Self-Made Man (11 page)

As she kept on, I put myself somewhere else. I tried to pretend that she was someone I knew and liked and wanted to be with. But it didn't really work. I tried to grind against her, too, but it was just a forced motion, tawdry and ridiculous.

Then it ended abruptly, just as the song ended, and she asked me if I wanted to go longer—lap dances are timed and paid for by the length of a song. I thanked her and said no. She smiled and stood up, pulling me up with her to make way for another dancer and her customer, who were already nudging their way into the cubicle. As I tried to collect myself, the incoming dancer brushed me away impatiently with the back of her hand.

I had a number of lap dances as Ned, and they always felt the same. Actually I could hardly remember what they felt like, because they didn't usually feel like much of anything. To me, when they were happening, they were mostly a blank, as blank as the faces of the dancers and the dead air behind their faces. I remember being struck again and again by the emptiness in the dancers' eyes. After performing, they usually made the rounds of the bar to solicit bills from onlookers, since few people ever bothered to make their way up to the stage to slip something in their G-strings. It was during these encounters, when I tried to engage them in conversation, that I saw how vapid they were or had made themselves to survive this work. That depressed me most of all.

But as I began to understand more about the shame that arose in men from the need to visit places like this, and the un-doubted shame that arose in the dancers for having to work in them, I thought I began to understand something more about the kind of woman that becomes a sex object in the eyes of men. A lot of women have asked themselves why so many men are so fond of modern porn stars and centerfolds, women who aren't real women, whose breasts are fake, whose hair is bleached into straw or perversely depilated, whose faces are painted thick, and whose bodies have been otherwise altered by surgery or diet to conform with doll-like exactitude to something that isn't found in nature. Why, I had so often wondered, didn't men want real women? Was it misogyny, a kind of collective repressed homosexuality or perhaps pedophilia that really wanted a body type that more resembled a man's or a child's, fatless and smooth?

For some, this is no doubt true, or why would magazines like
Barely Legal,
full of pre-and parapubescent girls, sell so well? Why would the fashion industry, long dominated by gay men, demand that women starve themselves until their bodies, hipless and breastless, look like the bodies of adolescent boys?

But as I made my way through strip club after strip club in search of some kind of answer, I wondered if maybe it didn't come back to shame. I knew from my own sexual fantasies that there is something appealing at least in the abstract about fucking someone who isn't there. When pure fucking and animal release is what you're thinking about—and that is what the male sex drive at its basest seems to be all about—you don't want there to be any witnesses. You don't want to be a dirty, senseless animal with someone you love or respect or are capable of loving and respecting. You'd be too ashamed for her to see that part of you in the light of day, and isn't a mind something like the light of day? A real woman is a mind, and a mind is a witness, and a witness is the last thing you need when you're ashamed. So fucking a fake, mindless hole is what you need. The faker the better.

I suppose, oddly enough, when it came to genuinely heterosexual men, all of this added up in my mind to something that might have been the opposite of misogyny, the idea being that you could only treat as an object something that resembled a real woman
as little as possible,
because only then could you bear to mis-treat it and yourself enough to satisfy your instincts.

Who knows? I certainly couldn't know with any kind of surety. But I knew what it was like to fantasize about women in the cold abstract, and I knew that when you did you weren't thinking about Ava Gardner. You were thinking about some anonymous, chesty, helium-voiced cheerleader slut blowing you in the locker room during halftime.

I'd been there in my head, though as I had just learned, there is a world of difference between going there in your head and doing it for real. But now I was here, where I could partake in this world as Ned, and at least stand for a while on the receiving end of what it had to offer. When I did, I found something more than the discomfort of being a woman in a man's world. I found at least what I thought was a glimpse of the discomfort of being a man in a man's world and what that did to women as well as men, and I felt something that I hadn't expected to feel. Genuine sympathy.

 

Still, thus far I was just a visitor, orbiting the periphery from a safe distance, and that could tell me only so much. I knew after visiting the Lizard Lounge with Phil that I wasn't going to put myself through the added torture of spending more time in these places with someone I didn't know. Besides, Phil's family life made it hard for him to get away. So after bowling one Monday night, I asked my teammate Jim if he wanted to go to the local hole and get a beer with me. We'd gotten to know each other fairly well. Besides, he'd talked of wanting to go to a strip club on his ski vacation, so I knew he had the taste for it, as well as a dire need for distraction.

His wife had been given her second cancer diagnosis a few weeks prior, and it was clear from the little he said about it that there wasn't much hope on the horizon. It was equally clear that he had nobody to talk to about it, and the rage and pain boiling up inside him were reaching critical mass. He was having trouble sleeping, so when she went to bed, often as early as nine o'clock, instead of watching cable reruns and smoking pot until the wee hours in a desperate effort to pass out, he'd head down to the bar to try to find some comfort in that oblivious company. I convinced him to come to the titty bar with me as often as he could make it, and it became a regular thing with us for a while. We'd head down there and play pool for a few hours, he'd let out some of what was eating him, and we'd soak up the miasma of that place like it was therapy, letting it corrupt us, until chatting with naked women and ducking into cubicles to have your parts rubbed seemed almost normal.

The local was windowless, ill lit and choked with cigarette smoke. Once inside, you wouldn't know whether it was day or night. This was something all these places had in common, probably because they were usually open by midday, and well patronized much of the afternoon. I guess they figured even people who make a habit of it prefer to do their sinning in the dark.

The local had a large ovoid bar, also characteristic, with two small square stages in the center, one girl dancing on each, working the pole and sprawling on the blinking squares of light that flashed on and off beneath her.

There was a kitchen in back that served French fries, hot dogs, burgers and wings, but you weren't well advised to consume anything there that had once been alive. Next to the kitchen there was a large red and white sign that said
NO BIKER COLORS
. I'd seen signs like this in other places, though they usually said
NO CLUB COLORS
, or simply,
NO COLORS
. I'd asked Jim what that meant, and he'd said, “You know, gangs.”

Foolishly, I'd said; “You mean Bloods and Crips, that kind of thing?”

“No,” he'd laughed. “These are white people.”

He meant motorcycle gangs like the Warlocks—who were reputedly much worse than the Hell's Angels—and other clubs like the Breed and the Pagans. They were rumored to be regulars at places like this, though I never saw many of them. But then, without their colors, I wouldn't necessarily have recognized them for what they were.

I do remember one guy, though, whom I wouldn't otherwise have noticed, who, thinking back on it now, was probably a gang member. He was well over six feet tall and wide as a doorway, and he had that just-try-it attitude about him that made you realize he could do just about anything he wanted and back it up with lethal force. Jim and I were sitting at the bar. Jim had gone to the bathroom and had left his coat on the back of his stool. There were several empty stools on either side of us, but this guy wanted Jim's stool. He came over, took Jim's coat and threw it on the floor. As he did so, stupidly I opened my mouth to protest that someone was sitting there. He stopped in midswipe and shot me one of those mock, raised-eyebrow looks that says, “You were saying…?” but whose real intent is “Do you wanna die?”

I'd never been on the receiving end of one of those gratuitous alpha male assertions, but it's the kind of thing you don't misinterpret, except maybe when you're piss drunk. I saw my error instinctively and redirected accordingly.

“Don't worry, man,” I said, raising my palm in a defensive gesture, “I wouldn't dream of it.”

He nodded and took the stool. Three guys sitting farther along the bar burst out laughing, as did I. I guess not everyone reacted the way I did, though. Certainly no rival biker would. Hence, I supposed, the need for the sign at the end of the bar.

Also at the far end of the bar was a large TV mounted high on the wall. Two others were placed similarly around the room. This, too, was typical of most of these places. The multiple sets were almost always tuned to a sporting event, usually basketball, football or hockey.

Off to the side there were two pool tables and the cramped couch room, which was so small and unobtrusive that I had assumed it was a broom closet until the first time I played pool and saw one of the dancers emerge from it with a customer. Even then I was still naive enough to think that only one dance could possibly be going on in there at any given time. My first time back there, though, I found out otherwise. There could be as many as three or four couples going at it in a space the size of a bathroom.

I became a regular at the local, going on as many nights as I could over the course of several weeks, sometimes with Jim, sometimes alone. I met Gina on my first night out with Jim. I'd been to the local a couple of times before on my own but hadn't stayed long. Early on I found it hard to make myself go to these places at all, much less regularly. They depressed me so much it would take me days to recover from a single jaunt.

Jim took a shine to Gina right away because she had large breasts—he liked big tits—and because she did this thing when she danced where she'd put her tit in her mouth and bite the nipple, pulling back and forth on it with her teeth for a good fifteen seconds, and stretching her flesh like pizza dough. Jim liked that a lot.

“Ouch” was all I could think.

Gina was a tiny woman, five feet tops, and aside from her double-D breasts, she was built like a sixteen-year-old gymnast. Her ass was high and tight without a hint of cellulite, and the only signs of the life she'd lived were the clutch of stretch marks on her belly, which was otherwise as firm and juvenile as the rest of her. She claimed to be thirty-four, which may have been a lie, but she could pass for it in the dark.

She said she had three sons, two teenagers and a three-year-old. She had been dancing since the age of eighteen, the year she'd had her first child. I'd assumed that that had been her reason for starting, but she claimed not to have needed the money. She had grown up with her grandparents in a wealthy suburb, and though not rich themselves, they had been well enough off to give her what she needed. She maintained that even now she didn't do it for the money, but if that was true, and not just some line she handed us, then her life was a whole lot sadder than I'd thought.

When I asked her why she danced at the local if she didn't really need the money, she said simply: “I love men.” Even if this had been true when she'd started out, which was doubtful, it certainly wouldn't have remained so in this of all places. It was a little like saying you became a coroner because you were a people person.

The more we talked, the more I was struck not by her purported love of men but by her apparent distaste for women. She talked about women's parts as if they were garbage. She found them repellant, she said, and far from finding the men she pleasured disgusting, she wondered why they didn't find her disgusting. She couldn't understand, she said, why anyone would want to get within a mile of a pussy. She went on about this for a while—too long—screwing up her face as she said, “Wet sloppy pussy, ew.” It didn't surprise me that she was filled with self-loathing—everyone in this place was—but the vehemence of her expressed dislike for the female anatomy and her abiding love of men as a so-called species gave me the impression that she was working pretty hard to cover over something traumatic from the past or to repel her true feelings about the present, but then I guessed that went with the territory.

She wasn't going to let me or any other customer know what she was really thinking. Deflecting the truth was part of the biz, integral to the whole show we were putting on for each other. Nobody came here looking for reality. Obviously, everyone came to escape it. And maybe to these guys, and a lot of guys, this seemed like fantasyland. But in reality it was the exact opposite. It was as real and ugly as it got, right down to the stretch marks and the careworn sofas. It was far uglier than all but the ugliest of life out there. Walking into one of these places wasn't an escape. It was like walking into the gritty subconscious, the very place most people were trying to avoid in the first place.