Thrill-Bent (19 page)

Shirley promises that the time-honored tradition of G-string stuffing is like Morse code for strippers, and has worked like a charm for him.

I nod and say, “Sounds like a great idea. There’s no way I’m doing that.”

He laughs and grabs the five out of my hand. He heads up to the stage and stands respectfully a few feet away from Plum while she twists her body around the iron mast like a thick pink ribbon encircling a Maypole. Her back is to the audience at this point and, like a rock god who performs his ecstatic solo for the knob-stuttered stack of amps at the rear of the stage, Plum pumps and grinds against the painted metal pole with no regard for the crowd, her long hair swaying from side to side, until I think the paint will sizzle right off. Finally, she notices Shirley—who looks like a little boy in a nice suit waiting for his mother to exit the hairdresser’s—and twirls around to face him. She doesn’t smile, but her face seems to take on a softer quality; she even seems slightly disconcerted that he has caught her daydreaming some private and possibly nasty dream. He reaches up to slip the bill into her panties right at her hipbone, and she crouches down a little to facilitate the bequest, bending her knees and opening her thighs an inch or two. It is an ingenuous, endearing gesture, the sexiest thing I’ve seen since I walked in.

Shirley disappears into the parking lot saying he has to make an call on his cell phone. Plum finishes her dance and comes over to my table, slowing way down as she passes behind me but not quite stopping. I can feel her presence as an electric charge across the back of my neck.

“Would you like to sit down?” I manage to expel before she is out of earshot. I gesture to the empty seat next to me. She looks startled, and there is an awkward moment during which I really don’t know if she’ll accept my invitation. I feel audacious, like I’m trying to pick up a straight girl at a T.G.I. Friday’s.

“Sure,” she says finally, dropping down onto the chair so she is perched on the edge of it. She is now wearing a see-through orange-sherbet-colored chiffon robe over her bare breasts and thong panties. “Where’s your friend?”

“He had to make a phone call outside.”

I am a little hurt that she seems more interested in Shirley than she does in me. Apparently, she isn’t as attracted to me as I am to her; her body is not involuntarily leaning forward to take in the scent of my hair and her eyes are not darting around to disguise the fact that she wants to stare directly at my mouth. Then I remember: I have not just been shimmying belly to belly with a well-endowed pole on a stage four feet above her head. She has no idea about my specific charms. I decide to give her a chance to even the score.

“You are such a incredible dancer,” I say. “Weren’t you one of the fly girls with J. Lo?”

She actually smiles, and her teeth are not totally perfect. One of her front teeth sticks out a little like it’s being booted from a too-crowded household. “Oh, thanks,” she says. Her voice is girly but strong, with a kind of flat, Methodist accent. “Naw, I never kicked it on TV, I’m not a real dancer. This is just ... “ she looks at me as though she is wondering how honest to be. “Just for fun ... and money, I guess.”

“What do you do for real?” I ask.

“I sing. And I write songs. I want to go to Nashville, but I haven’t saved enough money yet.”

She is getting excited now, and her face becomes more animated as she expounds on her aspirations. She tells me that she keeps putting classified ads in the weekly alternative paper looking for musicians to form a band, but all the guys who answer them are string-armed indie cock rockers who just want to snort speed and talk about Thurston Moore. She tells me her real name is Lynne. She tells me about a song she wrote this afternoon before coming to work. “It’s about getting your heart broken, you know, but it’s kind of a happy melody. Like if you didn’t understand English, you might hear it and think, ‘Wow, what a pretty little tune!’ But when you get what it’s saying, you’re like, ‘Oh my God, shoot me!’ You know?”

I do know, and I tell her I know. “That’s what the best art does, isn’t it? Creates a fissure between the form and the content, so that they both seem absolutely essential, more so than if either were apprehended by itself.” She is definitely staring at me now. I can’t tell whether it’s a prosaic stare of incomprehension, or a waggish stare of barely concealed ridicule, but at least I’ve got her full attention. I lean in a tiny bit closer to her face. “I’ve never done this before,” I confide. “The whole lap dance thing. I’m kind of nervous, but I really like you.”

She raises her eyebrows. “Never? Really?” She doesn’t seem to believe me. Do I closely resemble a lesbian regular (as far as I can tell, there are none of those) or is she just so used to hearing blatant lies out of the mouths of customers that cynicism is second nature? “I think we could have fun,” she says then, smiling just with the corners of her mouth. “I’ll go easy on you,” she whispers in my ear, and I can smell the spark of winter-green Lifesaver on her warm breath.

“No, no, no,” I whimper. “Don’t go easy on me. Please don’t go easy on me.”

The semiprivate back room at Zazzle’s is known to regular customers as the “Pool” because it looks just like someone’s 1970s backyard swimming pool. It’s kidney-shaped, so it’s really more like two semi-private back rooms; each bulbous end of the amoeba has its own blue-gelled track lighting system and surround speakers with the volume on high. One wall is tiled with an underwater mosaic scene, mermaids frolicking lustily in frothy turquoise seas—surprisingly tasteful for strip-joint art, besides which it warms my heart to know that at some point a hardworking mixed-media artist earned enough money to pay off a tiny percentage of his or her MFA loans. Windows line the opposite wall, looking out onto the stage and bar areas from slightly above, like a giant Playboy Mansion box seat. Velour-upholstered benches wend around the curved wall below the windows. We find a little harbor in the crook of the curve that feels safe, protected from the elements. We have the back quadrant of the left kidney to ourselves. Shirley tucks himself into the innermost corner of the bench, and is immediately almost entirely swallowed by the deep, plushy cushions there. His little arms and legs jut out from the velveteen suck like a bug caught in the comfy hammock of a spider web, and for a fleeting moment I consider a change in plans: maybe Lynne and I will tag-team Shirl, buffeting him from the east and west until he is wind-burned and pink. I flash on an image of four round white breasts sandwiching his happy, whiskered face. Smiling, I think:
Naw.

Shirley had come back from his phone call just as Lynne squeakily rolled her oversized Naugahyde chair closer to mine, grabbed the edge of the fake-wood table with her callused, guitar-playing fingers and pulled herself toward me until our knees clanked like two cans of beer raised by piffled frat boys. (It’s funny, I was thinking, these chairs are made extra large so as to be comfortable for two entangled people, but if each person has their own chair, the size does nothing to promote in-timacy—the stuffed-sausage-casing arms and awkward, iron casters careen us off of one another like bumper cars the moment we connect.) Shirley had taken one look at us and said, “Ladies, let’s go for a swim.”

I cautiously perch on the edge of the bench a few feet away from Shirley. I want Lynne to have as much maneuvering room as she needs. I really don’t know what’s about to happen here. This funky white girl, this sweet-as-pie Nashville-bound tunesmith is going to rub every square inch of her gorgeous body against mine, for money. I don’t even know how much money. I can feel the tiny sprigs of nervous perspiration blossoming like lake reeds from my scalp.

Lynne stands in front of me and unties the clasp of her chiffon wrap at the place exactly between her breasts. She lets the ties fall and the gown hangs slightly open so I can see the smooth furrow of bare skin there, a river whose banks swell up on both sides into the hilly, idyllic wilderness of her breasts, and then she simply stands there for a moment looking into my eyes. It takes me a minute to realize that she’s staring at me, because I am fixated on her breasts and the slim, vulnerable place between them. But when I look up, I see she is gazing at me almost greedily. Am I supposed to pay her now? What is she waiting for? I turn to Shirley for guidance, but he only waggles his eyebrows and gives me a little
You go, girl!
nod. Then, after a pause, I hear the first few beats to the Breeders’ “Cannonball” and I wonder if the DJ has been cued. But how could either Shirley or Lynne know that this is one of my favorite songs of all time? Lynne shrugs off her robe, which falls to the floor in a tiny heap like a burst balloon, and lowers herself onto me. I realize that she has been waiting for a new song to start.

The first thing she does is kiss me. I can’t believe it, since I didn’t think that was allowed at all. She leans into my face until I can feel her breath, runs her hands through my hair, and points her tongue, flicking it gently up and down over the center of my amazed lips. Then she puts her tongue in my mouth slowly, just a little ways, and relaxes for a second before sinking to the floor on her knees. She puts one hand on each of my thighs, and nibbles up my body, oscillating her head quickly and whipping me with her great head of golden hair, which feels like an army of blind chinchillas have taken a wrong turn on my lap. She stands up and turns away from me, wiggling her ass fast, several inches from my face. She bends over slightly and I see her finger reach back and slide up her G-string, strumming it like a guitar string, pulling it back a little so I can see her tiny shock of golden pubic hair and the pucker of her depilated asshole. She sits on me that way, pumping up and down and rotating her ass, pressing into my lap and my belly, offering herself up to me like a piece of wedding cake. The muscles in my legs tense, and I have no idea what to do with my hands. Before I know it she has turned back toward me and squeezed her skull between my thighs, and is performing a sort of circus trick: a perfectly balanced headstand that places her rear end in my face and the pointy toes of her boots slowly pawing my ears and hair. I’ve done this sort of thing in yoga classes, but always against a wall, not a person. She stays like that for a while, twisting her hips in a slow symmetry while my hands instinctively hover in the air around her hips in case she falls, but she has launched her body onto mine without leaning on me, she seems to need no one. I can’t say that this is exactly erotic; it is a prank, and she performs it exceptionally well. But Plum is performing it, not Lynne. She is the stiletto-booted, thong-clad stripper with the aerobi-cized body and the mane of Salon Selectives hair, not the cartographically birthmarked songstress turning her latest terse-but-sincere ad copy over to the classified desk and crossing her fingers. It is the form without the content, and I don’t know what else I expected, but I feel as hollow as a baby doll with a little rubber stopper instead of genitalia, glass marble eyes that clank open and shut when I nod my head yes.

Like often happens at the dentist’s office when I am hooked up to nitrous oxide, I seem to have lost track of sequential time. It’s hard for me to navigate how many minutes have passed since this dance started. All this touching, all this hair and skin and throbbing exists in a bubble of experiential hyperbole that floats above the whirl of ordinary narrative; or not above, but in the crux of the centrifuge, immune to past and future, to the rush of ambition, to gravitational forces. When my ears next tune in to the thumping bass line of the Pool’s speakers, The Breeders have vanished and Destiny’s Child is bragging “You thought I’d be lost without you, but I’m stronger!”

Lynne has been staring into my eyes since the beginning of time. Her face is one inch from mine, and our gazes have been locked for so long that it is like staring into a dark mirror, or down a rabbit hole where the unblinking eyes of the rabbit are like laser beams launching rods of light up at you.

“I want you to touch me,” she says, just mouthing it really, no vocal chords engage. “Do you want to?” She takes my hand in hers and guides it up to her breast.

“I thought I wasn’t supposed to,” I mutter, confused.

“It’s okay,” she whispers in my ear, lacing her fingers into mine and stroking herself with our hands.

I cover her nipple with my thumb and strum it a few times, feeling it harden under my touch. She is straddling my lap now, still looking into my eyes with her mouth open and her breath crashing in shallow waves. I put my other hand on her hip, running it up and down her side from the tender whiteness of her underarm to her plump and powerful thigh. I hear myself let out a little moan that sounds like the noise that her body would make if it could speak, the language of curve and flesh and need. What is happening here? Are we making love? She unbuttons my shirt and unclasps my bra, lowering her head to my chest and taking me in her warm mouth. She pulls back her hair with one hand so I can watch her biting my nipple, baring her cute, protruding front tooth in a feral smile. Before I know it we are making out, just as though we’re on a date in the backseat of a some giant cushy Cadillac. We are both topless, and her hair falls like a curtain around our heads creating a private fortress where anything seems possible, including the idea that this might all be an inspired daydream or an explicit trailer for a virtual porno film in a world where there are no taboos and no Kinsey scales. Her smells are all-encompassing: her sweat and her little girl perfume, the flowery shampoo she must use and the mermaid scent of her pussy. She hoists herself up on her knees and pulls down her G-string to show me, parting her labia with her fingers so I can see the pink glossy wetness there, the smooth inside of a seashell, a whorled pastel nebula containing vast universes not visible to the naked eye.

She unzips my pants and reaches inside my underwear, shyly beckoning me with her crooked index finger. Where does she want me to go? Her eyes narrow in a small smile: I am wet, and now she knows. Now Macy Gray is crooning in her throaty Carol-Channing-meets-Tina-Turner voice, the bass line thumping loud into the very core of our amoeba, rocking the Pool. The mermaids, who are expressionless, their faces humpty-dumptied together with bits of broken Fiestaware and shards of Seven-Up bottles, seem nevertheless to radiate the rapture of the deep. They, like me, seem to have gotten lost in a place they never imagined existed.