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Complex Numbers #517345 added June 25, 2007 at 7:57pm
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Long, Strange Strip
As mentioned in "Strip Mining."  , my friend Ken wanted to go to a strip club for his 40th birthday.
Figuring that'd be cheaper than buying his midlife crisis a convertible, we arranged it - not on his birthday, but for last Saturday night.
Now, the first thing to realize is that Virginia doesn't have many decent tittybars. My source tells me there may be a few down in Chesapeake, probably 3 hours away, but the better ones are in West Virginia.
(cue Deliverance theme)
Immediately, I had these visions of strip bar owners tempting young girls out of the trailer park by leaving trails of Twinkies for them to follow. Then I remembered that my mother-in-law is from West Virginia. Well, that didn't help; not that she's unattractive - far from it - but she's my mother-in-law. So after applying brainbleach, I decided to keep an open mind about it.
The afternoon saw me, my wife, and Curly, Larry and Moe (for our purposes today, I'll be Shemp) out past Staunton for a small gathering at a mutual friend's new house. This put us closer to West Virginia - but we still had to drive north. Yes, from many places in Virginia you can drive north and get to West Virginia; look at a map.
I'm not going to give more detail than that; suffice it to say that it still took us well over an hour to arrive at the club which, for the purposes of this entry, I'll call Treasure Island (yes, I know it's cheesy. Show me a strip club with a name that's not cheesy and I'll show you a strip club I can't afford to enter).
It is not legal for them to serve alcoholic beverages at these sorts of clubs in West Virginia, but you get to bring your own. We walked in with a cooler containing ice and drinks, and I had a bag containing a bottle of Quintessential gin. I thought about picking up some olives on the way and at least pretending I was drinking martinis, but I didn't. "Curly" no longer drinks, and he was the one driving, so I wasn't too worried about overindulgence. There was a $20 cover charge trial membership fee, which we paid at the door. They take plastic, but I was reluctant to use a credit card at a strip club. At least, before I started drinking gin.
Now, as I said, I'd never been to a strip club, but I'd heard a bit about how they work. No touching, no kissing, no licking, no blowing,  and no propositioning. No cameras, no cellphones, no knives (duh). If you sit by the stage, you have to tip. If you don't sit by the stage, you should go up occasionally and tip anyway - it's just courteous. And as you might expect, courtesy is important in a place like that. People who act all rude are asked to leave - and one look at the bouncers, and I decided I didn't want them to ask me anything.
There's one woman at a time on stage, and she strips anywhere from slowly (if there aren't too many tippers at the stage) to lightning fast (if there's a lot of guys around the stage). The standard tip, believe it or not, is a dollar - which, I'm now convinced, is why dollar coins won't catch on in America for a very long time, if at all.
You look at these things in movies or on TV and you get the idea that the women are either a) centerfold material or b) skank hos. But in reality, centerfolds don't dance naked for a dollar, and few people pay money to see skank hos. Not even in West Virginia. So what you get, in reality, are a few normal-looking college girls and a couple of older women who were more accomplished dancers. Only one of them had fake boobies (and yes, I can tell). Two had obviously given birth (and yes, I can tell) at least once, and they all came across as normal women trying to earn a few extra bucks.
You can say all you want about the exploitation and/or degradation of women, but consider the actual exchange that is going on here. You pay your money; they take your money. The customer has very limited say in what is going on; the women make all the decisions. For a price, you can sit there, fully clohed, with your hands by your side while she gyrates on your lap - we procured this service at one point for the birthday boy, who shall be called "Moe" for the purposes of my little narration. Some men seem to like it that way; Moe seems to be one of them. Now, who's being taken advantage of; who is actually being exploited, here? Hint: it's not the girl on the stage. Granted that no one forces them to dance, and no one forced us to come in with our money. Still, what are we paying for? A show; and, perhaps, the illusion, however brief, of intimacy.
I'll take the real thing, anytime. And perhaps my attitude is because I am married - but so is "Moe," though his relationship has a different character than mine. But I wasn't into it before I was married, either, or between marriages for that matter.
During a performance, the women who weren't dancing were roaming the club, wearing skimpy outfits that nevertheless would have passed muster at many beaches, and sometimes sitting and chatting with the customers. I don't know what they talked about; my exchanges with the strippers were limited to, "How much for a lap dance for 'Moe' over there?"
The customers, as you might expect, were about 95% male (okay, no, about 95% of the customers were 100% male; the other five percent, I wasn't sure of). Most seemed to be in their 20s, though there were a few exceptions other than the Stooges (us). It looked to be about maybe three dozen people in there at any one time.
I mostly sat in a comfortable chair and drank my gin. As the night wore on, I became more and more comfortable. Now, when I drink, usually what happens is I get more boisterous, and I laugh more often. I thought laughing at strippers would be rude, so I limited my intake of gin to just enough that I didn't much care about the passage of time.
I think we were there about four hours - maybe five, max. "Moe" had a good time, which was the point, as did his brother, "Larry." I had a good time because they did, and because every time they'd play a rock song, "Larry" and I would stand up and play air guitar/bass/drums and lip-synch.
I did mention I was drunk.
In any event, there really wasn't much to it. It's not glamorous, and it's not tacky; it's in that dead zone in between. It's not something I'd care to do again, though I won't say I never will.
But I'll never put a dollar bill in my mouth again. |
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