Charlie Huston - A Dangerous Man

Strippers.

At least there are still strippers.

Oh, God, there are still strippers.

PRIVATE EYES IS a strip club. Being a strip club, it is just like all other strip clubs. I pay my twenty-dollar cover, get my hand stamped, pay eight bucks for a soda, and take a seat at the bar. I am the only patron at the bar. Just me, a scantily clad bartender and scantily clad cocktail waitresses picking up drinks. I’m alone at the bar because of Rudy Giuliani.

While he was still mayor, Rudy got a public decency law passed that targeted strip bars and porn shops. The essence of the law is that adult trade can comprise no more than 49% of a business. The strip clubs’ answer to this dilemma was to wall off the majority of their physical space, and enclose their stripping in a carefully measured 49% of their total square footage. Inside that 49% they wanted room for patrons and strippers and little else. Thus the bar at Private Eyes features a wide expanse of elbow room because you can sit there all night without seeing a single bare tit. I sit there alone and let the bartender fisheye me.

She’s wondering what’s wrong with me. She’s wondering what a guy is doing coming into a strip club and paying eight bucks for a soda and not going into the next room to look at the naked girls. She’s waiting for me to start talking. She’s expecting me to turn out to be a talker. I don’t talk. I sit and I sip and I don’t go into the next room. The minute I go into that room, dancers will start coming to my table and offering me lap dances. I don’t want a lap dance. I don’t want to look at naked women. I want to sit here and wait. So I wait. And after about half an hour I hear what I’ve been waiting for. I hear the voice of the DJ, who sounds like every other DJ in every other strip club ever.

– That was Misty. Misty. Misty coming around to your tables right now. A special dance from Misty coming your way. And now we’re gonna bring out our special guest dancer. She’s here just for the weekend. You’ve seen her on Howard Stern and Sally Jessy. She had a feature spread in Hustler. The most infamous dancer in the world. Sandy Candy!

The DJ plays her song. Van Halen, “Ice Cream Man.”

I go in.

SHE’S GOOD.

I’ve never actually seen her dance, and she’s really very good. Not a lot of titty and ass shaking, more a slow strip with some low-key pole work. Classy, as these things go. And she looks great. Still wearing the Bettie Page cut. Never did get rid of the tattoos, the half circle of stars along her collarbone and the pin-ups on her shoulders. The crowd is thin this early, but the guys like her. She stays up on the main stage for a couple songs, then scoops her discarded dress from the steps, shimmies back into it, and comes off the stage to a nice round of applause.

There are a couple fans with a table up front. She goes straight to them and kisses them on the cheek. They probably follow her from gig to gig. She signs some 8x10s they have and a couple copies of a book that I assume is the one she had ghostwritten last year. Then she starts circulating, working the tables. She’ll do lap dances. The rate will probably be double what the regular girls get. I could wait, but she’s pretty popular with the clientele, and if she hits a big spender she might just camp out with him all night. Any stripper would just as soon cash in on one guy as dance thirty or forty. I wave down a cocktail waitress.

– What’ll ya have, baby?

– Just a seltzer. And could you ask Sandy to come over?

– Baby, she’ll get around. You want to talk to her now, all you got to do is go say hi.

I hand her a C-note.

– I’m shy.

She smiles even wider than she already was, takes the bill from my fingers and gives them a little squeeze at the same time.

– Sure thing, baby. You just sit tight.

She walks across the room. Sandy is leaning against the back of a chair, casually letting her breasts rub the head of the man sitting there, talking to him and his friends, laughing at everything they say. The cocktail waitress touches her shoulder and whispers in her ear and points at me. Sandy looks over, squinting into the dark corner of the room where I am seated on a banquet. She smiles, waves, holds up a finger to tell me to wait just a second, blows me a kiss, and turns back to the guys she’s been working. I wait a little longer, turn down several dances, thank the cocktail waitress when she brings me my seltzer that she still charges me eight bucks for despite the hundred she has tucked in her pocket. And while I’m watching her walk away, a hand slides onto my shoulder and Sandy smiles at me and pinches my earlobe and I jump and say something like Hi, hello, uh, hi, and the blank look and utter lack of recognition leaves her face as soon as she hears my voice, but she doesn’t scream and turn and run, she just drops her hand from my shoulder and lifts it to her forehead.

– Fuck. This is gonna cost a fortune in therapy.

WE SIT AT the far end of the bar, away from the bartender and the customers coming in through the front door and making a beeline for the main room. She drinks red wine that comes in little single-serving bottles with screw-off caps. I pay.

– You’re handling this pretty well.

She pours her wine into a glass.

– Yeah. That would be the Librium. There’s not much I don’t take well.

Librium. Antianxiety agent. Narcotic. Addictive. This information reels itself off in my mind, followed immediately by a strong desire to ask if she has any on her. I drink my seltzer instead.

– When did you start on that?

She’s sipping her wine. She stops in midsip, puts the glass down and looks at me.

– When? When did I start taking Librium? Shit, Henry, I don’t know, maybe about five minutes after I turned myself in to the cops and they started showing me pictures of the shit that happened in my house.

– Right.

– Color.

– Sorry. I.

– They showed me color pictures of those two hicks with their heads beaten in.

– Yeah, I get it. I’m.

– They showed me a picture of Terry.

She takes a big gulp of wine.

– Terry. What that dog did to Terry.

– OK. Stupid question. Just.

– So it was probably right around then, when I saw the picture of Terry with his dick chewed off, that I started taking Librium. After I got done screaming and all.

She finishes off her wine and signals the bartender for another. We don’t say anything while she brings it over and takes more money from my pile of bills on the bar.

Sandy cracks the top and pours.

– And you? How have you been? See you got a new look. How’s that working out for you?

– Sandy. I need help.

– No shit? Well, there’s a shocker. Wanted man shows up at a Manhattan strip club to see me? And he needs help? I would have had a hard time putting that together.

– It won’t take much time. I just.

I look over at the bartender, but the music from the main room is loud enough that she’s not hearing any of this.

– Sandy. It’s my parents.

– Sandy to the stage, please. Sandy to the stage.

She looks up, the DJ calling her for her next performance. She tosses down the rest of her wine, sets the empty glass on the bar, and kneads her neck with her right hand.

– OK. I’m gonna go dance now.

She stands up.

I put a hand on her arm.

– Sandy.

She moves her arm away from my hand.

– I’m gonna dance, and then I’m gonna come back and help your parents, because they probably never did anything to anyone, except for having you. And then you are going to fuck off out of my life. OK?

– Yeah. OK.

She walks back into the main room, and through the door I see her talking to the DJ, asking him for something, and he digs through his CDs and nods, and she goes up on the stage and dances to “Psycho Killer.”