As the Diamond Cabaret dancer leaned close, her melon-floral scent and the words “you’re gorgeous” snuggling my cheek, I got religion. It’s a man’s creed, which like any hard-core faith seeks total devotion or rejection; indifference is what damns you.
I finally understood why every man would do well to write at least one strip-club chapter into his life. It’s not that we require the neon promise of arousal, the titillation of sex denied.
It’s that a man who resists objectifying a woman is lying to himself. We must, to stretch our religion metaphor, walk through the valley of the shadow of lust, a trek without which we cannot square our hormonal, emotional and spiritual accounts. To suppress our natures is to emasculate ourselves; respecting and managing them allows us to be decent boyfriends, husbands and fathers. And better men.
Watching strippers never did much for me. So, during trips to Houston and New Orleans over the past several months, plus Denver more recently, I visited clubs to explore why. I went with friends, chatted with dancers and observed patrons.
To my mind, however, the question had already been answered.
A stripper, like a prostitute, doesn’t do what she does for us. Eyes cast to no one and nothing, she wastes her youth and talent on a pole. If she smiles and preens, it feeds our delusion of intimacy, the idea that ones and fives snapped beneath a G-string can cultivate a bond she shares with no other.
At least 90 percent of these women, says every dancer I have ever asked, are strung out or sexually traumatized, often starting in childhood.
“I didn’t have a father growing up,” Jada, a.k.a. XTC, told me in Houston – common in her experience in the world of dancing.
Sex and yearning are never simple, however. One of my guides to Gomorrah illustrated the point. “You get to be Hugh Hefner for an hour. And that’s worth a couple hundred dollars.”
Acknowledging our desire to be Hef, at least every so often, is worth much more, as my three-city journey affirmed.
Houston
No one strips as Cyndi Lauper sings “Time After Time,” her one great song: “Lying in my bed I hear the clock tick and think of you. …”
It feels like dead air on a radio broadcast, but the patrons at Treasures don’t care. No one in either of the club’s two main rooms is watching the dancers anyway.
Here, and at the other clubs my friend will show me in a city widely considered the strip-club capital of America, it’s all about the lap dances.
The women pay a nominal fee each night for the chance to make $300-$1,500, a waitress says. Boyfriends are banned from the club – something about fights breaking out.
Dancers from Russia, Argentina and down the street converge on my friend and me like schools of fish in dark water. They fasten to various men, negotiating, then bouncing and writhing in a way that occurs behind red-curtained rooms in other cities.
My friend considers strip clubs a special-occasion treat; too much indulgence would be “economic suicide.”
“It’s Playboy in three dimensions,” he says. Whether a guy is 20 or 60, “the women are always the same age.”
He tempers this enthusiasm for the scene by conceding “the hopelessness of it.”
Ariel, an Asiatic stunner, doesn’t get my sputtering ambivalence when I decline her $20 services. Her sexiness is overtly impersonal, embodying why I don’t like strip clubs. Yet the heat of it so close makes my wallet feel heavy.
That quality in Molly, a statuesque brunet with glasses, feels more sad and honest to me. It springs from why she began dancing.
“I was dirt poor,” she says, and her car had been repossessed. At strip clubs, “a lot of the girls are (screwed) up.” Yet no more than the waitresses at Chili’s, Molly says, and they make a lot less money.
Later, as I’m leaving, a male employee says, “I hope you don’t have a wife or girlfriend to go home to.”
He’s referring to the lipstick on my white shirt – compliments of Molly?
“No, I don’t,” I reply.
“Excellent!”
At Caligula, a seedier cousin of Treasures, Jada is sitting with her leg across my lap because she wants to, she says. She requires only a drink from me to gladly tell her life story.
Voluptuous and well over 6 feet tall in her clear platform shoes, Jada is a forceful version of most strippers I have ever talked to: self-possessed but fragile, worldly but cynical.
Jada, or XTC, is planning on college; she isn’t ashamed of her work (“I am an entertainer”); men are this close to useless (“I really don’t need a man to please me. All I want from a man is the touch and holding”).
“I think I am an attractive woman,” Jada says. “I think I’m an intelligent woman.”
She would prostitute herself only to support her child.
“My mom didn’t raise … a prostitute. She raised a woman.”
Randi (not her real name; I’m not a narc) is a dancer who offers herself as a call girl after-hours. Like a truck-stop waitress who’s known her co-worker for 20 years, she glides by and calls Jada “a good girl.”
“Ain’t that right, Alexis?” she says.
“It’s XTC,” Jada responds.
New Orleans
The strip clubs seem endless on Bourbon Street, where men on rented balconies chant, “Show your (breasts),” then reward the many female passers-by who do with cheering and plastic beads.
On a similar balcony filled with women, I innocently approach when beckoned, only to face a demand to show a part of my anatomy that involves removing my boxer shorts. Uh, no.
At Hustler’s, the patrons – tourists juiced on jazz and beer – are much more eager to throw money at the strippers than the resigned regulars in Houston. And the strippers are much less aggressive about peddling lap dances.
The dancers also look how I feel: very bored. One of my two companions isn’t bored so much as antsy. He reminds me of a junior high kid nervously waiting to ask his homeroom crush for a dance.
Bailey, a freshly scrubbed blond of 27 who could star on the teen TV hit “The O.C.,” says about 10 percent of her fellow dancers enjoy themselves onstage.
“I’m more into pleasing the crowd,” says Bailey, who works at Hustler clubs nationwide. What pleases her more, I’m sure, is the $1,000 a night she purports to make, plus a boyfriend who doesn’t mind her profession.
Denver
Accompanied by my pal Gary, I enter Diamond Cabaret with the swagger of someone certain of winning big at a casino.
The debauchery of Houston and New Orleans has backed up my view of strip clubs without essentially changing it. I will jot down some local color and leave.
The women here are B-movie beautiful, spread among four circular stages without poles and bathed in cool lighting that reminds me of Vegas. It’s a Tuesday, and the place feels comfortably empty, relaxing almost.
That’s when I’m lulled into the fantasy.
A lovely thing – “tragically” skinny, in Gary’s words – slides into a chair at our table. She could have played Jennifer Aniston’s little sis on “Friends”
Anticipating the tricks of other clubs, I tell Scarlett we won’t be buying her any champagne or getting any lap dances. She’s taken aback but stays and chats anyway.
The details of her life and how she expresses them aren’t remarkable: 20 years old, studying at beauty school, hiding her profession from her parents. In August, pockets filled with the cash of lonely men, she plans to leave the stage altogether.
What’s remarkable is that after Scarlett leaves to strip on the stage next to us, I’m hoping she’ll return, even without the promise of money.
When she does, I feel like that junior high kid, getting another shot to ask his favorite girl to dance.
It’s the same feeling as when, earlier on, I handed a single to another dancer after her set; the one who then brushed my cheek with her wonderful light scent. Arousal was in the mix, but it felt – in its momentary swoon – like the arousal of puppy love.
“It’s the only environment I can think of where very attractive women try to catch your eye,” Gary says.
And perhaps the only one where we’re happy to believe the prettiest of lies.
Staff writer Vic Vogler can be reached at 303-820-1749 or vvogler@denverpost.com.
