Max Collins - Quarry in the middle

I had no trouble finding a table toward the back. The room was lined in mirrors, which made it seem bigger and also put naked dancing female flesh everywhere, even though there was only one girl on stage at a time. Strippers in g-strings and pasties and feather boas and heels were trolling for guys to give table dances to, but not always succeeding, since that was five bucks not a single.

The girls were all under thirty, most closer to twenty, and seemed a mix of locals (possibly more of that community college talent) and gals on the circuit. I can’t explain how I knew this, other than to say about half of the dancers were breast-enhanced, and the others weren’t. Obviously, the road girls had the fake tits and the locals what God have given them. Most of the customers hooted and hollered and even invested in table dances, when the girls had big enough fake tits.

I had zero interest in fake tits, but to each his own. The girl I did find of interest, which is to say who hard-ened my dick, was clearly local-she was very pretty, blue-eyed, pouty of mouth, with straight blonde, seemingly natural hair, modified by a Farrah Fawcett flip that was a decade or so out of date. She had a pert dimpled ass that defied gravity, and wonderful pale creamy flesh, but her boobs were too small for the room.

They were just right for me. They perched on her rib cage with tip-tilting authority, perfect handfuls that these other cretins couldn’t appreciate. This cretin and his throbbing dick were most appreciative. I was on my third beer, by the way.

And in fact, I had just gotten rid of it or anyway its predecessors and was heading back from the john for my table when I felt a hand on my arm, and turned to look right into the little stripper’s big blue eyes.

“Can you do me a favor?”

She was either actually asking for a favor, or damn good. No, I didn’t think she was in love with me…

“See that guy over there-stuffing a dollar into Heather’s g-string? Be subtle.”

I flicked a glance at a beefy, make that fat, biker with a leather cap and more facial hair than two Grateful Dead band members-kind of an awful hair color, too, a yellow that tried to be red but didn’t make it.

“He’ll want a table dance,” she said. “I have to work the room or get fired, so I can’t, you know, turn him down or just disappear.”

“You want me to buy a table dance, I’ll buy a table dance.”

This was not nearly as hard as she was making it. Not that she wasn’t making it hard…

“He’s been here before,” she said. “He’s persistent. He puts his hand down in my front. I don’t do that. I’m not that kind of dancer.”

This was interesting to hear, since the Lucky Devil’s strip club was raunchy indeed-the girls took off their pasties and g-strings at the end of their first song. And they danced to three songs…

“How can I help?”

“We have a V.I.P. room. We can go in there and stay for a while, and maybe he’ll go away or settle for some-body else or something.”

“I do want to help, but what’s the V.I.P. room cost?”

“I’m not going to charge you anything! You’re helping me.”

So I helped her.

She took me into the back room, which was a bunch of easy chairs in open cubicles. No fucking was going on or anything overt; this was not about blow jobs or even hand jobs. This was good, clean, all-American fun, like the so-called dry humps healthy teens used to have under the bleachers at ball games. And I presume they still do, if they have a lick of sense.

The girls kept their pasties on and their g-strings, in the V.I.P. room, but otherwise were naked, and danced for a guy for a song (ten bucks for one, I gathered, twenty-five for three), most of it grinding in his lap or shoving her fake titties in his face and rubbing and rubbing and rubbing some more.

My little blonde did rub her cupcakes in my face a couple times, but mostly she just danced, or straddled my lap and didn’t really grind. We just talked. Here’s some of it, shouted over loud piped-in music:

“What’s your name?”

“Candy.”

Bow Wow Wow was doing “I Want Candy.” I swear.

“Stage name?”

“Real. Candace.”

“You go to school, Candace?”

“I wish. I wanna go to beauty college, but it’s expensive.”

“You local or on the road?”

“Local. Can’t travel. I got a kid.”

“Really?”

“Uh huh. Little boy.”

“What’s his name?”

“Sam. He’s five. He goes to kindergarten next year.”

“His daddy looking after him?”

“He doesn’t have one. A girl who works days, at the grain elevator? She sits with Sam till she goes to work.”

“You don’t look old enough to have a five-year-old.”

“I was fifteen.”

“Makes you twenty?”

“I’m twenty. You’re nice.”

“You’re nice, too, Candace.”

There was quite a bit more, but that’s as interesting as it got, and anyway you get the drift.

She smelled good-most of the dancers were doused in what used to be called dimestore perfume, but she had on Giorgio, or a reasonable facsimile. She had the usual heavy makeup, clownish cheeks, blue eyeshadow, pink lip gloss, but that was par for the course these days even for non-stripper girls. Even though she didn’t grind, I had a raging hard-on. My shorts were in ruins.

Another stripper, a skinny brunette with big but real breasts, came over and whispered in Candace’s ear, then went away.

Candace beamed at me. “Lover boy’s picked somebody else out! He’s on his second table dance already. I think I’m in the clear. You’re very sweet, Jack.”

I had told her my name was Jack.

Then she gave me a kiss.

Long and kind of real.

After that, she gave me a more legit V.I.P. room treatment for the rest of the song (“Hit Me with Your Best Shot”), and then led me back into the strip club. I tried to give her a twenty but I swear (unbelievable, but it happened) she wouldn’t take it.

I probably could have bought a legit table dance from her at that point, but I’d had all I could take. I went and sat in the rear of the smoky, mirrored room, focused on fake tits and disco lights until my erection went down, then wandered back into the middle bar. No more beer for me. I asked for and got a Diet Coke.

It was almost one, and I had a game to play.

About the same square footage as the strip club’s V.I.P. lounge, the private poker room was tucked behind the Lucky Devil’s main bar, though with no access from there. And of course the way in from the casino was guarded by one of those ubiquitous bouncers on boxes.

You’ve heard of wall-to-wall carpeting-well, this room had carpeting on the walls, plush, cream-color stuff, much thicker than the more normal-pile (but same color) carpet on the floor. Matching built-in couches ran along all the walls except the one adjacent the parking lot, which had an exit-only door and, more prominently, a big black padded Naugahyde wet bar with black shelving heavy with booze on one side and a stereo set-up on the other. A busty little platinum blonde in the standard Lucky Devil black spandex minidress was tending bar (and the stereo); right now she was filling bowls with chips and pretzels and such, her big brown eyes having no more expression than her raccoon mascara.

The decor was less eccentric than practical-sound-proofing was the order of the day, or night anyway, and the low-slung ceiling tile was part of how this chamber could be so quiet in the thick of a club where each room was noisier than the last. The track lighting was subdued, but the big hexagonal table was the target of a Tiffany-style hanging lamp. Though the billiard felt was new, the table appeared old, its maple handrails showing wear, and the chip wells and drink-holders (despite fresh cork) had the look of a craftsman who’d operated long ago.