Amateur Night at the Bubblegum Kittikat
Page 14
The guys on Jdate didn’t even read the profiles though. They looked at the picture and the body type, to which I replied “average.” I suspect had I said I was zaftig, rubenesque or proportionate I would have received fewer replies or possibly none and if I had checked the “firm and toned” box I probably would have had more guys asking me out than I could handle.
The next morning I had over twenty emails from potential suitors, and they all repeated the same unimaginative crap about how we should drink red wine and get to know one another. One guy sent a picture of his parrot. It was green and had the vocabulary of a three year old, he wrote.
First I deleted everyone over thirty-three. The girls at work sure liked older men, but I had no interest in dating my dad, or worse, my grand-dad. Then I deleted the guys who wanted to share a bottle of wine with me and the guy who suggested we go for sushi. I wanted someone who paid attention to me. I was left with three candidates.
“It’s not going to kill you to write them back,” my mother told me.
She was right. Their pictures weren’t fantastic, but who was I to be so picky? I decided to email them back. All three of them could compose a grammatically correct sentence and all seemed to be polite.
After a few feckless emails I learned the next stage in the process was to talk on the phone. At this point I had to weed out one of the finalists because of his obnoxious voice. I couldn’t date a guy with an effeminate whine who sounded like he had a chronic sinus infection. Plus, our conversation was about accounting. It was brief. I had zero interest in accounting. I had never even balanced a checkbook.
The other two were boring, normal guys who graduated from good colleges and went to jobs that required ties. I imagined that both of them had really liked Hootie and the Blowfish in college and that their favorite movie of all time was Die Hard III. These two were so interchangeable that I couldn’t even remember which was which. Josh or David. David or Josh. Did it even matter? Probably not, so I agreed to go out with both of them.
The first guy, a ginger architect, cancelled and disappeared into the ether after requesting a full body shot of me holding that day’s newspaper and making me promise repeatedly that I was not fat. No amount of convincing would get through to him and I wanted to be honest so I told him straight up.
“I’m five-six and weigh 135. I’m not rail thin but I’m not huge. I’m a healthy, normal sized girl. I think.”
“What size clothes do you wear?” he asked.
“Like a six or an eight. Look, what’s the big deal here?” I had to know.
The week before he had been fooled by another young lady who said she was average, but was actually zaftig, and he felt he could never recover if he had to date another girl who did not have the physique of Giselle Bundchen. Who could blame him? I mean, I see scrawny Jewish architects dating Brazilian super-models left and right. Don’t you?
“I don’t want that happening again,” he said, “I feel really traumatized from the experience.”
Hmm. Bombings, genocide, terrorism, child abuse, dinner with a fat girl. Yeah, makes total sense to me.
I did not tell the remaining young man, whose name was Josh, or wait, maybe it was David, what I weighed or that I worked at the Kittikat. I didn’t know what to do, so I lied by omission. My employment embarrassed me and I realized that no matter how wholesome I looked, and lord knows I looked wholesome, that no good Jewish boy would want to take me home to his mama, introducing me as the girl who calls cabs for drunk guys, cuts cigars and cashes out dancers at a strip club. I thought I’d break the truth after we met, if the date worked out.
Josh and I met for Italian at a place on the beach near my parents’ house. As soon as I saw him standing on the curb by the restaurant I instantly recognized him as the guy I had to call a cab for the previous Saturday night because he was so wasted at his friend’s bachelor party. He was the same guy who puked on the curb and the same guy who, before he puked on the curb while waiting for the cab that I called for him, had been up on stage, lightly bound to a chair, getting spanked by Kennedy and Crisis, as his friends threw dollars and roared with inebriated glee.
Josh and I had an awkward moment. He recognized me and was not as embarrassed as he should have been. He stalled in front of the restaurant and though neither of us said anything, he knew I worked at the Kittikat and I knew that he couldn’t hold his liquor and that he got his butt spanked in front of several hundred people. That was not the biggest problem in Josh’s mind. The problem was that I worked in a strip club and that I hadn’t told him up front. I thought the problem was the shame and humiliation he should have felt about baring his backside to a room full of strangers. Perhaps it was and he was putting the blame on me to deflect his mortification. It is, after all, probably not a good thing to go on a first date with a girl who has already seen your round, white ass.
“I can’t date a girl who works at a strip club and you don’t even look like your picture anyway, so I don’t even think we should waste our time and my money having dinner for something I already know isn’t going to work out,” he said.
“Fine,” I said, “I don’t think I can date a guy who gets wasted and lets strippers make a fool of him.”
JDate wasn’t working out.
“You need to give it more time. You can’t judge everyone based on one bad date.” said my mother, “See, that’s your problem. You’re too judgmental. You find fault with everyone. Stop judging people so quickly. Go out with everyone. You may be surprised,” my mom said.
“I’m not judgmental! These guys are judging ME!”
“You’re just as bad. You judge everybody. Listen how you come home and talk about your coworkers. This one’s a whore. This one’s an idiot. How do those girls get up there and stick their coochies in peoples’ faces? How do these men like these trashy bitches? Listen to yourself. You’re judgmental. And don’t ask me where you got that from because it sure as hell wasn’t me. I’ll be friends with anybody. I don’t judge people ’til I walk a day in their shoes.”
God my mom could be annoying.
Later that week, I talked on the phone to a South African who had the most exquisite accent. We agreed to meet for coffee. He was almost an hour late, but when he arrived he was as gorgeous as he sounded, proving a theory I have that there are simply no ugly people in South Africa. I nearly dragged him to the backseat of my car to have my way with him right there, but I managed to control myself while we made small talk over iced lattes for five minutes.
“I have to go,” he said,”I have a tennis game and if I thought there was any chemistry I may have cancelled it, but I’m not feeling it, so I’m keeping my appointment.”
I was stunned. Did I stink? Was I hideous? What did this guy want? It was like dating apartheid. He left me alone in Starbucks loudly sucking the last drops of coffee and melted ice from the bottom of my plastic cup.
I’d been judged unworthy. Again.
22
Who wears Lilly Pulitzer to a strip club, I wondered. Their outfits were the first thing that caught my eye when the two sorority sisters scuffed in on kitten heels behind their boyfriends, who looked like golfing types, the irritating ones who yell “You Da Man!” after Tiger takes his swing. And how could their outfits not attract attention? Eyelet trimmed sundresses with garish fuschia and Kelly green prints? In a strip club? You have got to be kidding me. Even I wasn’t that out of place. These girls looked like they’d come from a Junior League luncheon.
It happened at least once a shift, more on weekends. It always started like a joke - a guy brings his girlfriend to the strip club. I bet it was probably in some sexual self-help book. Wanna add some sizzle under the sheets? Visit a strip club with your lady. Share a sultry lap dance and watch the fireworks go off when you get home. Whoever had come up with that brilliant idea had obviously never seen the real life scenario play out at the Bubblegum Kittikat.
When men take their girlfriends to the strip club I can pretty well imagine what they’re exp
ecting is going to happen. They want to see some hot lesbian action between their significant other and a stripper. They think their girl’s going to get all twitterpated, the raunchy atmosphere of the club awakening some latent desires, making her go wild with passion and suddenly their lady on the street will turn into the freak in the bed that they’ve always dreamed of.
Sorry guys. Hate to break it to you, but it doesn’t always happen that way. When a man brings his woman to the strip club, one of the following outcomes can be expected: the girlfriend/ wife will either A. be terrified and hide and possibly cry. That’s basically what happened to me that time years before when Evan made me go with him to the Coronet Club in Atlanta. B. She will completely lose her mind. Usually this will happen after a few visits from the shot girl combined with some cocktails with suggestive names, and she will think that she herself is a stripper in which case she will cause a scene, take off all her clothes and get thrown out. C. The girlfriend really will become aroused by the sight of naked women all around her, causing her to forget her good sense (alcohol is generally involved in this scenario as well) and start groping the dancers, resulting in a stern reprimand by one of the bouncers or an invitation to get out and don’t come back. Or finally D. The girl will be furious at her boyfriend/husband for bringing her to such a shit hole and she will attempt to make him have as terrible a time as possible so that he will want to leave. I’d seen the last case play out pretty often and sometimes it got good because the angry girlfriend would also get jealous of the dancers and start fights with the girls who dared try to sell the couple a table dance, or God forbid, a friction dance. I always wanted to go over and tell them: “Sorry honey, she doesn’t want him. She’s only trying to pay her bills.” But they probably wouldn’t have listened to me anyway.
Since it was a slow Thursday evening in early December when most people were scurrying around town Christmas shopping, I told my door guy Chad that I needed a break. The truth was that I was bored. I’d spent the last hour and a half listening to Chad go on and on about the problems in his love life. He lived with his pregnant girlfriend but was cheating on her with one of the dancers, Arielle, who claimed to be a professionally trained ballerina. I highly doubted that. The girl had the grace of a burro. She was a gangly goth chick with stringy hair that looked like she dyed it in black cherry Kool-Aid, but Chad was obsessed with her and swore she looked exactly like Liv Tyler, which I can promise you she did not, and he was ready to leave the pregnant girlfriend if only he could convince himself that Arielle wasn’t playing him. She was. She’d tried to put the moves on Brent one night in the parking lot after the club closed and she was one of the girls rumored to meet customers after shift and on her nights off over in the Holiday Inn across the street.
I followed the preppy foursome over to the main bar. The guys wanted to get a table in front of the main stage where two Russians in fake looking wigs shimmied beside Colorado, a muscular black chick with a blonde weave who worked the stage like a buck naked Tina Turner. The girls wanted no part of it.
“Come on, it’ll be fun. Just for kicks,” the guys pleaded.
The sullen sorority sisters, one of whom I noticed had an actual grosgrain ribbon tied around her pony tail, crossed their arms in front of their chests and looked down.
“It’s cold in here,” one said.
“It’s disgusting,” said the other.
“Seriously, can we please leave? This is so stupid.”
The boyfriends attempted to ply them with drinks.
“Chardonnay! In plastic cups!” the beribboned girl demanded.
“Because eww, I’m not drinking off their real glasses,” added the one with the velvet headband.
“Gross. Who knows what kind of mouths have been all over them.”
“Oh my God, and where they’ve been! Disgusting.”
“I’m not touching anything!”
“Ugh. Let’s Purell.”
Cherish hiked up her aqua gown and hopped up into Stage Two close to the bar where she started her first song, with a nod to Shakira, by trying out some slow belly dancing moves. I talked to Cherish a lot, especially at the end of the night when she’d come over, exhausted and hang out at the register with me. She was my favorite dancer, both on stage and off, because she took all stripper stereotypes and crushed them to a powder beneath her Lucite heels. Plus, she was gorgeous in a natural, beachy way. Tan with sandy, side parted hair, wavy like she’d been in the sun and salt water all day, with blue green eyes, the color of the sea that skimmed a sandbar. A natural performer, Cherish loved dancing and she loved dancing naked. She never complained and she owned the stage with an unusual, grinning enthusiasm which even carried over into her personal dances. Cherish treated every customer equally, whether or not she purred into the ear of a bald juicehead with a goatee and a skull ring on his middle finger or an acne faced nineteen year old in baggy shorts who’d snuck in with a fake ID.
“It gets me off seeing people turned on by me,” she’d explained one night, “I just do this for fun and a little extra shopping money.”
Cherish looked down at the two sourpusses in the Lilly get-ups. She smiled widely, sincerely, and waved at them. The girls rolled their eyes and looked into the plastic cups of no-name white wine and Cherish shrugged. Girls were her specialty and she’d seek out couples because she was bi and loved doing friction on uninitiated straight girls. If no one was looking, she’d dart her tongue in their ears and nip at their necks.
“What is that horrible smell?” said the girl with the headband. She had pink frogs hopping all over her dress.
By that time, their dates had deserted them. The guys took a table center stage and one of them had already stuffed several dollars in Colorado’s garter.
“It’s this slut’s cheap perfume,” the blonde in the pony tail replied.
“Gross, who’d wear something like that?”
“Seriously, I bet she bought it at Walmart.”
“It’s giving me a migraine. I can’t take it. Look at her dress. Oh my God. Where do they buy this trashy stuff?”
“I don’t know, like, Hot Topic or something. Look at her. Who does she think she is moving like that? Does she think that’s sexy or something? Eww.”
“I have to move. I can’t take the smell. I’m going to throw up from it.”
I thought it smelled good, so much so that I’d even bought some for myself. Strippers smell like Hawaiian Punch and guys go crazy for the syrupy purple perfume of Victoria’s Secret Love Spell. They all wore it. Cloying as it was, Love Spell beat the hell out of cigar smoke, spilled champagne, sour bar mats, pukey mop water and sweaty crotch. The girls had to wear something strong and heady to overpower the other odors of adult entertainment.
“See, this is what happens when you don’t go to college. I bet this dumb slut can’t even spell the word stripper,” headband sneered.
Her friend snorted.
“Really, you think that? Because in the daytime she manages a bank branch,” I said.
I couldn’t contain myself anymore. I had to say something and it was true. Cherish, whose real name was Jenny (most of their real names were variations on Jennifer, by the way), managed a Sun Trust. She wore a suit and sensible pumps until five when she traded them in for an elastic thong and transparent platforms. She’d graduated from Florida State. Jenny was smart. She stripped twice a week because it gave her a thrill, not because she was a sad sack, drop-out addict who couldn’t read and had no other choices.
I went back to the door with my ginger ale. A few minutes later, Thing One and Thing Two showed up, having decided that if they stood menacingly by the front door that their boyfriends would tear themselves away from their table dances, realize this had been a dreadful idea and decide to take their miserable girlfriends home where they could resume picking out china patterns or whatever girls in Lilly dresses do in their spare time. They started in on Ava and Gisela next. I wanted to tell them who these girls were. Ava’s husband
had walked out on her, left her for a friend and had gone back to Brazil, left her with two toddlers and a mountain of debt. Gisela had a hard time learning English when she came from Colombia chasing a guy who promised her the American dream but abandoned her when she arrived at MIA because he was married with kids and hadn’t really believed she’d come. She sent her earnings back home to her mother who had breast cancer. They were sweet girls who’d been unlucky in love and needed a lot of money fast. I could relate.
“If you want to go home so badly, I can call you a cab,” I said.
“Umm, no thank you,” said the girl with the high, bouncy pony tail.
“Otherwise, you should shut up and stop making fun of everyone in here. You two don’t have a clue what you’re talking about. You have no idea what our lives are like outside of this place,” I told her.
“Whatever,” she said.
Unwelcome, they skulked to their boyfriends’ table.
Whatever is right, I thought. Stupid bitches.
23
Dating, or trying to date, became my second job and I have to admit that my first job was preferable. I had way more fun working at a strip club than I did navigating Jdate, though online dating had certainly proved interesting.
I broke down and walked on the beach with a guy who complained about his fibromyalgia and was allergic to basically, well, everything. This one, although he liked independent films and shoe-gazing Brit Pop, was so neurotic that he made me look like a pillar of sound mental health. On our walk I found myself counseling him about his various phobias, but we had to cut the date off because the sand was irritating his feet and he felt like he might be breaking out into hives. He asked me if I wanted to go back to his house and cuddle. I didn’t.
“Can’t you just hold me please?” he asked.
He sounded so pitiful that I gave him a hug but he pulled away.
“I should go. I think the salt air is clogging my sinuses,” he said.