Strip: Diets & Lipo

He drew circles under our bums. “More and more young girls like you are coming in.” “We can’t live like this anymore,” Rilke said. “We’ve tried diet and exercise.”

How can I write about sex, love and dating without sharing a little about dieting and body image? Taken from a chapter in my memoir, Strip: a glimpse into the lengths Rilke and I went to attain ‘perfect’ bodies in our 20s.

Recorded at Book Soup in L.A. Double click red button to watch.

At the strip club my sister Rilke and I tried a lot of diets.

The Rice Krispie diet. We’d buy marshmallows, butter and Rice Krispie cereal, melting the butter on the stove and stirring it all together. We’d ask people if they’d make them for us, drive to the valley and Ed Debevick’s on La Cienega Boulevard for them. Each one had a different consistency. It had to do with the ratio of marshmallows to butter and temperature. Too many marshmallows, not enough butter, not enough marshmallows, stale Rice Krispies.

One time we made them on acid. That was the best batch ever, but we didn’t really like acid so we didn’t do that again.

The AM/PM soft serve ice-cream diet. Allowing ourselves two trips a day to the AM/PM gas station across the street from the Church of Scientology. We tried other AM/PM locations but the consistency was wrong. We’d pull down on the lever of that machine, filling the cup as high as we could with chocolate and vanilla mixed together, then an extra dab of just chocolate on top.

The potato diet. Peeling a dozen potatoes at a time. Boil, cut, fry. We ate six a day with ketchup and I Can’t Believe it’s Not Butter spray.

The egg white diet. Egg whites, as many as we wanted all week, and one chocolate cake each on the weekend.

We gained weight on most of the diets. The girls in the strip club even said we gained weight, that’s when we tried Weight Watchers.

“You have to be a certain weight to join,” the lady said as she weighed us in. “You don’t qualify.”

We went to another location where we arrived with weights strapped to our ankles and bandaged to our stomachs and wore baggy sweatshirts. That worked.

The following week, on weigh-in day, we didn’t wear the weights.

“This is astonishing,” the lady said, as she adjusted the scale. “You both lost ten pounds.”

Weight Watchers was very hard. We couldn’t keep to the point system and were hungry all the time. We weren’t allowed frozen yogurt, too many points. That was a problem because we lived for frozen yogurt. Calling in to Penguins and The Big Chill every morning to hear the recorded message.

“Today, Tuesday, December 8th, the flavors of the day are peppermint palm, vanilla bean...”

We drove an hour every day from Los Feliz to Westwood, and if the flavors in the valley were good, then to Studio City. Cookies N’ Cream and Heath Bar Crunch meant two trips.

We sat in the parking lot in our 4Runner that we shared. We’d traded in our two matching Tercels for the one car since we went everywhere together. Sometimes we’d be so full from the frozen yogurt we’d just take a nap in front of Penguins. Wake up, go home, set our hair in rollers, put on our blue bathrobes and head to the strip club. On the way, we’d put in our teeth-bleaching trays, spitting out the excess bleach in the empty frozen yogurt cup.

The yogurt diet wasn’t working. We talked to Athena at the strip club. She had a butt like Ashley Grant.

“What’s your workout routine?” we asked her.

“Workout? Meth and lipo,” she said.

Three months later Rilke and I were recovering from liposuction on our bums. All the other girls at the strip club had done something, not just Athena. We just couldn’t live with the way our bums looked any longer.

We’d found Dr. Renisch in the LA Weekly, voted one of the top ten liposuction doctors in LA. We had to wait two months for an appointment. For the consultation we stood naked while Dr. Renisch asked us, “What exactly are you not happy with?”

“The under part,” I said. “You see how there’s no line separating the bum from the hamstring?”

“I see,” he said, taking a purple marker out of his breast pocket. “I could do a little here and here.” He drew circles under our bums. “More and more young girls like you are coming in.”

“We can’t live like this anymore,” Rilke said. “We’ve tried diet and exercise.”

“And my upper arms,” I said. “I’m very unhappy with them.”

He drew purple circles on my arms. The nurse came in and took pictures. “You will need someone to help you home and take care of you the first few days,” the nurse said. “And you’ll need to wear a girdle for three weeks while you heal.”

Three weeks later, with the girdles off, we stood on the rim of the bathtub, inspecting our butts in the mirror above the sink.

“We have a line under our butt,” Rilke said. “It’s beautiful.”

The thing is, after lipo, while we were healing we gained weight. The result gave us a muffin-top effect. Extra weight around the hip area above the butt.

“We should have had Dr. Renisch point that needle up while we were at it,” I said. “What’s wrong with us? I can’t believe we didn’t do that.”

We were very upset with ourselves.

“Seven pounds by the end of the month,” we agreed. “Nothing but an apple for breakfast, one cup of sticky rice for lunch, and a chicken breast for dinner. And if we’re really starving and feel like we’re going to run to Lucky’s for cake, rice cakes. But only in an emergency.”

By day ten we were ordering sundaes at the McDonald’s drive thru.

“Hold the ice cream, nuts, cherries and whip cream,” I told the woman in the window.

“Just the caramel?” the lady would ask.

“That’s right, just caramel.”

We sat in the McDonald’s lot at Vermont and Santa Monica in between Home Depot and a porn theater. Debbie Does Dallas was playing. Eating our warm cup of caramel, Rilke said, “We need a jump start to lose a few pounds right away.”

“Let’s ask Athena about her meth diet,” I said.

“That’s a good idea, she’s gotta have speed. You can hardly get her out of that bathroom, and after work she’s always at the laundromat.”

“We’re probably, like, the only girls who haven’t tried it. We’ll do it for one week and one week only, just to get rid of the muffin top.”

We didn’t diet anymore once we got on speed. Eating wasn’t interesting, not even frozen yogurt.

Rilke on the set of Showgirls before we met Dr. Renisch

Summer of Men will return with more men next week.

To read another excerpt about my first time being a call girl go here.