Self-Made Man

by Norah Vincent

  The real money is in lap dances, which in most places are twenty dollars each. But again, these are nothing like what we see in popular movies. They aren’t dances at all. They’re naked or mostly naked full-contact gyrations designed not for anything so quaint as titillation, but to make the man come within the five minutes he’s paid for.

  As I would learn later, there was actual sex going on in some of these places. At another bar about a half hour down the road from the Lizard Lounge, a place that had a reputation for being a virtual front for prostitution, especially in the midafternoon when it was slow, I fished around a bit to see how far the girls would go. I’d been told by a former regular that the wallet was the limit there, and that the garbage can in the men’s room was littered with used condoms. That wasn’t true the night I was there, but I asked one of the dancers anyway whether we could do more than grind. She told me it was a no go; that the management was cracking down. A girl had been fired there that very day for blowing someone in one of the VIP rooms.

  It made sense that it was in the management’s best interests to discourage this kind of thing, since they risked having their establishments shut down if they turned a blind eye. It was the girls alone, apparently, who pocketed the extra money if they chose to do more than dance. But then again, if a place acquired the reputation among regulars of employing girls who went the extra mile, naturally that tended to attract more customers by word of mouth. It was a balancing act either way.

  After my first encounter with a floor girl, I decided that if I was really going to get inside this world I was going to have to take a seat stageside, which would mean coming out of the protective shadows, crossing the room in front of all these men, and taking one of the coveted places up front.

  Up there guys put their money in their teeth and leaned into the dancers, who took the payment between their breasts or thighs, while the guys looked up at them with awe and gratitude for their favors.

  Phil was gung ho, eager for me to have the full experience, so we took our bottles of water and found two spots next to the stage.

  The first girl up was billed as a Penthouse darling, a supposed cut above the hamburger on the floor. Hence, the emcee demanded louder applause for her. But, to my surprise, the whistles and claps were scattered. Nobody was kidding himself. This was a dive. Anybody who was dancing here wasn’t prime. There was about as much electricity in that crowd as there is in the weekly bingo game at the VA—which is, frighteningly enough, sort of how I’d describe the whole ambience of the place. It looked and felt like a converted rec room. There were no windows or decorations of any sort. Just the metal frame vinyl chairs, and the rickety tables, and the low stage, and a turnstile at the front entrance where two paunchy creatures standing behind an empty glass display case took the cover charge and the twenties from the private dancers.

  I was right up front, a clean-cut sore thumb, with my button-down shirt and my fresh face. I wanted Ned to be handsome, but this wasn’t the place for it. I was dressed for a date, and this was a hellhole.

  The Penthouse girl came on in a cop’s dress blues and an officer’s cap, visibly embarrassed by the lack of noise she was generating, even at the prospect of getting naked. She strutted around for a minute shaking her French-manicured index finger at the crowd. But since this didn’t elicit much remorseful applause, she ripped her shirt and pants off by their Velcro seams, revealing the black G-string bikini underneath and a pair of knee-high black vinyl stiletto boots.

  “Who wants a blow job?” the emcee called out.

  The dancer motioned for a volunteer to come on stage. A skinny, young Asian guy in the front row eagerly obliged. The dancer put a beach towel down on the stage in front of her, and motioned for him to lie on it on his back. As he did so, he looked at her and us with a kind of disbelieving glee, as if to say: Is she really going to blow me right here, right now?

  I felt complicit just watching and every bit as depraved as the participants. I was a participant whether I liked it or not. The act of watching the show had made me part of it, and as a woman—and the only woman in the room who wasn’t for sale—I couldn’t help putting myself in the stripper’s place, imagining all those dehumanizing pairs of eyes coursing over me, and the emcee’s voice dangling me in front of them as bait. I couldn’t separate the stripper’s act from the hopeless life that I thought had probably led her or trapped her into doing this for a living. I couldn’t help measuring that life against my own, which now seemed shamefully privileged and unearned by comparison. But then, looking around the room at all the thoughtless consumption these guys were doing, taking in these women like a drug, like another faceless hit from the bottle, I felt this comparison collapse, and the supposedly monumental difference between us disappear. I knew that the circumstances of her life or of mine didn’t make any difference in this place. To these guys she had no life. She was generic and rootless, just her component female parts devoid of any individuation. And so, therefore, was I. I didn’t have to put myself in her place. I was in her place, just another piece of ass for the picking, had they only known it.

  The Asian guy threw himself down so greedily that his sneakers bounced like a toddler’s as his legs flopped apart. The dancer got on her knees above him and opened his fly. She reached in, pulled up the elastic on his underwear and peeked underneath. She held up her thumb and forefinger in the universal sign for small dick, and the crowd laughed. She reached behind her and pulled a porn-size dildo out of a black bag. She placed it on top of the volunteer’s crotch, holding it with one hand as she ran her tongue up and down its shaft and around the simulated head. This brought more life to the crowd and she worked it, taking the full length of the prop into her throat. This elicited a mild frenzy and the predictable climax. She leaned back for the money shot, and the dildo squirted its milk high into the air. She held it up to reveal a pump on its underside. Again there was laughter, and then the trick was over. The Asian guy stood up and scampered off the stage, fumbling with his Dockers.

  Hurriedly the stripper put her props away and stood up, motioning for more applause, but the zenith had come and gone.

  “Everybody say ‘Get naked,’” instructed the emcee.

  The crowd coughed the response and it fell flat around them. The girl winced again with embarrassment.

  “Oh, no,” said the emcee, “that’s not going to be good enough. You want to see her naked? Then everybody shout ‘Get naked.’”

  Again, the crowd obliged weakly.

  Now the emcee was embarrassed, too.

  “Okay,” he tried again. You could hear him groaning on her behalf. “Let’s try that one more time. Do you want to see this babe naked or not?”

  The cry rallied louder this time—“Get naked.” But you could still feel the inertia in it, overcome only by the necessity of the transaction.

  It would have to be good enough. Off came the bikini to reveal the usual preternaturally bulbous fake breasts sitting way too high and semidetached on her blanded torso.

  She offered them to the crowd, one in each hand, circling the rim of the stage. She stopped in front of the guy to my left, a thick-spittled computer geek in ill-fitting wire-framed specs. He stood up nervously with a few crumpled bills in his hand, took off his glasses and blinked his bloated reddened eyes blindly as he tripped a little closer to the stage. He placed his head between her nurtureless breasts for a few moments, then bumbled back to his seat, replacing his glasses with a stupid smile.

  For her last act Miss Penthouse distributed a few party favors, a couple of T-shirts and a few copies of her porno videos.

  “Ten bucks,” said the emcee. “Ten bucks for a video. Who wants one? Who’s got ten bucks for the lady?”

  Several shouts and bills went into the air, and the dancer strutted back and forth, running her tongue up the spine of one of the video boxes. She stopped in front of the chosen buyer, an obvious regular who, with his greased-back hair and his soiled yellow short-sleeved button-down s
hirt, looked like a registered sex offender. She squatted above him, spread her legs, and slid the lubricated box back and forth between her labia, then handed it to him. He ran the moistened edge of the box under his nose like a fine cigar, inhaling with a satisfied smirk. The crowd loved that.

  The dancer did the same with the rest of the videos. She flossed the full length of the T-shirts between her legs, too, and then tossed them up for grabs into the seats. They too were sniffed for traces of her scent.

  But I doubted if there was any scent. These women were nothing if not dry—dry and factory smooth as the dolls they were mimicking. Thinking this reminded me of a gay man I’d known, who, when I asked him why he preferred men, said, “Because they’re so nice and dry.”

  There was the same gay misogyny on display in these clubs. These weren’t women. They were factory-authorized, snipped, treated and depilated of anything offensive. The original German Barbie was modeled on a sleazy pinup, then whittled and air-brushed into peach exactitude for middle-American consumption, and these women were in turn modeled on her, right down to the plastic shoes.

  In its natural state, the vagina is not a delicate instrument. It breathes and salivates and even ejaculates, and it always has an odor. These women had no odor, even when they’d been sweating on stage and they put your face between their legs, as one of them did to me when I sat up front. They were odorless. They were freeze-dried. I wondered what they did to themselves before the show to make their parts so unripe.

  When she’d given away all her T-shirts and videos, Miss Penthouse left the stage, waving and blowing kisses as she went. I took the opportunity to leave Phil to his own devices for a while and vacate my seat at the front. I told him I was going to look for a private dance, and he smiled approvingly, raising his hand in the air and making the hang loose sign with his pinky and index finger.

  I headed over to the back wall where the girls on deck were lounging together, smoking and staring off into the middle-distance like waitresses on a break.

  Back there, off to the side, there was an open rectangular boothlike room with ten swivel chairs inside it. The chairs were lined up against the two long walls of the rectangle, and bolted to the floor. One of the long walls was only a half wall, like a pass-through in a kitchen, so that people lurking in the back of the main room could spy on what was happening in the booth.

  Most of the chairs were occupied by fully clothed men, each of whom had one of the naked girls sitting on his lap, facing him with her legs wrapped around his torso or gripping the floor for traction as she ground her crotch into his. Some of the girls were facing out, also in the straddle position, with their backsides likewise grinding against the men. In this place there seemed to be no provision against touching the girls, because the men were madly pawing and sucking the girls’ breasts as they thrust against them with ecstatic upturned faces.

  I was staring shamelessly, but this was, after all, what I’d come for, what the management expected. Why else the open wall? This was their best advertisement. There was a long line to get into the booth.

  One of the men, a very young guy in a football jersey, probably in his early twenties if that, had swiveled his chair all the way around so that he was facing the open wall. His baseball cap was turned fashionably sideways on his head, a cool affectation that only made him look younger. He was hugging the dancer loosely around the neck, his chin resting limply on her smooth shoulder. He wasn’t moving his hips. His face was slack. His eyes were open, and surprisingly gentle, and he was looking directly at me almost sweetly through a glaze of comfort, like a sleepy child being carried by his mother through the supermarket. He knew I was watching him, but he didn’t turn his eyes away, and he didn’t judge or threaten me for looking. He just looked back at me and rested there on her naked shoulder, soaking up whatever calm it was giving him.

  I looked at him like another mother—I couldn’t help it—and maybe in this strange, disjointed place he could see that. Maybe he could see that I felt sorry for him in the best possible sense, and maybe that was okay when no one else was looking. Or maybe he was just too stoned to know.

  The rest of the men were doing their business mechanically, lined up side by side as unabashedly as if they were pissing at the urinals in a roadside public restroom, just satisfying an urge, doing what needed to be done.

  That was, in fact, something Phil had said to me early on:

  “C’mon, man, you know. For us guys getting off is a biological necessity, like going to the bathroom.”

  It didn’t matter that the couples on either side of these guys were close enough to touch, and it didn’t matter that people like me were watching. Why should it? There was nothing intimate, nothing meaningful going on. To these guys it seemed that true privacy was reserved only for their midmorning shit.

  Observing this, I was frightened, standing there very much alone. As a woman teeming prototypically with all my necessary illusions, confronted with this spectacle of male factory function, I felt a despair that was salvaged only by the knowledge that I was not heterosexual. I didn’t want companionship or partnership with men. But most women do and that is why they don’t want to know, they can’t know that maybe they are making love to someone who is really just fucking them. This is not the whole picture, of course, but it is a freeze frame, a worst case scenario, and when I saw it and thought about it and allowed it to insult me, not just as a woman, but as an emotionally needy sexual mind, I felt very small and lost in my costume. I needed, as many women do, more than a carnal connection to happen in sex, but in this of all places it was absurd to go looking for it, or to be hurt when you didn’t find it. I wondered, though, if I wasn’t feeling a ruder version of the clash that can happen when men and women try to reconcile their sex lives.

  I stayed for a little while longer at the back of the room, noticing the crowd, which was made up mostly of younger men, and a few scruffy recluses in their fifties and sixties. As I considered the expression on their faces while they watched the dancers on the stage, I could see, at times, an odd reverence in their eyes, at others a bland disinterest. But there was no condescension in their gaze, no hatred for this low thing they felt compelled to watch. They all seemed uniformly addled by the spectacle, staring at these body parts on display, as if they hadn’t seen them a thousand times before in magazines and films and settings just like these.

  I wanted to know what it felt like to be inside that feeling, but the closest I was going to come was a lap dance, and even then it would be different. Still, I wanted to know how these women would treat me when they were the supposed object of my lust, and I was paying for it. I looked back at the dancers who were on break, the ones who were waiting for requests, and tried to choose one.

  There was one who was truly beautiful in a natural way. She was young, probably nineteen or so. Her dirty-blond hair looked real, as did her breasts. She was wearing very little makeup. In the dark it looked like none at all. She didn’t need much. Her skin was uniformly smooth, as yet unblemished.

  I motioned to her to come to me and she got up from her chair, playing into the fantasy, smiling very sweetly as she took my hand and led me to the creatures standing behind the glass display case up front. She held out her hand for the money, and I gave it to her. She gave it to the two men at the register with what seemed to me to be a sad resignation. For all the shabby, commercial look and feel of the place we might as well have been at the gun counter in a sporting goods store.

  After paying, I asked the girl if we could go somewhere more private than the open booth. She nodded and led me back behind a partition that was off to the side of the stage. Behind it, there were five small couches, each bounded on three sides by smaller partitions that afforded a semiprivacy. She led me to a vacant one and motioned for me to sit down. When I did she asked me to take my keys and change and anything else sharp or abrasive out of my pockets. Then she draped a silk negligee across my lap. She had taken it from a group of such garment
s that was hanging across the top of the partition that divided this closed section from the rest of the club. When everything was in place, she straddled my lap and sat down.

  She began grinding immediately. I knew that she could feel my fake dick through my pants. She was the first woman who had. It must have seemed very odd to her that it wasn’t hard, but then maybe some of the people who came here did so to remedy erectile dysfunction, or persist in it anonymously.

  At first I was frozen, lying back on the couch, my arms limp at my sides, my head turned away, my eyes closed almost as a reflex. I had never done this with someone I hadn’t at least taken to dinner first. The act wasn’t new to me, of course, but it was detached from the necessary precursors: emotion, seduction, imagination, mental connection—the things that are, perhaps, the hallmarks of female sexuality, and the very things that these strip joints and lap dances lacked. There was no pretense of foreplay here, mental or otherwise, and for me that took everything pleasurable out of the experience.

  As she kept on, I put myself somewhere else. I tried to pretend that she was someone I knew and liked and wanted to be with. But it didn’t really work. I tried to grind against her, too, but it was just a forced motion, tawdry and ridiculous.

  Then it ended abruptly, just as the song ended, and she asked me if I wanted to go longer—lap dances are timed and paid for by the length of a song. I thanked her and said no. She smiled and stood up, pulling me up with her to make way for another dancer and her customer, who were already nudging their way into the cubicle. As I tried to collect myself, the incoming dancer brushed me away impatiently with the back of her hand.

  I had a number of lap dances as Ned, and they always felt the same. Actually I could hardly remember what they felt like, because they didn’t usually feel like much of anything. To me, when they were happening, they were mostly a blank, as blank as the faces of the dancers and the dead air behind their faces. I remember being struck again and again by the emptiness in the dancers’ eyes. After performing, they usually made the rounds of the bar to solicit bills from onlookers, since few people ever bothered to make their way up to the stage to slip something in their G-strings. It was during these encounters, when I tried to engage them in conversation, that I saw how vapid they were or had made themselves to survive this work. That depressed me most of all.