Totally?: Tales Of Doe-Lairs And That Guy

Ok, since I’m using this place to empty my head of all it’s nonsensical thoughts… this is where I violate the male code….or at least try to figure out why I, personally, don’t subscribe to all of it. I was kind of reminded of this thought back in the “To Protect and Serve” post…regarding the “LIVE Nude Girls” section of Baltimore, so I thought I’d expand on it.

When you’re a young guy approaching adulthood, one of the biggest rites of passage once you become “of legal age” or even if you can get in to one beforehand, is….The Strip Club.

You’re waiting for this day…it’s presented to you as if it’s going to be every Christmas Day you’ve ever had all rolled up in to one. A cornucopia of naked women will be waiting to cater to your every whim…FOR A DOLLAR…and the more dollars you give them…THE MORE THEY DO!

That sounds crazy, right? That the one thing that you as a young guy want to see most…a naked girl right in front of your eyes will only cost you a dollar? I remember thinking back then…”Shit…I can’t buy an Arby’s Beef & Cheddar for a dollar!! You mean to tell me that the thing that all guys make asses out of themselves trying to see…the thing they will betray friends and country attempting to attain only costs four games of Pacman.? Sign me up!!”

Eh, not quite that way.

I remember the first time I went to a strip club. It was on 42^nd Street in New York City, or as it was known at the time…”Smut Row”. I was just out of High School, and two younger friends and I decided to head up to NYC for the day on the train from Wilmington. Only one of us had been there before, so he was going to show us around town. He told us of this mystical “Smut Row” on the way there as we sat on the train, and the important, most CRUCIAL part of the story was I believe this gem “Dudes, they totally don’t even check I.D.’s there!”

“Totally?” I asked?

“Totally” he said.

(It was the 80s)

Telling the story now reminds me of the movie “Losin’ It” with Tom Cruise and Shelly Long. They’re a bunch of guys heading to Tijuana, Mexico in search of the elusive “Spanish Fly”…which I think we now call “Roofies”…but the point is that one of the characters is explaining to the rest of them about Spanish Fly, like it’s the Holy Grail or something. That’s how Smut Row was being described as our Amtrak car darted towards Mid-Town Manhattan. As we walked out of Penn Station and reached the street, the first thing I saw was a group of Black Gentlemen dressed like Genies or Aladdin or something…with the curled shoe points and all, screaming about the White Devil and how his time was coming to an end. This is where I would use the “Toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore.” line if it weren’t so clichéd that I would make myself sick, AND because quoting Garland would leave my sexuality in question, but you get the point…NYC was MUCH different than Wilmington.

Now so I make things clear…we didn’t go to NYC specifically to hit strip clubs…but it became a “hey by the way” thing that somehow evolved into something more as the train ride continued. Arriving on 42^nd Street was like seeing the Emerald City for the….wait….that’s the second Garland reference. Hmm….perhaps we should have been going up there to see “Les Miserable” and “do brunch” at Tavern on the Green?

Eh….no way.

So…SO…we arrived at what was supposed to be Utopia! There were so many clubs to pick from…where do we even start?!? One of my friends pointed to a place directly across the street. “Let’s start with that one!” We darted over to it, and guess what?

They TOTALLY didn’t check I.D.s!!!!

Put a check mark next to that part of the utopian fairytale!!! Everything else had to be true, right? I mean a Wonderworld of naked women awaited just through these doors!

As we got through, we noticed a long line of guys waiting to go upstairs. My one friend said “There must be some INSANE shit going on up there! Let’s get in line”

So we did, and within just a few minutes, the line started to move. As we approached the stairs a large black bouncer said in an almost Barry White-esqe voice… “Ten Dollars!” We all began reaching in to our wallets as my friend says “Say man…what’s going on up there anyway?” He said “All Male Revue featuring Rocky “Rockhard” Johnson.”

And the brakes went “SCREEEEEEEEEEEEECH!!!!!!!!!”

This was TOTALLY not cool, dudes. (Remember…it was the 80s)

I don’t think you ever saw wallets go back in to pants pockets in unison faster.

We bolted out of the place…in a New York minute. (See how I linked a catchphrase to our actual location at the time? Awesome, right…RIGHT?)

Say, you know what’s worse than realizing you’re in a gay strip club when you’re straight?

Having to walk out of a gay strip club when you’re straight, knowing that all the locals know what the club is, but not what you are. That’s a character building moment right there! You never saw that shit covered on “The Wonder Years”!

So, refusing to be deterred by our, um…error, we ventured into the very next entranceway. Now immediately, I got a bad feeling. See, this didn’t appear to be a normal club…there was a long dark staircase leading upwards. At the top was what appeared to be a door to an apartment, which as it turns out, it more or less was. Inside it was empty of all things that would resemble an apartment however. There were rows of metal folding chairs placed in a circle, and very strange individuals sitting there waiting. In these seats waiting were guys who literally fit the stereotypical image of a pervert to the letter. These guys were balding, had a moustache, and were wearing a trenchcoat. This just felt bad from top to bottom. Shortly after we sat down, some awful dance music began playing from a speaker system, and one of the most unattractive naked women I have ever seen began gyrating around in the center of the circle. It was then that I noticed the up and down motion going on under the trenchcoat of one of the “fellas” in the room. As I turned to address my one friend next to me about getting the hell out of there as soon as humanly possible, I was shocked to find a Hispanic woman where I thought he was standing. She had on leopard skin spandex pants and no top. She appeared to be in her 50’s, her makeup looked like it was applied with a Paintball gun, and I remember her breasts most vividly of all. No, not because I had come there to see naked women and this was the first we had seen that day…but because the veins that were running through her sagging breasts looked like a roadmap. Are breasts even supposed to have veins? Seriously I thought they’re just like fat deposits or something? Anyway, before I could even process all of what I was seeing, she said to me with a Spanish accent “Hey Ho-knee…ha bout me and joo go in dee bakeroom for feefteen doe-lairs?”

I responded with “How bout, no?’

She wasn’t having it…”C’MON baybee!! I can make joo feel REAL goo…maybe for jus tin doe-lairs now, no?

“Fuck off” I responded.

This place was NOT the Utopian wonderland of naked women that I had been promised, and I was out of there and didn’t care if my friends were following me. See kids, be a leader, not a follower…and all that Afterschool Special stuff.

So, as I hit the street, I noticed that indeed my friends were right behind me. At this point, I think all of our dreams of Smut Row were being smashed to pieces but no one was willing to admit it yet. We then looked directly across the street…in big neon we saw “2001: A Sex Odyssey”. This HAD to be the place. It was high dollar looking…hot women were standing right on the street flagging you in, so NO Rockhard Johnson…NO Chita Rivera’s busted ass sister…finally we’d found the place that everyone always told us about!

In we went, and immediately we were approached by this really good looking Amer-Asian girl. She was really friendly and talked our one friend in to going in to a booth with her. Within 5 minutes, he came running out…beet red…sweating and saying “let’s get out of these places!”

Until this day, I have no idea what actually happened in that booth. Whatever it was, it didn’t seem like something he was happy about, and he wasn’t talking. Needless to say, my first experiences with The Strip Club left a lot to be desired. I left NYC extremely disillusioned, and questioning what guys found so great about these places.

In the years that followed, I’ve returned to The Strip Club on numerous occasions…mostly bachelor parties…in fact, I think ALWAYS bachelor parties. None of the times since have been as catastrophically bad as the first outing; but still, I can’t understand what it is that guys like about these places. First off, the initial excitement of naked women that once was the driving force behind my desire to go as a young guy is gone. I’ve seen plenty of naked women now at age 37, and seriously, I can’t stand the concept of strippers. I really don’t like what they mean. To me, they’re nothing more than a reminder of how ridiculous men are sometimes, and I’m part of that club by birth. The fact that we’re supposed to drool and lose our minds over some vapid girl bending her naked ass over in our face pretending to be in to us is somehow really irritating to me. I mean, I KNOW you despise me, stripper…you should despise me, or at least what I represent. That’s not to say you’re a victim, because you’re not. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that you’re on equal footing here on the predator side of the fence. You know most of the men who come in there are weak when it comes to shit like this…it’s sad…it’s pathetic…but it’s fact. And you’re there to capitalize on it. But see I guess that’s where my disdain for these places comes in. I refuse to be knowingly be a fool. If I’m duped by someone smarter than me, fine…but I won’t be duped out of my money because you’re naked. However there are plenty of us men who are willing to do it. They’ll act like uncaged baboons and they don’t care who’s looking! And I guess that’s it in a nutshell…I refuse to be the baboon. I’ll watch the baboon and laugh…but I’ll never be him.

In fact, that’s the only fun I have at these bachelor parties. The fun of picking out who “That Guy” is going to be. You see, there are a couple of friends of mine who basically see The Strip Club the same way as me. They laugh at it and the strippers who lurk inside. But on every trip…every time…there’s That Guy. Who is he? He’s the one that at some point in the night will utter the fatal words: “No, dudes, she really likes me…seriously!!”

That phrase is almost like an elderly woman yelling “BINGO!” at her church’s fundraiser. When you hear it, you know you have a winner.

The last That Guy was the best I can remember. He was so convinced that she was “really in to him”, that she convinced him to go to the “Champagne Room” with her for $100.

This was a big moment because in this room they would be alone, and she could let her urges for him run wild. See, it sucked because she couldn’t do anything out in the open or she would be fired, but in the Champagne Room…sky’s the limit! No, seriously…SHE SAID SO! This simply was a once in a lifetime situation, you know....to go to the Strip Club and have a stripper actually think you’re different than all the other guys that come in there…that YOU don’t just want to see her thrust things on her body in your face that she can’t even see without the assistance of a mirror. No, he wasn’t like all the other guys…they had a kismet. Annnnnnd…off to the Champagne Room they went!

Upon his return some 20 minutes later, he came back to our table with a HUGE smile on his face. I took a sip of my Jack and Coke, and as I returned it to the table I said “So?”

He looked at me and said “Dude that was awesome!”

I said “What did she do?”

He said “She took all of her clothes off and started grinding on me, and then I took my junk out…”

“Really...then what did she do?” I asked.

“Well, she wanted to watch me jerk off; she told me it would make her really hot.”

“Riiiiiight….” I said, leading him to finish the story, while unable to believe that this guy was actually telling me this with a straight face.

“So I finished and she was telling me how it made her so hot that she HAS to have sex with me, but she can’t do it here because she might get fired….she TOTALLY gave me her phone number.” (This was NOT the 80s anymore…well…for one of us anyway)

So I looked at him, took another sip of my Jack and Coke…returned it to the table and said “So in short…you just paid that chick $100 for the privilege of cranking your own rig……..WELL PLAYED!”

He stared back with this “Why’d you pop my Snoopy balloon?” look on his face.

But a thought immediately reassured him and he cavalierly said,”Dude, I TOTALLY have her phone number…you don’t get it.”

He’s right….I don’t.