Tonight, I Made a Stripper Cry

This happened last night. I’m trying to get it down while I still remember.

So, we went down to the Dollhouse. That’s our old stomping grounds. When Kristie, T and I lived at Valley Brook, we would sometimes go three or four times a week. We like the Dollhouse; it isn’t very big, and to be honest, they don’t seem to ever fill up, at least from what I’ve seen. This may seem like a negative to some people, but we saw it as an opportunity. It got  to the point where we felt a bit like VIPs (without any of us ever actually entering a VIP room; we still wonder what goes on in there), receiving squeals and hugs at our arrival. We had wallets full of those free passes to get in; the strippers have stacks of them, and they’ll give you a handful if you treat them like human beings for a few minutes. We weren’t just customers. I know what you’re thinking, damn, those strippers sure got a hold on you. We do tip the dancers and we do get lap dances, but we operate on a very strict budget. The women (and in no condescending tone) aren’t just making the rounds asking for a dance. They sat and hung out with us. And no, we didn’t buy them any drinks, and frankly I think it’s pretty tacky if one of them asks. Sorry, that’s a whore technique, not a performer technique. Get your shit straight.

Kristie’s favorite back in the day was Crimson, a petite, short-haired black lesbian who I found out later spent the majority of her life in ballet classes. She was an awesome dancer, the kind that you could tell was actually enjoying herself. She gets it; it isn’t about getting a hard-on by staring deeply into a stranger’s birth canal. It’s about having a good time, and everyone knows that naked people instantly make any party that much better. Think of it this way:

BAR = ALCOHOL                        STRIP CLUB  = ALCOHOL + NAKED PEOPLE

Does it make a little more sense now?

We of course had this conversation at one point, screaming our shredded lungs to pieces over a 200 decibel chant, “I ain’t sayin’ she’s a gold digger…” They all, ironically, or appropriately, are.

I couldn’t say I had a favorite, but a couple characters spring to mind. Bringing your girlfriend to a strip club is a profound, puzzling, exciting, and ridiculous experience. I love it because, obviously, it’s with Kristie, who everyone knows is basically the coolest chick in the world, and we have that level of communication such that, even though (and many of you probably don’t know) she often has jealousy issues, we can speak our minds clearly and directly without any bullshit games, and the problem is almost instantly squashed. There were some tribulations. One girl, I can’t even remember her name now, seemed to have this thing about wanting to take me away from Kristie when I got a dance. She wasn’t smart or real, but she was very nice which is usually enough for me. But every time I asked for a dance (I think it was just twice with her), she led me to the other side of the bar. And to be totally honest, she was pretty physical with her dances. She didn’t last long at the Dollhouse. I think one girl mentioned something about prostitution issues.

Mia was an Asian chick from Texas, cute face, a little chubby in the middle, and honestly kind of a lazy dancer, but we had some hilarious conversations. Hilarious because she was an idiot and usually faded beyond comprehension. It’s hard enough having a conversation over a 200 decibel phalanx of “BOOTY BOOTY BOOTY BOOTY ROCKIN EVAWHA”, try listening to a drunk stripper who I’m pretty sure had some kind of speech impediment in the first place. Now that I think about it, I can’t really remember anything we talked about. I do remember laughing, and I appreciate that. The DJ nearly always played “Smack My Bitch Up” by Prodigy when she was on stage. This is an awesome song, but I always wondered if there was a secret message in this. She probably just liked the song. One night, in an extremely drunken move, Mia literally bit one of my buttons in half. My shirt, you dirty thinkers. A little later that evening, she got in trouble for pulling some illegal maneuvers on stage. Yeah, she was that type.

A little experience gets you a long way in compiling a short list of stripper types. There are the blatant single moms, or what I call Our Mothers of the Sacred Temple. This female, appearing on any point on the age spectrum, runs her hustle by bringing up her kid in between shouts of “Go shotty, it’s ya berfday,” thus initializing the Pity Factor, the lowest possible stripper technique as yet discovered by man. Strippers, please listen to me. Don’t bring up your kids. All we can think about is a slimy, quivering organism squeezing out of that vagina you’re grinding on T’s thigh. The last thing we want is to see your gaping hole after hearing about your 1st grader’s absent father.

There are a scant few cool chicks, otherwise known as “Actual People,” who, at some point in our interactions, can actually lower that Impenetrable Stripper Wall and become, like Mannequin, or Cave’s lover, the Bride of Pinbot, a real live girl. Crimson was one of those, and honestly the rest could be counted on a Simpson hand.

Unfortunately, sometimes you get an Old Bag. I don’t want to be mean, but let’s cut the bullshit for a second. We’re in here to look at naked people. Remember my formula I presented up there: I am not splooging from the thought of your flappy vagina. I am admiring a moving, breathing female form, an interactive work of art; cheesy as it may sound; different from any other, combining dance, performance, improvisation, customer service, and pole chaffing. I don’t care if you used to bartend here. Your nasty face and even nastier C-section scar have no business on a stage, grinding awkwardly to “She’s My Cherry Pie.” That pie’s been sittin’ out too long. Just retire the jersey and marry a hairy guy from Miami.

Also, and one that I find particularly entertaining, is the clueless new girl, aka Melanie Griffith. She is often an energetic dancer, but she can’t disguise that thought behind her eyes: “Jesus fucking Christ, what am I doing with my life?” Another case of the Pity Factor, but I can hardly blame her. I just feel bad for them sometimes. She only has so much time before she looks in the mirror and finds herself metamorphosed into Sigourney Weaver. (Ten bonus points if you got that analogy.)

You also get the young, drunk tarts, who I call the Hidden Whores. Unfortunately sometimes not so hidden. The rub is the Protus-Nexus Drugged Naked Chick equation, which goes something like:

(WHORE + PURSE FULL OF DRUGS) x FREE ALCOHOL = EPIC, EPIC WHORE

We also call these Boomers Girls. I guess that’s an inside joke for people who have been to Boomers, and I’m talking about before it completely sucked balls, when they actually served alcohol.

Anyway, this girl, also known as The Girl Gone Wild, often appears in a tiny bikini, blonde or brunette white girl with small tits and a small ass. Tramp stamps and patterny neck star tattoos are common. The cocaine fuels her enthusiastic acrobatics on the stage, and the xanax helps her grind her ass on some fifty year-old’s fat belly without hating herself. She won’t hesitate to introduce herself by sitting on your lap and biting your ear. Rest assured: you have about T-minus 3 minutes before that VIP room sneaks into the conversation. That’s because, my dear friend, she is trying to jerk/blow you for money.

This brings us to last night. T spotted a Hidden Whore almost instantly. Those are kind of his type; not like he actively pursues them, but, like flies to a big juicy peach, they swarm to him. I don’t blame him; often the Hidden Whore, were she spotted on the street, would be considered above average in looks. I just don’t like them because I can see the cancer on their souls. She had shoulder length dark brown hair and bright green eye shadow, and wore a pink and white bikini.

This one had soul cancer bad. It wasn’t late; not even midnight; and she was flying. She dances with her roommate, both of them on stage, which I thought was a nice little change of pace. It was obvious this girl, let’s call her Agatha (sorry, I’m not good at making up stripper names), was the leader of the two, and probably the one who got her blonde companion into stripping. She would whisper commands to the blonde as they passed each other, something like “Take off your top,” always something to do with getting her naked.

I don’t know if this is unwritten or written as a rule of mid-level strip clubs, but from my experience, five bucks gets the top off, five bucks gets the bottoms off. Some strippers choose not to stick to this rule, I assume because they think they stand to get more tips when the tipper has an opportunity to crane his neck into their spread asshole. Sometimes it’s cool because, let’s face it, we’re here to get these people naked. Remember the equation? More naked, more fun. Sometimes, however, it comes across as an act of desperation.

Agatha was trashing it up on stage, and we all knew it, naked by the end of the first song. Even her blonde companion, who frequently, though subtle, managed to prance to the other end of the stage, as if to say, “I’m not really with her.”

After their turn on stage, Agatha returned her attention to T. Perched upon his lap, lo and behold, she mentions the VIP room. She can get him a great deal. Eventually the conversation fizzled and we moved on with our night.

We ended up going outside and losing our table, so we pushed two tiny round tables together right in the middle of the club, in between the doors and the bar. Like I said, the Dollhouse is kind of small, at least in comparison to more popular places like Pink Pony or the Cheetah. One girl, a big amazon blonde, clamped her hands on the back of my chair in order to balance herself for a lap dance on a guy sitting at the bar.

Kristie got a dance from a short stack blonde, her second from her of the night, moreso because she was especially enthusiastic than for looks (she didn’t expose her belly, pulling her shirt down to expose the boobies; we suspected stretch marks or the old C-scar). On the first dance, at our old table, she ended by pulling up her vagina into a long, narrow slit, exposing her engorged clit. She gave it just a little rub with the end of a finger, and it twitched. That was a pretty hot moment. Later, in the center of the club, short stack’s sophomore engagement topped the first. She forced Kristie’s legs open, shaking her ample ass against her crotch, then pulling up for an ass clap. She climbed on Kristie, ran fingers down her cleavage, licked her ear, her neck. The club was silent. The girl on stage, a tiny black Melanie Griffith, may as well have started tap dancing, because not a single pair of eyes were on her. Including her.

Agatha made her way back around to us. She was in, shall we say, a flirty mood. She stood behind Kristie and me, holding our chairs to balance herself. She descended upon Kristie (she gets lots of attention at the strip club), licking her neck, biting her ear. She squatted down to our level and said, “I want to watch you fuck her.”

I don’t know what I said back. Probably “Wow.” I was getting a little sick of this girl. I don’t like the Hidden Whores. Their soul cancer tends to fuck with my mood.

Then she attacked Kristie again, saying “I can lick your pussy and you can lick mine.” Granted, ordinarily hearing a girl say this to my girlfriend would be an incredible thing. But this girl barely knew what she was saying. She had the eyes. Those eyes that say, “I’m ready to destroy hope. Yours and mine.” Maybe I’m unique in that interpretation, but this is the bottom line: she didn’t want to lick my girlfriend’s pussy, pardon the term. She wanted me to pay her.

“Are you fucked up?” I asked, turning around as she bent down to hear me.

“I am so fucked up,” she answers. “I don’t even know what I’m doing.”

“Are you having fun?”

“No.”

Hm. For a moment, Pinocchio looked a little like a real boy. I looked into her eyes, and I saw the pain in them. “I can tell,” I responded.

She squatted then, and lowered her face. Oh shit, I said to myself. She looked back up at me, and the tears had gathered in her eyes, and they gleamed almost violently off of the flashing lights.

“It’s OK,” I said. I subconsciously touched her leg.

“Don’ttouchmeyou’renotsupposedtotouch,” she mumbled, almost incomprehensibly. Earlier that night, she had wrapped T and me in an awkward group hug, smashing our faces together. Before that, she had gently cupped T’s happy boys, a particularly brave marketing technique. I guess it’s a sliding scale. Of course, I know why she got mad. Because when she’s cupping happy boys, she’s in control. The physical digs a channel to the mental because, let’s face it, guys are usually led by the pursuit of either food or having our penises stimulated in some way. She knew that she had absolutely no control over me, and that felt like a violation to her. I knew, but I was fucked up and I didn’t care.

“Sorry,” I said, swiftly removing my hand. “I don’t want to make you uncomfortable, I’m just saying, it’s OK.” I was lost for words. I wanted to lecture her about doing stupid things, but hello, welcome to Hypocriteville. I’m there spending money to look at naked people. That’s like biting the hand that feeds you, which, according to Trent Reznor, is a bad thing. But in case you didn’t realize it by now, I don’t really look at the strip club like most people do. Most of the strippers are objects, as opposed to real people. Please don’t misunderstand me on this point: the circumstances of her existence depends entirely on her. I didn’t invent all of these categories. They arose naturally, like that creepy Darwin fish with legs.

Needless to say, she stumbled off soon after that, nearly falling as her ridiculously high heels slipped off the wooden bar floor onto the carpet. We continued with our night, and had lots of good times. A little later she descended the stairs from the secret stripper changing room, dressed in a short jersey dress, toting a cigarette that looked about a centimeter long. I may have gotten her in trouble. A big aspect of the job is customer service. I don’t even have a category for crying strippers.

Anyway, I hope she didn’t lose her job. Unless she was using her job to be a prostitute, which she was, which is wrong. But at the same time, who am I to tell someone how to live? In the end, who cares anyway?

We took a long hiatus from the strip clubs, mostly due to financial issues. Several months into our Vagina Vacation, Kristie and I found Crimson working at Blockbuster. Her real name is Simone. She was absolutely ecstatic to see us, yelling “Hey!” as we walked in. We were bewildered. Who is this little pocket rocket screaming at us? She jumped over the counter, saying, in full volume, “Do I have to take my shirt off for you to recognize me?” We felt eyes all over the store.

Simone walked around the store with us, and we talked about movies and a little about life. She’s going back to school, I can’t remember for what. She quit dancing, she got tired of it. It was a really fun and surreal experience, to see her in the Real World. The strip club is a time warp, a dark sanctuary in which time stops and worldly troubles are temporarily discarded. Still, in a strange way it felt good to get a little of the old VIP experience. In the end, she’s just a bubbly, intelligent, kind person, who used to dance her ass off at the Dollhouse. It’s really hard to judge that.

Some people think that visiting a strip club requires some kind of moral surrender. I think the fear arising from these women’s naked bodies is simply, classically, timelessly, a reflection of themselves, their own fear of being naked, of being regarded, and ultimately judged. To shed oneself of these fears is, in my opinion, transcendent. Our Sacred Temple.

I guess most people probably wouldn’t put it that way. But yeah, the strip club is cool.

I feel bad for making that girl cry.

THE END.