Thrill-Bent (18 page)

Shirley Temple, who still won’t tell me his real name, is talking up a storm but I’m not listening anymore. I tuned out when he started in on how Nevada tax laws affect the sex industry.
Can a lap dancer use the EZ form?
is what I’d like to know. But I can tell by the constant trebly timbre of his voice (he has an uncanny ability to monologue without pausing, even for breath) that he has moved on to being entertaining and educational about some topic or other, some landmark fleck of view that races by our open windows while we dart through the flat beige Nevada sahara, and I try to grunt or hum assent at the appropriate intervals so he doesn’t feel unflattered by my inattention. The Strip and the neighborhoods just behind the Strip are gone from view, all the neon and promise, the Circle K mini-marts, the Drive-On-In parking lots, the Spanish-style houses with ceiling beams as wide as Dean Martin’s grin. For all their brag and glitter, they were but a silly blip on the screen of the vast, pencil-etched desert that carries us aloft into another dimension entirely. I think Shirley explained why we have to travel so far to this particular tittie bar, something about city codes or laws of jurisdiction. But I don’t mind the open road for a while. Hot wind plasters my hair to my cheek, and bits of yellow grit wedge themselves between my teeth until I remember to close my mouth.

The day wants to turn into night but something is holding it back. The whole sky is yearning and heavy, weighted by a carpet of heat that’s neither bright nor dark, not hopeful but not quite hopeless, indulging in a leftover memory of light like the itching of a phantom limb. The long journey out of the dense neon forest and into the taupe landscape laid out like an endless canvas tent before us reminds me of the moment of waking from sleep. A long, bright dream has held us close, and now real life, with all its presumed attachments, lies down inside our skin like a familiar chore at the end of a long handwritten list.

“I’m not bitter, I’m a biter,” I announce out loud. Shirley, who seems to think I’m responding to something he’s said, laughs and honks the horn three times as though to accentuate the sentiment, three long and indolent pleas aimed at the back of someone who is already walking away.

He winks and says, “Just don’t bite the lap dancer that feeds you.”

In the distance I can see a white bulbous bump on the horizon, a thickly diaphanous spume shaped like an gigantic powdered wig that seems to cover the dry desert floor for miles.

“What’s that?” I ask, pointing.

“Oh,” says Shirley, nodding at the odd whitemer-ingue in the distance. “That’s this crazy installation by a Spanish artist named Braxo. Have you heard of him?”

“Yeah, isn’t he that guy who put the giant rubber duckie on the River Thames?”

“That’s him. Kind of a nut. I had to deal with him because he’s renting land from the county, and he’s got all kinds of excessive requirements in his contract: can’t be too hilly, can’t be beneath sea level, can’t be near animals or water, must have accessible parking, yada yada. It’s not finished yet. What we’re looking at is just under a third of the final piece.”

I squint but still can’t get a sense of the dimensions of the thing. It looks both tiny and huge, disconcerting. Fluffy on flat. Sky on land.

“What’s he doing?” I ask.

“He’s putting a cloud on earth.”

“Oh.”

“When are ya gonna come down?” Shirley bellows, as if he really wants to know. “When are you going to land?”

I join in joyfully. “I should have stayed on the farm!” we loudly agree, “I should have listened to my old man!”

Zazzle’s, much like Shirley and his dissenting drink, is a very pink oasis perched in the middle of the monochromatic desert. The building is cartoonish: a rosy breast-shaped structure rimmed with shiny gold paint, with three fake-Turkish turrets popping out of the roof like little bald men. I guess the idea is to create an exotic destination, a place where one’s fantasies about Scheherazade and her thousand and one nights, with all the attendant veils, hennaed harems, and ornate navel jewelry, can magically spring to life. On your lap. For twenty dollars. I scamper across the hot asphalt of the half-empty parking lot to the heavy black-curtained entrance, then get suddenly shy and insecure, standing in the shade of a turret waiting for Shirl to check his teeth in the rearview mirror and saunter over. He is cool as a pimp, all business, flipping open his little leather ID case for the doorman, with whom he seems familiar and amicable. They exchange silent reverse nods (where the chin and eyebrows lift slightly in expressionless recognition) and we are sucked down a brief dark hallway into the penumbra.

As the vast interior of the club opens up before us, I see that the ’80s are alive and well here at Zazzle’s. Chrome and mirrors play a big part in the decorating scheme (there is no touch of the Persian magic-carpet exoticism implicitly promised by the exterior architecture, although mere moments after we enter, a dark-haired girl in a porno
I Dream of Jeannie
outfit strolls by us with a grandpa on her arm). The domed roof harbors a large round room with a stage in the center, and tables and cushy pleather chairs all around. Onstage, a dancer in a tiny pink thong is wrapping her extremely long legs around a chrome-plated pole and bending backward in a dangerous-looking yoga pose, rubbing her groin up and down the pole like she’s trying to start a fire. I remember choreographing a similar move on the leg of my backyard swingset when I was a kid, not quite understanding why the brisk friction against my pelvic bone as I shimmied felt so compellingly delicious. A few steps up from the floor level, there is a long, mirror-tiled bar with another smaller stage at the end, where a very tan girl is bending over and offering a gentleman at the bar a chance to examine her gynecological peculiarities.

I can’t look away from the women’s bodies. There are females everywhere, leaning against the walls and lounging at the bar, walking through the room, sitting on the laps of the patrons in chairs. Some of them are practically naked—just a thong and high heels—and some are clad in more elaborate costumes. There is a Daisy Mae, of course, pigtailed and chewing on a shard of straw, with cut-off jeans riding high on her ass cheeks. Many of the girls are wearing completely see-through negligee gowns over their naked bodies, attempting a more “classy” look. A couple of white-trash twins roam the room in white T-shirts ripped off just above their nipples. I am invited, welcome to look at the intimate details of these bodies, and I spend my eyes doing what I’m told.

We sit at a table a few rows back from the stage. The DJ announces the next dancer, “Guys, you know it’s a jungle out there sometimes, yeah you’ve got to watch your tail. This next little pussy is as wild as they come, rawrl, she’s an animal. Please welcome to the Zazzle’s stage everyone’s favorite savage cat, Tiger!”

Britney Spears swells up out of the speakers, and an orangey-tan woman who obviously culled her inspiration from watching
Tarzan
reruns leaps on stage in a fur bikini and mussed-up hair with a plastic vine around her waist. Of course, it doesn’t stay around her waist for long, and soon she is using it to floss between her legs and whip her own ass ecstatically. I laugh out loud, but not too loud.

I am the only female here who is wearing something larger than a dinner napkin. I don’t want to get thrown out or call too much attention to myself. A cocktail waitress comes over, clothed in a slightly more conservative costume than the dancers, and bends forward in front of Shirley so her peasant-style blouse hangs open an inch or two and we can see her nipples—peach-colored aureoles that look like they were sculpted out of Spam. We each order club sodas. Shirley glances at me, surprised—but it’s not peer pressure; for some reason I don’t want to get drunk here. I want to keep watching and making mental notes while my mind is relatively clear. I am uncomfortable and self-conscious and a little bit gritty from the drive, and the prospect of an imminent ride on an outdoor, forty-story roller coaster jangles under my skin and pricks my nerves with adrenaline-tipped pins. I am hyper aware of the oddity of my situation. I don’t want to be able to assimilate what I see and feel into the foggy haze of some familiarly swollen altered state.

A bleach-blond, leathery woman in a yellow bikini approaches me and perches on my knee like it’s a stool she just pulled up. I am so surprised I stay stock-still, for fear she’ll fall off and crack a hip.

“Hi honey, you’re kinda cute,” she growls in my ear. “My name’s Birdy. Do you want a dance?”

Her voice is nothing like a birdy’s, in fact it approximates the register of Harvey Feirstein’s. I briefly wonder if there is a chromosomal question to be asked here, but one glance down her form tells me she’s all woman. Maybe not first-crack-out-of-the-box woman, unaided-by-reconstructive-surgery woman, but pure gal down there nonetheless. Her breasts are most definitely fake—knobby and hard, like the overly tanned knees of a sumo wrestler. But she’s wriggling her fanny on my lap and I can feel the sparks fly. That kind of heat doesn’t issue from a reconstructed body part. At least I wouldn’t think it would. Although I have absolutely no desire to watch this woman writhe more extensively on my body, I can’t seem to form words to answer her question. I don’t want to offend her. But the situation is absurd, void of eroticism for me, as though I am ten and playing with Barbies and my best friend’s mom just plopped herself down on my lap and propositioned me. This is an adult sexual realm that I don’t understand, a land that Barbie can inhabit in my dreamed-up scenarios for her, but not one I can step into with aplomb.

“We’re really just observing at the moment,” Shirley pipes in, leaning forward in his armchair and squeezing my arm as though to wake me from my reverie.

“Well, that’s too bad,” Birdy says, rising from my knee and putting her hands on her hips. She nods toward Tiger, who is now busy tying up her own wrists to the pole with her length of vine, pretending to be captive and rape-ready. “You won’t get to observe me—I don’t dance onstage anymore. After fifteen years, I just can’t swivel on these high heels one more time.” She lets out a cackle.

I look down at her feet. Like the other girls, she is wearing comically high-heeled shoes; hers are platform sandals that lace up her ankles, Roman-style. They must be a foot high. She teeters expertly over to the bar and I hear her mutter to another loitering worker, “Slow day, huh?”

Girl after girl stops at our table to offer her services. Some of them sit on one of our laps, some take a seat in the empty chair across the table. Some pay attention only to Shirley, some assume we are a couple and therefore should be pitched accordingly. Each girl smells the same, overly sweet, like bubblegum perfume. I remain fascinated but at a remove; the overtures strike me as forced and sad, as though this script hasn’t been rewritten in a thousand years. The girls go through the motions of graphic sexual flirtation, knowing exactly which body parts to touch and thrust and wriggle and articulate. I must be sending confusing messages. I’m painfully aware that I can’t shut my eyes or my mouth—I am examining every breast that dangles before my face, slack-jawed over every buoyant butt cheek that skims my field of vision. And yet I shake my head wordlessly when any given girl gets to the blunt proposition: “Can I rub my body all over you while he watches?”

I see that Shirley is excited. His pants are baggy but the bulge is unmistakable. I guess men are easy like that. After one gum-snapping pigtailed girl moves on in her quest to make a decent wage, Shirley stares at me for a long time with a sly grin on his face.

“What are you doing here in Las Vegas, anyway?” he asks.

“Midlife crisis,” I say. “Some people buy Masera-tis, I ride roller coasters.”

He squints at me and shakes his head. “Whatever you want, I’ll pay for,” he finally says. “Seriously. As long as I get to, um,
observe.”

“I hope your eyes aren’t bigger than your cock,” I snap. But then I realize I am intrigued. “Really?” I ask after a moment. Shirley starts fidgeting in his seat when he sees my trepidation crack open into a smile. The prospect of physical contact with one of these girls is suddenly more appealing. If I am not paying for it myself, if I am merely part and parcel of someone else’s enjoyment, then the dynamic is changed drastically. I am no longer the paying customer; I am the girl caught in the middle between the paying customer and the gainfully employed professional. And I’ve always, always liked being caught in the middle.

Just then, when I have finally gotten used to being a bystander—only pupils and sockets, like a pair of surveillance cameras in a packed, chaotic toyshop—my mind is engaged by a glimpse of something genuine. Real breasts, real thighs. Flesh that is jiggling a little and imperfect, a touch of cellulite, a small mauve birthmark in the shape of Greenland across the pelvic bone. The dancer who has just taken the stage has a pretty face and anunselfconscious, unsmiling manner. She could be alone in her living room (if there were a fifteen-foot pole in her living room) dancing to Janet Jackson on the stereo. She bites her lower lip when she starts to get a little funky (a phenomenon my high-school friend referred to as the “white person’s overbite”), shaking her hips fast and loose, hands in tight fists pummeling an imaginary foe. Her long hair is loose and unstyled and falls in her face while she shakes in her boots; she looks like Jane Fonda in
Klute,
a movie my grandmother unwittingly took me to when I was eight. I remember her hustling me down the aisle toward the exit the first time Jane wiggled out of her white leather minidress. I wasn’t even done with my popcorn.

Shirley hands me a five dollar bill. “You like Plum, don’t you?” he says. I hadn’t caught the stage name; in this constant flux of stimuli some of the aural details are the first to go. “Go on up to the stage and put it in her G-string,” he recommends with a grin. “It’s like a calling card. She’ll remember you and come over to the table when she gets offstage. It’s like tapping your horn at another driver.”

I look back and forth from Shirl to Plum. “Mmm, interesting. I didn’t know that was how it was done.”