I do have stripper stories but, like most things I've done, the stories have a different perspective. Why do I bring this up? Who cares? Let's just say someone close to me was found to be stripping. Maybe not naked stripping but leaving little enough to the imagination that it may as well have been. Don't know that money was exchanged so technically perhaps it wasn't really stripping. What is the distinction between a lingerie party at a club and stripping at a club? Anyone?
Anyhow, it conjured up a few stripper stories. Life is, after all, the stories we can tell isn't it?
The first time I ever saw a woman strip live before my eyes was as a freshman at the University of Cincinnati. Not sure how I hooked up with the guys I hooked up with but we road tripped to Dayton to see the Beastie Boys in concert on their Licensed to Ill tour with Fishbone and Murphy's Law. We stopped at a seedy little adult book/video store before the show. The booths where you continually pop in a quarter to keep the video going frazzled me after about one dollar so I wandered back to the "live" show.
It took me a minute or so to figure out that you had to keep putting money in for the blind to go up to see the girl dancing. It was a strange experience. I felt sad for her. She was not very attractive and looked bored, beaten down even. I learned quickly that if you put more money in she would come right up to your little window and show you, well, everything...in up close detail. I wasn't quite ready for that and was quite suprised to see, right in front of me, behind the veil of the window, an explicit presentation in female anatomy. It left me feeling even more sad.
The next time I was in the presence of strippers was visiting a friend in Lexington, Kentucky and we ventured off to a "gentleman's club". What the hell is that anyhow? All I remembe was that it was dark in the club with the stage the dominant feature in the club. I vaguely remember the girls (isn't that always the case?) but do remember watching one girl in particular. She came over to our table after dancing. I was the one who ended up talking to her.
She proceeded to tell me about being in nursing school with two children she was raising and she was stripping for the money. Maybe it was just a story I don't know but I believed her. We talked for a brief period of time and she seemed like a really nice girl. When she got ready to go back up on stage she told me she would do a special dance for me. It's quite possible, maybe even likely, that talking to customers is part of the gig as a way of making more money. I didn't know any of that but could now no longer watch her because I knew her as a person.
In the later years of college, one of my roommates had a girlfriend who stripped. He asked a group of us to come up and watch her dance. I told him that was weird but we went anyhow. This time I was a bit closer to the action and, though not a fully nude strip club, was rather disturbed by strange men putting money in what little clothing she had on. Intriguing as this was, I still couldn't watch her dance.
My final reminisce was a strip club in The Flats in Cleveland, Ohio where a group of us were participating in a bachelor party. We were in a club, a large stage in the center and a group of men standing around, cheering, yelling, throwing money on the stage with an MC egging the crowd on. As I get closer I noticed two fully naked women writhing around on the stage, oiled up, wrestling. It was almost surreal. Someone threw some suckers on the floor and within a few moments both of these suckers were put to their intended purpose, each woman inserting the sucker into a place I never imagined a sucker being inserted and, upon removal, licking the suckers.
The guys in the room went crazy. Watching on film is one thing. Somehow it is pretend, distant, fantastic, relatively easy to turn off. Here it was live in my face and rather than being turned on I was horrified. There was no distance. To hear the MC begging for more money to be thrown on stage, for the women to be wiggling around on stage like that in front of a bunch of strange, and rather barbaric, men was more than I cared to see. The whole scene just left me scarred for the human condition and the things we do to one another in the name of entertainment. It was the last time I went to a strip club.
Prude? Nah. Afraid? Maybe. Naive? Sure. But really just a little too sensitive. Even then, in the midst of various addictions, there was a heart of compassion. I didn't fully understand it at the time but I understand how women and men, lonely women and men, get sucked into this world. It is a world of fantasy but it's only as real as the dollars you wield and is ultimately empty.
Reminds me of a Moby song, one of his best:
I had to close down everything
I had to close down my mind
Too many things to cover me
Too much can make me blind
I've seen so much in so many places
So many heartaches, so many faces
So many dirty things
You couldn't believe
My wife will tell you that if I were to ever get busted picking up a prostitute it would not be to have sex with her but to talk to her, even take her out to eat, not as a date, but in an effort to somehow help. Though I did come to know a few prostitutes while working with the homeless in Youngstown, I have no prostitute stories.
No comments:
Post a Comment