Amateur Night at the Bubblegum Kittikat

by Victoria Fedden

  It wasn’t my fault Brent chose me instead of her and I suspected that part of his reason for doing so was that Patty was ugly. She had a face like a hatchet and about as much charm as a wolverine, which she also kind of resembled, although to be honest, a wolverine is cuter. Patty was about my height, with a pear shaped body and a wide ass that swallowed her thong whole. I’ll give it to her that she had nice legs and once I’m sure her tits perked enviably, but they didn’t now, pancaked like empty canteens inside her corset. Mostly Patty’s face made her ugly. A smile really is the best accessory and I never once saw Patty even crack a smirk. Patty’s pissy expression had become etched into her features, as if she were perpetually forced to savor a mouthful of spoiled sauerkraut. It’s true what they say. Your face really will get stuck that way. Thick foundation the color of silly putty caked in Patty’s wrinkles and heavy black eyeliner, outdated on the inner lids, made her already slitty eyes disappear. A bad haircut turned an already bad situation into a full-on disaster. Wine colored henna tried to cover the greys in her too short, too angular bob and the inch long bangs might have looked cute on a sassy rockabilly chick just out of her teens, but on Patty they looked weird and out of place and did nothing to flatter her long face and sharp chin.

  Patty cocktailed. She was a lifer in the strip club world and had worked Ft. Lauderdale clubs since I was in elementary school. Being “in the biz” was her whole identity, her whole purpose for being and she was one of those people (there’s one at every job) who live to get embroiled in workplace politics and will spend endless hours gossiping, spreading rumors and complaining about how things are run and how they used to be better and how this and that is unfair and how management doesn’t know what the fuck they’re doing and this place is going downhill and there are going to be lay-offs and maybe our paychecks won’t cash this week. Patty was always bitching about something and if it didn’t have to do with club operations, it had to do with her coworkers who were all lazy, incompetent, undeserving, useless and not the quality of stripper, bartender or waitress they used to get in a place like this. I barely knew her before she put me in her crosshairs, but I certainly knew her now. She had it out for me.

  I get that Patty had wanted Bubblegum Bucks. It was a pretty prestigious post and you raked in a ton without putting forth a tremendous effort, plus you didn’t have to run your ass off in a corset and a thong in platform spikes, which is incentive in and of itself, especially if you’re my mom’s age, which Patty was and trust me, you don’t want to see a menopausal woman trotting around in public in fishnet garters trying to keep up with a bunch of coke-thin twenty year olds. It ain’t pretty. Even if you look good for your age, a fifty something year old woman can’t compete with girls thirty years younger. Sorry. Patty must have known how things worked and what mattered, having worked in clubs so long and maybe deep down she was pissed at the unfairness, but it was all about looks and as far as management was concerned, Patty was lucky to have a job at all. The only reason they kept her cocktailing, giving her Champagne Room duty as a sort of lifetime achievement award, was because she had nowhere else to go and because she was so dedicated. Had she been a little nicer, I would have felt sorry for her, but she was so unpleasant that I wished she’d trip and break her foot. That way I wouldn’t have to turn around every five seconds to see her narrowing her eyes and wrinkling her nose as she griped to the closest ear while pointing at me. But now I had my Time Life books, so what the hell did I care? She could point all she wanted. I was reading about Ed Gein. He made lampshades. Out of people.

  Naturally I went through Serial Killers first, but the book that really hooked me was Unsolved Crimes. I got so involved in reading it, and thank the Lord it was an absurdly dead afternoon, that I never even looked up at a single pair of naked breasts all day. I forgot all about lunch and missed my chance at ordering Thai takeout and when the delivery guy showed up at my desk with a bag of pad prik I was profoundly annoyed that I had to leave the foggy streets of White Chapel, London with all its disemboweled hookers, to go find whoever’d placed the order and collect their cash to pay the dude so I could get him out of my face and go back to reading about who Jack the Ripper might have been. But Jack the Ripper was an amateur compared to the Zodiac.

  It’s San Francisco in the 1960s and a maniac is terrorizing the city, shooting and stabbing and sending impossible ciphers to reporters at the local papers. He’s calling people on the phone, sending post cards, throwing out threats and clues left and right and no one can catch the motherfucker and the one poor guy who managed to survive a wicked stabbing couldn’t identify the killer because he wore an executioner’s hood. To this day, no one has ever been able to figure out who the Zodiac was. He could still be out there. My God. It was chilling and I couldn’t stop reading. Could not put the book down.

  I’d just finished reading about a young mother who’d possibly escaped the killer by jumping out of a moving car with her baby when I decided to try my hand at decoding the letters and symbols in the photograph of one of the murderer’s letters. I must have stared at the thing for twenty minutes but it didn’t make a lick of sense. I couldn’t come up with a damned thing.

  “I have to ask, what is that you’re so engrossed in? I’ve been watching you and you haven’t looked up at all from that one page.”

  The calm, even toned male voice startled me. Honestly, I nearly peed my pants.

  I looked up and saw spots. It was like when you’ve been outside in the bright sun and then you come inside and you can’t see a foot in front of you until your eyes adjust, so I squinted and blinked like a mole at whomever was speaking to me and when my eyes finally unblurred, wouldn’t you know it, a hot young guy was standing right in front of me. Apparently I was on some kind of a winning streak. First I find a bunch of books I’d always wanted to read and next, a hot guy for once, walks into the Bubblegum Kittikat and starts a conversation with me. What are the odds I ask?

  He had silver eyes and I wondered if he could move things with his mind. Pewter colored hair, recently cut. Later I’d try to remember if he wore glasses or not. I couldn’t recall, but I easily remembered his light blue dress shirt tucked into grey wool slacks that were cinched with a black belt. Black loafers. Office clothes.

  He had an aloofness about him and I’d always been attracted to guys who were a little stand-offish. At first I couldn’t place it, why he seemed so shadowed, so grey-toned. It was the clothes, the cool shades maybe combined with his silver eyes. He looked like someone had penciled him in graphite standing beside my glass countertop. Most guys would have leaned in, bent down to my level and looked me in the eye instead of speaking to me while facing Tatiana vibrating on stage and making zero eye contact.

  “Remember those Time Life books?” I asked.

  He turned his head sharply, as if he’d forgotten that he’d asked me a question, then looked back at Tatiana and rocked back on his heels with his hands shoved into his pockets.

  “Do you always answer questions with questions?” he asked.

  “It’s a book about serial killers,” I said, “I’m reading about the Zodiac.”

  “Hmm, be careful of those,” he said.

  “Serial killers or books about them?” I asked.

  “Do you have change?”

  He produced a twenty and flattened it on the counter. I hit the C on my register, then changed my mind and gave him change out of my fishbowl instead. He thanked me.

  “You should look at me when you talk to me,” I said.

  “I’m in a strip club to look at naked women and you have clothes on,” he said.

  “Well I can take them off,” I said.

  Look, I’d been enduring a long dry spell. The last guy I’d slept with had caused my vagina to go numb so that almost didn’t even count and the one before that had a dick the size of a salt shaker and an ego the size of a freighter so I’d rather just pretend that never happened either. I’d taken a J-date hiatus and I still got random calls fr
om Meatloaf, so I was pretty desperate for some quality male attention. Normally, my better judgment would have dictated that meeting a potential suitor in a strip club was a no-no; that dating someone I’d met at work was asking for trouble, but I told myself that that was because most of the customers were smarmy or not my type. This guy seemed different and he looked a lot like the clean cut professionals I went for, so I allowed myself to imagine this as our meet cute in a rom-com and how years from now, like at our wedding, when people would ask how we met we’d smile at each other knowingly and tell them at the bookstore and that would be our own little inside joke and then he’d kiss me on the tip of my nose. That was why I flirted with him so unabashedly. So we could have inside jokes and nose kisses one day, because I was a naïve romantic who could turn any situation into a scene from a Nora Ephron movie in two seconds flat.

  The guy with the silver eyes looked at me and sort of half smiled as he took his change.

  “Maybe I’ll have to take you up on that offer,” he said.

  I watched him weave through the cocktail tables towards the stage. Tatiana squatted and invited him to tuck a five into her garter, but he handed it to her instead, then shoved his hands back in his pockets and rocked back on his heels again and I didn’t want to seem too eager if he caught me staring, so I went back to my book and tried to act uninterested. I’d just read The Rules and the women who wrote it said that guys only liked you if you acted like you couldn’t stand them and had no interest in them whatsoever, which made sense from my dating experiences, so I figured I’d try that and see how it worked. Problem was, I wasn’t very good at it. Every few seconds I’d look up to see if he was looking at me and then if he wasn’t I’d keep looking at him to see if he was going to look at me, which he did twice, catching me looking at him, so I’d quickly look away and try to pretend like I wasn’t staring at him, even though I was. And this is why I didn’t have a boyfriend.

  I spent the rest of a rather uneventful shift sort of half-assedly reading about the Zodiac Killer while checking every few minutes to see if the guy with the silver eyes was looking at me. He wasn’t, but Patty was. Every damned time I put my book down I’d lift my head and catch Patty’s glare fixed right on me. I went to the bathroom and on the way I had to pass her loitering around the service bar with a stack of empty trays. She had her hip cocked over to one side and was waving her right hand around in the air in her usual state of indignation.

  “- and if they think they’re going to do that me, then they’ve got another thing coming that’s for sure!” I overheard her saying to an uninterested bartender.

  She was still there when I came back from the ladies room.

  “- for that idiot! She can’t even keep her numbers straight and if you ask me, she needs to lose a few pounds. If Mr. Richards still owned the place he’d never let something like that slide, believe you me. No way. She’d have been out of here months ago, right on her ass. I’d have seen to it myself. Maybe I still will.”

  Then she laughed a humorless, wheezing snicker; the sort of sound that comes from three decades of inhaling the ashtray-asthma, hairspray, cheap perfume, hot-air, bullshit pollution of night clubs. Staying in a place like this too long is as bad as a career in a coal mine. It’ll give you black lung disease, and worse, a black heart to go along with it.

  It always sucks to happen upon someone bad-mouthing you, but what could I do? Start a fight? Make things worse? And even if I could have come up with one, what would a witty retort fix? Nothing. People like Patty are miserable and stay miserable and you can’t change them, so I pretended I didn’t hear and walked away. I was never one for confrontation and who really gave a shit what some old bag who had no life outside of a strip club thought about me? I had mass murderers to read about and a hot guy to pick up and shift was ending in a half an hour so I had better figure out how to make my move if I was ever going to snag him.

  “Who did it?” he asked, this time leaning in so close that he could have kissed me.

  Instinctively, I jerked back.

  “Did I scare you?” he asked.

  I gave a nervous little twitter, “Ha, no, no. I was just finishing this section.”

  I slapped the book shut and tucked it in the cubby below the register where I stored my purse. That was where the panic button was too and thank God I’d never had to use it.

  “My waitress said you could call me a cab,” he said.

  “I can. Yes, yes I can call you a cab. Where are you going?”

  “Home,” he had a way of standing very still that unnerved me, but when it came right down to it, all men unnerved me to some degree, so that wasn’t all that unusual.

  “How did you get here?” I asked and I have no idea why I even asked that except that I had no recollection of him coming through the front door and me ringing up his cover, although it was entirely possible that I was so wrapped up in grisly crime that I let him slip by and that would have been a problem if I got caught, being that he wasn’t a VIP. I’d never seen the guy before in my life. He definitely wasn’t a regular.

  “Hmm. Well. I came with friends,” he said. I don’t think he’d blinked yet.

  “So where are your friends?”

  “You ask a lot of questions. They left.”

  Was this flirting? I couldn’t tell so I kept it up, this, whatever it was.

  But I hadn’t seen him with anyone else and the afternoon was so slow that a group, even just a few guys, would have been noticeable, plus I hadn’t rung up more than two people at once all day.

  “What? They didn’t like it here? What’s not to like?”

  I spun around in my stool and fanned my arms out as if to display the magnificent abundance the Bubblegum Kittikat had to offer. I thought I was being funny, but he seemed unamused.

  “No they didn’t like it here,” he said.

  “But you obviously did.”

  Maybe he’d stayed because of me.

  “Are you going to call the cab?”

  “Well I can, yeah, but hey, where are you going?”

  “Home. I’m tired.”

  “Duh, I know, but where is home?” I asked, flashing my best grin.

  “Pompano,” he said. That was only the next town north.

  “No way,” I said like this was an unbelievable coincidence and what a small world it was and who would have ever guessed, “I’m going in that direction and I clock out in a couple minutes anyway. If you can wait for me to switch my register out for the night girl I can drive you home!”

  I really went out on a limb and touched his sleeve the way I’d seen the dancers do when they were trying to charm a customer.

  What I wished he would say was “That would be fantastic! And you know what? Forget taking me home. Let’s go have a long, leisurely dinner and after that let me get you some flowers and then let me go meet your mother so we can get married immediately” but what he actually said was “Hmm” and that made me feel weird and fretful so I said “or on second thought I could just call you the cab” and I picked up the phone to dial the cab company. He reached out and grabbed my arm.

  “No, hang it up, I’ll go with you,” he said and let go of my arm.

  “Well great then!”

  This was going to make such a funny how-did-you-all-meet story one day. I just knew it and while I was right about this one day giving me a story to tell, I was wrong about it being in the slightest bit funny.

  54

  “You’ll have to wait for me outside because we aren’t allowed to leave with customers. We’ll have to kind of sneak it. In five minutes go over to the Holiday Inn parking lot and I’ll pick you up there,” I told him. He nodded.

  There were good reasons why we couldn’t leave with customers.

  Leaving with customers could make the club look bad and it certainly hinted at prostitution, but the first and foremost reasons we couldn’t leave with guests had to do with our own safety. Strip club employees, especially the dancers, get off work wit
h ridiculous amounts of cash on them. This made all of us prime targets for robbery. Think about it. If you’re a criminal and you need some easy money fast, hit up a dancer as she’s on her way out of the club. It’ll be late, hardly anyone’ll be around and strippers are usually petite women who aren’t hard to take down.

  Aside from robbery, there was the issue of stalkers. Strip clubs attract a lot of creeps: delusional freaks, addicts, guys who believe their favorite dancer is actually in a relationship with them. They’d come in and see their girl with another client and flip the hell out believing she was cheating. Many of these men saw the dancers as expendable objects, things to possess, to control or to throw away once they’d used them, and that’s a dangerous attitude to encounter. Our clientele was a minestrone of the mentally ill and if you had good sense, you didn’t want to fuck around with unpredictable and unstable people, especially ones who’d had a few drinks. I can’t tell you how many times our bouncers had to rough up customers who refused to leave our parking lot because they were waiting for a dancer to come out so they could declare their love, and to some of these guys their way of “declaring love” might be with a gunshot to the head. You just couldn’t trust anyone.