Thanks to everyone that commented to my last post, I appreciate the kind words. Except for Wang calling me a pussy. Dude, I'm totally going to kick your ass. Also, to prove him wrong, I'm putting this back up. I had sent out about a half dozen query letters to different magazines this summer with no luck, and with classes looming, I don't have time to send out more yet. So here it is in its entirety.When you apply to law school, as part of the admissions process you are required to list any run-ins with the law you may have had. This is not to keep you out, but when you apply to the Bar, you need to show that you have been forthcoming in all matters. When I was 22, I pleaded no contest to a charge of disorderly conduct stemming from my extremely short career as a male exotic dancer. This is how it happened.
Being 22 and having taken a break after 2 years of college, I was almost content with my life as a waiter. I didn’t work a full schedule, so that left time to lift weights, chase skirts, and generally just fuck around. This idyllic existence had one drawback, though: cash was not as plentiful as it might be if I had had some ambition. One evening, over a few beers with my buddy, “Curly”, we got to talking about his new side venture.
Me: Dude, how in God’s name do you have the guts to take off your fuckin’ clothes in a room full of women?
Curly: It’s not as hard as you think! You can take your shirt off in front of people, right?
Me: yeah…
Curly: Hey, once the shirt’s off, the pants are easy! Shit, they’re begging you to take them off! Plus, that’s when the tips start to roll in. I’ve made $150 in a night. That’s 2 sets, 3 dances per set.
Me: Man, I’ve seen you dance; I hate to break this to you, but you’re not that great a dancer.
Curly: I know, I suck! The beauty is, you just work the room. Let them unbutton your shirt, go from table to table. They do the work, and you just rake in the cash! You should try it, the next time me and Moe get a gig, I’ll call you if you want.
Me: I don’t know…I don’t think I could get up the nerve.
Curly: That’s why we get half in the bag before we do it. There’s no way I could do this sober! In fact, Moe usually has a fully stocked bar set up for us as part of the contract.
Me: (light goes on in my head) All right! I’m in!
A couple of weeks went by and I got the call: “This Friday night; be at my place at 6, and bring a couple changes of clothes and the music you want.”
Shit.
I don’t own any spandex. What the hell am I supposed to wear??? Jeans? Slacks? Skinny tie? No, no tie, too much work. What the fuck kind of shoes does a male stripper wear???
I finally decide on several pair of parachute pants and some hipster shirts from Merry-Go-Round (hey, it’s the 80s). Now the hard part: the music. I’ve always been very particular about the music I listen to, hate Top 40. Psychedelic Furs? No, too trippy. The Clash? I love ‘em, but somehow can’t visualize taking my clothes off to “Police and Thieves”. I settle on Prince (hardly original, I know, but the ladies love the Purple One), Pretenders ( second album, staying true to the punk revolution!), and early Elvis (the classics, man).
Friday arrives and I head over to Curly’s, freshly showered and shaved. Curly throws me a beer and I slam part of it, my nerves singing like high tension wires. Curly has this extremely uncomfortable look on his face. Extremely uncomfortable.
“Uh, hey man.”
“What?”
“Uh, Moe wanted me to make sure to remind you to, uhmm..”
“Remind me to what?”
“Um, make sure that you, you know, …..washed your ass. Hey, if you need to, there’s a washcloth in the bathroom and some soap. Just take ‘em with you when you’re done, cause they’re gonna be all yours.”
“No problem, dude, I already thought of that! I always do on nights I go out, you know, just in case!”
“Oh man, you have no idea how much I hated asking you that question!”
Laughter ensues. Another uncomfortable situation avoided due to proper planning.
“Hey, just so we can be consistent, what kind of underwear do you stripper dudes wear for the show?”
“Oh, yeah. Here you go.”
And Curly tosses me a G-string. Not any old G-string, mind you. One that has obviously been KNITTED BY HAND.
Knitted. It’s brown with orange trim. Very subdued. Almost elegant.
“Dude, who made this?”
“Moe’s mom.” As if that is the most natural thing in the world.
“His mom??!!” As if that is NOT the most natural thing in the world.
“Yeah.” End of explanation.
What is going through my mind, you may ask. Not much, I’m only 22. But some level is wondering where the candy-striped parking gate that was supposed to be my fucking warning was. Is Moe’s mom some old lady who just couldn’t get the intricacy of sock-making? Is she, like, some kinky Meemaw? Or did she just want to make sure that her boy and his friends didn’t catch cold?
I take a deep breath, go with the latter, and jump right in.
7:00 and our carriage arrives. A Corvette. Nice.
“So which car do you guys want to take?” Knowing full well what the answer is.
“Oh, we’ll take my ‘Vette.”
“Yeeeaaaaah…there’s three of us. And it’s an hour away.”
“No problem. Curly, can I leave the spare on your porch?”
Beautiful. Just fucking beautiful.
We pile in the Corvette after I “volunteer” to take the back “seat”. With myself and our 3 duffel bags stuffed into what GM engineers optimistically refer to as a storage space, the side of my face smashed against the roof, we start driving. Maybe sitting on a bag wasn’t a good idea since I can’t see out the windshield unless I bend over and look UNDER the sun visors. So I take the bag/cushion out from under me.
Let me tell you a little something you might not know about the early 80’s L-82 Corvettes. They came from the factory with something called Sport-Tuned Suspension, which in laymen’s terms means Lumber Wagon on a Corduroy Road. Every bump, every highway joint, every painted stripe, I feel. I am One with the Road. I start to wonder how this is going to affect my tips. Will I have smooth tenderized baby-like buttocks? Or will they be bruised, battered beyond recognition? And, if that weren’t enough, Moe just happens to be a huge Loverboy fan and he’s got “Hot Girls in Love” cranked all the way to 11. I wish I could make this shit up.
It would be accurate to say that at this point I’m having second thoughts.
Just then Moe (mercifully) turns down the “music”.
“Hey, what’s your name?”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“Your stage name! You can’t go out there with your real name!”
“Yeah, I didn’t think of that…” Captain Beefstick? Lord Lust? Jesus, my neck hurts, maybe Quasimofo…
“Well, what are your guys names? Moe?”
“The Swedish Meatball, you know cause I’m Swedish.”
“Uh…yeah, I guess that makes sense. Curly?”
“Wild Child.”
“Wild Child?? Isn’t that the name of that one stripper we saw last year at that skanky place? Dude, that’s a chick’s name!”
“Fuck you, it is not; it’s gender neutral. Besides, it’s not like we’ll have the same customers.”
Moe: “Hey, what’s your nationality, you know, where’d your grandparents come from?”
“Well, I’m kind of a Heinz 57, but my grandfather was Polish.”
I can see the wheels turning in Moe’s head.
“Got it: the Polish Stallion!”
“Oh, I don’t know…I wouldn’t describe myself as a stallion…” Yeah, right, more like a beefstick.
“No, it’s got everything: you’re Polish and women love horses!”
Hard to argue with something that well thought out.
And so the night began. At 8:00, the Swedish Meatball, the Wild Child, and the Polish Stallion arrived for a 9:00 show. Boom, chicka-boom, chicka-boom.
We walk in, and the place is PACKED! There has to be at least 200 women there, which comes as a bit of a surprise to me. I grew up about 3 miles from the Sugar Shack, which at that time was at the forefront of the male exotic dancer explosion; hell, they’d been on Donohue, for Christ sake! Dudes taking off their clothes were no big deal. But here, apparently it was a very BIG deal. Let me tell you. I felt like a cream puff at a Jenny Craig weekend retreat.
So, under the watchful eyes of, oh I don’t know, EVERY SINGLE PERSON IN THE WHOLE DAMN PLACE, we make our way downstairs to our dressing area. As part of the arrangement, Moe (and he is surely going to heaven for this) negotiated an open bar for our use. We all grab something to drink, the DJ gets our music, and before I know it, it’s showtime. Moe decides he’ll go first, Curly second, then me for the first set; then Curly, me, and Moe will bring it on home.
“Ladies, please give a hand, and your dollar bills, to the Swedish Meatball!”
Moe goes out and the music starts.
Fucking. Loverboy.
“Curly, that dude needs to expand his musical horizons.”
“He thinks he did; used to be all Wham and Quiet Riot.”
Funny.
“You should see, Moe’s got this move where he does a forward roll, and when he comes up, his pants are in his hand and he swings ‘em around his head. It’s pretty sweet. Real crowd pleaser.”
Now, we had been drinking on the way to the bar, but it’s at this moment, listening to the crowd, that I become stone cold sober. I am scared shitless. The reality of what I am about to do hits me, and I start hearing a low-grade buzzing in my ears. My hands are shaking so much I can’t even tie the back of my G-string (because it’s made of yarn, don’t you know). Curly helps me, and I’m so nervous it doesn’t even occur to me how gay this must look.
Curly says, “Hey, you might want to try and relax; the tips will be better that way.”
“Relax?! How the fuck do expect me to…” Curly is not looking me in the eye when he says this. I look down and realize that I’m suddenly a boy again.
“Uh, I’m a grower, not a show-er.” Or maybe it’s cold. Or maybe this is nature’s last defense against a pack of hungry wolves, a remnant of the time our ancestors roamed the savannah.
“Hey, whatever; I know you, and I know you’re not a stubby, but those people upstairs don’t know that.”
“What the fuck am I supposed to do?!”
“Well, if it’s any help, I always think of Heather Thomas, you know, that chick on T.J. Hooker.”
“I can’t think of that right now! I mean, it’s not like I need soft music and candles, but… I just can’t relax!”
Just then Moe comes back.
“You’re up Wild Child; that room is smokin’!”
Whoa.
That was fast.
I’m on deck. Better have a beer.
Before I know it, Curly comes back down.
Oh shit.
“Ladies, put your hands together for some new talent! In his debut, it’s the Polish Stallion!”
I’ll be honest here. I don’t remember too much about that first set. I came running out to the “stage” next to the DJ, and started doing some approximation of what I thought must have been a seductive Dance of Love. I’m pretty sure it looked more like the herky-jerky twitchings of a demented scarecrow. I started unbuttoning my shirt, feeling more like I was undressing for a doctor appointment than an irresistible sex machine. Then, like the voice of God to Abraham, I heard Curly’s voice in my head, “ya just gotta work the room! They do all the work, and you rake in the money!” So, I started going from table to table, having a woman from each one unfasten a button or remove an article of clothing. Always the shyest ones at the table, because, frankly, I was just as embarrassed as they were. But it was getting easier. The last song of the set came, and there I was in my G-string (boy, that wool really does keep your boys warm!), amid applause and cheers.
The set was over and I headed back down the stairs.
“I am a fuckin’ ROCK STAR!!”
High fives all around. We do our second set. Moe comes back after his finale and says,
“What a fuckin’ blast! Hilarious! The tips are startin’ to roll in, boys! But I think I lost a couple bucks when I took off my G-string and wrapped it around a girl’s head!”
Remember this. This is what is known as “foreshadowing”.
“All right, let’s go out on the dance floor.”
I’m confused. “What?”
“Well, now we go out and the DJ plays some tunes and we dance with the ladies.”
“What….one at a time…like a dollar dance at a wedding?”
“Sort of, except not ‘one at a time’, but more like ‘all at once”.
Remember the old black-and-white cartoons, like Steamboat Willie, when Mickey Mouse is shocked and exclamation points shoot from his head?
“Guys, there’s only 3 of us, and like 10,000 of them! And there’s a bunch of them that I am pretty fuckin’ sure could be on a pro football team; and they really like me, know what I mean!? Boys, I’m scared.”
“Quit bein’ a pussy. This is when the REAL money rolls in, so if you want us to keep your share, just say the word!”
Well.
I didn’t come this far to make what I’d make waiting tables at Denny’s.
So out we went.
Now, I’m a gentleman and I don’t want to tell tales.
But these women were grabby.
Grabby.
Like Dawn of the Dead, fucking zombie-hands-breaking-through-the-wall, grabby. Except that, unlike the zombies, they all had dollar bills in their hands.
Dollar bills for me! For what? I didn’t put a roof on their house, fix their plumbing, shit, I didn’t even have to listen to them prattle on about what they did that day!
All I did was take my clothes off in a room full of them.
To paraphrase Yakof Smirnov, is this a great country, or what?
And that’s when the police came to arrest us.
I didn’t see them at first. I was busy. You know. Working. Moe, Curly, and I had separated into our own “spheres of influence”, shakin’ our money makers, shuckin’ and jivin’ all over the place. Thing is, I HAD to keep moving. Those fuckin’ G-strings tied in the back, or rather, un-tied in the back, and I had 3 Refrigerrettes running post-patterns trying their best to get at that goddamn thing. And oh, the money was pouring in! It looked like I had a woolly Fort Knox strapped to my groin. Dollar bills were stickin’ out like the quills on an orange-and-brown porcupine. Dollar quills!
But the police had no problem seeing us. I mean really, we WERE the only ones in the place who were undressed, although my Refrigerrettes were rapidly moving in that direction. Out of nowhere, 2 extremely large officers escorted me to the dressing area, one on each arm. Let me tell you something: I don’t know why, but those guns in their holsters look ten times their normal size when you’re (mostly) naked. No wonder the naked rednecks take off running on Cops.
Even at this point, I didn’t realize we were being arrested.
“Hey, you guys part of the show?”
To say that I was met with stony silence would be accurate.
What the fuck? These guys can’t be real cops, and besides, this is a legitimate business venture. Man, are they big. I know! They’re Chippendales, and we must be on their turf! Are we going to have to fight? Or have a dance off? Either way, I’m fucked, cause they’re huge and I’m not and I’ve seen them on Phil and Oprah, and those fuckers can DANCE and I surely cannot! They’ve got even better moves than the Swedish Meatball’s forward roll-out-of-the-pants-thing!
As we walk into the dressing area I see 2 fat guys in cheap suits with Moe and Curly, and I realize 2 things. First, these guys are not Chippendales. Second, these guys are cops, and I think we’re in trouble. One of the suits asks the owner if there is a back exit to this place and the owner points across the room.
“All right guys, get dressed.”
“What for? Are you telling me that exotic dancing (Moe always called it that; never stripping) is illegal here, but not 30 miles away?”
“No, the dancing is legal; but takin’ your johnson out and waggin’ it ain’t. We’ve got undercover policewomen in the audience and they’ve got pictures.” Remember foreshadowing? They showed us a real nice picture of the Swedish Meatball “dish-ragging” a customer’s head with his g-string. “You boys should have kept your… what are those anyway, potholders?”
We get dressed, pile into the police van, and drive to the station, where we’re printed and photographed. I guess they figured we weren’t a threat because they didn’t cuff us or separate us at all; hell, we didn’t even have to sit in a cell. They started asking how many times we’d done this, if we’d ever been to this town before, how we got started. Curly and I kept our mouths shut, since this whole venture was Moe’s thing. I’ll say one thing; Moe had those cops laughing their asses off at some of his exploits, and they could not believe the money he was making. Shit, by the time they released us on our signatures, they were placing orders for their own g-strings, compliments of Moe’s mom.
We drove home, glad that we didn’t have to spend the night in jail, but hey, at least we made a hundred bucks apiece. So all in all, it was still fairly profitable.
Except…we didn’t take into account that we would probably get a fine at our court date at the end of the month.
Two weeks later, and we have to drive to the next county for our hearing. After much deliberation, during which we combined all of our extensive legal knowledge, we decided on a plea. It went something like this:
“Look, no way it’s illegal! They take it all off at the Sugar Shack!”
“How do you know, you been there?”
“Haha! Fag!”
“No, I haven’t been there, but I know someone who has, and she told me.”
“You sure?”
“Of course I’m sure!”
“Alright, we’ll plead innocent.”
“Cool.”
Let me tell you, good solid legal advice like that is invaluable. And by invaluable, I mean totally worthless.
We arrive at the courthouse at 8:45 for our 9 o’clock hearing. What we didn’t know was that EVERYONE gets a 9 o’clock hearing. We grab a seat on the courtroom benches and have a look around.
Holy. Shit.
There are some hard-ass, pipe-hittin’ motherfuckers in here! A lot of ‘em!
HOLY SHIT!! That dude over there is in shackles! SHACKLES!!
Me and Curly look at each other, both thinking the same thing.
Is that dude gonna hear what we got arrested for? Naked prancing? He’s gonna think we’re PUSSIES!!
Now, I just want to make my pleading and get out of Dodge. Preferably before it’s feeding time for Mongo the psycho-killer-in-shackles over there. Fucking shackles!
So we wait our turn.
And wait. And wait. And wait. One by one, each and every innocent-until-proven-guilty scumbag criminal gets called up to stand next to the public defender and pleads his case. Drunk driving, wife beating, fighting, selling pot, smoking pot, growing pot; everyone gets called while we sit there. Even Mongo got called up, I don’t remember exactly what for, something about mauling his trainer…
Finally, there we sit, all alone except for the judge, the DA, her assistant, and the public defender.
And they’re snickering among themselves. And looking over at us.
Oh, the humiliation.
The DA: “Well, boys…” More laughter. Them, not us. “We’ve got a deal for you: plead no contest, and these lewd and lascivious charges will be downgraded to disorderly conduct, which doesn’t look near as bad, and after 5 years the charge will be expunged from your record.”
“But we’re innocent!”
DA: “No, these pictures tell a different story. Definite exposure of genitalia.”
Raucous laughter this time. Even the fucking public defender; I thought he was supposed to be on our side!
“But it’s legal where we live! The Sugar Shack has made a business of it; they’ve been on Phil Donohue!”
“Sorry, boys, but that’s a different county with different laws.”
Damn. Outmaneuvered. That DA is a shark!
Time for a legal conference.
“What do think we should do?”
Me: “What’s this “we” shit? I kept MY junk covered up!”
You sure? Absolutely positive? They said they have pictures of all of us.”
“Um, well I was pretty hammered at the end there…”
So we pled no contest, $300 fine. And I only made $100. This is not exactly turning out to be the money tree I thought it was going to be.
So we go home, and, being the responsible 22 year old, I immediately forget all about the fine. Hell, I’m in the next county, they probably forgot about me anyway, it was a whole month ago.
Wrong.
Luckily the cop who had my arrest warrant knew my dad and tipped him off to it. He went to the courthouse and paid it right away.
Then called me. Right away.
“Son, were you arrested for taking your clothes off for money?”
You know, when you hear put like that, it just doesn’t have the, uh, marketability, the cachet, that it did when Curly told me about it. So I explained the whole thing to him, how it seemed like an easy way to make money, blah, blah, blah. My dad’s a pretty sensible guy. Man of few words, you might say.
“Son, taking your clothes off for dollar bills is no way to make a living.”
Truer words were never spoken, Pop! And to this day, I’m happy to say that I’ve lived by that philosophy.
