Amateur Night at the Bubblegum Kittikat

by Victoria Fedden

  “Bitch, you got an eye problem? What the fuck are you looking at? Yeah that’s right! Turn the fuck around!” Iris yelled at another dancer who’d passed by on the way to the restroom and rolled her eyes in Iris’s direction.

  “Sweetie, can you order me some sushi?” Iris asked.

  “Sure, what kind?”

  “The fish kind. The kind without rice. Order yourself whatever the fuck you want. Dinner’s on Iris tonight. But JESUS GOD DAMNED CHRIST SMILE!!!”

  I laughed and she tucked a fifty into my palm.

  By nine-thirty, after I’d gone on break in the locker room, thoroughly enjoying my chicken katsu with Iris, the club started to get wild. A line snaked from the valet awning around the building and my door guy had to bust out the velvet ropes, which were jammed all on top of each other in the storage closet next to the men’s room along with the mop and bucket they used when someone drank too much and yakked. What in the hell was the big deal about Amateur Night that DREW all of these people and such an eclectic blend at that?

  The Bubblegum Kittikat didn’t exactly have the most diverse clientele. For the most part our customers were white guys with money and sure we’d get the Latinos, it was South Florida after all, and a couple of black guys, especially if they were athletes and dammit I never recognized them when they came in because I know as much about sports as I do about quantum physics. Actually, scratch that, I know more about quantum physics. Sometimes we’d get couples, but not too many. Usually, you’d find the most diversity under the white guy heading: rich old men, rich young stockbrokers, creepy old men who peed their pants (at least I think/ hope it was pee), dudes who looked like serial killers, truck drivers, Guidos (plenty of those) and their older counterparts the wannabe Mafia dons, rich white guys with criminal records who made fortunes in porn, disabled guys, a couple of retarded guys who always came in because it was the only place a girl would ever talk to them and along with the retarded guys were a number of tragic nerds who also came in because it was the only place where a girl would ever talk to them.

  But Amateur Night, forget about it. Amateur Night everybody showed up. Tons of couples, because all the girls had promised their men that they were going to dance even though half of them chickened out and wouldn’t even put their names down on the sign-up sheet. The other half signed up but bailed right before the DJ called their name. We had all kinds on Amateur Night. Every race, ethnicity and sexuality represented. Hell, we even had a bunch of gay guys, loud, old, queeny types who came to cheer on one of their favorite post-op trannies, who was gorgeous by the way. She’d even had something done to her hands to make them look more feminine.

  Not all of the contestants were real amateurs. A lot of them were obviously dancers from other clubs who wanted a shot at the five hundred dollars in prize money and several of the so-called amateur dancers were using the contest to audition for Phil and Brent in hopes of getting a full-time gig. Still others were what I’d call professional amateurs. They showed up for the contest every week. They ended up being my favorite.

  Purely for the entertainment value, which he knew I’d appreciate, Brent put me in charge of the sign-up sheet. I had to take down names and song requests, jot down a rough description (blonde, redhead whatever) and ask the would-be contestants what their turn-ons were so the DJ could make a big show of introducing them, as in “Here’s Jade, a 22 year old goddess with platinum hair. A 44 double-D, Jade likes motorcycles, body shots and lots and lots of whipped cream.” Corny with a capital C. Not even remotely original. They all pretty much said the same crap. They liked drinking, fast cars, money and fucking. At least they all did except one.

  She came in late. I asked her name.

  “You ain’t know my name?” she asked me back.

  I wanted to discourage her but I couldn’t think of how to do it without getting my ass kicked in the process. You don’t want to screw around with a two hundred and fifty pound black girl with neon green nail tips and a cranberry colored weave, especially not when her back is covered in homemade looking tattoos, most of which are misspelled.

  “No, I ‘ain’t’ know your name,” I said, “What is it?”

  “Please girl. You must be new or some shit if you ain’t know MY name.”

  “Yeah, I’m new. What’s your name?”

  “Chocolate Thunderpussy.”

  Choco HUH? Choco WHAT?

  “Excuse me?”

  “You cain’t hear? CHOCOLATE THUNDERPUSSY.”

  Six months ago, I’d been working in a kindergarten. On a Tuesday I would have made vegetable soup with the kids, gone on a nature walk. We would have acted out Snow White during play time. Six months ago, I still thought Evan and I had a chance, that we could work on things. If you’d have asked me then where I thought I’d be six months into the future I would have told you with great optimism that I’d still be there in Atlanta, in my house, still monitoring naptimes and recesses, still painting pottery. If someone had told me that instead of that, that I’d be attempting to have a conversation, a logical, rational conversation with a woman who called herself Chocolate Thunderpussy, and that this would be my job and that on Tuesdays there’d be no soup and no nature walk, that it was Amateur Night, I would have said that someone needed a good twenty-eight days of isolation in an insane asylum.

  “Ms. Thunderpussy,” I cleared my throat, “Um, what are your, um, turn-ons?”

  “Cheeseburgers.”

  “For real?” I asked.

  She nodded.

  “What else?”

  “Hennessy. “

  “Anything else?”

  “Pina Colada massage oil.”

  I scribbled it all down. I couldn’t wait to see where the DJ would go with all that. Here comes Chocolate Thunderpussy rocking the pole on the mainstage. She’s a full figured, Hennessy sipping, cheeseburger loving, Nubian queen who likes to pamper her men with pina colada flavored massage oil. Oh my God. What had become of my life?

  “Watch me win this shit,” Chocolate Thunderpussy said before disappearing into the crowd in the direction of the bar.

  The contest started at ten and we had almost twenty entrants. Each hopeful would dance to the song they’d chosen and try to rile the crowd up as much as possible. At the end, applause and shouts from the audience declared the winner. That’s partly why so many people showed up. The contestants brought their own cheering sections and the more people on their side, the better their chances at the five hundred bucks.

  She said she’d win and she did. Chocolate Thunderpussy trounced the competition. Even the gay guys sold out their tranny, who was gorgeous yes, but sullen and slow on stage, totally lacking in star power, unlike Ms. Thunder P. She was total X-factor that one. Shameless. She did things with her humungous titties and big old behind that shouldn’t have been legal, making every fat cell on her backside quiver like she’d plugged herself into a two-twenty outlet.

  I got home at three in the morning. My ears rang and I reeked of cigarette smoke. After a quick rinse I remembered to swallow my Zoloft because, yeah, I was still depressed and if I was this sad now, then how practically suicidal might I have been without meds? I shuddered to think, or maybe I shivered, still cold from abandoning the cardigan, which made me think of my tips. I hadn’t even counted up the bouquet of bills I’d snatched out of the fishbowl because I was so eager to get home once I’d counted up my register. The dollars fanned out on my comforter in a drab green arc. Two-hundred forty-seven dollars and some odd cents. No. Fucking. Way. I used to make that in a week at the hippie school.

  Money may not be able to make you happy, but it did offer some consolation. Still, how long ’til this was over? This grief? How long would it take for me to stop thinking about Evan every day several times a day? I saw him in everything. A man with his legs. Some guy wearing a tee shirt Evan had. Straight black hair flopping over someone else’s forehead. I even looked down while in line to pay for a Slurpee at 7-11 and saw that the guy in line behind me had
bony, hairy feet with long toes that looked like Evan’s and even though Evan was hundreds of miles away back in Atlanta, I constantly thought I spotted him in crowds, each mistaken identification sending jolts of adrenaline and anxiety through me before I realized it was someone else. How long was that going to happen? Making it worse was that now Adam, stupid, ugly, small-dicked Adam with his foul mouth, Adam who played me like dodgeball, wouldn’t get out and stay out of my head either, so I was perpetually wasting my mental energy on one or the other of these assholes. Why didn’t they want me? Why wasn’t I lovable? What was so terribly wrong with me?

  Early the next afternoon I woke up to find I’d fallen asleep next to my tips. In the deep sleep of pre-dawn, I’d rolled over on them and now the fives, tens and twenties stuck to my bare skin. Maybe it was my lotion. Maybe I’d gotten sweaty under the covers, and that was what had adhered them, but I had to peel the money off my body.

  16

  Nixon struck me as a particularly odd choice for a stage name. Stage names were, by nature, odd anyway. We had girls who named themselves after states. One time we had Montana, Dakota and Colorado on stage at the same time, which was pretty funny. Names like Savannah, Delilah, and Lola were popularly slutty. Some girls gave themselves names that seemed more appropriate for a puppy, like Cinnamon. We had the material girls, Satin and Velvet, and gem stones seemed to elicit a certain sexy cache. Diamond, Sapphire, Jade. Hell, we even had girls naming themselves Chardonnay, Champagne and Chianti, although Champale or Colt 45 would’ve been more like it. Anything vaguely sensual like Caress or Allure or aromatic like Jasmine and Ginger worked well on stage and so did names like Serendipity, Fantasia and Destiny. The letter X, rhyming with and therefore suggesting sex, was ever present in many stripper names (Roxanne, Lexus, Maxine, Alexa, Trixie) and we already had one president wrapped around the pole, a Kennedy, so maybe that was why she chose Nixon. I’ll never know. Maybe the air of disgrace appealed to her. Maybe calling oneself Nixon felt subversive.

  Nixon was a live action Peppermint Patty, orange bowl cut, freckles, gravely voice and all. If you had a Peanuts fetish, Nixon would be your girl and if Nixon were Peppermint Patty then I was Lucy Van Pelt. I should have hung up a sign over my counter that read “Psychiatric Help 5 Cents” because since I started working nights it was like the entire staff wanted to come hang out over my cigar case and tell me their life’s woes. I thought people did that to bartenders, but apparently that’s what hostesses are for too.

  Somehow word had gotten around that I was smart and normal, not the usual coked out drama queen with a raging case of Borderline Personality Disorder that normally worked at the Kittikat. That means that all the other coked out, Borderline drama queens came to me to vent. I have no idea why and I don’t know what gave them the impression that I was in any way intelligent. Maybe it was the cardigans or the folded crossword puzzles I’d take from the newspaper and pull out of my purse when it got slow and I didn’t have anything to Windex. Perhaps they’d seen me reading actual books at the register instead of US Weekly, though in all fairness the books I read were mostly pink with pictures of kitten heels and martinis on the covers and I could never finish a whole crossword puzzle, but maybe intelligence is relative. Compared to a lot of these folk, I probably was a genius, but we’d all ended up in the exact same place, so how smart could I have really been?

  They told me about a lot of bad relationships. One of the bartenders even paid her unemployed boyfriend’s child support. A lot of the strippers had exes who stalked them, guys who’d been abusive. There were a lot of restraining orders. Big Mack’s girlfriend, a cocktail waitress with fabulously curly auburn hair, tried to slit her wrists when he told her they needed to take a break, so I heard about that for hours whenever Big Mack worked the door with me. Mr. Haines had Brent fire Sparkles for comping too much Cristal and that caused a major scandal resulting in me having to hear from at least twelve people, from barbacks to bouncers, strippers to shot girls, about how the Bubblegum Kittikat sucked now that Mr. Haines had taken over when the original owner Cliff Richards started serving time.

  “It used to be so much better when Mr. Richards ran this place,” they’d all sigh.

  I ask them specifically what was better and they could never come up with a solid answer.

  “We made more money before the dot com bubble popped,” Nixon told me one night. She hated pacing the floor trying to sell table dances so she’d avoid it as much as possible by hanging out by the door with me until the floor manager noticed and came to shoo her away.

  “How long have you been here? My God, you look like you’re a kid,” I said.

  “Ha! A year maybe. I got in for the last of the heydays,” she rasped.

  “You still don’t look old enough.”

  “Wanna know a secret? I’m not old enough. I’m only seventeen. I’m not even legal to dance. I have a fake ID. I’ve been doing this shit since I just turned sixteen.”

  She nibbled and ripped at her nails. She didn’t even wear acrylic tips like the rest of them and her nails were bit down to the quicks with frayed cuticles fringing her fingers. It was gross. Brent and the house mother had both been getting on her to get a manicure and I really have no idea why they even let her work nights. Nixon wasn’t pretty and she didn’t make money. At least twice a week she’d fuss and whine to anyone who’d listen trying to get someone to lend her the cash to cover her house fee at the end of the night. Dancers at the Kittikat paid eighty-five dollars a night to the house out of what they earned in order to work. I never thought that was fair, but most of the girls made several hundred or even a couple thousand per shift, so it generally didn’t end up being that big of a deal. Nixon was the only one I’d seen unable to pay it.

  “Fuck,” she said, “I gotta do Feature.”

  They didn’t do “Feature” during days and it was my most hated part of working nights. Really, I could stand huffing cigar smoke, I could deal with gaggles of bitching strippers at the end of the night barking at me to cash them out. I could deal with fist pumping Guidos refusing to pay the cover and asking me if I knew who they were when they were nobody with no money. I could handle all of that if they’d just get rid of the feature.

  Around the top of the hour, a little later if the DJ got distracted or wasn’t paying attention, the dancers all disappeared backstage. The lights dimmed and the music stopped and then all of a sudden it was like the club exploded. The lights fired back on in a lightning storm of strobes, lasers, spotlights and disco balls and at the exact instant the lights flared a thundering voice boomed from the speakers asking the club one important question.

  “Y’ALL READY FOR THIS???”

  And I never was. Then that horrible, bass booming, cheering techno song from the early 90s, that awful song they play at football games, would crank from every speaker in the house, turned up to an eardrum damaging volume, so much louder than the music the DJ spun the rest of the night, which was also annoying, especially when he got nostalgic for his high school days in New Jersey and decided to play a set of 80s hair metal.

  When the music started, the dancers would stream single file from stage left and stage right, the mirrored floor glittering up off of their clear spikes. The two lines met center stage, merged into one parade of generally bored and jaded dancers clapping listlessly, barely in time to the beat, and continued down the steps onto the main floor where the line then broke off again with girls circling the floor waving, greeting the customers and offering to take them behind the curtains for friction dances. Their chattering was like a flock of blackbirds that had landed in the yard to peck at grass seeds.

  “Table dance?”

  “I really wanna give you a friction dance.”

  “I’m thirsty, Baby. Buy me a drink?”

  “Let’s go to the Champagne Room where we can have some real fun.”

  And this ritual happened every single god blasted hour and when I’d hear that “Y’ALL READY FOR THIS?” I wanted to s
cream “NO! For the love of God, I am NOT ready for this! Make it stop! Please just make it stop! Play some Whitesnake, I don’t care. Just make this song stop!”

  Beauty pageant plus slave auction equaled Feature. It creeped me out the way the girls were on display, game show prize style, for the men to choose their favorite. The girls had no choice. They followed the money, even if it led to the perv in the corner with the bad toupee and his hand down his pants. From the male point of view Feature must have seemed like one big party, but not a party in the real world where your lines are met with sneers and the girls all seem to walk away. Here, the gorgeous gals walked right up to you, rubbed your arm, wouldn’t leave you alone. In the Bubblegum Kittikat, only the men did the rejecting.

  Nixon never sold a lap dance, so as soon as “Get Ready for This” ended she clopped back over to the front door, graceless, and kicked off her shoes.

  “God damned things,” she said, “Can I bum a smoke? Come on.”

  “You know I don’t smoke.”

  “Can’t you open a pack for me and just give me one? I just want one.”

  “No, now quit asking me. Ask Iris.”

  “She hates me and she’s doing friction in the back anyway.”

  Charlie, the bouncer on duty, handed her a Marlboro to shut her up.

  “I’m a runaway,” Nixon announced.

  Nixon smoked and told me her story.

  “I was a test tube baby. Don’t I look like one?” she thought that was hilarious.

  “Somebody needs to buy me a drink,” she said, looking around presumably for a customer who might want to get her a cocktail.

  “Where did you run from?” I asked.

  “My fucking mom and stepdad.”

  I pictured it. Trailer park. Pitbulls on chains. Meth mouthed relatives.

  I craned my neck to look out the front doors to the valet awning. I thought I saw my dad drive up. Nixon spotted him too.