Swish

by Joel Derfner

  But then Daniel finally called and asked whether I could dance at Splash the following Wednesday, and relief washed over me like a very small, benign tsunami. There was no W-2 to fill out, no photo ID to process, but I would nevertheless be a real live go-go dancer.

  On the appointed night I set out for Chelsea at eleven; I arrived late, but within thirty seconds of my getting up on the bar, somebody had reached into my underwear, given what he found there a quick squeeze, and pulled his hand out, leaving a twenty behind. Clearly this was not going to be a five-dollar night.

  I went on in this manner until the wee hours of the morning. I moved lazily from one end of the bar to the other, smiling coyly at men until they pulled out their wallets. Every so often my underwear would fill up and I’d have to stuff most of the money in my socks. Then my socks would fill up and I’d have to go put most of the money in my locker. Occasionally men would ask my name and tell me theirs and we would spend a few moments talking, but mostly they chose to tip in appreciative silence.

  And for three and a half hours, I wasn’t worried.

  About anything.

  Because no one was weighing me in the balance, eager to find me wanting. No one was trying to determine whether or not I was sexy, because somebody in charge had obviously already determined that I was; otherwise, without the imprimatur of a professional, how would I have been permitted to do what I was doing? And so nobody needed to figure out whether I was smart enough or funny enough or nice enough to be worth his interest. Men were interested in me the moment they set eyes on me. This had never happened to me before.

  I wish to make it very clear that I was no more attractive than anybody else in the club. If I’d gotten off the bar and put my jeans on, nobody would have given me a second look—an assertion I know to be true because the one time I’d been to Splash before nobody had given me a second look—and I would have spent the entire evening wishing to be anywhere on the face of the earth but here.

  Tonight, however, with my pants off, men were taking it for granted that I was cute and giving me money for it, and in return I was giving them the promise of sex, the promise of if only. If only I could get off this bar, if only I didn’t have a boyfriend. If only you and I could be together.

  And on some level I meant it, just like I had meant it in the tugboat at the party on the pier. The person these men saw had never been asked to leave the floor during the fast skate at the roller rink at Randy Cohen’s tenth birthday party because he hadn’t been skating fast enough, and Charity Barnett had never told the entire school about it during show-and-tell the next day. The person they saw had never been anything but hot.

  Emancipated thus from my crippling past, I was free to interact like a normal human being—to accept what these men offered and to offer what I could in exchange. No, I didn’t want to start dating every guy whose hands grazed my ass, but the emotional generosity each one displayed inspired a reciprocal generosity in me. I don’t think there was a single guy there I wouldn’t have had sex with if circumstances had been different. It wasn’t that they were all muscular and sexy; many of them were in fact quite the opposite. But, along with the crumpled bills, they were offering me their own vulnerability. When two gay men meet under potentially romantic but public circumstances, the default dynamic is for each one to appear to want the other less than the other wants him, which is why often people who are dying to sleep together end up not looking at each other for hours at a time. But evidently this rule doesn’t apply when one of the two men is a go-go boy, and so these guys were allowing me to see them want me. And I felt deeply honored; I was only sorry to be limited in my recompense to an ass shake or two (or ten, depending on how much they were tipping). How could I not brim with gratitude toward the agents of my liberty?

  By the time I staggered out into the street—I had not seen 2:30 A.M. of my own volition since the Clinton presidency—I had made $214 (this number would have been higher, I was told, had patrons not been avoiding Splash after the recent spate of drug busts). It took me three days to recover from the lack of sleep, and after I returned to the land of the living the first thing I did was to e-mail all my friends urging them never to touch singles with their bare hands again, because they had no idea where those bills had been. I left the money I had earned on the coffee table and a few days later, when Mike’s parents were visiting us, they asked whether the overflowing plastic cup was my tip jar from tickling the ivories somewhere. The only way I could think of to avoid answering was to pretend to have an embolism, but just as I was about to start faking muscle spasms my dog ran in dragging a stuffed cow, thereby allowing me to effect a graceful change of subject.

  But I finally had to face the fact that, fully clothed and standing on the ground, I was once again the timorous, shrinking violet I had been before filling my socks with legal tender. The cup full of wrinkled cash was no match for Samara and Randy and Charity; their power far overshadowed any ephemeral strength lent me by the tender night.

  It was obvious that to regain the freedom I had felt so briefly I needed to dance again; luckily, now that I would be performing regularly at Splash, I would be able to feel that freedom weekly. All that remained was for Daniel to tell me to come back, so I waited patiently for his call.

  Very patiently.

  Very, very why the fuck isn’t the goddamn phone ringing?

  Apparently go-go boys with regular gigs are few and far between, and the rest work freelance. I was horrified to learn this, as it meant that the only way for me to become a fixture in the go-go world—anything less would be a debacle—was either to keep asking party promoters to hire me or to make them love me so much they would move me to the top of their call list. Either proposition would exert enough pressure on me that after three minutes I would turn into a lump of coal.

  Nevertheless, I went back to calling and e-mailing and being ignored. Once I even went to Splash on a Saturday and asked the guy running the party whether I could audition for him—watch out, Feminine Mystique!—and he said sure.

  That night I started to get to know some of the other go-go boys, who were neither haughty nor aloof nor unapproachable but totally friendly. Michael, for example, who had a) no discernible day job but b) the lithest body I had ever seen, won my heart by tipping me even though go-go boys never have to tip one another; I won his in turn by giving him my drink tickets. Later, as we waited offstage to do the shower show (a nightly Splash event in which all the go-go dancers cavort under the water cascading onto them from a mechanism above the stage) he grumbled in frustration at the limited time he had to achieve erection. “Do you have any Viagra?” he asked.

  “Wait,” I said, “do you have to have a hard-on for this?” I was wearing very well-constructed underwear, so I doubted I would have trouble maintaining the appropriate illusion, but still I was concerned.

  “Nah, I just like doing the show better that way.” I apologized for not having any Viagra and he turned to Paul, another go-go boy, who was a publicist by day. “Can I use you for inspiration?”

  “Sure,” came the answer, and Michael reached out and stroked Paul’s chest with one hand while working himself to a state in which he could enjoy the shower show with the other. The fourth go-go boy, whose name I never caught, turned out to have the same problem as Michael; Paul helpfully did something interesting to give him the lift he needed, and then it was time for us to go onstage, at which point I found out just how icy cold the showers at Splash really are. A bizarrely nonsexual element pervaded our interactions—these three guys just understood the difficulties inherent in their job, and did what they could to help one another out. As I left the bar, I felt proud to be a member of such a good-hearted group of people, and it took me three days to realize that the guy running the party was never going to call me.

  Finally, after weeks of agony, Daniel asked me to help him with a film festival he was organizing and I said yes I would be happy to but big breath pounding heart shaking voice trembling hand
s I wanted him to hire me to dance at Splash as often as he felt comfortable with. He said that would be no problem, and I almost started crying, and then at that week’s radio show he told me he’d gotten tired of being micromanaged by the guys who ran Splash so he’d quit.

  He hosted a party Saturday nights after the radio show at a bar called Eastern Bloc; I danced there a couple times, but it was nowhere near as satisfying as dancing at Splash. The go-go boys at Eastern Bloc were simply part of the ambience, like the too-loud music and the too-red lights hanging from the too-low ceiling. Nobody paid any attention to us and the tips were terrible. Then one day Daniel said that he was hemorrhaging money and so he was just going to have each week’s Eastern Bloc go-go boy do the radio show beforehand as well.

  I was being laid off from a job appearing on the radio in my underwear.

  I tried not to despair but it was seeming more and more likely that I would never again experience the joy that had filled me during my engagement at Splash. “I’m throwing a party at Scores next Sunday, though,” Daniel said (Scores being a notorious heterosexual strip club). “It’s the first gay party that’s ever happened there. Do you want to help out?” Of course I did. This would undoubtedly turn out to be another defeat to add to my burgeoning store, but the alternative—giving up—was unthinkable.

  I assumed I would be dancing, but when I got to Scores and took my pants off I learned that this was not the case. The other go-go boys working the event were going to be dancing—well, technically, they were going to be stripping, the only difference between that and go-go dancing being that they would start this party with their clothes on—but I had a different role to play. Once each go-go boy had finished his featured performance, he would make himself available to interested patrons for lap dances, which was where I came in, as the lap-dance monitor.

  My ostensible job was to make sure that none of the patrons and strippers had sex in the lap-dance rooms, but of course my real job was to make sure that the Scores bouncer didn’t catch any of the patrons and strippers having sex in the lap-dance rooms. I was also instructed to stop the lap dances after ten minutes, sex or no, so that if a customer was sleazy the go-go boy didn’t have to spend too long with him. Shortly after the party started Daniel instructed me to keep anybody who wasn’t getting or giving a lap dance from coming upstairs. I wanted to say that I was the least appropriate person within a hundred miles to have been assigned these tasks, since they involved disobeying a burly authority figure, keeping track of time, and telling people “no,” but before I could open my mouth he was already gone.

  I felt as if I were in a Sartre play. There were sixteen guys at the party in their underwear; fifteen of them were being paid to strip while I made sure everything ran smoothly and helped them out with anything they needed.

  I was a go-go intern.

  After one go-go boy and his customer left their lap-dance room I opened the curtains to turn the light back on and saw a smear of semen on the leather couch. Though I wanted desperately to pretend I had noticed nothing, I also felt very strongly that the next person to pay for a lap dance in the room had the right to an experience unsullied by the previous patron’s ejaculate, so I got a paper towel and, grimacing, wiped the couch clean. I reacted similarly half an hour later in another room when I saw a condom on the floor that had obviously fulfilled its intended purpose. I have taken some unpleasant gigs in the past, but picking up used prophylactics left behind by men who kept having to empty their underwear of cash while I ran frantically around saying “Okay, guys, time to wrap it up” loudly enough to be heard over the patrons’ preorgasmic groans but not so loudly as to dispel the mood may be the worst job I have ever had. When the party was over the go-go boys were supposed to share their tips with me, and every one of them forgot. (One guy did PayPal me the next day but then when I joked that I was shocked he had sex with people he met online he e-mailed me a confused “Why? Doesn’t everybody?” and stopped writing me back.) As I was on my way out, Daniel said, “Hey, do you feel like dancing naked at a party tomorrow night?” and, though all I really wanted at this point was to become a eucalyptus plant so I would never be required to have feelings again, I could not summon the psychic resources to turn him down.

  A few days after Daniel had first asked me how I felt about dancing naked, remembering what my friend Jim had said about go-go boys dancing with hard-ons, I made an appointment with my primary-care physician. Stuttering with feigned embarrassment, I told Dr. Weinstein that I was suffering from erectile dysfunction caused, I suspected, by my antidepressants. He obligingly wrote me a prescription for Cialis and sent me on my way. And so, the night after the Scores party, I had the appropriate supplies for Daniel’s event at Thai One On, a restaurant in the West Village. I knew from Jim and from Go-Go Boy’s blog that the evening was likely to be a tawdry one, but beyond that I had no idea what to expect.

  “Go-Go Boy says you get paid more if you come,” I told Mike as I popped the Cialis on my way out.

  “Good,” he said, “because the electricity bill was high this month.”

  I arrived late at the restaurant and found Daniel standing by the clothes check in the vestibule. “The other guys have all already done their sets,” he said, pointing to the party room, “so just go on in when you’re ready.” I couldn’t figure out whether I was supposed to be naked here (the people milling about were clothed) or only inside; to be safe, I kept my underpants on until I got into the main room, at which point I realized I didn’t know where to store them, so I just threw them in a dark corner and hoped they would still be there when it came time to leave. I got up on a platform wearing only my sneakers and socks, and, following the lead of the other dancers already ensconced in dimly lit niches about the room, manipulated myself into a suitably entertaining condition. I looked up at one point to see Go-Go Boy heading toward me from across the room; I hadn’t realized he would be dancing at the party too. “I didn’t know you’d graduated,” he said affably.

  “Yes, well,” I replied.

  Some of the guests were fully dressed; others were shirtless; still others wore only their underwear. A man in jeans and a button-down shirt came up to me, folded a dollar bill in half, put it in my sock, reached up, and squeezed me a couple times. Oh, dear, I thought, I didn’t realize that was part of the deal, after which I spent half an hour artfully toying with myself in such a way as to prevent anybody else from toying with me. Then I realized that the other dancers, less fastidious than I, were getting much better tips, so I gave over and let the patrons handle the goods (though when one guy made as if to taste them I backed away and laughed in friendly admonishment). Several times during the evening Button-Down-Shirt Man importuned me by repeating the squeezes without the cash incentive. When I rolled my eyes at this, the dancer next to me whispered, “I hate the guys who think a dollar gives them the right to grope you all evening. Just tell him you usually charge a lot more for what he’s already gotten.” I couldn’t figure out how to do this without making Button-Down-Shirt Man dislike me, though, so I held my tongue.

  While dressing for the event I had not thought carefully enough, and so instead of long, tight socks I was wearing short, loose ones. This meant that money kept falling out of them, as if I had been blessed by a crone in some twenty-first-century X-rated gay fairy tale. I kept having to collect the bills and put them with my things in the clothes check.

  Sometimes guys wanted to talk. One tall fellow with a Vandyke kept coming back to engage me in further conversation, tipping me each time. He asked what I did when I wasn’t dancing and I told him I wrote musicals.

  “My partner wrote musicals,” he said with a rueful smile. “He died a few months ago. You remind me a little bit of him.”

  I recognized a few people from places I’d danced before. One of them, a shirtless man in his forties with a limp, told me that people never seemed interested in him at these parties and asked me whether I had a boyfriend. I told him I did and he looked arou
nd sadly at the room full of flesh and sighed, “All the good ones are taken.” I realized he had come here searching for true love and I wanted simultaneously to hug him and to flee.

  “Joel!” said another man I had met in my underwear the previous week. “I was hoping I’d get to see you with fewer clothes on.” Dave was tall and stocky, with a shaved head and sharp, handsome features. I smiled at him coquettishly, delighted that he had remembered my name.

  As the night wore on, the party guests became more adventurous. Every once in a while I would glimpse somebody kneeling in front of somebody else in the shadow of a table, or eventually in the middle of the room, and there were dark figures doing God knows what in the alcove behind me. I became more adventurous too, and lifted myself to hang upside down by my legs from the heavy pipes running across the ceiling. This did not feel as thrillingly Caligulan as I had expected it to, but I was nonetheless gratified by the smattering of applause that greeted my dismount. One of the other dancers, who looked vaguely familiar, urged me not to risk such a maneuver again, in case the pipes weren’t strong enough to support me. I bristled at the implication that I was fat but then I realized that the reason he looked familiar was that he had appeared, impressively, in one of my favorite porn movies, so I forgave him the slight.

  Finally, at about three-thirty in the morning, I decided it was time to go. What the French call the little death was not required, but after three hours of hard work I would be damned if I was going to leave unfulfilled. Four or five gentlemen were standing around me, including tall and stocky Dave, and, as I accelerated the tempo of the movements in which I was engaged, I made it clear to them through facial expressions and inarticulate noises that I was on the brink of release. I felt a hand on my ass, another couple on my abs, and a few more on various other parts of my anatomy. “Joel’s a good boy,” Dave said to the man standing next to him, and then looked me in the eyes. “Yeah, he’s a good boy.”