Bruce DeSilva - Cliff Walk

“Your first time here?” one of the bartenders asked as I settled onto a stool to peruse the beer menu.

“It is.”

“Like to know how it works?”

“I would.”

“Two hundred gets you a half bottle of champagne and fifteen minutes in a private VIP room with one of the girls. For four hundred, you get a magnum and a half hour. The girls aren’t allowed to hustle you. You have to approach them. Don’t be offended if one of them turns you down. Not all of them are full-service girls. Some of them just dance for tips.”

Last night I’d hit the second club, Rogue Island, and found the door blocked by six pickets from the Sword of God, a local group of right-wing religious zealots. They brandished hand-lettered picket signs proclaiming “Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery,” “Hades Is for Whoremongers,” and “God Hates Fornicators.” A pair of bouncers roughly shoved them aside and ushered me in. As the door banged closed behind me, I could hear them out there, howling about hellfire and immortal souls.

Inside, I paid the ten-dollar cover charge and took a stool at the bar. A few discreet inquiries determined that most of the girls were locals-single moms trying to make a living and college girls hustling for tuition. The bartenders served a good variety of decent bottled beer. The customers wore Dockers and button-down shirts, and it was apparent that some were regulars. The girls welcomed them by name, giving them the same greeting Norm used to get when he waddled through the door at Cheers.

The girls performed naked on a single stage, swinging from stripper poles and thrusting their hips in crude imitation of the sex act. The bills tucked into garters here were mostly fives. When their fifteen-minute sets ended, the girls pulled on G-strings and skimpy bras to mingle with the customers. Topless lap dances were thirty dollars, two for the price of one before five P.M. A Franklin bought a blow job in a dark booth, or for a hundred and fifty dollars you could take the girl of your choice to one of those private rooms Whoosh described and do whatever you wanted for fifteen minutes.

I was sitting alone at a cocktail table with a good view of the stage when a slim brunette beauty approached and said, “Hi, Mulligan. Need another beer?”

“Marie? Don’t tell me you’re working here.”

“Don’t go all Oral Roberts on me. I just waitress.”

“Nice outfit,” I said. Her body stocking fit like a condom.

Marie used to wait tables at Hopes, and last year I took her to bed a couple of times, but it didn’t lead anywhere. She was looking for a guy to raise a family. I told her to keep looking.

“Tips good here?”

“Very.”

“But not as good as if you were stripping.”

“Of course not,” she said, and sat down at my table.

“What kind of money do the strippers make?”

“The hookers, you mean?”

“Well, yeah.”

“On a good night, the best girls take home a grand or so after expenses.”

“Expenses?”

“Yeah.”

“What expenses?”

“They have to pay a hundred fifty a night to dance here.”

“The girls pay the club? The club doesn’t pay them?”

“Uh-huh. Candy, who used to strip at Shakehouse until she put on a few pounds, says it’s three hundred a night there, but the hottest girls can make five or six grand on a big weekend.”

“Any other expenses?”

“The girls pay the house twenty dollars every time they take a customer into a private room, and they’re expected to tip the bouncers at the end of the night. Sometimes the bouncers take it out in trade, if you know what I mean.”

“I do.”

“On the plus side, the club buys condoms by the gross and provides them to the girls for free.”

“Condoms?” I said. “The Maniellas are Catholic. They’ll be saying Hail Marys till Easter if Pope Benedict finds out about this.”

I had more questions, but the bartender bellowed from behind the bar, “Socialize on your own time, Marie. Orders are stacking up here.”

“Gotta go,” she said. “I’ll bring you back a fresh beer on the house.” A few minutes later, she did.

Tonight at the Tongue and Groove, admission was free. A lone bartender served two brands of beer, Bud and Bud Light. The customers wore jeans and T-shirts with Boston Bruins and New England Patriots logos on them. Most of the girls were fresh off the boat from Haiti, Russia, Brazil, and the Dominican Republic. They wore nothing but G-strings and smiles as they strolled among the cocktail tables to tempt the customers.

Garter tips were one-dollar bills here. Lap dances ran twenty bucks a pop, blow jobs were forty dollars, and for a hundred you could drag a girl into a private booth and make whoopie for twenty minutes. On a slow night like tonight, you could get two girls for the price of one.

Vanessa Maniella had built bordellos to suit every Rhode Island wallet. At each club, I asked for her and was politely informed that she was unavailable. When I asked if anyone had seen Sal lately, I drew icy stares.

I was standing now in the doorway of the Tongue and Groove’s “all-nude room,” waiting for my eyes to adjust to the dark. By the time 50 Cent stopped rapping, I could just make out the rows of cocktail tables, all of them empty. I chose one by the back wall and took a seat. It was shift-change time onstage. The girl who’d received the dollar tip slid down onto the lap of her benefactor and whispered in his ear. Then she dismounted, took him by the hand, and led him toward a row of private cubicles that lined the wall to my left.

The other girl pranced naked down the stage stairs and scanned the room for prey. I could barely see her when she moved out of the light, but I sensed she was heading my way. Two new girls strutted onto the stage on long legs made longer by fuck-me heels. You couldn’t call them strippers because they didn’t have anything to peel off.

“Bonsoir, beebe. Waz you name?”

“Mulligan. What’s yours?”

“Destiny,” she said, but it came out more like “DEZ-tin-ee.”

“Sure it is,” I said. “That’s what all the Haitian mamas are naming their babies these days.”

That made her giggle, and I noticed for the first time how young and pretty she was. She was still giggling when she wrapped her arms around my neck.

“Buy me a drink and mebbe I tell you my real name.”

I pulled a twenty off the small roll of bills in my jeans, handed it to her, and asked her to bring me back a Bud. She snatched it and swung her hips as she walked to a little bar that I hadn’t realized was there. When she returned with our drinks, she didn’t give me change. I used my foot to push a chair away from the table for her, but she straddled my lap and pressed her small breasts against my neck.

“Marical,” she said. “My name ees Marical.”

“How old are you, Marical?”

“Ay-teen.”

The same age as Teresa, the clerk at Zerilli’s store, if she was telling the truth. I’d been trying to figure out what to do with my hands. I placed them now around her narrow waist.

“I show you a good time, beebe. Eef you get wit me, I make you world go round like craysee.”

She moved her crotch in a circle against the front of my jeans, and I felt myself stiffen. Paul Simon’s line from “The Boxer” popped into my head: “There were times when I was so lonesome I took some comfort there.” But I’d never paid for something I could get for free, and I was too poor to start now.

“I got big love for you, beebe. I do you half price.”

I shook my head no, and her shoulders slumped.

“Tonight I make no moany.”

“Slow night.”

“Slow, yes. The weekend be better, I hope so.”