Big Black Tits

Feeling a need to somehow offset the large-men-with-huge-guns overload watching eight consecutive hours of football inevitably leaves you burdened with, we headed to the strip club.

Sundays at the strip club have a different feel than your standard nights, maybe having something to do with Sunday’s status as the day of rest. At the strip club, this clearly means the rest of the strippers, the ones who, for whatever reason, don’t warrant a weekend or Thursday night or some other respectable shift [first example of Strip Club Irony: respectable shifts exist]. Fat ones, titless ones, one that resembled a certain bartender inappropriately named Doctor Dave, and a whole bridge club’s worth of old ones. One of these chicks was at least 60. Serious. A good set of fake tits can take you a lot of places in this country, but unfortunately, 1965 isn’t one of them. Sorry sister.

Sadly, looks alone weren’t the only issues plaguing these halfpence harlots. Not one of them seemed to possess any actual, detectable stripping skills. No sultry dance moves or Nadia-esque contortionism or manic pole-spinning. They all just kinda shifted about like the whore from American Psycho who Bateman tells to dance in front of the camera. I wanted to shout at them, “Don’t just stare at it, eat it!” They all just kept one hand on the mirrored ceiling the whole time, fishing around for the noose or something.

Despite these and other problems, there remained the undeniable fact that these women were naked.

The first one to make a move was some 100-pound black chick with a 45-pound rack. Gelardi, bane of our collective existence yet somehow muse to the late Mallo, pulls the venerable, “Oh, I’m all right, but this guy here’s been staring at you all night” move and shuttles her in my direction. Now I probably would have preferred some slamming blond chick who bore a slightly stronger resemblance to Brooke Burns, but they apparently don’t work on Sunday and I’m an equal opportunity lapdance patron, so I said let’s go.

We strolled over to the V.I.P. section, being careful to avoid the blindingly classy brass bar that served as the only physical barrier between the land where strippers and patrons roam free and the supposed V.I.P. zone, which was completely open and about the size of a large walk-in closet. The place seemed to enforce a “No Sex in the Champagne Room Because We Don’t Have One” policy.

I take my seat and Lardi grabs the one next to me, himself either a victim of his own ploy or simply his innate, crippling male weakness, the complete shut-down of all non-essential mental faculties, the inability to do anything except stare and follow once confronted with tits. His chick was white, appeared somewhere below the night’s Median Stripper Age of 45, and possibly foreign. She reminded me of Bruce Willis’ chick from Pulp Fiction, maybe only because she had the potbelly Willis’ chick wanted.

So I’m sitting there, getting rode like the Fireman’s Fair roller coaster, grabbing this chick’s huge fake tits (I’m still not sure if I was supposed to be doing this), just kind of enjoying my Sunday evening. [Side note: I am absolutely making my wife get a boob job, probably between the ages of 32 and 35.] I take a look over at Lardi, he’s just cracking up while the Pulp Fiction chick’s got her head down by his junk. Everything’s good.

I’m just passing the time in Silicone City ­ alternately taking pulls off my $10 beer and asking her throwaway questions like “Are these real?” and “So what part of Russia are you from?” - and Gelardi’s gone, back to the bar. I become confused for the better part of a second before the bitch grabs my wang and slams her ass into it about 400 times, with that damn “You Got Me Goin’ Crazy, Turn Me On” song seeming to come out of her rack, where my face spent considerable time.

Song over, she turns and asks me if I want another.

“Another what?”

“Another dance, honey. You’re into me for three already.”

So there I am, admittedly the worst mathematician in the joint, possibly the county, and I’m still pretty sure three bucks sounds a little cheap for all the jumping around the woman just did. Something smells fishy, and the place is definitely topless only.

“Three, huh? So that’s, uh…”

“Sixty bucks.”

Oops.

I considered bolting, pretty confident in my ability to take on the stripper but unsure about how the battle with the black noseguard bouncer would shake down. Seemed like a good opportunity to get punched pretty hard, but I passed it up, assuming I would have to come up with the cash even after sustaining massive head and kidney trauma. I paid her with the three freshly minted twenties I extracted from the ATM just 15 minutes prior, pretended the bastard music drowned out her demands for a tip, and headed back over to Lardi, who sat at the bar trying not to yelp too loudly.

“How much did she get you for?”

“Sixty.”

“She was that good, huh?”

“Not really.”

“Why’d you keep going, then? Didn’t she say anything?”

“No, not until she told me I was in for sixty.”

“And you didn’t say anything?”

“Nope.”

“What were you waiting for?”

“I just figured she’d stop when she wanted to.”

Turns out this is wrong. Strippers will not stop when they want to. When at a strip club, do everything you can to avoid this assumption. Strippers won’t stop when they want to because - in direct opposition to conventional logic, and Strip Club Irony example # 2 - they don’t ever want to stop. They don’t ever want to cease engaging in probably the most debasing station in life since the jizzmopper for one reason: they can make more money than Dad, M.D. by doing it. They harbor the collective illusion that the monetary compensation received outweighs the destruction of self and soul, the bombardment of total degradation the profession forces them to endure on a nightly basis. Thank god for us they feel this way.

Some of these strippers, like Gelardi’s Pulp Fiction chick, provide constant updates on the lapdance’s progress, offering an out and an estimate following each tune. Others, like Big Fake Black Tits, expect you to count the shitty Z100 songs yourself and only clue you in once they smell you running out of cash. In lieu of visibly posted instructional signs or pricing structures explained in detail by the strippers themselves, there exists at the tittie bar only the will of the stripper and ol’ Noseguard, who reminded me of an unfed grizzly.

Now, I’ve been in strip clubs before, all over our national landmass. Velveted palaces in New Orleans, converted barns in Wisconsin, a place called Cheetah III - which at one point I owned a hat from - in Pompano Beach, Florida. I’d been in this very same strip club before, even got a lapdance as far as I can recall. I’m sure I’d figured out these rules - where one song equals 20 bucks and whatnot - at some point, but for whatever reason, at that moment, they didn’t process. I really thought she was just going to stop whenever she wanted to. Big black tits can really mentally fragment a guy.

Anyway, who really made out worse here? Me, the idiot who got taken for $60 because I assumed the chick was going to quit humping when she felt the time was right; or the piteous synthetic stripper, who has to make like a human pogo stick for probably five straight hours, following which she changes out of her twelve-inch Lucite heels and presumably goes home: a) to her abusive boyfriend [strippers can’t have husbands, can they?], b) with the first guy who flashes a hundred and licks his lips after her shift’s over, or c) to the house she shares with her parents, whom she has successfully misled into thinking she is a paralegal?

I’ll take my life, as wanton and wayward and wasted as it is, any day of the week.