Don't Say I Never Did Anything For You

After my last post about memories of the last 3 years, I was asked to explain some of the events mentioned, so for you that are interested...

Master Pirate Robot, it looks like you had quite a roller coaster of a time these past three years. What religions did you change from and to? How bad did that disease get? How was your first strip club experience?

Let me answer those in chronological order, rather than spatial:

While working as a teacher in Donna I went through some of the roughest patches of my life. My parents moved to East Texas, leaving me without family within a 1/2 day's drive. It was lonely, but not impossible, to manage. However, to compound this situation, my wife of a year, who will remain nameless, finally got fed up with the state of our marriage and did something about it.

I will not, nor should I, place blame in the divorce. It seems to me that all divorces (or breakups of any sort for that matter) are about people becoming dissatisfied with their partner and deciding that a change needs to be made. Whether the fault lies with one or the other doesn't really matter. Either way, someone is tired of the other person to the point that staying married, or dating, or sleeping together, or working together, you name it, is no longer an option. In my marriage, my ex wife was the one who brought things to a head and got the papers signed, outside of that, I won't blame either of us.

Divorced and living alone, eating became my only solace. Don't get me wrong, I wasn't one of those guys that gets carted around on a forklift, but I wasn't far from it. I was pushing towards 360, the heaviest I would get in my entire life. I was miserable and food gave me a little bit of happiness. Much like heroine gives happiness, I imagine. So not only was I divorced, living alone and miserable, I compounded things by adding close to 30 pounds of fat to my already heavy frame.

I moved in with a friend, Joseph, into his Edinburg apartment and life looked up for a little while, but that was short lived. Hours spent playing video games, hunting for used cds, and surfing internet porn weren't filling the void, so to speak. It was during this time that I made my first trip to a strip club, the Longhorn Saloon.

Now the Longhorn Saloon is a "classy joint". And by "classy" I mean, don't even think of taking a date there unless she works there and you are dropping her off for the evening pole shift. And if you date strippers, let's be honest, you probably aren't reading this anyway. But back to the Saloon: Old, stuffing-exploded-out chairs, overpriced drinks, bad lighting, and a worn-out PA matched a run down exterior and pot hole-filled parking lot. Digs like this only attracted the most desperate of dancers. These women were like vampires, the sun was their greatest enemy.

Why my friends and I loved this place is hard to remember. At the end of the day we would look up with our straining eyes from hours of video games and file out, like zombies in search of braaaiiinnnssss, pile into the car, and ride down University Avenue. There, we would pitch the 5 dollar cover fee over the counter, pass by the bar for a beer, then cluster around a table (not too close! we're not perverts!) laughing and hooting for each performer as they shook like bowls of jelly in need of stronger Tupperware.

One night, Joseph and I had rounded up a larger group than normal and money and liquor, incidentally, was flowing more freely. Ronnie was pulled onto the stage by a rather large "cowgirl" wearing not much more than red leather, fringed chaps. She proceeded to give him the treatment on stage while we cheered, as if he were with Angelina Jolie and not an overstuffed Annie Oakley. Ronnie was game, beer in one hand, pole in the either, he smiled and let her earn the money we threw at the stage.

Several dancers later, a stripper, Lili, approached our table asking if any of wanted lap dances. It's odd when this happens, first of all, because the stripper is topless. For most men, the view of a naked breast automatically lowers the IQ from college grad to drooling hungry baby and the ability to make a reasonable financial decision becomes a game of blindfolded-darts in the back room of your head. I can think of only twice in my life that I have said no to a topless woman, once in this very bar, this night. So she passed by and went to her usual corner of the bar, waiting for her next shift on the stage.

I noticed Charlie following her to her seat and figured he was looking for a private dance, so my attention shifted back to the stage. There is some voyeurism in watching a friend get a lap dance. In principle, you are watching your friend have sex with a naked woman. Sure, his member never makes an appearance (or he's going to jail) but the stripper's job is to sell the idea, and, honestly, most of them have the act down. Watching Charlie have sex with a stripper was not on my scavenger hunt list. Well, not that night, anyway.

I looked up at, well, I mentioned them and the effects before, naked breasts. Lili was standing over me.

"Your friend bought you a dance." She spoke with a rough whisper. I guess it was supposed to sound sexy, but, instead, it sounded as if she had just finished off her third pack of lucky strikes. I looked around for an inhaler but no one was offering.

I will be honest, I was scared. It's sort of like losing your virginity all over again. Terrified you will make a mistake and do it wrong, wondering what it will feel like and how you will feel about it tomorrow by the light of day. Yes, this red-blooded, heterosexual male was terrified of the naked woman that wanted to sit in his chair, with him still in it.

She got on my lap and began to grind on my lap, going through the motions as I had seen her do with so many other men that filled the bar that night. But as an actress, she was good. No doubt, from the hours and hours of practice. As I've said before, they have to make it look convincing and, in more ways than one, she was a pro.Two things come to mind about that lap dance:

1. The stripper smell. Strippers have a particular smell. We discussed it that night at the table after she had moved on stage. Its the smell of baby oil and body spray. I would say its a nice smell, but its too slutty to be called nice. So instead, call it a sexy smell, but if I ever came home to my wife smelling like that, I would be worried as to where she was while I was at work. I have no doubt they have vats of the stuff out back of strip clubs, maybe the girls bathe in it, I don't know. But Lili smelled like every stripper I have ever been within smelling distance of and that smell was all over my shirt, worn like a badge for two days.
2. I was going to start this point by saying, "Not to be graphic, but...", but then realized that I am already writing this piece about my first experience in a strip club so what's the point of a statement like that. During her dance, Lili referred to my member as... drumroll here..."a turkey leg". I have called my man parts many ridiculous names, beginning with peepee at the age of 4 and ending with man parts at the age of 29, but turkey leg actually made me, and the table full of voyeuristic perverts (friends), burst into laughter, regardless of the fact that a stripper was draped across my chair.
   

After the lap dance, we left the Longhorn Saloon and picked up McDonald's on the way home. It was dollar Big Mac night and I had some singles left in my wallet. We kept laughing about having a turkey leg instead of a Big Mac, though in retrospect, that certainly placed shadows on our heterosexuality. Lili's smell lingered on my shirt and until laundry day my room had that slight smell of something afoot. Like something dirty had just happened minutes before, but I had just missed it. I was divorced, living alone, overweight, and miserable, in a room reeking of baby oil and bodywash, tired.

My apologies for the length. About halfway through, I realized that this story had a mind of its own. I will respond to the two other questions in follow up posts.