Charles Bock - Beautiful Children

He looked like the type who usually stood near the back. Maybe it was his big night out in Vegas (that would explain the shirt). Well, Cheri was in the mood to help, and parked her dimpled and peachy rear in front of his blushing face. She gave a pepper-mill grind, widened her legs out into an A and, in a smooth quick motion, bent over. Cheri's tight little gluteus was spread out all maximus-like, and her sex was juicy and engorged and hanging right in front of this guy's nose. She looked down through the space between her legs, over her hanging booming breasts. Her wig's fake ponytails fell into her eyes. Blood rushed to her head. And here, if the mood struck her and she damn well felt like it, here, while staring at him from upside down, Cheri could make eye contact; she could bestow upon this youngish and pink-faced mark a smile of full wattage. Imagine running into you here. Of all people.

An easy reach. In one fluid motion, Cheri placed her G-string atop his head. She slid her thong over the crown of his skull and moved the damp parts of the fabric past the slope of his forehead, onto his quickly fogging lenses, covering his face with the crotch of her panties as if they were a surgeon's mask, so that her scent all but overpowered him, reduced him to a quivering mass, all so this guy would basically be obligated to shell out thirty bucks for a private table dance, for no other reason than to find out what could come next.

Cheri could do these things because she was performing not for the mark but for a movie. And in this movie she was beyond sexy. She was A STAR.

This is what she told herself.

Saturday was the busiest night of the week on Industrial, a potholed utility road that emerged from beneath several freeway underpasses and ran parallel to the busiest stretch of the Strip. The warm summer night would have made for a pleasant walk from the closest casinos, except most valets and front desk workers discouraged such strolls, as thugs were known to wait in the shadows. A cab ride cost five bucks, plus gratuity, but was worth it, the taxis bypassing the Sheetrock suppliers, tombstone wholesalers, and construction rig rental agencies, and pulling up to the street's various gentlemen's cabarets — spots like Spearmint Rhino, Cheetah's, and Little Darlings, where dancers bared their breasts and stripped to their panties, and beer and hard alcohol were served at the bar. Taxis also stopped at aptly nicknamed spread joints, such as the Can Can Room, Déjà Vu, and Crazy Horse Too (home of the world famous Las Vegas strippers), where alcohol and video poker were legally prohibited, but dancers ended up in the buff.

The Slinky Fox was smaller than the newer warehouse-size super-clubs, but still more expansive than the grimy dives so often associated with strip joints. The stage was lined with footlights and strings of blinking Christmas bulbs, and was visible from almost any area inside the club. Rows of plush booths bordered the main room, carving out its space, while the booth backs created partitioned areas, smaller, more intimate playgrounds, each replete with its own series of tables and couches, as well as a side stage with some sort of fireman pole or trapeze. Frat boys clogged the aisles between the main and side rooms, watching in all directions with expressions that tried not to betray their wonder. Some off-shift dealers had pushed tables together in the central area and sat around, their starched collars unbuttoned, each man relaxing without words, absently turning over the bills he planned to leave as a tip as if flipping the hole card in a blackjack game. Cops in civvies stood in rigid bunches and focused on the stage without expression, even as they rubbed shoulders with surly union workers, beaten down from months on a picket line, who were standing in front of a few overweight immigrants, every one of them committing Cheri's curves to memory, to be recalled in an hour or so — when they'd go home and enter their wives, enter their girlfriends, enter their lonely masturbatory fantasies.

The song ended and Cheri did not respond to the scattered applause, but instead kneeled, motionless, concentrating on her breathing. Remaining perfectly still while completely naked and surrounded by a roomful of horny guys, this took a certain amount of poise. Sometimes Cheri blocked out their stares. Sometimes she feasted on them. Three sprightly piano notes echoed through the loudspeaker system, at which point remaining still was no longer her concern. She began slowly, kicking her legs out from underneath her in a fluid motion, moving them in a complete circle. Wounded innocence now, a woman's throaty voice, her lamentation: Every night before I go to sleep, Find a ticket, win a lottery. Cheri rose to a knee and reached toward the ceiling, stretching her arms. The piano gradually increased its pace, and a bass guitar joined in, and then drums, Patti Smith's epic moving toward its stride, with Patti wailing about buying her lover a jet plane, getting him on a higher plane, taking him up to the stratosphere and then sweeping down, where it's hot, hot in Arabia, babia, then cool, cold fields of snow…

It was an unconventional song for stripping. Usually, when a rock song got played in the Slinky Fox anymore, it was a sleazy number from the eighties, all bumps and grinds, as opposed to something from the arty side of the early New York punk scene. But Cheri had always retained a soft spot for the drama packed inside “Free Money,” and when she'd been looking to expand her repertoire, by some off chance, she'd thought about the song's dark and lulling start, its epic and passionate sweep. Cheri had vision in spades, if she said so herself, and she'd recognized the potential of “Free Money,” devoting a solid week to choreographing her routine, coming up with interpretive movements for every chord change, pantomimes that matched each lyric. She'd practiced trailing long see-through veils behind her, wrapping and unwrapping herself in and from those veils, beating herself down onto the stage floor. And it had paid off. The first time Cheri had performed to the song, she'd worked her entire shift doing nothing but private dances. Indeed, the routine had been so successful that other girls started putting “Free Money” onto their playlists, attempting their own clumsy interpretations, usually with feather boas. “Free Money” had been absorbed into each night's routine at the Slinky Fox for almost a year now, and of late served as nothing so much as an ironic motto for the girls to slave by, a catchphrase to tell one another as they passed in the dressing room. Which was a bummer for Cheri — she'd busted her moneymaker to come up with a distinct act, her own signature song. Heck, the soundtrack to the movie of Cheri's life came straight from the songs she stripped to, and it complicated things when she herself no longer wanted to hear her own playlist.

’Cause if like four girls in a row went on the main stage and did all three dances as a hip-hop homegirl, sure there was a chance the crowd that night would love hip-hop and all the dancers would be in the flush. But it was equally possible that twelve straight hip-hop songs would be numbing. Girl number two wouldn't make squat in stage tips, and girl three would be traveling an even harder road. Being a professional meant adjusting not only to whatever the previous girl scribbled on the DJ docket, but also to what kind of music the crowd was listening to that night. It meant keeping a notepad of which girls liked to dance to what music, what kind of songs you could dance to in any situation. Every time new meat started working the Slinky Fox, Cheri made sure to check out her routine and moves. Did this girl have anything Cheri did not? Do anything Cheri would not? Any day the Garden of Venus might call. The Garden catered to turbaned sheiks, and men in expensive ties and esteemed multinational figures. Men were not marks at the Garden, they were clients, and if a client phoned and reserved his favorite stripper in advance, you cleared five hundred an hour on those. The Garden had a Jacuzzi room and a waterslide, and their champagne dances were with real nonalcoholic champagne instead of apple juice like the Slinky Fox used. Cheri'd even heard that People magazine's sexiest man alive had recently dropped a couple of thou chasing dancers down the Garden's waterslide, and she frequently imagined the power in knowing that People magazine's sexiest man alive was staring, wanting nothing more than to be inside of her. Yeah, the Garden of Venus was high class, a girl had to be asked to audition there. And so the more distinct your personality and dance skills were, the more you could work a room and hook a customer, the better your chances of being asked to work at the Garden — which is why it was a problem when all your good shit was being absorbed. So what you ended up doing, you spent so much time checking out the other girls that some of the dykes tried to recruit you. There were misunderstandings. Uncomfortable situations. Sometimes after a shift the bouncers ended up having to walk Cheri to her Jeep as protection from men and women alike.