Strip club

November 19, 1980

The room swirls with cigarette smoke that makes me choke and can make out the shape of the topless stripper through its thick haze, as if the smoke covers up the parts of her that the law here says should not be exposed, flaunted in this bar here in Passaic because many of the patrons are off duty cops.

I haven’t been here in a while, not since the barmaid promised me a good time if I waited for her after closing, hinting that she might do something special for me if I could give her something more than the usual tip.

Men fill every inch of the oval bar, faces half lit by red and amber light from behind the rows of bottles and the flood lights focused on the stage where the dancer goes through routine gyrations, each set of male eyes fixed on each curve of hip or breast, desperate not to miss anything important, documented and filed for later personal consumption at home or in their cars on the way home.

And I’m no different, staring just as hard, making my pick of my favorite woman, tonight, a blonde, who comes on early, giving me the same look the barmaid did the last time I was here, with a wink and a nod, expecting something I’m not sure I can afford, but I want to.

I’m not even sure if it is the cold or something else that makes me shiver, though in the back of my head I think about options, about what I might get if I accept.

You don’t find love in places like this; so, it’s pointless to look for it. And it’s not why I come here anyway.

I had a chance yesterday to score with a woman at school or at least snuggle in some remote corner of campus the way I see other, younger classmates do on warmer nights, wrapped in each other’s embrace as if scared to let go, we all people floating after some dismal shipwreck seeking anything and anyone that will keep us from drowning.

The young woman in film class whose name I don’t even know kept smiling at me in that special way, and for two hours I drifted in a different more personal haze, paying almost no attention to the professor or the lesson only her and how her hand moved up and down her thigh as she smiled at me.

Then, I stumbled out of class to meet up with my on-again-off-again girlfriend and feeling guilty because I want or need something she can’t or won’t give me, needing a nod and a wink sometimes she doesn’t know how to give, even though every waitress I see in every diner and every dancer I meet in places like this, does.

I am constantly resisting situations I shouldn’t resist, shrugging them off, giving myself bonus points I don’t deserve for virtue I really don’t have.

I get all choked up at the smell of perfume or the lingering touch, that is rarely my on-and-off girlfriend’s.

We sold an old school ring I found in the street – I’m always desperate for money which is why I can rarely afford to come here.

She implied we might get back together. She doesn’t mean it.

We’re both too caught up in the need for personal freedom to ever commit to each other, her future taking her to some other remote place (geographically and metaphorically) I can’t go.

I left her house without her and did not want to face my lying in my own bed alone.

So, I come here, in search of something I can’t find there and should have gotten at school when I could, knowing I will leave here bruised even more than when I came in, thinking I’m doomed to spend my life sleeping with strangers, confused about what is right or wrong, good or bad, smart or stupid to do.

I stare up through the haze, catching a glimpse of myself in the mirror behind the cash register, looking exactly the way the other men look, waiting for something I know can’t come or shouldn’t if it does, waiting for the moment when the bartender – who isn’t talking to me anymore – shouts for last call, and we all plunge out into the cold and dark, alone.