A Night's Entertainment

The last time my buddy Charlie was in town, we hit the ATM, cashed our 20's at a gas station, and made our way to a strip joint: this behemoth of sin called Night Trips situated close enough to several colleges that the place was constantly packed with kids our age or a little older looking for a night's entertainment. The parking lot was packed worse than Disneyland when we showed up, but we found a place, paid the cover charge, and made our way to the bar to buy some hand accessories so we didn't look out of place.
There were roughly a thousand poles in this place, each with its own girl circling it, wrapping her legs around it, jumping on it and flipping upside-down, and each of those girls was reflected in the wall of mirrors that surrounded the entire place. It was total Feng-Shui: who knew how large the room actually was or how many people were actually in the place. Each stage was surrounded by people drinking and watching these girls in terribly uncomfortable looking clothing do things I can't do if I tried. I've always been impressed by stripper acrobatics, I have no idea how they do most of it, and all I can think of is how great of a work out pole dancing must be.
Charlie and I head upstairs by the pool tables where, a few feet away in a relatively dark corner of the world, people were getting lap dances. The lack of privacy scared me off: I've never been one for intimate encounters with thousands of people surrounding me (well, at least not with someone I don't really know [well, at least not here, tonight]). We were approached by a sullen and somber version of a woman with deflated breasts and deflated personality and walking like she had a disease inside her somewhere. Not interested, but Charlie's always ready to try new things, so he goes hand-in-hand with her into the darkness, and I'm left alone in the pseudo-blacklight to wonder about things.
See, I don't come here to these places for an erotic time, but for the people. I watch the girls spin round their poles, reflected in mirrors all over so that one girl equals twenty girls, and I watch the people sitting around the stage, eyes glued to some part of a girl's body, mouth slightly gaping. These people cash their paychecks in dollar bills for this kind of thing. I watch as a man approaches the stage with a five or something: the stripper takes it, he wraps his arms behind himself, and she gives him a quick one-on-one show, all the while a stupid, proud grin plastered on his face. She takes his head and holds it between her bare breasts and shakes. I have no idea what this could possibly be doing to the guy, but all the strippers do it to clients like this, even if they have no breasts. Meanwhile, a line of equally stupid-proud looking people was forming behind him, waiting to get their faces smothered in breasts.
But like I said, I come here for the people, not just the gatherers, but the workers too. It's interesting to me that these girls are all just caricatures of people. Sure, the girls are all different, but their nonchalant toplessness, their long legs and slight baby-fat on their stomachs, their generally messed up teeth all add together to make up just a reflection of the person. I wondered what they were like at home, if they just casually walked around naked at their college dorm, if they had boyfriend's who talked like the Fonz. I watch their reflections spin round their poles, their deflated breasts and faces engraved with hints of melancholy, and people kept throwing dollars.
The main attraction was a girl called Tina: for twenty bucks, she would lactate on you. I watched her do it to a guy and I couldn't believe I wasn't in some sort of horrible nightmare. She came to my side and locked eyes with me, squeezed her massive breasts together and beckoned, but again, I'm not interested. I thought about how somewhere she had a child, or maybe it was dead, who knows?
She wasn't really the main attraction for me. My main attraction was a pretty and normal-looking girl walking about with a tray to pick up beers. She wore clothes, and had a feisty look that said, “if one more guy hits on me, or tries to get me to sit on his lap, I'm gonna beat him until he can't stand anymore.” I fell in love immediately. I gave her my empty bottle and helped her collect the ones around the pool table and gave her a look which I hope conveyed my honesty and understanding. She disappeared into the crowd, and Charlie showed back up with his stripper.
“Your turn?” she said to me over the music. I didn't quite hear her so I asked what she said: “Want to dance?” Trying to be funny, I said sure then pushed my butt against her like I was giving her the lap dance. She laughed. Another stripper came up laughing, saying I was pretty good, then she taught me how to do a “bend and snap,” where you crouch down then stand up with your legs first then follow it with your body in such a way that if you have long hair, it flicks behind you. I tried it out and got a quick laugh from the professionals, then they went their way to do their business with people who are interested in a transaction of sorts.
We were both kind of fed up with the place by this point (about 20 minutes in), so we started thinking about leaving. When we saw a guy from our high school, that sealed the deal and we hopped in the car to find something else to do, preferably not another huge, franchise-type strip joint but a small mom-and-pop-type strip joint. We found this place called Boscoe's with an empty dirt parking lot, only a few cars in it. Paid the cover, went in, and this place was better. I love it when the girls aren't just interested in money, but will talk to patrons. We had a quick chat about income with this girl and what her boyfriend thought about her doing this kind of thing. He was the jealous type, which is too bad. Perhaps he should get out of the relationship, I mean, the money at a place like this is too good to pass up. 600-700 a night, generally. She pointed her boyfriend out to us at the bar, we waved and he waved back as congenially as he could muster to these people who were talking to his nude girlfriend.
She said at first he tried to keep her occupied all night, but it cost too much for him, and it was bad business to focus on just one guy night after night. A stripper has to be a kind of showman.
This kind of thing is why I come to these places. I love conversations like this, and there are only a few places to have them...
At 4, we made our way to a hole in the wall breakfast place: the kind where your waitress has existed since the dawn of time, never getting younger, never getting older, asking, “you want some coffee, shuga?”
“No thank you, Ethel. Just want some eggs and toast.”
Her vein-covered arms and droopy cheeks tell a thousand stories, just like the deflated breasts and secret melancholy of the strippers, just like the proud, stupid grin of a client. And they all speak of humanity and life and loneliness and greed and desire and let-downs and pick-ups, and every story is true and, like a reflection of a reflection, very rarely do they ever end or begin.