Charles Bock - Beautiful Children

“Hey? Um, excuse me.”

He tried to come off as irreverent and artistic, introducing himself and explaining that he saw them all standing here and looking so stunning that he just wanted to draw them all.

He jabbed and parried and tried to look cool while he admitted that, well, that is to say, um, comic books. He illustrated comic books for a living.

“But, see, comics are getting much more acceptance than ever. Look at all the movies—”

“Betty and Veronica not so much,” he answered, “but Jughead's kind of funny, I guess.”

Throw in his daily routine of protein shakes, which gave him major league blackheads and had him farting dust. Add the vitamin supplements that fucked up his breath and turned his piss flaming yellow. What the voice-over guy from the trailers would call a recipe for hilarity. What the other Knitters would sensitively label, shot down in flames.

At two-thirty in the morning, Bing was back in his room, back at his drawing table, still buzzed but sobering up, willing his hand steady, hoping to salvage something from this wreck of a night and not screw up any of his last two days’ work, all this while listening to the pounding headboards and squeaking bedsprings and grunts of monkey love that carried through the drywall from not one but each of the two bed-rooms that bookended his. It was funny enough to make a mental note about, cruel enough to make Bing believe God was getting laughs at his expense, and he could not take too much before he slipped on his shower thongs and walked across his bedroom and rummaged through his strewn laundry. Upon finding his fifteen-pound barbells, he carried the weights into the bathroom and locked the door behind him; he sat on the toilet and busted out curls in sets, lifting and grunting until his arms burned and shook. Then Bing stayed on the can and took heavy breaths and checked out his pectorals in the mirror, kind of zoning out, just staring at the windowsill, this dead flower stem propped up in an Evian bottle.

A curvaceous, sleepy-eyed Latin woman gathered her panties from the stage and walked its perimeter. Bending quickly to pick up the few scattered bills, she waved and smiled to those who had opened their hearts and wallets. The disc jockey repeated her name, then announced which dancer needed to report to the stage. Bing watched her and continued nursing his soda, the first two of which came as part of the twenty-five-dollar cover charge. He'd moved away from the catwalk and was standing in the darkness of the main area, where black light turned T-shirts fluorescent, and disco balls cast snowflakes of light in all directions. One or two buxom women in dark leotards and fishnet stockings weaved between bystanders, delivering drinks and taking orders. Far more noticeable were the various panty sets, the teddies and dominatrix outfits and naughty teacher clothing. The black lighting electrified the lingerie, creating startlingly bright colors, you couldn't help but look at them. At the girls who filled them.

Dancers who weren't onstage worked the crowd, slinging their hips, making their smiling rounds, seeking out specific guys who'd come up during their set and given them money, as well as anyone else who purchased lap dances with any sort of regularity, and anyone who spent a lot of time talking with the other girls. Standard protocol was to ignore all lumps who nursed their cover charge drinks and stared and never gave up a friggin’ buck. (Sure, you never knew who had money, who wanted to party, and who was biding his time until the right one came along; but usually, you had a pretty good idea.)

Truth be told, Bing didn't mind being passed over. The dancers should have been ignoring him. He wasn't a big spender, wasn't recognizable as a strip club regular. Sometimes in the dead of night, it was true, he got antsy and drove out by LAX and blew twenty bucks, slowly draining his two-drink minimum while getting up the courage to sit at the bar and maybe inch a few singles up a thigh. It also was true that, whenever Bing hit the road for a store appearance or got stuck overnight in some town, part of his routine usually involved a strip club. Small-time holes, mostly; half-empty venues where most of the customers had no intention of paying for anything more than the cover, and the only way the strippers could get through a shift without falling asleep was to stare at their own writhing reflections in the mirrored walls. When you got down to it, most of the tittie bars Bing had been in were depressing enough to make the facts of his streak of celibacy, living arrangements, and basic life history seem like Times Square on New Year's Frickin’ Eve. Yeah, Bing had seen his share of tricks and special promotions. He'd watched Jell-O wrestling and hot-oil wrestling. He'd seen naked girls, kneeling inside half-filled plastic kiddy pools, doubled over, holding their ribs, looking helplessly at the disc jockey. Bing had watched more than his share of these sad spectacles and he had wanted to step in and he'd had no idea how to begin, and so he had sat, a bystander, falling in love, in his own minor fashion, with each and every tragic young woman.

Outside a near booth, a girl with straight, sandy hair and small, pointed breasts was giving a table dance to a frat type, who wore a shirt exactly like the one Bing had on. Bing watched the guy run a dollar bill up the side of the dancer's leg, saw her hold out the waistband string of her thong. The guy's hand stayed on the dancer's inner thigh, right where the waist string connected to her crotch. Unfazed, she took a step out of his reach and began a new series of rotations, such that her message— that's not allowed —was clearly communicated. The minor drama reminded Bing of war stories he'd heard at comic conventions — tales of different illustrators, guys who spent a lot more time in strip clubs than Bing did, who, on occasion, offered strippers two hundred dollars to draw them; stories about strippers who took the money and told the artist to come back at the end of the shift and said follow me, then waited until a yellow light turned red and gunned it, leaving the poor dumb bastard stranded at the light. Bing started thinking about the flip side, too; stories involving amiable young ladies who'd followed different comic book artists to their motels and who'd sat still for the artist and bullshitted and been really cool, and then afterward, in every case, when the artist had asked if the stripper wanted to get something to eat or, you know, do something, each stripper had answered with a smile and some variation of the line, aren't you cute, each comic book artist reporting amusement in his stripper's voice, like there was something he wasn't getting, like he'd blown some chance without knowing he'd had a chance.

The thought of paying for nookie was truly depressing to Bing Beiderbixxe. It was like admitting you had no chance whatsoever of getting some on your merits. Basically you were saying, Yes, I am retarded but so what because I have my gold medal. Nevertheless, the stories intrigued him. Members of his own kind had successfully broken the wall, dealt with these women in real-life situations, outside their places of employment. Thoughts were zooming without completion, but a few decent connections were being made, and these connections distracted Bing enough that he was unprepared for the presence, now invading his personal space: an overstuffed, electric-white schoolgirl's blouse, mammaries leaping toward him, all but bursting through the fabric.

Attached to the breasts, a shapely body was stuffed into a Catholic school skirt that was so tiny, its fabric barely qualified as an afterthought. It took Bing a while before he got to her face. She did not appear to mind. Her smile was toothy, beaming in his direction, the black light making her teeth glow oddly.