No matter how many strip clubs I visit (and My [adopted] Fair City does like to style itself the Strip Club Capital of the civilized world) I always feel dirty. So last night, hunched over the stage-right table we’d collectively seized in a strip club on the outskirts of Portland proper, my partner, impertinent questioner that she is, asked why?
I, sloppy thinker that I am, found myself without an answer for her. Like so much else, it took a night of drinking, a long bus ride home and a follow-up session of hedonistic debauchery before I achieved the mental state necessary to formulate an answer. By then, my partner was fast asleep. So these things go. My mind is a slow, soft machine, and it takes a lot to prime that pump.
But I have to share this with someone, so into the wastelands it goes.
The decision to visit this particular strip club was a completely spur-of-the-moment. My Co-President informed us that one of our mutual friends had (A) secured a job there (B) working the 8-2:30 p.m. shift, assuring she’d be on stage at least occasionally until the State Liquor Control Commission-mandated closing time.
Thus, with altruism in our hearts, we trudged out into the perpetual wet and cold that is an Oregon winter, caught our buses, and arrived half an hour later. The club itself: a windowless wooden cube that squatted beside the road, its postage stamp of a parking lot sprinkled with a working class assortment of older American cars: Fords, Chevies, Pontiacs. We entered through the rear (no pun intended) and there she was: our fiend, on stage, naked but for her striped, thigh-high stockings. She recognized us on sight and smiled without breaking stride. Personally, I felt seized by the twin poles of embarrassment and lechery, both as naked as our friend on stage.
So I avoided eye contact and shadowed my partner and Co-President Action as we circled the bar. Inside, the club was hardly worthy of the word, and the more I visit them the more I realized how much our modern conception of the strip club owes to the modern rap music video, with its visions of New York and LA’s finest. The vast majority of “clubs,” share no resemblance to those storied establishments. Were it not for the stage, bar, tables, and video poker machines, they could easily function as portable storage buildings. (When the Revolution comes and all prisoners are released, that’s exactly what they’ll be…you can buy that for a dollar, though that’ll be $3.50 with inflation.)
A fat tub of humanity tapped me on the shoulder. “Hey, did you bump my friend over there.” He’s at least six feet and tipping three hundred pounds, his chin studded with a pitiful-looking wiry tangle of soul patch hair. I have a vision of myself as Robin (Tim Drake, not Dick Grayson—if I’m to be Robin, I’ll be a Robin who wears pants, thank you very much) and calculated the likelihood of my striking a pressure point through all that fat before one of his canned-ham fists sent me off to the Blessed Isles.
—Not intentionally, I told him.
“Well, look over there at him.” I followed the fat man’s sausage-finger to a thinner, taller, mullet-wearing individual behind the bar. He looked like Jeff Foxworthy’s cousin, still plying the family trade and no doubt resentful of his uppity, rich relative. “Wave at him,” the fat man said. I did. Mullet Man raised two-fingers in response, a flying V—for peace, which means Victory and not, thank god, Vendetta. Everything, in the language of lower class bar etiquette, was cool.
“That’s what I thought,” the fat man said. I turned away from him as fast as I could, the better to hide the contemptuous look on my face. I think of all the random invasions of personal space that I suffer everyday, in the mere act of stepping onto a bus—bumped shoulders, knocked heads, stepped-on toes ect. Would that I could send a Personal Linebacker out to intimidate the causes of such slights. So that’s why I don’t go out in public, I realized. There are just too many people in this world ready, willing and eager to pull you into a Dick Waving Contest.
Admittedly, we were in ripe territory for such people: their natural stalking ground. The strip club, whatever its drink price, décor, or hook, is a stationary testosterone battery. Its walls hum with pent up sexual aggression, all the more pervasive for it being almost exclusively male.
Thank god we grabbed our table to stage right, a respectable distance from both bar and walls, within sight of the emergency exit.
Our friend, who’s taken the stage name “Starlet,” joined us soon, fully clothed in skirt a black pull-over blouse and matching mid-thigh skirt, the stripper’s version of dress-casual work clothes. Starlet is a compact (4’11’’) Jewish girl, only slightly elevated by her high heels. The short cut of her black hair gives her face a pixie cast, accented rather than spoiled by her cat’s-eye glasses. By executive fiat I’ve commissioned her as a Commodore in Monster Island’s Navy (which, much like the pre-Revolutionary American Navy, is practically non-existent) She deserves no less for the extraordinary services rendered to our splinter-nation, services that have nothing at all to do with stripping.
Still, I won’t pretend I dragged my ass all the way out there for purely altruistic reasons. As a twenty-first century woman, secure in her body and herself, Commodore Starlet doesn’t need my moral support. I’m sure it was welcome, but I’d be lying if I denied that the opportunity to see her unclothed was my primary motivation for leaving the house. How could I and remain true to myself as a heterosexual male? Who among you hasn’t taken a moment to mentally undress your Platonic friends? And regardless of other issues, the strip club does have its utilitarian uses. Only there, within the confines of its context, am I allowed to financially support the Commodore for showing me her goodies without feeling like a complete scrub. Anything to help a friend in need…right?
So it was with mixed motivations that we (my partner, Co-President and I) bellied up to the stage for Commodore Starlet’s performance. She did three “sets” in the parlance of her profession. That is, in the parlance of the uninitiated, she stayed on stage for three songs, shedding clothing to the overly-loud rhythm of so-called “classic” rock. I recognize the Door’s “LA Woman,” before the intro is over and my mouth forms words in time with Jim Morrison as the Commodore removes her top. She finishes the song in skirt and bra, her legs sculpted by those extraordinary stockings. I don’t recognize the songs that drive her second and third sets. By then my mind is elsewhere. Commodore Starlet has my full attention.
She begins her second set by letting the girls out, tossing her bra into a corner of the stage. I marvel at her ability unhook the damned thing without breaking rhythm as she pinches her nipples. They become buds of a springtime sapling as she leans over the edge of the stage, getting uncomfortably close to the fat gentlemen seated on my right. She dances away from him (sweeping his dollar tip off the edge of the stage) shaking her booty in our general direction, eventually earning my amazement as she shucks her panties (which, unlike the bra, glow a imperial purple in the obligatory blacklight) with a single, deft motion, kicking them out of her path. Throughout all this she smiles down at us, and in the diffuse lighting of this awful place her lipstick is the same color as her labia.
Somewhere in middle of all this I experienced a revelation. In other performance based media, audiences derive their enjoyment from interaction with individual performer. Musical performances, stand-up comedy routines, dramatic readings, plays…hell, even political speeches…all of them are dependent upon the individual performer putting him or herself into the proceedings, the public forum allowing their personalities to grow large enough to fill the room and capture the viewer/listener’s attention.
Sex shows—be they stripping, lap dancing, live, or filmed porn—are the exact opposite of this, and as such they are one of the most dehumanizing (legally recognized) professions on the planet. There the performer is reduced from an individualized human being into a collection of mobile body parts and it is these which command her (and, to be fair, his) audience’s notice. The fat man to my right and the skinnier man to my Co-President’s left don’t go to these places to see stripper x perform. They’re there for the purely visceral experience of having an anonymous person shake titties in their face. That is the extent of their involvement in all this...and every time I see their like I can’t help but wonder, Have you people heard of this thing called the internet? It’s great: it’s like Pornotopia, with more T&A than most people a generation ago saw in their entire lives. And you can enjoy it all in the comfort of your own home, without braving the rain or worrying about some pig’s opinion of your blood alcohol content. More to the point, in the privacy of your own home you’re free to say and do whatever you want to your chosen sex object, up to and including jerking off.
Most strippers (save the few “lucky” enough to break into the world of hardcore porno) aren’t provided with a marquee. They never see their name in lights. They do not receive wages, neither salary nor hourly, working exclusively for tips save at a few, enlightened establishments. Theirs is the absolute bottom rung of the service industry latter, and I can’t enter a strip club in the United States without being uncomfortably aware of these, and other equally unfortunate, facts.
So I tipped generously and waited for the Commodore to redress herself. Hugs were exchanged, promises were made, and the combined Executive branch of Monster Island departed. But not before we extended our promise to Commodore: once we’ve got our burlesque house up and running, there were will always be a place for her in its arms.
