Self-Made Man

by Norah Vincent

  But as I began to understand more about the shame that arose in men from the need to visit places like this, and the un-doubted shame that arose in the dancers for having to work in them, I thought I began to understand something more about the kind of woman that becomes a sex object in the eyes of men. A lot of women have asked themselves why so many men are so fond of modern porn stars and centerfolds, women who aren’t real women, whose breasts are fake, whose hair is bleached into straw or perversely depilated, whose faces are painted thick, and whose bodies have been otherwise altered by surgery or diet to conform with doll-like exactitude to something that isn’t found in nature. Why, I had so often wondered, didn’t men want real women? Was it misogyny, a kind of collective repressed homosexuality or perhaps pedophilia that really wanted a body type that more resembled a man’s or a child’s, fatless and smooth?

  For some, this is no doubt true, or why would magazines like Barely Legal, full of pre-and parapubescent girls, sell so well? Why would the fashion industry, long dominated by gay men, demand that women starve themselves until their bodies, hipless and breastless, look like the bodies of adolescent boys?

  But as I made my way through strip club after strip club in search of some kind of answer, I wondered if maybe it didn’t come back to shame. I knew from my own sexual fantasies that there is something appealing at least in the abstract about fucking someone who isn’t there. When pure fucking and animal release is what you’re thinking about—and that is what the male sex drive at its basest seems to be all about—you don’t want there to be any witnesses. You don’t want to be a dirty, senseless animal with someone you love or respect or are capable of loving and respecting. You’d be too ashamed for her to see that part of you in the light of day, and isn’t a mind something like the light of day? A real woman is a mind, and a mind is a witness, and a witness is the last thing you need when you’re ashamed. So fucking a fake, mindless hole is what you need. The faker the better.

  I suppose, oddly enough, when it came to genuinely heterosexual men, all of this added up in my mind to something that might have been the opposite of misogyny, the idea being that you could only treat as an object something that resembled a real woman as little as possible, because only then could you bear to mis-treat it and yourself enough to satisfy your instincts.

  Who knows? I certainly couldn’t know with any kind of surety. But I knew what it was like to fantasize about women in the cold abstract, and I knew that when you did you weren’t thinking about Ava Gardner. You were thinking about some anonymous, chesty, helium-voiced cheerleader slut blowing you in the locker room during halftime.

  I’d been there in my head, though as I had just learned, there is a world of difference between going there in your head and doing it for real. But now I was here, where I could partake in this world as Ned, and at least stand for a while on the receiving end of what it had to offer. When I did, I found something more than the discomfort of being a woman in a man’s world. I found at least what I thought was a glimpse of the discomfort of being a man in a man’s world and what that did to women as well as men, and I felt something that I hadn’t expected to feel. Genuine sympathy.

  Still, thus far I was just a visitor, orbiting the periphery from a safe distance, and that could tell me only so much. I knew after visiting the Lizard Lounge with Phil that I wasn’t going to put myself through the added torture of spending more time in these places with someone I didn’t know. Besides, Phil’s family life made it hard for him to get away. So after bowling one Monday night, I asked my teammate Jim if he wanted to go to the local hole and get a beer with me. We’d gotten to know each other fairly well. Besides, he’d talked of wanting to go to a strip club on his ski vacation, so I knew he had the taste for it, as well as a dire need for distraction.

  His wife had been given her second cancer diagnosis a few weeks prior, and it was clear from the little he said about it that there wasn’t much hope on the horizon. It was equally clear that he had nobody to talk to about it, and the rage and pain boiling up inside him were reaching critical mass. He was having trouble sleeping, so when she went to bed, often as early as nine o’clock, instead of watching cable reruns and smoking pot until the wee hours in a desperate effort to pass out, he’d head down to the bar to try to find some comfort in that oblivious company. I convinced him to come to the titty bar with me as often as he could make it, and it became a regular thing with us for a while. We’d head down there and play pool for a few hours, he’d let out some of what was eating him, and we’d soak up the miasma of that place like it was therapy, letting it corrupt us, until chatting with naked women and ducking into cubicles to have your parts rubbed seemed almost normal.

  The local was windowless, ill lit and choked with cigarette smoke. Once inside, you wouldn’t know whether it was day or night. This was something all these places had in common, probably because they were usually open by midday, and well patronized much of the afternoon. I guess they figured even people who make a habit of it prefer to do their sinning in the dark.

  The local had a large ovoid bar, also characteristic, with two small square stages in the center, one girl dancing on each, working the pole and sprawling on the blinking squares of light that flashed on and off beneath her.

  There was a kitchen in back that served French fries, hot dogs, burgers and wings, but you weren’t well advised to consume anything there that had once been alive. Next to the kitchen there was a large red and white sign that said NO BIKER COLORS. I’d seen signs like this in other places, though they usually said NO CLUB COLORS, or simply, NO COLORS. I’d asked Jim what that meant, and he’d said, “You know, gangs.”

  Foolishly, I’d said; “You mean Bloods and Crips, that kind of thing?”

  “No,” he’d laughed. “These are white people.”

  He meant motorcycle gangs like the Warlocks—who were reputedly much worse than the Hell’s Angels—and other clubs like the Breed and the Pagans. They were rumored to be regulars at places like this, though I never saw many of them. But then, without their colors, I wouldn’t necessarily have recognized them for what they were.

  I do remember one guy, though, whom I wouldn’t otherwise have noticed, who, thinking back on it now, was probably a gang member. He was well over six feet tall and wide as a doorway, and he had that just-try-it attitude about him that made you realize he could do just about anything he wanted and back it up with lethal force. Jim and I were sitting at the bar. Jim had gone to the bathroom and had left his coat on the back of his stool. There were several empty stools on either side of us, but this guy wanted Jim’s stool. He came over, took Jim’s coat and threw it on the floor. As he did so, stupidly I opened my mouth to protest that someone was sitting there. He stopped in midswipe and shot me one of those mock, raised-eyebrow looks that says, “You were saying…?” but whose real intent is “Do you wanna die?”

  I’d never been on the receiving end of one of those gratuitous alpha male assertions, but it’s the kind of thing you don’t misinterpret, except maybe when you’re piss drunk. I saw my error instinctively and redirected accordingly.

  “Don’t worry, man,” I said, raising my palm in a defensive gesture, “I wouldn’t dream of it.”

  He nodded and took the stool. Three guys sitting farther along the bar burst out laughing, as did I. I guess not everyone reacted the way I did, though. Certainly no rival biker would. Hence, I supposed, the need for the sign at the end of the bar.

  Also at the far end of the bar was a large TV mounted high on the wall. Two others were placed similarly around the room. This, too, was typical of most of these places. The multiple sets were almost always tuned to a sporting event, usually basketball, football or hockey.

  Off to the side there were two pool tables and the cramped couch room, which was so small and unobtrusive that I had assumed it was a broom closet until the first time I played pool and saw one of the dancers emerge from it with a customer. Even then I was still naive enough to think that
only one dance could possibly be going on in there at any given time. My first time back there, though, I found out otherwise. There could be as many as three or four couples going at it in a space the size of a bathroom.

  I became a regular at the local, going on as many nights as I could over the course of several weeks, sometimes with Jim, sometimes alone. I met Gina on my first night out with Jim. I’d been to the local a couple of times before on my own but hadn’t stayed long. Early on I found it hard to make myself go to these places at all, much less regularly. They depressed me so much it would take me days to recover from a single jaunt.

  Jim took a shine to Gina right away because she had large breasts—he liked big tits—and because she did this thing when she danced where she’d put her tit in her mouth and bite the nipple, pulling back and forth on it with her teeth for a good fifteen seconds, and stretching her flesh like pizza dough. Jim liked that a lot.

  “Ouch” was all I could think.

  Gina was a tiny woman, five feet tops, and aside from her double-D breasts, she was built like a sixteen-year-old gymnast. Her ass was high and tight without a hint of cellulite, and the only signs of the life she’d lived were the clutch of stretch marks on her belly, which was otherwise as firm and juvenile as the rest of her. She claimed to be thirty-four, which may have been a lie, but she could pass for it in the dark.

  She said she had three sons, two teenagers and a three-year-old. She had been dancing since the age of eighteen, the year she’d had her first child. I’d assumed that that had been her reason for starting, but she claimed not to have needed the money. She had grown up with her grandparents in a wealthy suburb, and though not rich themselves, they had been well enough off to give her what she needed. She maintained that even now she didn’t do it for the money, but if that was true, and not just some line she handed us, then her life was a whole lot sadder than I’d thought.

  When I asked her why she danced at the local if she didn’t really need the money, she said simply: “I love men.” Even if this had been true when she’d started out, which was doubtful, it certainly wouldn’t have remained so in this of all places. It was a little like saying you became a coroner because you were a people person.

  The more we talked, the more I was struck not by her purported love of men but by her apparent distaste for women. She talked about women’s parts as if they were garbage. She found them repellant, she said, and far from finding the men she pleasured disgusting, she wondered why they didn’t find her disgusting. She couldn’t understand, she said, why anyone would want to get within a mile of a pussy. She went on about this for a while—too long—screwing up her face as she said, “Wet sloppy pussy, ew.” It didn’t surprise me that she was filled with self-loathing—everyone in this place was—but the vehemence of her expressed dislike for the female anatomy and her abiding love of men as a so-called species gave me the impression that she was working pretty hard to cover over something traumatic from the past or to repel her true feelings about the present, but then I guessed that went with the territory.

  She wasn’t going to let me or any other customer know what she was really thinking. Deflecting the truth was part of the biz, integral to the whole show we were putting on for each other. Nobody came here looking for reality. Obviously, everyone came to escape it. And maybe to these guys, and a lot of guys, this seemed like fantasyland. But in reality it was the exact opposite. It was as real and ugly as it got, right down to the stretch marks and the careworn sofas. It was far uglier than all but the ugliest of life out there. Walking into one of these places wasn’t an escape. It was like walking into the gritty subconscious, the very place most people were trying to avoid in the first place.

  “I’m hot and wet,” Gina said.

  She said that a lot, whenever there was a lull in the conversation.

  “I’m so horny,” she’d add, reminding us that the relief for her condition was only a couch away.

  Then she’d segue into something neutral like the pool game Jim and I were playing, as if that were just the normal flow of conversation.

  “I’d shoot at the five in the side pocket if I were you. If you put a little backspin on it, that’ll give you a nice leave for the seven in the corner.”

  She professed to be a shark, and I didn’t doubt it. She’d linger with us at the table for a few minutes calling shots and watching us miss most of them.

  She was a good saleswoman, the only stripper I met who could really play the game with any conviction. Unlike the other girls, who did little to conceal their dislike for you and the whole job, Gina was pretty good at pretending she liked you. Like the consummate politician, she’d remember your name from night to night, and even wave and shout encouragement at you from the stage when you were shooting for the eight ball. She’d come over between dances and put her arm around you and chat, and make you forget for a few minutes that this was all just a transaction.

  She climbed into my lap one night, wrapping her legs around my waist and her arms around my neck as I sat on a stool by the pool table.

  “How ya doin’, Ned?” she said, smiling.

  I usually dreaded these interactions with other strippers. They’d solicit you at the bar with their tits in their hands, sometimes with semisneers on their faces, and ask you how you were, often in the most hostile and obviously uninterested way. You’d have to pretend along with them, cracking that stiff smile, and make a little small talk before you put a dollar in their cleavage. Sometimes certain strippers latched on to me, holding my hand against their breasts for a good minute while they spoke about whatever came to mind. Usually what came to mind was how long and tiring a day they’d had. They probably did it hoping for another deposit from someone who looked like a sucker, but sometimes I wondered if I could feel a little desperation in it and a faint ring of truth when they’d say, “Can I take you home with me?” or when they’d stroke my hair and say, “You’re so sweet. Such a baby face. How old are you?”

  It didn’t matter what they said. It all made me feel bad. I didn’t like being their client. I didn’t like how they disliked me because of it. Most of all I didn’t like how much I identified with that dislike, and how much it made me want to assure them and myself that I wasn’t like the other patrons. But sometimes, when I’d been playing the role for long enough, that was hard even for me to believe. After all, I was there more often than most of them were, and just being there, for whatever reason, made me feel like I was lying to myself about not belonging.

  But when Gina got in your lap, she didn’t hold out or expose her body parts for tips. She’d just sit there and talk to you as if she’d known you all your life. There wasn’t much to say, just pleasantries, but it didn’t feel forced. It was disarming, and as distant as I was from real interest, I bought into the emotional fantasy a little, out of relief mostly. For once, someone made it easy to just talk for a minute like two people who enjoyed each other’s company.

  All of this was designed to get you in the back room eventually. She wasn’t pound foolish. She knew that if she just worked you like a mercenary, like most of the other girls did, she’d only get a few singles out of the encounter, but if she played you like a schoolgirl crush, she’d probably score at least a twenty, maybe more, on a lap dance or two before the evening was out. And that’s what usually happened. I watched her work, and I saw her disappear into the couch room far more often than the other girls, some of whom were significantly younger than she was.

  The first time I watched her go back there, she went with a guy who looked like Papa Hemingway, except that he was dressed in business attire: a white button-down, navy dress trousers and wing tips. Gina liked to use the couch nearest the door. It was perpendicular to the door, and it jutted out a little past the door frame. Because the black curtain across the door extended only three-quarters of the way down, you could see or surmise a lot of what was happening behind it. I could see Gina’s legs. She was kneeling between Papa Hemingway’s wing tips, her tin
y bare feet curled under her on the floor. As she did her thing, her feet curled and uncurled rhythmically in time with Papa Hemingway’s right foot, which was tapping softly on the floor, as if to a slow beat. She’d kicked off her shoes at the door. One of them had fallen on its side. Next to them was a pile of cash, Gina’s take. The picture of all this, the corner of the couch, the shoes artfully kicked off, the cash on the floor, Gina on her knees and Papa’s wing tips astride her, would have made the perfect advertisement for this place in all its sordid glory, or something you would have seen in Playboy as a cartoon, with a caption above it saying: “I’ll be home soon, honey.”

  A big biker guy in leather and denim with a Charles Manson beard and a lot of piercings in his face sat just outside the couch room, taking the money as the girls came and went, and peeking behind the black curtain periodically to make sure everything was copacetic.

  I would have said he did it for titillation, too, but from the bored expression on his face I got the feeling that once you’d been in one of these places for a while the sight of tits and ass and simulated coitus didn’t do much for you anymore. It was like porn or violence in films. Seeing all this day in and day out, you’d become so inured to everything these places were selling—nudity and beer and two-bit orgasm—that you’d have to keep upping the ante to feel anything at all.

  Fantasy is a necessary veil, and when you rip it away, the opposite of what you think will happen, happens. Gratification kills desire. And constant gratification kills it permanently until even naked, willing women seem made of cardboard.