The Beautiful Kind

I had a first date with a weird guy I met off the internet. We went to dinner and afterwards he asked what we should do next.

“How about we go to the Chocolate Bar for a nightcap?” I suggested.

He made a face. “Nah…how about a whorehouse?”

“You know where one is?!” I exclaimed. I had been to my share of strip clubs and adult theaters, but never a whorehouse. (Well OK, there was that one time in Mexico…)

“Oh sure,” he said, “I used to work as a bouncer at one on Tuesday nights, but it burned down when one of the whores got pissed and threw a lit cigarette into another one’s purse. You know, all that hairspray and wigs, very flammable stuff.”

I considered my options for a second, decided a whorehouse was way more bloggable than a trendy bar, so agreed to an east side field trip. (For those of you who are alarmed at this, you can kiss my ass, and here’s why: I drove alone to the east side every day to work as a stripper for a year when I was a teenager.)

We made the drive from city to seedy. He pointed out the turnaround spot where you can score crack or a blow job for $25, or trade one for the other. We drove by the place where I stripped years ago. I still shudder when I pass it. I think it’s a daycare now, and the sleazy owner Tom Venezia ended up getting busted for racketeering and spent some time in prison before shooting himself and some 21-year-old chick. I wonder how many other women were as delighted as I was to hear that, as The RFT described it, “he went out with a bang.”

We arrived at the sex shack and my date pointed out the burnt out shell of the former joint behind it. Nice. Inside, the place looked very much like a typical cheap strip club - wood paneling, a stage with a pole, black lights, a juke box, bar. We ordered drinks from my grandma who was bartending.

Oh wait, that wasn’t my grandma, my grandma had more teeth than that sweet old lady did, and she didn’t usually have her saggy breasts stuffed into a bikini top when she served drinks.

We grabbed a seat at one of the shoddy tables and surveyed the scene. It was a Monday night, so the place was dead. Besides us, there were three male customers and four women workin’ it. Sheesh I hoped that the two younger men there had a GILF fetish.

The women: there was granny bartender, a brunette woman shaped like a cello with a tramp stamp and a white thong up her ass, another old woman with cotton candy blonde hair and a shiny red “dress” an African-American girl with pigtails and zero tits or ass wearing a white costume that contrasted beautifully with her dark skin and flashing teeth, and a woman who very much reminded me of the burnt out shell out back. Her voice sounded like she had been in the place as it burned, her lungs sounded scorched. She played a video poker game at the bar and, you guessed it, smoked.

The two younger guys were the typical baseball cap/sports jersey types, and the old guy had beady eyes squinting out of his porcine face and clutched a beer. As we drank our beers (Miller Lite!) he sidled up to us and asked me, “This your first time in a place like this?”

I said, no, that I had worked in a place like it many years ago. That got him excited, I mean, if he could have popped a boner he would have. “Oh? Thinking about getting back in the business?”

I smiled and said no, I had a good job and was fine where I was. Trying to decide what a “good job” for a woman would be if she wasn’t stripping, he asked if I was a secretary.

My date noticed the woman with the cotton candy hair and red dress gyrating sloppily on a guy’s lap at the stage, and said to me, “Do you ever get the feeling you know someone but you can’t quite place them and you try and remember their name?”

“No,” I said.

“No?” he repeated incredulously.

“Well yes I get that feeling but I don’t try and remember their name. Chances are I want to forget.”

“Oh. Well I think I know that woman over there.”

Sure enough, when the song was over she climbed off the guy’s lap and hightailed it over to my date. “HI HONEY, where you BEEN?”

They embraced, and she introduced herself as Debbi and shook my hand. “Who is this?” she beamed.

He introduced me and announced it was our first date, and she winked and said, “Classy!”

She sat down with us and the creepy old man took the opportunity to sit down, too, you know, join the party. He asked me, “So, are you thinking of getting back in the business?”

I said, no, I lived too far away.

I got a good look at Debbi. I guessed she was about 50. (In truth, she was two years older than me - 36.) I couldn’t get over how frizzy/curly/white blonde her hair was. She had false teeth, lots of makeup, flesh spilling out of her red dress, nothing sexy here. But of course she was sweet and nice.

“Debbi worked at the place that burned down,” my date told me.

“YES,” she said, “And you better believe I cried my eyes out when it happened. ALL my shit was in there, ALL my shit - my costumes, my wigs, god everything up in flames!”

The old man stared at me from across the table. “Are ya thinking about getting back in the business?”

“No,” I said firmly.

“You can make good money,” he offered.

I glanced around the empty shit hole. “Yeah, I can tell.”

“Well not up here, in the back,” he said, motioning with his beer to rooms beyond the bathroom.

I just stared at him.

Changing tactics, he said in a low voice to my date, “Think we can get her up on the stage?” My date told him he didn’t suppose so, not tonight anyway.

I asked Debbi where the bathroom was, and she pointed towards the back. My date warned me not to go in the wrong door or else a man would try and have sex with me, possibly while I was urinating. He added that if I did go in the wrong door, to at least get a good price. While I was relieving myself in the bathroom decorated with fake plants, a country doll perched on the paper towels, and an ashtray within tapping distance of the toilet, Debbi and the two men discussed the going rates they charged here relative to what they used to charge at the old place.

When I got back, Debbi launched into her sob story as the African-American waif wandered by, asking for a tip for being mostly naked. She got a dollar. Debbi talked about how she worked at a thrift store during the day making $9 an hour, which was really good, and how she had to miss this here night job sometimes but how the owner was understanding.

“The owner of this place used to be a customer,” she announced. Everyone acted like this was a fabulous accomplishment. Well I guess it is pretty nice when you can go from tipping the women as a customer to owning them.

Debbi sure opened up to me. I wondered if it was because she found a sympathetic woman who could relate to her, as opposed to all the guys who looked at her and saw a tree stump with three holes and a wig. Did the guys not pick up on the grief radiating from her? Fuck, it seemed anything but sexy.

She went on to talk about her kids, getting a divorce and being free hot damn! And how the owner was kindly, unlike the last owner who would give you shit for drinking too much or doing lines on the job. “I have a right to my drink and my lines!” she said indignantly.

“So, are you thinking of getting back in the business?” creepy old man asked me yet again.

I sat up straight and said, “Oh YES!”

Everyone at the table looked surprised at my response. Old man even managed to widen his beady eyes ever so slightly.
“Really?” he asked.

“SURE, totally, oh wow, I’m going to quit my job right now and start next week, I can’t WAIT!” I said with enthusiasm.

I let that sink in and then explained to the table of confused faces, “Well it was obvious that the last three times I answered that question I didn’t give the right answer, so I thought I’d just say what he wanted to hear.”

I glared at him, then crossed my arms and smirked. I guess the stupid cheap idiot thought that if he kept asking the same question I would maybe change my mind because I’m a girl or forget the last 15 minutes of our conversation, ooh he’s sly!

He actually had the good sense to look sheepish and finally shut up.