It’s 11 o’clock on a Sunday night, and Ricky and I are waiting for B-Tit to come through the door of the IHOP we are sitting in. The hostess is giving us menus when she spots Ricky’s t-shirt, which is a screen print of Christopher Walken’s face that reads FEAR THE WALKEN.
“Girl, is that that actor?!” she booms excitedly. “I love him. I LOVE HIM.”
“Oh, yeah, that’s Christopher Walken,” Ricky says.
“What he been in?” the hostess asks, tapping a burgundy press-on nail on her forehead.
“Um, well, Suicide Kings, Biloxi Blues, King of New York – ”
“But you know his face is creepy, girl!” the hostess interjects, and cocks her eyebrow up as far as it will go.
“Well, yeah,” Ricky says.
“Then why you wearin’ his shirt?”
Ricky has no answer for this.
“Don’t matter, I love it,” she says. “You keep doing what you do, girl.” She checks to see if I am wearing anything similarly amusing, and is met with acute disappoint when her eyes lay themselves upon my Indian-print maxi dress and green cardigan, complete with flower brooch. She tosses a few napkins on the table and tells us our waitress will be along shortly.
The table adjacent to ours has three people at it: two are middle-aged women, one of whom is wearing a banana clip and the other a t-shirt screen printed with timber wolves, and the other is a guy, probably in his mid-twenties. He has tufts of mousy-brown armpit coming out of the black ribbed tank top he is wearing, and has a seemingly un-ironic gold cross the size of a child’s fist dangling near his plate of bacon. No one else is in our section, but we are all seated in adjoining booths. He catches me looking at him and nods. I smile civilly and adjust the napkin in my lap.
“I’ve got to pee before B-Tit gets here,” Ricky says, getting up. “Figure out what we can eat that isn’t going to solidify our arteries.”
She walks away, and I begin to examine the menu. Ricky and I, on a health kick since dedicating our mornings to weightlifting at the gym, have been trying to eat better so we can avoid swearing under our breath about poor food choices when we’re running it off on the treadmill, or, in my case with squats, swearing out loud. As I examine the “Lite Fare” page of the menu, I feel an abrupt disquiet inside that someone is watching me and raise my head to find the cross-wearing man looking at me, mouth agape, with a dull stare. Thinking that perhaps I just caught him at an awkward moment, I go back to the menu to examine the caloric content of the Harvest Grain Pancakes. When I look up, I am met again with a pair of glazed-over eyes and a face full of mousy-brown whiskers.
He stands up. “My muscles have gotten so big that I think they’re stretching out my tattoo,” he says, flexing his arm for the ladies at the table, and presumably, me. His hunter-colored tribal tat barely jumps to attention with his contraction, but the ladies nod in agreement.
“They’re definitely getting bigger,” the woman in the wolf tee notes, and when he looks up to see if I concur with this statement, I raise the menu up to my face and pretend to be engrossed with the crepe specials. The hostess offers to get me a drink while I wait, and I order a pot of coffee for the table. As she leaves, Ricky comes back to the table, and blocks the view of the strapping cross-wearer, who is still rubbing his bicep.
B-Tit – who files his taxes under Brian Titcomb – walks in with a Rasta-colored Adidas shirt and sun-freckled arms exposed. He’s let his red beard grow longer than the last time we had seen him. “Yo,” he says, and slides into the booth next to me. “I’m going to sit next to you because I’m a lefty.”
“Welcome to the soiree,” I say between sips of coffee.
The hostess takes the rest of the drink orders while we situate ourselves in the booth, discussing our plans for the rest of the evening.
“I’m glad you guys were up to doing something,” he says. “It’s this full moon. It gives everybody energy. I love when people are like, ‘Full moons don’t have an effect on humans. They affect the entire ocean, but not me.’ But nobody ever wants to go out on a Sunday night except when there’s a full moon.”
“Agreed,” Ricky nods as a waitress comes up to the table to see if we’re ready to order. She has to be in her late sixties, and is skeletal and ashen. Her hair appears to be her crowning glory, and is tied up into a neat, shining bun of silver and light blonde. Her nametag reads Barbara.
“Have you decided what you’d like to eat?” she asks.
“Harvest Grain and Nut Pancakes, please,” Ricky orders.
“I’ll have the same, please,” I say.
“Okay,” B-Tit starts. “I’m going to be twelve and order chocolate chip pancakes, because I know you won’t judge me.” He looks up at Barbara, who giggles, and, if I see correctly through her pale foundation, blushes.
“Do you want that with chocolate batter or regular?” she asks.
“Regular,” B-Tit says. “Too much sugar for me the other way.” Barbara giggles again and goes to place the order. I look at Brian, who is unassumingly stirring his orange juice, and decide that his charm comes, at least partially, from his ruby facial hair. It’s hard not to like a dude with a beard. Older women seem to be of the same mindset.
We go through the usual conversational subjects: how gay men are quite adept at fixing boat rudders, the problem with Russians in movie theatres, drunken uncles that pepper their everyday conversation with racial slurs, and delve into the psychology of B-Tit’s optometrist father driving a bright yellow 4Runner from 1986. The conversation then turns to strip clubs.
“I’ve never been to one,” Ricky says, and I admit to the same.
“Really?” says Brian. “Man, they’d love you. Two chicks walk in, nicely dressed, obviously not a part of the scene. I could take you up to one off of Thalia Road if you want.”
“Tonight?” I say, and look down at my green cardigan hesitantly.
“Sure,” he says. “If you guys want.”
“You think we can get in?” Ricky asks. “Are they going to give us trouble?”
“Nah. Sure, there’s a five-dollar cover, but I’m telling you, they’re going to love you.” Brian takes a mouthful of chocolate pancakes and just like that, it’s settled. We pay Barbara, who tells us to have a good night, and head out to the parking lot, where we lay our plans.
“Just follow me up to the light,” Brian tells me. “We’ll meet in the lot and go in together.” He disappears towards his truck and Ricky and I scatter like beetles towards my car, squealing nervously.
“What the hell are we getting into?” I ask her as I start the car.
“Well, let’s just satisfy our curiosity,” she says. “I feel like we have to go once.”
“Agreed,” I say, and we trail Brian up the road through a quiet suburban neighborhood and into the other side of town where the scenery quickly changes. Tax centers and tire shops litter the corners, and after we pass our fourth Chinese restaurant Brian signals to turn into a shopping center. I examine our destination as we park. A neon purple sign that reads L.A.’s flashes above the door, along with a red OPEN sign. We climb out of the car and trail Brian through the parking lot and up to the door. There are few burly patrons outside smoking cigarettes and chatting. I watch two of them go to take a drag but stop when they see us, a gaunt red-headed surfer and his bevy of women, one wearing what could easily be mistaken in some circles as a formal gown and one with Christopher Walken emblazoned across her chest. Oddly poetic.
Brian swings the door open, and a man at a black desk greets us. “Just need to see your licenses. Five dollar cover.” We get out our IDs and five-dollar bills, and a large man who appears to be the manager comes up to us. He stands in front of Ricky.
“I LOVE your shirt,” he says, stone-faced, and they begin a conversation on the brilliance of Walken while I hand my license to the man at the desk.
“Nice picture of you,” he says. In my license picture, I’m twenty and have the face of a girl who would never step foot in a strip club.
“Thanks,” I say quickly, still nervous. “Yeah, sometimes I wear my hair curly.”
“Okay.” He gives my newly short hair a polite once-over and gestures for me to go in.
Brian leads us to a table, and I examine the room. It’s lit up with blacklights, and there are girls dancing on the stage in what appear to be nothing more scandalous than sexy bikinis. There’s a pole that one of them slides around on a few times, but as it’s a thin crowd, she doesn’t seem to be putting her heart into it, and I could hardly blame her.
B-Tit orders a Bud and Ricky and I opt for Miller Lite when we are told by our Ukrainian waitress that they don’t have Yuengling. “What is that?” I believe were her exact words.
The clientele is an interesting mix. Ricky and I are the only women, and I am the only woman in a cardigan besides one of the strippers on break who is wearing it over her bikini top. There are several men who appear to be in their twenties or thirties, and a couple of fifty-somethings who are playing pool. There is an equal distribution of white, black, and Hispanic patrons, all of whom are intermittently glancing at our table, trying to decide who in the holy living fuck we are. B-Tit seems not to notice, and instructs us on the finer points of tipping.
“Okay,” he starts. “First of all, you want to go up to the stage and find a seat. They’ll come to you. Try to look real bored. When you throw your first dollar, have a look on your face that says, You haven’t showed me anything interesting yet. If you act engrossed at all, they aren’t going to show you their best moves.”
“So it’s the metaphorical equivalent to blowing your load?” I say.
“You have to make it dirty, don’t you, Laura?” B-Tit shakes his head. He continues, “If you want to give the atomic bomb, just throw out two bills at once. BAM! They won’t know what hit ‘em.” Ricky and I nod solemnly.
We take a few more swigs of beer, and I notice a pair of guys taking no pains to hide the fact that they are staring at us. We are, I presume, an enigma: there are a literal half-dozen women walking around in nothing but G-strings and cocoa butter, and they interested in the only women with clothes. One of them looks my maxi-dress up and down, and I recall my grandmother’s sage advice: “Regardless of what they say, men don’t want to see it all. They want a little mystery. They want to wonder what you’ve got under there.” Of course, my grandmother’s other advice that pertained to intimate relations between men and women was, “There’s nothing so interesting about sex. Even the cavewomen could fuck.” So I took it with a grain of salt.
B-Tit takes a long swill of Bud and announces, “Welp, I’m going up to the stage.” He goes to sit at the foot of one of the dancers, and proceeds to text on his phone while she grinds the pole in front of him.
“Wow, he is acting bored,” Ricky marvels.
“How many times has he done this?” I ask.
Ricky and I, being left to our own devices, do what we would do if we were at any bar: talk about typical girl shit. It didn’t particularly matter to us that our friend’s face was seven inches from a woman’s birth canal, we had to confer our opinions to one another about the new Sephora eye primer and whether it was appropriate to go out with a guy who had admitted that he didn’t know what a labia was.
B-Tit motions for us to join him at the stage. “Ready?” she asks, and we gather our courage and go sit next to him. There are two new dancers up on the stage, one in purple and one in pink. The one in pink is, to say the least, athletic. She stretches her legs above her head and then swan-dived into an impressive split, all while keeping a seductive look on her face. I watch her amazed, quite positive that I would look and sound like a water buffalo trying to escape from a herd of bees if I ever tried to move into that position. I had to tip her on sheer elasticity alone. I reached into my purse and pulled out a bill. I look at B-Tit, who nods, and I place it gently on the stage in front of her. She continues to grind on the pole and regales us with a move where she does a backwards roll into an almost regal pose of laying on her side. I know that I have broken the rule of looking unimpressed, but I wonder how many hours a day she has to flex to do these kinds of things. When the song ends, she collects her tips from the front of the stage and thanks us quietly. “You were awesome!” Ricky says, equally impressed.
She looks up, surprised, and breaks into a smile. “Thank you!” she says, and hoists herself up onto her platforms, which clack down the stage into the dressing room.
We watch two more dancers, who are equally impressive, and by the end, we’ve had a nice exchange with one of them, who reveals that she’s a little tipsy. I imagine you would have to be to not feel the pain of rolling into a human pretzel, but she seems cheery enough. A group of guys sits behind us, and one of them places a twenty up on the stage. She’s upside down and facing backwards at the time, so she doesn’t see him. When she goes to collect the tips, she picks it up and beams at us. The guy behind us frowns and orders a shot.
When we finish our beers, and run out of cash, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of reason for us to stay, so we wave at our dancers and go to leave. The guy at the desk tells us to have a good night, and we leave feeling, at least for me, strangely a part of the scene. We thank B-Tit for the experience. “No prob,” he says, and tells us there are plenty more we can hit up.
“I wonder what that place looks like on a Saturday night,” I muse.
“I don’t know, but I’m glad we went,” Ricky says, and I agree.
The next day, Ricky and I get up early to go to the gym. When both of us realize that we neglected to eat breakfast, we stop at 7-11 to buy a granola bar. When we go to check out, I look in my barren wallet and realize that I’m drained. “Shit, I used all my cash on the strippers last night,” I say, and the woman at the register smiles politely as Ricky hands her a wad of ones. She watches us leave, dressed in purple sweats, piling into a car that not twelve hours ago was parked in the lot of L.A.’s.
I go to back the car up, the morning sun beating down onto the alabaster sidewalk, and I slip on a pair of sunglasses. I wonder if my grandmother’s advice extends to the face – what does she have under those sunglasses? Is it the face of a woman who minored in Women’s Studies that spent the previous night laying dollars in front of elastic women? What else does she do to keep things interesting? Keeping with the theme of new experiences, I mention to Ricky, “You know, not having cash because I spent it all on exotic dancers wasn’t something I ever thought I would say.” I know of at least one 7-11 cashier that would concur.
