Amateur Night at the Bubblegum Kittikat Read online

  Right after Thanksgiving I’d just been sitting down to a steaming Styrofoam box of enchiladas with Velouria when someone knocked on the back door. I was closer, so I got up to get it. The door wasn’t locked but it always stuck and no one could ever get in from the outside. When I opened it, I found a tall, gangly girl in leggings and an oversized tee shirt. She was mixed race with a splotchy complexion. Her narrow eyes were too closely set and her lips were too skinny for her face, while her nose was too wide. She had thin hair. My eyes went to her scalp immediately and what little bit of light hair she had covering her head was frizzed and fried from processing. She’d slicked it back into a bun the size of a Hershey’s Kiss and secured it with a rubber band. The only thing going for this poor soul was her teeth. They were straight and bright white and thank God because nothing else on her was even remotely attractive. She must have been looking for a job I thought. Maybe she wanted to sign up for Amateur Night, bless her heart. They’d laugh her off the stage. Most likely she was looking for a cleaning job and I’d have to shoo her off because we weren’t hiring.

  “Can I help you?” I asked.

  “Oh sorry, the door got stuck again,” she said in a Jean Harlow whisper that I certainly hadn’t been expecting.

  “Who is it?” Velouria called. She craned her neck, half getting up out of her chair to see and then waved the girl in.

  “Di Darling, you’re early!” Velouria said, “Go get dressed while I finish eating.”

  The girl swung a Juicy Couture duffel bag over her shoulder and disappeared into the locker room.

  “Who was that? You know her?” I asked, scraping black olives into the lid of my dinner container because they’d contaminated my enchilada.

  “Next time make sure you remember to say no olives when you order. That’s Diana. You know her,” Velouria replied.

  “We have two Dianas now?” I was confused.

  “No ding dong. We only have one Diana!”

  “That’s not Diana!”

  “No, you’re right. That’s not Diana. That’s Yolanda, but in about an hour she’ll be Diana.”

  Getting up to plug in a series of curling irons and straighteners, Velouria showed me a plastic bin.

  “Diana’s in here,” she laughed and opened the box, “Look inside.”

  On a bed of strawberry blonde hair extensions rested false eyelashes, bronzer, body glitter, self-tanner, lip plumper, a contact lens case and solution, press on nails, Dolce & Gabbana perfume, a can of vanilla Slim Fast (dinner?) and a palette of colored powders and paints to rival any Renaissance painter’s. That was Diana and she fit in a small storage bin. Diana was nothing more than a mirage.

  I told Brent I was going in the back for dinner, but he was distracted still filling out police reports with the butchy lady cop, so he probably wouldn’t notice if I went missing for an hour or more. Sunny had the register covered and she really didn’t need to shadow me all night. Working the door of a strip club doesn’t exactly require an internship and a residency, you know. She could get the job done without me, and Big Mack would handle the sign-up sheet for Amateur Night.

  I wound my way across the main floor, passing Iris who winked at me as she performed an energetic table dance for a man likely older than her father. His bald head was red and peeling with either sunburn or rosacea and his gut engulfed the waistband of his slacks. As I passed, the man slid his pudgy, liver-spotted hand through the cut-out sides of Iris’s slinky black gown and she slapped him hard across the face. He wheezed and chuckled.

  “That’s right baby,” he said, “I like that. Slap me again.”

  She whacked him even harder, this time on the other side of his face and I saw him tuck a bill in her garter though I couldn’t make out how much he’d given her. God damn, I thought. I wish someone would pay me to slap them. I could make a fortune venting my frustration.

  Shimmer, an olive-skinned, black-haired, Lebanese beauty and probably our best pole artist, wowed the crowd on stage. She could hang upside down from the top of the pole, gripping it with one thigh while she held the other extended at a full right angle from her body. It was insane and gave the customers a clear view of her goods, but Shimmer knew how to titillate and she’d snap her legs closed after a second and spin around, still upside down, until someone invariably hollered from the crowd “Show us your pussy!” and she’d stop twirling and throw out her leg again. You wouldn’t believe how the money would pile up on the stage. I nearly slipped and busted my ass on a twenty that the smoke machine had blown onto the floor as I walked by.

  I pushed through the double doors on the back wall clutching my purse as if it held something more precious than tic-tacs and my driver’s license. The blinds were up in the empty manager’s office, the desk hidden under a heap of unfinished paperwork and the adding machine out of paper with a roll unspooled across the floor. Brent must have been changing the paper when the fight erupted.

  To get to the locker-room which was attached to the break room, I had to walk about a hundred feet through a dark shell of a room that was under constant construction without anything actually getting done. Mr. Haines had grand plans for the place – a posh steakhouse called “Boned” that would rival Fort Lauderdale’s finest dining. He talked about the new restaurant incessantly, almost manically, describing the red velvet booth seating and black marble tabletops streaked with veins of real gold he imagined, but so far opening day remained a long ways off. The walls were open. Pink insulation slumped behind exposed metal studs and nests of wire dangled, unraveling, from the unfinished ceiling. Rumor had it that Mr. Haines couldn’t afford to proceed with the renovations after Mohammed swindled him out of that half a mill and that he was so overextended that the banks wouldn’t finance any more projects for him. I’d even heard whispers that the Bubblegum Kittikat was in big trouble, though you wouldn’t think so to look at the crowd filing in for Amateur Night.

  I found Velouria alone in the back room sitting in a ripped office chair swiped from corporate, sipping chai from a Liza Minelli mug. She wore black leggings and a glittery green top that made her look like a magnificent sea creature – a magical octopus of some sort. Velouria always wore vivid makeup. She had fun with eyeshadow, adding brightly contrasting colors with bold streaks of metallics and jewel tones across her lids. Most people would look like drag queens if they did their eyes like that, but on Velouria, who even dyed her hair a rich scarlet, it worked. She was all glamour. I thought she was gorgeous.

  “Sweetie! Thank God. I’m bored to tears. Let’s order Chinese. General Tso’s?” she asked, kicking her patent leather heel against the bare concrete floor to spin her chair.

  “I’m too stressed to eat,” I sighed and collapsed into the old black leather sofa so hard that a big puff of air escaped the cushions.

  “What on earth is troubling you? What could possibly be stressing you out at the door? Did the fight upset you?”

  “Did you see the new girl Brent hired?”

  I picked up a three year old issue of Cosmo from the white lacquer and gold coffee table and flipped through it without even looking at the pages. The cover promised the usual secrets to driving him wild in bed.

  “Oh don’t worry about her. She’ll be on that stage in less than a week. I know her type. I’ve seen it a million times,” Velouria reassured me.

  “No, it’s worse than that,” I said and began to the whole ridiculous tale. I even told her about the salt shaker and the dirty talking.

  “And he’s coming here tonight and I look like crap and my hair wouldn’t cooperate so it’s in this stupid ponytail and I don’t want him to come in and see me looking like crap. I want him to come in and see me looking hot so he feels…I don’t know. I just don’t want him to see me looking all frumpy and nerdy and-” I ended but Velouria cut me off.

  “Ok cut it out. I get it. No one wants someone who screwed them over to see them looking less than amazing. You want him to eat his heart out when he sees you. You want that j
erk with his teenie weenie peenie to see you and feel like he missed out!”

  “Yes!”

  “And you want me to assist you I presume?”

  “Well, could you?” I asked.

  “Are you kidding me? I’ve been dying to get my hands on you! And after the night I’ve had with Romance and Bambi, I could use a little fun to take my mind off it.”

  Velouria jumped up and started plugging things in. She rummaged through some plastic storage bins looking for who knows what until she found whatever she had in mind and started looking for something else, all the while talking to herself.

  “Curlers? Hmm. Maybe the straightener? Where’s the diffuser? Ok, and red? Do I want to go red? No, the smoky eye. Something exotic. She’s got the complexion. Ok. Ok. Now get your behind over here and sit in this chair and don’t say a word until I’m through.”

  The back room looked like the dressing room of a theater. Two stylist’s chairs lined up against the north wall in front of tall mirrors framed with light bulbs which hung over rows of waist-high, white cabinets. On top of the cabinets Velouria stacked her bins and cases of beauty supplies and accessories. She’d plugged in a veritable arsenal of tools to attack my lifeless hair and all of them seemed to be steaming hot and potentially dangerous. I plunked myself down and Velouria got to work on my head.

  When she slid the elastic away from my pony tail my hair flopped limply over my shoulders.

  “You have no hair style,” she said.

  “It’s not going to curl. Don’t even waste your time. I’ve tried everything and it won’t hold,” I warned.

  “Didn’t I tell you not to say a word?”

  For what seemed like the better part of fifteen minutes, Velouria massaged elixirs into my scalp, sprayed my hair with what appeared to be shellac and ratted and teased my poor hair until I looked like I should be setting fires in Mr. Rochester’s attic. Now I am all for big hair. I’ve always wanted full, voluminous curls and held secret fantasies of one day achieving a Texas beauty pageant style up-do, but this was just a frizzed out hot mess until, section by section, Velouria crimped and curled and sprayed some more. I was in danger of creating my own personal hole in the ozone layer right above Fort Lauderdale from all of the Aquanet she’d gone through already, but I promised not to say a word and I kept it zipped while Velouria fastened bobby pins strategically around the crown of my head. She spun me around to face the mirror.

  “How about that Miss My Hair Won’t Curl?” she said, “And you’ve got thick hair. I didn’t have to use any extensions.”

  Half-up, half-down with curled tendrils falling from my temples and spirals cascading down my back, I could have absolutely competed in Miss Yellow Rose. My hair had height and body but best of all, it was hot. It also didn’t move and was so full of product that it crunched, but let’s forget that because it looked sexy as hell and no one was going to be touching it anyway.

  “Now the makeup you have on isn’t bad,” Velouria said as she started on my face.

  “But?” I asked.

  “You don’t have enough on. You’re in a strip club. You can get away with more. Make it theatrical. Your face is great for a bank teller or a real estate agent, but in here it’s boring.”

  “Yeah, I don’t really know how to put makeup on,” I admitted.

  “You’re one of those girls who spend a half hour putting on makeup to make it look like you’re not wearing any. Way too tasteful. Shut your eyes.”

  As she glued on a set of false eyelashes, a gaggle of dancers entered to take a break and freshen up. Shimmer downed a bottle of red Gatorade (pole acrobatics are a major workout) and Samba, an older Brazilian dancer who wore a black velvet gown that made her look like an Amazon jaguar, complained in a thick accent that the customers weren’t paying tonight. A bunch of them gossiped about the fight, while a few took to the couch and decided to order sushi.

  “Oh my God! It’s Door Girl!” Mia piped.

  Mia was a tiny thing and couldn’t have been twenty. She was from Central America and danced to support her family back home, which I knew because she often stopped to get change from my register and every time she exchanged her ones for twenties, she’d tell me about her life.

  “Velouria’s doing Door Girl! Look how cute she looks. Oh my God, are you doing Amateur Night?” she asked.

  “No!” I said firmly, “I am NOT doing Amateur Night. No way.”

  “You should totally do Amateur Night!” Shimmer replied.

  “Right?” Mia said.

  “Have you seen the trash that’s signing up tonight? Looks like Amateur Night at the trailer park. You have to do it. You’d win!” Nixon added and then asked if anyone could lend her some money for dinner just until later.

  I repeated myself.

  “I am not doing Amateur Night!”

  “Well you should,” one of the dancers mumbled, and I decided to take it as a very big compliment.

  I heard the bass thumping as Feature was called and the entertainment scattered, trotting like circus ponies back to the floor on their plastic hooves. Alone now, Velouria worked on my face in silence. I held my eyes closed while her brushes shaded and dusted across my skin; butterflies fluttering color into all the right places.

  “Now you can look,” Velouria said. She took a swig from her Liza mug.

  It wasn’t me. I don’t know who the reflection in the mirror was but it wasn’t me. The girl blinking back at me was smoldering, exotic, enticing and dangerous. I’d become my own evil twin.

  “You. Look. Stunning,” Velouria gasped, “I knew you’d look great but I had no idea. Victoria, you’re absolutely beautiful.”

  “Wow, I mean. I don’t know what to say. I look like I should be in a Robert Palmer video.”

  I glared into my smoky eyed, pale skin, red lipped reflection and strummed an air guitar, which caused Velouria to crack up. She had to admit I was right.

  “Ok Addicted to Love, then go with that. The persona works,” she said, “Now get your butt back out to that front door and make that jerk wish he never met you.”

  The teased hair, the makeup heavy on my face, all of it felt stiff and sticky, like a fake front glued onto the real me, but it was a costume, a mask and you can hide behind a mask. You can become an entirely new character and this was empowering. Like Sandy at the end of Grease, I strutted back through the club with a new tune running through my head.

  “If you’re filled with affection you’re too shy to convey-ey, meditate in my direction. Feel your way. You better shape up, cause I need a man,” I sang to myself.

  I love that movie. I’ve watched it at least a hundred times, yes singing along and always identifying with poor Sandy. I probably would’ve puked if someone tried to pierce my ears with a needle at a slumber party too and I had always wanted to know how it felt to be able to break out of the proverbial bangs and poodle skirt in exchange for a saucy perm and some spandex so I could make a hot guy chase me through a fun house while I sang to him that he was the one I wanted while simultaneously dancing away from him. Velouria’s makeover was as close as I’d ever gotten to finding my inner Pink Lady. I think it made me stand up straighter. I swear, I think I felt my hips tick-tocking to the beat of the Notorious B.I.G.’s “Hypnotize” as I headed back to the front to reclaim my seat at the register.

  A man grabbed me by the arm as I steered away from the main bar. He was sitting there alone and he was probably in his late 50s. He had hair plugs blown back into a low, silver pony tail and he wore a gold Rolex. His jeans were tight, his loafers ostrich and he left his white shirt untucked in an older man’s attempt at looking younger and hipper.

  “Dance?” he asked.

  “Huh?” I was confused. Why was he asking me to dance? There was no dance floor at this club.

  “Dance for me,” he repeated and this time it wasn’t a question. He thought I worked there. I mean I did, but not like that. He had mistaken me for the entertainment.

  “Oh, gosh, no.
I’m not a dancer! Sorry,” I apologized.

  “You should be,” he said, “What are you doing here?”

  “Oh, um, front door. I need to get back as a matter of fact.”

  He still gripped my upper arm and I tried to twist away.

  “Can you dance for me anyway?” He loosened his hold and began to stroke my arm flirtatiously, making my skin crawl.

  “No, we’re not allowed,” I said, which was true. We couldn’t take business away from the real dancers.

  “Can you show me your tits? You’ve got fantastic tits. They’re real right? I can tell.”

  “No! I mean, yes. They’re real, but no I can’t show you them. Ok, I need to get back to my post.”

  “I’ll give you two hundred bucks to show me your tits.”

  “I’ll get fired,” I said.

  But two hundred dollars? To show someone my boobs? It was incredibly tempting. That would be a nice little shopping spree right there and for pretty much zero effort.

  “I’m a regular. I’ll ask the manager. I spend a ton of cash in here. I should be able to do what I want in this place. Ray Haines is a good friend of mine,” the man boasted, but they all said that. Every jackass Joe who came in to the Bubblegum Kittikat imagined himself a VIP.

  “I don’t know. I don’t do that sort of thing,” I said.

  He leered at me.