Baring it all but revealing little

DIABLO CODY was slogging away at her entry-level, post-B.A. advertising McJob when she answered the call for amateur night at the Skyway Lounge, a downscale, downtown Minneapolis topless bar. “I found myself drawn to the bay of blacked-out windows,” she writes in “Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper.” “I wanted to be in there, part of that spangled corps of women who knew better but walked in anyway.... I wanted to take shelter in the dank, yeasty darkness, safe from the glare of snow and medium-bright typing paper.”

Cody buys herself a slutty outfit, dubs herself “Cherish” and takes the stage at the Skyway. Though she doesn’t win, she is seduced by the thrill of stripping and goes back for more. “I wanted to feel the way I had felt onstage again. Agitated. Afraid. More vulnerable than a newborn fawn still mottled with placental muck.”

Cody quickly leaves the low-rent Skyway Lounge for greener pastures, the green, of course, being cash. While keeping her day job, she works at a series of flesh palaces -- each one only nominally swankier than the last -- where she struts, grinds, shimmies and takes notes.

Many details and tidbits emerge, such as how lap dance patrons frequently wear sweat pants for enhanced pleasure, and why strip clubs are kept so chilly, “much like big sexy meat lockers. This ensures that the strippers will look awesome ... and will be forced to huddle together for warmth (creating the illusion of lesbianism, which managers encourage). Flesh stays taut and cool; private parts remain as fresh and florid as tuna sashimi.”

Cody’s prose snaps like a garter belt. She tosses around metaphors like a bachelor with a roll of singles. A leering guy is described as having breasts that jiggle “like silken tofu,” and her colleagues working the room are characterized as “thin, tawny cats, their legs like jointed drinking straws, their protuberant breasts leading the parade.”

There is an unmistakable Gen X backbeat to her rhythm and a heavy reliance on pop culture references to illustrate her points. Though it’s mostly good, frothy fun, sometimes she uses a metaphor as thin as a G-string to hold up a weighty idea, to wit: “Love is mysterious and rad, like Steve Perry from Journey.”

During her titular year she transforms herself from someone “looking like Dorothy Hamill learning to walk on solid ground after seventeen hours at the rink” into a tanned, shellacked, taloned pro stripper. “It wasn’t enough to be a nude girl ... “ Cody decides early on. “You had to be the nude girl. You had to sparkle, you had to coruscate, you had to bounce like the phantom cheerleader in the vault of every man’s memory.”

For all her brass, what is missing from Cody’s spicy memoir, ironically, is her own sexuality. There is a sense that she isn’t taking it all off for us. Toward the end of her book, she gets spooked by a bed dance with a Russian that goes too far. She confesses to having been terrified, but the details of that terror are absent.

Did she get turned on? Did she cross the line? Though she frankly admits to the thrill of trying to be on top of her game, and the rush that comes from breaking free of her middle-class, Midwestern, Catholic upbringing, she remains prudish. In the context of a tell-all memoir, that feels like cheating.

Eventually, Cody finds herself paralyzed, unable to offer one more lap dance. “It wasn’t the nudity or the grinding or any sex-phobic moral issue.... it was the whole girls-in-bulk thing that repulsed me. Hundreds of girls on the floor at some clubs, all reduced to begging dogs for an army of smug little emperors. The rules of attraction were reversed at a strip club. Girls that could halt midday traffic at Nicollet Mall were rejected by fat guys wearing Zubaz.”

Demoralized and burned out, she quits the life for good, presumably to find her true calling of being a pithy miss on the page, rather than the stage.

A writer friend once bemoaned NASA’s not sending a poet into space to describe the experience to us Earthbound folk in terms that we might understand. This, in the end, is the chief pleasure of “Candy Girl.” Diablo Cody is the Mars Rover on the far side of the tip rail, sending back uncannily clear images of life on another planet. For those of us who have stared, transfixed, from a distance, wondering how the air is up there, “Candy Girl” is a bracing lungful.

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Erika Schickel is the author of the forthcoming “You’re Not the Boss of Me.”