Stripper Lessons

by John O'Brien

  Thus energized, if not excessively nourished, he takes to the star-studded sidewalk for the jaunt back to his apartment. It’s getting warm. Busses everywhere blow huge brown clouds of particulate exhaust, so heavy they visibly hold their space like small patches of fog. Hollywood Boulevard, both ways, vanishes into these clouds; they hold the secrets of the vanishing point. Men and women asleep on the sidewalk are covered in a layer of real soot on the outside and no doubt on the inside as well. Tourists just hitting town from the heartland try hard not to look too discouraged at their first glimpse of the glamour. Those heading out to the airport peer around hopefully for the basis of a found memory. These people—here comes a family now, Mom and Dad in matching I Survived a Tour of the Stars’ HORMONES tees, Son and Daughter looking despondent, cause unclear—worry Carroll. He knows they’re going home unhappy, embarrassed to have shared in this vacation error and ashamed to talk it out among themselves. Though they wonder if maybe things turned out this way through some deficiency within themselves, like someone who can’t scare up a conversation at a party, still they have unanimously taken private vows never to return here. It’s on their faces and may come out tangentially in an argument over finances next month. Then the floodgates will open, and Carroll will almost be able to hear the shouting from Ohio. Ohio. What must such a place be like? Why would they leave only to willingly hasten home. Carroll’s never traveled on a vacation, never left the area around Los Angeles.

  At home, still thinking of soot, he washes his face and then heads down to his Vega. Soot everywhere in the garage, both brought in and generated here, or is it just busses? The car starts right up, no problem, and once out of the garage he turns onto Hawthorne to the corner and Orange. That to Sunset, to La Cienega, that part where the hill is so steep that he hates to come the other way and have to work the clutch so fast, it slipping bad enough as it is anyway and the hill not helping matters. But down is okay, and La Cienega goes right past the Beverly Center. There’s an entrance to the tricky garage on that side, no problem.

  The garage is under the mall but above ground. So the first through the fifth floor (level?) is all garage, and then there are three levels of shopping. Carroll forgets this and, after changing his mind about his parking spot twice and ending up at last on the fourth level near the Beverly Boulevard escalator, travels down to street level via two moving staircases and walks precipitously down a third that is broken and inexplicably tougher to negotiate than a real staircase, which after all doesn’t move anyway, before catching up with his error and finding himself on the street with a group of tourists waiting to get in to the Hard Rock Cafe. A great pall of airborne grease hangs outside this place, and though it turns Carroll’s stomach the tourists seem not to mind standing in it like it’s some great gaseous preview trailer for the restaurant, or some odoriferous hors d’oeuvre for which they will later be charged along with the City of Angels Sacred Cowburgers: No mistake, sir, that’s the Fat o’Gristle Smog Inhalant Plate, which you and your family enjoyed on our patio prior to being seated. This cloud must always be here; Carroll remembers it from the last time he found himself standing in front of the Hard Rock Cafe, the last time he made this same mistake with the escalators, the last and only other time he was ever at the Beverly Center. He endures the by now endless ride back up. All the up escalators work fine, no surprise there, and he arrives at last on level six, the first shopping level, being dumped off the top of the escalator like a bale of hay in a loft.

  Bullock’s department store is the first thing he sees, BULLOCK’S, if the sign is to be believed. So he was wrong about the Beverly Boulevard escalator and will have to walk to the other end of the mall to find the Broadway, right next to the La Cienega Boulevard escalator, he remembers from last time. Should have left the car in that first parking space. No big deal, he’ll walk across the mall and maybe even find some shirts along the way, though it won’t be the Semi-Annual Men’s Sale anywhere but the Broadway. But there are sales. Right away he hits a men’s store with a big hand-lettered banner in the window that proclaims UP TO 70% OFF—AND MORE! The store is called Casa Nova, and the only people in it are two well-oiled and suited, mustached salesmen looking out at him with their hands folded behind their backs. Carroll’s not sure he wants to be in the store alone with these guys, and, as if sensing his trepidation, one of the men shrugs and bends down, picks up a bottle of Windex and a roll of paper towels, and returns to wiping the front of a glass case. Just then two large women, shopping-bag mountains in motion, push past him into the store and take up with the other salesman. Carroll follows, and Windex is on him in no time.

  “Hello,” he intones, taking in at a glance Carroll’s tri-colored polo and brown polyester slacks. With meaning: “Just let me know if there’s anything that I can do for you.”

  Carroll, feeling captured and released under surveillance, nods: okay, yeah, and commences what he expects to be a brief look around the place. But there are many things to see, and he has been out of the loop, to put it gently. Silk shirts in bright colors and intricate patterns abound, slashed, so slashed, slashed so that the prices are too low even to divulge on the tags. Rather a calculation is required, involving the red-pen price under the crossedout marked price and application of the formula ALL Shirts an Additional 20% OFF Ticketed Prices and, in Carroll’s case, at least at this early stage, further adjustment to the tune of Cash Buyers Receive 5% OFF on ALL Purchases. In most cases these formulae bring the final price of a crossed-out $145 shirt down to $24, but even this is undermined at the last moment by Windex, who upon noticing any customer pausing at or near any piece of merchandise, materializes at the side of said customer and confides in a conspiratorial tone something like, in this case, “Twenty bucks.”

  “Really?” says Carroll, tugging on the sleeve of a blue jobbie with, yes, gold curlicues. That’s a table dance, he reminds himself. “Only twenty bucks?”

  This is so good that Windex practically throws down his paper towels. “Yes, sir. These are going fast . . . in fact . . . (inspecting the tag). Hey Rudy! These Palomas aren’t supposed to be on sale, are they?”

  “Palomas? No, I don’t think so,” recites Rudy from the register.

  A concerned look visits Windex’s face. Carroll waits, feeling queasy about causing this kind of trouble and hoping he’s not committed to paying a hundred and forty-five bucks for this shirt that he had merely touched in passing.

  “Well it’s marked down here, and I just told this customer that I’d sell it for twenty bucks,” argues Windex.

  “Then I guess you’re gonna have to sell it for twenty bucks, but the boss is gonna kill you. . . . Oh, what the heck: do twenty, we could use the numbers.” Rudy returns to his register; this then is the final judgment.

  Use the numbers, thinks Carroll.

  “You heard him,” admits Windex.

  “Why don’t you try it on, sir,” suggests Rudy, now through with his ladies and unable to hold his tongue. He loves this stuff, maybe too much.

  “M,” reads Windex, checking the size and removing the shirt from the hanger. “Oh yeah, this’ll fit you just fine, especially at twenty bucks, huh?” He chuckles and winks at Carroll. Now it’s the three of them against the boss, who must be at lunch, or off today.

  “That’s okay,” says Carroll, loathing the idea of undressing and dressing in one of the little plywood closets in the rear of the store, doors so badly fitted that anyone would be able to see through the cracks. “M is my size, I’ll buy it.” He smiles weakly, feels kinda strange. “Oh,” he dares, fishing frantically in his pocket for the evidence. “I have cash. I’ll pay for it with cash. Is that an extra five percent off?”

  “What—Hey Rudy! He wants five percent for cash!—what? Are you trying to kill me?”

  Out. Finally. Something wrong with that guy, but an okay shirt, and that does it, he’s going straight to the Broadway. Someplace reputable. Big.

  But before he can make it to that end of the mall he
sees this girl (sort of cute but no Stevie), salesgirl, must be . . . yeah, salesgirl, smiling at him from behind the glass of a shop called Eclecticution. The place is dark and the crowd is young, but this girl looks friendly enough and he goes in and she just loves curlicues and thinks they would look great on him but maybe he should consider some other prints as well like say . . . oh maybe . . . this piece here with the little dragons on the sleeves and the big one on the back and he really doesn’t think so, well how about, well then that’s fine, how about this one with these so very fine fine green and aqua lines that blend into swirls, which are really like curlicues anyway and don’t they look great with your eyes and the shirt is on him and her hands are on him and it really doesn’t look half bad those fine lines and what the heck he takes it and the socks well I don’t know okay now how about some jeans and you’ll be all set and jeans yikes watch out for those hands and even on sale that’s two table dances. Well now, baby, I kinda dig the way you’re flashin’ those threads. Hands like a pussy. Clothes like condoms. Oh fuck! I’ll buy anything!

  More bags, more shops. The MasterCard that he keeps strictly for emergencies (and the bimonthly dinner out just so the bank knows he hasn’t died) is crying for mercy. Carroll has begun to use phrases like: You take credit cards, right? and Could I put this on my MasterCard?, and even found himself avoiding one store on which the little credit card decal was conspicuously absent. Which decal—indeed, in this case a sculpted brass icon—he spots with some relief from a distance on the marble facade that surrounds the prodigious entrance to the Broadway, which he has, at last, reached. There he goes. Right away they sell him two large and handled shopping bags for a quarter apiece from a sort of honor-system vending machine. The barges of shopping, and he loads all his other bags into them and heads for Men’s.

  And wouldn’t you know it! The Broadway doesn’t have a single thing that suits him, and isn’t it lucky that he had the foresight to make those other stops. He buys a package of underwear to obviate any guilt he might feel in getting the parking validation that he declined at each and every one of the other stores, thinking that the big spending would happen here. This done, he heads back to the Vega, finds it after only two wrong levels (floors?).

  Head for home. Solid afternoon now, but an anticipated late night at Indiscretions will give him time to review his purchases. Radio. Rap music. Okay, why not. One look at the bags in the seat next to him reminds Carroll that all bets are off. This is a new age. For that matter every age must be a new age. Solo is missing, Stevie is here. No shoes, and that wasn’t easy after the virtual foot massage from the rather effeminate clerk, moussed and labeled Chaz. Name tag gleamed with reflected fluorescents, and Carroll had to admit that the attention really wasn’t half bad, and that there are worlds of activity out there that he’ll never come close to knowing, and that how bad can it be when anybody likes anybody else, no matter why or what the reason for. Traffic has that nasty amateur rushhour quality of Saturday afternoons. Weekdays, at least, carry rules of misconduct. The rap follows too closely the traffic, and for that reason it bugs him and he turns it off. The general flow of things up La Cienega causes him to miss the Santa Monica Boulevard turn, and he gets railroaded into making that clutch-slipping climb up to Sunset that he hates. But it goes okay, and he supposes that this time he knew it would.

  Billboards loom large here on this stretch of Sunset, many of them private insider stuff: Film San Antonio or Academy Members—For Your Consideration. . . . Expensive hotels, private clubs, restaurants he would never have the nerve to walk into, just driving on the street here makes him feel like he crashed a party and the bouncer is looking for him to kick his ass out of here. Past the intersection at Crescent Heights though it gets better, grittier, and while he doesn’t feel any more at home here, he can count on the fact that no one would notice or care. There’s a burger place on the right, and he catches sight of, peeking out from the back of the white brick structure, a streetwalker, is a good name for this girl, a hooker. A long-time Hollywood resident, Carroll knows one of these girls when he sees her, and seeing one of these girls is something that rarely happens anymore. Not so long ago they lined Sunset from here to past Western like so many hymnals down the back of a church pew. Now gone. Swept away. He wonders what they could have done to incur such genocide, wonders what he could have done to overcome his confounded fear and muster the nerve to engage one of them, or at the very least to offer some verbal declination in response to their intriguing solicitations, accosting him at red lights. Once one tapped on his passenger window and with a heaving motion brought forth from her sweater a bosom that was really too small to bring off the trick, though this girl acted unaware, handled herself as if she were a legend of the streets. He simply drove away, looking straight ahead, eyeing her in his rearview mirror, a wound on his windshield.

  Coming back this way he likes to make the left at La Brea and up to Hawthorne from there, provided that the left-turn bay isn’t too full. If it is he can always cruise on by to Orange, a contingency plan that in the past has bought him horns from behind as he struggles to position himself for the unpainted left there, just a yellow diagonal slash due to the fact that the intersection jogs and they probably don’t know what else to paint there. The garage, when he finally reaches it after almost being assaulted by a gang of black boys jaywalking on Hawthorne and giving him looks so nasty that he wished he had left the rap music on the radio but didn’t really think that that would’ve helped matters just the same, is choked with exhaust fumes. Last year the ventilation fans broke down, and no one was allowed to get to their cars all morning; maybe this is the same problem, maybe he’s the first to discover it and should report it. But no, the maintenance man is there in the corner, fooling around with a large pipe, which doesn’t quite look like it would be part of the ventilation—water is leaking from the pipe—but surely the guy must realize that he can hardly breathe. For Carroll’s part, his eyes are watering and he feels lightheaded. He can only hope that Maintenance doesn’t decide to take a nap behind the Dumpster, but there’s no way he’s gonna bother that guy again, not after the light incident.

  Gathering his parcels, he hurries to the elevator, which is not quite as bad as the garage, and makes it nonstop to his floor. Safely in his apartment, first thing, he turns on the television, just for some company. He gets it in the form of . . . they look like chimpanzees. Yes, four of them, four of them in a row, separated by plywood partitions, each one half-heartedly, in that distracted way that chimps have, manipulating a joystick-like control that is mounted on a panel on their laps. This evidently being done in response to some off-camera stimulus in front of them, the plywood perhaps to keep them from seeing the responses of their fellows, keep them from cheating, or maybe they just like their privacy. It all looks pretty familiar to Carroll, who figures that these chimps are unlikely to do anything different today than they did yesterday, or whenever they were last subjected to this. Face it: even if one of them did something prodigious, say managed to design and construct a new microchip, an ozone patch, or a reusable spacecraft, we’d never take it seriously. Too close to home, too scary, too many potentially disorganized religions. Now a researcher, a not unattractive woman in a white lab coat (but still the legs sticking out), approaches chimp number two. She is explaining something that neither Carroll nor the chimp wants to listen to; it will only complicate their lives. But the chimp seems to dig it when she touches his head. Probably to him she is God, and Carroll has to admit that he kind of likes this woman too. She’s got things covered.

  Well enough of this. Though he’s growing weary of the whole concept—not to mention guilty over the expense—it’s time to try on clothes. Not as free as the dancing he did earlier in the week, trying on new clothes, alone with only a mirror, seems very narcissistic, a tribute to himself not the dancers, very commercial, like giving up, like when he tries something small, say this pair of socks, adds the shirt just like the girl told him to, some
thing this small and it still pains him to waltz in front of the mirror. It pains him so much that he does it twice, then again. And again, same socks, same shirt, now a little music to cover the noise of the television. He hates looking at himself, but when he invades the mirror for the fifth time in the same clothes he knows, like picking a scab, that he’ll do it again. This mirror is filthy. It’s cracked in the corner where it got screwed in too tightly. Always been dirty and always been cracked, long as Carroll can remember, from the first day he moved in, and that was a long time ago. He doesn’t like the place any better now than when he was scrubbing that first night and trying to convince himself he hadn’t made a mistake. Been here forever and won’t ever leave. Reminds him of Melissa at Indiscretions. She’s none too happy, no secret there. Always the same dance for that girl, been there forever but can’t walk off the stage. She hates those men for liking her, but that only makes them like her more. Carroll wonders what it would be like to sit down and talk with her, talk right past those big breasts. What then? Does she quit? Does he move?

  Time for another bag. Whaddawehavehere. . . ? Jeans. Green jeans, as a matter of fact, like Mr. Greenjeans on the old Captain Kangaroo. But these are green Guess jeans, probably outside the poor farmer’s budget. Was he the one with the bunny puppet? Was he the reason Carroll bought green jeans today? The reason Guess makes them? Sinister, that old guy, like the decaf coffee thing. They look okay, but what? is he supposed to wear them only with these socks and shirt? Then it looks too well planned, or maybe not; he wishes he knew more about this stuff, might’ve been better to have a salesgirl who was less pretty and more honest. Maybe she was, how would he know? Hit the mirror. And again. Okay. Enough of that one. Once more, then off. He grabs another bag, the first one. What was it? Oh yeah, blue with gold curlicues. Let’s see—oh man, he looks scrawny. Get that thing buttoned!