Amateur Night at the Bubblegum Kittikat

by Victoria Fedden

  The other dancers hated Brooklyn. She chose to work days when management had relegated the rest of them to the undesirable banker’s hours because they were older, uglier or had weighed in too heavy for nights. No one wanted dayshift because the money was rarely good and business was slower and inconsistent, making it far more competitive. Weirdos haunted our afternoons. Day laborers showed up at 3:30 stinking of construction sites looking for as cheap a thrill as possible. Mohammed had been the noontime hour’s ray of hope for the summer, but he hadn’t been in for at least a week now and no one knew where he was. Without him, weekdays were bleak for everyone but Brooklyn.

  “It’s weird,” I said to Charlie, my door guy.

  Charlie was a freckly Italian kid with a South Philly accent. Wearing his tux, with his hair pasted over to one side, Charlie looked like an eighth grader ready for his Confirmation. In the jacket, you couldn’t see his scars or his tattoos.

  “What’s that?” he asked.

  “The whole thing with Brooklyn. How she only wants to work days.”

  “She’s hot right?”

  “Gorgeous. These other girls can’t even come close,” I said.

  “I know, right? She’s like Sports Illustrated hot, yo.”

  “So why days?”

  “She’s got a kid. She works when he goes to preschool and with the money she banks, she’s only gotta work two days anyhow.”

  “I’ve never seen her with anybody but the brokers though.”

  “She don’t need nobody else.”

  “It’s gross though. Creeps me out. It’s like she’s their slave or something. Like they own her.”

  “Pfft. You got it all wrong, yo. All wrong. She owns them.”

  I hadn’t thought of it that way.

  “You think Brooklyn comes for them? Hell no. They only come on the days they know she’s working and some days she won’t even show up just to fuck with them. Keeps ’em on their toes, yo. That’s a smart bitch. Not many like her.”

  “What’s so great about her?” I asked.

  I waved in Bob, a disheveled regular who was at least seventy. One of the cocktail waitresses had told me Bob was a judge downtown and this is why they never threw him out when he groped the dancers. Among strip club employees you just never knew when someone was going to need a judge on their side.

  Charlie and I paused to watch Brooklyn. The brokers never went for the Champagne Room’s privacy. They liked to park themselves in plain view, dead center of the room, equal distance from the three stages. Middle of the first song, Brooklyn reclined atop a cocktail table in her royal blue spandex gown (she only wore blue because she thought it looked best with her espresso colored hair) with one leg outstretched, her seven inch, Lucite heel practically impaling the crotch of one of the stock brokers. The song faded out into the next before it was over. The DJ stopped all the songs short so the lap dances and table dances wouldn’t last as long and the customers would need to buy more and more to make their fun last longer. The girls on stage took their cue and wriggled out of their tops but Brooklyn left hers on.

  I read her lips.

  “I’m bored. Fuck this,” she said.

  Panther-like, Brooklyn sprung off the table and made her way towards me for her smokes. These girls all smoked. Marlboro Lights and Newport Lights were popular. The black chicks liked anything menthol for some reason I never understood and most of the dancers would at least toss a dollar in my fish bowl unless they were bitches. Brooklyn never tipped me once and could never find the time to say a simple please or thank you either. To me, that says a lot about a person.

  “Marlboro Lights,” she demanded.

  She banged the pack upside down on the counter three times, opened it and went out the front door to smoke.

  “I don’t see what the big deal is about her,” I complained to Charlie, who craned his neck backwards trying to watch her smoke under the valet awning.

  “She’s hot.”

  “Most of the girls in here are hot. It’s got to be something else.”

  “Look at her. She knows she’s not supposed to be outside and she goes anyway. Those dudes paid her for a three dance set and she left after the first song. She doesn’t just break the rules, she makes her own rules. Plus she’s a fucking bitch. Makes her hotter and god damn look at her ass. Look at it. I would love to hit that shit. Black hair, blue eyes, no tan lines. God damn.”

  “Ok, I get it, don’t get yourself too excited over there.”

  Brooklyn never came back in. I don’t know where she went or why, but the stock-brokers were heart broken. After waiting for about a half an hour, during which some of the other dancers made futile attempts at selling them table dances, the stock brokers packed it up. Shortly thereafter the phone wouldn’t stop ringing. Every five minutes, I’m not kidding you, the broker named Jason would call.

  “Is Brooklyn back yet?” he asked.

  “Is Brooklyn dancing?” the next time.

  Then he changed it up to “Is Brooklyn working today?” I guess to try to make me think he was someone else.

  “Brooklyn went home early,” I told him.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. She just did.”

  “Do you know when she’s going to be back?”

  “No idea.”

  “If I leave you my number can you call and let me know if she comes back?”

  “I’m sorry, I’m not supposed to do that.”

  “But I don’t want to miss her.”

  “Sorry, I don’t know what to tell you.”

  Jeez, this guy was pathetic, but I have to admit I was pretty jealous. I would have loved for a guy to be that into me. Adam would be, I imagined and then I thought, oh my God, I wonder if he called me or not. I called my voice mail from the Kittikat’s main line. No messages.

  Adam called me late Friday afternoon. When I saw his name on my caller ID I felt like buying wedding magazines, lots of them, and shooting off fireworks. Finally!

  “I had wanted to take you out to dinner, but I have this stupid thing to do for work tonight. How about we meet up when it’s over. I’ll call you later. I’m so sorry. This really sucks. I had this great place I wanted to take you to,” he said.

  “I completely understand! We can definitely meet up later! I’ll wait for you!!”

  I flew out of the house to get a new outfit, agonizing in Old Navy before heading to the Galleria. Classy. I wanted something classy, with a C this time, not a K. Like Audrey Hepburn. Demure. I found a black shantung sheath so elegant that all I needed was an updo and a tiara to look like Holly Golightly (ok maybe if Holly had gained about thirty pounds, but it was close). I blew out my hair because that’s about all I could do with it since I didn’t exactly have a hair style. Shoulder length and side parted doesn’t require a lot of maintenance.

  I wanted to be sexy because my mind was made up, had been made up, since I first met Adam, that we were definitely having sex and I wanted it to be memorable and right and it couldn’t be perfect if he pulled off my panties and found a tribble. That’s an exaggeration of sorts. I was a frump, but I wasn’t ungroomed. No tumbleweeds for me thank you but although I wasn’t wearing the brown polyester jumpsuit from the 70s, my snatch thatch, as I’d heard Lola (one of the dancers) hilariously call it, was the equivalent of a Members Only jacket. My style needed a little updating, so I went at it in the shower, bent over at the waist trying to see what I was doing through the shower spray. I hoped to go for the neat little upside-down triangle – the Dorito look, but that went awry so I thought, ok, a wide strip, like a Band-Aid, would work too, but my landing strip ended up looking more like a lightning bolt and I’d missed a ton of hair on one side while several tufts stuck out underneath. Also, I was bleeding. Well, this wouldn’t do at all. I had a friend back in Atlanta who had her Persian cat shaved each summer so that his coat looked like a lion’s, complete with a mane, furry boots and a little poof on the end of his tail. It was the most ridiculous thing I had ever
seen until I looked in the steamed up bathroom mirror. The hack job I’d done on myself was the pubic version of a lion cut and there was no solution but to shave it all off, go the full Brazilian and start all over again. Instead of a Persian I’d become one of those awful looking, bald Sphinx cats, but hey, from what I saw at work guys went wild for a hairless hoo-ha, so Adam would probably love it. I was officially a Florida girl now, I supposed. I worked in a strip club and shaved myself bare. What next, I wondered.

  Once I got out of the shower and stopped the bleeding, I took some Imodium because I was a nervous wreck.

  I shouldn’t have eaten that falafel for lunch, but I’d already finished it by the time Adam called, and now the deep fried, garlicky, chick-pea balls were exacting their revenge. My stomach has always hated me and the second I get the least bit apprehensive or worried about anything my stomach responds with a gastrointestinal version of shock and awe. I hadn’t quite figured out how to be sexy, but I definitely knew that acid-reflux, loose stools and a bloated belly that made noises to rival an emptying bathtub drain weren’t arousing. I spent much of the early evening in the bathroom cursing my spastic colon and exceeding the recommended dosages of both Imodium and Pepto-Bismol.

  So there I was all fixed up, ready to go somewhere, smooth legged, pube-less and extremely constipated. I waited. I crunched Altoids. I brushed my teeth three times because Altoids only give you good breath while you’re sucking them and afterward you get this nasty sour taste coating your tongue from all the sugar. I watched 20/20 and when it ended I realized it was eleven and my dress was too tight and my eye shadow had faded. I hung my dress up in the closet, tossed a wrinkled tee from the laundry basket over my head and got in bed with a sigh. A few minutes later I retrieved the black sheath from the closet and hooked its hanger over the edge of my dresser’s mirror. Just in case.

  So did Adam call me? What do you think?

  Don’t be so cynical. Of course he called me. At two a.m.

  Coincidentally, that happens to be the time most of the clubs in town close.

  “Sweetheart, I am so sorry. The work thing ran so late and it was terrible. I was thinking about you the whole time. What are you doing right now?” he said.

  “Sleeping,” I replied.

  “I want to see you badly. Can I come over?”

  I told him I lived with my parents.

  “Please.” he said. “I have to pass by there on the way home anyway don’t I? Didn’t you say you lived off A1A? Give me directions so I can see you. I can sneak in, like we’re teenagers. It’ll be hot.”

  I gave him directions, brushed my teeth for a fourth time and took another quick shower just in case I had suddenly developed a noxious body odor in the eight hours I’d spent in my room and went outside to wait for him in the driveway wearing pajama pants and a clean tee shirt. I considered the sleek black dress, since the damned thing had cost me eighty-five dollars, but that seemed like overkill. He kissed me in the driveway and I led Adam inside as quietly as possible so the Doberman wouldn’t wake up and disembowel him before I had a chance to have sex with someone other than Evan for the first time in over seven years.

  “I missed you so much, but I was really busy all week so I couldn’t call you and I had all this stuff to do for work. I’m just so happy I’m with you now. Fuck, you are so beautiful,” he whispered as I locked my bedroom door.

  I fell for it about fifty times over. I overlooked the fact that he smelled like a pack of cigarettes extinguished in a bottle of vodka and I let myself be seduced because finally, someone wanted me and that was all that mattered. Someone actually wanted me enough to stop by my house on the way home from wherever in the middle of the night and that was a big deal. It was, wasn’t it?

  It sure seemed like it when he pushed me against my bedroom wall and kissed me hard, first on my neck and my jaw and then finally, finally on my mouth and I almost let myself relax and start enjoying it but he had to go and put his hand up my shirt, causing me to remember that I have weird and deformed boobs which were going to definitely make him hate me. And also I have a pot belly. And cellulite. And strange rogue hairs that are wiry and make no sense and pop up unexpectedly in random places all over my body and he was probably going to feel like ten of them that I didn’t catch in the hour I spent scrutinizing myself with the tweezers and when he felt them he was probably going to recoil in disgust and swear I was actually a man and run screaming from the house because I am a freak. Had I not overdosed on anti-diarrheals I probably would have needed a toilet from the panic that caused me to suddenly stiffen and hesitate.

  “What’s wrong with you?” he asked and I wanted to run off a laundry list of my flaws. I’m fat, hirsute and deformed. I’m damaged. I hate myself. No one loves me. I’m weird. My boobs are pointy. I have a happy trail like a boy. There are ingrown hairs on my bikini line that look like an infectious and probably hemorrhagic tropical disease. I could have gone on for an hour, but I didn’t say a thing except a whispered “nothing.”

  I breathed slowly to calm my nerves. I stopped mentally berating myself and remembered that I was a girl who worked in a strip club now and though I hadn’t quite figured out what that meant to me, it meant in that moment that I wasn’t going to freak out about someone seeing my body. It meant that every day I saw women with a catalogue of bodily imperfections get up on a stage naked and own every single one of those disfigurements so convincingly that men fell over themselves to see them, handing out wads and wads of cash to enjoy the beautiful sight of them. And if they could do that, then surely I could relax and give in to these kisses. Surely I could, and did, lift my arms to slide my shirt over my head. It was a small victory, but it felt like a personal revolution.

  We had ended up on the bed, I had shed my pajama bottoms and we were getting pretty hot and heavy when I realized two alarming things, which thank God, had nothing to do with me. Number one, Michelle was one hundred percent right. It was really, really small. Number two - this guy would not shut up. I hadn’t slept with many people at all, but the few I had been with in the past ten years had not felt the uncontrollable need to narrate the event as it occurred. I couldn’t remember anyone having ever said all that much of anything, but Adam here was keeping a running commentary as the events unfolded and his, umm, his diction was really limited.

  Adam was a dirty talker and I’d never been with anyone who used language like he did in bed, or anywhere for that matter. He had clearly watched way too much porn and read too many nasty magazines, because he sounded like he was reading straight out of Penthouse “Forum” and yes, I knew what that would sound like because when I was twelve my friend and I found my dad’s stash of X-rated publications, starting with the Madonna hairy armpit edition, and we kept ourselves entertained until high school with those damned things. I found Adam’s storytelling rather distracting. I mean, how was I supposed to stay in the moment, doing what we were doing, while trying to concentrate on the plot of whatever nonsense he was spouting off at the same time? Somehow I managed to filter it out, but we still had to deal with alarming thing the first. His penis was the size of a salt shaker. That is exactly what it reminded me of, and I’m not talking about a big peppermill type of device. I mean your standard, small glass salt shaker with the metal top like they have on the counter of every diner in the world next to the napkin dispenser and the pitcher of creamer. Lengthwise, widthwise, all around it was a salt shaker.

  Adam didn’t know he had a salt shaker. He believed he possessed one of those monstrous pepper grinders that servers lug to your table at restaurants to ceremoniously twist over your Caesar salad. Adam was in many ways like the Pomeranian who believes himself a Rottweiler, and his confidence got him far. He had no idea that he was more Seth Green than Brad Pitt just like he had no idea that he had a small weenie. He walked everywhere as if he was being followed by an invisible, adoring entourage. The guy even sat still with a swagger and it made him appear more attractive than he otherwise might have, alt
hough I only figured this out in hindsight. His confidence also apparently made his Vienna sausage seem like a kielbasa, because we had incredible sex. I supposed it was true what they said about size not mattering and something about the size of the boat and the motion in the ocean or whatever it was.

  You always hear the term “mind-blowing sex,” the secrets of which are usually promised between the covers of Cosmo or in spam emails hawking Horny Goat Weed supplements. I didn’t think it existed. I figured mind-blowing sex was an urban legend right up there with kidney harvesting until I slept with with Adam. Perhaps the sex seemed so good to me because it had literally been years since I had anything of quality in that department and my neglected body responded more than enthusiastically to any sort of positive touch, kind of how like if you’re really hungry foods you normally wouldn’t touch are suddenly delicious? One time I’d gone like ten hours without a bite and I ate a pot of Kraft mac n cheese with hot dogs cut up in and thought it was the best thing I ever put in my mouth.

  Evan had withdrawn all physical affection in the year before we broke up because he was busy getting freaky with his girlfriend, though I hadn’t known that until much later, and to be honest, although I loved Evan and our life together, the sex part was never much of a big deal. Evan said our blasé sex life was my fault, naturally. I was bad in bed, frigid and lacked passion. I didn’t like being looked at and had to do it in the dark, he complained, which was true, but I didn’t think it was all my fault. Evan had sex like he’d once read a generic “how to fuck” manual and it was probably like a set of directions from IKEA with confusing pictures of stick people and a lot of orderly numbered steps. He stuck to what he knew and never, ever changed the routine. After seven years of the same exact things in the exact same order, I could predict precisely what was going to happen and when and that the entire event would take exactly seventeen minutes and thirty four seconds from kissing to pulling the condom off, rolling over and going to bed. I didn’t know that other options existed in real life.