I have a buddy who’s never been to a strip club. Can you believe that? Forty-something years old and he’s never sat before the stage, shelling out dollar bill after dollar bill for brief glimpses of booty like a damn lab rat who keeps pulling the same lever for the same treat. Forty-something years old and he’s never sat gazing up at some strange, semi-naked lovely, feeling the odd combination of extreme lust and abject self-consciousness. You know what I mean. You’re there to look at the goods – are paying good money to do so, in fact – and yet you feel like a raging lecher just gawking like that. It’s a conundrum. Do you go ahead and do the white boy overbite, bobbing your head up and down to the beat of the music? Or just sit there frozen and gaping like a child glimpsing his first set of boobs as they shake, rattle and roll across the stage?

Strip clubs are ridiculous places, let me just say it. Half the men in those joint feel like inadequate assholes but will drink enough nine dollar beers to overcome it. The other half are the players, tan studs with neck chains and fat wallets who feel they have a shot at taking one of the girls home. The whole lot of them will wander to the stage, one-by-one and try to be that one fella who stands out before the ladies. He will flash his best smile, say something cool that he rehearsed in the car on the drive over, try to present his cash in a completely unique way.

You can hold that sweaty bill between two fingers and try to impart that you are one smooth customer; a man of confidence and style, like James Bond.

You can grip that one spot in your teeth and make that sweet thing come for it, relating to her through action that you are not afraid to get up close and personal and you don’t care where that money has been.

You can tease the dancer with your money, offering it to her and then pulling it back. I’ll bet she’s never seen that before, you stallion. I’ll bet that makes her squirm in ways that none of the other 2,000 men she’s danced before have been able to do.

You can offer up a bill with a few zeroes on it and maybe suggest that there’s more where that come. That pretty blond with the C and a half will give you a wink, dance around your head and then move on to the next dude, who has stuffed his beard full with one dollar bills. Seriously, big spender. You can’t compete with the beard transaction.

Some say stripping is demeaning to women. I say it’s demeaning to men.

I’m not a big fan of the strip clubs, but I really hate to see a man dodder into middle age without experiencing the awesome thrill of paying money for three seconds of attention from a semi-beauty. I’ve got to get that brother out there and while pondering it, I’ve begun thinking of a few of my favorite flesh clubs.

• My first was Good Guys in Georgetown. I remember it as a fantastic place, but that may be because the drinking age down there was 18 and I was able to swill beer and enjoy nudity in an entire legal fashion. I first saw the beard trick at Good Guys. It was my brother.

• In Newport News, Va., there was a place called The Cat. Or Cat’s. Maybe Kitty’s. Something feline, anyway. It was fantastic because any guy who came in with a woman got to drink at half price. I was seeing a liberal-minded young lady at the time and so got to drink plenty of cheap swill.

• While traveling to Florida with another girlfriend, we kept coming across a chain of restaurants called Cafe Risqué. It wasn’t a traditional strip club in that there was no liquor served. You went in and had coffee and breakfast and watched the girls, some with scars or missing parts, dance upon the stage. Old men would sit at tables right in front and watch the action while eating breakfast. For me, there is something just hideous about watching a girl strip while eating scrambled eggs. Plus, there was a minimum so I had to drink nine cups of coffee just to stay in the place.

• We used to frequent the one and only strip club in Waterville, Maine all the time. It was standard fair but really small, which is a little more cozy than I like a strip club. The last thing you want to do is stumble into a bunch of guys who have been watching nude girls dance all night. I think the name of the place might have been Boners. Would have been a good name, anyway.

• I went to the Golden Banana a couple times and I know it’s the place to be for the skin arts. But every time I went there, I had spent long afternoons in Boston and I was too drunk to focus on the entertainment. I have am thus unable to fairly rate it on the official Woody scale.

• We used to drive up to St. Georges, Canada as teens because the drinking age was 18. We’d go into the strip clubs there, act like idiotic Americans and get kicked out. You know you’re a tool when you get kicked out of a Canadian bar. One guy I knew actually bit one of the strippers on the buttocks. He’s probably in prison now. Biting a stripper hints at serious issues.

• Mark’s Showplace in Portland, Maine is where I really grew weary of the whole scene. The talent there was just fine, but the socio-political dynamics were really on display there. I kept running into lawyers I knew from the job and there were always a bunch of coke dealers angling for action. It finally occurred to me that paying $6.50 for a 12 ounce beer was ridiculous. Plus, there was this newfangled place called the Internet and everybody was raving about it.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 26th, 2009 at 2:11 am and is filed under Etc.. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.