Stripper Lessons

by John O'Brien

  Oblivious to her game, he thinks, No, no. This can’t possibly go on with everybody, can it? No, I hardly think so. I think it’s time to WAKE UP! because she likes YOU, and you’re definitely being told something here, pal. You’re being sent some kind of far-out message, just like the hot tub dream last night. Maybe so, maybe so, shouldn’t ignore these things. Impure as it sounds he’d like to have an erection right now, probably will get one later on at home. But God he’s terrified now, too scared to get hard, and certainly too scared to talk to her. Yikes! that was close. He hopes she’s not expecting him to touch her or anything. Oh, and the hair, more hair. The smell, the skin.

  Then Carroll realizes something is happening—or unhappening. There’s the voice of the DJ/doorman, and the music is getting softer, fading out. Stevie is stepping back, away from the counter and bending to retrieve her little bundle. Over! No, it can’t be over already!

  Two twenties, there are two twenties in the wallet.

  “Um . . . Stevmmmm (direct address predictably mumbled), if you had time I was hoping we could do another?” this all spoken to either her feet or the counter.

  C’mon, what are ya gonna do, say no? Cause if that’s the case, young lady, then you can just march your little bottom right on home. “Well sure,” she says, with the prettiest little smile this side of Pahrump.

  As the second song begins Carroll feels the comfort of experience, but not much. What he really feels is less terrified, slightly more able to attend to the here and now of this most fantastic experience. He watches her face, her breasts, her ass when she shows it to him, so very close as with the rest of her. They don’t speak much, both now having given up on small talk. Maybe there’s even an element of familiarity here, as in the quietly accepted pauses of a long conversation. No, it’s okay. We don’t have to talk. So the world simmers down to a background hum, the music barely an unobtrusive soundtrack. There’s only him, her body closer than he’s ever been to anyone before. Too much potential confusion, too many decisions, best to leave it all like this, a vision. As close as it gets, all the heat, the fragrance, leave it, please sir. Leave it now behind your eyes, a pre-memory, sir, please. . . .

  Oh! but the hair again flitting all around his face, but the song (how much left?), but the voice he needs again to hear, but the what-will-come-after, but the nakedness, but the breath, so close she is it falls on his cheek, hot, turn your nose, catch it, catch it. . . . Well now, isn’t that a gift! Small mist from heaven, sweet redolence from the mouth of an . . .

  “Are you an angel?” he blurts out.

  Stevie, somewhat dismayed that conversation has resumed, can’t quite hear him over the music but knows by his inflection that there’s a question awaiting an answer. She pulls away to face him then turns sideways and passes a nipple over his cheek, almost miscalculating and touching his ear.

  “What?” she says.

  “Are you an angel?” Infinitely patient now, glad that he asked, bewitched, perhaps, he is.

  Oh, jeeze! “You’re funny,” she says. When is this dog-of-a-song gonna end? Heavy metal. It’s toooo loooonnnngggg, toooo loooonnnngggg. She shows him her ass, snaps some elastic.

  You’re asking it wrong, dummy! That’s not like the dream. Remember the dream? Try again. He takes a short breath: oh yeah. “What are you?” he tries.

  Half amused, she says, “Okay, I’m an angel,” but she also glances over at the manager’s door. No reason. Reflex.

  “You’re an angel?” says Carroll earnestly, following his own indelible dream-script.

  She frowns despite herself. Tersely: “Yes.” Toooo loooonnnngggg. More breast-in-your-face, albeit set off slightly more than before.

  He now too wrapped up in the so-far flawless flow of their conversation to notice her slight retreat says, “Then I want to ask you something.”

  “Ask,” she says probably a little too harshly. She can sense the music nearing its happy end. Heavy-fucking-metal. Ugh.

  Well that doesn’t sound quite right . . . but close enough. Now he too can sense the music ending; he senses it through her. He realizes his heart is pounding, realizes that he simply doesn’t know just how real this is, realizes that this may be the single most important moment of his life. Guided, that’s it, he feels guided.

  “Will the meek inherit the earth?” he says, choking off a sob and feeling an honest-to-god tear on his cheek.

  Wham wham wham . . . wham . . . WHAM! Heavy-fucking-sucking-metal. Finally. Stevie smiles good-naturedly as she bends to retrieve her clothes. No way did he say that. What did he say? Okay, who cares. He didn’t ask for another song, so who cares. She makes a big show of putting her top back on: he is exactly the type that would dig that. Even if he does want another song, no go. She’s got to . . . umm . . . help out in the dressing room. Yeah. She promised the girls that she’d help out in the dressing room—excuse me: dressing area. She remembers the interview when she walked into this place for the first time, way after the requisite dance in his face, Fatso looking at the paper to recall the name they’d agreed on just thirty seconds earlier: “Now, ah, Stevie. Nobody in this place has no dressing room, see? Don’t let the girls tell you different. They know better. We all share a dressing AREA. It ain’t a room, it’s an area. See?” What the fuck time is it already?

  That was then, and this song too is now over. Dressed, wellsortof, polite but To The Point, she could be a stewardess collecting for drinks. “Let’s see. That was two songs, so that’ll be forty dollars,” she says, vaguely hoping he doesn’t repeat whatever it was he asked cause it’s plum gone out of her pretty head anyway.

  Rudely awakened but not at all offended, Carroll’s in awe of this woman. Just like the dream. The whole thing, even the end, was just like the dream. Mysterious ways. Oh God, she is an angel. He pays her, goes back to the bar after watching her float away, and almost orders a bottle of water before realizing that the money he left on the bar has vanished. He looks around at the men near him, but what’s that gonna get him? He looks up at the barmaid, and to his chagrin she is looking right at him, her eyes weary, just wondering about the tip.

  The manager walks her out to her car—not exactly her idea of a safe escort but at least a known quantity. Last night, her first night, she was able to avoid this and slip out on her own, but really, that wasn’t wise. Anything can happen past the click of the back doorknob. Men will wait, she knows. Men will wait.

  “Don’t tell me,” says the manager, stopping dead in his tracks, kicking up a little dust and using the opportunity to drop his arm across her chest. He puts a hand over his eyes in a mock clairvoyant routine. “Did Daddy buy us a wed Fewawi?”

  Oh fuck, a wed Fewawi, a red Ferrari. She forgot about the 308; she’d rather this guy hadn’t seen it. He peeks through his fingers at her, smiling with his eyes and doing a hopeless little dance step in the gravel. Stevie can see that this guy thinks of himself as a comic, probably tried or thinks he should try going professional, maybe on his own stage. Maybe that’s what happened to the Lilac Club pictured on his office wall. It has in the picture the look of a mere memory, wherever or whatever it was. This guy’s baggage, she knows, is all about deals, goes with the territory.

  “It was a birthday gift,” she says in a tone that she hopes is amiable. It would be easier if she were naked. What birthday was that?

  “And how many birthdays does it take to get a gift like that?” he says like it’s an old joke between old friends.

  Son of a bitch. Her fingers mercifully touch metal in her purse. “Well thanks for the walk,” she says, jingling her keys from her purse. “You were right. I feel much safer out here with you around.”

  Practiced, she’s in the car before the issue of goodnight even arises. Better to not even know what, if anything, his get-acquainted plan is. This is just one of the myriad reflexes that she has carried with her for years, that seemed to develop right along with her breasts (what came first?), like the quiver she can put on her lip. Crack th
e window, put him in the rearview mirror. He’ll be back for more, thinks he already got something.

  It’s an easy jump onto the 405, and in no time she’s home in Westwood. Her apartment is actually a condominium on Wilshire Boulevard, owned by one of her boyfriend’s corporations and rented back to him (well, her, but he pays the rent) as a way to beef up a column entry on his Schedule Whatever each April-automatically-extended-to-August. They’ve been together long enough now for him to stop coming around on a regular basis. His wife, new kid, feds breathing down his neck about the thrift in Denver, out of town next week, kisses on the phone, paging his flight. Her: “That’s fine. Just be sure to call before you drop in.” Him: “What the hell is that supposed to mean?” She remembers wondering, Why did I say that? But this is water over the dam, and things have settled into a stasis of well-enough-left-alone. She’s good at least through the next fiscal year and really couldn’t care less about the eventuality of a reevaluation. It’s not something that would matter much to her anyway. Her father always admonished her, a little girl, not to cry, not to sully her pretty face with needless tears. Now a swell condo, good advice, to be sure. The place sparkles like a hospital. That’s right, cleaning day. She chose none of this furniture, never understood his explanation of how it came to be here, never heard of insured furniture before, furniture that gets photographed every six months. When she returned from Reno there was a note from these insurance men: Understand you are on vacation. Had to let ourselves in and rephotograph sofa. You appear in previous photo. Our error. Sorry for intrusion.

  Stevie pings around the kitchen for a while, tossing down a cracker here, a swig from the milk carton there. She bites a pickle then puts it back in the jar, changes her mind, fishes it out, and drops it in the disposal. Such is dinner, and she dries her hands. Picking up her purse from the counter, she goes into her bedroom. Here she gets a (coincidentally) bank-style vinyl pouch from the bottom of her underwear drawer and adds to its already voluminous contents the money from her purse. Mixed in with these bills are the two twenties given her by Carroll after their table dance. But she doesn’t think about him or his twenties as she tucks away the pouch, hasn’t thought about him at all since he left her sight. Rather, she collects some things from the bathroom and lays them out on a towel spread over the foot of her bed. Sitting cross-legged, she clicks on the bedroom Sony and goes to work on her manicure. Soon she needs more cotton to help soak up the blood. Later the hurt from her fingers invades her dreams, but she is not one to cry out in her sleep.

  Muted; that is, on but without sound. He needs the silence to help him concentrate, to wrest some hint of direction from his rather eventful evening. But he can’t bear just leaving it off, so the television is muted. What now? “The Shy Man’s Guide to Meeting Women” doesn’t seem to apply in this case. What he learned there, watching it at the K’mon-n-Mart today, is far away from what he needs to know. Face it: the tape was a ripoff, a bill of goods, filled with absurd situations, improbable conversations, long filler sequences of women walking on the street, equivocal advice, and dubious aphorisms (“A short skirt is short work”; “You’re in the pink with that second drink”; “Avoid long conversations. Talk only of your car or movies, never politics or books—she might not be a reader! Why bend her ear when you can bend her over?”). In or out, man. Everything that comes across that screen is an absolute, every pixel on or off. Heaven or hell. That tape simply doesn’t wash. He wonders if it ever really did to anybody, or was it always just a scam. The lesson here, he grows surer by the minute, is that what needs to be learned is already known, was in fact learned long ago, and the trick is to find out where it is hidden within himself.

  Peripherally he picks up a light dancing in the shadows of the room. There, he feels it: a tiny temblor is jiggling the ceiling fixture, but it’s over practically before it begins, not even time to dash for a doorframe. Hell, he doesn’t even have the inclination to dash for a doorframe. There are angels in this world, and earthquakes are now out of his hands. Just like the dream, he thinks, it was so close, I can’t ignore it. This is the closest he’s ever been to what they call religion (though he isn’t calling it that). Another rumble, small aftershock. They’ll probably say on the news tomorrow that both of these are aftershocks to some bigger quake of months ago and miles away. Maybe these are big quakes in some far-flung corner of LA. In any case the last one set off a car alarm down in the garage. There’s another one, sounds like on Hawthorne, probably that guy’s BMW, that guy who’s out there every Saturday with one of those car-washing wands that they advertise on TV. No quiet. Still no fear.

  So what’s his plan? What’s his hurry? After all, he did meet her, right? Maybe that tape wasn’t so useless. Chock-full, it could have been, of subliminal messages; hours later, he meets her. Still he needs a plan. It all seems too little, too late. Time itself has taken on an importance that he never felt before Stevie, and this is silly. He knows well enough that he has no relationship with this woman. Now now, don’t sell it short. She was nice to him tonight, nicer than the rest of the world is to him. She was missing the nasty little element of conspiracy that he sees behind so many eyes, so many doors. Always on his mind, there are so many ways to go wrong. It does matter, and it matters now. He’s got to talk with her, got to have her talk back, and without a twenty-dollar meter ticking away between them, even without those sublime breasts between them. Well, covered . . . out of his face . . . for a while, anyway. This is serious. This is an angel. She’s here to tell him something. He’s got to listen.

  The car alarms have either shut off or passed into the vast WhoCares of the Hollywood din. Carroll falls asleep, has a bizarre dream about Stevie driving him to her home: she lives in a bomb shelter, and when she excuses herself to bathe and shave her back (?) he spots the missing SoLo/Bombgate file, mostly hidden under a stack of old TV Guides. He tries to grab the file, but he hears her coming back and stops. “How do you remember to smile,” he asks her when she returns, smiling, to the room.

  Friday saturday

  Good under pressure, he realizes of Pam. Without jeopardizing their buddyship she’s trying to make clear to him the urgency of locating the SoLo/Bombgate file.

  “We have got to find this thing pronto.” This in a half-whisper though her boss’s door is closed and there is no one around to hear.

  Once again Carroll has been waylaid on his way from the elevator to his desk. Once again SoLo/Bombgate has turned out to be the First Thing In The Morning. In fact Pam herself is still wearing her trenchcoat, a New York habit she refuses to give up no matter how perfect the Southern California climate is, dammit. Fair enough, it adds to the element of conspiracy she seems to be seeking, so much so that for a paranoid instant he wonders if she purposely kept it on while waiting for him. But then he notices that she’s still holding her lunch, a microwaveable container filled with red stuff, so she must have just walked in.

  She continues, leaning closer and deepening her whisper. “That file has original documents in it. (pause for effect, profound nod) The client is coming in on Monday afternoon, and if we don’t come up with that file it’ll be both our (and the most intensely whispery whisper yet) asses!”

  Carroll knows whose ass it’ll really be: Pam’s boss, the litigation attorney who’s working on the case and who will be meeting with the client Monday afternoon. This guy is an associate, so he poses no real career threat to anybody but himself; both Pam and Carroll know this, but he would never dare mention it to her; that’s not who he is. Was there anything about yesterday’s encounter that he should tell her? Has she already heard about it?

  “I tried upstairs yesterday.”

  “I heard.”

  Was this a test? He’s not sure what to say now. Realizing his finger is still stupidly gesturing up, he blushes and looks down. Is that a blue thing in her red stuff?

  “Carroll,” she says, “I think that might be a dead end. Look, we all make mistakes—you least of all, but yo
u are human. Maybe we should consider the possibility that the file was simply misplaced in the wrong drawer. Lord knows I’ve done that, and I don’t handle nearly as many files as you do. It’s okay, all we have to do is find it and everything will be perfect.” She sighs and squints: brainstorming, cooking up a plan. “I don’t know. Maybe the best thing would be a drawer-to-drawer search of the file room, then a cubicle-to-cubicle search of the secretaries, and finally an office-to-office search of the attorneys. What do you think?”

  What does he think? What does he think? He thinks he knows exactly where that fucking file is. That’s what he thinks. I’ve never misplaced a fucking file in my life!

  “That must be it,” he says (that is a blue thing). “I’ll start first thing. I’ll let you know how it’s going before lunch.” He shuffles in place, a habit that he’d like to lose but that seems entirely appropriate right now.

  “I knew I could count on you. You’re a lifesaver.” She indicates with an outstretched finger her boss’s door. “And don’t think HE doesn’t appreciate it too.” Here she smiles tightly, lips plump and pursed like two greasy red-brown doggy treats.