Gabriel Roth - The Unknowns

The only thing to do now is to contain the panic and despair for a few more hours, which is why, twenty minutes later, I find myself exiting a cab across the street from the I-Hole. It’s a solution that presents itself fully formed, but if I had to show the working it would look something like, What can possibly stop me from thinking about what just happened? Pretty girls taking their clothes off. Where can I find them ?

I get cash from the ATM in the lobby, despite the usurious five-dollar fee, because when I feel this bad I am allowed to waste money. Twenty-five dollars gets my hand stamped with a special ink that only shows up under black light. I give the cashier two more twenties, which he exchanges for singles to be passed around the club’s microeconomy. There’s a board above the cashier’s desk with WHO’S DANCING NOW printed at the top and, beneath it, nameplates engraved with the stage names of the dancers: Princess, Midori, Porsche, Tiffany, Asia, Mykel, plus New Dancer 1 and New Dancer 2, representing girls who haven’t been there long enough to get a nameplate made. These nameless girls more than any others seem to hold out the possibility of happiness: perhaps their names are Jen or Heather; perhaps they are nice, normal women who happen to be incredibly hot strippers and who would like to hang out later. As I pass through the heavy velour curtain into the club itself the music has the viscosity of an element somewhere between air and water. The room is a big cuboid, dressed up with velveteen drapes but beneath them unmistakably cinderblock industrial. Everywhere around this rough-edged theater are women in sex costume: tiny shorts, skirts too short to serve a skirt’s purpose, bikini tops and minuscule T-shirts and huge heels. It is a rich and thrilling set of possibilities, and the prospect of choosing from among these women makes me hopeful. I walk down the aisle toward the stage, making eye contact with the women without acknowledging the men at all. Men here have to extend privacy to one another, as in a restroom. We’ve brought our lust and sadness to this place to have them tended to by professionals.

The rows of theater seats, red and beginning their decay, run parallel to the long catwalk. I choose a seat midway along the front row and turn my attention to the dancer, a tiny Asian with a stretchy blue skirt hiked up all the way around her waist. She smiles with a distant mania as she shakes her breasts vigorously back and forth, a movement more athletic than erotic. She’s too skinny, too crazy, but I lay two bills on the lip of the stage anyway, to establish my bona fides. I shift back in my seat and relax into the arousal and the music, feeling my concerns narrow to a pinprick.

The song ends and the dancer picks up her clothes, gathers the dollar bills scattered over the stage, and hurries off, no longer a performer, now just a naked girl stuffing things into her purse. Over the PA, the DJ instructs us to give a big welcome to Alannah, and a blonde emerges in a little white skirt, black shirt tied tight across her breasts. She’s not small, and she seems to be overspilling her clothes. And then she selects me from the six other tippers in the front row, looks me straight in the eye, and unleashes a smile that generates in my brain the exact chemical correlative of This girl and I are in love . The male nervous system’s response to a smile from a pretty girl — the sudden infusion of joy and fear — is no less powerful when you’re paying for it.

Alannah begins to dance. Intermittently she shuts her eyes and resembles a girl dancing alone in her bedroom, imagining being watched. It’s possible that she’s enjoying herself. She’s either an exhibitionist or a skilled pretender; there’s no way to tell which. She makes her way to the end of the catwalk and back, smiling at each spectator in a nice-to-meet-you way, until she reaches me and, once again, it’s as though we have some private arrangement. She holds my eye for almost half a minute, far longer than she gives anyone else. I sink into my seat, a luxurious erotic charge circulating through my body as sweet as any feeling in the world, and on the worst night of my life it’s available for nothing but money.

As her final song goes into repeat-to-fade the DJ exhorts us to applaud and Alannah gathers up her take. On her way off the stage she grins at me, and then she’s gone and I’m reeling.

There follows one of the mysteriously long pauses that sometimes interrupt the entertainment’s flow at the I-Hole. The dancers fan out to proposition us; they’re not allowed to solicit while another girl is performing. A thin woman with olive skin leans over the armrest to offer me a lap dance, and I decline quickly. I sit buzzing in my cushioned seat, trying not to look at the door from which Alannah will soon emerge. The DJ plays generic techno music and says over the PA, “Mystique to the back, Mystique to the back,” like a paging desk at an airport. And then I feel a hand on my shoulder and Alannah is at my side, wearing her minimal outfit again, bending in close and saying, “So c’mon back with me.” She takes my hand and we walk together, like a couple, away from the stage.

My visit is in danger of being brought to an end too soon. Alannah and I are about to go into a room lined with small curtained booths. Inside a booth, we are going to conduct a quick negotiation — I will not haggle; I don’t want to corrode the excitement by getting stingy and realistic — and then Alannah is going to take off her clothes and rub her elegant body up against me. At some point I’m going to ejaculate in my underwear — there is a tissue dispenser mounted on the wall of each booth in anticipation — at which point the ability of the I-Hole and its subcontractors to excite and distract me will be tapped out, and knowledge of certain realities will flood back in to fill the void.

She exchanges a quick greeting with the beefy black security guard and leads me to a booth. Inside she says, “So it’s eighty for a private,” and I give it to her, and the awkward part is over. I fish my keys out of my pants pocket so they won’t get in the way, hang my jacket on a hook. And then she puts her hands on my shoulders, sits me down on the banquette, and, grinning, turns around and prettily lowers her skirt. Her white thong is the smallest imaginable. She slides down onto my lap, then throws her head backwards onto my shoulder, while in the mirror I watch her undo the knot on her shirt for the second time. The perfume on her neck is sweet and fruity. She starts to writhe, and her skin is absurdly soft, and light seems to emanate from her pores. For some reason I am not hard. Alannah continues to move against and before me, demonstrating her deep and thorough grasp of the physical language of male sexual fantasy. The bikini top comes off, and then the G-string. Her breasts are swept across my face; her cunt and her asshole are offered for scrutiny; her eyes suggest an unstoppable sexual hunger. Why is something always wrong? Alannah is straddling me now, her back to me again — there are only so many positions for her to take — and in the mirror she wears a look of intense concentration. Her grinding on my lap suddenly feels incongruous. This isn’t what I need. It seems important not to let her know. Once the song is over — is this the second or the third? — I will get out of this noisy windowless place. I see my own face in the mirror and think Maya’s gone , and I watch my features crumple as tears stream down my cheeks and land, hotly, on Alannah’s shoulder.

She jumps up, startled.

“Sorry,” I say.

“What was that?” she says.

“Uh, I just — I’ve had a really hard day,” I say, and this admission starts the tears flowing again.

She understands, now, what she felt trickle down her back, but she doesn’t seem relieved. She stands in front of me, naked but for her huge shoes, and grabs her purse from the little shelf, a gesture that is somehow the opposite of pornographic. “So, what,” she says. “Are we done?”