There was not a strand of hair on her body, with a helpful amount of baby fat on her to keep her so authentic and approachable. She flashed those achingly wondrous misshapen Chiclet teeth and stepped right to him, looked down on him, leaned into him, asking that most ordinary of stripper questions: “So, what do you do?”
She was close enough now that Milt could smell the redolent scent of body lotion and candy-like perfume. He’d always hated the scent of Jolly Ranchers and the taste of Twizzlers, but Devlin’s scent was somewhere in the middle, and he didn’t mind at all.
“I’m…uh, a writer-producer,” Milt said. Her emerald saucer eyes revealed nothing. She’d heard this kind of thing before, and he knew it.
He was surprised at himself that he’d let it out so effortlessly. No snide riposte to her question, no guarding of his true vocation. The lotion-candy smell of hers was ostensibly rather like Sodium Pentothal to Milt, and likely any other man who came in the room here with her.
“That’s niccccce…” Devlin cooed sibilantly, gently blowing into his ear with warm Bubblicious gum breath, leaning into him further so that her small, pert breasts brushed against his face. His nose delved deeply into the wide, buttery crevice, her nutbrown nipples pointing accusatorily into his cheeks.
She placed his hands on her hips, making it clear he could touch her, and she slowly, steadily straddled him. There was nothing now between her bald nether region and his crotch, but for his underwear and jeans. Without them, Milt and Devlin would be fucking.
It was more than the sexual arousal now, Milt at once felt. He had let the cat out of the bag and something inside of him wanted more. “Yeah,” he went on, “I’m actually back in SoCal for a screening of a film I made with some friends.”
“Oh, yeah?” Devlin said, tightening her knees around his waist and gazing deeply into his eyes. There was a shock of recognition in her face.
Wait, this guy is for real?
“Yeah,” Milt said, firing up. “We’re doing a full tour around the country, actually. You’ll be seeing some articles about it in a few magazines and some TV spots soon, especially around here. Our premiere is in LA this weekend.”
“Wow,” Devlin said, seeming to be honestly into it. “So, you, like, make movies?”
“Sometimes,” Milt said, feeling he’d earned a squeeze of her haunches, which led to her closing her eyes, leaning lustfully back, her breasts and brown erect pencil eraser nipples pointing toward his face, only centimeters away.
“That is so funny,” Devlin said. “I was just gonna say that you look so much like Seth Rogen. Do you like his stuff? I love him.”
“He’s…pretty funny…sometimes,” Milt grunted.
“I’m thinking about getting into movies,” Devlin said, pull-ing herself back toward him, opening her eyes, talking to him now as though they weren’t practically in the throes of sex.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, porn, you know?” she said as though it were as simple as that. “A lot of dancers do it to help advertise themselves and get jobs at other clubs. I’d love to go work in Vegas someday. I only just started at this, but I think I’m doing pretty good for twenty.”
Twenty!
Milt did the math and quickly realized she wasn’t even born when Kurt Cobain killed himself.
“Do you think I look twenty?” Devlin asked, spinning herself around on Milt, shoving her labia deeper into the concrete denim-covered erection poking up underneath his jeans. She leaned back and placed his hands over her b-cup breasts, her erect nipples rubbing against his palms, sending lightning bolts of tremors up and down his back.
“I guess,” Milt said, trembling slightly. “I think you look beautiful.”
She turned her head slowly and looked in his eyes. “Thank you.” It almost seemed sincere. “Do you think I could be in porn?”
“Uh, yeah,” Milt said. “I think a lot of people would want to see you.”
Aside from the very real urge to see her fucking on screen, Milt did feel as though it was a kind mitzvah he was engaging in here, encouraging her into what could be a potentially lucrative career path. She was a young starlet on the rise asking a seasoned pro what his thoughts were regarding where she should go next.
“Beats waitressing,” she snickered. “The customers hate you, the kitchen hates you, the owner hates you. I tried doing it before I dropped out of high school to come work here last year, but it wasn’t for me. Everyone was so mean.”
He was delighting over rubbing her breasts and feeling her nipples, breathing in the smell of her silky brown hair brushing against his face as she rhythmically rocked her bottom over his pointy, hard dick poking up into her soft flesh from beyond the tightening denim between them.
Obviously, this girl really could be in porn. She would likely kick ass in it. The whole miscellaneous-race thing would be a big help. She was exotic without being alienating to any specific demographic. He almost wanted to ask her what she was, but thought better of it. Besides, she was already getting up and off him, her heels clicking on the concrete floor. She leaned into him, kissed him softly on the cheek, and asked, “Do you want another song?”
Song?
He hadn’t realized music had been playing throughout their faux courtship. He did know from the three or four times in the past he’d actually bothered to have a private dance at other strip clubs that the cost was typically measured by song. But Devlin had not been clear about this, or the amount per song, when she’d first lured him into the booth.
Devlin and he had a special connection, didn’t they? He was giving her career advice, for fucksakes. Would it just be a friendly, nominal fee at the end? He wanted to keep talking to her. It wasn’t only about the way she looked and sensually moved up and down and all around and on him. It wasn’t. He knew that.
“Uh, yeah, sure,” he said. “A few more songs. I…like talking to you.”
“Well, we can just talk, if you want,” she said, smiling. “Some guys do pay me just to talk.”
“No, no,” Milt fired back, worried he’d flubbed it. “You can keep doing what you’ve been doing.”
She smirked and he almost fainted from the power of it. She took off his hat and put it on her palm-sized head. The hat dwarfed her, but it looked good and she knew it. She winked and turned around, wiggling her ass in his face.
He looked down to her short crack and saw there a typical tramp-stamp tattoo, only it read as a romantically gothic scrawled quote: What matters most is how well you walk through the fire. He took note of it, liked it quite a bit. It was a guidepost from the universe confirming that he needed to stay here with Devlin. That was exactly what the ass-crack tat was.
She placed his right hand on her right buttock and lightly patted it, giving him permission to continue. He gave her a little spank.
“Mmmmm.…” she said.
It was incredible. It was exactly what he needed. He had earned this. He had been under so much pressure lately. The money, the weight gain, the shit with Laney, the shit with Silverstein, the awful awful awful shit with CineRanchero, keeping everything going with the fucking tour and film, and….
Devlin turned back around and leaned into his right ear, blowing into it with her sweet-smelling sirocco breath. He loved when strippers did that. How did they know to do that?
Then she purred, and Milt thought he wasn’t going to be able to control his animal instincts anymore…but a large bouncer opened the door, looked inside, and exited, closing the door behind him.
“Don’t worry about it,” Devlin said. “Carlos is just making sure I’m not giving you a blowjob or something.”
“Do you ever do that?” Milt asked.
“I don’t, but a lot of the other girls do. Do you like drugs?”
The drugs. Frankly. The coke. How long had he been in here? How many songs? “Uh, sure,” he confessed.
“Do you have any coke? I’d love to do some coke with you right now.”
“Not right now,” Milt said. “But we might
be getting some…a little…uhm…later.”
“Oh, cool.” Devlin danced around the room as though she were one of those girls back in high school rehearsing for a routine she’d be performing during lunch assembly. “Maybe we could hang out again the next time you come and we can do some together.”
Milt knew he’d never come back here. But he wanted nothing more than some cocaine right now to do with this enticing little minx.
“You’re married?” she asked, coming back from spinning around the room. She picked up his left hand with his large silver ring on his wedding finger and kissed it.
“Yeah,” Milt said.
“What’s that like?”
“It’s all right.” Milt was surprised at the conversation that followed, his revelations, concerns, and fears about his marriage to Laney. The admission that they had both messed around with other people already, that they both questioned whether or not they had gotten married too fast, that they had “only” gotten married at a courthouse with a few random friends who had happened to be off early from work that afternoon, that both Laney and he had been having some extremely tough conversations about this right before he had to leave for the tour.
Laney and he were still so new, see, and things would probably get better, right?
He couldn’t believe he was unloading like this. More to the point, he couldn’t believe that Devlin was not only listening but was seemingly interested. Really interested. And wearing his hat through it all, while she listened and soothed him, and grinded her crotch against his denim-encaged dick.
It had become the very best therapy session he’d ever had.
Devlin decided to lie down and stretch out on the floor. Alluringly coiling and uncoiling snakelike, she asked, “Why did you get married?”
“Because we loved each other,” Milt said as easily as if she had said something like, Do you want to just stick it in me real quick and no one will ever know? “We still love each other. Very much. We’re glad we’re married. We both want to have kids. But…”
“It’s complicated.”
“Yeah,” Milt said. “Marriage wasn’t what we thought it would be, what everyone else said it would be. It’s not like the movies.”
“It’s weird how many times I’ve been saying things are ‘complicated’ lately,” Devlin said. “Or ‘people are complicated’ lately. When did everything get so complicated?”
He was impressed by her worldliness. Then again, she’d probably heard it all before. He really did love Laney, and he knew she really did love him. They had made the right choice. He knew it. But it was a matter of figuring it all out. He knew they would when he got back from LA, or maybe after this whole fucking tour was over and they could get back to normal.
Milt and Devlin continued speaking about love, relationships, and what it meant to grow up.
He smirked, and Devlin asked what was up.
“Nothing,” Milt said. “This whole thing is just reminding me a little of that scene in The Catcher In The Rye.”
“Oh, yeah,” Devlin said, the childish waif of her surface-self fading almost entirely away. “When Holden’s talking to the hooker in the hotel room?”
“Yeah,” Milt said, surprised at her recognition. “I never really liked that book.”
“Oh, I know!” Devlin blurted. “It’s like, who wants to listen to some spoiled, whiny rich kid complaining about how horrible his spoiled rich kid life is? Who fucking cares, right?”
“Right!” Milt said, always glad to meet another hater of a book that had been thrust on him throughout high school and college by teachers and Salinger fans who for some reason thought the boring, whiny thing was a literary masterpiece.
Milt and Devlin nodded their heads, smiling at one another.
“Ha, I guess that makes me the hooker then, huh?”
“I have to tell you,” Milt said to avoid the question and elephant in the room, “the thing about being married, is that it’s so special. We’re no longer just boyfriend and girlfriend. We’re not dating. We’re not ‘together,’” he said with air quotes.
Devlin looked confused. “What do you mean?”
“I can’t really say. And I think that’s the point. Why am I married to my wife? I don’t know. I think that’s the best reason of all. It’s indescribable what we have. She’d call this ‘kinda gay,’ but the truth is that there’s something there we can’t define and that is so unique between us, we have to be married, because we don’t have it with anyone else. Even though both of us have had a lot of other relationships and have fucked plenty of other people. Some of whom, that’s all the ‘relationship’ was.”
“Yeah, I know what that’s like,” Devlin said. “And not just because I’m the hooker in Catcher here.”
“There’s this movie called My Dinner With Andre—”
“I love that movie!”
“No, you don’t!” Milt laughed. “No way!”
“Why, because I’m naked and dancing for you?”
“No, because you’re like twelve!”
“I’m twenty!” Devlin laughed, pretending to slap him. Milt put up his guard and blocked her. “I’m really into movies. My Dinner With Andre is rad.”
“Rad?”
“Yeah!”
“Well, anyway,” Milt went on, “there’s that scene toward the end where Andre tells Wally that the reason he thinks people have affairs is because they’re searching out the next kind of adventure or thrill, basically.”
“Sure…”
“As he goes on with that line of reasoning, Andre says that what makes for a good long-term relationship—you know, like a healthy marriage—is the realization that that can be an adventure or thrill too. The unique experience of actually being with someone, the same someone for a record-breaking amount of time. You know? What is that like? Actually being with someone for that long and not breaking away. I think that’s what Laney and I have going for us. No matter whatever other problems we might have, individually or together, we’re married. We’re best friends.”
He wasn’t sure, but Milt may have caught a brief, glittery seed of a tear in Devlin’s left emerald eye. Then it was gone. “That’s…beautiful,” she said.
Devlin, still on the floor, closed her eyes and went back to writhing around. Then it dawned on Milt. “Uh, I think we’d better call it a night.”
The mood completely shifted. Frostily.
Devlin’s face registered a haughty Oh and she stood. “Are you sure?”
“Yeah. I really better get moving. My friend is here, and I don’t know if he’s waiting on me or what, and we’ve got other stuff going on tonight.”
“Oh,” she actually vocalized this time. She placed the hat back on his head and walked, clacking her heels, toward her bra and underwear over by the door. She put them on hurriedly like she was rushing out of her boyfriend’s room before curfew. The illusion was over. It was time to leave.
The quick change in atmosphere sent a new set of lightning tremors up Milt’s back. Wait a second. How long had they been here?
There was the part of him that assumed what Devlin and he had been doing had been…yeah, special. That she would maybe give him some kind of discount on the whole experience.
But as he followed her out the door, through the club—where Frankly sat sunken into his same chair from before and giving Milt a strange “WTF?!” look as he passed by—and toward the cash register area with two very archetypically business-like young men who were definitely not here for fun or therapy purposes, Milt experienced a frisson of brutal reality.
“Okay, fourteen songs, at sixty-five dollars apiece, that’ll be—”
Holy shit.
“—nine-hundred and ten dollars.”
Devlin was standing next to him. Why wasn’t she saying anything? Why wasn’t she coming to his defense? Why was there no, “Wait, this guy is different. This guy shouldn’t have to spend $910 on a forty-five-minute hangout session with me because we had a real connection I
don’t have with any other customer?”
She said nothing.
Because she wasn’t his friend. She wasn’t a therapist. She was a stripper who aspired to be a porn star, and that’s that, Mattress Man.
Fuck. $910. Plus tip.
Like a large church bell pealing over and over again in Milt’s head, it repeated, crushing his brain. That was more than half his monthly rent.
Laney! What would she think? Would he be able to keep this colossal fuck-up from her? FUCK!
$910.
Plus tip.
Milt could tell the two business fellas behind the cash register who were not fucking around caught the fear in his face. One cracked, “Do you need to use the ATM, sir?”
Devlin feigned a modicum of theatrical concern. “Oh, I’m sorry, baby. I thought you knew how much it was.”
He turned to her and tried to lock eyes again, tried to bring back that special connection. But the problem was that there had never been one. Maybe she could be more than a porn star, he figured. She had been an excellent actress.
$910.
She hugged him. She actually hugged him. “Are you okay?”
God, but she did smell good.
Milt was too embarrassed to say anything about how the price had never been mentioned earlier, that he had had no idea that it would work like this, and that he had thought that maybe it was going to be one solid reasonable price. So he said nothing, paralyzed with fear and anxiety.
Like a malfunctioning automaton, he fumblingly moved over to a young lady who looked almost identical to the two gentlemen on the other side of the cash register area where she stood by an illuminated computer screen. “Do you want to use a credit card instead?”
He did. He would have to. He hoped there was enough on his Discover Card. Or that they would take Discover Card. Did anyone take Discover Card anymore? Why did he have a Discover Card?
The church bell again: BONNNNNNNNG. $910. BONN-NNNNNG. $910…
Devlin was already moving on to another mark, Milt saw to his left, beyond whom Frankly sat shaking his head disapprovingly but with a contrapuntal smile that clearly communicated, “Can’t take you anywhere, son.”
Selling Nostalgia Page 10
