I stood for a while at the Atlantic’s foamy edge. I looked like shit in the red bikini. My body was going to wash up near the fishing pier looking even more bloated and pale than it already did. I could not get “Ice Ice Baby” out of my head and I felt vaguely hungry. I was bad in bed. I was a control freak. I never danced. Not only had I never danced like no one was watching, I never danced when no one was watching. I couldn’t even stand to be alone with myself without torturing, judging, nit picking and finding fault with everything I did. I was even trying to judge what my own corpse was going to look like. I waded in a little further until I stood about knee deep in the water, and I did not throw myself into the sea. I just stood there with my toes sinking into the pebbled silt and thought about throwing myself into the sea. I shuffled in a little further but the waves kept knocking me to my knees and I kept trying to stand back up until finally, the current grabbed me, tossed my feet over my head and dragged me in. Instantly, I knew what it was. I’d been sucked into a rip current.
All I can say is that I must have a team of guardian angels who were supervising my George Bailey episode, because as the ocean yanked me out to its depths, “Ice Ice Baby” screeched to a halt inside my head, replaced by a woman’s voice. I think she had an English accent. I’m not kidding.
God did not speak to me, at least I don’t think so, although maybe. That’s not what I’m saying here. I always wished I was some kind of prophet, where God would appear to me in a burning bush or its modern day equivalent, but this has yet to happen. Unfortunately, no, FORTUNATELY, this voice wasn’t God, but the woman from the public service announcement that ran constantly on our local TV channels telling tourists what to do if they are caught in a rip current.
The rip current tore at me as it hauled me out to sea, much further out than I would ever willingly swim, even in dead calm waters, because I’d always been terrified of the ocean. My bikini bottom came untied on one side as the tide tried to dislocate my left shoulder. The current seemed alive, like it had a consciousness and I finally understood how this makes people panic when it catches them. It’s as if the ocean means you harm.
“Don’t panic,” said English Accent Lady in my head. She was very stern.
I instinctively arched my neck to keep my face out of the surf. Stones, sand and shells got sucked out with me, filling my bathing suit, stinging the red, raw places where I scratched my thighs in anguish earlier. Everything was gone from my mind. I forgot ever thinking I wanted to die. The current carried me out even farther and I could not touch the bottom, so I kicked frantically, desperately, trying to feel sand and trying to stand up.
“Remain Calm. Do Not Fight the Rip Current.”
I held still. This took a great act of will because, caught in the current, I’d started freaking out and trying to fight it, which made it a hundred times worse. That’s when people get tired and drown. I knew that. I’d seen it on TV. Never fight the rip current. It will not carry you to the shores of Normandy. The rip current heads out to sea for a little while and then curves and peters out. Go with it, I reminded myself.
“Swim Parallel to the Shore.”
Ok, I thought, but which way? English Accent Lady didn’t make it exactly clear if you should go up or down, so I swam away from the rip current. I went north and I had to really overcome the urge to freak out more because I still couldn’t touch the bottom, there were waves and I was positive there were sharks that were ready to have a feeding frenzy on my arms and legs. I dog-paddled parallel to the shore for a good ways until I got tired, stopped for a bit and floated. Remember, people die when they get too tired. Take a rest, I told myself. When things get too crazy, stop and float for a little while to catch your breath and clear your head. Let the water support your weight.
“Swim back to shore at an angle to avoid being caught in the rip current again.”
I tried to do this and I guess I did it right because pretty soon I could touch the bottom again, although I didn’t want to because who knows what sort of things lived on the bottom that could sting me or pinch me or bite me. I started walking forward out of the water and then the waves came and lifted me again, warm and gentler now as they carried me back to the shore where I belonged and where my beach towel had been waiting all along. I picked it up and started on my way back home because this is where I lived and where I was going to live and there was nothing I could do about it except just accept it and force myself to stop acting like an idiot.
I did not run shouting down A1A about how I now loved South Florida. I was not filled with a sudden joy or a passion for life. I did not yell “I love you bus bench with realtor’s picture on it!” I did not declare adoration for the sea grape trees, the diner on the corner that ripped me off for my hash browns earlier or the Shangri-La By The Sea motel, with its concrete sea horses painted a garish aqua. I did not embrace the girl who walked by in a thong bathing suit baring her ass to the world, nor did I blow kisses to the guys in the pick-up truck who honked their horn at her.
This was the first time, though not the last, that I had ever saved myself and the first time that I had ever seen myself as worth saving and somehow that was also the day when I finally made up my mind about accepting a job at the Bubblegum Kittikat.
That night, I picked up the phone again and this time I didn’t call my ex. I called Raymond Haines.
6
Raymond Haines didn’t just want to give me a job. He also wanted to fix me up with his nephew Brent, who was a year older than me, and I was game. I wanted a boyfriend. No, I needed a boyfriend. A boyfriend would prove that I was lovable and worth something. It would get back at Evan and show him that I could find someone too because it made me absolutely ill that a disgusting individual like him could jump straight into another serious relationship and find love when a good, nice girl like me cried alone in her parents’ house every night after swallowing her daily milligrams of Zoloft.
So yeah, if someone wanted to fix me up I was all for it. Raymond had Brent call me, we set up a lunch date at my favorite Mexican restaurant and I went on my first blind date. I had no idea that it would be the first of many blind dates that year or that my lunch with Brent would be the most normal of the meals I’d share with strangers.
Brent had grown up in the woodsy mountains of North Georgia and had the accent to prove it and this gave us instant common ground for conversation. We’d both just moved from Georgia to South Florida and were both experiencing a degree of culture shock. Over enchiladas we remarked about the plastic surgery nightmares we’d seen.
“Can you believe they advertise boob jobs on TV here? I almost died the first morning I was here I turned on the news and all I saw were ads for breast augmentation!” I said, “And now I can’t get that stupid song for the Florida Center for Cosmetic Surgery out of my head.”
“It ain’t Georgia down here that’s for sure. The other day I saw this woman walking down the street. Gorgeous. Nice body, long pony tail and I’m thinkin’ she’s a cutie and then she turns around and the woman was at least sixty. I was like WHOA girl! She had so much work done to her face she looked like Michael Jackson!”
I liked Brent and he had made me laugh at least six or seven times already. He was short. He said he was 5’8” because no guy, I’m convinced, will ever admit to being shorter than that, but he was closer to my height at 5’6” and he was a little stocky. Brent had dark blonde hair that must have been white when he was little and he wore it a little long for my taste and brushed over to one side. He was a clean cut Dockers and tucked in polo shirt type and he reminded me of someone who might be a youth minister in a Baptist church – someone who’d go deer hunting and say grace before he ate his Chick-fil-a. He couldn’t have been anything besides a Republican and I guarantee you that at some point in his life he drove a pick-up truck which he probably kept fastidiously clean. None of this is even remotely my type, but like I said, he was nice and he made me laugh. He also hated onions as much as I did. He’d ordered e
verything sin cebollas.
“So what are you doing down here anyway?” I asked, jabbing a chip into the salsa after first making extra sure it was the mild one.
“Well,” he started with a sigh and long drink of Diet Coke, “I’m going to work for my uncle.”
“Oh ok, yeah he owns a company that makes trailers right?”
“Yes he does, but that’s not where I’m going to work.”
“No way.”
“Yes way. I’m going to work at the club.”
“I think I might too,” I said.
“Forgive me for saying this, but you just don’t look like the type of girl who-”
“No! No. I’m not stripping or exotic dancing or whatever they call it, oh my God, no.”
My face was getting hot. I was blushing and that embarrassed me so of course I started blushing more. I couldn’t even talk about the Bubblegum Kittikat without blushing, so how on earth did I intend to work there?
“Cocktailing? I can’t really see you in the whole corset and garters outfit either,” Brent said.
Now he was starting to get on my nerves.
“Well why not? I mean, that’s not what I’d be doing either. I was thinking about hostessing. Working the front door. But seriously, why can’t you see me in the, um, outfit? Just out of curiosity.”
“You’re just not the type. I can’t see you in a strip club.”
“Brent, you just met me. You have no idea what type I am and if you can’t see me working in the club then where can you see me?”
“In the library.”
“Well you don’t look like the strip club type either, Mr. Creased Khakis.”
“Oh I’m not,” he said, “which is precisely why my uncle brought me down here to run the place for him. He knew he could trust me. There’s big problems at the club. All the employees are stealing left and right and he’s losing a ton of money. He wants me to go in and set ’em straight.”
“I heard that. Your uncle told my mom that he wanted someone he could trust at the front door because he thinks the girls he’s got there now have been pocketing the cover charges. I’d never do that obviously.”
“Do you think you could handle working there?” he asked.
“I don’t know, but at least I feel safer knowing you’re there now. I won’t be the only goody- two-shoes kid from Georgia at least. Right?”
“It’s gonna be a different world that’s for darned sure,” Brent said.
7
My mother was practically waiting for me in the driveway when I got home from lunch. She wanted me to have a boyfriend almost as badly as I did and had been encouraging (more like nagging) me to “get back out there” and start dating. She believed a new relationship would solve a lot of my problems, so she was dying to know how it went with Brent.
“Nice guy. We had Georgia in common at least,” I said, trying not to offer her too much, lest she get her hopes up.
“Sooo? Do you think it’ll work out?”
“Honestly, he didn’t seem all that into me. He patted my head.”
“How’d you guys leave it?”
“Well he had to rush home because he had diarrhea from the Mexican food, but aside from that and the head patting, we said we’d see each other at work,” I said.
“At what work?”
“Brent’s the new manager of the Bubblegum Kittikat. That’s why Ray brought him down here.”
“You’re kidding me. And you decided to do it after all?” my mom couldn’t hide her smile.
I nodded, “It’s only temporary. I can change my mind whenever I want and I’m only doing it for the adventure. And the money.”
I was about sixty-three cents away from overdrawing my bank account.
The first time I went to work at the Bubblegum Kittikat, on a rainy Tuesday in October, was the third time I’d ever set foot in a strip club. You could go cliché crazy with that one. Third time’s a charm or three strikes and you’re out? Though I’d wanted to at least visit the place before I clocked in, I hadn’t gotten the chance because Ray had spent the week moving into his newly renovated penthouse in a beachfront high-rise (he’d only rented from my parents briefly while he was waiting for his condo to be finished) and because my mom refused to go. She was mad at Mohammed for some reason I couldn’t discern and didn’t want to run into him. I’d had to make all the arrangements with Ray over the phone. “All the arrangements” is a bit of an overstatement though. My instructions, which I wrote down on a half a sheet of yellow paper torn from a legal pad, were as follows:
“Dayshift. 12 noon Tuesday. See Phil. Tell $12.50 an hr. Dress prof.”
Oh my God the anxiety. You would have thought I was getting deployed the way I acted. I didn’t sleep all night and when I dozed off briefly, I had a ghastly dream in which Evan found me trespassing in the house and called the cops and then when they arrested me, he started yelling and screaming that I was a criminal like my parents and that I was just trash because I worked at a strip club.
You would not believe how much I agonized over what to wear. What in the name of God does “professional dress” mean in the sex industry? A pin-striped g-string? I didn’t know what anyone wore to work in a strip club and when I considered it, it seemed like the whole point of the establishment was to discourage clothing, so it didn’t make sense. Can you see my dilemma here? And being that I didn’t have a lot of clothes, since I’d been forced to leave most of my wardrobe behind in Atlanta where my ex’s new girlfriend was apparently enjoying wearing them according to continued reports from my neighbors, I didn’t have a lot of choices.
Dressing wasn’t exactly my forte. I’ve always been a prime candidate for one of those TV shows where some unsuspecting frump gets assaulted unawares and whisked away for a new outfit, hair-do and face full of make-up. I’d always worn jeans and tee shirts or long flowered dresses, which I considered “bohemian chic” and other people apparently considered Amish. My family was constantly laughing at my outfits and calling me “Little House on the Prairie” and at the beginning of the summer they’d even thrown my favorite shoes into the Intracoastal canal, giving the ten year old Mary-Janes a burial at sea because they looked like something an impoverished Pilgrim would have worn. Since I had no clue what to wear I threw on a long flowered dress of the sort I wore when I worked at the hippie kindergarten. It was a dress, therefore it was professional. Right?
“Aren’t you starting work today?” my mother asked.
She was washing dishes by hand in the kitchen sink despite the gleaming, unused dishwasher beside her. My mother was weird like that. She was a country girl at heart and she liked things the old fashioned way, so she refused to heat her lunch in a microwave or put her dishes in the dishwasher and let it do the work. She said she didn’t trust machines but this was one of the many contradictions of Mom because, after all, she had a room filled with computers and used them to make her sometimes mysterious living, but come to think of it, she probably didn’t trust her computers either.
“I am, in fact, starting work today,” I told her.
“In that?”
“What?”
“That dress?”
“What’s wrong with it?” I threw up my hands in frustration.
“No. Take that off. You look like you just came up off the farm.”
“It’s not ok?”
“No, it’s not ok. Get back in your room and find something decent to wear.”
I looked at myself in the full length mirror hanging in my closet. I picked at the hem of my dress and thought, hmm, Laura Ingalls at the titty bar? Maybe my mom was right. Oh jeez, what am I saying, of course my mom was right. Remember when I said she was always right?
Finding an outfit would have been a lot easier if my sister had still been home. No one would have been shocked if Natalie, the party girl of the family, took a job at the Kittikat. She would have had something for me to wear. My mom was also out of the question because she was a lot bigger than me and wo
re nothing but outfits from Chico’s which were attractive and age appropriate on her but would have been weird on me. I found a pair of black pants and a white tank top. Ok and a cardigan because what if I got cold? I’d probably get cold without sleeves. Or shoulders. I found some nondescript flats to slip on and I was done.
“Is this better?” I asked my mom who had progressed from dishwashing to stacking together a ham and cheese sandwich.
“It’s not great but it’s definitely better. You better make some money so you can get some new clothes.”
That was motivation. New clothes would be fun.
“Go put some makeup on,” she added.
“I have makeup on!”
“I can’t see it. You need to get some color. You look like a vampire.”
If one more person said I needed to get some color, I swear to God I was going to pop a blood vessel. So what if I had pale skin? Back in high school my friends all liked the combination of dark hair and eyes and a fair complexion. My nickname had been “Beetlejuice” but come to think of it, maybe that hadn’t been meant as the compliment I perceived it as.
I ignored my mother, packed a brown bag lunch and left for work. On the way out she yelled.
“Put on some lipstick!!”
8
I passed the Bubblegum Kittikat all the time. It wasn’t one of those sign-free topless bars in the middle of nowhere, behind an industrial complex under a highway overpass. The Bubblegum Kittikat was next to a Holiday Inn across from a Target. It was a present shaped building, wrapped in mirrors, ribboned in hot pink neon. An obscenely large, diamond shaped sign announced South Florida’s premiere gentlemen’s club from the parking lot where an attendant stood at all hours directing traffic with two flashlights as if he were landing private jets on some exclusive runway. I always thought that was overkill, but nothing at the Bubblegum Kittikat was understated, except perhaps me.
Amateur Night at the Bubblegum Kittikat Page 4