Naked ambiguity

Okay, last Friday night was sort of…weird. Not the hanging out with Jeff part—he had no problems with me not drinking and seemed pleased that he had access to a designated driver. Plus, Jeff and I are the sort of friends who, even after 5 or 6 years' absence, end up talking as if we'd seen each other just yesterday. So, we met up at Atlanta Bread Co., shot the shit and grabbed some dinner, then decided to head to Augusta, since it was First Friday and downtown Augusta celebrates by having a block-party. Or something.

I say that "or something" there because we never even made it to the First Friday celebrations: we ended up going to the Discotheque.

Now, those of you who are familiar with Augusta know what the Discotheque is, but for those of you who aren't it's… well, it's hard to pin down exactly; you could call it a "strip club" but, honestly, most of the stripping is pretty perfunctory: women get on-stage at the beginning of a song, quickly remove any outer clothing and the bikini-top they're wearing, then flail and grind in a highly sexually-charged manner while wearing only a g-string. Once that song ends, they quickly (or as quickly as their perilously high-heels will allow them) remove the g-string and repeat the whole process for the next song. The entire time they're doing this people—mainly men (with some notable exceptions)—throw small bills at them. I believe the correct term for this is "exotic dancing," although that phrase could just as easily describe Australian Corroboree or African Moribayasa. Presumably this dancing is "exotic" because, in my experience, this sort of behavior is entirely alien to women outside of these clubs.

I'm sorry if the preceding paragraph comes across as a little bit dense and nit-picky about the details of places like the Discotheque that everybody takes for granted, but let me share a secret with you: I've really only ever been to one club like this—the Discotheque—on two separate occasions—once Friday night and once on a similar Friday night about 10 years ago, when I was going through my divorce. Since I'm not an habitue of "strip clubs," I invariably go in to them with a different paradigm in mind: something where pretty women with complicated hairdos twirl feathered boas and languidly drop bits of clothing to the raunchy glissandos of a slide trombone. Needless to say, when I'm confronted with a woman looking for all the world like she's an epileptic in her gynecologist's office while Papa Roach thunders in the background, I'm always a little bit surprised and slightly disappointed.

That's not to say that I didn't have a good time, because—and I'm not sure how to feel about this—I did. I can't really pin it down either: I know that the entire endeavor is the definition of sexist, with women being blatantly and sexually objectified, then rewarded for it, but looking around at all of us men throwing money at naked women in the hope that one of them would come around and air-hump one of our faces, I wasn't quite sure who was exploiting whom. Basically, the entire experience was a colossal joke in very bad taste, the kind that makes you laugh even though you know it's not really funny. Plus, I did get one pretty funny story out of it.

So, I'm sitting on the outskirts of this entire fiasco, while some marginally pretty naked woman on-stage is facing away from me and touching her toes, when one of the dancers who had recently finished her turn and put her slinky dress back on sits down next to me and says "Hi."

Now, I had just watched this woman dance and, quite frankly, I wasn't too impressed. She was very pretty, with a nicely (and probably very expensively) constructed body. However, she didn't seem "into it": she didn't make eye contact with any of the guys stage-side while she danced, did the same moves over and over again and basically was just sleepwalking through her whole performance. Turning to face her, I saw that she had the same thousand-yard-stare she'd had on stage. Here, I thought to myself, is somebody who is neither very good at her job nor very happy with it. She's kind of like the McCashier of the exotic dance scene.

I decide I'm not going to hold this against her though: I've worked retail; I know how much customers suck.

"Hi," I say, extending my hand. "My name's John. How're you?"

She accepts my hand and looks somewhat puzzled, as if she'd like to think but, being so pretty her whole life, has never really had need or reason to do so. "I'm fine?" she says. "My name's [insert generic stripper name here]?"

"Well," I say, "it's nice to meet you." Then, not knowing what the hell I'm supposed to do with a vacant, non-dancing stripper, I turn back to the stage to watch the dancer there slap some ecstatic guy across the face with her tit. Once this part's done, I glance back at Miss Slinky Dress. She's looking at me. We make eye contact. I smile and give her my best bemused look, probably blushing. She leans in close.

"I get naked, you know," she says.

I pull my head back a little, my eyes widening in surprise. Not the sort of surprise that says "No way" but more the surprise that says "No duh." I mean, I've just seen every inch of this woman, including inches that her boyfriend probably ignores on a daily basis. I'm in a strip club and she is obviously a dancer….

In short, it's a decidedly weird moment in which we're both wondering who's denser.

After a moment of awkward, eye-contact maintaining silence, I smile, raise my eyebrows and nod just a little to let her know that I've figured this out.

"Right up there," she says, pointing sidelong at one of the unoccupied pole-dance tables. I glance over at it and, still smiling, give my slight nod. "Do you want one?" she says, leaning forward to close the "No duh" distance I'd already injected into our body language. Her eyes are still as intimate as if she were meticulously counting the hairs on the back of my head.

Trying unsuccessfully not to laugh and grinning like an idiot in the process, I blush straight up to the roots of my hair and stammer "Yeah, of course."

Now, while I don't often go to places like the Discotheque, the ice-cold glass of soda for which I paid $6.50 reminds me of one simple fact: nothing in these places is free. However, because I am both polite and a prude I can't bring myself to ask the next obvious question. Call me a romantic, but the phrase "And how much would that cost?" doesn't come naturally to me when I'm conversing with a woman, even a stripper who's just offered me a table-dance.

So, instead, I smile widely, possibly even chuckling a bit. My blush develops a blush of its own. I run my hand through my hair, glance down at the table and the $6.50 soda sweating in its little water ring, look quickly sidelong at the stage where a dancer is flossing her labia with her g-string, then back into those vacant and, I now notice, hazel eyes. I can feel a bout of hysterical gut-laughing coming on, and I'm not sure what's going to set it off.

And she's still staring through me like I was a streamer of cigarette smoke in front of a mildly interesting television show. "It's twenty dollars?" she says, resting her hand on the table and just barely brushing my knuckles with her fingertips.

The gut-laugh erupts, and I can't stop it. I lift my hand off the table and rest my forehead on my fingers. I look back up at her still expressionless face and try to throttle the laughter back to something manageable while I choke out "Oh, I'm so sorry sweetheart, but you've picked the wrong dude. I don't have twenty dollars."

Still laughing, I turn away from her as the current song is ending. While I watch a naked woman crawl around on-stage scooping up stray singles, my table companion stands up and slinks off out of my peripheral vision.

That was most of my night, really. I know that I absolutely should not go to these sorts of places very often. From out of the fog of mixed sexual frustration and moral ambiguity through which I wandered all Friday night, I have gleaned one cold, hard, indisputable fact: I am a total sucker for naked women. At one point, after I'd run out of money, I looked over at Jeff and said "We are at a crux point here, man: we either need to leave right now, or I'm gonna hit that expensive ATM over there, get $100, convert it to singles and go completely bananas." He laughed. "No, man…I'm totally fucking serious."

We left shortly thereafter.