Amateur Night at the Bubblegum Kittikat Read online

  The more I resisted, the harder the two dancers dragged me away from the bar and my half eaten cookie.

  “Come on! No!” I yelled, half laughing, half completely serious, because oh my God, a lap dance and what the hell were they going to do to me and what was I supposed to do back?

  Everyone got in on the action and soon the bartenders, the bar backs, cocktail waitresses and bouncers were egging on Cherish and Svetlana as they sat me down, more like pushed me down actually, on the matted, velveteen banquette seating that surrounded the main floor. Even the DJ found it hysterical and started spinning “Back That Ass Up” because really, what better song is there to get a lap dance to than that? All I can say is that at least it wasn’t a Christmas carol because I was already traumatized enough.

  I’m not one to be the center of attention and I prefer to enjoy the entertainment, not be the entertainment, yet here I was with an entire room full of people pointing, laughing and goading two strippers into making a spectacle of me. Someone, I think it was the Australian bartender who looked like he belonged in a print ad for surfboards, started chanting “LAP DANCE! LAP DANCE!” and for the first time in my life I was the one in the center of the Coliseum being thrown to the lions, or lionesses as the case may be, instead of watching safely from the bleachers.

  I sat statue still with my hands stiff at my sides and I could feel my jaw clench in a way that had to have made my expression downright grim. Cherish put her hands on my shoulders, ducked down and whispered in my ear.

  “Just relax.”

  Svetlana popped off her Santa Hat (all the strippers were wearing them that night) and wiggled it down over the crown of my head, because apparently, I didn’t look stupid enough already, and even though it was just the first song, both Cherish and Svetlana shimmied out of their gowns to dance in their G-strings, one green and one red appropriately. Had they planned that? Just be over, just be over with, I thought.

  They swayed in front of me. Cherish did her signature prance, skip, twirl move and then rotated her ass in my face while looking over one shoulder and Svetlana squeezed her implants like over-risen bread dough and managed some contortion in which she could alternately lick her own nipples, something I certainly hadn’t ever considered worth trying. They draped sheets of their long hair across my face. Cherish sat on my lap facing me, back arched and legs wide open while she thrust her hips in time to the slow rap song. When it was Svetlana’s turn, she kneeled at my feet and slowly slid upwards until her face was level with my crotch and with her hands reaching up to my shoulders, she shook her head from side to side, miming oral sex. At one point she slipped her hand under my cardigan, under my bra and grabbed my boob and oh dear God, I was being felt up by a six foot tall Ukrainian blonde. The guys went nuts when she did that, but all I could think of was how she smelled like cabbage and finally, finally the song was almost over and the dancers ended by dancing in front of me again, and thank God not on me, slowly caressing each other’s shoulders, arms and perfect asses, which the guys also loved because men will just about lose their minds over any sort of hot, fake, lesbian action.

  When it ended, with me red faced and out of breath, feeling like I needed to step outside for a few minutes, both dancers tousled my hair the way one might a child.

  “You like?” Svetlana asked.

  And what was I going to say, so I just nodded. Like wasn’t the right word. Survived was more like it.

  “We should get together after work tonight,” Cherish said.

  Did she mean? She did, didn’t she, because I’m pretty sure she wasn’t saying we should go get a plate of eggs and hashbrowns at the twenty-four hour diner on State Road 84. Wow, I’d been hit on, propositioned practically, by a stripper. On Christmas. I nodded and avoided her for the rest of the night. Naturally I was flattered, and my dating life was so bleak that I’d often said I’d be better off dating girls, but when it came right down to it, I didn’t think I could get it on with a girl, as lovely as she was.

  No one did any real work that night, except maybe the bar staff, who poured and shook mixed drinks as if they were hosting their own party for once and not just trying to make a buck satisfying our customer’s needs for drunken debauchery. Some of them even did a few Tom Cruise-esque “Cocktail” stunts. It even seemed like the dancers took it off for fun.

  Later in the evening, my parents showed up with Mr. Haines to join the revelry and I thanked my stars that they hadn’t come in during my mortifying lap dance. Mr. Haines, looking especially dapper in, of course, another white linen suit with a red tee shirt, made everyone comfortable in a Champagne Room and called for two bottles of Dom on ice. He lit an El Presidente, which absolutely reeked, but hell, it was a strip club. Instead of chestnuts roasting we had the stench of cigars. What are you going to do?

  And of course it wouldn’t be Christmas without Santa bearing gifts for us all. I’m not talking about the lame mall Santa slumped over, goggle eyed over his half-Chinese goddess. I mean a real Santa Claus with lots of toys for all the little girls and boys.

  He came in a Ferrari instead of a sleigh and yes, he was actually Jewish and he looked more like a blue eyed cocker-spaniel rather than the Saint Nick you loved as a kid with the wooly beard and the red, furry suit, but cut him some slack because this Santa filled our stockings with money. So much money that we called him “Money Mike.”

  Money Mike was Michael Deerman, a notorious porn spammer, rumored to have made hundreds of millions off of triple X websites and emails. People said he had a bad temper. He’d been arrested for some pretty ugly bar room brawls, though none of them had happened at the Bubblegum Kittikat and he came in so often that many just assumed he was the owner instead of Mr. Haines, who’d been away a lot lately dealing with the births of his sixth and seventh children which came only two weeks apart. Money Mike was beyond a regular. I couldn’t remember a night I’d worked where he wasn’t already camped out in a champagne room by the time I clocked in, and he’d stay there often until closing or close to it, reclined on the love seat, the edges of his nose raw and bleeding as if he suffered from a perpetual case of the sniffles. A harem of thin, young strippers surrounded Money Mike at all times, trying to impress him enough to get a webcam deal. Maybe he’d offer them an online video on one of his websites, a couple photos even to help them break in to the porn business where the real money was and where they could get famous.

  Most of these girls had come from small towns across the US, villages in Central America, Asia or Caribbean islands. They came to South Florida hoping for the big time. Neiman’s shopping sprees, enormous designer purses, rich old men, their names on the VIP list, afternoons spent racing down the coast on the deck of a Cigarette, their hair whipping straight back behind them. Tanning beds and French manicures, days spent languishing at the spa, a life where they felt like a star. In Money Mike with his red Ferrari and neck full of chains, a fat three carats in his earlobe, they saw the possibility that all their daydreams of wealth and prestige could be realized, and so they kissed his ass to the point where you’d think their collagen-plumped lips would callous and acted like Money Mike was Jesus Christ.

  A lot of rich people give to charity. Ever look in the society pages of the paper? It’s all a bunch of glittering aristocrats boozing it up at fundraising galas and giant cardboard checks written out to six figures going to organizations like Ducks Unlimited. Money Mike was no different. The likes of him would never be welcome at the National Heart Association’s ball, and he’d never donate to the Red Cross or The United Way. His charity of choice was the strip club. He handed out hundreds like they were Kleenex and strippers were snot nosed kids. Money Mike paid car notes and rent, traffic tickets, disorderly conduct fines. He paid off angry drug dealers making threats and handed over bundles of cash, folded and bound in rubber bands to girls with unexpected and unwanted pregnancies. When Jazz’s pap came back abnormal, Money Mike slipped her an envelope of bills to cover the cryosurgery when he wasn’t even t
he one who gave her the warts.

  I never understood why he did it. It wasn’t for sex. He didn’t need to pay for that and most of the girls claimed he never touched them. Guilt perhaps? Pity? Who knows. Maybe when you have that much money you can’t possibly spend it all, so what else can you do but spread the wealth? Giving could have given him a sense of power, made him feel important. Many of our regulars had savior complexes and saw the dancers as their own personal damsels in distress. Or maybe altruism really exists, even in the topless bars of the world, and Money Mike gave simply because he had what these girls needed and helping them out, no questions asked, was the right thing to do.

  That Christmas, Money Mike gave everyone on staff C-notes so crisp and flat they looked like he’d ironed each one. The dancers got more, a lot more. Some got as much as a grand. Even pathetic Nixon scored three hundred out of him and she was far from being one of his favorites. And when the other regulars caught on, they decided to play Santa too and suddenly it was like a tornado of cash swept across the floor, though nobody else had money like Mike Deerman. Most of our regulars were old guys. They drank Manhattans and smoked Pall Malls, came early before the drink specials ended and you got the sense they lived alone in shabby, 1960s style condos by the beach, that their families, if they even had exes and kids, disowned them and that their lapdance funds came from social security. Still, they gave us what they had - fives, tens and twenties and trust me, it added up. My fishbowl overflowed and with no more legal bills to pay I could spend, spend spend. Easy money doesn’t tend to last long and I’d developed a dangerous taste for Tahari.

  Bill, a regular who was at least seventy-five and never missed the lunch buffet, brought his favorite girls fake pearl chokers for Christmas, while Donald, whose toupee looked like it came off an old Austin Powers costume that had been left out in a rainstorm, gifted his favorite table dancers with cheap bottles of drug store perfume. I believed it was the thought that counted, but later I found all the necklaces and unopened perfume boxes discarded in the locker room garbage bin. I told Marie, the bathroom attendant, about the tossed out items, figuring maybe she could at least use the perfume and for the next several months I never saw her without her pearl choker.

  Brent came in around ten, dressed in street clothes (his usual Dockers and Polo), with Alicia on his arm. He’d dumped the cat-faced Cambodian and she’d quit in a huff to work at Glitters, another club closer to Miami. Alicia’d just graduated high school and stunk of Homecoming Queen popularity. One look at her dusky tan, wheat colored hair and aquamarine eyes and you knew you’d find her as “Best Looking” in the yearbook superlatives. The only clue I had as to why she ended up at the Kittikat was that her real name was Jamesina James, Jamie for short. With a real name like that, you kind of have to end up stripping, so at least you could call yourself something a little more sensible. When I asked Brent why her parents had named her that, his answer was that she was Canadian, as if that explained it all.

  “They wear Speedos and black knee socks on the beach. At the same time. What do you expect people like that to name their kids?” he’d said.

  I ended up sharing a crowded, champagne room loveseat with my parents, Mr. Haines and Tracy, Brent and Alicia/Jamesina. My mother’s favorite dancer Diana danced for us to, you guessed it, “Santa Baby” but I got bored and visited with the cocktail waitresses at the service bar for a while, where we giggled and gossiped about the new floor manager Chris who’d replaced Phil. Phil had quit without warning the week before, so of course rumors circulated about the reason, but the truth was he’d been offered a better gig as general manager at Tigress, one of the clubs just off the Turnpike, steps from the tollbooth and the Waffle House. Tigress didn’t even try to call itself klassy. It probably would have lost all its clients if it had. Phil would be perfect there and now we had Chris, who, being young and hot in the buff, bald, goateed sort of way the Bubblegum babes went for, had ignited a frantic competition between the strippers and a few servers to see who’d get him in bed first. We’d started taking bets on who we thought the winner might be and pretty soon things got so giddy that Luz, the bartender, persuaded me to try a real drink for once. She called the frothy green cocktail, which tasted like Scope, a Girl Scout Cookie and I loved it. I was so taken up in all the revelry that I nearly peed my leather pants when someone tapped me sharply on the shoulder.

  “What the fuck? I leave for four months and come home to find my entire family in a strip club on Christmas? What the hell happened to you all?”

  My Christmas wish had come true. My sister had made it home, with just an hour and a half left before the clock struck midnight and the holiday ended. She looked tired. Her hands shook from the all the Red Bull she’d downed in order to drive alone for twenty something hours straight and her hair was streaked back in a messy, dirty-blonde ponytail. The Purdue sweatshirt she wore smelled like the Marlboro Lights she smoked when my parents weren’t around quickly misted over with Pearberry body spray.

  “Oh my God! Natalie! You made it! It’s really you!” I exclaimed throwing my arms around her and squeezing her tight.

  “Ok, ok that’s enough.”

  My sister was never one for anything sentimental and since she was in kindergarten I’d only seen her cry once, for about thirty seconds, possibly less, at my grandfather’s funeral.

  “Well that drive was a fucking nightmare and a half. Can I get a shot?”

  “You’re underage.”

  She rolled her eyes.

  “Do I need to pull out my fake ID?”

  “Probably not. Patron?”

  “Whatever. I’m not going to taste it anyway. What the fuck?”

  Natalie pointed to my pants and wrinkled her nose.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Vic, are you wearing leather pants?”

  “Umm, yeah. Yes I am. I’m wearing leather pants.”

  “And was Dad wearing leather pants too?”

  “Yes, yes I think he was. Mom kind of. I don’t know. She went on a leather pant buying spree for Chanukah.”

  My sister looked panicked.

  “Don’t worry,” I said, “You’re safe. I don’t think she knew what size to get you. We thought you might have succumbed to the freshman fifteen or something.”

  Natalie rolled her eyes and downed her shot.

  “I need bed,” she said, “And food. Can you get out of here early?”

  Mr. Haines didn’t have an issue with it, so my sister and I left together.

  “I brought some weed down from school,” Natalie said as she unpacked, “Smoke a little with me.”

  “Sure, ok,” I said.

  “Really?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Wow, I thought you’d have a fit and say no.”

  We smoked it outside, then went back in and unloaded Christmas dinner’s remains from the fridge, piling paper plates high with leftovers.

  “Oh my God, these sweet potatoes are insane,” Natalie said.

  “You have to try the stuffing and corn casserole. Yum.”

  “I still can’t believe you’re wearing leather pants. What the hell went on while I was gone?”

  “I don’t know. I guess a lot’s changed,” I said.

  “Shit, I guess so. I’d never have believed it if I hadn’t seen it. And jeez, you work in a strip club! Do you like it?”

  “Actually, yeah. I love it.”

  “And you smoked pot!”

  “Well, I didn’t inhale,” I confessed.

  “Asshole.”

  She elbowed me in the shoulder and I retaliated by smacking her ass with a wooden spoon. Natalie told me to fuck off and we grabbed plastic forks and tucked into a Tupperware of ambrosia salad with such voracity that you’d have sworn we hadn’t eaten in weeks.

  “Merry Christmas, Nat,” I said.

  “Merry motherfucking Christmas,” she replied.

  And you know what? It was.

  28

  The day after Christmas migh
t have been Boxing Day in England, but at the Bubblegum Kittikat it was Amateur Night and I wasn’t about to miss it. I’d made sure the new manager Chris put me on the schedule for a few reasons. Foremost, I had to cheer on Casey.

  She worked the door during the day, so I saw her when our shifts overlapped around six in the evening. Casey was a cute girl, sweet and in her early twenties. She wanted to make the transition from cab-calling and cigarette-selling to stripping so she could make the big money and Amateur Night would be her audition. Chris was being a dick about it by making her try out. It wasn’t like she was some skank off the street. We knew her. The regulars recognized her already, but Chris insisted that he needed to see her “stage presence” or some nonsense before he decided to let her off the register. The truth was that Chris didn’t think the customers would go for Casey because she was so small and she didn’t have the Malibu Barbie appeal that made many of our girls big earners. Casey didn’t look even remotely stripperish. I’d have pegged her for a fifth grader. We’re talking four foot ten, eighty-pound tiny and her breasts had never developed because she had some kind of endocrine or pituitary disorder that stunted her growth. She’d told me all about it one day, explaining that part of the reason she wanted to dance was to save up enough money for a boob job.

  “I hate looking like a kid,” she said, “I need some tits so people know I’m a grown-up.”

  I liked Casey and I wanted to be there, clapping and yelling her name to help her out. Whistling and cat-calling for Casey would be fun, yes, but the real entertainment that Amateur Night would come from Meat Curtains, aka The Roast Beef Sandwich. Meat Curtains had recently dethroned Chocolate Thunderpussy, who’d been so mad about losing to a skinny-assed, white girl with a tore up coochie that we hadn’t seen her since at least Thanksgiving. Paris, a dancer from Martinique who moonlighted at the ghetto club Bon-Bon’s, said Chocolate Thunderpussy had scored a full time pole position there.

  No one’s name, thank God, is really Meat Curtains. Chris, along with Sean, the Irish skinhead bouncer, started calling her that the first night she slunk through the front door and murmured in a nearly unintelligible southern accent about wanting to sign up for the amateur contest. Her pimp brought her in. At least that’s what we figured he was, but I suppose he could have been a super-controlling, common law husband or something. Either way, he bossed her around and made her hand over her prize money immediately after she stumbled off stage. Paolo said he saw the dude give her a shove into a rusty Firebird out in the parking lot and yell something about her making eyes at somebody in the audience. He may have called her by her real name, but Paolo couldn’t make it out. I’d have pegged her as a Tammy, but she signed up as Diamond and after she flung herself around the pole and slid jerkily down it with her scrawny, bruise-dirtied legs flung open, no one could call her anything but Meat Curtains, though most of us girls, in pity, preferred to call her The Roast Beef Sandwich, because somehow it sounded slightly more polite.