I met a stripper today. Correction, I met many strippers. Fascinating characters. But I started this bit in the singular for a reason: I met one stripper who stood out from the rest. I have no idea if anything she said or showed was true, and no clue whether I will ever see her again. I am not in love. I have a crush. She is beautiful, but so many of them were. Maybe it was her smile. Radiant. She had the ability to go from frigid, icy and constantly scanning the room with her restless eyes, to beaming, shimmering, alive like lava. It’s genetics, and not for a moment was I convinced that the lava was content with herself.
The lava had just run down from the ashen hillside, and not yet hardened or settled. The lava was uncertain. The lava was alluring, but I never tricked myself into thinking she’d let me in. But I’ll never rule out a volcanic surprise. Bury me, I dare you.
We talked about random stuff, writing and acting, and I just wanted to steal her away and let her crash on my couch for eternity. I can’t even remember her name. I gave her a fake one right when she approached me, and didn’t correct it until later. We talked, and she revealed that she has only been on the job for 2 days. Another stripper said the same thing, but I still believe her. I could tell. She wasn’t professional. All the other strippers would approach you, talk to you for a length of time depending on their personality and individual strategies, and then ask to take you back for a dance. This girl never asked. She was tired, maybe afraid, maybe expecting or hoping for me to ask her, to save her the embarrassment.
Or maybe she had intended to ask, but we begun to talk, and our conversation assumed a normalcy, a charming flavor, and suddenly asking me to pay for her to grind up against my jeans and motorboat her t*****s in my face seemed vulgar, grotesque. Her paradox may very well have been the task of establishing an escapist front for her work while simultaneously searching for a homey and relatable niche for settling into her new home. How can she connect if the code of her job requires her to disconnect? So she sat there with me, and our talking would stop and go, my arm harmlessly touching her shoulder and our eyes both towards the floor, beehives of thought formations gathering behind them, fighting different wars within ourselves, eyes toward the floor, side by side, the stripper who wants to write and the thinker who wants to act, not in love, not in lust, an unlikely pair on sunset blvd.
We somehow negotiated exchanging information. I initiated it, and she insisted that I not try to help her. She hates that. It was precisely what I wanted to do, but I agreed to just ‘talk’. I had to find a pen. I did, and then couldn’t find her.
I come back from a dance or something, and find her. She writes it on my hand. Sitting in silence. Me asking her why she isn’t trying to pick up anyone, joking about the guy on the left looking receptive. She isn’t into it. Burnt out on the second day, or just not warmed up, never burnt in? What a character. She seems to briefly try with somebody else, walks out the exit door, and that’s the last I see of her. I leave over an hour later.
Before she got up, another girl approached me. I had just told her that my name was *****, and that Hektor was a lie. The other stripper starts up the sales pitch disguised as a come-on, and its not working. She asks me my name. Hek-tor, I say. She asks me what’s on my shirt. Blood-stains. Haha. Where are you from? Camelot. What are you on? A stool. I am on my game. I don’t want her. I want her to leave. I never tell her to leave, I just play around, the silent angel of gloom to my right, listening, or perhaps zoning out. Finally the earnest stripper gives up; I’m not interested.
I turn to my unlikely friend, or the friend of my dreams, and give her a little look, maybe a smirk that probably was so subtle it wouldn’t have shown up in a mirror. She gives a weak, forced little reaction back, jerk of the neck or widening of the eyes, the most basic admission that she had been there. Both our sets of eyes flicker back to the floor. She’s failing miserably at the role of stripper, and I just taught her a lesson in her own game. Play, play, play, get them to give you what you want, and eyes to front. Her eyes never left the front, and my eyes hardly rested on her, even though they wanted to. I didn’t fall in love, or in lust, but my couch is empty and my mind is full, and whether that number she wrote on my hand was real or fake, the actress who couldn’t play the stripper was real as hell, and reminded me of the lava that set long ago under the asphalt of sunset boulevard, my new backyard.
![[send message]](https://www.writerscafe.org/images/mail.png){kind=small}
![[befriend]](https://www.writerscafe.org/images/friend.png){kind=small}
Share This
Email
Facebook
Twitter
Read Request
My Library
Flag Writing
