Everything Is Perfect When You're a Liar (34 page)

“Angela, I will never have a normal body again. Babies ruined me.”

“You are dumb. Your body is great.”

“You're my friend. You have to say that or I'll stop speaking to you.”

A bullhorn siren goes off, and the same parade of glow-stick waitresses returns, all dancing toward us, holding up our bottle of champagne like an offering to the pussy god Larry Flynt. The lead waitress uncorks the bottle and squeals. Another puts a martini glass full of whipped cream on our table. A third girl puts a martini glass full of strawberries on our table and shouts, “DON'T WORRY, THEY'RE TOTALLY FRESH!”

The champagne opener is their leader. “Is there anything else you need?” she asks me.

I grab her arm and pull her onto the couch beside me. “Look, we have no idea what we're supposed to be doing here. We can get lap dances, right?”

She laughs, then sees I'm dead fucking serious. “Yes. Actually, the girls usually come right up and offer. But everyone is scared of you guys.”

“Scared?”

“Yeah.”

I look around at the other people in the strip club. They're all Vegas casual, touristy and totally drunk. A red-faced guy in a T-shirt is dancing with his pants half down. A bunch of stumbling Asian girls, wearing all the jewelry Forever 21 has ever made, are screaming and dancing at their table. Then I look at our group. We're totally deadpan. We're all wearing dark tailored clothing. We look like hot fucking narcs. Or Europeans.

“How do we do it?”

“I can send some up.” She looks around. “Do those two look good to you?” I don't even look. I'm on a mission. “Yes. So how do we pay them?”

“Give them twenty dollars after they dance. If they ask for more, tell them to fuck off. You can also get a private room or booth. They're upstairs by the bathroom.” Then she walks away.

I turn to Matt, Angela, and James.

“She's sending up two lap dancers for the guys.”

Their faces fall.

“Right now?” Matt asks.

“Yes.”

We're terrified. Two girls walk sexily to our table. One is tall and thin with no boobs. The other looks like a large-breasted teenage girl who wears Juicy Couture as formal wear. They give Angela and I tequila shots, maybe as a “We cool?” gesture before they ride our men.

The thin one mounts Matt's lap on the far side of the couch. I focus on the booby one climbing on top of James. She immediately puts one breast on either side of his face and slides down, slowly. His head reemerges from the top of her breasts, like a horrified baby being born. His hair, forehead, and then his wide, terrified eyes; he's looking right at me from in between her real boobs. He reaches out and holds my hand. Matt sits back impassively while his dancer rides his lap; he looks like he's reading Yelp reviews on his desktop. The girl reaches over and starts to stroke Angela's chest. For twenty bucks, I feel like the girls are really giving a good show. I wouldn't try this hard. Thighs pumping, hair tossing—it's athletics for sure. And then they're done. All at once they're trying to make small talk: “I like your shirt! My boyfriend would never wear that,” or “Can I have some of your champagne?” I pass them the money and they leave, because I don't share my champagne with naked girls who ask me for it.

Matt leans over to James. “Did you get a boner? I didn't!”

“Nope, not even close!”

“Angela,” I ask, “was she feeling your boobs?”

Angela looks traumatized. “She said, ‘You can take off your shirt too,' and I said, ‘That is way too complicated.' She said, ‘My sister works here too,' and I was going to say, ‘WHOA! Bad childhoods,' but instead I said, ‘That must be nice.' ”

Then it happens. While Angela tells the guys how traumatized she was by the girl's 100 percent flat non-boobs, I see a girl walk onstage to Skid Row's “18 and Life.” She looks exactly like if Megan Fox and Christina Aguilera had a baby: Fox face and body, Aguilera thugness. She isn't trying very hard on the stage; there's hardly anyone there to tip her, so why would she? I like this lazy hot stripper the most.

I stand up and look at my crew, pointing at the stage. “I'm going to get that one and take her to a private booth to see what she does to me.”

James sees her. “I'm coming too.”

I drink three shots of tequila and sway to Skid Row. When she gets offstage, I walk up to her. I'm terrified, thrilled, and drunk. I feel like a Middle Eastern sheik or an old Mexican hobo.

“Can I get you in a booth with me?”

She smiles. “Sure.”

The booths themselves are giant chair-and-a-halfs with six-foot-tall backs, all slightly turned into the outer walls so they're pretty private. She motions us to an empty booth.

“Do I just sit in it?” I'm really playing it cool.

“Yeah. You can sit together, or he can stand and watch, or whatever.”

“We'll sit.”

I slide into the corner of the velvet booth, and James sits beside me. He is sweating. We are not calm; the tequila has not worked. But this doesn't put our girl off. She pushes my legs apart and straddles one of them. I try to relax, or look relaxed, and shift position, resting my arm on the booth. Into something wet. I lift my arm out of the wetness. It's semen. I can tell it's semen. I just put my elbow into someone's semen. I am not going to look at it. Even when I get out of here to wash my elbow, I will not look at it. I will never look at it.

I look at James. I want to tell him there's semen on my elbow, but I don't want this trip to the strip club to be a total waste of seven hundred dollars. I see the tissue on the table in the corner and suddenly understand the difference between getting a private booth dance and getting a normal lap dance at the table in the main bar: in here, you can totally jerk it. Only I have no wiener to jerk.

The stripper grabs my hand and puts it on her perfect B-cup boob. And now I know why guys say, “I didn't know if it was real or not,” because I can't tell if her boob is real or not. This is the first time I've ever touched a boob that wasn't my own. It's a
lot
like touching your own tongue after it's been novocained at the dentist. She's kissing my neck and running her hands all over my torso, my back and my stomach, when she whispers into my ear, “Damn, you have a tight hot body.”

I pull back and look at her. “What?”

She stops her dancing. “Seriously, you have a really fucking good body. I've been doing this since I was sixteen. I
know
girls' bodies, and you have a hot body.”

I turn to James. “DID YOU HEAR THAT?!?” I squeal. “SHE thinks I have a great body!!” This is one of the biggest moments of my life. For a minute, I forget about all about my semen elbow. Megan Fox just touched my three-baby stomach and told me I have a TIGHT HOT BODY. I get up and start jumping around. “Yeah! TRACY ANDERSON I LOVE YOU!” I pick my drink up off the little table with the tissue box and throw the whole thing back. I deserve it.

Then it hits me. “OH MY GOD, WHAT IS THIS?!”

That glass was not mine. I just drank someone else's old water. Maybe Semen Elbow's water. I have his DNA in my mouth and stomach and on my elbow. I throw the glass in the corner. “THAT WASN'T MY DRINK, JAMES, THAT WAS NOT MY DRINK.”

I start spitting on the floor.

“Honey, what? It's okay.” Megan pulls out her rhinestoned BlackBerry and starts typing on it with her superlong acrylic nails (French manicure, like all good strippers/OC housewives) while I spit in the corner.

James stands up. “Should I get you something?” He sees my panic.

I yell at both of them, because I feel like they just don't get it. “I JUST DRANK AIDS WATER AND I HAVE CUM ON MY ELBOW.” James's eyes widen, but with confusion; he looks like he's on a game show where he has to beat the clock to complete a task but his brain doesn't yet understand what that task is. He rushes off, saying NOTHING, leaving me with a stomach full of AIDS and a stripper with real or fake boobs.

Megan looks up from her BlackBerry. “You want Listerine?”

I nod. “NOW. QUICKLY!”

We scurry out of the booth room to the row of hand-washing sinks outside the bathrooms.

“She needs Listerine,” Megan says to one of the girls behind the sinks who washes your hands for you. (Fancy.)

“I DRANK AIDS WATER,” I repeat to the hand-washer, who looks at me like I'm mentally handicapped. “And I have cum on my elbow. Can you please wash it off for me?” I wash my mouth out with Listerine, over and over, spitting into the sink like it's curing me of the AIDS I've ingested. I can't believe I drank that water. I begin a mental inventory of everything I just caught: hep, hep, herp, AIDS, strep, influenza, SARS. This is the Black Lilith Moon stuff my mom was talking about.

Angela appears. “WHAT HAPPENED?! James just came back to the table and said the words
communicable disease
to Matt.”

I shake my head. “It was terrible, Angela. I drank from a water cup. It wasn't mine. It was an old cup in a jerk-off booth. I have AIDS and I had cum on my elbow.”

Angela's eyes open wide and she shakes her head. “NO.”

“Yes,” I say. “That woman washed the cum off my elbow for me. We should have called Pasqual . This would have never happened with Pasqual!”

“Oh my God,” she whines, consoling me. “You totally have AIDS.”

Megan goes back to typing on her phone. “You don't have AIDS,” she says.

At six
A.M.
I crawl under the bedsheets, where no one can see me, and finally fall asleep. I wake up an hour later, at seven, and vomit across the room and into the bathroom. It's either the diseases or the drinks, but I'm vomiting everywhere as James lays passed out with his face in the pillow. When I was younger, I was able to drink tequila and fall asleep and wake up and eat eggs and wear makeup like a normal person and not barf at all.

I text Angela. “On floor of bathroom. Throwing up everywhere. I hate being old.”

“Matt is sick too,” she texts back.

I peel myself off the floor and brush my teeth. I avoid looking at myself in the mirror, but eventually I catch a glimpse of the monster. I look like I need a dollar sign in my name. I look like I had a terrible childhood. I look for a dent in my forehead. A few months ago I drank moonshine and I was so hungover and sick that my forehead actually caved in a bit, until I looked Cro-Magnon. I will forever rate my hangovers based on that forehead divot. No divot today.

I text Angela. “There is no way I'm making brunch with Copperfield.”

She replies. “Nope.”

James is awake when I walk back into the bedroom. He's wearing his workout clothing. “I'm going to the gym.”

“Wait, what? I'm so sick I think I'm going to die. Why aren't you sick?”

“Do you think our tolerance levels are the same because we've lived together for thirteen years? It doesn't work that way. Do you need anything?”

I pout. “No. But you're forty years old, and I'm only thirty-three. I think having three babies come out of me really aged me. I'm, like, eighty in so many ways.”

He kisses my plump forehead. “Love you. Go back to sleep. I'll get you Gatorade.”

I fall back to sleep. At one
P.M.
, I wake up and text Angela.

When I'm done throwing up for the fifth time, I realize I have to call Copperfield. This is a moment I could not have imagined happening. I am canceling brunch with David Copperfield because I have a hangover from a strip club where I probably got AIDS.

“Hello?”

“Hi, David?” Calling him David is weird.

“Hello! How are you doing this morning?” I figure he probably already knows, right?

“I'm not doing so great. Uh, we went to Hustler last night, and were out until six
A.M.
And now I'm totally sick and, well . . . I don't think I can make it for brunch. Unless . . . I, like, get better in a minute or something. I'm pretty sick.”

“Well, that's no good.”

“No, no. I mean, I just don't think you need to see me vomit. I'm totally embarrassed by this, by the way. Not normally my thing but, uh, Vegas.”

He leaves a knowing pause. “How were the girls?”

“Huh?”

“At Hustler? Were they good? I haven't been there in a long, long time. You never know what you're going to get.”

“Uh, there were a few good ones. Nothing that made me cringe or anything.”

 

When we get to the airport that night, I feel better, but not by much, waiting in the baggage and ticket line in my hoodie and sunglasses, with thousands of other people in hoodies and sunglasses who'd also spent their morning in Vegas vomiting after spending the night in a strip club.

Matt seems exactly as hungover as I am, but he's limping. “Sciatica, from Copperfield's trick chair,” he said. “Why would he do that to me?!”