All I Could Bare: My Life in the Strip Clubs of Gay Washington, (22 page)

"I know this is a lot to ask," Peter said, "but do you think you might be able to make it to the funeral?"

Dave felt a mix of emotions—surprise, fear—but he responded simply with, "Of course."

At the funeral, Dave was anxious the whole time and tried to stay on the periphery of things, sitting in the back of the church and not making eye contact with the other mourners so as to not invite questions. But as Peter was escorting his mother out of the church, he introduced Dave as his "friend."

They continued to talk on the phone after that, but the time between calls stretched longer and longer. They hadn't really spent time together or done "oh shit" since New York, and Dave was beginning to think he should move on. There was Jeff, a new dancer and former teenage bodybuilder, who he'd recently turned his attentions to.

"That's partly why I'm out tonight," he explained. "Jeff asked me to help him fill out a job application and I think he wants to use me as a reference."

"What are you going to put under 'relationship'?" I asked.

"I don't know. Family friend," he said, taking another swig from his gin and tonic. "So what about you? Have you found another boyfriend yet?"

"No. Still playing the field, I guess."

He paused. "That's surprising. I always figured you for the type of guy who would settle down."

"Yeah, well. What can you do?"

"You're not getting any younger, you know."

"Thanks for reminding me."

"No. I'm just saying, you don't want to wait too long."

"Yeah, I hear you."

It seemed like everywhere around me people were ready to issue my sexual death certificate. I'd recently had a younger guy I was dating tell me, "I'm just going to go ahead and break up with you now before you're too old to get somebody else, OK?"

So Dave's questions brought the sting of these words back like a fresh slap on a healing wound. After a couple of minutes, I told Dave that I was going to check out what was happening at the other clubs.

"It was great seeing you again," I said, tapping him on the back before making a quick exit. It was the last time I ever saw him.

23

I was riding in a cab through downtown D.C., past the pointy Washington Monument all lit up at night and then down into the tunnel that runs under the Capitol grounds leading to that southeast neighborhood where I'd spent so many nights, most of them naked. The cab was a black-and-orange Capitol Cab like the one my grandfather used to drive. It was another one of those moments that I experienced so frequently in D.C. when my past and present came together in odd and mysterious ways.

I'd come to town this weekend to visit the clubs one last time. Word had come down that the whole block would be bulldozed to make way for a new baseball stadium, the four-hundred-million-dollar centerpiece of a grand plan to overhaul this once-forgotten neighborhood. The clubs had to go because they were, as city officials put it, in the stadium's "footprint." It was unlikely that they would be able to relocate to another part of the city because recent changes in zoning laws made it nearly impossible for sex-oriented businesses to set up shop anywhere else. For a time, it looked like the block's strip clubs, bathhouses, and porn theaters might get a stay of, well, sex-ecution. A judge initially refused to issue eviction notices until the ink was dry on the city's contract with the baseball league. But by late March, the deal was done, and the clubs were given until the first weekend in April to vacate the area that had provided safe haven for more than three decades. The way the whole thing went down echoed, as Hank Stuever of the
Washington Post
described it, "a cruelly predictable high school metaphor: the jocks win."

As soon as I heard about the imminent evictions, I thought about heading down there just to get one last look, to experience the clubs one last time. My life was now so different than it was when I used to scoot across the bar in socks that my grandmother gave me or just hang out in the clubs as a customer. I had changed. The world had changed.

Whenever I reflected on the past five years of my life, I always thought back to an article I was working on in summer 2001. It was a cover story for the now-defunct black women's magazine
Honey
on Lisa "Left Eye" Lopes, the most notorious member of the R&B girl group TLC. The interview took place at an upscale condo in Jersey City, New Jersey. (Sean "P. Diddy" Combs's mom lived in the same complex.) Lopes was staying there while she prepared the release of her debut solo album,
Supernova.

She felt excited about the project because she thought it would finally allow the world to see her differently—a more thoughtful grown-up rather than the wild child she was when she notoriously torched the house of her boyfriend, NFL star Andre Rison, in an alcohol-fueled rage. She was trying to remake herself. (There was even a black-and-white painting on her bedroom floor with the words "A new star is born.")

"Are you tired of people thinking that you're crazy?" I asked her as we walked along the Jersey City boardwalk at sunset.

"It doesn't make sense for me to fight what people already think," she answered. "I'm not going to run around saying, 'I'm not crazy, trust me.' I can only do what I do. And maybe one day they'll say, 'You know, that girl ain't so crazy, after all.'"

We walked around for a while as the sky grew darker and darker. Lisa had a lot on her mind. She talked about her reconciliation with Rison, who had filled her condo with twenty-six dozen roses that morning and had run out, during our interview, to pick up some organic vegetables for dinner.

But even in the midst of discussing this current relationship, her thoughts kept returning to her brief romance with late rapper Tupac Shakur. According to her, they bonded the moment they met. She was taken by his conversation, music, and charisma; he was drawn to her creativity and piano-playing skills.

Surprisingly, though, they never consummated the relationship. "That's the first thing he told me. 'Never let me have sex with you because I'm going to look at you differently,' " she said. "And I never wanted him to look at me any differently than he did."

"If he'd proposed, would you have married him?" I asked.

"Yeah," she said almost reflexively.

She still thought they would one day be together even though Shakur was dead. "Does that mean I'm going to die in order to be with him?" she wondered. "What does it all mean?"

As it got later and our interview was winding down, we sat on a bench. Lisa started talking about her album again. She was so excited about it that she didn't want to entertain the idea that it wouldn't be a hit. She expected it to sell 20 million copies.

"I'm way too confident, and I realize the power in desiring something and manifesting it," she said. "And I've desired this for so long."

We sat on the bench for a while longer and looked at the Manhattan skyline, which was just beginning to light up. I don't specifically remember looking at the World Trade Center's twin towers but I know they were there. Just a few months later, however, the towers were gone, and the next year, so was Lisa. She was killed in a car accident in Honduras, where she often went to escape music biz pressures.

After her death, I thought about our interview a lot, what she said about dying in order to be with Tupac and especially the goals she expressed for her album, which was ultimately never released in the United States. Her death was more confirmation of the simple adage that's served up in an infinite number of variations from pulpits all across the world: No one is promised tomorrow.

I started thinking more about my own life—not just what I wanted to do, writing, but how I wanted to live. What kind of life did I want and how was I going to get it? I began making a lot of career moves, transitioning from magazines to newspapers by becoming pop music critic of, first, the
Buffalo News
and then the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
. But then the daily grind of newspapers started to wear on me. A lot of people imagine it would be fun for your job to entail constantly going to concerts and chasing around celebrities for interviews. But the relentlessness of it made it nearly impossible to have a personal life. Most nights were taken up with shows, and I had to be prepared to drop everything whenever some big music act came to town, got in trouble with the law, or in the case of Lisa, died suddenly. With that kind of schedule, I knew I'd unlikely be able to ever find someone who would fill my apartment with twenty-six dozen roses or buy organic vegetables for me.

All of this made me think about returning to the land of academia. Let's face it, you can't beat the schedule, teaching classes a couple of times a week and having summers off to regroup. I made the decision to return to the University of Maryland to finish my Ph.D., and by the time I heard about the clubs closing, I was living in Providence, Rhode Island, working as a professor in the writing program at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, which was about thirty minutes from my apartment. Everything was going great. I loved Providence for its mix of bohemia and working-class grit and, most surprising, I was enjoying teaching.

After years of being a journalist, I now felt I had something valuable to pass on to the students, so I didn't have any of the insecurities I used to harbor about being a fraud. I'd also become much more comfortable with my sexuality and had explored so many facets of it that it didn't feel weird to turn it off and on. I was such a different person than I was when I stripped that I wondered if I really needed to go back to the block. I'd made peace with my time at the clubs—learned from it and, in many ways, thrived because of it.

"Why spend all that time and money just to go back and be sad?" I asked, when I called Seth for his advice. We talked several times a day and people always thought we should get back together. But they didn't understand that we had found a certain peace through friendship, and we didn't want to do anything to trouble the waters.

"You can't pretend it's not happening just because you don't want to feel bad," he said. "There's nothing wrong with being sad about losing something."

"I know, but it feels like I'd be going out of my way just to get all weepy. I already did that when I stopped dancing at the Follies."

"But those clubs used to mean everything to you. I should know," he said, making a dig I tried to ignore.

"So you think I'll regret it if I don't go?"

"I think you need to say good-bye."

Swayed by Seth's argument, I made plans to go to D.C. that very weekend. It was unclear exactly when each club would be closing, and I wanted to be there when they were all still open. It was a little awkward explaining to my parents why I was dropping everything to head to D.C. at the last minute since I still hadn't told them I'd been a stripper. But I simply said I was going to visit old friends, and this seemed true enough.

The cab stopped at the corner of Half and O streets and I got out and went into Secrets. It hadn't changed much since I was last there. I didn't know the guy at the door, but the bartender was still the guy who initially hired me. We shook hands and he made me an Absolut Vanilla with Diet Coke.

I took the drink and made my way through the crowd, which was thick but no more so than on any other Saturday night. I expected to see some signs of the club's impending demise, like sad faces or ghoulish apparitions of strippers from the past twisting and shrieking in the mirrors. But there was none of that. It felt like any other weekend night when people were just out to have a good time.

"Didn't you used to dance here?" said a deep voice coming from my right. I looked over and noticed a short, heavy-set white guy with an eye patch standing next to me.

"A long, I-o-o-o-o-ng time ago," I said.

"You probably don't remember me. I'm Fred."

"Nice meeting you again. Are you here to say good-bye, too?"

"No, I'm not going to say good-bye until the bitter end. Who knows? We might get another week or so."

'Yeah, well, I live out of town so I just decided to come back one last time."

"So, are things the way you remember them?"

"Pretty much. Hey, do you ever see a guy named Michael? He was one of my regulars. He used to love it when I hit him on the head with my dick."

"Oh, yeah.Bald guy? Was always out?"

'Yeah."

"He died a couple of years ago. From what I hear, it was a heart attack. Real sudden. I think he went in his sleep."

"Oh, man. Really?"

"Yep."

'That sucks. I can't believe he died."

"Well," Fred said, "it happens to the best of us."

For a moment, I was shaken. I didn't know how I was supposed to feel. In a way, I didn't know anything about Michael—his last name, his occupation, his survivors if any. But in another way I knew something so singular about him, how he loved getting hit over the head with my dick. What this knowledge ultimately counted for, I

wasn't sure. But there was no denying the sense of loss I felt.

"So, have you been to the new club down the street?" Fred asked, mercifully breaking the silence.

"What new club?"

"It's called Heat. It's where La Cage used to be."

I'd forgotten that La Cage had switched ownership about a year before. "Is it worth checking out?"

"Definitely," he said. "It reminds me of the old days before 'The Rule.'"

"Really?"

"Yeah, in fact I'm about to go over there now. I was looking for one boy who was supposed to be dancing here tonight, but apparently he didn't show. Story of my life."

We walked out of Secrets together and I got a stamp so I could get back in without paying again. I wanted to come back because I didn't feel like I'd yet soaked up enough of the atmosphere to last a lifetime. I'd never had a place that meant something to me be demolished. Every other place that I'd moved away from or left behind still existed. I could drive by an old house, apartment, or workplace. But everything on this block was about to be bulldozed. I didn't know how to prepare.