AN AS YET UNTITLED TALE FROM A TITTY BAR
By Jamie Richter
Copyright 2011 by Jamie Richter
Smashwords Edition
Saturday, November 13, 2010.
A glance at my wristwatch revealed the time to be approaching eleven in the evening. Here I was, exploring the drizzly warren of Melbourne alleys in search of adventure, the thick, faux-leather jacket and navy blue baseball cap which had previously protected me from the elements now stowed conveniently in my hotel room. I stopped momentarily to take refuge under an awning near a small park in an attempt to regain my bearings as I searched for familiar landmarks: a shop I’d visited previously, a street sign, that homeless bum who corralled me outside McDonalds for money to “make a phone call”, anything. I had to mentally restrain myself from reaching into the pocket of my nondescript, black jeans, producing my iPhone, hitting the Google Maps app, and letting the in-built GPS do its thing. Nah screw that, I hadn’t flown all this way just to wuss out now. That’s right - I was going to go all Bear Grylls on this shit, even if it killed me. My eyes scanned the inky, infinite matrix of city streets and laneways. Nothing rang any visual bells; the city looked like much of a muchness in the patchy rain.
My right hand slid slowly down my thigh before coming to rest on the rectangular bulge in my jeans pocket. I was seconds away from whipping it out and worshipping at the altar of the telephonic God that was Steve Jobs. Then suddenly, out of nowhere, I did something that countless mental health professionals would consider an uncharacteristic act of primal stupidity – I sniffed the air. I sniffed the air not once, but twice. Bingo. I realised that I was somewhere in the vicinity of Flinders Street, the distinct smell wafting from the sewers underfoot was the immediate giveaway. I had to laugh - it’s funny how things can change so quickly. Only a few hours ago I had grandiose plans of hanging out with my friend on her birthday, one of the main reasons for coming all the way to Melbourne and yet somehow here I was… alone, wet, horny, and inhaling the pungent bouquet of human faeces.
There, a couple doors down from the 24-hour pizza place.
I’d skulked past this particular gentleman’s club on at least half-a-dozen occasions, my mind pouring over relatively trivial matters of strip club protocol and etiquette. Would the baseball cap and jacket ensemble I’d been sporting earlier in the night meet dress code? Was there even a dress code? Was it customary to tip the performers after each dance? Are they called ‘performers’? Could I play the cheapskate and nurse my scotch in a dark corner? It was almost as if my conscious was trying to baffle me with bullshit in the hopes that I’d turn around and go back to my hotel room, without so much as even stepping foot inside this den of depravity. Fuck you brain – you’d get yours soon enough. With my extensive knowledge of strip clubs exhausted, courtesy of six seasons of The Sopranos, I decided that it was time to man-up, bite the bullet, and simply walk over and quiz one of these compact Polynesian doormen about my long list of queries regarding dress code, protocol, and the like. That’s their job, right? I figured by now that at least one of those guys had to have already scoped me. It was pretty obvious that they knew, that I knew, that they knew I was a strip club virgin. The aforementioned waft of human excrement aside, I’m sure these two could have smelt my hesitancy in the air.
You know how sometimes you play out a situation in your head, like it was a scene from an American sitcom? Well, here I was with this fanciful notion that I could stroll over to these guys, pepper them with some amusing ‘strip club virgin’ questions, we’d proceed to laugh and engage in a little light-hearted banter over how big a ‘noob’ I was, before casually, almost effortlessly, letting me into their establishment. In the completely logical construct known as my mind, such an outcome would have been considered ideal. However, my mind isn’t even remotely representative of the real world. As I headed in the direction of the club, specifically to chat to the doormen, I stopped momentarily to give this pair of clowns another quick up and down, all before I swaggered past yet again - another swing and a miss. It wasn’t so much that I was too chickenshit to ask the pertinent questions, but rather the fact that I’d come to the conclusion that I would’ve been hard-pressed to get more than two syllables out of the mouths of these Neanderthals: perhaps a grunt of recognition, a scratch of the balls, maybe even a rambling fart, but nothing that counted as actual conversation.
I caved. When the real world fails me, which it does in a regular and spectacular fashion, I resorted to doing what any tech savvy geek would do. I posted on Facebook.
What's the protocol? Can I just go in, drink and ogle women, or do I have to buy tokens to give the slappers, whether I want to or not?
Slappers? Yes, apologies ladies.
Self-confessed geekdom aside, my primary motivation for my little adventure wasn’t to see naked women. In all honesty, I didn’t have the slightest interest in naked women tonight. Sure, that confession is probably contrary to everything a heterosexual male stands for, but it was the unadulterated truth. Dropping by your local strip club might be a run-of-the-mill chore for the average big city dweller, but this small-town rube had never been inside a strip club in his life and he wanted to see this place.
My Dark Narrator wanted to see this place.
My Dark Narrator NEEDED to see this place.
My Dark Narrator is the creature in my head that compels me to spend countless hours of my adult life tapping away at a keyboard until the early morning, frequently shunning friends, family, and a social life. Often he’ll come to me as a voice but more often than not my Dark Narrator will manifest himself as a constant drone burrowed deep within my subconscious. It’s a din that I cannot shake, no matter how hard I try, until I scratch that story from my skull, word by word, sentence by sentence, dumping it haphazardly onto the page before me. I know that might sound crazy to seemingly sane individuals, but we all have our own internal narrators. For me, he just happens to be a cackling voice that deconstructs the ludicrous world around me, before moulding it into dark, almost comical narrative.
Come to think of it, the more I write, the more I start to believe that ‘being creative’ is merely code for having a ‘socially-acceptable mental illness’.
Observations aside, there’s a well-worn mantra in the craft that goes something like ‘write what you know’, and although I begrudgingly acknowledge that I just used the wanky catchphrase ‘the craft’ while referring to what is essentially my hobby, ‘write what you know’ really is the cardinal truth. You can’t get around it. Sure, I‘ve published something like fifteen or so pieces of short fiction in various magazines and online journals around the world, but I certainly don’t claim to be a brilliant writer. If anything, I’m mediocre at best. Experience is king. A person can read as much as they like, and they can study ‘the craft’ as much as they want but in my fractured mind, experience is the giant fuck-off blade on which a writer’s Swiss Army Knife is built.
Think of it this way: would you willingly receive flying lessons from a pilot whose sole experience with a flight stick was the one lodged squarely between his legs? No. Well, probably not. Would you take the word of a Michael Jackson impersonator when it came to the thrill of walking on the actual moon? I certainly wouldn’t. The primary task of any writer worth his or her salt is to create a living, breathing world for their reader. Regardless of fictional persuasion, the writer needs to be able to draw on personal experience in order to fill that world. It’s the physics of this world, and how believable it feels under pressure that determines if a reader is going to plough through your 500-page behemoth, or use it as a paperweight for their regular subscription of Yawn Weekly.
Now back to me, because this little tale is all about me after all. I tend to write in the speculative fiction genre, not out of an unabashed love for sci-fi. If the truth be told, I cannot tolerate popular franchises like Star Wars or Star Trek but rather out of the fact it’s relatively easy to get published and probably the most fun of any genre. I know that revelation sounds kind of cold and while I adore authors such as Ray Bradbury, it’s the truth.
What I truly enjoy writing is black humour. When I first got into this caper, specifically screenwriting, I dabbled with a crime fiction black comedy in the vein of an Australian ‘Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels’. I know that’s highly unoriginal, but copying, or as Quentin Tarantino would say, ‘paying homage’ to your favourite works of fiction is a natural first step for beginners. As I logically progressed from screenwriting to short fiction and novels, due primarily to a lack of any real film industry in this country, I adapted my screenplay into a barebones novel, which slowly limped along to become a barebones second-draft of a novel. On the few occasions I’ve dusted off the manuscript for friends to peruse, I’ve had generally positive feedback – but it’s far from perfect. I knew that if I was ever going to evolve as I writer, I had to get into this club.
I needed to absorb this world as if by osmosis.
I needed this experience to add authenticity to the seedy underworld I had created within the pages of my manuscript gathering dust at the bottom of my desk drawer.
I knew that I’d kick myself if I didn’t go in.
I checked my wristwatch again. With the time pushing midnight and enough mildly-useful replies from sleep-deprived friends on Facebook, I decided that it was time to sack-up and take the leap. I gave myself a quick once over: my shirt neat, my collar straight, my jeans buttoned - my shit was together. Then again, my shit was forever together. As I rounded the corner - boom! For the last couple of hours there hadn’t been a soul outside of the club, but now, suddenly the empty roped-off queue had magically overflown with a sea of rowdy, intoxicated Islanders. Not two or three but at least twenty or thirty from my hasty headcount. Shit. At this point I considered turning around and walking away, not because I was intimidated, sure, I’ll admit I was a little unnerved, but it was more the idea of being locked in a confined space with these guys. Down ‘there’, wherever ‘there’ was, I lacked any semblance of situational awareness.
Situational Awareness: the perception of elements in the environment within a volume of time and space, the comprehension of their meaning, and the projection of their status in the near future.
In layman’s terms: I had no idea who was down there, their numbers, their ethnicity, their general intelligence level, stages of intoxication, and almost no way to gauge the general atmosphere. I was going in blind. While I hadn’t come here looking for a rumble, if the shit did indeed ‘go down’, I really didn’t want to be sticking out like Captain Cook amidst a tide of pissed-off Islanders. Having examined a few random guys standing in line, I doubt I could have taken even one of these brick-shithouses in a fair fight, let alone twenty or thirty in an unfair one.
Screw it.
If I’d learnt anything from hours wasted on Assassin’s Creed for the PlayStation, it was the fact that mingling with crowds had distinct advantages. Bobbing in a sea of black muscle shirts and tribal tattoos, I could blend in and become virtually invisible. Sure, a pale white guy in a line of Islanders kind of stood out like dogs balls on a canary, but who cared? It wasn’t like anyone knew me down here. With a sullen shrug I wandered to the back of the line in an attempt to funnel into the club unnoticed, giving one potential patron a friendly nod of the head in chauvinistic recognition of the delights to come – in return he shot me what could only be described as a ‘who the hell is this white boy?’ look of disdain.
Oh yeah, this plan was going down a treat.
Ten minutes passed and while none of us had actually been granted access inside during that time, I had somehow managed to find myself at the front of the queue. Don’t ask me how. Maybe it was like a scrum in Rugby Union where the little white ball eventually gets pushed in the right direction with enough argy-bargy, but there I was, front and centre, humming my way through several Herb Alpert trumpet solos. Hey, what else does one do when they are bored? I assumed that the long wait was obviously to do with the fact that there was only a certain amount of space in the club, fire regulations and all that, and the only way we were getting in there was if other people left. Okay, at least that answered one question – the place was packed. I should have figured as much. It was a Saturday night after all.
Saturday night was peak peep time.
The general mood in the line was jovial, aside from a couple of follicly-challenged tradies who had exclaimed that they were “sick of the fucking about” and promptly left around the five minute mark. As I waited patiently, I did my best to pick-up on random conversations within the line. Well, those conversations that were held in my native tongue. From what I could extract, it sounded like these guys were friends out on a buck’s night, a fact that was quickly reinforced when a stunning twenty-something brunette sauntered over to us in her white tank top and cut-off jeans. I highly doubted that she could have been the girlfriend of any of these brutes in line – these boys would have snapped her tiny frame like a twig. Once I finally tore my eyes away from her pert little breasts and focused on the actual words dancing across her soft, supple lips, it became obvious. She was the ‘hostess’ for this rowdy clan, and for whatever that task entailed, it looked like she was earning every dollar of her money tonight.
Here I was hovering at the front of the queue: standing before the doorman, the gorgeous hostess, and the possibility of finally getting into this stupid strip club.
“He’s not with us” the hostess said, a void gaze in my general direction. The buck’s party was waiting to go in as a group, and clearly I wasn’t part of it. “These guys here are with me” she added with a circular hand motion that encompassed everyone in the queue bar yours truly, just to reinforce the fact, “but not that guy”.
For some bizarre reason I felt slightly injured by the fact that I wasn’t a part of their little club. You know, that elite club where the only criteria for eligibility is that your mate is getting married in the morning and you’re all pissed-as-farts, staggering around malodorous, overpriced strip clubs in the hope that women with low self-esteem will remove items of clothing to the rhythm of terrible electronic music – you know, ‘that’ club. Wait? Come to think of it, I’ve never actually been invited to a buck’s night either. Christ, I really needed to get some new friends that had prospects of getting married. As I sighed at that pathetic realisation, my feelings of exclusion quickly vanished.
“I can’t let all you guys in just yet” the doorman replied as he ran his meaty hand across the rope, “but you can go in mate”. What? Did I hear him correctly? I cocked my head as he unclasped the rope, and with Secret Service style efficiency he ushered me down into the den of depravity with a solitary swipe of his left hand, his right pressed firmly against his earpiece.
Oh yeah! I was in baby!
I stopped at the entrance and peered down into the inky blackness for what felt like seconds, two, maybe three but in reality it would have been little more than a momentary hiccup in time. I shrugged and remembered the words of Martin Luther King Jr.: “You don't have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.” That seemed quite apt under the circumstances, but I doubt he was referring to the steps of a strip club, rather some nonsense about racial equality or the like. Whatever the abyss at the bottom of those well-trampled stairs held, I was about as prepared as I ever would be.
I made my way down to the bottom of the first flight of stairs – BANG! Jesus H. Christ! Where the hell did this ugly bastard come from? I blinked. He blinked back. I shot him a bleary-eyed look of indifference. He shot me the same bleary-eyed look of indifference back. Maybe it was the all the travel that had sapped my mental acuity, or possible brain damage from having sat through the film Skyline only hours before, but it took me a second to realise what was going on. Yes, it was my reflection. How intelligent! Just throw an already disoriented person into the dark and plaster the walls with mirrors. It was instantly obvious that this place hadn’t been designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, but then again, there’s not a lot of call for architectural brilliance in a run-of-the-mill titty bar. Still a little disoriented, I turned to my left and slowly made my way down the next set of stairs, again running headlong into another mirror. This was becoming repetitive. Another left turn, then down further into the rabbit hole.
After a litany of left turns, I stumbled into what initially appeared to be a nondescript room manned by the conspicuously absent second doorman, now holding a handheld metal detector.
BUUUUZZZZZZZ!
I hadn’t even moved within a meter of the doorman before the fixed metal detector above the entrance of what I now realised was the cashier’s office, began to wail and carry on. Great. Like any calm law-abiding citizen anywhere, I mouthed the words “What the fuck?” before my mind rapidly poured over the possible contents of my pockets. Guns? No. Knives? No. Brass knuckles? No.
Regretfully I had to leave all of my cool toys at home.
The doorman ambled toward me and proceeded to wave his handheld metal detector around my trunk. Apprehensively, I waited for the results – nothing - not even a whimpering beep of disappointment from the tiny plastic device. Immediately my Dark Narrator rapped me on the shoulder, cupped his twisted hand around my shell-like ear and whispered, ‘I thought it was meant to make a noise? I wonder if that dickhead even had the thing turned on.’ Given that I was currently in a small room with a hulking doorman and minimal material witnesses, I decided that his quip needn’t be verbalised, my faint smirk hopefully enough to patronise my Dark Narrator into thinking he’d got the desired reaction.
For a malevolent being he was easily placated.
Any confusion I felt at this point was instantly put at ease by the attractive cashier, who had evidently been watching this scene unfold from the comfort of her desk and could do nothing but giggle at my apparent awkwardness. She was a definite cutie. Her big brown doe eyes locked with mine and we smiled – she must have known that this was my first time.
“That’ll be twenty dollars please” she said.
Christ, twenty dollars? Really? The price of admission sounded a little steep, but what did I know, maybe this place was competitively priced in comparison to the other titty bars in town? Anyway, it wasn’t like I was going to walk out now after all I’d been through – they had me snookered. Hell, I’ve shelled-out close to that amount to get into a shitty club back home and back home there was next to no chance anyone was going to wilfully get their tits out in my vicinity.
I opened my wallet and parted with a crisp fifty dollar note.
The decision to part with such a large denomination wasn’t a conscious strategic move and while I could have given her the correct money, waiting for the young lady to fish change from the register allowed me the opportunity to observe the ample assets that overflowed from her skimpy uniform. That marvel of engineering known as the Wonder Bra had an amazing ability to make mountains out of molehills, yet in the here and now, I really didn’t feel the need to complain.
Beautiful women are like tigers; they should be respected for their unpredictability, admired from afar, and inconspicuously observed in a manner that doesn’t make them feel like you are sizing them up for your next meal.
Part of me felt like a royal arsehole for taking such an unnatural interest in her cleavage. That normally wasn’t my style, at least not toward complete strangers. Surprisingly she didn’t seem to notice, or maybe she just flat out didn’t care – having deadshits drool over your rack was probably par for the course in an establishment such as this. As I absorbed one last eyeful of mammary magnificence, I spotted something shiny and rectangular just off to the side of her left breast. Eyes averted. Okay, if the nametag was correct, this lovely creature was named Amber. No doubt Amber was bound to take enough harassment, ogling, and smart-aleck comments from the drove of simpletons that funnel through this place on a daily basis - she really didn’t need my contribution.
I flashed Amber a final sweet, disarming smile as she handed back my change. Pleasantly, she reciprocated in kind.
With my change now safely stowed inside my wallet and my wallet deliberately placed within the inside pocket of my dressier faux-suede jacket, rather than my back pocket, I made my way across to what I had hoped was the third, and final entrance. I stood in front of the shiny gold door; my reflection mimicking my every gesture and motion. Was this thing going to open? I couldn’t see any obvious handle on my side. After what seemed like an eternity, the door slid open to reveal, wait for it, a rotund, balding Caucasian bouncer in his early forties, barking orders to an unknown party on the end of his walkie-talkie. Yes, another doorman. Seriously, how many of these fuckers were there? No sooner had I finished that thought when he nodded in recognition of my presence and stepped aside to reveal the inner sanctum.
The place was packed.
The place was dark.
The place was noisy.
The place was crawling with scantily-clad women.
Excluding the whole ‘packed, dark, and noisy’ elements of the equation, this situation had instantaneously amplified in awesomeness by at least a factor of a gazillion-and-a-half. There were naked women everywhere and for once in my life, I had absolutely no obligation to satisfy any of them. As I stepped into the abyss, the geek inside me wanted to re-enact a scene from my favourite B-movie, ‘From Dusk Till Dawn’, where George Clooney’s character bursts through the doors of the infamous Mexican strip club, The Titty Twister, scans the room, throws his hands in the air, and declares “Now this is my kind of place!” with his trademark colossal grin.
I already had the colossal grin down pat.
Wait, that ‘noise’? That noise was familiar. I paused to get my ear in – it was music and it was instantly recognizable. My heart lifted. It was always thrilling to hear a familiar tune when out in public, given my predilection for heavy metal and industrial, genres ‘normal people’ view with healthy distain, I was constantly in a stage of aural starvation. Sigh, yet another item on my long list of grievances with the shitty so-called ‘clubs’ back home. Christ, I really hated club music, but come to think of it, I hated ‘clubs’ in general.