Amateur Night at the Bubblegum Kittikat

by Victoria Fedden

  I stepped on the gas and drove the car closer.

  “Right here,” he said, “Stop here.”

  I glanced around and sure enough we were at the back entrance of Palmetto Bay where there was a small sign and an unattended gate arm. My relief was enormous; the kind of relief you feel when you’ve been trudging up an unbearably steep hill and then all of a sudden you’ve reached the peak and can start going down and you’re so glad that you practically skip to the bottom, aided and lightened by gravity finally working in your favor.

  I pulled up parallel to the entrance and refused to go any further.

  “I’m going to let you go right here,” I said.

  He began to blink quickly and fidget in his seat.

  “Aren’t you going to give me a blowjob? Anything?” he asked.

  “What?” I was aghast.

  Then he sneered and my heart literally, actually stopped for a second and did a flip flop. It felt like I had a goldfish in my chest that had jumped from its bowl and was struggling to breathe. The sensation made me cough violently.

  His face, lit fluorescent orange from the street lights and pocked in black spots from the shadows the raindrops made on the windshield, had turned into a Halloween mask and seeing him now, so close, so horrible, I couldn’t imagine how I’d been deluded into finding him even remotely attractive, because he wasn’t. He was pale and his skin was covered with a thin sheen of sweat which had seeped through the fabric of his shirt and had stained his armpits. He had a paunch and a flabby double chin and his fingers were as swollen as boiled hot dogs with bitten nails and shredded cuticles. He smelled faintly of vinegar.

  “Get out,” I demanded, “Get the fuck out of my car.”

  “Hmm. I thought any whore who worked in the strip club and offered a guy a ride would be willing to suck my dick. What a disappointment. I thought for sure you were working.”

  Working? It took me a second, probably because I wasn’t working, to understand what he was talking about. Working was code, a euphemism for prostitution.

  I repeated my demand, “Get out of my car now.”

  Jesus, why didn’t I have a cell phone? If I lived through this I swore the first thing I was doing in the morning was heading straight to the Verizon store.

  “How much will it take? Twenty? Thirty? What’s the going rate these days for Kittikat sluts? If you’re expensive you better do it good and swallow my come,” he said in his maddening flat affect.

  “I’m not a prostitute! I thought you liked me! I thought you’d ask me to dinner!” I yelled.

  He sat quietly for a moment while I frantically tried to organize my panic into a plan, but then he smirked.

  “Hmm. Ok. So yes. You really aren’t so smart at all, are you? And what a disappointment, so I’ll go and hmm, what a shame because I wanted your lipstick around my cock.”

  He pulled and jerked at the door handle, seeming nervous and awkward and unable to look at me, and once the car door finally flung open, showering him with rain from the roof, he stumbled stepping out and nearly fell into a puddle. The very instant I saw that he was out of the car, I threw my body across the passenger seat to yank the door closed and slammed my palm on the automatic door lock button. The immediate reassuring clunk of the locks was the sound of my life, safe, saved.

  I didn’t turn back to see what he was doing, where he was going or if he was even looking in my direction. I whipped my little green convertible around as fast as I could and the tires screamed on the asphalt. I must have broken every traffic law in the book trying to get home as quickly as I could and honestly, I would have welcomed a cop’s flashing lights on my tail at that point, though none materialized. I don’t even remember my drive home, only the moment I finally pulled into my parents’ driveway where the bright lights from the kitchen windows cast a magnificent yellow glow and inside my mother and father and several of their friends were sitting down to a dinner of my mom’s chicken paprikash. I could catch my breath now. I was safe. I was at home and it smelled of fried onions, peppers and garlic. There was a place to kick off my wet shoes, my father popping open a bottle of cabernet, a purring kitten, dogs’ rambunctious salutations.

  Thank God. Thank God. I was alive.

  55

  Late that night, after a searing hot shower, I watched Henry & June for about the thousandth time. I always liked the movie for its aesthetic. It’s beautiful, lush, full of jewel toned velvets, opulent Art Nouveau costumes. It’s Paris in the early thirties with artists and writers and Edith Piaf warbling the soundtrack, plus it’s NC17 so what more could you want in a film? I mean really? I always thought if I were a movie, I’d be Henry and June and I always related to delicate, innocent Anaïs, the housewife who writes and who so desperately longs to break free from her perfectly dull bourgeois existence to embrace her passions and expose the dark places hidden in her soul. I had always understood exactly how she felt, but I never related to the movie as much as I did that night. There is the scene where the writer Anaïs Nin confides in her cousin Eduardo Sanchez that she is passing through a crisis and he warns her to be careful and that “abnormal pleasures kill the taste for normal ones” and when I watched that scene that night, although I’d seen it, as I said, at least a thousand times before, I finally understood exactly what he meant and I finally got that that was how the club was ruining me.

  I’d begun to notice lately how every time I left work I’d feel odd and disoriented and it would sometimes take me more than an hour to readjust, as if I were a diver who needed to ascend slowly from the depths to depressurize in slow increments to avoid a fatal shock to my system. The club was so insular that it created an alternate reality within its windowless walls and after spending several hours trapped inside, apart from the weather and natural shifts of sunlight, cut off from fresh air, being outside gave me The Bends. The outside world was too quiet. Even the buses roaring through roadside puddles seemed muffled in comparison to the blaring soundtracks of striptease whose bass lines had reverberated through my skull for the past several hours. The colors muted. Even the smell of rain failed to invigorate and excite me the way it once had. Back when I lived in Atlanta, when the first drops pattered on my shingled roof, I’d run to my door step and stand outside to inhale the freshness of ozone on the wind as it whipped up the street and swept through the pines. Now, when it rained, my first thought was that we’d be busy and rain meant more tips in my fishbowl.

  Club life distorts your perceptions and assaults your senses so persistently that you become accustomed to over-stimulation. You expect all lights to flash, all colors to shine neon. Spend too long behind the velvet ropes and you’ll start to prefer the stink of chemical air fresheners to the real gardenias open on your lawn. You won’t even be able to hear the birds singing high in the branches of the mango trees anymore. The outside world lacks the intensity of the club and when you aren’t at work, your interactions with other people, the kind who don’t work with you, will feel flat and insignificant without the charge of strip club drama and dysfunction. Like everyone said, it was addicting and sucked you in. The club was a pimp, tricking you into thinking it would give you a better life, the friends and family you never had. It convinced you that the rest of the world was what was going to hurt you and the club would protect you, but everyone knows pimps are only out for themselves. They’re liars. You’re there to make money for them, that’s all, and if you don’t, then screw you, you fucking worthless whore.

  56

  “You dumb ass,” Brent said, “I cannot believe that you, of all people, left with a customer.”

  Brent had yanked me into his office the second I reported in for my next shift.

  “How did you know?” I asked.

  “Patty told me. Have you lost your damned mind, girl? You know better.” He shook his head in disappointment.

  Brent chewed two Rolaids at once and washed them down with a can of coke. I couldn’t even look him in the eye, so I stared at the four hundred
dollar silver strappy sandals I bought a few months earlier. Giusseppe Zanotti at Neimans. I’d felt so empowered when I bought the stupid things, like screw the world I can buy couture Italian shoes, but then when I got them home they wouldn’t stay on my feet. Trying to walk in them was damned near impossible because they slipped and wobbled and the chains slunk and tightened in weird places, preventing my foot from flexing normally, but if I held perfectly still and remained seated, the shoes were beautiful: studded with aqua and pink Swarovski crystals.

  Fucking Patty. If anyone in the place deserved to be stabbed in the face with the heel of a stripper shoe it was her. I should’ve known and how could I have been so stupid? Maybe it was true and maybe I really wasn’t very smart. After all, I had done a lot of idiotic things lately and when I thought about it, maybe I hadn’t been making bad decisions just lately, but for my whole life. Of course Patty had seen me. She’d probably followed me outside under the guise of a cigarette break to spy after she noticed me talking to the creep who took me on the joy ride two nights earlier.

  “You’re fucking up lately,” Brent said. He stabbed the tip of a ballpoint pen into his legal pad to make his point.

  I looked at the ceiling tiles and exhaled.

  “I don’t know what to say,” I said.

  “You’re not denying that you left with a customer?” he asked.

  “No. I did. I mean, I could lie, but I’m an honest person Brent. I did it and I got the crap scared out of me and I learned my lesson. I’m sorry,” I said, leaning forward cradling my temples.

  “I should fire you on the spot, but I’m going to do you a favor because it’s you, do you understand me? Because it’s you and I’m still convinced that you’re not like the rest of the jackasses in this place. I’m going to write you up and my uncle will have my ass if Patty bitches to him so you better be on your best behavior from here on out.”

  I thanked him profusely.

  “Yeah and thank you for giving me more stress and more paperwork, now get your ass back to the door and do not let me see you back here again,” Brent warned.

  Written up at a strip club. Did it get much worse than that?

  I was working another day shift and lately business had been practically non-existent before Happy Hour because it was summer now and we were floating motionless in the off-season doldrums. The slowdown had been a main topic of gossip lately with most of the employees blaming everything from the burst of the dot com bubble to the controversial results of the election the last fall. I’d actually heard someone speculate that tourism was down because the rest of the country was mad at Florida for the hanging chad debacle that got Bush into the White House. Most of the Kittikat staff blamed Mr. Haines and his poor management and they insisted on comparing him to Cliff Richards, the previous owner, who still sat in a jail cell for racketeering. Only a week earlier, Mr. Haines had gone on a firing rampage that was nothing more than a temper tantrum resulting from his frustration at the sudden drop in customers. We needed a new crop of employees, he’d decided. The old group had gotten spoiled and lazy. They were stealing and taking advantage of him, he believed, and there was nothing left to do but get rid of almost everyone and start fresh and it sucked because almost all of the people he fired were honest and hardworking. They were my friends, kind of, at least at work, and I’d miss them. The funny part was that back when I started in October, Mr. Haines was complaining about the same thing, convinced his employees were stealing, and maybe he was right and maybe I was missing something, but I’d never seen nor heard of anyone taking a thing. The Kittikat employees were, for the most part, pretty honest, not counting a couple of the more troubled dancers, but that was to be expected.

  There comes a time at every job when it stops being fun, when you’ve been there for so long that there’s been enough turn-over that suddenly, the old familiarity and camaraderie you used to share with your coworkers is gone. You look around and instead of waving to your friends across the room, all you see are strangers and management’s made so many changes that it doesn’t even feel like you’re at the same job you started at months or years before. This is the point where you begin to reminisce fondly about the “good old days” and how things used to be and this is the point where you start browsing the want ads and trying to figure out what to do with the rest of your life. At least, that’s what I’d been doing lately.

  Speaking of ads, Mr. Haines had apparently put some somewhere looking for fresh talent to staff South Florida’s premiere gentlemen’s club and purveyor of fine adult entertainment because that afternoon I was swamped with a motley parade of rejects tramping through the front door seeking work. One of our new policies was that each candidate had to fill out a complete job application and the thing was at least four pages long. It was the kind of application that folds up like a menu, it’s so long and asks all about your education and then requires a list of references. You’d have thought, at least from the application, that these poor souls were applying for an executive post at a Fortune 500. I mean, seriously, it was a strip club. How much education did someone need for any of the positions we had open? A degree in pole dancing from Hoochie University? And what sorts of questions might we ask if we checked references? I can hear it now. Can Destinee grind her pelvis consistently? Lick her own nipples? How would you rate Shantay’s ability to carry drinks across a room on a tiny tray while wearing five inch platforms?

  The application was total overkill and if you asked me all it really needed was one question: Are you dysfunctional? Yes or No. If the answer was Yes, you were hired. Optional bonus question: Have you had a boob job? Yes? Then you were definitely hired.

  Handing out applications all day got me depressed and watching these poor souls trying to fill them out made me even sadder. Most of the girls needed help because for whatever reason they could barely read. Two of them didn’t even know what the word “reference” meant and one applicant couldn’t even figure out how to use a ballpoint pen. I kept telling her to click the button on top and when she finally left I threw out her application figuring I’d be doing everyone a favor and saving management a world of aggravation later on. If you can’t open and close a pen, you’ve got problems. She was applying for a bartending position, so I could only imagine the problem she’d have with the soda gun. Bless her heart, as my grandmother would say.

  57

  We needed some excitement, a fight perhaps or some mysterious, new high roller who’d stir things up and electrify us with the anticipation of easy, plentiful money. Men that rich though, are always on the move. That’s why they call them jet-setters. They go where the fun is and I can assure you that the fun is not in South Florida in the summer. The money had migrated to the Northeast, to Vegas, to LA and the best talent had followed, which is why our entertainment staff had dwindled by at least half.

  The good strippers, the ones who really worked it, chased the cash. They were travelers, gypsies in the purest sense, willing to stuff their spandex in a duffle bag and take their show on the road. They lived a nomadic existence and were hustlers, these girls. They had no permanent addresses, only favorite motels. They pursued action because action meant cash: big sporting events, male dominated conventions, resort towns in season, holiday weekends a bonus. Some dancers even watched the stock market and if the Dow shot up, they’d hop the next flight to NYC because they knew the brokers and floor traders would celebrate in high style; trickle-down economics always benefitted sex-workers.

  Paolo’s ex-girlfriend, Cadence, I’d learned, was one of these traveling strippers, though no longer by choice. She’d needed cash to pay her and Paolo’s debts, including his child support. Traveling to dance in New York City is how she’d gotten her limp. Terrified to fly, she’d taken a train up north instead. The train had derailed when it hit a tractor trailer stalled on the tracks and she’d seriously injured her back in the accident. The shoes she wore to earn her pay certainly hadn’t helped I’m sure, and Cadence, desperate, half crippled
and wincing as she pumped her pelvis to “Bad Medicine” ground on, once having strutted, but now hobbling after whatever cash she could scrounge. Paolo had recently mentioned that she was up in Jersey again for the summer trying to work off some of her debts. This time she’d driven.

  Since the A-list fled, the Kittikat was left with locals and dancers like runaway Nixon and past-her-prime Candy and all the single moms who couldn’t leave their kids to peel their gowns off at Scores or Sapphire. Everyone had to make do with the slim pickings handed out by hard-core regulars.

  My father’s accountant, Irwin, came in a little later and tried to act as if he didn’t recognize me. This wasn’t the first time he’d been in. Hell, he was practically a regular and each time he came in he’d barely make eye contact with me, probably because he was married or embarrassed. Everyone knew he had a fetish for black girls. He liked them tall and skinny with long weaves and high, tight booties, the darker skinned the better and they only liked him back when he tipped well. Irwin held a striking resemblance to the portrait of Benjamin Franklin on the hundred dollar bills he liked to pinch between his coffee stained teeth. It was gross the way he paid his dancers and it wouldn’t have been so bad if he’d let the girls just take the money with their hands, but, still clenching the cash between his lips, he’d bury his head between their tits and stuff the money in their cleavage with his tongue. Lalique, one of Irwin’s favorites, couldn’t stand it. I once saw her washing the crumpled bills in the bathroom sink.

  “His breath be stank and his money be stank,” she said wrinkling her nose.

  It was true. Irwin’s mouth reeked from the mothball stench of periodontal disease. You could smell it from three feet away. I couldn’t even imagine giving him a lap dance. You’d need a gas mask not to gag from it. The dancers put up with a lot and maybe in the grand scheme of things stank ass breath was on the low end of the spectrum of disgusting things they had to deal with to earn a buck.