Amateur Night at the Bubblegum Kittikat

by Victoria Fedden

  Candy smacked her hands down on the glass countertop.

  “No way!” she exclaimed, “I was going to do that once, back in Ohio, when I was eighteen.”

  She frowned and looked away, back towards the main stage, while she lit her cigarette.

  “Why didn’t you?” I asked.

  “Met a guy, followed him to Florida, started dancing, you know,” she said, still looking away.

  I nodded.

  “I loved kids. Wanted to have a bunch. Wanted to work with them. I’m great with kids. I really am. They love me,” she said.

  “So what happened?” I pressed, but I already knew her story before she told me.

  She’d been lured by the glitz and the easy money, always thinking that dancing was only temporary – just a few more nights, a few more weeks, maybe another month. But her maybe another month turned into maybe another year and before she realized what had happened there she was 55 or 60 or however old she really was, relegated to day shift trying to plaster her face with makeup to trick the customers into thinking she was younger. Candy had been here more than twenty years. This woman couldn’t do anything else. She had destroyed what was once a pretty face with desperate plastic surgery and now her greatest skill in life was her ability to move each of her breast implants independently in time to the hip-hop music she didn’t even like.

  “Do it,” she said, “Get out of this place and go to school. I gotta go hon. I’m up on stage three in a sec.”

  She fled, dropping her still burning Virginia Slim in the sand of the lobby ashtray. I watched the fire slowly dwindle it into a tube of hot ash.

  As I sat in my stool by the mirrored front door and watched her flexing her scarred chest to the beat of the Notorious B.I.G., I realized that while it was too late for Candy, it was not too late for me. Screw the two days until Jamaica. Screw coming back to work after vacation and you know what? Screw the rest of my shift. I’d already learned my lesson about procrastination and I was getting out while I still could, before I became the hostessing equivalent of Candy, because I didn’t want to see myself as a senior citizen sitting in the same stool with a beehive hair-do, cat’s eye glasses on a chain around my neck and my huge ass stuffed into a pair of pink polyester slacks still ringing up cover charges and hoping I could get out early enough in time to make it to Bingo.

  The Bubblegum Kittikat had been there for me when I needed it and the club had more than served its original purpose, which had been to help me pay my legal bills. Working the door distracted me from the grief over my lost life and it entertained me while I figured out what to do next. It had given me something to look forward to each day when I’d convinced myself that my future looked bleak. In the strip club, I’d finally let go a little. I’d learned unexpected lessons about judging others and about generosity and acceptance. Staring at naked women every day changed how I saw women’s bodies. There were a million different perceptions of beauty. Any woman could be gorgeous and glamorous, even me. Mostly what it took was a little effort and a lot of empowerment, and maybe a little body glitter.

  The Bubblegum Kittikat taught me that we all perform; we all wear costumes and mine had been my frump. I’d buried my grace under slouchy cardigans and saggy jeans and I’d needed to be stripped down, to expose myself in order to learn who I really was and what I really wanted. All these years, since the middle school, loser lunch table really, I’d been petrified of rejection, scared the world would say no to my dreams, so I hid. I got stuck in a relationship that wasn’t healthy and where I was abused and I stalled at getting an education and choosing a fulfilling career all because I was afraid of being turned down and told I wasn’t good enough at something or for someone. But you know what? Rejection isn’t deadly. In the past year I’d been rejected plenty, but I’d done some rejecting myself (thanks Jdate and guys who talk about their four inch penises) and it hadn’t killed me. Every day at work I saw dancers tirelessly trolling the floor, barely dressed, asking over and over “Want a dance? Want a dance? Can I dance for you?” and more times than not, the answer was no, but did they slink off and cry in a dark corner? No. They couldn’t afford to, so they ignored the nos and pressed on because they had a goal and a house fee to pay and because the yeses, though fewer, were more important than the nos. You can learn a lot about life from strippers.

  I’d learned the lessons I needed and now it was time for me to move on.

  I tapped on the glass window of the office door. Brent was inside, leaning back in his wheeled office chair with his loafers kicked up on the desk next to a bottle of Maalox.

  “What’s up?” he asked.

  “Slow day?” I asked.

  “I guess,” he drawled.

  “OK, so well, I don’t know how to say this and I hope you won’t be mad at me Brent, but-”

  “You quit?” he asked.

  I was shocked. I blinked. My mouth was agape, so I snapped it shut.

  “How’d you know?” I asked.

  I didn’t know what to do with my hands so I absently picked up a ballpoint pen from the desk and started fiddling with it.

  Brent smiled and chuckled. He put his feet back on the floor.

  “It had to come sooner or later,” he said, “You’re not, well, you know. You’re not one of them.”

  “Neither are you,” I told him.

  “I know, but I’m here and I made a promise to my uncle and I’ve got a job to do. For now.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “So?”

  “Go on little bird, fly away. I’ll take you off the schedule,” I thought he sounded a little sad, but it could have been my imagination.

  “That’s it?”

  “What do you want? An exit interview? A cake?”

  “Cake is always good,” I joked.

  “Git, go on,” he said shooing me away and waving.

  “You know what I want Brent?” I said, setting the pen down.

  “Jeez, what?” he said, pretending to be annoyed.

  “A hug.”

  “Oh for god’s sakes. What is this? Mister Rogers’ neighborhood?”

  He stood up and gave me one anyway. I pulled away first.

  “You’re not changing your mind are you?” he asked.

  “Nope,” I said.

  Now here’s the part, where, if this were a romantic comedy, or if they ever made this story into a movie, where I’d act like I was going to leave but Brent would call me back into his office. He’d grab my face in his hands, the way I’d always fantasized that someone somewhere would (but as of this writing still never has), and draw me to him for a long, slow kiss. He’d say he’d always loved me and I’d sigh and my hair would look great and we’d turn around to see that the entire staff of the Bubblegum Kittikat was standing in a ring outside of the office doors, looking in the window and clapping and then the DJ would break into “I’ll Take You There,” we’d all start dancing and the credits would roll. The end.

  Fuck that. Come on. This is a memoir and that shit doesn’t happen in real life, which is exactly why it didn’t.

  All that happened was I grabbed my purse, said goodbye to Paolo, and left. On the way home I stopped at the Pollo Tropical drive-thru. I was in my room with my kitten, on my bed with a spork in a pile of black beans in time for Oprah. If you think this seems anti-climactic, well, it was. The only difference was that that morning when I’d gotten up, yanked myself into a halter and zipped a mini-skirt over my hips, I’d been a girl who worked at a strip club. By dinner, I was girl who was unemployed, single (not even dating) and still living with her parents.

  But I wasn’t right back where I’d started a year earlier. I was very, very far away from that place.

  Now I was calm. I had plans. I was setting goals. I had money saved and money in the bank and I wanted to travel a bit and go to school. A boyfriend would have been nice, but I no longer felt the need to scramble desperately after a man’s affections in order to feel loved. Maybe I’d date again, but casually, and just for fun.
I wanted to use that energy to work on myself now that I no longer needed a guy’s empty compliments to convince me that I was beautiful or special. One day, I thought, it would be nice to be in a relationship with someone, not because I needed to prove something to myself or to my ex or to the popular girls from sixth grade, but simply because I enjoyed spending time with the other person.

  A few weeks earlier, when I’d given the lift to the creepy guy and could have ended up embalmed in a barrel and hidden away in public storage, I’d sat down and reassessed my life, trying to figure out when and where I had felt the most whole. Where, if ever, I asked, had I felt like the best version of myself? It hadn’t been with Evan, that’s for sure. With him, I’d been my worst: whiny, clingy, timid and unquenchably needy. Yet when I went to work at the kindergarten, I’d felt genuinely happy. Maybe it was the innocence of the children and their constant playful chatter. I loved the bright colors of their toys, the dress-ups and puppet shows and the way everything had seemed new and thrilling to them. We sang and danced and told stories every single day in our classroom and we celebrated birthdays along with the tiny, individual triumphs of childhood (Jeremy can tie his shoes!). That was what I wanted again and what I wanted for my life. I wanted to be back in the classroom.

  My mother, who is still, stubbornly, always right and always has an appropriate cliché handy, likes to say that hindsight is 20/20. Looking back, I could see clearly now, like someone had finally taken a soapy rag to the bug-splattered windshield of my perception. All my life I’d believed that I couldn’t do anything and that no one would ever want me because I was ugly and stupid. The past year at the Bubblegum Kittikat taught me to be beautiful and to know it. I found my sexiness and my self-respect. I learned to stop procrastinating. Now, college was going to teach me to be smart.

  Not that I wasn’t still scared half out of my mind, because I was. I’d have to find a way to pass College Algebra and the very thought of Statistics roiled my bowels, but I’d have to find a way to get through it and after what I’d made it through, surely I could likewise conquer math. Look, if I could strip naked in a room full of people, lord knows I could figure out the value of x, right?

  But screw that for now, I thought. I was headed to Jamaica to a resort called “Hedonism.”

  61

  One Year Later

  “I think I’m going to shit my pants,” I told my sister.

  It was nine in the morning and I was in the parking lot at school, trying to look nonchalant, though I was half in hysterics when I called my sister (yeah, I’d finally gotten that cell phone).

  “Are you laughing or crying?” she asked.

  “Both?”

  So I laugh/cried a little more because when I said I might shit my pants, I hadn’t meant it figuratively.

  “You idiot, what’s wrong?” Natalie asked, laughing herself.

  “I have to get up in front of the class,” I began.

  She knew how I got when I was nervous and she suffered from the same affliction I did, so she wasn’t surprised when I explained that I had to give a big speech in my Public Speaking 101 class.

  “I had to stop at a Burger King bathroom on the way,” I laughed.

  “Oh no! Gross,” she gasped, but she wasn’t surprised because she’d been there too.

  “So now I have to give a speech in front of a room full of people and I have a stomach ache,” I went on, “I don’t think I can do it. I’ve never talked in front of people before.”

  “Not a big deal. You did pose nude for a calendar after all. A five minute speech? Shit, that’s nothing. You’ll be fine,” she said.

  She had a point.

  Public Speaking 101 was a required core class and I dreaded it almost as much as the remedial math class I was also taking that summer, that I’d tested into and which was still hard even though it was the easiest math class the community college offered and not even a credit class. That day we were doing a demonstrative speech. We had to explain how to do something and then get up and actually do it. Mine was “How to Make a Mosaic Heart” so I’d brought a wooden cut-out of a heart, several pieces of tile, some joint compound and a small pail of grout to class with me. My stomach was a mess and as I sat through my classmates’ speeches, all I could think about was my own and that in minutes I’d be up in front of thirty something people, talking. I could do it though, and as my sister had reminded me before we got off the phone, just think, in a few short weeks, once the summer session ended and before the fall one began, it wouldn’t matter anymore because I’d be heading off to Hawaii. Last summer it had been Jamaica, and this summer I was jetting to Maui. Amazing the surprises life brings us when we let it.

  The professor, a tall woman whose ankle tattoo thrilled me when I’d noticed it on my first day of class, called my name and I moved toward the front of the room where I spread out my props on a table. I cleared my throat.

  “Sometimes things break, but when they do, you don’t have to throw them away. Don’t be afraid of breaking and don’t give up on the broken because you can always pick up the pieces and rearrange them and turn them into something new. Something beautiful,” I started. My stomach was fine but I was choking up a little so I paused for a second.

  I smeared joint compound on the wooden heart with a plastic knife, explaining that it was like icing a cake and I showed the class how to arrange the broken shards of porcelain tile and bits of cracked glass.

  “You must be patient,” I explained, “Sometimes you have to rearrange the pieces of a mosaic over and over until you get them right. Eventually they will fit, though sometimes not as you’d originally expected. In the end, your broken parts will become an interesting and intricate work of art, stronger for having been broken and reassembled and more beautiful with all of its cracks.”

  The Denouement

  You didn’t think I was just going to leave you hanging, did you? Any self-respecting memoir has to have a denouement, the part where I tell you what happened once the story ended, and denouement has a kind of dirty ring to it, doesn’t it? It sounds like something someone would do in a strip club, maybe in a special back area – The Denouement Room.

  So here’s what happened:

  I went to school. It took me a while, a year in fact after I left the Kittikat, to make up my mind, but that wasn’t a wasted year. I traveled, I worked in an art gallery and briefly as a nanny before I took some time off to concentrate fully on my classes. I even took sailing lessons and I started looking for an apartment to buy.

  My dating hiatus didn’t last long. I really wanted to find someone to share my life with, so, reluctantly, I went back on Jdate and had several more wacked out dates before I finally got lucky and met a young PhD candidate in psychology who was just finishing up his dissertation. Things didn’t end up working out between us, but we had fun for a year, so I couldn’t complain.

  School was the one thing though that did work out. I started writing and learned I was halfway good at it and that more importantly, I really enjoyed it. I never conquered math and probably never will but I managed to pass the required classes with the help of tutors and the math lab and I didn’t care that I barely passed as long as I got the credits so I could move on to the classes I loved and where I excelled, which I did for the first time in my life. Turns out I wasn’t so dumb after all.

  I never went back to the Bubblegum Kittikat. Occasionally, around town I’d see people and recognize them as customers from the club, but they never recognized me, or if they did, they never acknowledged it.

  Mr. Haines eventually opened his steakhouse, Boned, but it flopped and hard and soon the club, which had been struggling all along, closed and Mr. Haines became a distant memory. I don’t know what happened to him, if he’s still in town somewhere or if he moved away. A big New York club took over briefly, the Kittikat sign replaced with a new name. Then another club out of California briefly took up residence and for a long time, the old building, still mirrored, still piped with neon, s
at vacant, the marquee out front stripped bare. No more announcements for porn star appearances, happy hours, free lunch buffets and sadly, no more Amateur Night at the Bubblegum Kittikat.

  Strip club employees all over South Florida rejoiced when Cliff Richards got out of jail and made his comeback, opening a new club, Hot Pink, just steps away from the empty Bubblegum Kittikat. Once again the spot lights swiped Ft. Lauderdale’s night skies and all of the former Kittikat employees went to work there, more faithful than ever to their original boss. The club is still booming. I know because once, for all of a week, my sister tried cocktailing there. She couldn’t handle the shoes. Or the groping.

  Just recently, Cliff Richards reopened the original Bubblegum Kittikat as a sister club to Hot Pink. I hope it’s doing well. I haven’t been in to check it out, but I pass it nearly every day. I think about stopping, but I’d have to find a man willing to escort me in and my husband (yes I have one now!) isn’t into strip clubs. Still, I kind of miss the place.

  A few years back I ran into Brent in a jewelry store. I was dropping off a ring that my mom needed repaired and lo and behold, there he was with “Jasmine” picking out an engagement ring. Fantastic timing I have, right? He’d quit the club not long after I did and had taken a job in sales for a technology firm. I don’t know if he ended up marrying the gorgeous Asian stripper, but even I had to admit that they looked happy that day deciding on diamonds.

  I don’t know what happened to any of the dancers. I never saw any of them ever again, but I’ve often wondered what became of them and if they’re still out there baring it all and grinding against strangers night after night. Most of them would be pretty old now, at least for exotic dancers.

  My friends are all doing well. Angelina married a hot fireman, moved away and became a sweet, suburban mom. She’s blissfully happy. Olivia lives in the Northeast and is engaged. My parents are still the same, still making deals, still hustling, but they’re great. My sister is married and has a baby.