Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In An Aqua Storm

The dancers undulated in their own little worlds, cocooned in overpowering music. Some wore—shades of the long-gone sixties—white patent-leather boots. Others black high heels. Their G-strings were glitzy versions of thong-back bikini bottoms.

Temple didn’t know what your average red-blooded male mused upon when viewing this skimpy item of undress. She always wondered what kind of depilatory aid such scraps required, and how often. Did the women wax, pluck, shave, or simply napalm any offending body hair away?

After the waitress returned with the drinks, Temple insisted on paying for hers—and nearly choked to find out it cost six dollars. The wages of sinning, she guessed.

She was beginning to recognize patterns in the women’s movements—not the tried-and-true burlesque bump-and-grind announced by an emphatic drum roll, but a fluid undulation half belly dance and half sexual pantomime. Pelvises swiveled clockwise and counterclockwise. Arms lifted to show off torsos doing likewise. Bare breasts, less imposing than she had expected, pulsed like gentle molds of Jell-O to the motions.

It didn’t do a thing for her. She checked out the men at the other tables. It didn’t seem to be doing much for them either. They sipped long-neck beers and lowballs, watching quietly. God knows that there was no point in talking against the pounding music.

Then the big front door opened, splashing in an oblong of blinding sunlight and a bristle of silhouettes. Five new paying customers felt their way into the dark.

These guys headed straight for the stage and sat down. Temple saw now that the stage was ringed with a slightly raised lip and chairs, and that the room’s other small dancing areas were merely tables with the centerpiece of a living, dancing doll.

On the main stage, the dancer had turned to offer her audience a rear view while she dreamily watched her mirror image brush the back of one hand over forehead and hair, run the other down her breast and hip. An air-conditioning vent in the floor lifted the hair at her nape, fluttered the flimsy scraps of fabric covering her G-string.

Next to Temple, Ruth stirred uneasily.

As the dancer exited without turning through a shaggy curtain of aluminum fringe, the DJ’s voice—a big, booming, carnival-barker kind of voice—blared out over the slightly muted music.

“Now, gentlemen and ladies”—Ruth and Temple cringed in tandem to realize that their table hosted the only women in the place beside the strippers—“a special treat. Please welcome the delectable Dulcey!”

As his words died the recorded music revved up to eardrum-bursting intensity. “Wild Thing.”

A thin red beam of light lanced the entrance area, while the silver streamers shimmied as if shaken by an irresistible force. Then a woman sashayed through. She wore thigh-high black leather boots and a black-and-white zebra-striped spandex dress cut low across the shoulders, high across the derriere, and sparkling with random rhinestones. Her hair was a bleached platinum fountain exploding from a clip at the crown of her head. Black-and-white zigzags of opalescent and black glitter shadowed her eyes.

The lights shifted, painting the white stripes an unearthly blue-white. Temple glanced above the stage to a black-painted ceiling mounted with fluorescent light fixtures holding bright purple bulbs—the ultraviolet lights that painted what was already exotic with another layer of intensified artifice.

This lady moved. No languid, sensual sways for her. She strutted, she swung her assets fore and aft, she ground her shoulders and her hips in every direction on the compass, each movement threatening to dislodge the dress’s tenuous cling to her torso.

Ultimately, however, she actually had to shimmy out of it, which she accomplished by turning her back and peeling it off inch by inch, facing the audience only when some great revelation had been accomplished. Given the shortness of the garment, this didn’t take long.

The zebra dress crumpled to the floor, ignored, while she strutted around the perimeter in her rhinestone-strewn white thong-back bikini bottom, jumping up on the foot-wide serving area, then pouncing back on the stage and casting herself onto the dark floor in contortionist positions.

Temple heard an old-time barker’s singsong spiel unwinding in her head: Ladies and gentlemen, she slinks, she shimmies, she crawls upon her belly like a snake, she bends like a bow and thrusts back her head and her leg until one black spike heel meets her white-lightning hair. She does the splits six ways from Sunday and ten ways that wouldn’t be legal the other six days of the week, either. She —

But Z-bra Woman wasn’t the main performer now. A man at the stageside seats jumped up and lay grinning on his back atop the stage rim. A small cylinder protruded from his mouth like a periscope.

Ruth leaned closer until she could shout into Temple’s ear. “Is that a cigarette?”

Temple pushed her glasses’ bridge tight to her nose. About as long as a cigarette, about as thick as a cigarette, but...

The smiling dancer noticed the man, came over, straddled his head with her Wicked Wanda boots. She began gyrating her hips and twisting downward.

“No,” Temple shouted back. “It’s a rolled-up bill.”

“A what?” Ruth screamed.

The dancer’s bending knees brought her pelvis lower and lower, bit by bit.

“A bill. Money,” Temple screamed back.

“That’s disgusting!” Ruth shrieked in turn.

Temple watched, running various possibilities through her head. She was relieved when the dancer dropped to the floor behind the man and slowly extracted the bill from his mouth with her teeth.

“Not sanitary,” Temple agreed at the top of her lungs.

Ruth gave her an incredulous look.

The woman tucked the rolled-up bill in the side of her G-string, then repeated the performance with another man who had cast himself faceup on the stage, “smoking” a greenback. Temple contemplated the likely denomination of those bills—ones? Too cheap. Fives, maybe. Tens, twenties? Irrelevant curiosity often distracted her from maintaining a strong moral posture at all times.

As for taking strong postures, period, the dancer had faced the mirrors, dropped down on her hands and stretched out her legs to demonstrate an exercise that Temple had viewed intimately many times in aerobics class. The men seemed to find it vastly more interesting than she did, especially when it was performed without benefit of leotard and tights. A man from an outlying table had come quietly to stand before the stage. Temple didn’t notice him until the performer did. She must have been watching something else.

Smiling, the dancer moved to his position, pulled up her pale hair with both hands, and began to gyrate her significant parts in a sort of presentation package. Since the stage was only at table level, her athletic ability to move up and down gave the expression “in your face” a whole new dimension.

Then the dancer dropped down to sit on the stage rim, putting her arms around her one-man audience’s shoulders, whispering in his ear, lifting the G-string over her hip almost coyly, allowing him to place a rolled-up bill in its elasticized safekeeping.

“Garters,” Temple said sagely to no one who could hear her, “have come a long way, baby.”

Beside her, Ruth Morris just shook her head.

By the time Miss “Wild Thing” left the stage, bending provocatively to retrieve her bit of elasticized dress, her G-string sides bristled with bills, which added a piquant savagery to her costume.

Within a minute, a successor was announced, and then another. Some performers’ names sounded like a yuppie parent’s dream: Berkeley, Madison, Tracy. Others fancied liquor names: Champagne, Brandy, Tequila. Temple was struck by how many adopted place-names—Miami, Phoenix, Wichita—established both anonymity and a stage persona tied to place, to a possible home. Nobody picked Tampa, probably because it sounded too much like “tampon.”