The room was crowded with leather-clad bikers, soon to be married men carrying bosom-shaped novelty mugs, and topless women begging to perform table dances for disheveled slobs with their bellies hanging out of their T-shirts. The only person who didn’t belong was the man sitting next to me. He was a lanky gentleman wearing a black pair of Dockers and a white dress shirt with gray pinstripes. He had a full head of wavy gray hair and wire-framed bifocals. His face looked firm, but his skin was dry and pitted. He noticed that the dancer on stage wasn’t attracting much business and laid an extra dollar on the platform before him.
The dancer was a heavyset woman with small shoulders. She had small breasts that rested on either side of her belly, and for reasons I didn’t care to know, her nipples were wrapped in flesh-colored finger Band-Aids. She danced to the edge of the runway before the man next to me and crouched to slide his can of Pepsi out of the way. The man slipped off his glasses to prevent them from being smudged. The dancer stepped over the small table that held our drinks, straddled her legs around the man’s chair, and eased herself down onto his lap. She rocked back and forth against his hips and said, “Hey, Phil, I haven’t seen you here in a while. How you been?”
“Oh, can’t complain,” he said like someone bumping into an old friend at the supermarket. “How’s it going tonight?”
“Oh, you know,” she said, smiling, rubbing her breasts against his cheeks, “Makin’ enough to pay the bills.” She lifted the strap of her g-string for Phil to slip his two dollars under. “Thanks. Stop and talk with me before you leave, okay?”
He looked her in the eyes and grinned. “Sure thing, Marla.” She pinched his cheek and stepped back onto the runway.
This happened on my first visit to a strip club, and I still have trouble believing it. After watching countless stripteases on HBO, Showtime, and Cinamax, I had never expected the dancers to actually talk with their customers. If anything, I would expect them to say, “Am I still your favorite?” or “Oh, baby, baby, you make me so hot.” Instead I hear, “There’s nothing wrong with being nervous. I still get nervous every time I go on stage,” and “No need to apologize. Ain’t none of us millionaires here.” These women weren’t pretentious whores, drugged-out strays, or sexed crazed party girls. They were average, mundane women who happened to make a living with their bodies.
I had also never expected a man like Phil to look so harmless. He was the strip club patron, the regular, the dirty old man, the g-string addict. Male culture despises this pervert as much as female culture disdains the stripper. We have unwritten rules to avoid becoming like him. We are only allowed to go to a strip club once or twice, on special occasions, and always with the company of other men. These rules are evident when men share their strip club stories. “But I was only there for so-and-so’s bachelor party,” they often say. “There are some guys who go there every week.”
But in my experience, the guys who go only once or twice are the real perverts. They’re the ones who steal or try on the women’s discarded clothes. They’re the ones who spank the women after the managers have reminded them to stop. They’re the ones who put dollar bills between their teeth for the dancer to pick up with her thighs (a good way to infect your eyebrows with crabs). They’re the ones who treat strippers like mindless playthings to be fondled and thrown away.
The patron sees the stripper as his equal. He knows that his perversions are being exploited as much as her body. He also appreciates the stripper more because he knows what it means to sacrifice one’s dignity and reputation to satisfy a need. He does not coax the dancer into anything grotesque or childish. He only touches her at the shoulder to help her keep balanced. He smiles at her when she dances. He stares into space when she services others.
I had often fretted that I might become one of these lonely perverts some day, but that fear had never crystallized until I met Phil. As Marla wrapped her doughy breasts around my face, I realized that the rest of my life could be like this. I saw myself shuffle back here week after week with a wad of dollar bills in my front pocket. I saw myself drive home to jerk off and watch television until I fall asleep. That wasn’t the life I wanted to live. I wanted to meet someone, go on dates, buy presents, share apartments, get married, have children, and experience all of that other so-called bullshit.
I wasn’t searching for a lap dance when I left the house that night. I had planned to go to a different type of dance bar, the kind where the women stay clothed and ignore you until you buy them a drink, across the street from the topless bar. I had intended to find a nice woman to spend the rest of my life with and get her number, but after I paid the two-dollar cover, I found the dance floor empty. Only a few couples were there, sitting and having conversations over beer. I couldn’t drink because I had driven there by myself, and I felt awkward just standing there with nothing to do. On the way back to my car, I saw the promise of easy intimacy in the black silhouette of a naked woman painted on a windowless wall. I had never viewed a real pair of naked breasts since, I suppose, I was an infant. I was curious. I drew a deep breath and walked across the street.
My arm was tense and shaking as I pulled out my driver’s license for the bearded man behind the cash register. The place had the standard decor of any bar: a pool table, a couple of arcade games, some neon Budweiser and Michelob signs, and a few dark-stained tables smelling of spilled alcohol and cigarette butts. The distinctive feature was a small stage protruding into the center of the room. A brass-plated pole ran from the ceiling to the black and white checkerboard floor of the stage. There, a woman in cutoff jeans slipped off her neon pink bikini top and threw it against the smoke-streaked mirrors behind her.
I sat down at one of the tables away from the stage. After a few minutes of watching, a pretty blonde in a skimpy white dress touched me on the shoulder and asked me if I wanted to have a private dance. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the twenty dollars required for such a service, and she moved on. Then I noticed that the men at the foot of the stage were laying down dollar bills for the dancer (who had discarded her cutoff jeans by now) to give them a ten-second lap dance. When her show was over, she gathered up her clothes and money as we applauded. I carefully stood up and walked to the platform, finding an empty chair next to Phil. Marla chose three songs from the jukebox and stepped on stage to wipe the pole with a white terrycloth towel. A voice from an unseen microphone introduced her as the vivacious Crystal Flowers.
When I finally left the strip club, I felt confused. I wasn’t sure if what I had done was wrong. After all, I was young and single and no longer belonged to any religion that forbade pleasures of the flesh. I was over twenty-one and didn’t break any laws. The women weren’t forced to work there either. They probably could have made more money waiting tables at Perkins. I didn’t put myself in danger of contracting a venereal disease. I didn’t do anything wrong, I told myself over and over again, but I never found it comforting.
If you strip away the taboos, unearthly lighting, throbbing music, and drunken hilarity, you are paying for little more than a woman shoving her breasts in your face. Why is there so much demand for this service? Are we so afraid of real sex that we’ve created a form of prostitution without it? Does this ritual satisfy some Freudian longing for our mothers? Do we come here for the illusion of affection? If so, why does she have to be naked? Why doesn’t she give you a hug instead of a handstand in your lap? She won’t kiss you on the lips, but she’ll shove your face into her inner thigh. What kind of a culture creates these inconsistencies? And why did I enjoy them?
These questions didn’t discourage me from returning to the strip club. If anything, they’re part of what drew me back. I told myself that I was going to go to the legitimate dance bar, but I had a convenient collection of dollar bills in my pocket just in case. I peeked inside the dance bar, found it empty, and walked across the street. When I entered the topless bar, I saw a girl who looked like a close college friend. She wasn’t dancing; she was one of those rare straight women who follow their male companions into these places because they are too drunk to know where they are. I was afraid that I had been busted, but she turned out to be a mere look-alike. Still, seeing a familiar face had killed the mood for me. I wondered what my friends, my family, would say if they knew that I went to places like this.
The third time I bypassed the dance bar entirely and headed straight for the strip club. A long time had passed since my second visit, and I had been suffering from a terrible numbness, as if I wanted to cry but couldn’t. I had no one to talk to about this numbness because I worked nights, and my coworkers at the door factory did nothing but yell at me for mixing orders and not paying attention. I didn’t know it at the time, but I drove to the strip club that night hoping the women could take that numbness away. There was one precious moment, when one of the girls blew hot air into my ear, that I forgot everything, but, upon remembering, I was miserable again. Each new dancer seemed younger and less experienced than the last, and the once-or-twicers grew louder and more demanding. I wanted to leave, but I didn’t have the energy to stand up. Then one of the dancers started stripteasing to Jewel’s “Who Will Save Your Soul.” It was the last thing I wanted to hear at the time, and when it was over, I finished my Pepsi and left. I never went back.
Much has changed since then. I’ve returned to college, and I have friends to talk with when I get lonely. I’ve gone on a few dates but have not yet found a woman to spend the rest of my life with. I haven’t stepped inside of a topless bar in five months, but the urge to go back is still strong. I don’t necessarily want another sweaty, g-stringed woman to rub against me. I just want to get away from all of the problems in my life and slip into another reality, one where I feel appreciated and relaxed. I know of no other place to receive such treatment. No patron does.