JP: There are two major incidents in Egyptian Exotica in which you experienced tension because you refused to have sex with a client. In the first one, you were potentially in danger.
RZ: I was in San Francisco, and I was working in a club that was supposed to be upscale. And a dancer that I worked with and I went to an after-hours club and she saw one of the managers there, and another regular client. The manager basically told us that he would be willing to pay us money if we danced at this man's place, this regular's place. This doctor named Peter from the Midwest. So we went over there, and I was a little hesitant, because I'd never done anything like that; I'd never gone outside of the club and danced. But I did anyway because the girl I was with sort of pressured me, and I was like, "what the hell, OK." And, you know, there were a lot of drugs and stuff. And I sort of stayed and I stayed and I stayed, and I felt uncomfortable because we weren't getting paid, and the girl I was with was trying to pursue a relationship with the doctor, I dunno, trying to marry him or something, I didn't know what was going on. She was definitely trying to get him to be more of a regular than he already was. And I felt uncomfortable. I didn't know this at the time, but I'm pretty sure she had promised them sex, and I didn't know until I was ready to leave, and the guy tells her, "What do you mean, you said you would do more." I didn't know anything about it until that point. So I felt that we were owed a little bit of money, since we had been there for, I dunno, five hours, six hours, maybe a little longer.
JP: He got pretty threatening?
RZ: He pulled out a gun. He was really, really high at the time. Earlier in the night, I had been asking him when we were going to get paid, and he said, "here, take all of my money," so I did, and I took it into the bathroom, and I kept it hidden. And the girl I was with at the time said they were going to pay us anyway, and I told her I wasn't sure if I trusted the guy.
So when we came down, and I was getting ready to leave, the guy said to give him his money, since I wasn't willing to do any more with him. And he took a gun, and put it in my face. So I gave him part of the money. Looking back on it now, keeping part of the money was a really stupid thing to do. But at the time, I wasn't willing to spend all those hours with those people and not get any money. It would've been a complete waste of our time. I wasn't thinking rationally. But I'm glad we got paid and I'm glad I'm safe. Scary time.
JP: What about the time in New Orleans?
RZ: Well, I had definitely gone from upscale to way downscale at that point. I was working at a very, very… I'm trying to find a word for it… it was not the highest-scale club you would go into for a drink. It was definitely grungy, but I liked it because you could do what you want and nobody would bother you. But there's always a price to pay in a place like that, because it's sort of lawless, or at least it pretends to be, even though there's lots of laws that are supposed to apply to the place. Anyway, it was off in the French Quarter, and a guy walked in who was really drunk, and he was sort of hung up on me, and wanted me to dance for him. There was another girl there, and we were both supposed to dance for him. There was no dancing room available, they were all occupied, and since he had gotten the magnum-sized champagne, they told us they were going to give us the big room. The big room was this sort of upstairs storage, this sort of crappy hole with crumbling plaster on the walls. So we put him on this really gross couch there, and we were supposed to "dance" for him.
JP: Now, what's the champagne about?
RZ: Well, in New Orleans, in a lot of the places, you get paid according to how much champagne you sell. They give you really, really terrible champagne, and you have to get a customer to buy you either eight glasses—which cost $16 and hold about four sips—or you can have them buy you a champagne split, which holds two or three of those glasses. Or a bigger bottle. Then, once you sell eight drinks worth of champagne, you're eligible to make five dollars an hour. You basically have to be able to sell eight drinks to be eligible to earn your wage from the beginning of your shift to the end. And if you sell more than your eight drinks, then you get paid more than five dollars an hour. So, for instance, a magnum is $500, so that counts for all of your eight drinks and you get paid an additional, I think it was $200.
So anyway, the guy buys a magnum, after buying a couple of glasses. So we go up there, and we're dancing, and he's really grabby, one of these drunk grabby sort of guys. He was sort of gross, but it wasn't even that he was gross, I just don't like to be grabbed on. So I'm sort of lap dancing for him, and this other girl is really working it to get the money. But he's really fixated on me, partially because I'm not really letting him touch me very much. So he ends up getting really drunk, and I won't do anything, and I go downstairs and leave him there. The manager tells me not to worry, that the other girl will take care of him. But she comes down and says that he's really making a lot of noise, and that he's going to want a refund if I don't go up there.
At that point, they brought him down into one of the really dimly-lit booths, and had a girl with dark hair that kind of looked like me put on a black bikini and go in there. And she ended up, you know, servicing him, and I gave her $25 to do that. So he thought it was me.
JP: Do you consider dancing an ethical issue for women?
RZ: Do you mean, for women who are dancing, or women who are not dancing?
JP: The women who are dancing?
RZ: I don't know about all of the dancers. I feel that it's not necessarily an ethical issue. The women I knew got to a point where they were very, very numb. You're doing the job. You know, do you really think about the ethics of your 9-to-5 job? No, you're just there to get your money and get out. After a while, ethics doesn't really come into the picture. It's your routine. You don't think about it in terms of ethics, unless you really take the time to think about it, or you quit dancing for a while and it happens to cross your mind.
At the time, I was in my twenties, I wasn't even sure what the hell I was, if I was bi, if I was straight or gay; I wasn't sure of my own sexual identity, and I didn't really care. So dancing kind of went with the time of my life when I started. It was a great thing to do, it was fun, I was very confused, it was a confusing time. But it's OK to be confused. Later, it became a problem. Toward the end of my career, it became a problem when I had boyfriends who pointed out that it was a problem, and it became even more of an ethical issue after I quit. It's weird, I still kind of feel shame about it, in a way. I'm not ashamed of what I did, but I'm afraid how people will react when this book comes out. I don't know what it is, it's just sort of an insecurity that comes into my mind sometimes. It's not even that I regret it, that I regret what I've learned. It's the fear of what other people will think. And I know I'm not supposed to give a shit what other people think, and it's almost like I admire the way I was back then, because I didn't give a shit what people thought. Now, I actually care what people think. I'm at a point in my life where I want to form relationships, and I think about what I say, and how I say it, and how to be considerate of other peoples' feelings. Sometimes one of the things that comes up is "what is so-and-so going to think of me knowing I did this." It is something that crosses my mind.
JP: What about the dancers who do take money for sex? At that point, does it become an ethical issue?
RZ: For the woman who is doing it, I don't think it's an ethical issue. I think that if she's prepared herself to do it, and knows what she's willing to do, I mean, I would hope she's thought about it and decided that she's willing to go through it. For me? I cut it off way before that. I didn't really like to be touched at all.
JP: Why did you set that line? Surely you'd make more money if you didn't.
RZ: Yeah, I know. I always felt like a little bit of a virgin, even as a dancer. I always felt like I never really got into the industry, even though I was in it for four years. I felt that I needed to save something for myself. I was very frightened, when I was in an intimate relationship, and I was not feeling anything; my mind was wandering. Everything was becoming routine, and I got really scared, I felt that my work was infringing on my intimate life. Which was definitely crossing the line. It was something I was uncomfortable with. I needed my private life, and I didn't want my work to interfere with my private life, and I needed to set a big boundary there. I think a lot of customers were ticked off about that. And sometimes, I was ticked off at myself, because I wasn't giving my customers what they wanted. But, at the same time, I knew I was going to be dealing with a shitload of issues when I got out of dancing. I didn't want them to get any worse. I feel that I would've just hated myself. That's just knowing me as a person: I would have hated myself. That's not to say that other people who get out of dancing, or who get out of prostitution, would hate themselves. If that's the decision they make, and that's the decision they're happy with, that's fine. It would've created a lot of tension and a lot of issues for me, because I would've crossed my own line. And I was just never willing to do that.
JP: The name of the book is Egyptian Exotica, but your writings express a good bit of ambivalence about being the Egyptian dancer, or for that matter, the exotic-looking dancer.
RZ: Well, my appearance is a very specific thing, and it was kind of like seasonal fruits, like "gee, I feel like having something exotic tonight." And there was a lot of discomfort, regarding my own identity, and I'm sure a lot of it was personal. I'm not going to say men don't like women who look different, because, how am I supposed to know? There were women who looked a certain way, they looked like your very traditional girl-next-door, and they did very well most of the time. That's a very popular look. I had insecurities about looking different. I always associated Western dancing, stripping, with typical blondes. They did pretty well, most nights. And on the nights they didn't do well, I did really well, and they would say, "Oh, it's a fucked-up night for me." That would happen once every couple of months. It didn't work for me on a regular basis. But the business itself is set on tips, how well you can work a customer, how well you can sort of finesse. And my problem wasn't just as an Egyptian, but as a person, in that I tend to be blunt sometimes. And with that and my looks, it just didn't always work.
It was really weird, because I would tell people I was Egyptian when I was dancing, and they would say, "no you're not." People really wouldn't believe that I came from that part of the world, like people from that part of the world don't have kids, or something.
I'm uncomfortable with it, sometimes. On the one hand, it's very nice to have the attention when I get it in a positive way, but it's almost like it's a choice between, "where the fuck are you from, you look different," or "oh, wow, you're so exotic." It's either one or the other. Of course, I happen to pick lifestyles in which my looks are a big thing. It definitely mattered in the clubs, but also while I was reading the tarot. In that case, if you look exotic, people are usually going to flock to you.
JP: When did you start writing this book, and how long did it take you to finish it?
RZ: I started writing the book within a year after I quit dancing. I didn't think I would be writing it as soon as I did. But I ended up getting into a UCLA essay-writing class, and right after that class was over my teacher told me that there was a year-long intensive writing program for non-fiction that she was teaching, and only seven people were going to get in. She said that you had to be working on a book, you had to be working on a memoir, in order to get accepted, and the applications were due in two months, and she would need the first fifty pages of my book. She was an excellent teacher, and I really wanted to be in the class. I wrote the book in my journal in about a month. In about a month's time, I filled up three books. I was writing about twenty pages a night, all by hand, really bad scribbling, I couldn't really read it afterwards. Then I went back, and I put the whole thing in the computer. I put the first fifty pages together, and I sent them off, and I got accepted into the program. So, for that nine or ten month period, we were working on our books. I was able to put together pieces of the first draft, and from there, I worked on it for another couple of years. You have to count, also, that there were a lot of blackouts happening in Los Angeles at the time, and I lost about 170 pages of the book. I had only about fifty pages left, and had to start more-or-less from scratch. My hard drive failed, and I couldn't restore any of my files. I only had my printed copies, which came to about fifty pages. From the time I started, to the time that I found an agent and a publisher, it was four years.
JP: To what degree do you consider Egyptian Exotica a book about dancing? You touch on a number of personal subjects.
RZ: There was a lot more that I wanted to put in, that didn't make it into the final cut, as it got too confusing. I was really trying to compare the cultures, in a way, how I thought of dancing as the Westernized version of belly dancing, and how I was a little naive. I wanted to put more parts about my life in Egypt in there, but I'm now saving those parts for my new book.
For me, it's not really just about dancing. I've read most of the books that have been released about dancing. And I always felt like there was a part of the person missing, a part of the real person who had actually done this, and what they went through, and how they felt afterwards. Just what's underneath that eggshell mask that you wear when you dance. You carry that mask around with you for a number of years after you quit. And it's almost like a recovery process when you get out of dancing; you have to deal with who you are as a person. There's a thawing that takes a number of years to really happen. I felt like there was almost a coldness, you know, a reduction to fact, in the other dancing books. The environment was like this, the customers were like this, I looked like this, I thought this was so stupid. I really wanted to talk about how fucked up one can be while dancing, and how people just sort of have their own inner lives while they're dancing. You have the dancing, and you have the thoughts about dancing, and then you have your life outside of dancing.
Obviously, dancing is a different sort of job, but even when we're consumed by our jobs we're still our own persons. I wanted to write about myself as a person, as well as myself as a dancer. That was really my goal, to humanize the whole experience. Maybe even to bridge the gap a little bit, between dancing and the rest of the world. And if that works, great, and if not, hopefully somebody else will come along and do a better job.
JP: What are you working on now?
RZ: A memoir. Probably my last memoir, I'm going to do fiction after this. It's sort of a multi-generational saga about my relationship with my mother and my grandmother and our lives together. It's about how conflicted and volatile our lives were. It's a complicated chick story. I'm about 75 pages in, and still don't know how to confidently pitch it yet. But it's about that tangled mess of caretaker relationships, and how that mess sort of resolved itself after my grandmother died, yet left a lot of grief and bitterness in the air.
JP: Is Egyptian Exotica a chick story?
RZ: Maybe a little bit. I didn't want to write it from a chick standpoint. I wanted something that men would be able to read and enjoy, as a good book. I don't know. I don't think I can yet figure that out.
Jonathan Penton is the Editor-in-chief of Unlikely 2.0. Check out his bio page.