Play Something Dancy

by Dee Simon

  It was now almost 11:30, and I had been waiting over an hour. I heard one of the middle-aged nurses announce in an apathetic tone the number “88.” I looked down at the crumpled piece of paper in my hand and sighed heavily when I discovered that it had the number “118” printed on it. Without my headphones or any non-STD reading material, I just sat there vacantly staring ahead, trying my hardest to pretend I was somewhere else. I focused my attention on the TV mounted on the wall above the nurses’ desks. There was no sound, but the program was close-captioned so I was able to follow it. I watched for about ten minutes before I realized what was actually going on. The clinic had produced their own dramatic films of different situations when a protagonist would contract a venereal disease and then be forced to confess their misdeeds to their spouse or partner. In this particular episode, a married black man had been carrying on a secret love affair with another man and contracted AIDS. Now he had to reveal to his wife that he was having a homosexual affair and ask her to get tested for her own safety. It was surely going to destroy their marriage, but he could not keep secrets like this from his wife anymore. The video took pains to illustrate the moral turpitude of living one’s life on the “down-low.” I was unfamiliar with that term but saw how the lesson of the video was applicable to the lives of many people in the room. Without warning, a monotone voice announced, “118.” It took me a moment before I realized that my number had been called, but as soon as I did, I jumped to my feet and rapidly walked to the front of the room, my hand holding my ticket high up in the air as if I had won a raffle. The VD raffle. Congratulations, number 118, you have syphilis.

  “Hi, I’m number 118,” I said excitedly, handing the ticket to a large black female nurse.

  “Okay. Follow me,” she said, frowning.

  I followed her down a corridor to a small examination room.

  She opened the door and pointed to two blue plastic chairs. “Sit down and wait. The doctor will be here in a few minutes.”

  I sat down on the chair directly underneath the anatomical poster of a man’s penis and inspected the room. It looked like a regular doctor’s office. I didn’t see any bloodstains on the floor or aborted fetuses in the trashcan. In fact, it was much more sterile than I thought a city clinic would be. I spied a metal container filled with condoms and lube on the counter across from me and quickly grabbed a handful as the doctor walked into the room. She was a very attractive Asian in her early thirties. Wonderful. I get to show my diseased penis to an attractive woman. I might as well get used to it.

  “Hi, my name is Dr. Green. And you are?”

  “Uh. Hi. Um. My name’s Dave.”

  “Hi, Dave. What brings you here today?”

  I was at a loss for words. It’s not often that you find yourself spending your birthday at the City Clinic with pus leaking out of the head of your cock while chatting with a beautiful Asian woman. It took me a few moments to respond. “Umm. I experienced a slight burning sensation when I urinated this morning and am worried that I might have caught something.”

  “Okay. I have a few questions that I need you to answer.” She asked me a series of questions about my sexual preference, the number of sexual partners I’ve had in the past year, whether I had hired a sex worker, and if I had ever had a venereal disease before. She seemed slightly unnerved when I told her how many sexual partners I had in the past year, but she did not comment. Once the interrogation was over, she put her folder on the counter, slipped on a pair of latex gloves, and said, “All right. Let’s pull down your pants and have a look.”

  I wasn’t expecting her to be so blunt. I suppose I didn’t know how it would go down, but I didn’t think it’d be like this. I expected her to leave the room and allow me to disrobe and slip into a gown and then she would be able to examine me. “So, you want me to just pull my pants down right here?”

  “Yes, that would work.”

  “It would work,” I laughed nervously. The reason I was nervous was that I felt my dick begin to stiffen as soon as she said, “pull down your pants.” To my chagrin, there was something about an attractive woman wearing a doctor’s white coat that I found extremely arousing at that moment. I wasn’t too surprised because I usually have at least three awkward boners a day. Considering the circumstance, I didn’t think I’d get one at the clinic.

  “Umm, can I go to the bathroom? I have to pee.” I didn’t really have to go, but I was trying to buy myself some time.

  “Well, actually that’s not a good idea because the urine would wash out any type of discharge that may be there. I’d rather examine you before you do that.”

  “Oh, okay.” Reluctantly, I stepped forward, unbuttoned my pants, and pulled out my semi-hard penis. The doctor didn’t seem to pay any attention to my tumescence and instead was focusing her attention on the head of my penis.

  “Yep. Looks like we have a discharge,” she announced triumphantly, holding up her index finger to show me a pus-like substance.

  As soon as I saw the discharge on the tip of her finger, my arousal vanished and my dick shrank to a third of its usual size. “Holy shit. That’s disgusting.”

  “Well, you definitely have something. That’s for sure. We just don’t know what yet. I’m going to examine this under the microscope to see if I can tell whether it’s gonorrhea or chlamydia. In the meantime, please take this cup to the bathroom and bring back a urine sample.” She put a plastic cup into a brown paper bag and handed it to me.

  “Okay. Thanks. Is there a bathroom back here?”

  “There’s a bathroom in the waiting room. When you have your sample, bring it to the nurse at the front desk and she’ll escort you back to this room.”

  I left the examination room and walked out to the waiting area with my brown paper bag and urine cup. I couldn’t believe my life had come to this. And the worst part was that I didn’t even have to go to the bathroom. I figured I might as well try. Perhaps being in front of a toilet would cause me to want to go. As I walked around the rows of chairs, I noticed that there were quite a few people with brown paper bags in their hands. I guess I wasn’t alone. The bathroom was on the smaller side and consisted of one stall and one urinal. The stall was occupied with a man who sounded like he was in the throes of terrible intestinal distress. He was loudly moaning, and every few seconds I heard a wet fart noise and the sound of liquid shit splattering against the porcelain bowl. The sound was not only disgusting but the stench was unbearable. I didn’t even try to pee. I returned to the waiting room and sat down in the first open chair I could find.

  “Hey, Sanchez, you waiting to pee? Me too,” said a familiar feminine voice.

  I looked up and did a double take when I saw Chyna sitting to my right holding a brown paper bag in her hand. She and I currently worked together at Teasers, but in the past I had worked with her at several other clubs, including the Doll House and Foxys. Chyna had a petite figure and wore her hair in a blonde weave with one side in tight braids that softly contrasted with her mocha complexion. I had never seen her without a full face of makeup, and this occasion was no exception. In fact, it seemed like she had purposely dressed up to come to the City Clinic just in case she might meet a suitor.

  “Oh, hey you. What are you doing here?” I asked, trying my best to minimize the awkwardness.

  “The same reason you’re here. My pussy itches from some dirty dick,” she said with an insidious laugh. “You by yourself?”

  “Uhh, yeah. You?”

  “I smoked a blunt, dropped my kids off at my baby’s daddy, and came over here. Been here since 8:30.”

  Chyna couldn’t have been much older than twenty-two. I shuddered to think of the type of role model she was as a parent. “Well, you look great for having woken up so early.”

  “Sanchez, you know I always look fine. I don’t care where I’m going. So who you been hookin’ up with? I seen you talking to Desire. And I thought, hell no, he don’t want none of that. That ho is nasty. You know when she worked at Foxys
she sucked Pepper’s dick?”

  “Haha. I didn’t hook up with Desire. I talk to lots of girls at work about music and other work-related matters.”

  “Don’t lie to me, boy. You a player. I hear people talkin’. Girls talk in the dressin’ room. I ain’t finna tell you what they be sayin’, but they talk. A lot.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t believe everything you hear. Things can be taken out of context and that’s how vicious rumors are started. Case in point, the other day I was chatting with—”

  “Hold up. I gotta piss.” She hastily stood up and gracefully walked in her six-inch heels towards the woman’s lavatory. After a few minutes, she returned holding her brown paper bag up in the air like a trophy. “I was waiting twenty minutes to piss. Damn. Now I can get the fuck out of here. Peace out, Sanchez.”

  Before she turned to leave, I said, “Chyna, let’s forget we saw each other here this morning, okay?”

  She cracked a wry smile. “Okay. You know what helps me to forget? Weed. You got any smoke?”

  “No, why would I bring weed to the clinic?”

  “I dunno. So you can smoke it. How much money you got?”

  “Wait a second. Are you trying to extort me?”

  “Do you want me to forget I seen you or what?”

  “Well, I saw you too. So if you tell people you saw me here, I’ll say that I saw you here.”

  “Yeah, e’erbody knows I come here two or three times a month. I don’t give a fuck if they know. How many times you been here, Sanchez? I don’t think I e’er seen you up in here before.”

  She had me and she knew it. I reached for my wallet and pulled out two $20 bills. “Okay, I only have $40, but I’ll give it to you if you forget that we saw each other today and we’ll never talk about this experience again. Deal?”

  She snatched the money from my hand and smiled that wry smile again. I found it difficult to trust that smile. “Sanchez, you got yourself a deal. I didn’t see nobody up in the clinic today.” She turned around and walked behind the back row of chairs on her way to deliver the nurse her urine-filled cup.

  I didn’t trust Chyna at all, but there was little I could do except bribe her. Hopefully, the money would buy her discretion, but I was skeptical. I waited for another ten minutes or so before I had to pee. Luckily, the stall was vacant and the odor had dissipated somewhat. I filled the cup with warm urine, carefully placed it back into the bag, and quickly left the bathroom to give it to the nurse. She told me to follow her back to the exam room where I found Dr. Green writing notes on her clipboard. “Hi, Doctor, I have a cup of pee for you. You know, I never thought I’d say that.”

  Perhaps she didn’t find my joke humorous or wasn’t paying attention, but with a serious expression, she replied, “So, after examining the slide under the microscope, I could tell that you have gonorrhea. I want you to get a blood sample as well, so we can test for other sexually transmitted infections.”

  I was devastated by the news. I knew I had caught something, but I didn’t realize I had caught many things. What am I? A grab bag full of diseases? A VD swap meet? Alarmed, I asked the doctor, “What do you mean other infections? How many can a person have?”

  The doctor sensed my agitation and responded using a much softer tone. “I didn’t mean to frighten you. It’s possible that you could have contracted two different infections, so it’s a good idea to do a blood test just to make sure we have our bases covered. But before you leave, we’ll give you antibiotics to treat the gonorrheal infection.”

  Her words did nothing to alleviate my concerns. I had already convinced myself that I had AIDS and was trying to determine whom I was going to will my record collection to. Dr. Green led me to a small lab where I had two tubes of blood drawn. I didn’t even wince when the nurse inserted the needle. At this point, the pain was meaningless. They could drain me of my diseased life-blood, and it would only serve to hasten the dying process. The nurse had me fill out a form and choose a password, and instructed me to call in two weeks to get the results of the tests. She said that they would contact me if the AIDS test turned out positive. I was thrilled to wait two weeks to learn my fate. To treat the gonorrhea, she gave me an antibiotic called Suprax and told me to abstain from sexual activity for the next week. That wasn’t going to be difficult. I was so disgusted with myself that I couldn’t fathom masturbation, let alone sexual intercourse. Finally, she said that it’d be a good idea to inform any sexual partner that I have had in the past month that I have a gonorrheal infection, so they can get tested as well. That was not going to be a simple task. Not only was my reputation at stake, but also my livelihood was at risk. A couple of the girls I hooked up with in the past month were married to ex-convicts. To my chagrin, I found out about this after the fact. I decided it was best to keep my little secret to myself.

  The next day, I had to work the Tuesday night shift at Teasers. I brought a Suprax in my pocket just so I could be sure to take my evening dose at the right time. I was following the doctor’s orders verbatim. While it still burned slightly when I urinated, I had stopped looking for evidence of a discharge because now I found the whole situation extremely depressing. I arrived at the club a bit earlier than usual and decided to use the rear entrance as to avoid having to talk to anyone. As I walked to the back door, I smelled the unmistakable aroma of potent marijuana. I looked around for the source and found Chyna sitting in a black Honda Civic sucking on a blunt. The driver’s side window was cracked open and thick plumes of grayish smoke escaped through the narrow opening. I hurried my step and tried to walk by unnoticed, but unfortunately she had already spotted me. Rolling down the window, she leaned out of the car and yelled:

  “What up, Sanchez? Does it still hurt when you pee?” She laughed so hard when she said this that she almost tumbled out of the window.

  I pretended not to hear her and waved as I walked by her car. Though I couldn’t make a positive identification, it looked like Gangsta Bernie Mac was sitting in the passenger seat.

  “Sanchez, I’m jus’ messin’ wit u. You wanna smoke some of this blunt?”

  “No, thanks. I have to get upstairs and set up for my shift. But you better be careful. I heard Randy’s working tonight.” Randy was the General Manager of Teasers. He was a diminutive man, standing barely over 5’4”, with a fearsome cocaine habit and an even more fearsome Napoleon complex. He had a reddish-brown mullet with feathered layers on the sides that he had worn proudly since the eighties, and rumor had it that he had used so much tanning spray over the years that his skin was permanently dyed an orange hue. Even without the cocaine, he had a mercurial disposition. Randy suffered no fools and would unleash his fury on any of his employees without the slightest provocation. You never knew what would set him off, which is the reason most people hid from him when he made his rounds. If a door guy saw Randy walking in his snakeskin cowboy boots towards the club, he’d warn the managers over the radio and they’d hide out in the bathroom waiting for him to leave. There really was no place for the DJ to hide. He just had to pray for mercy, which Randy rarely dispensed. I heard that he once fired a popular DJ for playing Lou Reed’s “Satellite of Love.” We found out later that Randy had caught his ex-wife blowing a bouncer in his Corvette and that song was playing on the car stereo at the time. Simply put, Randy was someone you did your best to avoid at all costs. One surefire way to piss him off and be instantly terminated was to smoke marijuana during your shift. Randy despised marijuana with a passion. If he smelled even the faintest odor of it, he’d accost any employee in the vicinity and shine his penlight in their eyes to see if he could tell whether their eyes were red. He called this procedure “Randy’s Roadblock,” and everyone lived in fear of it. Chyna seemed undaunted by my warning.

  “Randy can eat a fat dick. I ain’t scared of that motherfucker.”

  With that, she took an egregious puff on her blunt, stuck her head back inside the car, and rolled up the window. I continued on my way and entered the club through the
back door. Without encountering anyone, I ran upstairs to the DJ booth and came upon Derek, the day shift DJ, packing up his CD case. I liked Derek because he was too inexperienced and, quite honestly, too simple to ever be considered a threat. As a night shift DJ, you need to be constantly aware of the position of the DJs beneath you. All strip club DJs are a scheming lot who would stab each other in the back without hesitation if it meant earning more money on better shifts. But simple Derek had no aspirations to work the night shifts. He’d often remark, “Night shifts are too busy and too dangerous for me.”

  “Yo, Sanchez, what’s up, man?” he asked, sounding genuinely excited to see me.

  “Not too much. How was the day shift?”

  “It was good. A little slow in the beginning but picked up the last two hours. You have a nice crowd up in here now.”

  I scanned the room and saw that most of the tables near the front row were filled with perverts. “Yeah, it looks like a good crowd. Thanks for getting them warmed up.” I began to remove one of my CD cases from my backpack when I noticed Derek anxiously staring at me and fidgeting with his lighter. “Hey, dude, is everything okay?”

  He shuffled towards me, staring at the ground, mumbling, “Umm. Can I show you something?”

  “Yeah, sure. What is it?”

  “Well, umm, I gots this problem. You know, a problem down…there. And was wondering if you’d take a look at it.”

  “A problem down there? What are you talking about, Derek?”

  “Well, I heard you was at the clinic yesterday, and you know about this type of shit, and I don’t know, I thought that…I thought that…maybe I could show you my dick and you can tell me if I got summin’.”

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. That lying bitch. That soulless harlot. I knew she couldn’t be trusted. “Derek, tell me, did Chyna happen to mention that she saw me at the clinic yesterday?”

  “Nah.”

  “Okay, then. Who told you that I was at the clinic yesterday?”