Stripper Lessons

by John O'Brien

  And come they do, the words of the DJ/doorman. Come they do, and if history is any guide they probably include the name of this new redhead, pronounced clearly over the room, preceded by not too many desultory remarks, bumps o’ the mike, and all-around general static and lack of squelching. Carroll wouldn’t know. He would, but his attention is suddenly sucked through the reverse vacuum of his eyes the moment they fall upon Stevie, dressed for the floor and tending to her thank-yous in a fashion more timely than he predicted. She is wearing a white wraparound lace thing, a half robe, and though her breasts are certainly present the effect is surprisingly chaste, and they should present no problem in conversation . . . her breasts. She begins at the far side of the stage. By now the new redhead is dancing her second of three, moving back and forth far too often and using every opportunity to block his line of sight as he watches Stevie thank the big tippers. He is unable to keep tabs on how and how long she is with each man, and he takes solace in the fact that she is saving him for last. More redhead . . . there . . . what? She’s been with that guy. . . . He thought—he assumed—that she moved along, but she’s still talking to Bachelor Number Two. Way too long, at least twice as long as she spent with the first guy. Now she’s laughing. They’re both laughing. More redhead. Oh great. She’s indicating the booths, showing the guy where to wait for a table dance. What a lowlife, taking advantage of everybody’s thank-you time to ask for a table dance. Carroll has half a mind to speak to the manager, but that’ll never happen. But again, who knows? He just hopes for Bachelor Number Two’s sake that she finishes her thank-yous before skipping over to the booth with him. No. Okay. Well at least he’s going alone to wait at the little counter in front of the booths. At least that’s something. She wouldn’t forget Carroll. Of course not. It won’t be any great joy watching her dance for this guy, and he’d rather not have the additional pressure of thinking about that just when he’s trying so hard to keep up the nerve for his thank-you. . . . Okay. No time to worry about it now. One more guy to thank, then Carroll. Here she comes—that was quick, hopes his goes longer—here she comes.

  Stevie approaches him. There can be no doubt, for she is looking toward him as if to a destination. His heart is pounding, and by now that is old news. The fact that he’s already been through a table dance with this woman, had her topless, inches away from his face, talking to him, does nothing to assuage his perennial anxiety. Reaching his side, she stops, or halts, like it was given to her as a stage direction.

  “Thank you,” she says, and she offhandedly puts her hand on his back, big-sister-like and in lieu of a peck on the cheek.

  But Carroll doesn’t see it that way. To him it is suddenly the most affectionate gesture he can imagine. Behind his flushed face and eyes so stinging that he must continually blink at her, he thinks that she’s so right, that even this small action is the most brilliantly appropriate thing she could have done. He wants to look around and get the reactions of the men in the room, but he dare not look away from her magnetic half-smile.

  “. . . welcome,” he gets out.

  After giving him a little pat to indicate goodbye, she pulls her hand away from his back. He senses this, and realizes that if he has anything to say to her he’d better say it now.

  “Table dance . . . remember me?” Though he knows she remembers him from their table dance last night, his mind is a blank, and this is the best he can do on such short notice. He should have had it worked out better, about the clothes. What kind of clothes does she like. And what else? There was something else. He can hardly expect her to do all the talking.

  “You want a table dance?” she asks, misunderstanding and with both hands now clasped impatiently in front of her.

  He wasn’t ready for this, and he’s sure he’s not ready for another table dance; it’s too hard, too much, too much at this point anyway. “No. . . . I had one last night. Do you remember? We talked?” He can feel his shoulders shaking, and he hopes to God she doesn’t notice. Should have padded shoulders, like a suit. Little shock absorbers for his nerves.

  She sorta remembers. Yeah, she guesses she remembers. “Sure, sure, I remember. We talked, right? Thanks, thanks a lot.” Still not sure what he’s after, she adds, “Did you want another then? Tonight? I’ve got a customer waiting, but you can be next if you’d like.” She doubts that the guy on deck will go much longer than two dances. She’s got time for this guy, and it wouldn’t hurt to make up a little work after missing so much of her shift. Yeah, sure, she remembers this guy. He’s okay.

  Now he’s worried that he blew it, led her on, and he wonders if he shouldn’t take the dance, if he isn’t committed to it. Then he remembers the money. At twenty bucks a song even one would clean him out. He’d have to leave, go home, or go to the ATM and come back, and that would look stupid not to mention cost him another cover charge. He should change the subject, and again he wishes he could remember what he wanted to talk to her about; it seems he had something in mind.

  “Well maybe later, or tomorrow. I mean I want one, but I can’t right now . . . so maybe later.” Now he’s sure she can see him shaking. “Shirts,” he says, real sudden. “Do you like curlicues? On shirts, I mean. Do you like curlicues on shirts? Do you like shirts with curlicues on them?” Caught up in the question, the proper phrasing of it, he’s almost dancing around in his seat, delivering the lines in verse.

  Yeah, now she remembers this guy. He’s gotta be harmless, even cute. So many puppies looking for a teat to suck on. “Sure, I like shirts with curlicues. Do you?” Funny, how now she’s got him placed it’s so easy to respond to this stupid question. Sweet, really. He’s sweet in his way.

  Now he’s just rolling. He’s a ball, and he’s just rolling. And it’s easy, it’s too good, like a gutter ball in bowling, no effort. “Oh yes! I like them just fine. I have some (a small lie: he will have some). I’ll wear it. . . . I mean I’ll wear them here.”

  She’s busting. Oh, what a sweet little ninny he is! Can’t laugh in his face though, not this one. “Do,” she says, smiling widely as a compromise to her insistent laughter. “Do,” she repeats, all she can get out. She’s gonna lose it, so quick as a tick she tags his cheek with a kiss and then leaps off, away. She walks away. Sweet, really. Curlicues, oh God!

  It’s like a movie. He can just see things happening around him. This may be the happiest moment of his life. He’s always wanted to make this statement, but now that he has he realizes how limiting it is, depressing almost. No matter, he was right! He thought she liked him, and he was right. A kiss. Right here in front of the world, she kissed him. He should know by now: there are good days and bad days, but they’re always mixed up in the same day. Stevie’s there, Solo’s there (somewhere), things are in place. He sits down, all grin, watches the new redhead without really seeing her. Third of three. Gotta get her name.

  But he can’t help but notice, maybe more now because of the shirt than anything else, that Redhead is spending a fair amount of time with Curlicue. She’s kneeling before him from the stage with her face much too close to his, close like should only be in a table dance. He’s got one of those smug right-where-I-want-her grins, the son of a bitch. Must be that damn shirt. Now she’s leaning over him, squatted sort of, ass up in the air, tits in his face, and all that long red hair covering swinging around his head, tickling the back of his neck, covering him like a little tent. There’s only two lousy bucks in front of the guy, so what gives with the special treatment? Maybe he’s her boyfriend. They’re not supposed to be in here, the boyfriends, but Carroll’s seen stuff like this before, especially with new girls, whose boyfriends can get in with the crowd because they’re not yet recognized by the management. It never seems to last though; somehow they always find out. As a test Carroll puts two bills out on the rail, even timing it so that she happens to look around right as they go up. Sure enough she wraps up Curlicue in short order and swings over to Carroll, almost as if she’d been waiting the whole time for him to finish up tha
t other business and start flashing some green. He thinks maybe the girl is just hungry, maybe just liking her new job, digging the new gig, Chase would say. She does seem to be enjoying herself, and while he doesn’t get the full hair-breast treatment, he does get more than he’s used to getting.

  Salaciously she licks her lips for him, like a Penthouse magazine photo, only moving. “Is this your little bell?” she wants to know, reaching for something at his shoulder. “Is this how I call you?”

  Carroll can’t figure out what the heck she’s talking about and has to pull himself away from her so-close lips in order to check out his shoulder and hopefully offer a response. She’s tugging a piece of his shirt. This stupid shirt that his aunt sent him has those stupid buttoned shoulder things like on a uniform that you’re supposed to keep gloves or a hat or something under. Epaulets. He always assumed they were phony and didn’t even unbutton, but fuck if one didn’t unbutton itself, the goofy strap hanging sloppily off his shoulder, a nerd ID badge, like a pocket protector or a sign that says KICK ME. He almost fumbles and tries to rebutton it, but pulls his hand back in time when he realizes that that would necessitate brushing her off, her playful fingers.

  “I guess it came unbuttoned,” he says stupidly. And worse: “I hate this shirt, my aunt sent it to me.” Great. He feels himself blush and wonders why it took so long. Seen too many tits, maybe, breasts.

  She smiles, still flirting, and he can see that she’s willing to tolerate him. Two bucks is two bucks. “Well we’ll just have to get you a new shirt,” she suggests, rising and preparing to make center stage for the end of the song.

  So it was Curlicue’s shirt that caught her attention! Amazing. Amazing yet the coincidence. Unable to resist the opportunity for a second opinion, he asks her, “You like curlicues?” though he feels the answer is obvious.

  She cocks her head, still flirty enough to make it seem like she’s secretly pleased by the unexpected query. “You like curlicues?” she asks, or says, or repeats. He can’t tell, she’s turned her back and gone her saucy way.

  Saturday sunday

  Saturday morning bright and early he walks down to the corner for a cup of coffee and a paper. Normally he would drive, being uncomfortable walking in his heart-of-Hollywood neighborhood, but most of the more threatening inhabitants of Hollywood Boulevard are not around in the morning. They’re sleeping, temporarily cloistered in their gritty holes in the wall, abject and miserable, he imagines, in their inchoate contrition, unsure of why they feel bad about the horrors of the night before and waiting like a time bomb to explode and lash out at their detestable accomplices. Such is the life of the bad guy on television, and Carroll feels comfortable with this portrait. Coffee, too, is not part of his usual routine. Think about all those ads on TV for decaffeinated coffee, hardly any for regular. There must be something wrong with the stuff, something they’re not telling us . . . yet. Wean us off with the placebo before it’s too late. Congressmen’s daughters must be getting sick, a quiet panic. He’s always eschewed anything he notices other people craving. Guys at work, always the coffee in one fist to balance out the law book in the other, torn pieces of paper page markers sticking out sloppily like so many tentacles. Still, he feels randy, and one cup might be fun. It’s not like he’s never tasted the stuff. Best to drink it now and then so you can be part of the class-action suit that’s inevitably coming.

  The paper is a thorn in his side. He hates to buy it. Hates to spend the money when the deadbeat across the hall—well down the hall actually but it still rankles—gets the damn thing delivered every day only to let them sit outside his door and pile up for weeks on end until the maintenance man has to haul them away in that enormous plastic wheelbarrow the size of a Dumpster and just as smelly, lets them sit and rot, turn yellow despite the darkness in the hallway. Oh! but God forbid anyone should touch one of those papers, anyone like Carroll, who after taking out the trash one day returned to his own floor and happened to notice a story on the front page of one of the papers—unclear even if it was that day’s edition—that caught his attention, and rather than up and take the discarded piece of trash as would be his obvious right and no court in the land would argue, he stood there like a dope, reading it in the hall, or starting to read it but not getting far before Deadbeat yanks open his door (Carroll had never seen the guy before and he looked bad, dirty and pathetic like one of those TV bad guys) and says, “Can I help you?” shouting it real mean and making it sound more like What the fuck are you doing outside of my door? “No,” Carroll muttered. “Sorry.” Scampered back to his own apartment, where he remained all day wishing he had that paper so he could look for a new place to live though that thought eventually went the way of the maintenance man’s next wheelbarrow load, and indeed, months later when he found himself cornered in the elevator with Dead-beat the guy acted like he’d never before laid eyes on Carroll, who, of course, endured the ride somewhat less comfortably.

  What he is seeking this morning in his bold foray into the universal clique of Styrofoam coffee cups and segmented newspapers is information on where to go for some new clothes, threads, Chase would say. Ads, subliminally lodged behind his eyes from being flashed before him on television, for department stores and their sales, should, he hopes, have less glitzy but more informative siblings hidden somewhere in the folds of Saturday’s Los Angeles Times. The Broadway, Bullock’s, the May Company, Nordstrom, names that he knows he’s seen, places that must sell clothing, nice clothing, but he needs a hotter trail. The ads, the TV ads, always turn him off for some reason. Odd, then, how he remembers so well the even cheesier ads for 976 chat lines and pitches for party-line phone sex delivered by lascivious-looking (but always flawed) women holding princess phones and pining for verbal company. Who could have predicted this industry? They knew about computers, they knew about cocaine, they probably even knew about music video, but who ever would have guessed that phone sex would become the burgeoning industry it seems to be. Response to AIDS, he considers, and immediately feels out of his depth, like this is stuff best left to the commentators who follow the local news, purporting to be station manager or maybe news director. Those guys use words like AIDS as if they’re supposed to, get away with saying stuff that would embarrass Carroll to death if he ever tried it. Condom. Lesbian. Words best left in print. After all, what does he know about sex? This is the place: GYROS, FALAFEL, HAMBURGERS, TACOS, OPEN 7:00AM, and underneath it all a hand-drawn cup of coffee with three squiggly lines rising out of it to indicate how hot it really is. This place, he’s seen it before, it’ll do fine. It even has a little wraparound counter and some refolded newspapers strewn about the stool tops. A guy in an apron-protected silk shirt collects shavings from a sweating column of unidentifiable meat, makes a sandwich, and hands it to a customer with already greasy lips. At this hour! Glazed and powdered donuts sit atop the counter. Carroll’s speed.

  Two glazed and one powdered, exactly, a small black on the side, as ordered, augmented at the last moment with Moca-Mix from a warm commercial carton, as consumed, just like at Winchell’s when he stopped to use the bathroom . . . had to be four, five months ago. The Moca–Mix carton is sitting in a stainless-steel pan full of water-once-ice, which Carroll knocks as he reaches for it, causing it to splash around. This elicits a suspicious look from the mustard-colored chef, who decides that it might be a good time to renew the ice and mitigate future spilling. To him Carroll looks like someone who is destined to add more cream to his coffee as soon as room is made in the Styro-foam cup. To Carroll the chef looks displeased at this unforeseen chore, and he guesses that he’s now persona non grata at this place. He decides to lie low, burying himself in the paper and propitiously coming up with a full-page ad for the Semi-Annual Men’s Sale at the Broadway. Locations are listed, and it is decided that the Beverly Center—though the garage parking confused and intimidated him when he was there last year, causing him to lose his ticket and pay without argument a full day’s rate for what should have
been three hours free—is the place to go. Hastily he finishes his breakfast, avoiding the eyes of Mustard Chef and leaving a quarter on the counter as a compromise between leaving nothing and leaving a real tip. He can never tell at a place like this. Sometimes they have little baskets that say Thank You! and this is nice because you know what to do, and because the clinking of coins sounds the same even if you don’t put in a lot.