Zola Tells All: The Real Story Behind the Greatest Stripper Saga Ever Tweeted

Zola’s family calls her The Enforcer. As the oldest of eight in a family that cycled through fathers and cities, Zola was always, as her mother Nichelle Watkins tells me, “putting everybody in their place.” This went beyond telling her sisters to do the dishes. She was a tough precocious girl who fought often. A boy once smashed a bottle over her head in math class because she was answering too many questions correctly; another time, when a girl spit on her, Zola says she earned a few hundred hours of community service for slamming the girl’s head into the ground.

On her 18^th birthday, while still in high school and living at home, she began waitressing at Hooters. She wanted to be a singer and was saving money to move into her own place, when another waitress told her about the lucrative world of exotic dancing. “She’s like, ‘I make two grand a weekend,'” Zola recalls. “I was like, ‘Okay, I’m coming!'” Her mother, a successful paralegal, balked, but also treated Zola like an adult. “You got to be careful,” Watkins told her. “I can’t tell you to stop, but what I can say is you need to come to me if there’s any trouble. And don’t do anything outside of your dancing.”

Zola was quickly earning up to $1,000 a night in tips, but the job came with its share of trouble. She saw a bouncer get shot, and was briefly involved with an older guy who, while they were sleeping, got raided by the police. At one point, she and another dancer fell in with a gang of credit card thieves. She recounted each episode to her mother with a mix of wisdom and world-weariness. “I am good,” she repeatedly said. “I learned my lesson.”

One afternoon in March, Jessica Rae Swiatkowski, a bisexual 21-year-old blonde with collarbone tattoos, walked into Hooters for lunch with a friend. Zola caught her eye. “She walked past and she was pretty,” Jessica recalls. “I just brought her over to the table.” The two of them got to talking, and Zola showed Jessica her Tumblr blog on her iPhone. Jessica scrolled through nude pictures of assorted models and images of unicorns until she came to a shot of Zola in a red sequined thong with a rack of lingerie behind her. “Are you a dancer?” She asked. They swapped stories about clubs where they’d both danced, and Jessica showed her photos of her little girl. “We should work together sometime,” Jessica said. They exchanged numbers.

“She was really nice,” Zola recalls. “She was sweet, she was cute.” 

A few days later, Zola was watching Powerpuff Girls on Netflix when she got a text from Jessica: “Do you want to come to Florida with me?”

“What for?” Zola replied.

“Well you said next time I dance that you’d come and I’m going to dance in Florida,” Jessica said, adding her boyfriend was coming along.