All I Could Bare: My Life in the Strip Clubs of Gay Washington, (14 page)

I turned the car around. I still wasn't sure if I actually wanted to make a porn video, but I figured it wouldn't hurt to find out if I
could.
I walked back in the club and told Porn Guy that he could take my picture.

"Great," he said enthusiastically. "The only thing is my camera is back at my hotel. We'll have to go there to take the picture."

This struck me as a little weird; and in retrospect, it should have set off alarm bells. But at the time it made sense that he wouldn't have his camera with him. What kind of geek goes clubbing with a big Polaroid swinging around his neck?

We left the club, jumped in my car, and drove to a Best Western a couple of blocks away. The hotel was officially called the Best Western Capitol Skyline, because it offered a grand view of the U.S. Capitol dome—that is, if you could look past the Wendy's, the McDonald's, and the Exxon in the foreground. A lighted sign in front of the Best Western touted the "Friday Night Fish Fry in the Skyline Lounge."

As I walked to his room, down the long dark hallway covered with patterned seventies-looking wallpaper, I felt the same way as I did when going to the Glory Hole with Symphony Guy. It was like I was playing "me" in a film. Yet, at the same time, I knew that my quickening heartbeat

and the sweat seeping from my armpits were not put-ons. The moment at once was unreal and all too real.

We got to his room and he asked me to strip to my undies. "Tightie whities," he observed. "Nice." It was all a part of my boy-next-door look.

He took a couple of shots of me in my underwear standing against the wall, which featured more geometric wall patterns, this time in gleaming gold.

"Uh, could you suck your gut in a little bit?" he asked.

I did, or at least I thought I did.

"A little more," he said.

"Damn, why did I eat all of that pizza?" I screamed in my head.

"OK, now take off your underwear."

Not a problem, I thought. I felt comfortable with this part of the photo shoot. I knew that once I dropped my drawers, ol' reliable would immediately stand at attention.

"You have a really nice dick," he said.

"Thanks," I answered proudly.

But then the trouble started. He told me to grab my cock so that it stood straight up. But he said I could use only two fingers so my hand wouldn't cover my dick. Some guys must find this easy to do because porn models have to do it all the time when they take pictures. But for me, it was like advanced yoga. We tried it for several minutes, and I just couldn't get it right. My dick kept slipping from my grasp just as he snapped the picture.

He sighed and then said, somewhat exasperated, "Let me just get a shot of your asshole."

"OK," I said, feeling frustrated and ready to leave. "What do you need me to do?"

"Get on the bed and bend over on all fours."

I climbed atop the shiny bedspread and assumed my best doggy-style position. I heard a click and the slide of the Polaroid film coming from the camera.

"Wait a minute," he said. I heard him walk into the bathroom and then come back out. Suddenly, I felt some cold, slimy goop sliding down my ass crack.

"What the fuck is that?" I asked, whipping my head around.

"Oh," he said. "I wanted to put some lotion on your asshole to make it shinier."

"Fuck," I thought as I turned back around, "this is all getting too weird." It felt like I was about to get my ass plowed by the turdlike green thing from
Ghost Busters—
I'd been slimed!

"This is good," he said, as I felt a finger poke around in my cheeks, smoothing out my ass hair.

I heard several more clicks, more film sliding from the camera. "How many pictures of a greased-up asshole can you possibly need?" I thought.

"OK, now flip over," he said. I rolled over and slid down the bedspread.

"Do you cum a lot?" he asked.

"Depends, I guess."

"It would be really good if we could see you cum."

"OK," I said thinking that, after having an ass full of Best Western lotion, popping a load wasn't going to be any more humiliating. I really just wanted to get out of there. But I figured that I had to see it through.

I lay down on my back, closed my eyes, and started jerking, trying to get the job done as quickly as possible. Then I felt the bed move. I opened my eyes and saw that Porn Guy had put down his camera and was now unzipping his own pants.

'Tour dick is really turning me on," he said, grabbing hold of his own stubby penis. He started jerking himself off, faster and faster, making the whole bed shake. I closed my eyes again and conjured up the hottest ass I could imagine. I came quickly, not much, but at least I was done. A few seconds later, Porn Guy cried out, "Oh, yes," and sprayed all over the bedspread next to me.

I jumped up and went into the bathroom, spotting the open tube of hotel lotion by the sink. I grabbed a clean towel and wiped myself off. Then I looked in the mirror, looked closely at my face, into my eyes. It was still the same face I saw each and every morning. Everything was still the same. I balled up the towel in my hand and threw it on the floor.

"Thanks for coming by," Porn Guy said as I walked out of the bathroom and started putting on my clothes. "I'll call you if anything comes of the pictures."

"All right," I said, heading toward the door.

"Maybe I'll see you the next time I come to town with Chi Chi," he said.

"Yeah, see you," I said, with the door closing behind me.

As I made my thirty-minute ride home, I felt lotion swishing around in my buns whenever I shifted my weight or made a turn. I felt like Irene Cara when she auditioned for that pervert in
Fame
. It was my bare-titty moment. I drove along and the lyrics to Cara's "Out Here on My Own" played in my head: "We're always provin' who we are / Always reachin' for the rising star." I wondered why I had ultimately decided to go back to the hotel with Porn Guy; why hadn't I just said no? I also wondered if he would call.

15

One evening in July, I arrived for work at Wet and saw something shocking, like a giant cock falling from the sky. There was a sign on the back of the dressing room door that read: "Attention All Dancers: You are not to be touched, fondled, fingered, or stroked in any shape, form, or fashion. This applies both to customers and yourselves. Your cooperation is both expected and appreciated. Thank you, Management."

"Not to be touched, fondled, fingered, or stroked," I said to the other dancers in the room. 'What are we supposed to do—
dance?"

"Yeah, and we can't even touch ourselves," said Jay, a new dancer I'd met at Wet who was slipping into his stiff white sailor pants.

"I know, why bother?" said another dancer, a blond from the Virginia sticks. "It wasn't even worth the drive to come here."

"Does anybody know why?" I asked.

"Something about the alcohol board cracking down on the strip clubs," Jay said, before walking out onto the bar.

I followed him out, wearing my jean shorts, a G-string, and a T-shirt. I felt overdressed since I usually went out commando in a pair of jean shorts, but I didn't want to risk any dick exposure until I found out what was going on.

I asked the bartender what was up and he gave me the scoop. Apparently some inspectors from the D.C. Alcoholic Beverage Control Board visited the club a few months before and saw dancers playing with themselves and customers playing with dancers—in other words, what happened at Wet and the other strip clubs every night and had been for years. But where the alcohol board had once turned a blind eye to the clubs, it now appeared to be cracking down, since it was technically illegal for sexual acts—however defined—to take place in establishments serving alcohol. And these were serious charges. Wet faced a ten-thousand-dollar fine and permanent revocation of its liquor license.

For this reason, the club wasn't playing when it came to enforcing the new rules. Some of the club's security guards were recommissioned as monitors to watch what was going on between the customers and the dancers.

"And anyone who breaks the rules," the bartender told me, "will be fired immediately."

Hmm, I thought to myself, nothing like the threat of losing your job to put you in the mood to get nekkid and sexy. But nevertheless, I put on a brave face as I took off my jeans and began to remove my G-string. I tried to take my time with this because I knew my cock was in foxhole mode, staying as close to my body as possible like a scared lad to his mother's breast. The conditions in the club worked to produce maximal shrinkage. Not only was there all this tension in the air, but it was as if the Coldmeister himself was working the air-conditioning, villainously turning it up so that we couldn't get our boy batons to stand at attention. I tried to move my G-string around to create some heating friction, but to no avail. Finally, I just took it off to reveal that I had a sad and sickly snail hanging between my legs.

I walked over to Michael, who had started coming to Wet once he found out I was working there. He was seated by himself at the bar, studying the ice cubes in his drink more closely than ever before. He put two bucks in my sock and I tried to sort of wiggle my limp cock around for him. But he just laughed, and I threw my hands up like "What can I do?" There would be no head-banging cock action tonight.

Michael, at least, had a sense of humor about what was going on. Most of the other customers were pissed as they now had to deal with signs telling them not to touch, obtrusive security guards watching their every move, and their hands getting slapped by dancers when they crossed one of the newly drawn lines. In one night, Wet went from a relaxed, good-time free-for-all to a strict kindergarten class with pricey drinks and a cover charge. Not surprisingly, attendance plummeted.

By the next night, we were dancing for only about three or four guys at a time. They'd come in, figure out what was going on, and quickly abandon us for La Cage or Secrets, which were still, at least temporarily, in business-as-usual mode. Frustration built among the dancers and management, which let us sneak a few grabs and touches over the weekend because we weren't making any money. But by the next week, a new sign appeared on the back of the dressing room door: "Sorry, Guys. We are back to no touching by the customers and you can't touch yourself or another dancer! Sorry & thanks." Apparently, someone got wind that the ABC investigators might come back.

That night, I tried to stay in a good frame of mind, since for the past few weeks I'd been feeling like Grumpy Stripper Smurf, which was never a good attitude for getting tips. I thought I'd even try to dance a little, as I started to do a more purposeful take on my side-to-side two-step and even threw in some ass wiggles and dramatic
Flashdance-
like head jerks. But I was bored by the end of the first song, a dance mix of Toni Braxton's "You're Makin' Me High" that seemed like it was never gonna end.

It was too late in the game for me to try to be Jennifer Beals or, for that matter, her dancing stunt double, Marine Jahan. I spent the rest of the night wandering from one part of the bar to the other like some kind of flaccid nude loiterer. I knew something had to give.

One of the songs the D.J. played that night was a Wet staple, "Movin' On," a minor club hit by the British girl group Bananarama. (In the eighties, I was a big fan and would work myself into a closeted-gay-boy frenzy over "Doctor Love," "Robert De Niro's Waiting," "I Heard a Rumor," and "Some Girls." But after the group lost my favorite member, Siobhan, I'd stopped caring.) I'd heard the song dozens of times, but I'd never paid attention to the lyrics, happily occupied as I was with hands on my dick and money in my sock. But that night the downsized divas seemed to be chirping right to me: "I know we planned to stay together / We just ran into stormy weather."

I had thought about quitting Wet as I drove in that night, but now I decided I was really going to leave. With the new rules in place, I wasn't making any money and it wasn't any fun. People assumed that I'd prefer not being touched—and a lot of dancers did—but I always liked that aspect of dancing once I got used to it. And it wasn't just because I was lazy and, unlike Donna Summer, didn't want to work too hard for the money. I enjoyed the weird intimacy of the touching, how it created this hard-to-define physical connection between two virtual strangers, a dialogue of flesh on flesh. I wasn't just a detached fantasy figure for the customers. I was warm and could respond to their touch. This made it more exciting than just dancing around being gawked at. And did I mention the whole lazy thing?

At the end of the night, I told the manager not to put me on the schedule for the following week, that I wouldn't be back. He halfheartedly tried to talk me out of it, telling me that things were gonna get better. But I could tell he didn't believe it himself. (In fact, things got a whole lot worse for the club in the short run. The ABC Board fined Wet $10,000 and suspended its liquor license, forcing it to close for several weeks.)

As I drove home that night, I had the chorus of that Bananarama song stuck in my head: "... I don't know where I'm going / But I'm movin' on." It was one of those moments when the silliest pop song can seem profound for the way it nails what you're going through. The truth was that I didn't know where the fuck I was going.

I had done the stripping thing and had been relatively unscathed, save for some creepy moments and the whole slippery-ass-crack porn-audition fiasco. (Porn Guy never called, by the way.) I hadn't become part of a big University of Maryland sex scandal; and my parents were still blissfully in the dark about what their only begotten son was doing in the dark.

Also, things were still going well in my relationship with Seth. We were now going on six years. Sometimes we'd be sitting on our couch together watching an episode of
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
or
The X-Files
that he'd taped for me while I was at work, and I'd think, "This is what it must feel like to last."