Club 42

by Joanna Angel

  CLUB 42

  CLUB 42

  A CHOOSE-YOUR-OWN EROTIC FANTASY

  JOANNA ANGEL

  Copyright © 2021 by Joanna Angel.

  All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or online reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Published in the United States by Cleis Press, an imprint of Start Midnight, LLC, 221 River Street, 9th Floor, Hoboken, New Jersey 07030.

  Printed in the United States.

  Cover design: Jennifer Do

  Cover photograph: Shutterstock

  Text design: Frank Wiedemann

  First Edition.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Trade paper ISBN: 978-1-62778-306-4

  E-book ISBN: 978-1-62778-519-8

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  Dedicated to my sister, Sarah.

  You fucking hipster.

  I love you.

  “Get on stage and show me what you can do. I have to put another girl up in two songs,” said . . . a guy whose name I didn’t know yet. I wasn’t sure if he just didn’t introduce himself to me, or if he did introduce himself and I didn’t hear him over the blaring collection of Top 40 hits from three summers ago. It was 11:30 a.m. on a Tuesday in Midtown Manhattan, and I was surrounded by carrot juice and naked women.

  Let me explain how I got here.

  Approximately three hours ago, I was two hours deep into my shift at Fix, an incredibly average coffee shop in Hell’s Kitchen, NYC. Despite the oddly adventurous name that sounds like a Halloween theme park, Hell’s Kitchen is an incredibly unexciting neighborhood, which explains why I was able to easily find a job opening for a barista. I lived in Brooklyn—where the coffee is always amazing, the tip jars are always empty, and all the barista jobs are taken.

  One year ago, I was living in Singapore, eating some of the world’s freshest dumplings, and working on a documentary film about a film. I wasn’t a Singapore local—I’d learned about three sentences of the language and thought I had respect from the locals, but everyone knew I was just one of the college kids on the NYU campus, very much part of the U without the NY. My graduation thesis was a documentary film about a lost film in Singapore. After researching all year . . . I never found that film. It was definitely fucking lost.

  The result of my research led to an underwhelming C+ grade. At least if I had failed out of film school, I could have made up some anti-establishment reason, like I was just too avant-garde for even an avant-garde film school. But that wasn’t the case. I was declared incredibly average by the world of academia, and that’s not exactly something you can put on a resume.

  While I never mastered the art of finding, or documenting, a lost film, I did learn that I had a strong passion for drinking coffee. Unfortunately, after a few weeks at Fix, I’d learned that I had very little passion for making coffee for other people, particularly people who insisted on ruining a perfectly fresh Ethiopian bean pour over with an entire cup of full fat milk. That was the order I accidentally spilled all over a woman in a crisp, white pantsuit. Fortunately for her (or me?), the cold cup of lactose swimming inside my cup of perfection stopped the coffee from third-degree burning her, but it certainly didn’t stop the beverage from staining the suit. I didn’t like this woman’s taste in clothes, or her taste in coffee, but alas. I was fired . . . from a job I never really wanted, but needed . . . and rent was due in a few days.

  I left the coffee shop and walked right past the train that would take me to another train that took me home. I was in no rush to go home, or anywhere for that matter. Walking through Manhattan with a determined expression on my face always felt productive. Everyone always looks like they have such a clear purpose in New York. I strutted the streets, not showing any of the guilt of someone who’d just spilled a cup of coffee on a customer and gotten fired from a minimum wage, under-the-table job. It felt like I’d just committed a murder and was comfortably walking the streets with blood on my hands.

  Oh yeah. Let’s get back to what got you excited in the first place—the naked women. See, I cleverly put that in the first paragraph to rope you in. I probably lost you somewhere along the way with the pantsuit and Singapore and whatnot, but don’t worry. I’m getting closer to the part about the naked women, and I promise you that the rest of this book will have lots and lots of naked people in it.

  My aimless walk led me out of Hell’s Kitchen and into Times Square. It’s very un-cool for a Brooklyn hipster to be in Times Square, passing things like Guy Fieri’s restaurant and shops that sell very illegal not-endorsed-by-the-team-whatsoever Yankees hats. At least Times Square embraces the fact that it’s completely douchey, and doesn’t attempt to be a “neighborhood” like Hell’s Kitchen. You have to respect that. Times Square never even tried to be hip. It doesn’t care. It laughs at hipsters all the way to the bank.

  Hopped up on caffeine and hypnotized by the oddly striking, bright blue Chase Bank advertisement above me, I tripped and fell on my own vintage kitten heels, and was helped up by the hand of a heavy-set guy with olive skin and a thick mustache who had been handing out flyers outside of a door that said “Club 42.”

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  “Yeah! I’m fine!” I answered. “Thanks, I’m sorry.”

  “All good!” He smiled. “Be careful out there.” He handed me a Club 42 flyer, which seemed rather pointless considering I was standing in front of the club already. Wouldn’t it have made more sense to go to a different part of town? Or literally stand anywhere except right here?

  Oh. The flyer said “free admission” on it. That was the point of this flyer—to make sure the people passing by wouldn’t just pass by. This trick worked, on me at least.

  Club 42 was an unoriginal name, to say the least. This was literally a club, on 42nd Street. Well, a strip club, that is. I wondered if this was the place where Cardi B used to work? I knew she used to work at a strip club in Manhattan, and since this was the only strip club I had ever been to in Manhattan, there was a very good chance this was the same one. I walked in, without any entrance fee, and no one asked to see my flyer.

  A girl with a greased-up high ponytail sat in the entrance of the club, furiously tapping away on her phone with long acrylic nails that sounded like raindrops on a rooftop. She was sitting in front of an empty coat room, which was lined with lonely wire hangers swinging back and forth in the short gust of wind that resulted from my swift opening of the door. It was eighty-five degrees with about 400 percent humidity. No one this time of year had a coat.

  “Auditions are in the back,” she said, barely looking at me. I tried to hand her my flyer, and she didn’t care even in the slightest. I walked toward the back, because this ponytail lady had directed me to the back, and it felt like the right thing to do.

  A tall, stocky man in a suit opened a heavy door for me and motioned me to come inside. I felt like I was being led to some kind of high-end drug deal. As he opened the door, the muffled sounds of outdated pop music became loud and clear. I tried to hand that same man my now crumpled flyer. He didn’t want it either.

  The room was filled with neon. Neon signs, neon LEDs that lined the stage, neon lights around the bar, neon light-up floors, but different colors of neon that flashed intermittently between blue, pink, green, and yellow. Apart from that, it felt like an intimate dining room with lots of little tables and seats—and a stage with a pole in the center. A handful of women walked around in lingerie, drinking coffee, and shoving their breasts into men’s faces.

  I gravitated
to the bar. The “bartender” took a freeze-dried egg sandwich and put it in a convection toaster oven. I was familiar with this device because they had the very same one at Fix.

  “Are you new here?” the girl behind the bar asked. She was short and skinny with long, straight brown hair and short bangs, and she was wearing a blue corset (holding tiny, perky breasts that didn’t quite seem like corset material), little black shorts, fishnets, and sparkly Ugg boots. It was one of the strangest outfits I’d ever seen.

  “Yes,” I said. I reached in my pocket to hand her my free admission flyer—perhaps she could redeem it for a free toaster sandwich? I was determined to use this for something.

  “Auditions start in a few minutes—should be easy. I think you’re the only one.” She smiled.

  Well that was very sweet. Now I felt bad that I’d internally made fun of her outfit.

  But what audition was everyone talking about? I kept thinking it was a code word for something that happens in the afternoon at strip clubs, or perhaps it had something to do with the “free admission” flyer. Admission sounds a lot like audition.

  “Can I get you a drink?” the bartender asked. It wasn’t like me to drink before 5:00 p.m., but since I was recently unemployed, I figured what the hell, why not?

  “A um, a PBR?” I shrugged. I had no idea what they served here. I couldn’t see any alcohol at all by the bar, but I assumed it was hidden somewhere. She laughed. Was she making fun of me for drinking PBR? I really needed to get back to Brooklyn. What the fuck did they drink in this part of town?

  “It’s full nude here—no liquor,” she replied, and she pointed at the stage. A blonde, buxom woman crawled around the stage on all fours, and yes, her vagina was just inches away from a man in a suit, who I’d thought was drinking a beer, but looking more closely, I realized it was actually just a bottle of root beer.

  “Have you worked full nude before?” the bartender asked me.

  “No,” I replied. I mean, I wasn’t lying. I’d certainly never worked at anything in the nude.

  “The girls all say it’s easier—the guys got only one thing to spend their money on!”

  Just then, a man in blue jeans and a blue button-down shirt came up to the bar and asked for a carrot juice. The bartender opened a minifridge and handed him a Naked brand carrot juice, which I found . . . fitting. In this establishment, “Naked” applied to juice without preservatives and to exposed vaginas.

  A tall, fit, dark-haired man wearing a black suit, with a coiled earpiece behind his ear, came rushing over. He exchanged a few words with the bartender, and they both pointed at me. I couldn’t hear what they were saying—the music had just been turned up several decibels. But I smiled and waved. Should I attempt to hand this guy the flyer?

  “Get on stage and show me what you can do. I have to put another girl up in two songs.”

  “Huh?” I replied. Wait. What? Get on . . . what? Me? Excuse me!

  In retrospect, maybe this should have been obvious: they thought I was here to audition to become a stripper. This was why I was granted free admission sans flyer. I was about to open my mouth and explain that this was a giant misunderstanding, and like, order a round of carrot juice for everyone and laugh or something.

  But I held my breath. In this moment I thought to myself, well . . . maybe I should audition to become a stripper? I had nothing to lose. There were about twelve guys in here, and I didn’t know any of them. There was something very comforting about that “bartender,” and I felt like she wouldn’t steer me wrong. She told me industry trade secrets like “girls say it’s easier.” Just the other day Cardi B came up on my Pandora playlist, and no other music I listen to sounds anything like Cardi B—that had to have been a sign.

  I’d spent a year looking for a lost film that I never found—and I’d been unemployed for the past eighty plus minutes. Life had felt very much without a purpose lately. Maybe this was a purpose.

  I took a big swig of root beer (in retrospect that was actually a bad idea) and looked at the man in the suit with determination on my face. “I’m ready.”

  “Okay. Go get changed, quickly.” He pointed to the general back of the club and said, “Dressing room is back there.”

  But the truth was, I didn’t need to use this dressing room, because I had nothing to change into. I mean, it was a strip club, did I really need clothes? I thankfully did have a matching bra and panties set on because I’d planned on getting laid later. That’s a whole other story.

  “No thanks,” I replied. Maybe he’d appreciate how resourceful I was?

  “What?” he said. He just looked confused.

  “I don’t need the dressing room!” I replied.

  “You can’t get changed on the floor,” he said.

  “That’s fine! I’m fine,” I yelled over the music.

  “You’re going on stage like THAT?” he said.

  No one else here was in a polka dot summer dress and kitten heels. This could be part of my . . . brand. I’m sure Cardi B had her own signature thing—this could be mine! There was no law anywhere that strippers had to wear neon and sparkles and shiny stiletto heels, right? My dress was from Marc Jacobs (well I didn’t buy it there, I found it at a thrift shop and I was rather proud of the find), and I was happy to flaunt it on stage.

  “Where did you work before?” he asked.

  “Fix!” I proudly answered.

  “Never heard of it,” he said. I mean, I wasn’t going to lie about my previous employment, but I hoped they wouldn’t call and ask for a reference.

  The man in the suit shrugged and rushed me toward the stage—like, the same stage the other dancers were on. I’d imagined I’d be taken to some back room and a couple people would judge me, à la American Idol, but that was not at all what happened. This was technically not even an “audition”—I was just . . . working?

  A slender girl walked off the stage, fully nude except for gold stiletto heels, holding a gold bikini in her hands. I looked at the way her calves tightened up when walking in the heels, and how that tightness continued up her body to her perky ass. Her heels magically made her long legs look longer, and they arched her feet in such an elegant way I instantly developed a foot fetish. I could now see how these stilettos made more sense than my one-and-a-half-inch heels from a thrift store, made of worn leather that I’d attempted to fill in with a black Sharpie. I pranced toward the stage and smiled at the girl walking off, and in exchange, she gave me a mean look and didn’t smile back at all.

  There was no turning back now. “Work It” by Missy Elliott came on. Apparently, it was time for me to work it!

  The businessmen by the stage seemed intrigued. One of them put down his root beer. I could see them all looking at me—I mean, they were in chairs surrounding the stage, and I was on the stage, so they had to look at me. First and foremost, I swiftly unclasped my fanny pack, which was cinched onto my waist, and let it drop to the ground. It made a loud thump on the stage because of all the loose change in there. Oh well—I’d made my presence known. I lifted my dress up, and two guys walked away. At the start of the song there had been six guys watching. The chorus hadn’t even kicked in yet, and now there were four. Ouch. I’d dealt with rejection before, but usually I was just ghosted in text messages—I’d never seen it happen so blatantly and so quickly.

  The song kept going and the lights beamed. I put my hands against the pole and did whatever form of twerking I could do. It had always felt ridiculous when I’d attempted to do that at random bars (only when enough alcohol was in me and the right hip hop song came on), but something about holding onto a pole made my ass gyrate in just the right way. My dress only had a handful of small buttons in the back, and it was totally impractical for this situation. I was beginning to understand why bikinis were the preferred wardrobe, but I had to just keep shaking my ass. Hopefully no one would notice me painfully trying to wrap my elbow around my head to unbutton the dress that was stuck around my torso.

  One
of the guys near the stage laughed and motioned for me to come over. I got down on my hands and knees and crawled over, attempting to do so to the beat of the music. He smiled, motioned for me to turn around, and unbuttoned my dress as the other guys hooted and clapped. I pulled the dress over my head, so excited for it to be off that it took away any anxiety I had about undressing in front of strangers. Everyone seemed so happy for me— and by everyone, I mean the four people.

  “Is it your first day?” one of the guys asked.

  “Yes it is!” I replied. He slipped a twenty-dollar bill in the center of my bra. Holy shit! It took me several grueling hours to make that at Fix. I felt a rush. A guy in a paisley tie pointed at my bra with a circular motion. I held onto my tits, and he threw some dollar bills on the stage. Soon, all four of the men were showering me with money! If I had to estimate, there was a good thirty-four dollars surrounding me (with big help from that original twenty-dollar bill that had started everything off).

  I’d heard this song many times before, but I was hearing it differently now. I got on all fours and arched my ass. I peeked my head over to the side of the stage and saw the boss man over there with his arms folded. I cracked a smile at him. I could grin and shake my ass and win anyone over right now—I just knew it. He glanced at his watch and yelled, “I need to see you naked before you get off the damn stage.”

  “What!” I yelled, still gyrating. I didn’t want my precious new fans to know what was going on.

  He came closer to the stage, and I stood up. If I’d been in a movie, there would have been a record scratch, and silence. I was upset because we were at the breakdown part of the song, and I had big plans for that part.

  “I need to see you naked—take that off!” He pointed at my bra. My twenty-dollar bill guy clapped his hands, shouting, “Yeah take it off!” Like my bartender friend had told me—this was a full nude club, and there was only ONE thing to spend your money on. So I walked back to center stage, stripped out of my matching Amazon Prime lingerie, and . . . shook my money maker. I bounced my Bcup breasts as best I could. I got back down on my hands and knees, but this time my pussy was completely exposed to the men nearby. It was inches away from them, and I felt . . . free.