Amateur Night at the Bubblegum Kittikat Page 15

  I got an email a few days later from a guy whose picture was smokin’ hot. Hot I’m telling you. He was gorgeous. Black hair, artfully tousled, glittering dark eyes and a buff build he said he got from playing hockey. I was all over this one. A Brown graduate and a West Palm ER doctor? Hell yeah. I was ready to pick out a wedding dress. We talked on the phone and he seemed fairly normal. He said he would take me to dinner at a five star restaurant that I never heard of. I even bought a new dress. The black satin hugged my curves, while criss cross spaghetti straps gave me some much needed cleavage. I couldn’t wait to wear it, though according to his profile, Eric liked red wine and strolling the coast. I decided to ignore his lack of originality due to the extreme hotness displayed in his picture. With the busy schedule of a trauma physician, who has time to coin clever online dating profiles?

  Eric had me drive to his apartment and I thought I was lost because the entrance stated that it was an over fifty community. There are many of those in Southern Palm Beach County. I swear there are no old folks left in New York and New Jersey because they all live in duplexes in gated communities in South Florida, but I had to be lost, right? Because why would a Palm Beach doctor live in Cemetery Village? Amazingly the guard at the gate knew the name and showed me where to go. I followed the directions and walked up to the apartment. I knew I was safe because there were about seventeen old people playing shuffleboard outside, meaning there were plenty of witnesses in case this guy decided to skin me and turn me into furniture, although most of the witnesses were so elderly that they may not have been very reliable and when questioned on the stand would utter something unintelligible about it being Brooklyn, 1926. I decided I wouldn’t go inside.

  I walked up to the apartment and knocked on the door. An enormous, side-showishly obese man answered and I apologized for disturbing him.

  “Victoria?” he asked.

  “Uh. Yeah,” I replied.

  “It’s me. Eric.”

  He was expressionless. I looked closely. There was no resemblance to the picture, but I don’t think I needed to tell you that. I peered inside the apartment which was decorated in 80s style mauve, grey and white lacquer. Silk flower arrangements collected dust while porcelain kitty knick knacks pounced and played on every available surface. A real cat, a white Persian, wound around Eric’s legs.

  “Is this your apartment? Aren’t you too young to live here?” I asked.

  “I live with my grandma. I have to tell everyone I’m 50 and hide that I’m her grandson. I tell everyone I’m actually my dad and they don’t know the difference,” he answered.

  “And you are how old?”

  “27.”

  27 passing for 50 is not a good sign, and since he was 450 pounds, his health probably was more like a middle aged man’s. Suddenly I felt terribly, terribly sad. We stood in the doorway for a minute. I didn’t say anything about the picture. Obviously he knew. He knew I knew.

  “Are you really a doctor?” I finally asked although I knew the question would do nothing for the awkward silence.

  “I work at the hospital,” he said.

  “Doing??”

  “Discharge.”

  “I work at a strip club,” I said.

  “That’s nice. Do you still want to go to dinner?”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, the restaurant I said I was taking you to doesn’t exist.”

  “I see.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Look, do you just want to go to Hooters?”

  I thought some greasy wings and orange panties might do this poor soul some good. He was very excited and I got a distinct gut feeling that it would be ok to ride in his truck (he couldn’t fit in my car) and that he would not tan my hide for lampshades. His grandma would never allow lampshades made from human skin. It wouldn’t go with her mauve silk flower arrangements at all.

  I wanted Eric to be able to say we had a real date. I wanted him to be happy about an evening out with a girl who was not ashamed to be seen in public with him, and I wasn’t. I didn’t want him to have to feel one more time how the South African guy, Adam and Evan made me feel and I didn’t want to be like the architect who practically needed psychological counseling after being subjected to dinner with an overweight girl. I knew that while there was hope for me, there wasn’t much hope for Eric and that, as my mother would say, it would not kill me to share some wings with this guy.

  I wanted it to turn out that we had a really good time; that we laughed and carried on and made fun of all the people in Hooters while chowing a hundred and seventy-five chicken wings and three orders of cheese fries. If this were fiction, that’s how I’d have written it, but sadly, Eric was really dull. He didn’t have much to say and whenever I asked him a question he gave me one word answers so that I had to prattle on and on until I got bored of listening to my own self and started to make up some really crazy, off the wall shit like that my dad was an astronaut and that I had a Great Dane who could say “ice cream.” Also, as a child, I had a real Pegasus which we kept in the garage. Eric found none of this remotely interesting and to top it all off, he suggested we split the check. I couldn’t wait until we got back to his grandma’s apartment and I could go home. Before I left, I had to ask.

  “Eric, where’d you get that picture from?”

  “I don’t remember. I copied it off the Internet somewhere.”

  I couldn’t understand why someone would misrepresent himself so blatantly. He knew I would find out and what did he expect would happen? Was Eric’s life so bleak that he just wanted to feel, however briefly, what it was like for a girl to be interested in him? He must have felt as if he had nothing to lose anyway. How many girls had he tricked like that, all of them excited, like I was, for their date with the handsome, hockey-playing doctor?

  24

  So many people lead false lives, hiding their true selves behind elaborately constructed facades, terrified that others will know the truth about who they are, how they look, their secret joys, despairs and desires. The Internet makes it easier. Copy and paste, create a name, any name. Keep your secrets behind your screen and keyboard. It’s just as easy to hide in a strip club. In a place where girls take it all off, where everything is exposed, the great irony is that so much is covered up. For example, if you charged your credit card, your statement wouldn’t rat you out later. The Bubblegum Kittikat wouldn’t be listed. Instead, your wife or your accounting department would see that that three hundred and seventy eight dollars you packed in Chanel’s garter was charged innocently to Haines Enterprises International. That’s just a simple example though. Working the door, I saw far more complicated deceits.

  You think you know everything about celebrities. Between the websites, tabloids and Access Hollywood, we’re privy to more information about the personal lives of movie stars than we are about our own family members and don’t get me wrong, I’m totally addicted to celebrity gossip, that’s why I was so excited when an A-list movie star rolled up under our valet in his brand new, gleaming, black Porsche.

  I would love nothing more than to tell you who the movie star was, but I’d probably get sued, so let me just state that millions of women the world over adore this man. You can’t get more A-list and he’s starred in some of my favorite films of all time. I about fell off of my stool and busted my head open on the register when he walked in, bizarrely alone, looking almost sheepish.

  Famous people visited the Kittikat all the time. We had Marlins and Dolphins almost every night, though I rarely recognized them. One night every one of the Pittsburgh Penguins showed up on a bus and Dennis Rodman was practically a regular. Local news anchors counted as famous and we had plenty of rappers and rock and rollers too, along with actors who’d played minor roles on The Sopranos. Someone had to point them out to me every time, but not this guy. It was impossible not to recognize someone that famous, even when he tried to pretend that he was just a regular customer.

  Paolo escorted the future Oscar winn
er to a private room and called Brent. Since I was left alone at the door, I couldn’t be as nosy as I would have liked, and I didn’t get to see much more of what went on. According to Paolo, the actor turned down all attempts to heap him with comped gifts. No champagne please. No thanks to the fruit and cheese platters. Caviar wouldn’t be necessary either. They should have offered him a Shirley Temple, I later joked. Unlike the rappers and rockers, the humanitarian had no desire to be surrounded by his own personal harem of strippers, all of whom would have gladly worked for free and all of whom, even the lesbians, would have willingly broken several decency laws if he’d have asked. So what did the guy want? Just one girl to keep him company and he’d asked Brent to find her for him.

  “Model quality,” he’d requested, “Someone extraordinary. I came here because of your reputation for hiring only the finest entertainers.”

  He turned down Diana and Chanel, our two biggest money girls, and settled on Rio because he liked redheads. She really was gorgeous too, with a 60s Bond girl kind of vibe about her. The guy had good taste. Years later I’d see him with one of his girlfriends on Entertainment Tonight and laugh because the supermodel could have been Rio’s twin.

  Everyone in the club wanted to know what Rio was doing with the movie star behind the Champagne Room’s drapes. Even Paolo, who now stood guard outside, appeared to be trying to eavesdrop, though that would have been impossible over the trance set the DJ pumped. Her jealous colleagues bitched that Rio was fucking him on the couch and they about spit with envy when Rio emerged unexpectedly and strolled back into the locker room, saying she had to change because she was leaving for the night. The star paid her house fee and bought a few courtesy bottles of champagne, which they didn’t even open. His credit card was stamped with a different name, the name he’d used to introduce himself to the staff, so we all argued for the rest of the night whether or not that was his real name and the name we knew was a stage name, or if he used his real name professionally and used a false moniker to throw off potentially over-zealous fans.

  I’m sure Rio thought she’d fallen into a real life version of Pretty Woman and who can blame her? They all hoped for that. Hell, I hoped for that. At the very least, Rio hoped for an all-expenses-paid weekend getting it on with one of the sexiest men alive. Imagine her surprise when she realized the A-lister wasn’t interested in her at all. He needed a beard to fool the paparazzi while he spent the weekend in South Beach with his boyfriend.

  The clients had their skeletons and so did the dancers. It only seemed as if they bared all, especially Tyler, whose secret I uncovered by accident.

  Someone had ordered a crap ton of Italian and the delivery guy dropped it off with me, saying it had already been paid for. No one on the floor knew who the chicken marsala belonged to, so I decided to take it back to the locker room where the dancers usually took their dinner breaks. Maybe Velouria would know whose it was, I figured, but when I got back there, the large room, which usually teemed with sweaty girls hastily applying another coat of shimmer lotion, was deserted. I looked at the clock. Nine. That was it. They’d all hurried out to get Feature over and would be back within fifteen minutes, so I’d leave the bag on the break table.

  Plastic clattered on tile. I jumped.

  “Hello? Somebody back here?” I called, “Anybody order Giannone’s?”

  “Motherfucker!”

  A raspy girl’s voice, the kind that’s sexy in your early twenties but after a few more years of cigarettes and late nights in a club, turns into one of those voices that makes customer service reps call you sir.

  “Hello?”

  I received no reply, so I went looking and found Tyler behind a row of lockers, her enormous purse splayed open, the contents having fallen onto the floor. She was naked except for a black thong, strings as thin as angel hair, but that wasn’t the problem. I’d seen her naked plenty of times and she wasn’t even pretty. At least not to me. Tyler was what I called “guy pretty” because you know, men and women have totally different ideas about what’s attractive. Men are easier to please. Anorexic, huge tits, long hair, blonde even better. Yeah. She’s pretty. Women look for things like elegance and a Grace Kelly face. We’re perfectionists and we’re hard on ourselves and our sisters. Men don’t notice the lines around our smiles or that weird thing our left eyelid does sometimes. They don’t care if our mascara is clumpy. I was learning quickly that as long as a woman wasn’t fat and had recently shaved or waxed her bikini area, a man couldn’t care less about class or sophistication, of which Tyler had neither. And the only mystery about her, at least to me, was how she had not even the teeniest suggestion of cellulite anywhere on her body. She had an incredible physique, but she was a butter face, horsey and narrow eyed and God, was she a bitch. No one liked her. Where most people make friends, Tyler made enemies and for no apparent reason. She constantly accused other girls of talking shit. She’d complain that they tried to steal her regulars and then she’d move in on theirs. A lot of the dancers suspected that she stole from their lockers, because a lot of things, little things like a few twenties here and there, a compact, a mister of Love Spell, had turned up missing lately and usually on nights when Tyler worked. And now it looked like I’d be the one who finally caught her in the act.

  But I was wrong. Tyler wasn’t stealing. She was covering up something else.

  “What the fuck are you looking at?? What the fuck are you doing back here?” she shrieked, her voice shrill with panic.

  I held up the bag of Italian food and tried to explain.

  “Somebody ordered – I was looking for – I’m sorry.”

  “Get the fuck out of here! Turn around! Stop looking at me you little fucking kike bitch!! Get out of here! Are you deaf?? Nobody’s supposed to be back here!!!”

  When she lunged at me, heels skidding on the lid of an open jar of Dermablend, I saw it clearly. What had looked like a shadow from a short distance under the trembling fluorescent lights, revealed itself to be an enormous birthmark, like cabernet splashed across half of her face, down her neck and over her left breast, which was grotesquely spherical and stretched from an oversized implant. I thought of Gorbachev and that Hawthorne story we’d read in tenth grade English before I dropped out of high school. She was stained and disfigured from the thing. She must have felt like a freak going through life with her face, neck and torso bisected by the birthmark’s jagged red borders. What must middle school have been like for this poor girl? She grabbed at me, raking scarlet claw marks into my chest with her acrylic tips in an attempt to pull me by the neckline of my dress and shove me into a row of lockers, and I stopped caring about how hard her childhood must have been. The bag of food on the floor, marinara leaking across white paper.

  “Don’t you fucking tell anybody what you saw! You hear me? If you tell anyone, if you fucking tell a soul, I swear to God I will cut your throat. I will fucking have your ass!”

  “Calm down. I don’t care. I’m not going to tell anybody. It’s not a big deal! I swear, it doesn’t matter. Go ahead and finish putting your makeup on before Feature ends. I can watch the door for you or something.”

  “Fuck you! I don’t need your fucking pity. I don’t need you or anyone else’s help. Get the fuck out of here!!”

  She let go of my clothes with a shove and I fled.

  “What happened to your chest?” Sean asked me when I returned to the door.

  Still shaking I stuttered something about an itchy mosquito bite.

  “It’s nothing. Just temporary. It’ll go away soon,” I said.

  By the end of the night the scratches disappeared and at three am, as I unlocked the car I noticed someone had keyed my driver’s side door. Still, I never told anyone. I’m good at keeping secrets, I guess.

  I thought of all this as I drove the forty minutes home from Eric’s grandma’s apartment. I tuned the radio to the station that plays twenty-four hour Christmas songs for the whole month of December. I took the long way home, through nei
ghborhoods where I’d once lived, past the house my parents had bought when they first married. The lights strung up under the eaves of ranch houses looked sad, the inflatable snowmen puffed up under palm trees, ironic and wan. It was eighty degrees, yet the radio crooned “Baby It’s Cold Outside.” T.S. Eliot said that April was the cruelest month. How could he have forgotten wretched December?

  At least I had the Bubblegum Kittikat’s annual Christmas party to look forward to. Maybe I’d feel more like rocking around the Christmas tree then.

  SONG TWO

  TOPLESS

  25

  Brent and I were arguing in the back office while we shared dinner. He didn’t like sushi either and asked me to go in on takeout from his favorite wings place so he could meet the minimum order size for delivery. I said the club should close on Christmas. He said it had to stay open.

  “No one’s saying you have to work Christmas,” he explained.

  “I know, but that’s not my point. No one should have to work on Christmas. We should close. It’s not fair.”

  “What do you care? I thought you were Jewish.”

  “Half Jewish. I love Christmas.”

  “So do you just celebrate for half the day?”

  I gave him a look.

  “You’re supposed to spend time with your family on Christmas,” I said.

  “Which is, my dear, exactly the reason we’re open.”

  It took me a moment, three wings and two celery sticks stabbed into the ranch dressing, before I got it.

  “Ohhhhhh,” I said.

  “Precisely. Shall I put you on the schedule? The party starts at seven.”

  I thought about it. We celebrated Christmas, but it was a low key affair at Casa Azul. My mom would roast a turkey, but that was about it. None of us were big on gifts. We’d gotten a tree right after Thanksgiving. Growing up, we never had one. I had to enjoy my grandparents’ fiber glass pine to get my “O Tannenbaum” fix, but in the past few years my mom had become disenchanted with her adopted religion, missing the traditions she’d grown up with, and we began decking the halls. Like everything else, we Levys did Christmas our own way and covered our tree in blue and silver Stars of David. It worked. So seven, huh? My mom would have the turkey and dressing packed up by five latest and if I didn’t go to work I’d be left alone all night to weep over the ending of It’s A Wonderful Life. Sure, I’d work. How could I miss out on a Kittikat Christmas?