My Night at a Strip Club, and What it Led Me To
“So, do you loves want to go to a Christmas party at a strip club after this?” My sister and I both, in unison, replied “Absolutely.” Strip clubs, in the right taste, the right amount of alcohol, and with another man’s money to spend, can be one of the most rewarding experiences any American can have. However, it’s a very delicate scale that must be balanced, or everything can be thrown off and you can wind up talking to a stripper all night in the bathroom about her dreams to become a dental assistant. We had forgotten about the fragility of this kind of offer.
Thirty minutes later, the three of us— me, my sister, and Tom, a man who thought he was on a date with one of at least one of us — were calling our Uber and accepting our fate to leave our old Prius overnight in valet and deal with the financial consequences later. That was sort of our go-to mindset (let us know if you want private money management classes). “Oh, it’s in Inglewood? Who’s party is this?” My sister paced around with her huge well-deserved shopping bags and her face slightly worried me. I, as you should know, am probably the worst person with directions and physical placement that you will ever meet. In short, I have no idea where the fuck I am. Like ever. If you’re not an LA native, or just directionally-challenged like me, Inglewood is not the best place to be going at ten at night with receipts from The Grove falling out of you (even when someone else’s last four digits are on them). I remained positive and our excitement to return to a place we sometimes consider heaven (strip clubs) overrode hesitations. “Johnny Spring’s, the guy who owns Wildcat, or whatever that couture company is” Tom said. My sister’s face furrowed even further. “Oh the Uber is here, come on loves, chop chop.”
She went in the front seat, an odd choice considering Tom definitely thought they were on a date, and I slid into the back with him. Forty minutes and a lot of terrible-yet-amazing-circa-2007 rap songs later, we found ourselves in an expected argument with the bouncer trying to explain we were there for the Christmas party. We got in without much persistence and no one checked our ID’s. Yet another red flag we chose to paint white. We went straight to the bar and were immediately handed alcohol, and then proceeded to find a front row seat in front of a fully naked stripper, equipped with a pink gemstone butt plug. This, as you may know, is illegal, and no, I don’t mean the butt plug. Alcohol sales are prohibited at fully nude clubs, and considering the fact that I downed a vodka-soda without paying, I’m guessing they discovered a loophole, like man discovering fire, voilà. The drunker you can get an already-slurring regular, the better for the naked women around him, and by default, better for the club owner.
“I’m gonna go to the bathroom.” My sister said. Tom was nowhere to be found but I assumed he was with his friend, whose party it was. A few guys came and went in the seat to the right of me before my sister returned to her seat which was on the left, but the one who stayed next to me was the Christmas-party-curator himself, Johnny, in all of his glory. He was slurring and drooling and violently yelling at the strippers to come over to him, once in a while shoving his face in their boobs and trying to grope them. I used my beanie to try to ignore him, thinking that if I couldn’t see him he would magically disappear.
Once my sister and her “date” came back, we threw (Tom’s) money and had fun for a little while, but it wasn’t long before Johnny was directing his energy towards me when the next stripper proceeded to ignore him. He leaned on my chair even when I was leaning on my sisters’. He tried to move my hair out of my ear to tell me the most vulgar shit you will ever hear about women. About what he wanted to do, about what he thought he would do. By this point my body language had me completely caved into myself, almost sitting on my sister’s lap while he took over my chair. It was like a dream I couldn’t pry myself out of. It was like a fly stuck to my body with superglue. Of course, any other fly and I would have just ripped it off and left without skipping a beat, but because I knew him mutually through Tom, not to mention he was supposed to be some big-shot professional executive, I wasn’t exactly inclined to make a scene. My anxiety had topped out at 500 horsepower, and I was desperately trying to get myself back to baseline before I took any action, a suggestion from my very, very Northern-Californian therapist. I was taking deep breaths and pulling my tears back. I looked at my sister and she knew instantly we needed to get out.
I could barely take the horrible wrap-up conversation the four of us had. My ears felt plugged and my vision felt blurry from anxiety and tears coming very soon. I could kind of make out what he was saying — something about how he could drive us home and that we didn’t need to Uber, even though he was coked out of his mind and drunk beyond human understanding. A phone finally buzzed indicating our ride was here, and I once again slid into the back thinking my sister would be there next to me to hold my hand. Tears immediately started falling down my face and there was nothing I could do but look out the window dramatically and try to be quiet. No one noticed anything was wrong for a while, but when the guy-who-thought-he-was-gonna-get-laid-but-quickly-lost-hope moved closer to my sniffles, and my sister turned around, they both knew something was terribly wrong.
