Amateur Night at the Bubblegum Kittikat

by Victoria Fedden

  26

  It was one of those years where it never seems to feel like Christmas. Everyone said it too, not just me.

  “Sure doesn’t feel like Christmas this year.”

  I must have heard it a hundred times. I don’t know what Christmas is supposed to feel like, but we can start with cold, which it wasn’t in South Florida in December. A couple nights had gone down into the low sixties, but the days were breezy, humidity-free and a perfect seventy-two degrees, which the tourists from Montreal loved, but I didn’t. I missed the icicles and flurries and I just couldn’t get over seeing the North Pole themed decorations propped up in the St. Augustine grass under the royal palms in everyone’s yards. It was weird and unfitting. We needed something different to define Christmas in the tropics, I thought. Maybe like a Christmas flamingo or something. Or if you wanted to truly represent South Florida, instead of Mrs. Claus, Santa should have a twenty year old trophy wife at his side on your front lawn.

  Santas sweated, ringing their bells in front of Target and the parking lots were crowded with shoppers red with road rage from fighting traffic and crowds to get the last game system or “It” toy of the season. Old ladies wore sweaters heavily embroidered with holly and gingerbread men and the street lights in the plaza by our grocery store sparkled in their fringe of silver garland and bells. There was plenty of red and green, but still, I couldn’t get into the holiday spirit, not even when the DJ, right after Thanksgiving started mixing all of my most despised Christmas songs in with the Alice Deejay and Nelly hits. “Jingle Bell Rock,” “Rocking Around the Christmas Tree,” Springsteen’s annoying assed version of “Santa Claus is Coming to Town.” Yeah, it was hard not to be a Scrooge when you had to watch Felicity, legs spread eagled on the floor of the main stage, flicking her jeweled clit ring with a long, red fingernail to the beat of “Santa Baby” and winking while a hoard of frat boys home for winter break cheered her on with wads of dollars. Felicity’s kids were getting the new Playstation. She left one night and said the next morning, first thing, she was getting her little girl a life sized stuffed pony that was pink and wore a crown. We had decorated the club one slow Sunday night shift in early December. Plastic mistletoe dangled in every doorframe. The brass railings were coiled with gold and silver garland. Pots of fake poinsettias sat clustered by the front door and the white, fiber optic palm trees that usually glowed in alternating rainbow hues along the back walls of all three stages now bobbed with glass and metal ornaments. All throughout December the girls wore Santa hats and tossed out peppermint sticks during Feature, which they also liked to draw in and out of their sticky glossed mouths and tickle with their tongues suggestively. The customers went nuts when they did it, practically begging to be led behind the curtains for a private friction dance. One night, right before Christmas, all of the friction chairs were filled and there was actually a wait.

  Maurice, the men’s bathroom attendant, a small, elderly Haitian, emerged into the lobby and threw up his hands in exasperation.

  “All out of condoms!” he said, “Have to get more and pay full price. Ridiculous!”

  “Condoms? What in God’s name is he doing in that bathroom?” I asked Paolo, who was currently manning the door with me.

  “He’s mad because we order them wholesale for him,” Paolo said, “And now he’s out so he has to buy them retail to get through the night.”

  “Why does he need condoms? Wait, don’t even tell me. I don’t want to know. It’s illegal. Something illegal’s going on, isn’t it? There really is sex in the Champagne Room, isn’t there? Ok, tell me.”

  “Settle down. No one’s having sex in the Champagne Rooms. That I know of. The rubbers are for friction dances.”

  “But they stay fully clothed. I don’t get it.”

  “Oh Jesus, you are innocent aren’t you? Look, the guys go in the men’s room before they get a dance and put on a condom so, you know. God damn, didn’t you ever dry hump your boyfriend in high school?”

  I shrugged and shook my head no. I guess I missed out on that one as a teenager.

  “The guy gets excited. He comes in his pants. Doesn’t want to ruin his night. Doesn’t want his wife to find the stains. Whatever. So he wears a rubber. Takes care of everything.”

  “Oh. My. God. Men are ejaculating in here? Are you serious? I had no idea.”

  “What did you think happened during a friction dance?” Paolo asked.

  “I, hmm. I hadn’t exactly considered it. I’ve never been behind the curtain. I have no clue.”

  “Later on, you take a break and go check it out. Nobody’ll notice if you just slip in and out real quick.”

  “So it’s not like a lap dance, just in private?”

  “Not quite.”

  Well, I was finally going to have to see what on earth was going on back there.

  More of a long, narrow corridor than a room, the friction space was lined on both sides with black vinyl recliners, the kind that are easy to spray with 409 and wipe down with a paper towel. The chairs on the left faced the ones on the right, but that didn’t matter because if you were sitting in one, you wouldn’t be able to see anything in front of you because your view would be blocked by the naked woman on your lap, and obviously, if you were in the friction room, you’d be focused on nothing but the girl you’d purchased anyway. It was darker in there, the air dank and thick with the smell of bodies and breath. Movement surrounded me, slow grinds, frenzied thrusting, the rhythmic pumping of bare asses, long hair whipping, fingers dragging. It was sex without penetration and don’t let anyone fool you into thinking otherwise. In fact, I’d had plenty of actual sex that was a lot less intense than what was going on behind those curtains. Only a couple girls went the slow sensual route. Most of them looked like they were trying to hang on to the back of a kicking bull. It was worse than a rodeo in there. After a glimpse, I’d seen enough and I didn’t get it. From the masculine perspective, getting a friction dance seemed like a tease, even if you were one of the ones with the condom on under your boxer briefs and from the feminine point of view, well, it looked exhausting and kind of stupid, but I bet it sure as hell burned a ton of calories. As out of shape as I was, I probably wouldn’t last a full song without wheezing uncontrollably and needing a Gatorade to replenish lost electrolytes.

  On my way out I happened to turn and look to my left because I thought I heard someone call my name. That happened a lot because one of the most popular dancers misappropriated Victoria as her stage name, which drove me nuts because I didn’t want to think I’d been going through life with a stripper name all these years, although apparently I had. I blame Victoria’s Secret and their damned panties for it. As I suspected, it wasn’t my name being called. The dancer known as Victoria (her real name was Gina) stepped off the stage, but something else caught my eye. Maybe it was someone’s idea of a joke. Maybe it was set there in earnest, but a small plastic Nativity scene, complete with Holy Family, hovering angel, a few sheep and a donkey sat on the ledge outside the friction room.

  27

  Monday, December twenty-fifth still didn’t feel like Christmas. Everything was missing. Nothing was right. My mom roasted a turkey. The whole house smelled like sage, sautéed onions and roasted sweet potatoes. Blue lights twinkled in an approximation of merriment on our Star of David tree while my mother pushed the cranberry sauce in a cylindrical blob onto a plate, where she sliced it in circles along the indentations left by the can. My dad whistled The Little Drummer Boy’s pa rum pa pum pum incessantly and by all rights, it should have been a Merry Christmas for all, but it wasn’t. I woke up missing Atlanta and the hurt was like a migraine pounding in my psyche. My parents couldn’t lure me out of bed until three in the afternoon.

  “Baby, what is it?” my father asked.

  “I don’t know. I don’t know. It’s not the same without Natalie,” I said, missing my sister even more upon saying her name.

  “She’s a damn idiot. She should have flown home, but no no. She
had some party she didn’t want to miss at the last minute and then she just had to drive all the way here from God damned Indiana in the freezing assed cold because she didn’t want to be stuck home for three weeks with no car. I told her!” my mother complained, brandishing a gravy coated wooden spoon.

  My sister hadn’t made it home for the holidays. In the open aired Jeep we’d all advised her wasn’t cut out for a Midwestern winter, she’d set out for Florida, hit a patch of ice and spun out into a median somewhere in Ohio. Luckily, she had friends in the area who helped her out, but the Jeep wasn’t fixed in time for her to make it to Christmas dinner. She’d be home maybe on the twenty-sixth or twenty-seventh, and there’d be reheated leftovers, but it wouldn’t be Christmas anymore.

  I filled my plate when dinner was ready, ate silently and wished for a Christmas present. Olivia had gotten me a silver alarm clock from Pottery Barn and Angelina gave me some candles that smelled like pumpkin pie, but they weren’t the kinds of presents I wanted. I lacked something intangible, some feeling of twinkling magic, of wholeness and fulfillment, of connection with loved ones that I remembered vaguely from my childhood Christmases spent in my grandparents’ wood paneled family room, where I’d picked at turkey and stuffing at the kids’ table with my cousins. And really, when was the last time I even had a Christmas like that? Maybe when I was ten or eleven, before we’d moved to Florida? I couldn’t even remember the last one.

  I tried too hard all those years with Evan. I wanted the perfect holiday snatched from the pages of Martha Stewart Living, complete with garlands of live greenery shrugged over the mantelpiece and ladled mugs of homemade eggnog (without the rum of course). I’d baked from scratch, coordinated each ball on the Christmas tree, making sure that not one fairy light sagged from a single bough. Don’t laugh, but I’d even planned my outfits. There was a lot of tartan and crimson velvet involved and I probably looked like a red and green plaid nightmare but I thought I was being festive. None of it had worked. Creating the illusion of the ideal Christmas never filled the void within me that gaped each December like a broken window. You can hang some pretty drapes over the window, but the heat’s still going to escape unless you figure out how to repair the shattered panes and as yet, I hadn’t. Evan hadn’t even spent Christmas with me the year before, our last holiday season together. He’d gone on vacation with his father, or so he said. Lord knows where he really was. Lord knows. I went to my friend Rachel’s house that year. At least I wasn’t going through that again.

  The one thing that made me start to feel a little better was that I looked fantastic in red lipstick and if there’s any day of the year you can get away with smearing scarlet across your lips it’s Christmas (Valentine’s day too but can we please just forget that day exists?) and if there’s any place you can get away with wearing bright red lipstick it’s a strip club. So I slathered it on and buttoned up a form fitting and extremely low cut black sweater with a faux fur collar. Yes, I know it was a cardigan but it was sixty-five degrees which qualifies as freezing in the tropics and you should have seen my cleavage in this thing. Frumpy I was not and how can anyone be frumpy in leather pants? My mom had bought them for me a few weeks earlier. Happy Chanukah. It was the sort of outfit in which one cannot but help to pose in front of the mirror. I looked good. I looked like I could whip the slouchy, pitiful ass of the girl I was the previous year in that horrible, drop-waisted plaid catastrophe with the Peter Pan collar. I couldn’t believe I’d actually worn a gingerbread man brooch. What the hell was I thinking?

  With a scarf around my head, my cat’s eye sunglasses on and the top down on my new car, I could have totally passed for Natalie Wood. I’d had the used, dark green BMW for three weeks now and I’d only put the top down once, but what better occasion for a convertible than Christmas in South Florida? I drove a stripper’s car now. Savannah gave me a hell of a deal on the new ride. It didn’t matter to her because her previous sugar daddy had bought it for her four years ago and she’d recently traded up both the sugar daddy and the car. I loved my new car and so what if it was five years old and would probably forever reek of Savannah’s Bain de Soleil? It was still a BMW, albeit a BMW that had weird stains in the passenger seat and in which I’d found not one, but two bottles of Astroglide, but still. Still. Who’d have thought that I’d ever be driving a convertible Beamer?

  The light outside always seems strange and different on holidays. I find the empty roads, the darkened businesses eerie. There is an unsettling stillness, a magnified loneliness if you venture outside, because the holidays are about home, even if you don’t have one. Even the sushi place closed on Christmas and there were so few cars on the roads that it took me only seven minutes before I pulled into the Kittikat’s parking lot when normally the drive took me just under fifteen. The Chinese buffet next door was locked and empty; the smell of fryer oil that normally permeated the surrounding air dissipated. Instead of festive, the early sunset and the shuttered businesses felt apocalyptic.

  But there was Brian, the parking lot attendant, dutifully wielding his Maglites, spinning the flashlights artfully towards the club’s entrance whenever a car whizzed past on the highway as if they might see him and say, you know, let’s forget Aunt Doris’s dry pfeffernusse this Christmas and spend the evening with a bunch of strippers instead. And if Brian weren’t enough to attract patrons, double spotlights, the kind you see at Hollywood premieres, oscillated in frenetic figure-eights from a trailer in front of the building, shooting two wide shafts of bright lights looping into the heavens. The parking lot was surprisingly full. Not Friday night full, and certainly not Amateur Night full, where the valets had to double park and run the overflow over to the Holiday Inn’s lot, but close, causing me to ask myself, who in the Sam Hell goes to a strip club on Christmas?

  The last thing I expected to see was Santa Claus enjoying a nice table dance from a green-eyed, half Chinese beauty who called herself Jade. She tugged at his beard, which was attached by a stretched out rubber band, and then bent over backwards, legs shoulder width apart, to touch her toes, giving Old Saint Nick a view to be jolly about. Cassidy strutted over to join Jade, bowing at the waist to dangle her breasts inches from his face. They were real and sagged, but she had nipple rings. She liked to loop her thumbs through the silver hoops and then stretch her nipples like they were chewing gum before pulling them in opposing circles. Santa went crazy for it. This was the same man who’d sat in a flimsy, white glitter throne in the middle of the discount mall across the street having his picture snapped over and over while small children howled in terror on his lap. I recognized him easily. Ho Ho Ho indeed.

  There was that damned Bruce Springsteen song again, and I was guaranteed to hear “Santa Baby” at least twenty times before the night ended. That song was like a stripper’s holiday anthem, as opposed to my own dejected, theme carol “Last Christmas” by Wham!. Maybe I’d put in a request to the DJ later after a few Shirley Temples.

  I started for the register but Paolo stopped me.

  “Merry Christmas!” he said, giving me a hug which lifted me off my feet.

  Paolo had easily become my favorite bouncer to work with. He was so stoic at the door you’d think he was guarding Buckingham Palace, but if no customers were around, he’d talk and talk to me and about the oddest topics. He was fascinated by anything paranormal, theological or New Age. Buddhism was his latest discovery, but he could talk endlessly about UFO sightings, Bigfoot, the Montauk Project or cattle mutilations. Paolo was a swarthy guy in his early thirties, one of the first generation born in New England to Portuguese immigrants. He came from a family of fishermen and had only recently moved with his live in girlfriend to South Florida from the blue collar Connecticut coast. Every woman in the club wanted to fuck him and most of them had because Paolo apparently believed in free-love and had some kind of open relationship arrangement with his girlfriend. Handsome and serious with still brown eyes and thick black hair which never seemed to grow out of its closely cr
opped boundaries, I could understand their attraction. Paolo looked great in his tux. He was quiet and considerate and although I had no interest in sleeping with him, I loved that he never tired of talking about alien abduction and past life regression.

  “There’s no cover tonight. We’re all here just to have a good time. You can go sit on the floor and enjoy the party and if someone wants a cigar I’ll come get you. Look, Gia’s Nonna made cookies for us. Go help yourself. I know you love cookies more than anything on earth,” Paolo said.

  This was true. Very true. I loved cookies more than anything on earth and whomever Gia’s Nonna was, well, the woman was a saint because she’d made a good three hundred cookies at least, and there had to have been a dozen different kinds. They were stacked on a plate as big around as a truck tire which sat at the end of the service bar, sparkling with red and green sprinkles and dusted with confectioner’s sugar. It doesn’t get better than cookies at work. I’m sorry.

  Cherish grabbed me when I was halfway through a pecan puff.

  “I am totally, totally giving you a lap dance for Christmas missy,” she said with a coy smile and a wink, “and Svetlana’s going to help me.”

  “No! No!” I tried to protest.

  “Don’t be bad girl or Santa not bring treat!” Svetlana growled in her Ukrainian accent.

  “No, I can’t get a lap dance!”