It's Not Me, It's You: Subjective Recollections From a Terminally Optomistic, Chronically Sarcastic and Occasionally Inebriated Woman (11 page)

It took way too long to realize we were on a downward spiral, but as he became less and less stable, I found the only mood of his I could tolerate was sleeping. One morning, as he lay in bed snoring louder than a rusty leaf blower, I tiptoed around, collecting my things, hoping to make a clean getaway. Unfortunately, he woke up hungover and suspicious. I told him as nicely as I could that he was completely out of his mind and that I was done with him for good, and continued heading for the exit. Suddenly he flipped out and tried to stop me from leaving him by physically blocking his front door while ranting and raving; I guess he was thinking that if I spent some time as a hostage, I might choose to use my time in captivity recognizing all his wonderful qualities. It was about that moment I realized I was not just in a dead-end relationship but I might actually be in danger.

That’s when I had the brilliant idea to pull the Tori Spelling.

I spoke gently as you might to a gorilla if you accidentally fell into its cage. “You know what? You’re right. I am crazy to let someone as amazing as you go. I’m just really stressed lately and obviously taking it out on you. You don’t deserve that.” It was working. He started pacing back and forth, telling me he was relieved to hear that I realized this was my problem and not his.

“You’re just mixed up, confused.”

“Right,” I said. “Why don’t I go home and give some
thought to why I have been acting like such an unreasonable and selfish bitch.” He noticeably perked up.

“Yeah, yeah, you should do that. And then we can get together later tonight.”

“Absolutely.” And I got the hell out. Sure enough, Tori came through. I guess for him I was literally the one that got away.

A
nytime I hear an Ani DiFranco song, I can’t help but think about vaginas. It’s midnight. Somehow I’ve ended up at a lesbian bar in West Hollywood surrounded by women. Suddenly, out of nowhere, my idol, Ani DiFranco, saunters in, jumps on stage, and starts giving an impromptu acoustic performance. I manage to fight my way through a smoky haze of flannel shirts and wallet chains, getting closer and closer to Ani, and finally scoring the one empty seat directly in front of the stage. As I’m letting myself get wrapped up in her passion, I get the strong sense that she’s singing directly to me—every steel string guitar chord change, every erotic lyric—and as I look around I realize the stone-washed-jeans crowd is looking at me with jealousy because she
is
singing directly to me. My face gets hot, I try to play it cool, but Ani unquestionably sings at me hungrily.

The minute her set is over, she makes a beeline to my chair. “I’m Ani,” she says. “Who are
you
?”

We sit at the bar, drinking about thirty Kahlúa and Creams, talking about everything and nothing. Before I know it, we’re making out heavily, so heavily the bartender in her Violent Femmes T-shirt and six nose rings tells us to wrap it up. But Ani is nowhere near ready for the night to end, and she demands that I come back to her place for a nightcap. I’m terrified but enormously curious and titillated, so I agree—and before I can change my mind, we’re whisked up to Ani’s Hollywood Hills pad in the back of a random fan’s Jeep Wrangler.

Once out of the car, Ani grabs my hand and guides me up the steep incline of steps to her funky Spanish-style house. Holding hands and giggling like naughty schoolgirls, we fall lustfully into a hammock swing on her porch and continue our make-out session surrounded by dozens of colorful hand-painted statues and intricately woven hanging baskets. Ani slowly caresses me as we lie in moonlight. Every now and again she pours me wine from a nearby bottle of Italian Chianti and we feed each other succulent summer fruits from one of the baskets: cherries, kiwis, red grapes, and papaya. After a while, Ani breaks our lip-lock and gets up to grab one of her many guitars lined up just inside her French doors, giving me a chance to gaze at her marvelous womanly curves. She turns, catching me staring, smiles, and comes back to the swing.

“You’re shivering,” she says in a raspy whisper.

“I’m not cold,” I say back, voice quivering. Gently she
covers me with an ancient crocheted afghan and strums me an ode to my reproductive rights that is so exquisite I make her swear she’ll put it on her next CD.

“Of course. And I’ll dedicate it to you. To this night.”

Suddenly, Ani puts down her guitar, rips off the afghan, and kisses me more and more ardently, moving deliberately southward…unbuttoning my pants…and
that’s as far as that fantasy goes.

Like most women, I have fantasized about a little girl-on-girl action, but even my wildest imagination stays G-rated, only culminating at second base—under the shirt, over the bra. In fantasy and reality, my mouth has never been anywhere close to another woman’s nether regions. But I
have
looked.

Years ago, my friend Nina lived a mere two blocks from Crazy Girls, one of the more notorious topless joints in Hollywood. Despite the proliferation of titty bars in cities across the USA (in Texas, I believe there are more strip clubs than strip malls) and despite the glittering lights and flashing signs practically yelling NUDE, NUDE, NUDE three times so that you can’t possibly miss the fact that there are indeed naked ladies in there, neither one of us had ever gone to one.

But all that changed the night of Nina’s thirtieth birthday.

A group of us, including her boyfriend at the time, were hanging out in her one-bedroom apartment, sloppy drunk on Veuve Clicquot, dancing around the living room and trying to remember the last verse to
The Golden Girls’
theme song.

“Thank you for bein’ a friennnd, traveled down the road and back again, your heart is true, you’re a pal and a confidant. And if you…,” our friend Mel warbled.

“Yeah, we know that part, but what’s the next verse? Something about ‘I hope it will always be this way’ shit!” The guy who came up with Google had the audacity not to have invented it yet, so we were reduced just to singing the part we knew over and over, when someone interrupted our repeat performance by suggesting we hit Crazy Girls. Okay, I think that someone was me. But the idea caught fire like a Pinto backed into a wall, and just like that we went from Golden Girls to Crazy Girls in the space of five minutes.

By the time we’d walked over and were paying our admission—well, truth be told, only the men ended up having to pay (somehow, if you’re a woman accompanied by men it’s easy to haggle, and by haggle I mean show a glimpse of cleavage)—I was giddy with excitement. We were about to finally venture past the bacteria-laden black curtain dividing nakedness from the rest of the civilized world.

A huge bouncer with his head shaved to a shine opened the drapes and beckoned us through and Nina and I headed straight to the bar so that we could check things out from the safety of a close proximity to alcoholic beverages. Once I had a seven-dollar Captain Morgan’s and Diet Coke in my hand, I took it all in. On the main stage was a gorgeous brunette in a tiny, sparkly G-string named “Stormy” with the exact body type I’ve always wanted but could never achieve unless I had a full body transplant, which I’m pretty sure has only been
attempted once in India on a sheep. She had long legs like a pony, and slim, boyish hips with the slight curve of the lower back that made her butt stick out like a pout—a butt without a trace of cellulite—bitch! Sure, she was sexy as hell, but I found myself fixating on how hard she must have to work out to have a body like that.

“What’s up with that dancer’s amazing ass?” I asked Nina, who was ogling Destiny, a blonde on the second stage. I hadn’t even known Nina was into blondes!

“Yeah, she does look great. She’s clearly trained as a dancer her whole life. But what about Destiny? Do you think her boobs are real?” Looking at Destiny’s two overfilled water balloons trying to burst free of her chest cavity, I didn’t even dignify Nina’s question with a response. I turned my attention back to Stormy.
Had she spent her childhood dedicating herself to hours of ballet, determined to become a prima ballerina, but due to an ugly ankle injury ended up on the pole? Also, how much did she have to work out?
I figured since she had her days free she could pretty much live at the gym. The glare of the lights was making it difficult to gauge her actual physical perfection, so needing to get a closer look, I left my bar stool and sat down at the foot of the stage—and remained there until I’d exhausted my entire paycheck. Luckily, there was an ATM on the premises that dispensed one-dollar bills. These strip clubs, they’re always thinking!

The whole vibe was completely different than I’d anticipated. I half-expected to see women sobbing while forcing themselves to strip off their tops in a last-ditch attempt not to
get evicted from their housing projects or pay the government twenty thousand dollars in back taxes. But these women did not look unhappy in the least. The sex in the air was palpable. The driving beat of rap music combined with topless, gyrating, beautiful women, and adding quite a nice alcohol buzz to the mix, in short, made me incredibly horny. Clearly, most men felt the same way, except a few, I’m assuming regulars, who were clustered around small circular tables, sipping Jack Daniel’s while getting a lap dance, acting like they were just conducting a business meeting, and not like they had a big old set of knockers in their face.

At first I found it a turn-on to be around so many aroused men. But before long, I was getting suckered into the appeal of each girl who took the stage, choosing favorites and cheering them on. Needing, wanting them to notice me and pay me special attention—which they did. And I’m positive it was because they really liked me. I know in my heart it had nothing to do with their car payments.

Nina and I went back again and again. We became like addicts in need of a nudie fix. Oh, sure, we’d
try
to go out to other places, parties, and bars, but it seemed like we always ended up at Crazy Girls before the night was over. And so we became regulars. Crazy Girls was kind of like our Cheers but with hotter waitresses. We even got sucked into some of the club drama, tearing up when we heard that Venus’s girlfriend broke up with her because she couldn’t accept her job and recommending a lawyer friend when Trinity got pinched for shoplifting. We knew that our favorite stripper, Crystal, a
skinny, honey blonde with a major heroin problem, was in danger of getting fired. Some nights she would look stunning and sit with us for a while to talk, while other nights she would be nodding out in a corner with a couple of guys who looked like they had priors. I would’ve tried to help, but short of paying her for a few lap dances, what could I do? I’m not Mother Teresa.

One night Crystal floated the idea of either Nina or me cosigning a credit card for her to help her get out of the business. Cosign a credit card? Was she insane? I was, of course, appalled. Why would she want to
stop stripping?
With a body like that—she was the hottest girl there. I couldn’t be a party to Crazy Girls losing its best girl. It just felt wrong.

Around this time, Nina and I agreed that it was probably time to kick it up a notch and experience the Totally Nude strip bar. After all, I was starting to get desensitized to the whole topless experience. So one night while at a party, willing ourselves to be out among people without the social lubricant of naked breasts, we casually mentioned to a couple of guys that we’d never been to an all-nude strip club.

Ten minutes later, we arrived at the Star Strip on La Cienega Boulevard—XXX-All-Nude Girls, Girls, Girls again, in case we weren’t sure what type of nudity we’d be in for. Right away, it was clear we were in trouble. It was like we’d tripped into another universe, and I’d seen enough
Twilight Zone
s to know that this probably wouldn’t end well. After paying a twenty-dollar admission, we were led over to seats—which, for some reason, the personnel had neglected to cover
in plastic—in front of the stage for what was basically vaginas on parade. The men panting over the girls on stage were not here to discuss any sort of business. The only business that was being conducted here was the business of vagina. These girls didn’t even bother dancing. They barely sauntered across the stage only to lie down on their back two seconds later, rip off their G-string, and splay their legs apart, like a puppy looking for a belly rub.

I couldn’t understand the appeal whatsoever. I mean, I already owned one of those bad boys. With a mirror and a slightly uncomfortable squatting position, I could see it anytime I wanted to and be twenty dollars richer for it (although I did enforce a two-drink minimum on myself), but unless I’m shaving, I try to avoid viewing that area as much as possible.

These women were proudly putting their goods in our faces, I think hoping our dates would give them more money. Nina and I, out of pure guilt that they were degrading themselves, kept the dollars coming. But it was a catch-22; the more money we gave them, the more into it they thought we were and the more unwanted attention we got. When the hoo-hoos got too close for comfort, we tried to make awkward conversation.

“Hey, Mercedes, where’d you get those Lucite heels?” Nina asked. “They’re really nice!” Mercedes didn’t miss a beat.

“Oh, Frederick’s of Hollywood. It’s literally across the street. You wouldn’t believe it, but they’re not even that
uncomfortable,” she said as if we were just chatting over a bathroom stall and not staring straight at her clit piercing.

We might’ve had an easier time getting through it, but Nina and I were way too sober, seeing as how it was illegal to serve alcohol when the girls were completely naked. I thought it should be illegal
not
to serve alcohol. Right then and there, I vowed to be completely liquored up the next time I was subjected to viewing women’s private parts. This might be tough to do in the gym locker room, but somehow I’d make it work.

Although we were desperate to leave, we knew the guys had dropped eighty dollars to get us all in, so we figured we should be polite and give it a few more minutes. I tried to think about other things, like the science of stripper names.
Why is Mercedes a good stripper name but Hummer not so much? You could name yourself after a whisky, like Black Velvet, but I don’t think Old Crow would go over nearly as well. Jasmine, sure, Flytrap, doubtful.
That burned off about five minutes. Then I spent another five minutes just trying to avoid eye contact with the other clientele. I needn’t have worried too much because all eyes were glued to the spread out on stage. Men with their eyes glazed over, practically hypnotized by the pussy.

I was done—I needed to get out of there immediately. But as I was grabbing my purse and throwing down a goodbye buck, Asia came out to perform, strutting her way down the narrow strip of stage to an
amazing
song. I desperately wanted to leave without seeing one more vagina, but I had
to know who was singing, so I waited for Asia to get close enough to ask.

The next day I went straight out and bought my first Ani DiFranco CD for the song “32 Flavors.”

It’s been years since I’ve been inside a strip club, but to this day all I need is to hear Ani’s voice and I’m right back there like it was yesterday.