I shudder at the idea of people faking seduction.
Especially if it’s actively directed toward me! I don’t want to see naked people who wouldn’t even want to see me shirtless at the beach. That’s my baseline. Yes, I frequently avert my eyes during sex scenes in movies. “Oh, do you need more popcorn? I’ll be back when this is over.” That’s the kind of weirdo I am. So, take my misgivings with a grain of salt.
Ten-ish years ago,back when I was living in Columbus Ohio, I lived in a massive apartment complex. Just a parking lot of rentals and condos that sprung up to feed the housing needs of the call centers a few miles away. It was sketchy.
A half mile away, the closest business that wasn’t a gas station was a strip club. The way it was explained to me, it was one of those strip clubs where only four people can be there at any one time. You pay a quarter to see a woman behind glass.
So, now I’ve written this last part down, I have to assume people were bullshitting me. Or maybe I don’t remember what they told me? It was tiny home small. That’s the point. Imagine a shipping container with a sign that said strip club without saying strip club. An outhouse instead of a bathroom.
Imagine the secrets a place like that might hold.
I bring this place up because… my neighbor worked there. I didn’t know it when I first met Holly. When I first met her, she was with a tiny curvy blond friend, Penny. It was 2 AM, and they were giggling at the bottom of the steps of our building. I had just parked my car in the lot twenty feet from where they sat eating fries and drinking Slurpees. I had been working a late shift, at the Abercrombie and Fitch Warehouse. (Oh, the stories I should share about that job!)
As I headed towards the two women — figuring out how I’d have to sidestep past them, but before I reached the sidewalk’s curb — something spooked them. It seemed my presence changed the vibe. I couldn’t fathom why. I’m harmless now, I was way more harmless when I was twenty.
Holly and her friend darted up the steps. They looked back briefly to see if I was following. “Get your keys out!” her friend, Penny, told her.
My neighbor looked over her shoulder, saw me trotting up. She doubled her pace. It felt like she was running away from me, but instead of going up to her own apartment on the fourth floor, she stopped at mine and tried to get inside. Fiddled with the key and lock. I don’t think we even locked our door at this time. We were the kind of household that welcomed murderers.
“Wait, what is going on?” Was she drunk or stupid? I couldn’t come up with a guess that made any sense to me, so I just stood in the stairwell a little slack-jawed. I questioned myself silently, “I don’t know how to navigate this situation. Maybe I should smile?” I smiled and rolled my eyes at Penny.
Penny, the curvy blond, was bubbly. “This isn’t your apartment, Holly! You live with your mom upstairs.” She gave me a furtive kind of look.
“Oh, my Gawd.” Holly laughed and turned around to lock my eyes. Her pupils were huge, she had pale skin, chipped blue nail polish from biting and scratching, matted white-girl dreadlocks, with a couple of strands of purple and blue slinking down them, and her laugh — nervous as it happened to be — was full of white teeth. She was insincere but still come hitherto. I’d actually seen her in the parking lot before, she was arresting out the corner of my eye, but now, with her a few feet away, I was kind of fucked up.
Beautiful people fritz out my brain.
I don’t like it. Now that I’m thinking about it, insincere come hitherto was kind of her modus operandi. Every interaction felt like… she wanted your brain to dance between, “Are you flirting with me?” And, “Wait, why? I actually get the feeling you don’t like me.”
That’s how she moved through my life, for the few months I knew her.
Her tongue hit hard between her teeth as she paused for a blip on the first word, “This! Is your apartment,” she cocked her head to the left, “isn’t it?” A silent titter crossed her lips and she said, “You know, you’re awesome. So sorry.” She cackle-laughed and ran up to the fourth floor.
Penny was laughing too. But it seemed an irrational, ‘Why are we laughing,’ sound.
“Why did you say he was awesome!?” I heard Holly’s friend asking.
“I don’t know,” Holly yelled and the door to her apartment slammed shut.
After that incident Holly started, I don’t know, being weird and present more often. She’d keep the door to her apartment open and blast music loudly. She’d come down and ask if it was too loud. Or send Penny, who we learned was really her frenemy, down to ask us for an appliance or some baking utensil there’s no way she thought we actually had.
I was living with Atom S at the time
One night I snuck into the doorway of his room. He was sitting at his computer desk, smoking and reading an article on Slashdot. I couldn’t make out the headline. I remember telling him, “She wants us to come over. This is her flirting with us.”
“No.” He took a drag on his cigarette. “Who? What! No. And even if she did, why would we ever accept an invitation like that? Fuck her.”
“She’s gorgeous.” I didn’t understand. How could this not be enough?
“The stripper!?” Atom balked.
“Don’t disparage that fine upstanding woman,” I told him. “Don’t call people strippers.”
“Huh?” A cuspy Gen-X, Millennial, he didn’t think calling her a stripper was disparaging, he just wanted to make sure we were talking about the same person. A cynic with a heart of gold. A sarcastic tattoo waiting to happen. He’d cut you with language, but you wouldn’t notice because you were laughing through the pain.
“Wait, she’s a stripper? For like, reals?” I asked.
“Are you fucking kidding me, in the outfits she walks around in? With that skeezy meth head of a boyfriend she’s got, with those crazy ass wigs? A stripper or a MAN…” He leaned away from his desk, cocked an eyebrow at me, and brought his hand up to the corner of his mouth. This formed a makeshift shield like he was about to tell me a secret. Slowly in a loud mock whisper he let me know, “She’s not a man.” Then after another drag of his cig he blew a smoke ring out the same side of his mouth he’d just whispered with.
A few weeks later she’d infiltrated our apartment through some ploy concocted by Penny. I found the pair in Atom’s room. Sitting and smoking with a few other people we knew.
Holly’s whole life story, but especially her origin, was hard to believe. She was sort of a real-life supervillain. I’m not going to belabor it, but… yeah. Holly’s mother, whom she lived with, was even more unhinged. But more like, typical bad-drunk-mother trying so hard, but failing, out of control. Penny, her frenemy, wasn’t a stripper but made her living pretending her leg was broken. Sending pictures of her leg in a cast to guys on Craigslist.
I had one meaningful conversation with Holly that has stuck with me. Haunted. It’s a memory that just, sits there, settles in like a fog, passes me whenever I see an ad for a strip club for sure, but sometimes just at random points. If I see an old man with lonely eyes. If a stranger gives me a smile I don’t fully understand.
“I have to quit stripping,” she told me.
“Yeah?” I asked.
“It sucks. It’s mean. Like… there are these guys who come and they are fine, right? They are like… they have their shit together, or you know, whatever. They come in and they have some money and they GET IT. They get that this is my job. And that it’s… We aren’t in a relationship. They pay me and I giggle or laugh or look hot or whatever it is I do, all the things I do. They get it.”
“It’s transactional, it’s a performance?” I sort of tell ask her.
“Yeah. But you can’t make a living off those guys. You make a living off the guys who have no friends and don’t get it. And they won’t get it no matter how many times you explain it to them. They give you money, they like… give you money from their social security checks. Like Dan, you just got it, totally got it, and you haven’t even seen it in action. Transactional. It’s my Jay Oh Bee. But these guys don’t. And they want a fantasy, but then they don’t TRULY get that it’s a fantasy. And it’s just sad. Because if you want to make a living. These are the guys you need.”
“That’s uncomfortable,” I murmured.
“Yeah. And you see women being super shitty to these guys. These — you know. Whatever. These normal, old, men. Maybe they lost their wife or never had one. And they just don’t have anyone. It doesn’t matter the reason. Or it does. But they just don’t have people. No one has told them they are cool or sexy. Ever. No one would tell them that, right? So they pay for you to just like talk to them, but you have to string them along and milk them. That’s where the money is. And if you don’t do it, someone else will and it will be worse than if you do it. There are girls who are like fucking evil with these guys. There are broken homeless people due to strippers.
“But it’s also like, like you know? You can’t explain it to them. You tell them, ‘You don’t need me. Get a fucking friend, a real friend. You just need someone to talk to.’ But they won’t. It’s fucked. Like they tell you they know it’s a fantasy and it’s okay. But it’s not okay. It’s fucked up. They don’t need boobs. They need to go to a coffee shop and play some chess with a rando. But they pay for boobs instead.
“Also, the owner of that place sucks. He’s a liar and he sucks. I don’t want to get into it. Fuck him. I quit. I’m quitting. I don’t need it. Fuck the whole place.”
Because she said she didn’t want discuss the details of the final straw leading to her quitting, I dropped it. I just assumed I’d keep seeing her and she’d tell me later. But I didn’t. I saw the blond girl, Penny, a couple times after that, saw Holly’s mom — kind of a lot — but never Holly, so I’ll never know the thing she didn’t want to get into.
Or maybe I already do?
I get weird about strip clubs.
Because there’s enough stories from movies, video games, pop culture, and friends to understand, “He’s a liar and he sucks,” means the world’s more dangerous than I admit. Because I’ve met some strippers and they’ve told me some stories and… those stories were enough.
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