Chapter 26 Oral

“Assume the position, ma’am.” Pause. “And I use the word assume, because I assume—” Pause. “—that you’ve been in this position before.” The crowd of two-hundred-plus horny ladies went wild. This was my first encounter at a male stripclub. My thoughts on such a place had always been simple: Male strippers are gross. We were there for Anita’s birthday. My friend Ellie’s cousin’s ex husband owned the club, so she had hooked it up for us. We thought the experience would be fun in a totally ironic way—like, “Ha-ha, look at these Fabio dudes dancing! What losers!” We were wrong. These men were hot as fuck. Onstage, “Nico”—dressed in stripper police gear, complete with Ray Ban sunglasses and an artificial-hormone-fed figure—was standing behind a woman he had bent over the chair. Laughing, blushing from a combination of embarrassment and drunkenness, the woman would be somebody’s wife tomorrow. Tonight, though, her girlfriends had signed her up to simulate sex acts onstage with a man wearing a thong under his cop uniform. As the theme from the show Cops played, Nico tore his uniform off and danced around the stage. The crowd cheered on as he did backflips in nothing but shoes and a small piece of cloth covering his dick and asshole. A frumpy woman, presumably an employee, came onstage to escort the bachelorette off as more Nico-looking men, only dressed in tearaway prison outfits, joined in on the act. Ellie had gotten us a booth right up front, so we could enjoy the show with the best view in the house. But the real show was behind us. Women yelling, banging on the tables, jumping up and down on the chairs. Out of context, you would have thought we were monkeys in a zoo at feeding time. If I were a man working at this club, I would be terrified of women. I mean we were frightening. The show had opened with six shirtless men dancing to 50 Cent’s “In da Club.” The lights beamed off their oiled muscles, making the women scream so loud I thought it was a tape recording to get the crowd going. I had never heard noises like that in my life. I was screaming, too. Some of them danced better than me. Scratch that. All of them danced better than me. A couple of them even did pole tricks, which I don’t do at all. I wondered how much they make. Had any of them done gay porn? I wondered if they were all just flaming homosexuals outside of this club. These men were too aesthetically pleasing to be straight. Gay retail clerk by day, women’s sex object by night? Straight for pay? A few men, for their solo shows, danced to the same songs I used to dance to when I was stripping. I wonder if the same things ran through their heads while they dance. Why am I here? How many more minutes until my shift is over? Did they hate this job as much as I had? It’s not that I didn’t enjoy dancing. It’s not even that I didn’t enjoy the men I was dancing for. In fact, once I was onstage, once I was interacting with the crowd, once I was giving lapdances, I enjoyed myself. It’s the late hours, the dirty clubs, the million cigarettes I ended up smoking in the dressing room . . . Too tired to do anything during the day, not wanting to eat too much before going naked in front of hundreds of men . . . Unrolling the filthy dollar bills thrown at me before finally washing all the grime off my body in the shower at 5 a.m. My saving grace was Maury, the closest thing I’ve ever had to a sugar daddy.