by Ted Neill
But they didn’t.
Tyra called, at least once a week. Tyra was the only person from school that remembered Daniel’s birthday on June 29th. Daniel had met Tyra at school. Met her at Mass, actually. She was a Eucharistic Minister. She was impossibly beautiful, with auburn hair and curves that made Daniel hurt inside. She liked him too. She said he was sweet and smart, not like most of the guys that she knew. Daniel was sure he was in love again. They started to hang out regularly. Daniel would have said they were dating. But then one day, when he asked Tyra to be his steady girlfriend she said,
“Daniel, you’re a really nice guy, but I have to be honest with you. If we were dating, I’d still be fucking other men.”
It wasn’t the response he expected.
Shortly after that, Daniel had started to figure things out. All the guys that said “Hi” to Tyra on campus, the men that would recognize her at bars when she came in with him: she had slept with most of them or their friends.
“I take my freedom very seriously,” she said. “I knew I should tell you, but you were so nice and so good. I thought you’d stop being my friend.”
They could be friends, Daniel decided. Not girlfriend and boyfriend, but friends. Then came the second blow. Tyra stopped going to church. She said she didn’t believe in God anymore.
“We have to forgive people, even if they don’t say sorry. God forgives us only if we do say sorry. Double standard,” she said.
“But God loves us,” Daniel said.
“Why create all these people just to love you? Just to worship you? God’s an egoist.”
“We have a choice.”
“And we’re punished if we don’t choose him. We go to hell, right?”
Daniel couldn’t argue with her. He couldn’t ever date her now either; she was an atheist. He prayed for her. Every day, not just on Sundays, although on Sundays he would pray for Inez too.
The summer wore on. Daniel worked his job as a waiter during the day, saving money for tuition and school books. Most of his friends had not come home for the summer, so at night he read books that he picked up at the used book store, classics like The Brothers Karamazov, Ulysses, Things Fall Apart, and The Bluest Eye. One Sunday morning at Sacred Heart, he saw a girl that looked like Inez, sitting up front where he and Inez used to sit. He walked up behind her, but it was not Inez. It was some teenage girl—way too young—with braces. She smiled at him. He smiled back but sat on the other side of the church. One time, at the coffee and doughnuts reception after Mass, the priest saw Daniel sitting on a radiator, talking to some high school girls who wanted advice on college admissions essays.
When the girls had gone, the priest said, “Whatever happened to that lovely young lady from Bolivia I always used to see you with?”
“She dumped me.” Daniel couldn’t keep from adding, “She’s dating someone else now.”
Daniel felt an awkward pause coming. It arrived with all its eyes-to-the-floor, feet-shuffling glory. The priest stared out the window. Daniel got up and said he had to go to the men’s room.
Tyra called just as Daniel was dreading the approach of the Fourth of July, and all the picnics he would have to attend, alone. Tyra said that her dad still wasn’t sober, had lost his job, and now there was no way to pay for school. She’d have to get a job. Actually, she had already got one. She was dancing.
“Dancing?” Daniel said into the phone.
“Exotic dancing,” she said.
“Exotic dancing?”
“God, Daniel, you’re so innocent. I’m a stripper.”
“Oh.”
“It’s going to put me through school, Daniel.”
“I guess you need to do that.’
“I went to church the other day.”
“You serious?”
“I didn’t burst into flames.”
“That’s great. It’s really great, Tyra.”
It was September. Daniel was glad to be back at school. While he was headed to the cafeteria one evening, he saw Tyra talking to a tall blond guy with big shoulders, a strong jaw, and a flat stomach. Whoever he was, he was wearing pleated khakis, an oxford shirt that showed off his biceps, and expensive sunglasses. Tyra was standing in pumps, blue skirt, and a pink fitted T-shirt. She had his attention. She had the attention of every male who walked by.
Daniel was going to keep walking. He didn’t want to be introduced to the blond guy, but Tyra saw him.
“Daniel!”
Tyra jumped up and hugged him, hanging on his neck, her heels curled up so that her pumps touched her backside. He hugged her around the waist. The other guy was watching. She waved good-bye to him over Daniel’s shoulder, and he left looking miffed.
“Daniel, it’s so good to see you. I missed you,” she said.
“I missed you too. Thanks for remembering my birthday. Everyone always forgets it, in the summer.”
“No problem. Hey, we can celebrate it this weekend. Or we can do a half-birthday party in January.”
“That would be nice,” he said. His cheeks felt hot as they walked along the quad, and she put her hand in the crook of his arm. The trees were just starting to turn yellow, and a brisk breeze sent a rain of them down around them.
“When you going to come and see me dance?” A strand of hair swept into her lips.
“Jeez, I wouldn’t know what to do in there, Tyra. What is strip bar etiquette?”
“You’ve never been to a titty bar?”
“Uh . . . .”
“Daniel, you are such a gentleman. You just come in. Sit down wherever you want. Ask the waitress to change a twenty into ones so you can tip the girls, then you watch.”
“You make a lot of money?”
“Men are stupid. They’ll fork it over.”
He couldn’t help but notice the note of derision in her voice.
Daniel procrastinated. He dated other girls, but things never worked out. He took one girl out, but she only talked about her ex-boyfriend. Another girl deserted him at a restaurant when some of her friends came by and asked her to go clubbing with them. One girl, Tammy, whom he helped with her history paper, offered to take him out to a nice restaurant to thank him. She did. When the bill came, however, she claimed to have forgotten her purse and asked him if he would mind covering it.
One night he was home alone and the phone rang. It was Tyra.
“It’s a slow night,” she said. “You want to come up and keep me company?”
“Sure, okay.”
Daniel rode his bike up Wisconsin Avenue to where Tyra worked. The club was next door to a Blockbuster Video store. Imagine that, he thought, mothers bringing their kids from soccer practice, T-ball games, and Christmas pageants, to pick up movies from the kiddy section and just a brick wall separates them from topless women.
He locked his bike up beneath a street lamp, just a block away from the club. The sidewalk was bordered by a stone wall with an iron gate. On the other side was the Episcopal cemetery; beyond that, the cathedral. Daniel contemplated the cathedral. The stone, hoisted up to impossible heights and mortared into permanence, was beautiful, breathtaking. He thought of grace, beauty, and transcendence. He thought of being with Inez. She could be breathtaking at times. But other times, she had been a pain, sort of full of herself, mean even. Maybe he was lucky to be rid of her. Although a part of him wondered if any girl would ever love him again. Or even like him.
But Tyra liked him. It was good to have friends.
One time, Tyra had shown up at Daniel’s dorm room after drinking at a party, and she had tried to kiss him. He’d turned his head away. He wanted to be special. Everyone made out with Tyra, and a lot of people fucked her. Daniel decided he would be the exception by not making out. He would be special. It was the opposite of Inez. She had had high standards. Even after dating all that time, they had never had sex. He was Inez’s first kiss. Guys in high school had hated Daniel because he dated Inez. Because he “got somewhere” with her. Inez had tolerated him removin
g her bra, but never her panties, nor his boxers. Plus, they never touched each other there with their hands. Instead they would grind against one another until they climaxed. Never too many times in one night, or else Inez would become reticent and ashamed.
Daniel had loved her all the more for it. He was still a virgin and was happy for it. “Your virginity is a gift from God,” she used to say to him. “Only to be shared with the one you commit yourself to for life.”
He had agreed.
But the rumors that had reached him said that Inez was indeed fucking the new guy she was dating. It made Daniel wonder what had been wrong with him.
He walked up the hill and tried to focus on Tyra. The rules were different with her. He would stand out with Tyra by not “getting anywhere” with her on purpose. That would be how he would make sure their friendship was special.
He walked down the sidewalk, past empty office buildings, past a Chinese take-out joint. At the door to the strip club there was a cement rise, a step before the door. It wasn’t quite high enough to be a real step, but it seemed to be trying. In its effort, it was more of a hazard than anything else, not high enough to be helpful, not low enough to be negligible, just there enough to warrant a red sign on the door with gold letters that read, “Watch Your Step.”
Daniel went inside and saw another door, this one with a sign that said, “No Cover Charge.” He pushed it open. A large bouncer dressed in black asked for his ID. Daniel gave it to him. He looked at it with a frown.
“This really you?”
“Yeah.”
Of course, it was. Daniel didn’t own a fake ID.
It was a profile shot. He asked Daniel to turn sideways. As Daniel did, he saw the length of the bar.
Three stages, three girls—dancing, twisting, topless, and bottomless. Men sat in chairs, across the aisle or at the foot of the stages, facing the girls, paying the girls.
Full nudity. Tyra hadn’t said it was full nudity. Titty bar. Titty bar meant tits, but here were vulvas: shaved, pink, and stretched open for display. A man went up to the stage and dropped down a one dollar bill. The dancer raised her leg above her head, and her labia yawned open.
One dollar. Just one dollar, to see all that.
Daniel didn’t know what stage Tyra used. She’d said they danced in fifteen-minute shifts. He sat in the second row, definitely not the first, in front of the center stage. There was a mirror behind each dancer, a mirror with letters that said, “Do Not Touch Dancers.”
These were not good-looking guys. They were average guys, very average: a quiet, short one with a duffel bag; two chubby guys in college sweatshirts; a very fat man in a suit; a man in his forties, with spiked hair on top and hair down to the base of his neck in back, wearing a nylon jacket and sweat pants cut off at the knee; two men, brothers perhaps, with cardigan sweaters and cinnamon-frosty beards and thick professorial glasses. Daniel thought he saw one handsome young man with good build and good hair, but when he turned, Daniel realized he had buck teeth and a grotesque goatee.
Daniel was the most attractive guy there. A feeling he wasn’t used to.
The others were men who would never see a beautiful girl naked, unless they paid.
And the women were beautiful, amazing really. All of them, but Daniel only picked out two he would consider “attractive.” He had long ago realized the difference between attractive and beautiful: it was all about approachability. He had learned that Inez had been beautiful but over time realized she was not attractive. He wanted to consider himself a man of discriminating taste. Whereas he knew all the men there would take any one of the girls they could get. He knew, from hearing people talk about strip bars, that every man there wanted to leave with a dancer, go home with a dancer, have sex with a dancer.
He didn’t. He told himself that this quality made him different. But the dancers didn’t know that. He wanted them to. He wanted them to know that if he tipped them, it was because he knew they had rent to pay, and he wanted to help them pay it, not fuck them.
Then Tyra appeared. She walked down the aisle between the seating section and the stages. Every man turned to watch her go past. She was in black lingerie and a silver robe, a red Chinese dragon swirling around it. When she saw Daniel, she ran over and hugged him.
“Hey, sweetheart!” she said, sitting down next to him.
“Nice robe.”
“Thank you. I got it at Commander Salamander.”
“You have the nicest outfit here. It’s really classy.”
“Thank you.”
A waitress asked them for drink orders. Tyra introduced Daniel as a “very special friend.” He supposed it was their own code or something. The waitress winked at him and said his drinks would be free. He asked for a vodka tonic with two limes; it was what Daniel’s older friend, Sidney, always ordered. Tyra had a Sprite. When the waitress left he said, “She seemed nice.”
“She’s the only one,” Tyra said.
They talked about dancers, how they couldn’t be trusted. How they let the guys think they had a chance, just to get tips. Tyra emphasized that none of the guys there had a chance.
“If the first time you met me, I was here—” Daniel said.
“We wouldn’t be friends. But you wouldn’t come here, Daniel. It’s why I love you.”
Daniel looked around at the girls. The reflections of the girls. The men, the men staring at the girls. Starring at Tyra. Staring at him.
“No. I probably wouldn’t.”
The men watched her, even with her clothes on. She was the best-looking dancer there. She had hugged him, kissed him. The men must have wanted to tear him apart with their envy, tear him apart and find out what he had done to warrant the affection a stripper. Tear him apart or lift him to their shoulders in triumph, because his victory was their victory.
She said that strippers were fucked up. They all had to be the center of attention. They had sexual dysfunctions. They had to have male approval. They had been molested when they were younger. It was like chaos theory, Daniel said, the theory that a butterfly’s wings flailing in Africa could make it rain in San Francisco. An uncle or father’s hand grazing a thigh at five landed them straddling a brass pole at eighteen.
“Daniel, are you a little tipsy?” Tyra asked, smiling.
“I don’t know,” he said. He’d never had a vodka tonic before. But he did notice he was talking a lot. “How many of these poor girls have been molested?”
“Most of them. All of them?”
“Not you.”
“God, no. Dad’s a drunk but not a pervert. I’m here to pay tuition. I was going to quit after the first month, but it’s not like Pop is going to come through on my rent. It’s up to me.”
Tyra was wearing dark red lipstick. She looked dangerous. She lit a cigarette. A stream of gray from her mouth became a cloud of gray that touched the ceiling and the colored lights, and when it dissolved, there was a naked girl dancing in a mirror. Daniel stared at her for a while and lost track of the time.
“Earth to Daniel,” Tyra said.
“Sorry. Hey, I’m glad you went to church the other day.”
“Yeah, God pisses me off sometimes.”
The statement made him cringe. He took a sip of his drink, the way people sip drinks when they’re uncomfortable. He repositioned himself on his chair.
“Well, I’m sure we give him a real run for his money.” He wasn’t sure what he meant. Tyra didn’t seem to care one way or another. She was looking at one of the girls.
“She does great pole work.” Smoke came out with her words. “I don’t know. There are some things about Jesus though that I find beautiful. I can’t let go of those.”
“So, you still . . . like Jesus?” Daniel said. His drink was empty. The waitress brought him another.
“I find him beautiful,” Tyra said, sipping her Sprite. “That’s why I wanted to be a Eucharistic Minister, so I could hold his body in my hands. He wouldn’t care that I am a stripper. He hung out w
ith prostitutes, adulterers, and tax collectors for God’s sake.”
It was something. Jesus was God. Did Tyra know that? Of course, she did; she was a good Catholic girl.
The bouncer walked by, a big guy with a bald head. He might have seemed friendly in any other situation, but now he was just ominous. Tyra reached out and touched him on his massive hand. He stopped.
“Rodney. This is my friend Daniel. He’s a very good friend.”
They shook hands, Rodney’s enveloping Daniel’s.
“Sorry I gave you a hard time at the door. Won’t happen again,” he said.
“No problem,” Daniel said, trying to pitch his voice low to match Rodney’s. It really was no problem. At least now it wasn’t. He was just so relieved that Tyra still believed in Jesus.
It was Tyra’s turn to dance. The music never stopped; it was fed from somewhere else, not in tune with the comings and goings of acts. Not that the guys cared much. The dancer in center stage wound down her dance. She slipped on a dress that still showed her labia when she bent over. Tyra ascended. She pulled a roll of paper towels and a bottle of Windex from the side of the stage. She sprayed the mirror. Shots of Windex looked like giant gobs of spittle. She wiped the mirror. She wiped the poles with an up and down motion. She put the Windex and roll away, then spun around, her robe flaring out like an inverted flower.
She was dancing, with a vibrancy in her muscles and intimacy in her eyes that the other dancers lacked. The robe shimmered. It tantalized, it mesmerized. It was gone. Now she was a woman of dreams, in lacy black panties and with firm breasts. The perfect form from a lingerie ad. That was not real, that was a construction of a photography studio and air brushing; yet it was real, right there before all of them. Her skin was a perfect, unblemished amber under the red lights. Cigarette smoke was being blown her way by anxious lungs. The drinks the waitress had served Daniel had helped him to relax. He felt permeable. In a moment so removed from the present distractions that his thoughts were lucid, he realized this was why people went to hell.
