All I Could Bare: My Life in the Strip Clubs of Gay Washington, (11 page)

Mikey didn't even mind getting felt on by a bunch of gay guys. "This is a muscle," he explained to me one night, flexing his baseball-sized biceps, "and this is a muscle," he continued, pointing toward his cock. "If a guy touches me here [his arm], they can touch me there [his cock]."

"What do you say if a customer asks if you're gay?" I asked him one night as we sat in the dressing room.

"Usually," he said, looking up from counting a stack of bills, "I'll tell them that I'm straight, but that I messed around with a few guys when I was in high school. That generally keeps them going."

Danny wanted to talk to us because the manager of Mr. P's, a gay dive in Dupont Circle, was looking for some guys to dance on Wednesdays, one of the nights when Secrets was closed. I felt a little uneasy about doing it because Mr. P's was located in the official gayborhood, so there was more of a chance to be seen by someone I knew. Mr. P's also had the reputation for a relatively rough clientele. There was no cover, so anyone could walk in off the street.

I was on the verge of saying no when Danny told me that they were paying $50 for two hours' work plus tips. I was taking Seth to see
Rent
on Broadway for his birthday, and this extra money would come in handy. Besides, Mikey readily accepted the offer, and I seldom passed on any opportunity to work with him. We were buddies of sorts. He told me about his girl problems; I quietly lusted after him.

The first night at Mr. P's started strangely. The club wasn't licensed for nudity so we had to keep our G-strings on and we couldn't play with ourselves. This left me feeling self-conscious because I had nothing to do with my hands.

Adding to my anxiety, they made us dance on a tiny bar located in a dark upstairs room.
TINY. BAR. DARKNESS.
The words triggered my near-constant fear of
ASS ON FLOOR.
But I thought I could stomach it for a couple of hours.

And I was looking forward to working with Mikey. A lot of dancers thought he was a prick, but he was always nice to me. As we stood naked in the upstairs employee bathroom that they made us use as a dressing room, I noticed him staring at me in the mirror. He stood there big, muscular, manly, and tan, while I looked short, fleshy, boyish, and pale.

"What the fuck are you looking at?" I said, jokingly.

"Oh nothing, just comparing," he said with a laugh.

"Fuck you," I said, shoving him playfully. "Get away from me."

"Don't worry, I may beat you in some ways, but definitely not if we're comparing cocks. You have me beat by a mile, or at least a couple of inches."

"Yeah, yeah," I said.

"No, seriously. We should give you a nickname or something, like The Little Boy with the Big Toy.' Or, I know, what about 'Li'l Big Chief'?"

"No thanks," I replied, secretly thrilled that he even noticed my cock, much less wanted to give it a nickname. I imagined this is what it was like to be on a football or basketball team and share a sort of casual, ass-baring, locker room intimacy with other guys.

"Man Saber," Mikey offered.

"Nope."

He paused for a moment. "OK, I've got it," he said. "The Weapon."

'That's better," I said, just as Danny came racing in the room.

"Craig, you're on now. Mikey, you take the next set."

"OK," I said, pulling up my red G-string and following him out the door and down the steps to the club.

"Mikey's so hot," I said to Danny as we walked down the stairs.

"Yeah, I'd probably date his father," responded Danny, who had a thing for older married men.

There were only a few customers at the bar, and the one paying the most attention to me was an older guy with a handlebar mustache. He especially liked it when I stood over him and slowly bent down until my dick, bundled in the pouch of a red G-string, nearly rested on the tip of his nose.

I didn't recognize any of the customers from Secrets or the Follies until I saw the infamous Mr. Tickles. He wore his trademark trench coat and his face was flushed red as always. In the past, Mr. Tickles had never tipped me and by now I'd learned not to take this personally. I knew I wasn't going to be every guy's type. But that night, Mr. Tickles walked right up to where I was on the bar. I kneeled down in front of him. He put a couple of ones in my sock and proceeded to tickle me under each armpit. It felt weird and a little dry and scratchy. (You'd think a guy with a tickling fetish would keep his nails filed and invest in a good hand cream.) But I tried to muster a smile.

"Do you like to be tickled?" he asked in a squeaky, pinched voice.

"Oh yeah," I said, trying to inject my voice with pornlike conviction.

He kept tickling me for about thirty more seconds, and then he patted me on my calf and moved away without saying a word. I couldn't tell if he was a satisfied customer or a disappointed one.

When I told Danny about this, he said my failure to come off like a tickling enthusiast was a big financial mistake. "Honey, Mr. Tickles is one of the best tippers there is," he said, lacing up his black boots.

Danny claimed that he once went to Mr. Tickles's house to be tickle-tortured for an hour. His compensation: a round-trip plane ticket to the vacation destination of his choice. I never knew if I fully believed all of Danny's stories, but I figured that since he'd been doing this for longer than anyone else I knew, he'd earned the right to a few exaggerations.

After talking with Danny, I went back out for another set. I hadn't made as much money as I wanted to, so I was pleased to see Handlebar Mustache Man still at the bar. I'd given myself a nice fluffing in the bathroom, making my cock hard underneath the G-string. Feeling quite proud of my overstuffed red crotch pouch, I walked over to him, waited while he slipped some money in my sock, then slowly moved my package toward his face. He leaned his head back and opened his mouth. I flirtatiously moved closer. I figured that maybe he was like my Secrets regular Michael and wanted to get bopped in the head. But that wasn't it at all, as I discovered when the guy opened his mouth wider and wider and then bit down on my cock.

"What the fuck!" I yelled, rising to my feet as I felt a sharp pain rise along my shaft. I couldn't believe it. Nothing like this had ever happened before. Granted, I'd been bobbing my hard, red-G-stringed dick just inches above his open mouth, but he wasn't supposed to put it in his mouth, much less chomp on it with his teeth. I sped down the bar, doing a strategic sidestep sashay around a martini, and jumped down to the floor. I raced through the crowd and up the private set of stairs to the employee restroom. Mikey was there pulsing his rounded pecs in front of the mirror over the sink. I stood beside him and pulled down the front of my G-string, noticing wet teeth marks on the red fabric. I grabbed my dick and searched for broken skin.

"What happened?" Mikey asked, alternately looking at his chest and checking out what I was doing with my dick.

"Some asshole bit my cock," I said.

"Why'd he do that?"

"Fuck if I know," I said, glad to realize I wasn't bleeding. "This place is fucking crazy. I knew I didn't want to work here."

'"Want me to kick his ass?" Mikey asked, without turning from his reflection.

"No, that's OK," I answered, a little giddy that he had even asked.

'°Well, let me know," he said. "Can't have anybody fucking with The Weapon," he said.

I pulled up my G-string as Danny came running up the stairs saying, "They want you back on the bar. Now!" I rolled my eyes. You'd think having some Jeffrey Dahmer wannabe try to take a bite out of you would get you exempt from the rest of your shift. But no. I dutifully went back downstairs. As I got back on the bar, I told the bartender what happened, but he just laughed it off and offered me a free drink.

"I don't drink," I said.

"What? A dancer that doesn't drink?" he said to the customers around him. "
That's
a new one."

They all laughed.

I moved away and walked right over to Handlebar Mustache Man, who was at the same place on the bar. "Don't you ever fucking do that again," I said to him. He looked up at me and smirked sheepishly. Then he reached into his faded Levi's, grabbed a fistful of bills, and stuffed them all into one of my socks. I took this as an apology.

13

Given how disturbing the cock-biting incident was, I wish I could say that was the last time I worked at Mr. P's, but it wasn't. I danced there several more times until they stopped featuring dancers. I had come to rely on the extra money.

This was just another example of how my personal boundaries weren't as fixed as I once thought they were. I discovered they could stretch like an elastic waistband and give way like a levee.

I realized this again one Saturday night in August when I was working at Secrets and things started out really slow. There was almost nothing worse than being onstage naked and having nobody pay attention to you. You felt futile, pointless, like your existence at this moment in time was a huge mistake. When things were this slow, you were grateful to see the friendly smile of a regular. You'd walk over to the regular and kneel in front of him with gratitude because he's just made your presence matter.

But this night, there were hardly any customers to talk to. I spent most of my time between sets in the dressing room watching Mikey flip through magazines. "Look at this guy," Mikey said, pointing to a Calvin Klein ad featuring Antonio Sabato Jr. in his underwear. "What's he got that I don't have?"

As the night went on, things got even worse. By 11
PM
I'd made only $15 in tips. This sucked because I wanted to buy groceries after work. But I had deeper concerns as well. Even though I saw that the night was slow for just about everybody, I worried that it was somehow worse for me. As I danced onstage, idly keeping time to the music, I noticed every time a customer approached another dancer, every time a rolled piece of green paper traveled from a customer's fingers into another dancer's white sock. I'd think, "Where's my tip? Where are my customers?"

A panicked feeling hit me. I began to see the slow night as a sign. I'd been dancing for only a few months, but maybe my career was over. Isn't this the way that sort of thing happens? You start making less and less in tips, and pretty soon you're the pathetic dancer who just shows up for the base pay. Could my time be up already?

'Why's it so fucking slow?" I asked when I got back to the dressing room.

"Slow?" said Mikey. "I'm having a great night. Look what my sugar daddy bought me." He opened up an eyeglass case and pulled out a pair of Ray-Bans.

"Two hundred dollars, baby," he said, putting them on. "Now these are going to take me to the top."

"OK," I said, "let me rephrase. Why is it so slow for everybody but Mikey?"

"It's August," said Danny in the kitchen/dressing room as he changed from a black satin G-string to a blue cotton one. "Everybody's out of town."

This made sense because most of my regulars were missing in action. Not even Michael, my usually reliable dick-on-the-head guy, was there. Dave stopped in, but he left after about thirty minutes to go to La Cage, where Peter was working. Dave was excited about the way things were going with Peter. Recently, Dave had given Peter his phone number so that Peter could keep Dave updated on when and where he was dancing. Peter would call and leave these long stream-of-consciousness messages, and Dave saved them all.

One time when they were talking, Peter told Dave his last name—an act of enormous trust and intimacy within the context of the clubs, where dancers went by first names, most of which were fake. "It was kinda like a breakthrough," Dave told me.

But still Dave wanted more. "I would like for him to maybe come to my apartment," Dave explained, "even if it wasn't sexual, or maybe we could go to the movies, something like that."

When Dave wasn't at the clubs, he'd daydream about Peter. "I think about being in bed with him all the time," he said. "A lot of times I just think about waking up with him and cuddling with him and having my arm around him or just to be able to go to sleep with my arm around him. That's something I find very arousing.

"It's almost like creative visualization," he continued. "You imagine what you want to happen and it happens. I use creative visualization in all sorts of other areas of my life, and I started thinking, why not use it with this? My inclination with Peter was to always think that something wasn't gonna happen. But then I started thinking, why not omit those negative thoughts and just start thinking of it in a positive way and visualizing it happening? So a lot of times I try to think about the whole thing in detail, like what his reaction would be and what he might say. It's not just sexual. It's the whole trip."

As Dave said this, I thought back to a time when I was at the Follies talking to Peter about having sex with customers.

"Would you ever do it?" I asked while we stood naked, changing in the dressing room.

"For money?"

"Yeah, would you do it for money? Have you?"

"Not much. And not the whole nine yards. I might just, you know, like we'd jerk each other off. But I can't go doing actual intercourse with just anybody."

"Would you ever date a customer?"

"I don't know. I don't want to get too majorly involved with anybody. I just want to, like, entertain."

Based on this conversation, I didn't think Dave's prospects looked too good. But then he told me about something that had happened the last few times he'd seen Peter. For weeks, he'd been telling Peter that he really wanted to see him cum.

"On the bar," Peter exclaimed, "That's totally against the rules!"

"I know, I know," Dave said, trying to calm him. "And I don't want to get you in trouble. But we could do it so no one would know."

Peter, ever the stripping Boy Scout, was totally against the idea at first. There would be no rule-breaking emissions from him, no sirree. But that changed late one Saturday night, when La Cage was nearly empty. Dave sat in the dark, far-left corner of the back bar. The bartender stood clear on the other side doing something with the glasses. Peter moved toward Dave on the bar and kneeled down.