Stripper Lessons

by John O'Brien

  “It’s all done,” he says. “You can go now.”

  “Huh?” says Carroll, too annoyed to be really curious. It’s one fucking little thing after another tonight.

  At this Tool Belt looks disgusted himself. “You’re not the guy? I mean, you’re not the guy. There was a guy out here that wanted to use the head.” This isn’t enough; the men stare at each other. “I was working on the toilet, fixing it. It’s okay now if you want to use it. (almost there) Do you want to use the bathroom?” asks Tool Belt at last.

  “No,” says Carroll curtly.

  But as the conversation closes he realizes that he does, and now he won’t be able to for like ten minutes, or at least until the guy leaves or isn’t looking. And this is perfect. This fits right in with the day, right in line, right behind every miserable moment that’s led him to this point. A whole fucking marching army of miserable moments. He gets to a chair, sits down, and doesn’t even bother to get up and look when he senses a puddle on the chair being absorbed into his suit pants. Best case would be a spilled drink—it does feel cold—but he’s not about to stand up now and bend over backward to get the bad news. Besides, where would he go to clean it? The men’s room?

  So who cares, forget it. Watch Jasmine. Tip her. Clear your head and look for Stevie. That bitch of a cocktail waitress knows he’s here but is too busy talking with her boyfriend du jour to bring him a cider. Well Fuck Her, and he turns his attention to the stage. Jasmine looks just miserable, and Carroll reflects on how it must be a little humiliating on slow nights like this to have to get naked and act like you care for a fistful of jerks and even fewer dollars. Though he shouldn’t and can’t afford it, he puts a five-dollar bill on the rail for her. At least it’s something, and when she sees it they’ll have something between them for the duration of her set. Jasmine dances around, station to station yet abandoning her usual in-line progression and adopting a side-to-side bounce to make the most of the dearth of customers. Carroll awaits his visit; she spotted the five, and it shouldn’t be long now. But the song ends without even a pause in front of him. Worse, because he came in in the middle of her set, she has only one song to go. Five bucks is a lot of money for him to spend on a rail tip. Of course he would never take it back, couldn’t once she saw it, and he can only hope that she’s saving him for the third song. He’s seen that before, he’ll probably get the whole thing, get looked at nasty by the other men. He looks around during the break: Tina, Nikki, no Stevie yet, probably in the dressing area. He tries to see through the split in the curtain but he can’t make anything out from this angle. It is dead, and he has seen them send girls home early on slow nights, and it might be her night off altogether. . . . God, he hopes not! He can’t face that after this day, won’t be able to stand letting their relationship continue on this sour note for another twenty-four hours.

  “One more time for the lovely Jasmine, gentlemen, out in a moment with the third of three,” says the DJ / doorman. That fucker always goes behind the curtain on the side for some reason. He gets to see everything. “Coming up next, lovelylady by the name of . . . lovelylady by the name of Melissa, gentlemen . . . coming up right after Jasmine with the . . . third . . . no . . . yes, the third of three.”

  Melissa? His heart sinks. He really needed it to be Stevie next, and considering the size of the crowd, the fact that it isn’t means it’s even more doubtful that she is here at all. Jasmine takes the stage. He knows he’ll have to be attentive to her when she comes over, but now that his hopes of seeing Stevie tonight are vanishing, he is in no mood for smiling. Even the door to the ladies’ room—he’s been eyeing it since he walked in—hasn’t opened once. Nobody could be in there that long, not here at this place. Still, perhaps a glimmer of hope? Jasmine looks like she’s about to come over, just finishing up with a guy on the other side who has two singles in front of him. Look at him, sitting there looking shamelessly right up at her as if two bucks buys him the world, as if (oh Christ! now he’s leaning forward) his two-buck timer is running. Carroll wants to scream at this guy: Fuck You! Fuck him! What? does he think that’s a five he’s got out there? Carroll sits back and folds his arms, ready to enjoy again, though for different reasons, Jasmine’s visit. Show that jerk what two bucks’ll get him. He knows that she’s meticulous about sharing her time equally with each guy on the stage, so five bucks is a strictly gratuitous gesture when Jasmine is dancing. Of course Two Bucks, whom he’s never seen here before, wouldn’t know that and so looks terribly impressed with his own savvy in buying this extra attention. Finally she is done with him, but she moves next not to Carroll, but to the guy sitting four seats down from him. She was just at this guy . . . what gives?

  Stunned, he watches her make the circuit again, pausing once more for each man at the rail except him, not even catching his eye, or letting him catch hers, moving about as if she doesn’t see him at all, let alone the fiver before him. This is awful. Unbelievable. Could it be that Stevie warned everybody about him? Does she hate him that much? And where the hell is she? Did she quit because of him? The music for Jasmine’s set ends, and she leaves the stage without once dancing in front of him and his five dollars. He sits there fuming, beside himself. He wants to find Stevie, and the most expeditious way to determine if she is working tonight will be to ask someone. But he can’t move. He needs to sit where he is and resolve this Jasmine thing first. She’ll have to acknowledge him when she comes around to collect her tips. After all, five dollars is normally considered kiss-on-the-cheek material, so she’ll have to at least look at him. Waiting, scanning the room as if in search of a witness to this injustice, his eyes fall upon the cocktail waitress, still at the bar. She’s looking right at him! There she is with nothing to do. Here he sits with nothing to drink. She knows it, and still she does nothing. Laughing and leaning her elbows on the bar, she looks back to the barmaid and runs a finger around the rim of a glass languidly, to confirm, Carroll knows, that she has no intention of bringing him a drink.

  Now it feels like everyone is looking at him, and he suddenly wonders if this is all imagination. Is this what it means to go insane? Once at work he watched Security drag an associate from his office. The guy had barricaded himself inside and wouldn’t come out. Everyone thought he was working, but on day two he started screaming and banging the walls. When they finally yanked him out he peered around at the gathering, looking like death incarnate, tight little eyes, beating down hard. Everyone was there, and the guy kept yelling for them to stop staring at him. Cocaine paranoia, they murmured amongst themselves, but they were staring.

  He suddenly realizes that Jasmine is past him, collecting tips on the end of the stage, and indeed, his five dollars is gone. He has no recollection of her being in front of him. Anger, never before like this in this place, sweeps over his face, and in his fist he balls up one of the discarded cocktail napkins that litter the counter.

  “Hey!” he says loudly, brusquely, and it crystallizes the moment. Now everyone really is looking at him. All the conversation, even the music, has been sucked into the vacuum of that word. His move.

  He rises unsteadily and moves to the part of the rail that Jasmine is backing away from. In a place like this there are, of course, contingency procedures for such behavior, and he can already feel things begin moving around him. Not from the customers—they all sit motionless like a good audience, like it’s the most unobtrusive way to distance themselves from any association with The Problem—but from the corpulent figures with scars on their faces who lurk in the dingy back rooms. Beasts you never see but know are always around a place like this. Carroll’s never been in a fight, much less in a place like this. Carroll is suddenly not so sure he ever belonged in a place like this.

  “Hey . . . ,” he says again, gripping the rail.

  Jasmine holds her ground but is ready to bolt. She checks the bar to confirm that she is safe, though she knows she is. The room is absolutely silent.

  “What,” she says.

&nb
sp; He wishes he knew what he wants to ask her. He really does. At first he thought it was about the tip, but he doesn’t care about that now. Then he thought he was going to ask her about Stevie, but he knows that no one here will give him any information like that. Not now. He can feel someone bearing down on him. Turns out it’s the black guy who was talking to the cocktail waitress when he walked by. Carroll feels pressure, a strong hand on the back of his neck.

  “You gotta leave, man,” says the black. The voice is disarmingly civil, if not downright affable, but the hand will clearly remain on Carroll’s neck until the night air is felt. “Best you shoulda stayed home tonight.”

  He allows himself to be led out without any further disruption, laughing inwardly at the understatement: he should have stayed home tonight. And he means it. As weak as some of the nights have been, this is the first time he has ever regretted coming to this place. They reach the door. Sure enough, the hand is gone from his neck when they pass to the outside. From there his escort watches him walk alone to and start his Vega. The sheer bulk of this man standing at the door keeps the curious inside where they belong. A small favor to both of them: you and me, we’re not monkeys. Carroll backs into a parked car as he is maneuvering out of the lot, but neither he nor the black seems to care about this.

  So many lights, here, the village, all up and down Wilshire Boulevard, mark in one way or another so much traffic, people going and coming far below her lofty balcony. It’s never too late around here, and the air is warm but not warm enough to chase the tickling chill from a droplet of melting semen as it falls from her vagina and makes its desperate way along her thigh. Stevie lifts her feet to the patio chair and hugs her knees, pulling her short silk robe around her like a cocoon. Inside, snoring on the bed, is her boyfriend, here on one of his increasingly rare visits. No call before the dropping in, and what the hell did that mean anyway? All those people. All those problems. Tonight’s news ran a story of a newly immigrated Lebanese family, the father, the sole supporter, shot dead on his second week in his new American home, a bystander in a drive-by shooting. Wife was under sedation, but sons and daughter cried for the hungry camera, as if in supplication, cables from the station’s remote perhaps extending to heaven. Another drop of semen falls, this time down along the tender fold of her buttock. Men below eat their dinner out of Dumpsters. Boyfriend has already apologized about the sorry state of even this neighborhood and that she has to live with this and he’ll see about tighter security. Indeed, somebody down there needs tighter security. But she knows that she’ll never be pretty enough or naked enough or fuck good enough to keep those men away from those Dumpsters, and another drop of semen falls from her vagina. No worries there, puddle or no. The worst part of the operation was that it hurt. It seemed like the right thing to do, like it fit, like when she looked at her life it fit. Smoothing out an aberration, and now he can shoot whatever he wants into her with no fear of a costly little heir apparent running up his attorney’s fees next year. It did hurt, but she’ll be damned if she can feel anything down there now. Just numb. Just cold drops of dead semen and it’s just as well because we gotta get some better security to keep those bastards from licking our tossed-out frozen-food packages. Dad took one between the eyes, now do we stay or do we go? A bullet between the eyes wouldn’t be all that bad if it kept you from seeing those bastards licking our tossed-out frozen-food packages. At least it would keep them from stinging. She collects on her fingers a smear of his semen, his cast-out come, and rubs it under, into her eyes. They sting. They do sting.

  Monday

  Solo, the SoLo/Bombgate file, has, evidently, been found. Found, that is, if the scribbled note from Pam, who worked over the weekend, is to be believed. So he dragged himself in here early for nothing. Client’s coming in, file’s found, problem’s over. But that’s not the point, not anymore. Call it a piece of good news after the worst day of his life, and let it go. But where was it? He looked everywhere. How could he have not been the one to find it? This was Carroll’s project. He terrorized him-self looking for that file, and he should have been the one to find it. At this early hour on a Monday the office is still pretty empty, and if Pam worked over the weekend she likely figures that she owes herself an extra half hour of sleep this morning. For that matter what’s he doing here now? He’s the one who should be getting an extra half hour of sleep. But of course, the best it would have been is an extra half hour of staring at his TV—turned off, all night he stared at it turned off. He decides to run down the hall and take a look on her desk.

  It wasn’t so bad, the not sleeping, with the world so silent like it gets, punctuated by the on-off cycle of his refrigerator so that the offs seem that much quieter when they come around, him lying there, the air so thick with aloneness that he could smell it, taste it on his tongue in the morning in place of the usual pungent coating of residual sleep, which always feels left there like a wafer that was dissolved during the night. Apart from the dead screen of his television, he also watched the meager reflections cast by streetlight through his window take the ceiling with projections of various shapes in the room. They were so faint that you couldn’t see them by looking right at them, but the moment you looked away there they were again. It reminded him of the Pleiades, of tenth-grade astronomy class. The teacher had told them to look for the little cluster of stars one evening, warning them that it would only be visible to their peripheral vision. No one bought this, and predictably there were kids the next day who defiantly claimed they had seen the whole schmear looking right at it. Carroll doubted that, he himself had looked for the cluster the night before and the way to do it was to find it, look right at it and see nothing but where it is, then look a tad to one side and see as much as you’re permitted to see. Those kids needed to be right—it didn’t matter what about—but Carroll knew better. And that’s how it was with the lights on his ceiling last night. But as the night wore on he noticed that they were vanishing from even his peripheral vision, and he realized that the sun was moving in on them. Again, not yet strong enough that you could notice any brightening of the room or sky, but you just sensed the change on some primal level long ago dismissed by the species, as if someone you trusted implicitly called you up and told you that the sun was rising, and though you couldn’t see it at all you believed that person. You believed it so much that pretty soon you started to imagine it was getting lighter. Carroll figured a solid hour had passed between the time he imagined it getting lighter and the moment his eyes told him it really was getting lighter. Actual sunrise, he knew from watching the Almanac segment of the Weather segment of the News on TV last week, was still a long way off.

  So it wasn’t so bad, lying there awake. Nothing like the drive home. Now that was bad. He passed the airport, drove under that huge runway bridge just as a jet was taxiing across it. Until then he had been driving in a sort of pleasant daze, like, he supposes, maybe drunks drive, though he didn’t weave. And he remembers everything. Hitting that car in the parking lot and not stopping to leave a note (even if he had thought to do it it hardly would have been appropriate). When he felt the impact Carroll looked instinctively to the door of the club and saw the black guy who had walked him out standing there alone. Carroll smiled like they were old friends, but later realized that there was no way for the guy to notice this from across the lot in the dark. He did let him pull away though, so he must not have been too concerned about the car Carroll hit. And Carroll kept that silly smile on his face as he drove down Imperial Highway, banking right with the easy curve of a traffic triangle onto Sepulveda. Everything was fine, like a queer out-of-his-hands relief had washed over him. Not thinking, just smiling. He drove north on Sepulveda, heading toward the little green VENTILATION OK light that guards the entrance of the runway tunnel and feeling okay himself. But he shouldn’t have felt okay, and as if to correct this flaw in the glass a huge TWA 747 suddenly consumed the sky and the runway above him just as he rolled into the tunnel. Now this may not sound l
ike much, but even on a mundane day you can count on a fast education about the enormity of Man’s machines down at the airport when car meets jet meeting bridge, and for Carroll, whose day had been anything but mundane, the experience had less to do with Man’s machines than it did with a veritable wake-up call from the darkest places of his mind. Big fire-fucking angel from hell steps into the picture right when it’s too late for him to do anything but crawl under its belly and hope for the best. So ended the pleasant daze, and the rest of the drive home was riddled with anxiety and terror, regret and despair.

  The jet of course had served its purpose and wasn’t to be found anywhere in his rearview mirror, though he kept looking there, as he emerged from the tunnel and proceeded along Sepulveda, past the airport, the billboards that sing specious songs of lavish accommodations to the ears of expense-account–endowed travelers. Carroll inched upward to get a look at himself in his mirror and found there a face as white as the balled-up cocktail napkin, which he then discovered in his hand. He wiped his brow, causing his hand to start shaking, and returned to the road before him while continually checking the mirror to con-firm what lay behind him. Something very bad was in that mirror; he caught glimpses of it behind the eyes he met there. It shone in a flash deep within the nether reaches of his pupils, shone with an intensity that fairly lit up the car so brightly and quickly that when he looked again it lived only in the photosensitive memory of the luminous dials that dot his dashboard. The closure, he couldn’t ignore it: never again may he return to Indiscretions. Headlights of the opposing traffic, when the cars came upon him, locked onto his gaze and stung his eyes the way a welding torch high above and across the street can still manage to stab through the daylight and cause you to wince. The devastating truth of how this terminus would affect his life grew perniciously in his belly. Never again . . . never, never, never again see Stevie. Never park in the lot, never walk through the door, never see the inside of That Place, never see Melissa, Tina, Nikki, anyone. Never again do what lies at the center of his world. He had to slam on the brakes to make the turn onto Santa Monica Boulevard, and the jerk of his body in the seat was all that was needed to manage the trick. He choked, and before he could stop himself, vomited on the steering wheel and his lap. Not much, but messy, caught some on his arms when he had to steer through it. Between him and his apartment was a long stretch of stoplights, even heavy traffic in West Hollywood in the middle of the night. And once he got there, once he got home, what could he do? Clean up? Wait for work?