If they gave out awards for procrastination, I could have won one. Procrastination had pretty much defined my life up until this point. I hated the finality of decision making on one hand and on the other hand, well, I just liked doing what I wanted to do when I wanted to do it and most of the things I tended to put off until later and later and later were things that were unpleasant and not fun. I channeled my creativity into finding a million distractions to help me avoid getting serious about my life and the million distractions were always far more compelling and entertaining than adult responsibilities. In a lot of ways my job at the Bubblegum Kittikat was one big stall. It bought me time to heal but it also enabled my avoidance of what people irritatingly call “the real world.” Ironic then, that the strip club was where I finally learned my lesson about procrastination.
Chris sent me home on Sunday night because I had a bad cold and a barking cough and nobody wants to be greeted at the door of a titty bar by a sea lion. Kind of ruins the fantasy.
“Hey guys, welcome to the Bubblegum ARK ARK ARK ARK Kittikat.”
Yeah, not sexy. Or sanitary.
I spent the next two days desperately trying to recover so I wouldn’t miss Amateur Night. Lately we hadn’t had any characters along the lines of Chocolate Thunderpussy or Meat Curtains, but we were still in the throes of Spring Break. Throngs of out of town co-eds, drunk off their asses on Miami Vices and acting like the out-takes from a “Girls Gone Wild” video, kept our recent Tuesdays both entertaining and packed. College kids aren’t real high rollers but they come armed with mommy and daddy’s credit cards and the sheer numbers of kids that showed up ensured that everyone working would get paid. Small tips still add up when there’s enough of them and I didn’t want to miss out. My cocktail of choice for the evening was a mixture of Dimetapp and Cherry-tuss, a codeine rich cough syrup that made me a little loopy but silenced the persistent hack.
Velouria called me around three Tuesday afternoon to make sure I was coming in and I assured her I’d be at work. In fact, I was about to shower and already had a turquoise tube dress laid out on the bed.
“Ok, because I spent all day making you my famous Italian Wedding Soup,” Velouria told me, “You’re gonna love it. Italian penicillin.”
Does every ethnic group call chicken soup their own personal antibiotic? Probably, but it didn’t matter to me what it was called. Velouria was a fabulous cook and I loved when she brought in her culinary masterpieces. I was all about some wedding soup. That would be perfect for my throat and jammed sinuses.
I took my dinner break early because all I could think about was the Italian wedding soup and it was every bit as divine as I’d imagined. Ditalini pasta swam in a dark, flavorful broth alongside tiny meatballs spiked with garlic and cheese and ribbons of escarole and it was even more delicious sopped up with a chewy hunk of garlic bread. When I finished I sat back in my chair at the break room table and sighed.
“That was the best soup I’ve ever eaten. I should’ve worn my Spanx under this tube dress. I swear I’ve eaten so much I look like I’m four months pregnant now,” I said.
Velouria smiled, proud of her cooking.
“Well, you’re going to love this then,” she motioned to the fridge, “Right in there I’ve got a nice big Tupperware container for you to take home.”
I got up and hugged her.
“Velouria, you are the absolute best. I’m so glad I know you,” I said.
She laughed.
“Ok, ok enough sentimentality. Your mascara’s about to run and I don’t have time to fix it. I’ve got a black eye to cover up, a hangover to camouflage and three trailer park princesses who need some serious help with their hair before I’ll let them grace our fine stage. Love ya sweetie, now get back to work. It’s Amateur Night at the Bubblegum Kittikat!”
And that it was.
I blame the line around the building and I blame the Cherry-tuss (which I may have gone a bit overboard on) for what happened to that container of soup.
At least fifteen girls signed up to compete in the amateur contest that night, all of them boasting names ending in a singular “i”: Foxi, Brittani, Silki, Laci. I tried to talk Maxi into another stage name.
“Seriously, do you want people to think of feminine protection when they see you naked on stage?” I asked, but my argument didn’t compel her and Maxi it was. No one ever listened to me.
I ran out of Marlboro Lights that night, which was really crazy considering that I’d just done inventory and placed a big order since I knew it was Spring Break and we’d be jammed. Brent, who had just broken up and gotten back together with Alicia/ Jamesina James for at least the twentieth time and was thus in extremely crabby spirits threw some sharp words my way about the cigarette shortage, then blew all the petty cash buying extra cartons at the grocery store. He came back through the front door, a bottle of Maalox in hand and tossed the shopping bags on my counter saying only to ration them out to customers only, not dancers, before he grumbled his way back to his office. When I opened the last bag of cartons I found a pack of king sized Reese’s cups. He knew those were my favorite.
That night was non-stop. Every time I turned around someone wanted me somewhere. I sold an obscene amount of Bubblegum Bucks and practically wiped out the humidor and I was so exhausted that I downed three Red Bulls before last call when a hoard of angry strippers descended upon my register to trade in their fake money for the real deal, all of them fighting to be first in line so they wouldn’t have to wait to leave. They were like a mob of angry villagers wielding pitchforks and torches. Walled in by a Versailles of display cases and counters, I was their Marie Antoinette. I had their money so they wanted my head.
We went through this routine every single night and it never got easier. They wanted money they could spend in the real world and they wanted it fast. I get this. They’d twirled in five inch platforms for eight hours shoving their tits into the chins of cheap, obnoxious frat boys. They were entitled to their earnings, but cash out with forty or so dancers was a tedious process and meticulous records needed to be kept, checked and rechecked for accuracy. If my register didn’t add up I was in big trouble and I’d have to stay, no matter how late it got or how tired I was until I could reconcile the discrepancy. Luckily, because I was diligent, that hadn’t happened. At least not until that night.
The night’s entertainment shrieked that I was too slow. They yelled and whined and huffed and puffed. They turned on one another accusing each other of cutting in line, shoving, stealing, giving dirty looks and the dreaded crime of “talking shit.” Having managed a classroom of kindergarteners, I could usually handle the dancers. When the orderly line I demanded clamored into a mess resembling a self-tanned mosh pit of breast implants, I’d simply stop, sit back on my stool with my arms crossed in front of me and refuse to dole out any more pay until they used their inside voices and kept their hands to themselves. They hated me, but it worked every time.
I didn’t get out of there until five am and by that time, I was a staggering, listless zombie. I was high from the cough syrup and had long since crashed from the Red Bulls and by the way, energy drinks and codeine cough suppressant? Bad combination. Trust me. I don’t even know how I drove home and I never did figure out why my drawer wasn’t adding up. A pissed off and equally exhausted Brent finally threw up his hands in defeat after the adding machine spit out yet another tape of discrepancies.
“Fuck it,” he said, “Go home and go to bed. We’ll figure it out tomorrow, I mean today. Later today.”
And somehow, before I left, I actually remembered to get the container of Velouria’s soup out of the break room fridge.
I ended up sleeping past three the next day, and when I got up, feeling much better, and shuffled into the kitchen, my mom was already making dinner – chicken paprikash, one of my favorites.
“How long are you planning on driving around with that Salvation Army bag in your backseat?” she asked, peeling a potato over the sink.
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I cleared my throat and wiped my nose on the back of my head.
“Umm, good morning?” I croaked.
It had been over a month since I’d cleaned out my closet and gotten rid of the stuff that I’d brought from Atlanta as well as some of the clothes that were still a tad too snug. I’d stuffed the unwanted items into a black garbage bag and shoved that into the practically non-existent backseat of my BMW. I drove the sporty model and the backseat was practically an afterthought; so narrow and cramped that my purse barely fit. The garbage bag of clothing overflowed into the front of the car and smothered the gear shift, but I’d been driving around like that for several weeks now, every day putting off a trip to the Salvation Army drop-off.
“It’s almost five ‘o’ clock. You’ve long since missed morning,” my mother said.
“I don’t remember the last time I saw a morning,” I commented, and it was true. I’d become a vampire, my schedule the opposite of the sun’s. I was now part of the night club undead.
“Why don’t you just throw on a pair of shorts and get in the car and get rid of that bag?” my mother asked.
“Tomorrow,” I replied.
“Is that when you’re going to go over to the community college and see about getting into some classes for next semester too?”
I shrugged.
“Yeah,” I said, “Tomorrow.”
But the next day I was off and slept well into the late afternoon again. When I got up I found a million other things to entertain myself with. You should have seen my high score on Tetris. I’m not kidding. It was impressive.
My cold now history, I couldn’t wait to be back at work. I sizzled in my snug, hot pink, satin sheath and strappy silver heels and my dress was so short I didn’t dare bend over too far. I mean, not unless I wanted a bigger tip from the baller in Champagne Room Four, anyway. I sprayed my hair big, glossed my lips and spritzed on the Love Spell, ready to sell the hell out of some play money. On busy nights my job became an energetic ballet set to raunchy hip-hop jams where I jetéed back and forth between the cash register and the credit card machine taking covers and emptying the safe where we stored the Bubblegum Bucks. I pirouetted past the cigars, pliéed to reach the Newport Light 100s in the lower cabinet and stretched into an arabesque to answer the phone while I simultaneously guillotined a Cohiba for an impatient Guido wearing a Knicks jersey and a fedora.
Velouria had made spaghetti marinara, so at about nine I got Charlie to cover the door while I clocked out for dinner. It was still early so not all the dancers were on the floor yet and the dressing room, like an aviary of neon hued tropical birds, filled with their squawks and flapping. I ate surrounded by naked women of all kinds as they strung themselves into elastic thong panties and brushed bronzer across their collar bones. The chemical, summer smell of self-tanner polluted the air and under the fluorescent overhead lights, a knot of nearly identical, orange-skinned blondes gossiped as they flat-ironed their long layers.
“If anyone needs eyelash glue, it’s in the bottom drawer now,” Velouria called out between mouthfuls of pasta.
Princess complained about cramps and asked if anyone had Midol. She was a lanky girl with over-processed hair that swished her hipbones. It was dyed too black and she had tan lines that made her look as if she were wearing a permanent, cream-colored string bikini. She slunk around whimpering about bloat, though I could easily count her ribs and like her fellow dancers her nudity appeared to be an afterthought. For me, walking around a room full of people, some friends, several acquaintances, most strangers, without a shred of clothing on, not to mention a tampon string dangling from between my legs, would have been beyond incomprehensible.
“Velouria, I can’t find the scissors,” Princess whined. She wrinkled her nose and tugged at the string.
“Jesus, quit whining. They’re right here,” Velouria said. She produced the missing scissors from a pocket on the smock she wore when she styled hair and handed them to the PMSing stripper.
Princess thunked her bare foot up onto the break room table where we were eating and spread her vulva wide open with her left hand so she could snip off her tampon string with her right. It fell to the floor and she casually tossed the scissors back to Velouria and strode away.
“Princess!” Velouria bellowed, “Do you think we want to see your bleeding snatch while we’re eating?”
“And spaghetti no less,” I chimed in.
“She might call herself Princess but she certainly isn’t a lady,” Velouria said with a grimace. She shook her head and looked at the ceiling.
“More importantly, she just answered one of my burning questions,” I said, feeling suddenly queasy about the strands of red sauced pasta left on my plate.
Velouria raised her eyebrows.
“What do strippers do when they have their periods? I always wondered,” I said.
She chuckled and spooled a generous mouthful of spaghetti around her fork.
“They cut off the strings. Mystery solved.”
And so it was.
“But the other mystery is…how did you enjoy the soup you took home?” Velouria asked.
OH MY GOD. No. I did not just leave the Italian Wedding Soup in the car for the past three days in the blazing hot Florida sun. No I did not do that. Yes, yes I did that. I left Italian Wedding Soup in the car for the past three days.
“Umm. It was great!” I said, “I loved it. Best Italian Wedding Soup I’ve ever had.”
“Did you bring my container back by any chance? I’ve had that set for years,” Velouria asked.
“Oh, no,” I said, messing with my fingernails, “I’m not done with the soup yet. I’ll bring it back tomorrow.”
Shit, I thought. I had left the soup in the car for three days. It would definitely be a poisonous, bacteria ridden mess after that long and I vowed to take it inside immediately when I got home from work and run it through the dishwasher.
But did I do that? No, I didn’t. I forgot it for two more days because soup stewing in a hot BMW convertible in Florida for three days was not long enough. I had to leave it for five days.
By Sunday my car smelled like the ass of death and it was no longer possible to forget that a Tupperware container of Italian wedding soup had been abandoned on the passenger side floor for going on a week. I rolled down the windows, sprayed the interior of the car with Febreeze and planted an entire forest of pine tree air fresheners to cover the odor, except of course they didn’t really mask it at all. They combined with it so that my car smelled like a shallow grave in the middle of a pine woods. You’d have thought I was carting a body around in my trunk from the stink alone.
There was no avoiding this. I had to bring the Tupperware container into the house and clean it at once. Except it was gross and I didn’t want to, but some things you absolutely can’t avoid.
When I pulled the Tupperware out from under the seat, ever so gingerly, pinching the lid with my fingertips, it had become suspiciously swollen from fermentation and the top threatened to fly off. If that happened, the contents would then shower me with botulism and I would die, writhing on my parents’ perpetually slippery driveway. I held the orange Tupperware far from my face, carrying it in the house Frankenstein style with my arms extended in front of me. I dropped it on the kitchen counter, because I really meant to throw the soup away and run the bowl and its lid through the dishwasher to sterilize it. I really meant to do that, I swear. Except it was gross and I didn’t want to. So I left it on the corner of the kitchen counter for several more days next to the cordless phone charger and a stack of junk mail that my parents would probably never get around to opening. With all the clutter and chaos, no one would notice it sitting there for weeks.
Sunday night I avoided Velouria at work because I didn’t want her to ask me where her Tupperware container was because that would mean I would have to face the mess inside the container in order to clean it out and return it to her and the mess had now gotten so putrid that I would have d
one anything to avoid having to open the container up and deal with it once and for all. And I mean anything. I even contemplated just quitting my job there altogether, never calling Velouria ever again and just throwing the entire container in the trash. Then I thought, well no. Maybe I could just explain what had happened and just buy her a new Tupperware. Maybe I could make up for my mistake by buying her a whole entire new SET of Tupperware to show how repentant I was. But then she’d know that I forgot her generous gesture of making me soup and she’d know I lied to her about enjoying it and she’d hate me forever. This chain of thought went on and on until it somehow ended with me homeless and dead on the streets, as all my chains of obsessive thought eventually conclude.
This situation could only have happened in my parents’ house. Nowhere else in the world could one leave a bloated Tupperware of fermented, spoiled, week old, unrefrigerated Italian wedding soup sitting in plain view on a kitchen counter without someone immediately noticing, but at Casa Azul, as predicted, no one noticed for quite some time. Several people came and went and everyone just kind of did what they needed to do around the Italian wedding soup, but no one thought to move it, open it or otherwise inspect it in any way and every day that damned orange plastic container, puffed from unspeakable deadly spores, glared at me, taunted me and tormented me and became more and more disgusting with each passing second so that the more time passed the more I dreaded having to clean it.
Another week passed. I continued avoiding Velouria, stopped letting her tease my hair into Cosmo-cover updos and encrust my eyelids in jewel-toned glitter. I knew she thought I was mad at her, ungrateful and having an attitude. She also thought I was a Tupperware thief; an awful, treacherous rat who connived to run off with her quart sized, orange, circa 1975 round container with a pleated lid. And I couldn’t bring myself to just go to her and explain what I had done because I was so ashamed of my misdeed, so not only was I procrastinating cleaning the container, which had by now spawned empires of mold, I was also putting off telling a person whom I cared for very deeply about what I had done and I felt awful. As a friend, and as a responsible adult, I truly sucked.
Amateur Night at the Bubblegum Kittikat Page 31