My Expeditions to the Planet of Third-tier Strippers - expurgated version

While I was writing a comment for the 2Blowhards, a series of memories of dark rooms, pulsing music, and nekkid women jarred loose from the memory attic and spilled all over the floor. Also, just yesterday Salon had an article on a woman anthropologist who researched a project for her anthropology degree by becoming a stripper, called "G-strings and Ph.D.s". (You have to click through their daily ad to read it.) I decided images of strippers jiggling at me from various corners were more than just a coincidence, so I used this bubble of synchronicity to fuel a blog entry. So, grab a drink, get comfy, and join me for a spell. The following is all true, and no names have been used because no one's innocent in these stories.
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My hometown has a tiny twin city across the river. Even though this twin town was (and is) smaller than most other hamlets in the surrounding counties, it boasted the only strip joint in a two hundred mile radius. It was a brick shoebox with one thick metal door next to a tiny glass window embedded deeply into the narrow facade, and another metal exit door on the side, under a single bare bulb which also lit a faded advertisement for Coca-cola that had been painted across the entire wall sometime in the fifties. The tiny window had a cheap light-up plastic sign with changeable letters, which have never been changed, and it read, simply, "GO-GO".

We cruised hour upon hour as teenagers, a tank full of minimum wage as David Wilcox so eloquently coined it, sticking mostly to the main drag which wound through the length of our town. Yet, at least once a night, we would cross over the bridge to drive past the "GO-GO" sign because there was a six-inch gap where it didn't cover the window, and if things were aligned just right, you could catch the blue and red blur of the stripper on the tiny stage as you went by. Cops came by regularly enough to prevent outright stopping, or kids gawking through the window. Even if the cops didn't catch you, the owner would, bursting out of the door, all four hundred hairy pounds of him, to yell at you while waving a baseball bat.

The right of passage for us guys upon turning 18 (back in the day before the Reagan administration forced the drinking age to 21 through withholding highway funds from non-compliant states - "state's rights" my ass) was a trip to the joint to get your first legal drink and stuff a dollar into the stripper's g-string (usually with a "hee-yuk, aw garsh" Goofy demeanor). When my turn to go came around, my mom yelled after us, "Don't drink from the glasses in that place!" That provided the fuel for many months of speculation, whilst cruising, as to what could possibly be contaminating the glasses. Our fevered little imaginations cooked up all sorts of sordid scenarios - it practically became a hobby - until I finally outright asked my mom what she meant. "Oh," she said, "the owner is too cheap to change the water in the glass-washing sink, so it's usually a week old." Occam's razor, indeed.

Senior year and the following summer had most of us turning 18, so we made a lot of trips to the "GO-GO". Even after the veterans had discovered how tawdry it really was. Since this town was a minor eddy in a tributary to the most outlying backwaters of the stripping industry, you can imagine the girls that graced the 8 by 5 foot stage, with cheap mobile-home mirror tiles festooned across the back for full panoramic viewing, blue stage light on one side, red on the other. The poor things would display evidence of dental plan deficiencies, possess on one person more stretch-marks than all of our mothers had combined, exhibit egregious examples of the affects of gravity we never saw demonstrated in any physics lab, or they were so young and lost it broke your heart. Still, you had to take one for the team and for the new guy turning 18. To this day I can't stand the song "Superfreak".

An ugly trend developed early in those voyages into the land of untouchable women (save for wrapping a dollar bill around the string crossing her hip) and even more untouchable glasses. I don't know if it was because we were typically the only booth full of young boys, or seemed to be likely targets for having the most disposable income, or if the older trolls were just too much work, but the girls on their breaks would always come and sit with us. (One of the more delicately natured guys in our clique would always note where she sat and would never sit or even cross over the area. It eventually became a game to purposely push him across his little waterloo.) But every single freakin' time, after she was done chatting up the boys, and maybe getting yet another buck or two, she would zero in on me and tell me her story. To a one, they had all been sexually abused at some point in their life, most had kids they were supporting since the welfare dried up, and they all stressed that they were still just nice girls really, hoping to settle down some day once they found that special someone. (Well, the ones with bad teeth were usually more independent, didn't like kids, and were clearly lost to alcoholism.) I don't know if it was my general uncomfortableness that drew them to me, as I was terminally embarrassed when the strippers broke the forth wall and pulled up a chair, or if it was the fact that I simply listened and didn't keep driving the conversation around to just one more peek at her boobs (as they usually wore a shawl or something offstage). Knowing their hard stories made it worse for me when the obligatory birthday bash cycled up. I was already having some conflicts in squaring the patronization of a strip joint with my Christianity (though I was not nearly as devout at that age), but knowing what brought the strippers through the door made it somehow even worse.

After that summer I didn't cross the threshold of another strip joint until my late twenties. Though many of my buddies did. I still wince at the memory of an event related to me by a buddy of mine (who's a Mormon!). He went to a club where the stripper would pick up quarters with her, uh, talent as the guys rolled them across the stage; one misogynist cretin evidently heated up a quarter with a lighter before he rolled it to her. I sincerely hope the bouncer beat the guy simple.

Outside of a couple bachelor parties (requiring courtesy participation), I've only been in the halls of capitalistic nudity (not that there's anything wrong with that) twice.

We were deep in the years of severe bachelorhood. (I think most guys who don't marry in college experience this.) A buddy of mine and I were strolling down the icy, overcast streets of downtown Minneapolis after a movie, lamenting in that call and response form of commiseration ("Whoa is me." "Yeah, whoa is me, too.") over our utter lack of female companionship, and the grim expectation that the situation was not going to change soon. We were on "E-block", the literally one-block stretch of filth and depravity that existed downtown (as this was Minneapolis, the place where all the children who are above average go when they grow up), and we passed the place where you could watch nekkid women through a window that slid open when you put money in the slot (like in that Madonna video). We stopped, looked at each other, shrugged, said, "Why not?' simultaneously, and strolled in. Being neophytes to this world, we entered a booth together, sorted through our pockets for some bills, and fed the machine. Up popped the shutter, and a totally nude women landed in front of our window like a crab pouncing on a shrimp, belly up, feet on either side of the window, crotch pointed our way, balanced on one arm while she used her free hand to rub her talent vigorously. We stood there, eyebrows hoisted at the sudden sky-diving-esque descent into full frontal female groping. She was in mid-conversation when she appeared, chatting animatedly to another girl presumably performing to her left, so it took her a minute to notice there were two of us standing there, in slight shock. Suddenly, she spun her head to face us, bounded out of view in one fluid motion (I'm guessing she's with Cirque du Soleil these days), popped her head back into the frame and shouted angrily, "Hey, one guy to a booth!" All the girls in their crab positions around the inner chamber craned their heads to glare at us. We bolted from the booth with all the grace and style of the Little Rascals running from a ghost over a floor covered in dried syrup (... yes, ewww). Outside the door, we quickly agreed that we'd seen enough, quite literally, and decided to fall back on that primary comfort of the lonely bachelor, a frosty mug of ice-cold beer.

My final experience, to date, with the princesses of the pole was after I got married and had returned to my hometown with my wife for a holiday visit. My wife had heard the tales of "GO-GO" from myself and my group of friends, so she wanted to see the famous hole venue for herself. My wife was six months very pregnant at this time. The hilarity of going to the strip joint with pregnant wife in tow was just too delicious of an opportunity to pass up. Then, my mom chimed in, "I'll go with you!" At that moment, I think I had an inkling of the swirl of emotions Neo must have had when he woke up in the pod after taking the blue pill (even though that movie experience was still in my future). Nonetheless, off we went. We were five feet inside the door when we bumped into more of my high-school friends home for the holiday with their wives. The girls all surrounded my wife and had a brief, loud hen party about having babies because that was their common goal of the moment. The looks on the regular's faces, perched on their row of stools (drinking from glasses!), over this eruption of young pretty women in the midst of a seedy strip bar rhapsodizing over hopes of getting knocked-up, was a tableau of every expression the human face can render at once. We took the big booth that would hold all of us, right off the stage. Later, after the final chords of "Superfreak" drained away, my wife turned to me and, with some dismay stemming from either the entertainment (the stripper was of the "close to retirement" school) or the ambiance, she asked, "Was it always like this?" The whole booth, including my mom, chorused, "It's usually worse." Then my mom told us they'd just opened a new one down the street, and she'd heard it was better. We agreed on a mass migration when our drinks dried up.

I should point out one other factor that determined a lot of the behavior of the night owls in our fine, tiny, twin cities. The river marked the border between two time zones, so the bars in the smaller town stayed open one hour later. Thus, it got the majority of the late night business. And even though the women didn't frequent the (now two) strip clubs and stuck to the other bars, they'd heard enough from their boyfriends and husbands to know the skinny.

So there we sat, at the other bar, as the young lady took the stage. She was quite pretty and fresh. The bar had invested in some Van Halen, which was a nice change of pace from the 8-track-tape-that-wouldn't-die of Rick James at the other place. A truth about this form of amusement is that once the girl is down to her g-string, the story's essentially been told, so I began to reflect on my unique situation vis-a-vis this particular evening. I looked over at my wife, who glanced at me and winked. I turned to my mother who raised one eyebrow, Star Trek style (a family trait), as if to say, "What?" I gotta tell ya - there are few things so surreal as sitting next to your mother and your pregnant wife while watching a stripper. (My mom and my wife are both progressive, intelligent, sophisticated woman, though, so that helps.) About then there was a commotion at the door, and the little blond stripper fell off her pole, bounded to her feet, grasped her breasts with her hands, covering them, and screamed, "Oh my gawd! I'm not 18!" Everyone at our table looked at each other like a bunch prairie dogs who'd had a cousin suddenly snatched from amongst them by a bird of prey. Police pushed through the heavy crowd and dashed for the stage. The young stripper screamed again and leapt off the stage, high-tailing it to the dressing room, cops filing in behind her. Everyone around us started chugging their beers, so we took the clue and did the same (though my wife just put the cap back on her bottled water in preparation for transport). Sure enough, two of the police re-emerged from the dressing room and shut the place down. Outside, as we walked to our cars, my wife turned to me and beamed, "THAT was FUN!"