The man I don’t necessarily want to be lovers with is making his zipper gnash its teeth. And I’m tipping the girl. Who is not really blonde, but brave, because her bush is dyed too.
I haven’t forgotten you. You’re in the corner. Are you bored, broken up with, busted? One of those things. I don’t care which. You’re in a fairly good suit missing the tie. You have a company card. You have balls enough to submit your receipts for reimbursement. You’ve poached egos, you’ve slid in ID, and the percentage of your actions you’re willing to take responsibility for is approaching double digits as you mature. You like titty bars. Right? Why do YOU like them, if the question’s on the table? I know you asked it first, but I don’t play by the rules. You should be able to tell that. I drink bourbon. Straight. You’re drinking light beer. You’re a wuss in creep’s clothing. You have made a joke to the bartender about girls who drink drinks like mine, who are on their third, a joke about slinging me over your shoulder and carrying me away. Good luck. You’re like every guy I ever meet, greet and complete a frazzled, foolish fantasy for. I know you. Don’t bother giving me your name, I’ll only pawn it in the morning. And don’t leave your wedding ring on the bedside table. I’m making a wedding ring quilt. Sort of chain mail. It’s 6 by 8 feet and it’s three-quarters done.
I almost graduated from a respected university. I’ve taken courses in things you’ve never thought of. I read Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Proust. For fun. And I like titty bars. A dichotomy isn’t it?
So, the velvet banquette, you sweating in the corner in the jacket you’d rather not drop in something questionable, flashing lights specially timed to obscure cellulite, sparkly thong panties stretched over the pricking promise of puissant pudenda. Me, bent over the platform, my breasts pressed against the stage, my skirt riding up behind me, and Her wrapped around the pole, 10 feet up, whirling by the hook of one high heel, a pornographic merry-go-round.
She’s why I come. Or not she exactly, but girls like her. This is nothing new for me. I come to this bar often. They’re the same everywhere you go. This Bar in Singapore, or This Bar in Milwaukee. They’ve been converted from finger steak restaurants and bowling alleys and daycare centers. In them, you’ll find girls in stretch vinyl chiffon sequin rubber plastic tassels candlewax chocolate whipped cream gothic naive whorish schoolgirl kneesocks pulled up to there and demi bras cupping 800 sizes of mammary, all these various versions of the voracious vestal vulva, shaking their things for profit just as they have ever since Eve noticed the figleaf was backless. And thank you God (in case you need to hear a prayer from these lips that have never uttered your name save for in the heat of heavenly sin), these girls are good to look at. God (in case you’d like me to go down on my knees and for once not do it with my mouth full), give me a long-legged stripper braided around a pole and listen to how well I can speak in tongues.
Wonderful things I have seen, speaking of miracles:
1) Happy Hour. South Texas, 1997. The face of Christ appears in the 5 o’clock shadow of the shaven pussy of a 17-year-old-stripper. Following hubbub and criminal charges of exploitation of the faithful, stripper is sent straight to the electrolysis chair.
2) Salt Lake City, 1994. Another bush story. Impervious Stripper lights her bush on fire as part of an incendiary act entitled “Moses.” Fire department comes.
3) Georgia, 2001. Stripper with a sense of humor glues two cream-filled pastries to her nipples in lieu of pasties.
4) Asses and tits and glittered eyelids from here to eternity, mother–daughter duos, 4 feet tall to 7 feet tall, Amazons and Tinkerbells, handstands, batons, girls capable of fucking baseball bats, fruit bats, and battery-powered behemoths.
Do you actually think I’m capable of making this shit up?
I haven’t forgotten you. You’re not really in this story, but I know you’re still there, balancing on that cracked vinyl or buttery leather barstool, leaning on that splintered formica or Italian marble counter, shuffling your sheaf of singles or bundle of billions. You’re the guy. We’re here to entertain you. You’re the reason God made pussy out of Adam’s rib. Forgive the religious imagery. I took a lot of theology courses before I didn’t get my degree.
The lights change, the shift rolls over, the new girls are fully dressed and the naked ones who’ve come off the platforms are roaming the audience like gunslingers, fingers twirling, spurs jangling. Lone hens in flocks of crowing birds, visiting cock-tables and roosting there. I go back to my velvet banquette and my tête-à-tête with the man who will never be my lover, and brood over how to be rid of him. He’s still throbbing over the possibility that he’ll get to go home with me and one of the naked girls, but he hasn’t asked the right questions, and I haven’t let him know that I’m hooking my thumb in the waistband of my panties, slipping them off and leaving them wet and exhausted beneath the table. He claims to be a career soldier, but has somehow missed basic training and every subsequent opportunity to learn how to shoot his gun. I am here for the strippers. And the new one, you like her too, I notice, is a redhead with seamed stockings and a 1950s black dress.
Is it the bliss of constant renewal, perpetual undress, the blessed press of freshly naked flesh? Heaven for the attention-deficient, girls whose names and features you need not recall tomorrow, bounty, outlay, spreading thighs and flashing eyes, moans and sighs and no goodbyes. Could anything be more satisfying than the titty bar? Certainly not the having of the things you’re thinking you want. Certainly not the pulse-pounding pursuit of Prurience and her minions. In the titty bar, you don’t have to move, apart from hand to wallet, hand to drink, hand to cock. You can recline, and imagine that for five bucks your grapes are being sweetly peeled. You can watch us.
The redhead unmakes her New Look silhouette, standing on her hands and twisting her ankles around the pole. Under the mourning dress is a merry widow. Her legs are crossed and, despite her upended pose, she is demure. Have I mentioned how I love titty bars? The music is loud and electronic, someone is claiming this girl is actually a stockbroker, and all I can hear is my pulse playing In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida on my eardrums. She winds her way up the pole, arched and upside down, stripes of white thigh showing between her garter belt and her stockings. She flips over, holding herself tight against the metal, and those of us with the right angle see that between her legs she’s wearing nothing. She pulls herself up the pole, slowly, slowly, her pussy spread against it, and with one hand unzips the dress and lets it drift to the floor.
And there you are, leaning forward slightly, boredom requited, mouth a little open. The expensive suit missing the tie is crumpling and you don’t care, your elbow is in beer, and you let it soak, you’ve got one foot on the floor and the other half raised in a step in the right direction, but you won’t be taking it yet. You’re scared. This is the stripper that doesn’t exist. I admit it. You do too. She’s not real. There are no strippers like this stripper. She’s the one we’ve all been waiting for. She’s the one that makes us wander from town to town, to all the titty bars in the country, the one that bent over us in the night and left lipstick on our faces, the one whose smell of sweat and perfume lingers on the fleece of sheep that, leaping, sent us sleep.
And her red hair glows in the lewd light, libations flow so fast it’s trite, and all of us sitting here ignite with something like the firefly’s torch, undrownable, quenchless, our blazes desperately blinking and signaling to the constant shining thing that is her body.
She is a bonfire in a snowfield and the ice in our drinks relents.
She puts one foot on the floor and leaves the other stranded against the pole, kicked over her head. Her garters imprint her flesh, her stockings slide smooth against the air, and she unsnaps one of the buttons holding them up. The music is gone by this point. We can all hear each other breathing. We’re calculating which of us will get there first. None of us can move.
Do you remember the story? About the princess at the top of the glass mountain. And the apples she rolled d
own the mountain to suitors, who, if they brought the apple back, could win her. I can’t remember how Prince Charming finally made it. I can only remember all the hopefuls who skidded bruised and despondent to the bottom. I may be making this story up to some extent. In one of the anthropology courses I analyzed it, cannibalizing from feminist tomes, but I have no recollection now of how to get to the top of the glass mountain. I only know how to fall.
This is why I love titty bars. Do you agree? We descend on love like mosquitoes, frantic desire relieved after one long suck.
Her stockings are gone now. She’s barefoot, which is against the rules. Strippers are supposed to wear platform slippers made of clear plastic, but none of us are complaining. She’s looked us each in the eye and crawled on hands and knees across the platform. She’s strung a stocking around the neck of the never my lover man, and drawn his glazed face toward hers. She’s flicked her pink tongue over his lips. We’re ruined. We sit in soiled clothing, peanut shells crunching under our feet, strings of drool suspended from our chins. We’ve nothing left but want. I can see the freckles on the tops of her breasts as she bends over our banquette. She slips her hand into the lace and jiggles the flesh, pushing the strap over her shoulder.
The room is a collective moan. You are on your knees, suit be damned, cellphone be lost, wallet be stolen. You’re the guy. We’re doing this for you. If you can believe that, you may also be able to believe that she loves you and only you. Believe it. She is the sexiest stripper on the face of the earth, and she doesn’t exist. She’s made of smoke and sawdust and sympathy. She puts her nipple in my mouth, and I suck. Because she’s the stripper that doesn’t exist, her breasts are real, and because I don’t believe in boob jobs, so are mine. She holds my tits in both hands and runs her thumbs over my nipples.
You, being male, will not understand how calculated it is that I am the only woman customer in the room. I will get all her attention, I will be loved, and you, being male, will love it. Hands from here to infinity grab wallets, hundreds of dollars flick forth, and the stage is showered with satisfaction. You may also not understand why it is more satisfying to feel her lips against mine, to feel her breasts against mine, to feel the merry widow’s lacings in my hands, and to untie them, than to be kissed by the man I never came with. His maleness does not mean he is a man. I would rather crisscross the country, kissing strippers, than do almost anything. The stripper that doesn’t exist is everywhere in the dead of night, as soon as the drinks are strong enough and the cars outside have stopped honking and they’ve called last call, she’ll come out of her dressing tomb and start spinning in front of us. Music box ballerinas don’t dance when the box is closed. I open my legs to her hand, and together we circle the pole. Something in the abandoned college education says mayday, mutters about ribbons and spring and possibly sacrifices to a virgin god, but I ignore it. Have I forgotten you? I’ll let you lay your cheek on the stage and look up at us, as we weave together.
I love titty bars. I love them for my knee between her knees, and for the dress lying spread across the floor. I love them for the wire in her bra, and the glitter of greed in her eyes as the men in the room hang upside down and shake, emptying their pockets in bright rivers of coin and credit, whimpering for more and more and more and then some. The floor is knee deep in tips within moments and you feel the forty thieves must have a hideout here. She and I are still pole dancing, and we will be nightly. They know me at this bar. I’m here all the time. In Egypt and Miami and Paris and everywhere. The stripper that doesn’t exist trails around behind me, always arriving before I do, always ready with the fake eyelashes, always wet and bent over backward. She can swallow swords and eat fire and fuck snakes and God, can she shake.
I’m not going to give you the satisfaction of putting you back in the story. You’re the guy. You’re always here. If you’re quiet you can watch us get into my car, see us drive away, read the motel sign on the highway telling us to Sleep Tight and see us stumble out and go into our room. You can squint through the keyhole and see what happens when the stripper that doesn’t exist kneels in front of me and rubs her face over my bush, and you can hold a glass to the door and listen to us gasping and moaning and breathing into each other’s bodies. You can watch the end of the story becoming the beginning.
American Holidays
Mike Kimera
1. Memorial Day
“So what was your best?”
“Best what?”
“Best erotic experience.”
Mark is a sex bore. He talks about it so much it’s a wonder he gets time to do it.
“Mine was with two Swedish twins in a sauna,” he says, leaning toward me conspiratorially. “I’d added a day to a Swiss business trip to get some skiing in and these two and I were first back to the hotel from the piste. Well, you know how the Europeans are with saunas, everyone together and no clothes allowed. Just one of these girls would have been amazing – snow white hair, all-over tan and sleek body – but twins! I thought I’d died and gone to pussy heaven.”
I hate men who say pussy like that. Like a woman starts and ends at her cunt. But I’ve known Mark since grade school, so I give him some latitude. Turning slightly away from him, I look toward the lake where my wife, Helen, and Barbara are sunning themselves. They are the best of friends, and they tell each other everything. I want to sit quietly beside them and listen to their talk. Instead I am standing next to Mark at the BarBQ pit, burning burgers.
“So anyway, the shock came when the first one took me inside her. In the heat of the sauna her pussy felt cool. No shit. Cool pussy from an ice maiden in a sauna. How sexy is that! Then, when her sister joined in . . .”
I think Mark is making this up. Maybe the twins were real. Maybe he even saw them in the sauna. But I want to believe that he doesn’t cheat on Barbara on his business trips.
I am a little in love with Barbara. Helen pointed it out to me one night as we drove back from dinner at their house. She said that she’d noticed that Barbara is always the last person I look at in a room, and that I avoid being alone with her, both sure signs of my attraction. Denial would have been pointless; Helen knows me too well. After a few seconds of guilt-ridden silence, Helen pulled the car over to the side of the road, and right there, on a tree-lined suburban street, where nice neighbors repaint their picket fences every spring, she fucked me. She didn’t say a word. Mouth on mine, she freed my cock, pushed aside her panties and rode me. I came like a boy. She grinned at me, held my face in her hands and said, “If you ever call me Barbara while we fuck, I’ll cut your dick off.” Then she drove us home.
Only when Mark says, “Your turn,” do I realize I’ve missed his sauna-sex story, and he is now waiting for mine.
“Come on Pete”, he says, “even a terminally married man like you must have had some erotic adventures. ’Fess up.”
An image of Helen blossoms in my mind. She is nineteen and has just let me fuck her for the first time. She’d insisted that we use her parents’ bed. “It will make up for all the times I’ve had to listen to them screwing,” she’d said as she led me into the master bedroom. I am lying on my back, wrists still tied to the headboard, sated and happy, watching her between half closed eyes, pretending to be asleep. She is sitting at her mother’s dressing table, brushing her long black hair. The sun streaming through the window behind her seems to me to be a kind of halo. She leans her head to one side so that she can push the comb through the full length of her thick glossy hair. This causes one small upturned breast to push off the silk robe that Helen has “borrowed” from her mother, and to stretch triumphantly up towards the sun. I am hypnotized by the play of light on her hair; the smooth movement of her arm as she wields the brush and the slight but attention-grabbing movement of her silhouetted breast. She puts the brush back on the dressing table, looks at me and smiles. Many times since, I have returned to that moment of still happiness, crowned with the love in her smile.
“Well?” Mark says.
“Sorry Mark,” I say, “nobody seems to want erotic adventures with me.”
I mean it as a playful way of changing the subject. Mark takes me literally.
“I don’t know,” he says, “you’re not bad looking. I know Barbara thinks you’re sexy. You just need to read the signs.”
“I think the food is ready now,” I say, gathering the half-burnt/half-frozen products of Mark’s culinary skill onto plates.
“You must have been tempted. At least once,” Mark says.
“I’m happily married Mark. Temptation is easy enough to overcome.”
“Ah yes,” Mark says, “I’d forgotten about the ‘Peter Brader, man-of-steel’ act.”
I start to walk back toward the lake, hoping to bring an end to the conversation before we get into a fight. Mark has always taken my abstinence from casual sex as a personal affront. Briefly I wonder if he thinks it’s all an act and I’m just refusing to share the details with him.
“Barbara really does think you’re sexy, you know.”
I stop and look at him. He laughs.
“No need to look so horrified. She’s not going to rape you or anything. But she told me that she admires your serenity. Isn’t that a great phrase? Admires your serenity.”
I try for a wry smile but Mark is already striding ahead of me, so it is lost on him.
“OK girls, the hunters have returned with freshly charred dead animals for their women to feast upon,” he shouts.
Sometimes I think Mark is locked in a parallel dimension. The “girls”, both in their late twenties, exchange pained glances at Mark’s return, but he either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care.
This meal is a tradition amongst us going back eight years, to when we were both newly married couples. Every Memorial Day we drive out to the lake and have a barbecue on the public beach. Back then we slept in our trucks and drank beer with our burgers. Now we rent a large cabin and sip Pinot Noir. Sometimes I think the burgers are the last talisman of the days when we had more hope than history.
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