Self-Made Man (12 page)

“I'm hot and wet,” Gina said.

She said that a lot, whenever there was a lull in the conversation.

“I'm so horny,” she'd add, reminding us that the relief for her condition was only a couch away.

Then she'd segue into something neutral like the pool game Jim and I were playing, as if that were just the normal flow of conversation.

“I'd shoot at the five in the side pocket if I were you. If you put a little backspin on it, that'll give you a nice leave for the seven in the corner.”

She professed to be a shark, and I didn't doubt it. She'd linger with us at the table for a few minutes calling shots and watching us miss most of them.

She was a good saleswoman, the only stripper I met who could really play the game with any conviction. Unlike the other girls, who did little to conceal their dislike for you and the whole job, Gina was pretty good at pretending she liked you. Like the consummate politician, she'd remember your name from night to night, and even wave and shout encouragement at you from the stage when you were shooting for the eight ball. She'd come over between dances and put her arm around you and chat, and make you forget for a few minutes that this was all just a transaction.

She climbed into my lap one night, wrapping her legs around my waist and her arms around my neck as I sat on a stool by the pool table.

“How ya doin', Ned?” she said, smiling.

I usually dreaded these interactions with other strippers. They'd solicit you at the bar with their tits in their hands, sometimes with semisneers on their faces, and ask you how you were, often in the most hostile and obviously uninterested way. You'd have to pretend along with them, cracking that stiff smile, and make a little small talk before you put a dollar in their cleavage. Sometimes certain strippers latched on to me, holding my hand against their breasts for a good minute while they spoke about whatever came to mind. Usually what came to mind was how long and tiring a day they'd had. They probably did it hoping for another deposit from someone who looked like a sucker, but sometimes I wondered if I could feel a little desperation in it and a faint ring of truth when they'd say, “Can I take you home with me?” or when they'd stroke my hair and say, “You're so sweet. Such a baby face. How old are you?”

It didn't matter what they said. It all made me feel bad. I didn't like being their client. I didn't like how they disliked me because of it. Most of all I didn't like how much I identified with that dislike, and how much it made me want to assure them and myself that I wasn't like the other patrons. But sometimes, when I'd been playing the role for long enough, that was hard even for me to believe. After all, I was there more often than most of them were, and just being there, for whatever reason, made me feel like I was lying to myself about not belonging.

But when Gina got in your lap, she didn't hold out or expose her body parts for tips. She'd just sit there and talk to you as if she'd known you all your life. There wasn't much to say, just pleasantries, but it didn't feel forced. It was disarming, and as distant as I was from real interest, I bought into the emotional fantasy a little, out of relief mostly. For once, someone made it easy to just talk for a minute like two people who enjoyed each other's company.

All of this was designed to get you in the back room eventually. She wasn't pound foolish. She knew that if she just worked you like a mercenary, like most of the other girls did, she'd only get a few singles out of the encounter, but if she played you like a schoolgirl crush, she'd probably score at least a twenty, maybe more, on a lap dance or two before the evening was out. And that's what usually happened. I watched her work, and I saw her disappear into the couch room far more often than the other girls, some of whom were significantly younger than she was.

The first time I watched her go back there, she went with a guy who looked like Papa Hemingway, except that he was dressed in business attire: a white button-down, navy dress trousers and wing tips. Gina liked to use the couch nearest the door. It was perpendicular to the door, and it jutted out a little past the door frame. Because the black curtain across the door extended only three-quarters of the way down, you could see or surmise a lot of what was happening behind it. I could see Gina's legs. She was kneeling between Papa Hemingway's wing tips, her tiny bare feet curled under her on the floor. As she did her thing, her feet curled and uncurled rhythmically in time with Papa Hemingway's right foot, which was tapping softly on the floor, as if to a slow beat. She'd kicked off her shoes at the door. One of them had fallen on its side. Next to them was a pile of cash, Gina's take. The picture of all this, the corner of the couch, the shoes artfully kicked off, the cash on the floor, Gina on her knees and Papa's wing tips astride her, would have made the perfect advertisement for this place in all its sordid glory, or something you would have seen in
Playboy
as a cartoon, with a caption above it saying: “I'll be home soon, honey.”

A big biker guy in leather and denim with a Charles Manson beard and a lot of piercings in his face sat just outside the couch room, taking the money as the girls came and went, and peeking behind the black curtain periodically to make sure everything was copacetic.

I would have said he did it for titillation, too, but from the bored expression on his face I got the feeling that once you'd been in one of these places for a while the sight of tits and ass and simulated coitus didn't do much for you anymore. It was like porn or violence in films. Seeing all this day in and day out, you'd become so inured to everything these places were selling—nudity and beer and two-bit orgasm—that you'd have to keep upping the ante to feel anything at all.

Fantasy is a necessary veil, and when you rip it away, the opposite of what you think will happen, happens. Gratification kills desire. And constant gratification kills it permanently until even naked, willing women seem made of cardboard.

At some point all of this ceased to be about desire, if it was ever really about desire in the first place, and became about something else: loneliness, or inner pain, or doing time or penance for some long ago hurt that had never healed but somehow found companionable misalliance here with all the other misfits and detritus. I don't think anybody in that place was really capable of normal arousal anymore. They were dead inside and you could see it. They were in pain and sitting with it, looking for it, maybe even getting off on it, because when pleasure is used up, pain is all that's left. It's the only thing that lasts longer.

 

This place wasn't just where men came to be beasts. It was also where women came to exercise some vestige of sexual power in the most unvarnished way possible. My pussy for your dollars. I say when, I say how, I say how much and I get paid for it. There was tremendous manipulation built into the rules under which these places operated. The provision against touching the girls could be bent or broken at will by each individual girl, and enforced by guys hired for the purpose, guys like the pierced biker at the couch-room door. This was an age-old whore-john-pimp dynamic, but more played at than truly enacted, and always in a controlled setting. It was a grotesque parody of what women and men did in real life, the mating dance with all the civilized pretense stripped away.

It was an unpleasant scene. There was a lot of anger in those rooms, and animus was always simmering beneath the surface. With the exception of the frat boy types who came in packs, and then only to the higher profile places, most of the men at the local came alone and sat alone nursing a beer or a whiskey. Everything about them said: “Don't bother me.” They just slouched there watching the stage, leaking bad vibes like slow radiation. Even the girls often failed to wring a smile out of those glowering types, which explained why so many of them had given up trying long ago, and now came across like disgruntled cashiers at the all-night grocery. That's about as much enthusiasm as anyone had for the process: cash in, cash out; beer in, piss out; leave me alone. Like I said, this wasn't fantasyland.

The only time Jim and I ever struck up a conversation with another patron at the local, the guy started bellyaching right away about how the titty bar was just an expensive cock tease. He pointed to the pile of singles lying in front of him on the bar, telling us how it had dwindled from twenty to a few measly bills in a mere half hour. Jim commiserated in jest, pointing at our own diminished stack and suggesting that yeah, maybe getting a mail-order bride was a better idea.

“Not really,” the guy said. “I read about a guy in the paper the other day who got himself one of those, and one day he came home from work and found her fucking the neighbor, so he took her outside into the street right then and there and bashed her head in.”

The way he told it, it sounded like the moral of the story was that live-in whores are more trouble than they're worth. Not exactly a surprising or minority opinion in that crowd, but jarring enough to put you off a propensity for chitchat.

After a few weeks of going to the local on a regular basis, I got to the point where I just couldn't make myself go anymore. It was too much—all the accumulated pain of the despicable patrons who had nowhere else tolerable to go, and the injured dancers who could hardly contain their despair, and the surly bartenders who made shit tips. It all just fell down on you and piled up around you like the ashen, boozy smell of the place, until you just didn't want to do that to yourself anymore.

Toward the end of our time together, while we were having a drink at a regular bar that he liked to frequent, Jim confessed that he was beginning to feel the same way.

“Yeah,” he said. “I'm kinda through with those places for a while. They give me bad dreams.”

He'd told me a few weeks before about a particularly vivid and disturbing dream he'd had about going back into the couch room with Gina only to find that there were no couches back there at all. Instead there were only bathroom stalls with no doors and dirty old toilets in them. He dreamt that she was blowing him on one of the toilets. He said he woke up feeling really disgusted and disgusting.

All I could think was, how appropriate. Unlike most of those purgatorial scumbags, he knew this place for what it was, and that, for all his flaws, was why I liked him.

I'd been inside a part of the male world that most women and even a lot of men never see, and I'd seen it as just another one of the boys. In those places male sexuality felt like something you weren't supposed to feel but did, like something heavy you were carrying around and had nowhere to unload except in the lap of some damaged stranger, and then only for five minutes. Five minutes of mutual abuse that didn't make you feel any better.

One thing was certain, though. Everybody got his hands dirty and, politically speaking, nobody really came out ahead. It wasn't nearly so simple as men objectifying women and staying clean or empowered in the process. Nobody won, and when it came down to it, nobody was more or less victimized than anyone else. The girls got money. The men got an approximation of sex and flirtation. But in the end everyone was equally debased by the experience. Everyone, no matter what his or her circumstances, had made the choice to be there, and chances were that choice was made in the context of a lifetime's worth of emotional wreckage that had been done to their lives by people of both sexes long before they stepped through that door.

Whenever I think about my experiences in these places now, and the profound pity they aroused in me, I remember something that Phil said that first night when we went to the Lizard Lounge together. It was something that shocked me far more than the sudden vehemence of his guy talk about what women were for, and it was something that I now realize could have applied to the men in those places just as much as to the women.

“I go to some of these bars,” he said, “and this is the family man in me, and I say to myself, these girls were somebody's daughter. Somebody put them to bed. Somebody kissed them and hugged them and gave them love and now they're in this pit.”

“Or, maybe someone didn't,” I said.

“Yeah,” he nodded. “I've thought about that, too.”

I thought dating
was going to be the fun part, the easiest part. Certainly as a man I had romantic access to far more women than I ever did as a lesbian, and this felt like the best of all possible boons. I could partake at last in the assumption of heterosexuality and ask out any woman I liked without insulting her. Of course, I was in for a mountain of rejections, and the self-hatred that came with being the sad sack pick-up artist, the wooing barnacle that every woman is forever flicking off her sleeve.

Sadly, that's how it went for Ned most of the time at first when he tried to meet strange women in singles bars. As I would soon learn, that's how it went for most guys. It was just the way of things in the wild when you were male. You were the eager athlete, the brightly colored bird doing the dance, and she was the German judge begrudging you the nod.

To be a guy I had to get out there. I had to play the game as it was played, no matter how bad it felt. But I figured it couldn't hurt to enlist a compatriot for support, so I asked a friend, Curtis, to be my backup. He was perfect for the job. He was a handsome, well-built, gregarious type, secure and sensible enough not to take himself too seriously, or care much what a stranger might think of him. He had agreed to help me navigate the scene and work with me on my male cues, which were still in need of some fine-tuning. I was never quite sure, for example, exactly how low to pull my baseball cap over my eyes. I still talked too much with my hands, and sometimes I still applied my Chapstick with a girlish lip smack. Just the day before, while out shopping at a department store as Ned, I had rubbed the insides of my wrists together after applying cologne at the men's fragrance counter. The woman behind the counter narrowed her eyes at me and then looked away as if she'd seen something indecent.

I needed another pair of eyes to correct me on stuff like this, stuff I did without thinking. Curtis had said he would nudge me when I got out of line.

He spent our first night out together kicking me under the table.

We went to several places that night, all of them neighborhood watering holes that catered to young professionals who were either on the prowl or just out for a booze-up with friends.

At the first place, an upscale sports bar, I was ready to launch with abandon, though Curtis tried his best to dissuade me. He knew better, having come of age in a man's skin. He'd gotten his nose pushed in one too many times after charging horns-first at an aloof beauty. He didn't recommend the practice.

But I was on a tear, eager to test my new treads. So as soon as we sat down, I picked out a couple of twenty-something women sitting at a table across the room. I gave them a few lingering looks to check their interest. I caught one woman's eye and held her gaze for a second, smiling. She returned the smile and looked away. This was signal enough for me, so I stood up, made my way over to their table and asked them whether they wanted to join us for a drink.

“No, thanks,” one of them said, “we're on our way out in a minute.”

Simple enough, right? A brush-off. No biggie. But as I turned away and slumped back across the room toward our table, I felt like the outcast kid in the lunchroom who trips and dumps his tray on the linoleum in front of the whole school. Rejection sucked.

“Rejection is a staple for guys,” said Curtis, laughing as I crumpled into my seat with a humiliated sigh. “Get used to it.”

That was my first lesson in male courtship ritual. You had to take your knocks and knock again. It was that or wait for some pitying act of God that would never come. This wasn't some magic island in a beer commercial where all the ladies would light up for me if only I drank the right brew.

“Try again, man,” Curtis urged. “C'mon. Don't give up so easily.”

Near our table there was a group of three women at the bar, clearly friends, chatting among themselves. He pointed in their direction.

“Right there. Perfect. Go for it.”

“All right. All right,” I said. “Jesus, this really sucks.”

“Yeah, well, welcome to my world.”

I swore under my breath as I got up to go. Curtis crossed his arms and leaned back against his chair, smirking.

When I reached the bar I could see that these women were absorbed in their conversation. I was going to have to interrupt, and the female me knew that my approach, no matter how unassuming, would be perceived as a little pathetic and detestable. Small-shouldered guy sidles up to cute chicks with a canned line and a huge hole of obvious insecurity gaping in the middle of his chest. I stopped at the thought of this. I didn't want to be that guy, the nuisance guy that women always dread. I was embarrassed for myself. But then how to retreat with dignity? I was already lurking awkwardly behind them, lamely pretending to flag down the bartender.

As I leaned toward the bar with a bill in my hand, the women turned to look at me, the way you do when something unremarkable enters your peripheral vision. Their eyes took me in like a billboard on the highway, running the length of me, then moving back to the point of interest elsewhere.

Succinctly, I was put in my place, stuck there with no recourse.

I thought about what I could say that wouldn't sound cooked-up, cheap or presumptuous. I decided it was best to be honest. I'd always respected that in men who had approached me. I'd once given my number to a young businessman on the street in New York simply as a reward for having had the balls to put himself out there and ask me for my number. I'd had no intention of going out with him, which, in retrospect, I see wasn't fair. When he called I had to tell him I was a lesbian, which, like most interested men, he refused to believe was a real, sustainable state of being.

“Why'd you give me your number then?” he'd asked finally.

“Because I was proud of you,” I'd said.

Now, at the bar, it was my turn to make myself proud, or at least fend off crushing defeat. I decided, however, that Curtis was going to have to do his job on this one, so I went back to our table and yanked him up.

“You're coming with me,” I said, dragging him across toward the bar.

He had a self-satisfied look on his face. He was enjoying himself at my expense. He knew he was teaching me a lesson and he was relishing every second of it.

When we got to the bar, the women were as absorbed as ever in each other, huddled together, trying to talk over the music. We entered their orbit abruptly, me still half dragging Curtis by the arm. I tried to smooth over the breach:

“Hi, ladies. [Ladies? Jesus.] I'm sorry to interrupt, but I wanted to meet you. I don't mean to be a pain in the ass about this [God, I was groveling already], but my name's Ned and this is my friend Curtis.”

Curtis and I had joked that he would play my wing man at times like this, my conversational stopgap. Like typical guys, we found the
Top Gun
humor disproportionately funny in this context. It made us feel better about the downsizing we knew we were letting ourselves in for.

At first the three women looked us over like inferior produce in the supermarket. Then they smiled weakly. They were well brought up. They knew enough to cover quickly with the kind of anemic politesse that we all use on bores at cocktail parties. We were in, but I could see that their patience was thin.

I focused on the woman on the left who said she had gone to Princeton and was working in a foreign policy think tank. I decided to drop the novelist persona that I'd adopted as cover with my bowling buddies, and switch to talking about my recent job as a political columnist. I thought this would make for common ground, which in part it did, but only of the nodding variety. “Oh, you write about politics. Uh-huh.”

She wasn't going to bite.

As I talked on, trying to work with her clipped responses, I found myself, as I had on my first trip to the bar, switching again to her point of view. Seeing how protected she seemed, I remembered how protective of myself I had often been in encounters with strange men. I had always made the same assumption, one that my brother Ted had ingrained in me as a young teenager: all guys who make advances to a woman only want one thing—to get in her pants.

I remember him saying, “It doesn't matter what they say. They'll say anything. Just remember. They only want one thing.
That's how guys are.
”

I took that assessment at face value, an assessment that was, I have to admit, mostly borne out by my experience in college, where I found that most young men who bothered to speak to me at parties did indeed only want one thing. To the rest of them I was invisible. Why bother, I guess they figured, if you didn't want to fuck her?

Whatever veneer a man pasted over this intention, and it wasn't usually a very artful one, I always knew or thought I knew what he was after. I had, I realized, treated most men with the same coldness that these women were showing me.

And therein lay the paradox for me. Even if (and this is an enormous “if”) it could be argued that most guys who chat up strange girls in bars or on the street only want one thing, it was equally true that I wasn't most guys. I was a woman, with a woman's sensibilities. Besides, I didn't want to sleep with them. They were just another test case.

Still, it didn't feel good to be on the receiving end of their suspicion. After all, there are plenty of guys in the world, the marrying kind, I suppose, who really just want to get to know a girl, but have no other means of doing so except to strike up a conversation on the fly. So should they bear the brunt of the majority of their sex's bad behavior? And was the majority really that badly behaved?

There I was, caught square in the middle of the oldest plot in the world: he said/she said. It was the woman's job to be on the defensive, because past experience had taught her to be. It was the guy's job to be on the offensive, because he had no choice. It was that or never meet at all.

It's a wonder that men and women ever get together. Their signals, by necessity, are crossed, their behaviors at cross-purposes from the start. I was beginning to feel happier than ever to be a dyke. As a woman, it was a lot easier to meet women, because even in a dating situation there was always the common bond of womanhood, the common language of females that often makes even strange women able to chat amiably with each other, almost from the moment they meet.

I wondered if the same thing would happen here. Would these women lower their defenses if they found out I was a woman?

After another ten minutes of condescension, I realized that this was going nowhere, and that I might learn more about Ned if I let them in on the gag.

I had to repeat the phrase “I'm really a woman” four times before they got what I was saying. There was a moment of absolutely stunned silence, and then the inevitable “No way,” in chorus.

Then, with startling quickness we all began chatting like hens. Their aloof facade fell away, and not, I sensed, just because of the conversational fascination of the disguise, but because they felt disarmed enough, knowing that I was a woman, to let me in. The inclusion was even physical. When I'd approached as Ned they had been sitting facing the bar. They had only bothered to turn halfway around to talk to me, their faces always in profile. Now they turned all the way around to face me, their backs to the bar.

I understood this reaction immediately. I had predicted it. But still a part of me resented their prejudices. I was still the same person I had been before, just as any given strange man is a person beneath his blazer or his baseball hat. As a woman, I was accepted. As a man I had been rejected yet again. I understood intimately the social reasons for this, but it seemed unfair all the same.

As Curtis and I said goodnight and walked away, I found myself thinking about rejection and how small it made me feel, and how small most men must feel under the weight of what women expect from them. I was an actor playing a role, but these women had gotten to me nonetheless. None of these interactions mattered. I had nothing real at stake. But still, I felt bad.

So how must men feel when it's a true encounter and everything in the game seems stacked against them? They make the move, or the women bluff them—without tipping their hands—into making the move. The guys step out (stupidly, it now seems to me) into the space between, saying something irreversible and frank—a compliment or an outright indication of interest—and most of the time the women step away, or laugh disdainfully, and the guys are left with their asses in the wind. That's the sport, and men are the suckers. Women guard the gate and men storm it. Natural selection is brutal, and women do, in the immortal words of Jim Morrison, seem wicked when you're unwanted.

“How do you handle all this fucking rejection?” I asked Curtis when we sat back down for a postmortem.

“Let me tell you a story,” he said. “When I was in college, there was this guy Dean, who got laid all the time. I mean this guy had different women coming out of his room every weekend and most weeknights, and he wasn't particularly good looking. He was fat and kind of a slob. Nice guy, though, but nothing special. I couldn't figure out how he did it, so one time I just asked him. ‘How do you get so many girls to go out with you?' He was a man of few words, kind of Coolidge-esque, if you know what I mean. So all he said was: ‘I get rejected ninety percent of the time. But it's that ten percent.'”