by AM Davies (they/them)
Some names and details have been altered for privacy and legal reasons.
My last night as a whole-bodied stripper began with me running late. It was December 18, 2018, just after 6:00 p.m. Little did I know I wouldn’t arrive at my destination. The light turned green, and I had right of way, but they turned left in front of me, and the only option was to veer to the right. It didn’t matter: the driver slammed into my scooter, in the middle of a crazy busy Los Angeles intersection.
As I lay in the middle of the intersection on my stomach, while a woman I never met—nor even saw her face—prayed over my body, I thought, “I guess I can’t go to work tomorrow.” My next thought was, “Stay present and focus on the moment. Think about one thing at a time as it happens to you.” I let everything go and trusted the people around me, the strangers that rushed to my side, and the EMT’s that cut the clothes off my back as I continued to lay on my stomach. I gave in and felt a sense of calm, after all, there wasn’t anything I could do.
No one wanted me to move. I kept telling them that my legs were alright, that I could move. But slowly, I felt the pain in my foot rising, like burning, shooting pain. My spine felt fine, but my knees were on fire from rolling off my scooter onto my hands and knees until I landed on my back. As soon as I stopped flying through the air, I scanned my body and realized my back and legs were alright and moving, that I wasn’t paralyzed. I rolled over onto my stomach and army-crawled my way out of the middle of the once-busy intersection, for fear of being run over. Traffic had stopped after the collision, but I didn’t know that right away. It was dark. I had a helmet on. I was disoriented but breathing and alive. I had no idea I just lost all five toes and the ball of my left foot. I had no idea they were all pancaked together, flattened and dangling off what was left of my heel to mid-foot. I had no idea my skin ran away from itself and curled up to my heel.
The pain didn’t register until I got in the ambulance. It was seething hot pain, like fire and ice were licking up my leg to my knee. I couldn’t sit still. I was writhing in pain, but not crying out. I remember thinking, “This is how it feels when you break a bone I guess.”
I asked over and over for something for the pain. A very good looking EMT, with a strong jaw and soft face, of course, gave me something, as it was obvious from the damage he saw I must have needed it. He slid a needle into my arm that was much thicker than a normal needle. I welcomed the pain in a part of my body other than my foot. The relief was minor. But still, there was no crying, no blacking out, no screaming. I was cool as a cucumber for some reason. I asked the EMT, “Are they going to take my foot?” Even though I didn’t know my foot was smashed, I knew something was terribly wrong. He sucked air between clenched teeth and said, “I don’t know, but it doesn’t look good.” I lifted my head to look, and immediately put it back down. I didn’t want to see, but I did catch a glimmer of something white at the end of my foot. My thought then was that it was the white toenail polish from the pedicure I got the day before. I later found out it was my bone sticking out of the middle of my foot: my toes had been obliterated.
While I was flying off my scooter, my phone flew off too, but in a different direction, so I couldn’t text or call anyone. The medics took me to the ER. I kept repeating…
“Where am I?”
“ No one knows I’m here.”
At the same time I was laying in the street, my mother called my phone by “coincidence” and a stranger answered and told her everything they could, including where I was and where they were taking me. She could hear me in the background yelling and instructing the strangers “Call Taylor! Call Taylor!” She was my best friend at the time–my sibling stripper, my closest neighbor, my emergency contact.
After the workers in the ER were done with the MRI of my head, and tending to my foot, they left me still with unanswered questions, like “what the hell happened to my foot?” One of the hospital workers eventually put me upstairs in a room by myself with a dilaudid button. That was fun but also, like, how did I get here? Just a bit ago, I was on my scooter, and now I’m in this room, alone with a drug button. The doctor came in. He was young- looking, tall, smooth, and gentle. He finally told me what happened. I felt relief finally knowing what had happened to me, I felt good knowing some of my foot was intact, but concerned that my dancing career was being upended.
My first question was “Will I be able to wear stripper heels again?” He seemed unfazed by the question and told me there was a great possibility that I would. That settled me. I figured, okay, if I can still dance with one and a half feet, nothing has changed all that much. Then he walked out of the room. The lights were off, it was just after 8:00 pm, and I still didn’t know if anyone knew where I was yet. That’s when I finally cried.
About an hour later, Taylor and another friend of ours showed up. Mom had heard my cries and called her. What a relief to see a familiar face. I remember wanting to make a plan to get back to work. I was laser-focused because if I didn’t go to work, I didn’t make money. There was no back-up plan. All there was at the time was stripping and sex work. I had been on a roll, too, saving money and budgeting and was financially doing the best I ever had in my life. I finally figured out how to be smart with my money, after 18.5 years of mostly stripping, and it was all I could think about.
Obsessed with getting back to work, I emailed my boss, and she told me “Let’s see how things go.” It made my stomach churn.I’d been getting pre-accident signals that she might be looking to get rid of me. She was a chaotic and at times unkind boss, but I knew her since 2009 and hoped she might have a place in her heart for me after all that time. Boy, was I ever wrong! When she sent an empty Christmas card to my hospital room, I knew I had no chance of going back. Every year, those crappy Christmas cards had a measly fifty bucks in them. This year, dammit, it was just a signature. Maybe she finally found out that I was trying to open my own club…
A week after my accident, on Christmas Day, Taylor showed up with Christmas decorations and snuck in stuff to make mimosas. She opened the door to Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You.” Many people came to visit me that week while in the hospital. For some visits, I was conscious; for others, I was so high from the pain meds, I could barely talk.
During one visit, my friend Liz mentioned that they should start a GoFundMe since I wouldn’t be able to work for a while. The thought embarrassed me. In my mind, as a 38-year-old adult, I should have had a plan, I should have had money saved for something like this. Others urged me to accept a bit of help, so, reluctantly, I gave in. If it weren’t for crowdfunding, I would have been penniless.
I naively thought I wouldn’t be working in the clubs for at least three months. It was really hard coming to terms with the possibility it could take longer to heal and be back in my heels. Yet, everyone else understood the gravity of my situation: not being able to dance for a living anymore was upon me.
I had money saved, but it wasn’t enough. There was no backup plan in the case of a situation like this. In fact, most sex workers don’t have a backup plan…
Strippers don’t get disability, they don’t have unemployment insurance, and most don’t have health insurance either. The clubs at the time did not adhere to the proper employee status laws; and they still don’t. But this was close to the height of AB5 when I had my accident. The law had only been talked about up to that point: It was introduced in January 2019 and passed a year later. The law was supposed to improve our working conditions and help strippers access the benefits they are entitled to when things like this happen. The point is, there were no options for me then, and I’m not sure, even with AB5 in place, there would be for any strippers now. I was on my own. I was disabled.
This was devastating. I mean, I’ve known for almost two decades, right? That this was the case, that there was no support from government entities for sex workers… but I never applied a situation like this to myself before. I never thought, “Someday I will need protection if something happens to me, because without my functioning body, what happens to the work?” If I had lived there at that moment, panic would have set in. Because the reality was, the safety net was nonexistent for me, for people like me.
Three months and more went by. The half-foot worked for a while, but it was excruciating. I didn’t care about the pain when I was in my heels though. Don’t get me wrong, the pain was constant: I just powered through it. I was stuffing anything that was soft into the toe of my six- inch black boots. Cutting up airplane neck pillows to adjust the right size and shape. Then putting weight on all my little tender bones, pushing on the flesh that was healing from being ripped and sutured back up. It was the nerve pain that really got me, though. Phantom pain is the strangest thing… I could feel my bones being smashed, again and again, every night for over a year.
Even though I was able to teach pole classes for an hour at a time in my heels, there was no way I could go back to the clubs, because being on my feet that long just wouldn’t work. The skin at the end of my foot where the main damage was, was still so delicate, and it often felt like it would rip open with all my weight on it. There was a burning sensation with each step that I took, no matter what shoe I was wearing, but in the heels, it was 5 times the discomfort.
Online became my chosen option for sex work, but it meant creating content alone in my studio apartment. For almost two decades I had worked in boisterous, exciting, people-filled environments. But now I was alone, struggling to be creative and still grappling with the fact that part of my body was gone forever. And the pain… it never stopped since that first night. I still feel it every day, just on a spectrum. Some days I don’t notice the constant tingling from the nerve damage. Sometimes, I can’t sit still.
There was a lot to come to terms with in my new life. There were moments that I cried and cried alone, cradling and kissing my little painful foot, grieving the person that I was once, the life I once had. Wondering who I even was anymore. People rallied around me during this time. I could still walk, despite the constant discomfort. I pushed all my trauma aside and didn’t deal with it so I could try to live how I was living before. To others, it probably seemed as if not much for me changed, other than that I wasn’t working at the clubs anymore. I did some OnlyFans work, taught some dance classes, and came close to doing full service in a more defined way. Someone had made me an offer to be a regular, a sugar daddy, and I was ready to say yes. I knew no other kind of work, and he was familiar and comfortable. I considered myself lucky. But everything would change once again, and this time for the entire world.
Taylor and I decided to rent a house down the street from where we were living in East Hollywood. It was only a couple blocks away from each of our apartments. We had plans to turn the house into a dance art house. We would teach fitness, pole dancing, create art, make videos, and rent out space to other artists. It would be a communal live/work space. We moved in on March 1, 2020. It was going to cost me $1,700 a month to rent a bedroom in the main part of the house. That was over $600 more than my previous living situation. I don’t know where I thought I would get the money from. I must have had it or thought I was getting it or I wouldn’t have signed a lease. The lease said Taylor and I were responsible for $10,000 a month in rent. We found four other housemates to fill the extra rooms, but two weeks later while we were still moving in, the pandemic was officially announced, and everything fell apart.
Right away, a couple of our housemates backed out and we had to quickly find others so we could cover the expensive rent. About a month in, we discovered that one of our housemates, Kelly, had severe mental health issues coupled with an extreme alcohol problem. Her alcohol abuse would take place after some sort of manic episode. She would binge drink for days, sometimes steal our alcohol from the shared kitchen and hide the bottles in her room. Then after about three to four days of binge drinking, we could hear her screaming and moaning from her room as she was detoxing.
Another housemate, Anna, invited her boyfriend to move in with her in her space, and they physically and verbally abused each other often, which we could hear through the walls of the main house. The yelling would start around 6:00 am, and one could hear all the insults they were throwing at each other, accusing each other of this and that. The arguments escalated over the months with their fighting happening almost every day.
By mid-May, 2020, it became apparent that my foot was deteriorating. The bones were trying to push through what little flesh was left at the end of my foot. It started to look like knuckles on a closed fist. My foot started to twist sideways from the pulling of my skin and flesh. I had to make a choice. Either do a muscle graft and attach it to the end of my foot, or amputate. The muscle graft sounded messy–more scars, not 100% viable, and could make my foot a weird shape, meaning no more heels. I chose amputation. It was the logical choice for someone like me. I could still wear my heels, and the pain would be less (I thought). No more putting weight on small bones. No more wondering if the skin graft on the end of my foot would rip away. I took two weeks, making a pros and cons list, talking to other amputees, petitioning forums, consulting multiple doctors and prosthetists. I was on a mission, one that was all about deforming my body in some way. It was the strangest decision I’ve ever had to make, and it consumed me. I wanted nothing more but to dance again, to feel like I had some semblance of my past life still with me. Being sexy was my identity, and how I expressed myself was my brand. They used to call me “The Queen of Sexy” and it was a title I held proudly. If I could have a foot that didn’t hurt anymore, I might just be a new kind of sexy, I thought. Maybe I’ll be even cooler than I was before, I thought.
On May 28, 2020, I arrived at the hospital to spend the night, knowing that, in the morning, I would be a below the knee amputee. I would be more disabled than before. But I was okay with that. Because I was spending the days leading up to my surgery contemplating “Cut my leg off or don’t cut my leg off,” I wasn’t super aware of what had happened on May 25. I had an idea, but it wasn’t until I woke up the next morning with no leg, watching the streets of Los Angeles burn from the anger at George Floyd’s murder that it hit me. I laid in the hospital and cried for George. No one was allowed to visit this time. There was no comfort from anyone for those few days. I was back on hard pills for the pain, which I hated. My memory of June 2020 is so foggy. I remember Anna trying to talk to me about money and how to calculate the house bills while I was super high. When I followed up with her –this time clear-headed–Anna couldn’t find the time. The deal we made was not a good one for me and the other housemates. I felt taken advantage of in my state.
Sometime in June, Taylor had pretty much ditched the house and wasn’t around to deal with most of the house drama. She was staying in the mansion of a famous model in a completely different part of town, oblivious to—or simply ignoring—the mess that was growing. A whole week would go by where we wouldn’t see her. It felt like I was losing my best friend because I was unwell, that my disabledness was inconvenient for her. Admittedly, the way I was showing up was heavy. I was unaware at the time of how anxious I was to make sure things got done. But at the same time, there was very little help with issues around bills, around house repairs, and around Kelly, Taylor’s lifelong best friend. On one particular day, Taylor decided to go to the desert even though Kelly was having a mental breakdown, which Taylor knew but didn’t do anything about. Kelly hadn’t slept for days and seemed to be in a manic state. She couldn’t sit still, couldn’t stop talking. She had to be constantly monitored to be sure she didn’t do anything to hurt herself or start a fire.
Eventually, with the help of a friend, I took Kelly to the ER to “5150” her (a 72-hour psychiatric hold). I was still in a wheelchair, the amputation happened less than 2 months prior. I repeated to the doctors and social worker through my mask, “She needs help and we at home can’t help her.” The three of them stood over me as I was pleading with them to take care of her, while I was half legless in a wheelchair, all the people in the waiting room witnessing the drama. I felt like no one was taking me seriously because I was in a wheelchair. The looks in their eyes were all perplexed, confused by the conflicting stories that Kelly was telling them versus what I was telling them. It was like they didn’t believe me that she hadn’t slept in three days, that she was talking to people that weren’t there. I wondered if it was because I was in a wheelchair that they believed her over me. Her story was that she was fine and should simply go home to be taken care of by me.
I was on and off the phone with her parents and her psychiatrist, while Kelly was loose, running around in the streets in front of the hospital–doing God knows what–while I was in the waiting area, begging the hospital staff to help her. After not giving up and accepting their idea for her to be sent home, they brought me into a private room with her and a social worker, who I could tell had a hard time believing my version of events. Her eyes were wide with confusion, but Kelly just sat there and said nothing while I described the situation. When the social worker left, Kelly came over to me, grabbed my knees and got right up in my face, and said “If you say another word, I’ll…” And I said “What?! What will you do?!” She sat back down just as the social worker walked back in. When I told her, “She just threatened me while you were gone,” they finally agreed to admit her. After six grueling hours, I returned home from the ER.
Back at home, the fighting between Anna and her boyfriend in the next unit escalated. I had to hobble over to their door, which was outside on the side of the house, knock, and tell them “You have to stop. I do not want to call the cops and it sounds like you’re killing each other in there.” They would come to the door, one by one, chests heaving from the activity of throwing things at each other. He accused her of coming at him with a frying pan, she accused him of dragging her by the hair across the floor. I’m almost always more inclined to believe the woman in these situations. But I could hear the escalation through the walls every single day. It was clearly both of them. They would break up and get back together again every week. I watched her post about being happy and finding peace in life as advice to her audience on Instagram where she promoted her yoga and healing, but listened to the opposite everyday.
Mary Jo, the housemate whose room was connected to mine, mostly stayed in her room, facetiming or canoodling with whoever her new catch was. She did spend some time with me and was the only person who was around during the time I seriously and dangerously detoxed from opioids. If she hadn’t been there, I don’t think I would have made it. I was disoriented: overheating, vomiting, sweating, and crying. I didn’t eat for seven days because everything just came back up. It was all water and crackers. I’d never been so skinny in my life. She was with me every day, checking in on me constantly for the first three days, which were the hardest.
Not many people would or could come over, due to pandemic restrictions. The landlords started to get angry that, except for Taylor and me, almost none of us could pay rent. The pressure was on me every month to collect rent and pay the house bills from four other housemates. I had to follow up constantly to get money from people. Everything was in my name. Things got dark for me. It was the first time in my life I seriously considered suicide. “How much can one person take?” I would ask myself. It would be better for me and everyone if I went away, I thought. But my biggest fear was getting it wrong and becoming more of a burden if I lived but was more disabled. So, I never took the plunge.
I was still doing OnlyFans and thought, “Now I have a real niche I can tackle. Half a foot didn’t get me anywhere with fetishes, but a missing leg–that’s going to change the game.” It sure did. Have you ever heard of Devotees? They are people who are “devoted to amputees.” Just like in any group of people, some are nice and some are scumbags. I experienced both. But what really threw me for a loop was when people would ask me for uncomfortable custom videos. Some requests were to lay on the floor and act helpless and paralyzed, suggesting things like, “what if you fell from your crutches and couldn’t get up.” Others would tell me how much hotter I would be if my stump were above the knee. And others wanted me to tell stories of how I lost my leg, and then rub my stump sensually as I sexualized my stump. Some of these things I just couldn’t bring myself to do.
Sexualizing my stump felt okay, but acting helpless felt dark, creepy, and violent. There’s a difference between someone loving your stump and someone getting off on your helplessness. One made me feel powerful. The other made me feel used. So I stopped engaging online with people who wanted sex work from me privately and only did online shows with the other workers for a while. There were just too many boundaries being pushed and, looking back, I’m grateful I decided to step away from that, because my mental state was not okay. Even though I needed the money, I couldn’t even bring myself to open my messages after a while. It was visceral.
Because of the pandemic, getting a prosthetic took longer than normal. So when I did the online strip shows, often I was alone, crawling around on the floor to set up my camera angles. Also at the time, I was using a device called “iWalk”, which is like a crutch that is hands free, sort of a mix between one of those knee scooters and a crutch. Although helpful, it was exhausting considering the type of work and movement I was doing in it. Working for about four hours straight, having to change outfits, pole dance, floor work, making sure I had drinks to shoot for when customers bought us a shot, making sure my set was ready. Doing it with both my legs was tiring enough, but it was exhausting doing all the work with a missing leg.. When I was done with the show, the whole pole room would be a huge mess. One night, Mary Jo found me sitting in the middle of a huge mess after an online show. I was drunk and crying because I didn’t have the energy to clean up. There were clothes, glitter, props, my computer, tripods, and lighting equipment everywhere. She helped me up and said it was okay if it was cleaned in the morning. Online strip shows got too arduous after a while, so I started to turn them down. My career was slipping away. My identity was floating in a cloud above my head, waiting for me to let it go. My life’s work was becoming painful and empty.
My days got darker and darker. Local men we knew began harassing us. They would pound on our door trying to get in our house, enter our backyard area without our permission, even dump bags of trash in our driveway and call us whores. They told us we were going to burn in hell–you know, typical things people say to sex workers. They knew some of us were strippers and were trying to warn the neighbors about us, that we were harlots and to be vigilant of our activities. But the neighbors liked us, so at least we had that.
On top of all of this, helicopters were flying over our street until 3:00 am every morning. I would wake up at 6:00 am every morning to make sure our trash wasn’t being tampered with by our harassers, listening to the sound of bickering through the walls as I waited on the couch, staring out the window, ready to hobble outside to block the driveway with my car at any given moment. Taylor had disappeared by this point, Mary Jo was there, but not how I needed her. I needed someone to physically be with me, and there was no one. The loneliness was heavy, even though I lived in a city with people all around.
I have a memory of laying on the couch, talking to my mother, and I could see myself in the facetime video. I was edgy and jumpy, my hair was oily from not washing it, eyes red from stress, lack of sleep, and PTSD. I was embarrassed to be seen by anyone, even her. I was a mess, I wanted to die. She had begged me for months to come home. But the timing had to be right because of the lawsuit we had started.
We had decided to sue our harassers as they eventually got into legal trouble for bothering us so much. We just had to wait. So instead, every day of the last month I was in the house, my mom would check in on me. That couch was where I felt oddly safe. It called to me at 6:00 a.m. every morning, no matter how little sleep I got, between the constant sound of low flying helicopters and the phantom pain, which was so intense it kept me awake for hours. It was as if a dry ice cloth was being wrapped around my entire leg that was missing. The couch was the place where I would cry every morning, hoping the chaos would end soon. Shaking from pushed to the edge every day and night.
Finally my mother and I made a plan. My brother would fly out to LA, and we would pack my car and my two cats and drive across the country together to Pennsylvania so I could be with my mommy. I was relieved but, at the same time, heartbroken. Los Angeles was so special to me: It was where I learned to be an adult. It was where I started stripping. It was a lifetime of memories, experiences, and long- lasting friendships. As we reached the 15E Freeway, I was resting my head on my arm, leaning out of the window and watching us drive out of California, my favorite state, my home for 22 years. I was dead tired and just laid there like that for at least thirty minutes, letting out whimpering noises as the tears gently rolled down my cheeks.
What I haven’t mentioned is that during all of this, I was integral to the building and formation of Strippers United, I was volunteering for the Black Sex Worker Collective, and I was recording episodes for YAS (Yes A Stripper) Podcast. I never stopped working for and with sex workers. It was a distraction from my pain and chaos. It kept my mind occupied, and to this day, I don’t know if that saved me or hurt me. Perhaps I should have taken more time to care for myself, but that’s not what happened. I may have been too bored and hurt myself. I constantly had bottles of pills, it wouldn’t have been that hard. But did I do harm to others by not stepping back?
I was not in my right mind, but no one–not even I–seemed to notice. If they did notice, no one said anything. When I’d make a mistake, I was judged harshly for it and tossed aside. When I took a stand for others, I was labeled a traitor. When I asked directly for help, I was given blank stares and met with silence. All around me, people were treating me differently than before, and friendships dropped off one by one. The loss was compounding with each week, each month that went by. I will never know if it was ableism or the result of my behavior. Maybe it was a combination of both? After all, I was drowning in despair and anxiety, and I was a different person than I was before. When people become disabled, their relationships can change profoundly.
This can range from ableism, unskilled communication, or a mirror for their own mortality–a reminder that life can be altered forever, in just one moment. In one instance, I found out I was fired from a movement retreat by seeing a newsletter that didn’t include me as one of the main instructors. I was told that they didn’t think I could handle it, even though the event was a year away. In other instances, people were saying things like “I don’t think of AM as disabled” which diminished my experience of only having one leg, as if it wasn’t hard for me. I don’t blame anyone, but to this day, I do grieve my lost friendships. I love hard, no matter the missteps, mistakes, or slight harms done to me. I had to accept that I changed, and as a result, so did my surroundings.
My role for a long time was as a leader, in and out of the strip club. I was a dynamic performer, one who was well known, who traveled the world teaching other people how to be sexy. I was tireless, fearless, strong–both physically and mentally. The amputation that truly changed all of that. It was the main event. I had no time or grace to deal with the loss.I wasn’t afforded it by my housemates, colleagues, friends, or even myself. Perhaps it was collective denial morphing into disappointment when I couldn’t handle things as well as we all would have liked.
Leaving LA was the first step to coming to terms with what happened to me. My old life was gone and a new one–slower, quieter, definitely more honest, and filled with love and attention–was waiting for me just around the bend. Yes, I eventually wore heels again with a traditional socket prosthetic, but after yet another surgery in August of 2023, I am currently not able to wear heels of any kind, but the pain is much better, my walking is much better. The answer is no, I can’t wear heels again, at least not for a while until something is invented for the type of prosthetic I now have. But the love I found in my partner and being with my family makes up for that loss. I am no longer afraid of being alone, I am at peace and feel love like I never have before. It almost seems like fate, like this was all meant to be and today, I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be, living without heels, living without my left foot but living with acceptance and unconditional love. If I had to do it all over again to be where I am today, I would.
Special thanks to my mother and my dear friend, Selena, for your edits, prompts and support.
