Lawrence Block: The Topless Tulip Caper

Then the lights went out.

There was quite a bit of applause. Not a roar or anything, but more than a polite ovation. A few of my fellow voyeurs scooped change from the bar and headed for the exit. Most of us stayed where we were. The lights had only stayed off for a second, and another record had already been cued and started up, more of the same monotonous rock. If that’s the music of my generation, then I guess I’m a throwback or something.

There was no emcee. I had been sort of afraid of some Neanderthal in a checkered sport coat coming up and telling dirty jokes, but Treasure Chest stuck with the basics; when one girl went off, another one came on. A male voice came over the loudspeaker and said, “That was Miss Tulip Willing, ladies and gentlemen. Let’s have a big hand for her now. Tulip Willing.” I looked around the club for the ladies he’d been talking about and didn’t see a one. I suppose there might have been some at the tables but there certainly weren’t any at the bar. Nor, for that matter, did I see anybody I would be inclined to label a gentleman. The audience gave Tulip another weaker round of applause in response to his request, and as it died out he said, “And now, ladies and gentlemen, for your viewing pleasure here at the one and only Treasure Chest, a girl with a chestful of pleasure, a pint-sized lady with queen-sized attributes, the one and only Cherry Bounce.”

A pair of curtains parted and Tulip’s roommate stepped into the spotlight. I knew she was Tulip’s roommate because Tulip had told me so. I was seeing her for the first time and my immediate reaction was to wish that she was my roommate.

She was a tremendous contrast to Tulip. Tulip was about six feet tall, give or take an inch, and Cherry was maybe five-two in platform shoes. Tulip’s hair was long and blond, Cherry’s short and jet black. Tulip was built on a grand scale, reminding you that you can’t have too much of a good thing, and Cherry was slim, pointing out that good things come in small packages. The one thing that both of them made you dramatically aware of was that human beings are mammals.

She started to dance. She was naked, incidentally. I guess I didn’t mention that. I understand that some of the topless-bottomless clubs start out with the girls wearing something, but Treasure Chest kept it simple. She was naked, and she started dancing, and as grubby as the club was and as much as I disliked the music and atmosphere, I decided there were places I would be less happy to be.

The thing is, she was a pretty good dancer. Tulip had moved around nicely and all, but what she was there for was to show you her body and the dancing was more or less incidental. With Cherry, the whole performance was enhanced by the fact that she could really dance. I don’t know if this made any difference to the rest of the crowd but I noticed it and I suppose in some way it heightened my reaction to her.

“That’s my roommate,” a voice said.

A hand touched my arm. I turned to see Tulip standing beside me. She was wearing clothes, but not the jeans and Beethoven tee-shirt I had seen her in earlier.

Now she wore a loose-fitting navy dress. You still got a fair idea of what was lurking beneath the dress, but it was a good deal less obvious.

“Oh, hi,” I said.

“HI yourself. I gather you like my roommate.”

“Uh.”

“She’s pretty, isn’t she?”

“Uh, yeah. She’s, uh, pretty.”

I had been wondering what it would be like when Tulip joined me at the bar. I more or less expected some aggravation from the other males, which was why I had been moved to do the number on the creep with the thin moustache. But evidently men who get off on staring at naked girls are unsettled to be in the company of those very girls, naked or otherwise, and nobody tried to sit in on our conversation. As a matter of fact, the fat man on Tulip’s right actually moved a stool away.

“Cherry dances better than I do,” she said.

“I thought you danced very well.”

“Oh, come on, Chip. You’re sweet, but I’m not a dancer. I’m just up there to wiggle my tits and ass at the customers. That’s really all it is.”

“Well, uh—”

“Cherry’s a real dancer. Look how graceful she is.” I looked. “The trouble with Cherry is she thinks this is going to lead her to a career in dance. At least I have a realistic attitude. This is an easy way to make a dollar and not much more. Cherry thinks she can make the easy dollar and still use the place as a stepping stone. But she’s generally naive, you know. I take a harder line on reality.”

I didn’t take any kind of line on reality at that point. What I took was a sip of beer. I did this carefully. I don’t know if I’m Mr. Ultra Cool generally, but we had established earlier that whatever cool I normally possessed tended to get lost when Tulip was in the immediate vicinity. So I sipped the beer carefully to avoid gagging on it if she said something disarming.

“Did you like my act, Chip?”

“Yes. Very much.”

“Did it turn you on?”

When I didn’t answer she said, “I’m not asking because I’m trying to embarrass you. It’s just that I’m trying to understand the particular head of the men who come here. You know, like I don’t think I would get off watching a man dance around naked. I can’t say for certain because I never watched that, although I was reading where a bar at one of the big mid-western colleges has one night a week with male nude dancers, and the college girls go there and really get off on the whole thing. So maybe it would get me excited, but I don’t think so. In fact I don’t think those college girls would get off after the first few times. Like they would be getting off on the idea of it, you know, but after it became a frequent thing it would be boring for them.”

“I see what you mean.”

“But men really get off looking at naked women, don’t they?”

I glanced briefly at the absorbed men on either side of us. “Evidently,” I said.

“So I wasn’t asking to put you on the spot. But you seem like a sane, healthy guy, and I was wondering how you reacted, because sometimes I’m inclined to think of the general audience here as a batch of perverts, which may or may not be fair of me, and I was wondering how someone like you would react.”

I didn’t know exactly what to say, because I didn’t know what my reaction was, exactly. It had been a turn-on watching her on stage, but then it had been at least as exciting in many ways being with her that afternoon, and it was hard to decide whether I would have reacted to her the same way on stage if she had been a total stranger instead of someone who had already Put Ideas In My Head. In some ways it might have been more of a turn-on if I hadn’t known her, especially at the end when she did the spread number. That might have been a turn-off in any context—it was sort of humiliating and demeaning and like that—but how could I tell? If it was a total stranger up there I might have gone ape like all the other card-carrying sex maniacs in the audience.

I tried to judge some of this on the basis of my reaction to Cherry, but that didn’t really work either. Because even though I hadn’t met her she was already someone I knew by proxy. I had stood in her messy bedroom, I had pictured her in my mind, so it wasn’t the same thing.

I was trying to decide how all this worked, and how much of it I wanted to mention to Tulip, when the barmaid turned up and asked if I was ready for another beer. I still had a half-filled glass and there was some left in the bottle, so what she meant was that I was drinking too slowly and the joint wasn’t in business for its health.

“Chip’s with me,” Tulip said. “You can let up on the salesmanship number, Jan.”