only goes to visit them on holidays, the same times I fly back to Philly.

“Why don’t you ever visit them?” I ask one day. I’m walking her to work. We have just scuttled quickly past the frosted glass frame door of her parents’ store, super quick so they don’t see us.

Sue Lee won’t answer. She waits around the corner while I buy some food from them, an origami paper bucket of oranges. Outside again, I peel back the skin, and little white veins stick to my slice. Her mouth is trembling and I can tell she wants some, but she has to answer first. Like, she won’t even allow herself to ask for some.

Instead she tells me about the strip bar. This week is her week to make the music mix. Every week someone else gets to pick, and their ten favorite CDs are on repeat. Last week someone picked Portishead, “Nobody Loves Me,” “Glory Box,” and it ran the whole week, until Friday afternoon when a girl started to cry during the chorus of one song. Portishead could be the saddest music imaginable. Good to slow-dance to, Sue  Lee said, but how can anybody strip to trip-hop? All her songs were wild, guitarry songs. Bratmobile and the Rolling Stones. Songs that, when you shook your ass to them, you were afraid it would fly off.

“Damn,” I said. “You always tell me about these strip things, Sue Lee. How come you never invite me to your club?”

“You can come. If you got that kind of money you can come.” Sue Lee had this wicked, intellectual look in her eyes when she talked like that, like daring you to think of what she meant for real.

“Would you think less of me?”

She shrugged. “Probably.”

“Even if it was for an anthropological experiment? To see what the men are like?”

“You can just stand outside and see what the men are like. But you want to go in, don’t you.”

“It might be interesting.”

She sighed.

“You know, most of the people who go in aren’t sketchy old men? I can handle sketchy old men. Most of the people there are just regular boys, guys our age that could get a date if they wanted to. Not even frat guys. It’s just creepy that it’s come down to this, come down to nudie dancing as a means of sexual communication.”

“I needn’t go, if you’d rather I didn’t — ”

“You always sound so scientific. Whenever you talk it’s like it’s scientific,” she said.

“So can I?” I said.

“Why are you asking? Are you going as an anthropological experiment or do you want to jerk off?”

“What about both, how does both sound?”

Sue Lee’s eyes got really wide, vertically ovular instead of the normal horizontal, but only for a moment. Like a spark of something. For a second, I thought she was going to freak out. Then she stopped walking, looked at her wrist where a watch should have been, and then over at me. She asked if I knew what time it was. I said, a quarter to three.

She put a finger on her lips, calculating.

“Okay,” she said. “Come on.”

We ran down to the bay. The strip clubs were on the edge between Chinatown and North Beach, never more than five minutes from the bay. There were all these little fifty-foot long beaches around. The wind was freezing, but otherwise perfect for swimming.

She told me to get naked. I did, but not like that. She wasn’t watching me; as soon as she saw me start to do it for real she got naked too. We jumped in the ocean and swam for a little while, out just past where your feet can still touch the ground, leaping in and out of the water in somersaults. Susan Kim had long hair, ridiculously long hair. It was always back in a very thin ponytail, but in the water it opened into a glorious circle. Whenever she jumped, a giant rainbow of water flew from the tip of it. Her mascara swam all over her face but she didn’t notice. I barely noticed, either. The sun was high in the sky and the clouds were close to our faces and we were on the ocean, perhaps the most westward people in the world, the closest Americans to Japan right now. And because it was the ocean there were no buildings, and the sky felt like it was right over our heads.

We dressed quickly and went to the strip bar, still wet. Susan Kim was ten minutes late, but the guys at the door weren’t really worried. “This is my roommate,” she said. “Don’t comp him. Charge him double, if you can.”

The bouncer shrugged. He held out one massive land mine-sized hand.

I paid, and she disappeared. She came back a second later, asking me if I had any make up around. Hers had all washed out in the ocean. “Hell no,” I said. Were the other girls around, she asked the bouncer? He shook his head. They were all already on stage.

I sat in a booth and watched the other performers, already dancing behind the glass. There were a dozen or so booths , most of which faced the same direction as mine, and I could only see inside two or three of them. The booth next to me, which I could not see at all, had sporadic heavy thumping sounds in it, like someone was thrusting himself against the wall.

Directly across from me — the booths were in a semi-circle, and the stage was in between — there was an old Asian-type gentleman in a shirt that was nice, but definitely from a thrift store. He was balding, and had on a baseball cap, to look more low-key, I think, but he had one of those resolute faces that looked at once distinguished and lecherous. Like he was trying to be very honest and friendly about being at a strip bar, but he still knew he was at a strip bar. I realized at once he was Sue Lee ’s father.

And Sue Lee, who was standing at the curtains in a nipply bikini and no makeup at all, was about to make her entrance. The girls weren’t even really dancing, just strutting and cooing, mostly, and she could just walk in and pretend it was all pre-choreographed. But she didn’t. Sue Lee took one look in the booths, turned around and ran as fast as she could the other way. I’m sure I heard a door slam.

And I ran, too. For a second I thought about running after her, seeing if she was alright. But I’m not that dumb, I knew not to. Instead I ran down the street, down the impossibly steep hill of Kearney Street that Chinatown was built on. And I kept running, too, toward the ocean that opened up at the bottom of the hill.

Matthue Roth’s first book, Never Mind the Goldbergs, was just published. His second, Yom Kippur a Go-Go, was published by Cleis (It’s a memoir but it isn’t really true.) His most recent book, Candy In Action, was published by Soft Skull Press in 2007. He keeps a secret online diary at www.matthue.com.