Profiles
My Night Among the Naked Women
Nipple derbies aren’t tough to find in America, but novelist DANIEL WALLACE had never been to one before, even when he lived in a stripper house. An essay for the uninitiated.
- Out of the Brainland and Into the Heartland (February 11, 2010)
- Dead of State (January 22, 2010)
- By Any Other Name (November 17, 2009)
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I saw her across a crowded room, just like Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra and Perry Como said I might one day. And she was so beautiful. Our eyes met, and then—who can explain what it is, maybe it’s magic—we clicked. All of a sudden she was coming toward me, her eyes still locked on mine, and even though we were surrounded by a hundred other people they seemed to disappear as she walked right up to me, smiling with all the authenticity honest desire can muster. She knelt beside the chair I was sitting in and she whispered in my ear: “Would you like a dance?”
Of course I would. But I didn’t stand up; she sat down. On my lap. She took off her blouse and let it fall to the floor behind her; now she was naked except for those panties, panties that could have doubled as a Band-aid, and her breasts were as close to me as breasts could get without actually touching my skin. As her lips slid past my ear she said, “My name’s Georgia,” and she was smiling then, her eyes beaming as she pushed my legs apart and straddled them, moving her face upward from my stomach; and her nipples, now fully erect, were moving across the top of my shirt, toward my face. I thought, “I should probably take one of her nipples in my mouth”—that was the impulse at this point, but I didn’t. I let her do whatever she wanted to do while I sat there and enjoyed it as best I could. I let her have her way with me. And letting her have her way with me meant resting my face in her cleavage, just for a moment, long enough to inhale the sweet vapors residing there. I took a deep breath. Then I watched her bend over and do something I really didn’t expect: She slapped her ass—her own ass!—as hard as she could, which somehow indicated that this particular encounter was at an end.
“Ten dollars,” she said, bending over to retrieve her shirt.
I gave her $12.
“Hey,” she said. “Thanks.” Those extra two dollars did the trick: After she dressed she bent over and gave me a little peck on the cheek, lingering there for up to one-point-five seconds before she disappeared into the crowd, into the darkness. And then—such was the night and the magic of this place I was in—I saw yet another woman, and this other woman saw me, we clicked, and I wondered how much money I brought with me, and whether I remembered to bring my ATM card.
* * *
Gentlemen’s clubs, titty bars, nipple derbies. I was a 40-year-old man and I’d never been to one before, not for a bachelor’s party, not for a guy’s night out—never—and something about that felt wrong. I like women; I like naked women. At that time of my life—recently divorced, free, open to everything I hadn’t been open to for the past half-dozen years—I had an ambition to see as many naked women as I could. Suddenly, being in a room full of breasts seemed, like reading Mailer or killing a chicken, a necessary element in my education as a man. So, I went to see them.
Myrtle Beach, S.C., is home to about 20 strip bars. They have everything in Myrtle Beach from dark and seedy rooms where older women walk a kind of gangplank through the barroom—clubs that don’t even have signs out front—to elegant, softly lit, marble-lined dreamscapes full of diaphanously gowned young women. Three and a half hours from where I live, the likelihood of seeing anybody there I knew was slim. I had my son, Henry, with me, and his maternal grandmother lives down there and she said she could babysit. I couldn’t take Henry with me to the clubs, of course: You have to be 21 to get into them, though you only have to be 18 to dance; Henry was six. I took him to the aquarium. Myrtle Beach has a great aquarium. The main tank is huge, and designed as an enclosure, so that all manner of sea life—beautiful fish, manta rays, turtles, even sharks—swam by on all sides. You could believe you were somehow actually in the sea yourself, safe and dry but inside its very heart.
I suppose there comes a point in a man’s life when he feels as though he isn’t seeing enough naked women.“Can we get in there?” Henry asked me. That’s Henry: As close as he is to something, he’s never as close as he’d like to be.
“No,” I said. “The sharks would eat you.”
“Maybe you,” he said. “Not me.”
After the aquarium we went to an amusement park, where there was a ride called the Slalom. An enclosure about the size of a minivan, the Slalom simulates being in a really fast car. There’s a screen inside the vehicle displaying a picture of a computer-animated racing track. We were on the left, the competition was on the right, revving their engines. As the cars began flying down the track, the contraption we were in bounced up and down, turned left and right, moved slowly up the steep hills then insanely fast down the precipitous mountainsides. You really had to hold on, too, otherwise you would have been thrown out of your seat. It was like having a roller coaster ride without having to build the damn track. I was scared to death, hurtling along; Henry wanted to do it again the second it was over. When we got out of it both of us were a little surprised to be in the same place we started, that we hadn’t gone anywhere at all.
Then there was the baseball game. Henry fell asleep in my arms around the top of the sixth. I carried him to the car and drove him to his grandmother’s place, tucked him in, took a shower, and by 11 was ready for whatever the evening might bring.
I went with a friend—let’s call him Jerry—who had some experience in these matters. Jerry had been to a few of these bars in his time, but now that he was a professional businessman and a brand-new Christian, his visits had dwindled to almost nothing. He’d actually been a couple of times this year, he said, but they were for birthday and bachelor parties, not the way it used to be when he would go to a strip club for entertainment, instead of, say, going to a movie. This is the world I had driven into, one where a man might leave work and, on his way home, drop by a strip club for a beer; a world where a man could talk to other men about which strip clubs were the best strip clubs, or maybe about a particular woman at a particular club: “You should definitely go see her,” one man could say to the other. This was all so foreign to me. I might as well have been deep within the Amazon, hanging with some tribal friends, hunting spider monkeys with blow darts. Back in Chapel Hill, N.C., I usually did end up going to a movie. To realize that going to strip clubs could be a part of my everyday life both thrilled and frightened me. To Jerry, of course, it was just his old life, the guy he used to be. But there’d been no hesitation when I asked if he would show me around the clubs in Myrtle Beach. Anything he could do to help.
* * *
I used to live with a stripper—in the same house, anyway. It was my second year of college in Atlanta, and I’d moved off campus and found a cheap room with a fold-out couch and an ancient refrigerator that hummed and clicked on and off all night long, inches from my head. Her name was Shelly. Shelly the stripper lived down the hall. I thought she was beautiful, in a dark, carnivorous, scary way. The way she looked at me as though she could eat me up. There was something powerful in her brown eyes, hidden beneath her bangs, some power I recognized but didn’t understand.
We didn’t have much to do with each other, really; our lives were lived on different schedules. But occasionally we’d bump into each other in the hall, coming and going, and my heart would rocket around my chest and my brain would sort of freeze up—the kind of ridiculous, gaga stuff you see on television sitcoms. I’ll never forget the day she knocked on my door: Her phone was broken, she said, could she use mine? I watched her dial a number—this was back when people still actually dialed phones—and the way her index finger slipped so sleekly into the plastic holes and turned the dial ever so slowly—even this sent a charge through me.
I watched her talk for a minute, make some plans to meet someone somewhere. Then she hung up.
“Thanks,” she said. “Thanks a lot.”
And then, for no reason that I could fathom, unless it was to see if I would die, she walked deliberately across the room and kissed me.
* * *
It was inevitable, I suppose, that Colin would want me to see what he looked like in his stripper’s costume.It’s not hard to find naked women in America: Topless bars are everywhere. Not just bars, either, but topless maid services and topless car washes, too. Whatever a woman can do without wearing a shirt is being done somewhere, with someone. I’ve always heard strip clubs referred to as “gentlemen’s clubs.” Who knows why—they’re not much like the gentleman’s clubs once so popular in England. To me, a gentlemen’s club would be a place where aristocrats hang out after dinner smoking thin cigars and sipping cognac. But these are not the kind of gentlemen who frequent the clubs of Myrtle Beach. At least, I didn’t see them there. The men who come to these places range from frat boys and truck drivers to cowboys and businessmen. I suppose there comes a point in a man’s life when he feels as though he isn’t seeing enough naked women, and with some men this feeling comes around more often than it does with others. Maybe men never feel as though they’re seeing enough naked women, but things—things like true love and fidelity and honor, and perhaps a general squeamishness—keep us out of the places where we could view naked women on a pay-per-view basis.
In addition to there being no real gentlemen, they’re not really clubs, either (you don’t have to be a member) and they’re not even limited to men. Women stand at the edge of the neon-lit stage too, slipping dollar bills into the tight black garters of the leggy topless dancers, and getting a little something for their contribution, just as I did. A special twist, a personal shake, maybe a shock of hair dragged slowly across her face. Everyone is welcome in these clubs, as long as you have a little—OK, a lot—of money, and are able to control yourself in a way you may have never have had to before.
And maybe this is what that euphemism is all about, calling us “gentlemen” even before we’ve earned the right. The club owners encourage control; they encourage restraint. It’s not always that easy, either. Because when an attractive woman undresses before you in a sensuous or mock-sexual way and begins to rub her breasts in your face, a man is trained to react in a certain way. When she gazes longingly in your eyes, when she runs her fingers through your hair, when she takes her middle finger and licks it lustily as if the festivities were just beginning you’re bound to find yourself thinking, if even just for a moment, “This girl really likes me.” I had to restrain myself, just a bit, as her face made a close pass by my lips, not to kiss her. It was a nearly involuntary motion on my part, this move to kiss—my sexual socialization. And no, it’s not exactly heartbreaking when you see her doing the exact same thing to a man at a table six feet away. It’s not exactly heartbreaking.
But at the same time you wonder how this could be, how these feelings could be engendered in one man by one woman, and replicated in another man, just a few feet away a few minutes later.
* * *
There was another guy who lived in the house with Shelly and me. His name was Colin. Colin was not a physically hideous man, but he wasn’t handsome either. He was nearing 30, like Shelly, and was about 5 feet 9. He had thin, anemic brown hair and a pathetic moustache: You could count the hairs on his lip if you wanted to, but I don’t think you’d want to. He wore glasses with large, aviator frames and dressed in second-hand polyester trousers. I don’t remember what Colin did to make a living but it couldn’t have been much, because on the few evenings we were together, drinking a beer on the porch of our shared house, all he talked about was how much money Shelly made.
“She rakes it in,” he told me, rolling his eyes. “Two hundred, 250 bucks a night.” This was in 1980. “And all she does is take off her clothes and dance. That’s it!”
“She’s pretty,” I said.
I had this very uncomfortable feeling of walking into somebody else’s living room by accident—actually, into somebody else’s life.He looked at me. “Have you ever been to her club?”
I shook my head. It hadn’t occurred to me. I was probably too young to begin with, but the idea of going to a topless bar had never even occurred to me.
“She’s not the prettiest,” he said. “At the same time, she’s prettier than a lot of them. Some of them are downright ugly.”
He sipped on his beer, nodding, as though hatching a plan. It turned out he was hatching a dream. I don’t know where it came from: his envy of Shelly, or his desire for her kind of money. But no more than two weeks later, Colin became a stripper.
He invested in a g-string and a garter belt and got himself a job taking off his clothes for women. Oh, how he loved it! And what wasn’t there to love? Just to be able to see, on a nightly basis, the eager desire in a woman’s eyes, and to make money while he was seeing it—he became a prince of the night. He began to shine with gaudy confidence. His desultory walk was replaced with a showy strut. And he was especially different with Shelly. He’d always been cowed by her before, by her cocky beauty. I think she found him a little lame and didn’t hesitate to let him know it, and this made him wither in her presence. But now he thought he was her equal.
It was inevitable, I suppose, that he would want me to see what he looked like in his stripper’s costume. Colin was on the porch when I came back from school one day, and he started right off talking about how skimpy it was, “like the smallest bathing suit in the world,” but eventually he ran out of words to describe it. “Wait here,” he said, and went inside to change into it, as if he were a superhero.
I didn’t want to see it. I wanted to see Shelly in her stripper’s costume, but she’d never offered to show it to me. Dreaming of her naked was a hobby of mine; seeing Colin naked was the nightmarish inverse of that dream. But I was helpless now. I heard his door open and close, and then he was padding down the hall toward the porch.
He pushed through the screen door and stood there, wearing nothing but his big, brown, plastic sunglasses and his almost invisible G-string. It wasn’t really anything but a small black bag he could store his penis and testicles in. His skin was milky white, and his body was soft and oily and hairless, like a stick of butter left out overnight. He stood there smiling, as happy and proud as I’d ever seen him, not caring who saw him—hoping, I think, that everybody would. He wasn’t beautiful, but that wasn’t the issue here. He believed he was beautiful, and it worked. For him.
“What do you think?” he said.
* * *
It was a warm, sticky night. Jerry drove his new dark-green Infiniti (Christianity and managing other people’s money were really paying off for him), and we took to the streets of Myrtle Beach with the engine purring and the windows down. First stop: Derriere. Derriere was housed in a squat one-story brick building, a building that once could have been a mom-and-pop office-supply store. Inside there were no fancy strobes, no stage, just a thin, circular catwalk, room for one naked woman to walk back and forth and to kneel down periodically to talk to the men who sat in chairs around it. The floor was damp and the roof was low, and the club was lit by the same bulbs I used in my own home: good old 60-watt. There was no pretense at Derriere, absolutely no imagination; basically, if all you had was a hankering to see what a woman looked like naked (and Jerry said that they actually took it all off at Derriere, eventually, though we didn’t stay for that part), this is where you went. I saw a couple of naked women right off, just hanging around, chatting it up with the guys, some of whom had come straight here from the construction site where they worked, others from the office, but they all had their shirttails out and their sleeves rolled up, and in the gloom they all seemed a little bit scary, leering. I had this very uncomfortable feeling of walking into somebody else’s living room by accident—actually, into somebody else’s life. Jerry and I left after only a few minutes. They didn’t serve drinks there, either; there’s a law that states if you go to a bar where a woman takes all of her clothes off (not just the top) you can’t serve alcohol. It’s just too dangerous. Instead, the proprietors left a couple of ice chests on the sidewalk outside the entrance; you could leave a six-pack there and when you got a little thirsty walk outside and drink it. We did not bring beer of our own.
Stop no. 2: the Palace. The Palace was a big step up from Derriere. It felt a little like what I would imagine walking into Hugh Hefner’s rec room might. The waiters wore black vests and bow ties, and the walls were paneled in very dark, expensive-looking wood. The small stage was tastefully lit with a soft light, and champagne bottles, chilling in silver containers, flanked each side. Rock and roll blared from hidden speakers, and just as we sat down at our tiny round table Liz slipped through the curtains at the back and began to dance. We knew her name was Liz because there was a DJ who told us that, bellowing through a microphone above the raucous drums and guitar: “And here she is, gentlemen: Liz. Show Liz your appreciation, give her a hand, give her a dollar, give her your undivided attention.”
Liz was tall, blonde, maybe 30, and seemed like a nice girl. Very pretty. She had a fresh, wholesome look about her, and she was good dancer, too, giving herself up to the music, letting herself go. It was as if she didn’t even know we were there. She was wearing a white, full-length gown that clung to her body like her own skin, but which was remarkably easy to remove when she decided to; midway through the first song it just seemed to fall off of her. And there she was, in all of her wholesome freshness, dancing to Aerosmith, catching my eye and smiling, catching Jerry’s eye and smiling, wrapping her leg around one of the silver poles at the end of the stage and twirling delightfully, mouthing the words to the song as she scanned the meager audience. This was a Monday night, after all. Then she took hold of the silver bar spanning the top of the stage and did a few pull-ups. She did more pull-ups than I could do, which was impressive, but there wasn’t anything really erotic about it, or arousing in any way; all it made me want to do is congratulate her for being in such good shape. Jerry thought she deserved a dollar, though, so he went up and she kneeled down and he gently placed the dollar in her garter, which was blooming with money already. She could have made change for everybody in the club with the money she had hanging off her leg.
Then her dance was over, and she left the stage, and Cheryl took her place. Liz, having slipped back into the floor-length dress she had just taken off, made her way out into the crowd to mingle, eventually working her way over to our table. She asked if we’d like a table dance (a notice on the table told us that this would cost us $10). We did want a table dance, but we still had one more club to visit, so we declined. That was OK with Liz, though. As much as she’d smiled at us—more, I thought, than she smiled at anybody else—we weren’t that special to her. There were other tables, and she left us for them.
* * *
It was bound to happen, I suppose, after everything: Shelly and Colin became friends. I think they probably even became lovers, though their world, a parallel sexual universe existing so close to my own, was still a mystery to me. I’d come home from school and find them sitting on the front porch together, their feet resting on the railing, draining a six-pack. And though I usually had the impression I was interrupting something, they were always friendly, pausing to ask me about my classes and if I was meeting any girls. They treated me as though I were a harmless diversion, which I guess I was. I was just a kid; they were strippers. Their experience in this realm lent them a knowledge and a power I could only imagine. And I don’t think it was because how much of them other people had seen; I think it was how much they had seen of other people, and all their naked desires. Colin and Shelly both had that faraway look in their eyes now. It was as if they were only visiting this planet, where everyone wore clothes.
* * *
I was a 40-year-old man, divorced. I wasn’t dating anybody yet, though I would start dating someone soon, and I would marry her. But tonight it was just me and this woman, and in the moment I could believe she really liked me.The night was no longer young, I was tired and, for some reason, a little sad. Part of me enjoyed staring at all the naked women, but another part wanted to set them all free, as if they were formerly wild jungle animals caged in a third-rate zoo. I also thought I would have been at least a little aroused by now, but I wasn’t; usually it only took one naked woman, so you’d think being with dozens of them would increase the arousal quotient exponentially; it didn’t. Knowing someone’s real name might be erotic for me, I guess, or maybe I just over-thinking it. Anyway, I was ready to go home.
But Jerry had saved the best for last. As soon as we walked into the Manor, where we actually had to pay a cover, my heart began to beat the same way it had for Shelly 20 years before, except maybe times 10, because that’s about how many pretty, topless women I spied directly through the neon haze. The Manor was huge; it looked like a disco abandoned when the fad died, subsequently taken over by naked women who only wanted to dance. And they had left things pretty much as they had found them: the expansive, brightly lit stage; the colorful neon; the long, well-stocked bar and the tiny round tables and comfy chairs bunched together in a semicircle for better viewing. Even with all the colorful lights, though, there was a dimness, a smoky darkness you could get lost in.
But what made the Manor better not only in degree but in kind was the way it made this illusory world of sex and desire seem so real—so habitable. The women here weren’t merely naked and pretty; they were naked, and they were pretty, and they wanted you. Or maybe I should say me; they wanted me. Not just me, of course, but me and everybody else. Just like the Palace, scathing rock music blared and a DJ narrated the stage events, which were continuous. He named the women—Honey, Sugar, Carol—and bellowed his impressions of their acts, as if to keep our attention.
“Would you look at Carol go!” he said, as Carol, a small woman in a nightie, did the splits, and then, losing the nightie, slowly raised her small, lithe body upwards via the propulsive magic of her shapely thighs. “She is a beauty!”
At the back of the stage, another woman—Deirdre—made her entrance, and another after her. There was a never-ending stream of women, and they were all pretty; they would have been head-turning women even fully dressed, though I can’t say I ever saw them fully dressed. And when the stage became crowded, one would make her way down into the audience to say hello, shake our hands, and maybe rub her nipples across our chests. Or not. It all depended on what you wanted to do, and what you wanted to pay for. Because nothing happened for free. A pack of cigarettes was eight dollars, a beer was nine, a table dance was $15 and a couch dance was $25. A blow-job shot, wherein a woman pretended to have oral sex with a test tube full of vodka, then stuck it in her cleavage, and then you drank it—I can’t remember what that cost, actually. But it didn’t really matter. Money loses its cachet in the Manor; it can’t compete with sex. Money can’t even compete with the idea of sex. Spend $300 on a new dishwasher and your pen drags over the check; but spending that much getting a pretty woman to be nice to you, really nice to you, is painless. Take my money, please! Just do what you just did again.
I was on a budget, though. I couldn’t do everything. I had just enough money left for a couch dance. A young woman from Kansas named Julie sat down at our table, and, in a pleasant way, told us what a slow night it had been, but how “we could change all that.” She looked like she was from Kansas. She had short, auburn hair, fresh white skin and a farm-girl smile, and she was clothed in what looked like a large pink tube sock.
She was playfully tenacious, this Julie. She wouldn’t leave the table. “Come on,” she said, “let’s have us a couch dance. Why not? You won’t be disappointed. No one has been yet.” And though I had my eye on someone a bit taller, well, Julie really wanted to give me a couch dance, and it seemed impolite to say no.
I wanted company. Naked company. For as pleased and relieved as I was to be done with that first marriage, I was alone for the first time in years, and I hated it.So she took my hand and led me back to a small room where it was just her and me and a couch.
I sat.
“Comfortable?” she said.
I wasn’t, so I sort of slouched, and removed my glasses. We could hear the music a room away.
“Van Halen,” she said. “I’m ‘Hot for Teacher.’ Perfect.”
She removed the pink sock, and beneath it she was completely naked, save for some nearly invisible panties. Her breasts were lovely and round and she had little freckles everywhere. She danced. She really seemed to like Van Halen, she moved so easily to the beat, and she smiled, listening, looking at me. Then she moved closer and put her hands around my neck. She stared deep into my eyes, and then she dragged her nails down my arms, gently, and she grabbed my thighs tight. She rubbed her breasts against my lap, and pushing herself upwards on her hands she let her breasts travel the length of my torso, past my lips, where she paused, so I could smell her. I did. I took a deep breath. She moved down and up and down again. This sort of thing would repeat itself until the end of the song, with a couple of variations, and though I knew that the song would end, probably sooner than I wanted it to, and that I would be paying her $25 for being nearly naked with me here for almost three and a half minutes, that was OK. I wasn’t thinking about the time, not then; it was all about the moment, moments wherein I could let myself go and actually believe that what seemed to be happening was happening. I was a 40-year-old man, divorced. My son was asleep in a strange bed half an hour from where I was sitting. I wasn’t dating anybody yet, no one seriously, though I would start dating someone soon, and I would marry her. But tonight it was just me and this woman, and in the moment I could believe she really liked me, and that I really liked her, and here we were together in this dark room, on a black leather couch, about to love each other. I could mesh this make-believe moment with a real one from my past, and when that happened it all seemed so real, as it must have to Shelly and Colin, moments transcending the garish, twisted reality it actually was. I thought of the aquarium earlier that day, when you could really believe you were in at the bottom of the ocean. And that virtual ride we went on—but for the lack of wind through my hair, it might as well have been a roller coaster. A lot of modern life is like this, just one facsimile experience after another. And the trouble isn’t distinguishing between these experiences: The trouble is caring whether they’re real or not. I mean, a real roller coaster might have been better than the fake one, but there wasn’t a real roller coaster in sight.
This is just to say that my night among the naked women was a magical one—my night of virtual happiness. It turns out I wanted more than a room full of breasts: I wanted company. Naked company. For as pleased and relieved as I was to be done with that first marriage, I was alone for the first time in years, and I hated it. But here, in the course of a few unsustainable and fabricated moments, I loved and I was loved. It worked for me. Nipple derbies will be around forever, because no one’s going to frequent a club where you can experience the sensation of virtual loneliness: We all know what that feels like, and we feel it way too often. Beneath (or above) whatever is dirty, exploitative, and ugly about these places, they’re about much more than a craven wanting; they’re about being wanted. And who can put a price on that?
Of course I would. But I didn’t stand up; she sat down. On my lap. She took off her blouse and let it fall to the floor behind her; now she was naked except for those panties, panties that could have doubled as a Band-aid, and her breasts were as close to me as breasts could get without actually touching my skin. As her lips slid past my ear she said, “My name’s Georgia,” and she was smiling then, her eyes beaming as she pushed my legs apart and straddled them, moving her face upward from my stomach; and her nipples, now fully erect, were moving across the top of my shirt, toward my face. I thought, “I should probably take one of her nipples in my mouth”—that was the impulse at this point, but I didn’t. I let her do whatever she wanted to do while I sat there and enjoyed it as best I could. I let her have her way with me. And letting her have her way with me meant resting my face in her cleavage, just for a moment, long enough to inhale the sweet vapors residing there. I took a deep breath. Then I watched her bend over and do something I really didn’t expect: She slapped her ass—her own ass!—as hard as she could, which somehow indicated that this particular encounter was at an end.
“Ten dollars,” she said, bending over to retrieve her shirt.
I gave her $12.
“Hey,” she said. “Thanks.” Those extra two dollars did the trick: After she dressed she bent over and gave me a little peck on the cheek, lingering there for up to one-point-five seconds before she disappeared into the crowd, into the darkness. And then—such was the night and the magic of this place I was in—I saw yet another woman, and this other woman saw me, we clicked, and I wondered how much money I brought with me, and whether I remembered to bring my ATM card.
Gentlemen’s clubs, titty bars, nipple derbies. I was a 40-year-old man and I’d never been to one before, not for a bachelor’s party, not for a guy’s night out—never—and something about that felt wrong. I like women; I like naked women. At that time of my life—recently divorced, free, open to everything I hadn’t been open to for the past half-dozen years—I had an ambition to see as many naked women as I could. Suddenly, being in a room full of breasts seemed, like reading Mailer or killing a chicken, a necessary element in my education as a man. So, I went to see them.
Myrtle Beach, S.C., is home to about 20 strip bars. They have everything in Myrtle Beach from dark and seedy rooms where older women walk a kind of gangplank through the barroom—clubs that don’t even have signs out front—to elegant, softly lit, marble-lined dreamscapes full of diaphanously gowned young women. Three and a half hours from where I live, the likelihood of seeing anybody there I knew was slim. I had my son, Henry, with me, and his maternal grandmother lives down there and she said she could babysit. I couldn’t take Henry with me to the clubs, of course: You have to be 21 to get into them, though you only have to be 18 to dance; Henry was six. I took him to the aquarium. Myrtle Beach has a great aquarium. The main tank is huge, and designed as an enclosure, so that all manner of sea life—beautiful fish, manta rays, turtles, even sharks—swam by on all sides. You could believe you were somehow actually in the sea yourself, safe and dry but inside its very heart.
I suppose there comes a point in a man’s life when he feels as though he isn’t seeing enough naked women.“Can we get in there?” Henry asked me. That’s Henry: As close as he is to something, he’s never as close as he’d like to be.
“No,” I said. “The sharks would eat you.”
“Maybe you,” he said. “Not me.”
After the aquarium we went to an amusement park, where there was a ride called the Slalom. An enclosure about the size of a minivan, the Slalom simulates being in a really fast car. There’s a screen inside the vehicle displaying a picture of a computer-animated racing track. We were on the left, the competition was on the right, revving their engines. As the cars began flying down the track, the contraption we were in bounced up and down, turned left and right, moved slowly up the steep hills then insanely fast down the precipitous mountainsides. You really had to hold on, too, otherwise you would have been thrown out of your seat. It was like having a roller coaster ride without having to build the damn track. I was scared to death, hurtling along; Henry wanted to do it again the second it was over. When we got out of it both of us were a little surprised to be in the same place we started, that we hadn’t gone anywhere at all.
Then there was the baseball game. Henry fell asleep in my arms around the top of the sixth. I carried him to the car and drove him to his grandmother’s place, tucked him in, took a shower, and by 11 was ready for whatever the evening might bring.
I went with a friend—let’s call him Jerry—who had some experience in these matters. Jerry had been to a few of these bars in his time, but now that he was a professional businessman and a brand-new Christian, his visits had dwindled to almost nothing. He’d actually been a couple of times this year, he said, but they were for birthday and bachelor parties, not the way it used to be when he would go to a strip club for entertainment, instead of, say, going to a movie. This is the world I had driven into, one where a man might leave work and, on his way home, drop by a strip club for a beer; a world where a man could talk to other men about which strip clubs were the best strip clubs, or maybe about a particular woman at a particular club: “You should definitely go see her,” one man could say to the other. This was all so foreign to me. I might as well have been deep within the Amazon, hanging with some tribal friends, hunting spider monkeys with blow darts. Back in Chapel Hill, N.C., I usually did end up going to a movie. To realize that going to strip clubs could be a part of my everyday life both thrilled and frightened me. To Jerry, of course, it was just his old life, the guy he used to be. But there’d been no hesitation when I asked if he would show me around the clubs in Myrtle Beach. Anything he could do to help.
I used to live with a stripper—in the same house, anyway. It was my second year of college in Atlanta, and I’d moved off campus and found a cheap room with a fold-out couch and an ancient refrigerator that hummed and clicked on and off all night long, inches from my head. Her name was Shelly. Shelly the stripper lived down the hall. I thought she was beautiful, in a dark, carnivorous, scary way. The way she looked at me as though she could eat me up. There was something powerful in her brown eyes, hidden beneath her bangs, some power I recognized but didn’t understand.
We didn’t have much to do with each other, really; our lives were lived on different schedules. But occasionally we’d bump into each other in the hall, coming and going, and my heart would rocket around my chest and my brain would sort of freeze up—the kind of ridiculous, gaga stuff you see on television sitcoms. I’ll never forget the day she knocked on my door: Her phone was broken, she said, could she use mine? I watched her dial a number—this was back when people still actually dialed phones—and the way her index finger slipped so sleekly into the plastic holes and turned the dial ever so slowly—even this sent a charge through me.
I watched her talk for a minute, make some plans to meet someone somewhere. Then she hung up.
“Thanks,” she said. “Thanks a lot.”
And then, for no reason that I could fathom, unless it was to see if I would die, she walked deliberately across the room and kissed me.
It was inevitable, I suppose, that Colin would want me to see what he looked like in his stripper’s costume.It’s not hard to find naked women in America: Topless bars are everywhere. Not just bars, either, but topless maid services and topless car washes, too. Whatever a woman can do without wearing a shirt is being done somewhere, with someone. I’ve always heard strip clubs referred to as “gentlemen’s clubs.” Who knows why—they’re not much like the gentleman’s clubs once so popular in England. To me, a gentlemen’s club would be a place where aristocrats hang out after dinner smoking thin cigars and sipping cognac. But these are not the kind of gentlemen who frequent the clubs of Myrtle Beach. At least, I didn’t see them there. The men who come to these places range from frat boys and truck drivers to cowboys and businessmen. I suppose there comes a point in a man’s life when he feels as though he isn’t seeing enough naked women, and with some men this feeling comes around more often than it does with others. Maybe men never feel as though they’re seeing enough naked women, but things—things like true love and fidelity and honor, and perhaps a general squeamishness—keep us out of the places where we could view naked women on a pay-per-view basis.
In addition to there being no real gentlemen, they’re not really clubs, either (you don’t have to be a member) and they’re not even limited to men. Women stand at the edge of the neon-lit stage too, slipping dollar bills into the tight black garters of the leggy topless dancers, and getting a little something for their contribution, just as I did. A special twist, a personal shake, maybe a shock of hair dragged slowly across her face. Everyone is welcome in these clubs, as long as you have a little—OK, a lot—of money, and are able to control yourself in a way you may have never have had to before.
And maybe this is what that euphemism is all about, calling us “gentlemen” even before we’ve earned the right. The club owners encourage control; they encourage restraint. It’s not always that easy, either. Because when an attractive woman undresses before you in a sensuous or mock-sexual way and begins to rub her breasts in your face, a man is trained to react in a certain way. When she gazes longingly in your eyes, when she runs her fingers through your hair, when she takes her middle finger and licks it lustily as if the festivities were just beginning you’re bound to find yourself thinking, if even just for a moment, “This girl really likes me.” I had to restrain myself, just a bit, as her face made a close pass by my lips, not to kiss her. It was a nearly involuntary motion on my part, this move to kiss—my sexual socialization. And no, it’s not exactly heartbreaking when you see her doing the exact same thing to a man at a table six feet away. It’s not exactly heartbreaking.
But at the same time you wonder how this could be, how these feelings could be engendered in one man by one woman, and replicated in another man, just a few feet away a few minutes later.
There was another guy who lived in the house with Shelly and me. His name was Colin. Colin was not a physically hideous man, but he wasn’t handsome either. He was nearing 30, like Shelly, and was about 5 feet 9. He had thin, anemic brown hair and a pathetic moustache: You could count the hairs on his lip if you wanted to, but I don’t think you’d want to. He wore glasses with large, aviator frames and dressed in second-hand polyester trousers. I don’t remember what Colin did to make a living but it couldn’t have been much, because on the few evenings we were together, drinking a beer on the porch of our shared house, all he talked about was how much money Shelly made.
“She rakes it in,” he told me, rolling his eyes. “Two hundred, 250 bucks a night.” This was in 1980. “And all she does is take off her clothes and dance. That’s it!”
“She’s pretty,” I said.
I had this very uncomfortable feeling of walking into somebody else’s living room by accident—actually, into somebody else’s life.He looked at me. “Have you ever been to her club?”
I shook my head. It hadn’t occurred to me. I was probably too young to begin with, but the idea of going to a topless bar had never even occurred to me.
“She’s not the prettiest,” he said. “At the same time, she’s prettier than a lot of them. Some of them are downright ugly.”
He sipped on his beer, nodding, as though hatching a plan. It turned out he was hatching a dream. I don’t know where it came from: his envy of Shelly, or his desire for her kind of money. But no more than two weeks later, Colin became a stripper.
He invested in a g-string and a garter belt and got himself a job taking off his clothes for women. Oh, how he loved it! And what wasn’t there to love? Just to be able to see, on a nightly basis, the eager desire in a woman’s eyes, and to make money while he was seeing it—he became a prince of the night. He began to shine with gaudy confidence. His desultory walk was replaced with a showy strut. And he was especially different with Shelly. He’d always been cowed by her before, by her cocky beauty. I think she found him a little lame and didn’t hesitate to let him know it, and this made him wither in her presence. But now he thought he was her equal.
It was inevitable, I suppose, that he would want me to see what he looked like in his stripper’s costume. Colin was on the porch when I came back from school one day, and he started right off talking about how skimpy it was, “like the smallest bathing suit in the world,” but eventually he ran out of words to describe it. “Wait here,” he said, and went inside to change into it, as if he were a superhero.
I didn’t want to see it. I wanted to see Shelly in her stripper’s costume, but she’d never offered to show it to me. Dreaming of her naked was a hobby of mine; seeing Colin naked was the nightmarish inverse of that dream. But I was helpless now. I heard his door open and close, and then he was padding down the hall toward the porch.
He pushed through the screen door and stood there, wearing nothing but his big, brown, plastic sunglasses and his almost invisible G-string. It wasn’t really anything but a small black bag he could store his penis and testicles in. His skin was milky white, and his body was soft and oily and hairless, like a stick of butter left out overnight. He stood there smiling, as happy and proud as I’d ever seen him, not caring who saw him—hoping, I think, that everybody would. He wasn’t beautiful, but that wasn’t the issue here. He believed he was beautiful, and it worked. For him.
“What do you think?” he said.
It was a warm, sticky night. Jerry drove his new dark-green Infiniti (Christianity and managing other people’s money were really paying off for him), and we took to the streets of Myrtle Beach with the engine purring and the windows down. First stop: Derriere. Derriere was housed in a squat one-story brick building, a building that once could have been a mom-and-pop office-supply store. Inside there were no fancy strobes, no stage, just a thin, circular catwalk, room for one naked woman to walk back and forth and to kneel down periodically to talk to the men who sat in chairs around it. The floor was damp and the roof was low, and the club was lit by the same bulbs I used in my own home: good old 60-watt. There was no pretense at Derriere, absolutely no imagination; basically, if all you had was a hankering to see what a woman looked like naked (and Jerry said that they actually took it all off at Derriere, eventually, though we didn’t stay for that part), this is where you went. I saw a couple of naked women right off, just hanging around, chatting it up with the guys, some of whom had come straight here from the construction site where they worked, others from the office, but they all had their shirttails out and their sleeves rolled up, and in the gloom they all seemed a little bit scary, leering. I had this very uncomfortable feeling of walking into somebody else’s living room by accident—actually, into somebody else’s life. Jerry and I left after only a few minutes. They didn’t serve drinks there, either; there’s a law that states if you go to a bar where a woman takes all of her clothes off (not just the top) you can’t serve alcohol. It’s just too dangerous. Instead, the proprietors left a couple of ice chests on the sidewalk outside the entrance; you could leave a six-pack there and when you got a little thirsty walk outside and drink it. We did not bring beer of our own.
Stop no. 2: the Palace. The Palace was a big step up from Derriere. It felt a little like what I would imagine walking into Hugh Hefner’s rec room might. The waiters wore black vests and bow ties, and the walls were paneled in very dark, expensive-looking wood. The small stage was tastefully lit with a soft light, and champagne bottles, chilling in silver containers, flanked each side. Rock and roll blared from hidden speakers, and just as we sat down at our tiny round table Liz slipped through the curtains at the back and began to dance. We knew her name was Liz because there was a DJ who told us that, bellowing through a microphone above the raucous drums and guitar: “And here she is, gentlemen: Liz. Show Liz your appreciation, give her a hand, give her a dollar, give her your undivided attention.”
Liz was tall, blonde, maybe 30, and seemed like a nice girl. Very pretty. She had a fresh, wholesome look about her, and she was good dancer, too, giving herself up to the music, letting herself go. It was as if she didn’t even know we were there. She was wearing a white, full-length gown that clung to her body like her own skin, but which was remarkably easy to remove when she decided to; midway through the first song it just seemed to fall off of her. And there she was, in all of her wholesome freshness, dancing to Aerosmith, catching my eye and smiling, catching Jerry’s eye and smiling, wrapping her leg around one of the silver poles at the end of the stage and twirling delightfully, mouthing the words to the song as she scanned the meager audience. This was a Monday night, after all. Then she took hold of the silver bar spanning the top of the stage and did a few pull-ups. She did more pull-ups than I could do, which was impressive, but there wasn’t anything really erotic about it, or arousing in any way; all it made me want to do is congratulate her for being in such good shape. Jerry thought she deserved a dollar, though, so he went up and she kneeled down and he gently placed the dollar in her garter, which was blooming with money already. She could have made change for everybody in the club with the money she had hanging off her leg.
Then her dance was over, and she left the stage, and Cheryl took her place. Liz, having slipped back into the floor-length dress she had just taken off, made her way out into the crowd to mingle, eventually working her way over to our table. She asked if we’d like a table dance (a notice on the table told us that this would cost us $10). We did want a table dance, but we still had one more club to visit, so we declined. That was OK with Liz, though. As much as she’d smiled at us—more, I thought, than she smiled at anybody else—we weren’t that special to her. There were other tables, and she left us for them.
It was bound to happen, I suppose, after everything: Shelly and Colin became friends. I think they probably even became lovers, though their world, a parallel sexual universe existing so close to my own, was still a mystery to me. I’d come home from school and find them sitting on the front porch together, their feet resting on the railing, draining a six-pack. And though I usually had the impression I was interrupting something, they were always friendly, pausing to ask me about my classes and if I was meeting any girls. They treated me as though I were a harmless diversion, which I guess I was. I was just a kid; they were strippers. Their experience in this realm lent them a knowledge and a power I could only imagine. And I don’t think it was because how much of them other people had seen; I think it was how much they had seen of other people, and all their naked desires. Colin and Shelly both had that faraway look in their eyes now. It was as if they were only visiting this planet, where everyone wore clothes.
I was a 40-year-old man, divorced. I wasn’t dating anybody yet, though I would start dating someone soon, and I would marry her. But tonight it was just me and this woman, and in the moment I could believe she really liked me.The night was no longer young, I was tired and, for some reason, a little sad. Part of me enjoyed staring at all the naked women, but another part wanted to set them all free, as if they were formerly wild jungle animals caged in a third-rate zoo. I also thought I would have been at least a little aroused by now, but I wasn’t; usually it only took one naked woman, so you’d think being with dozens of them would increase the arousal quotient exponentially; it didn’t. Knowing someone’s real name might be erotic for me, I guess, or maybe I just over-thinking it. Anyway, I was ready to go home.
But Jerry had saved the best for last. As soon as we walked into the Manor, where we actually had to pay a cover, my heart began to beat the same way it had for Shelly 20 years before, except maybe times 10, because that’s about how many pretty, topless women I spied directly through the neon haze. The Manor was huge; it looked like a disco abandoned when the fad died, subsequently taken over by naked women who only wanted to dance. And they had left things pretty much as they had found them: the expansive, brightly lit stage; the colorful neon; the long, well-stocked bar and the tiny round tables and comfy chairs bunched together in a semicircle for better viewing. Even with all the colorful lights, though, there was a dimness, a smoky darkness you could get lost in.
But what made the Manor better not only in degree but in kind was the way it made this illusory world of sex and desire seem so real—so habitable. The women here weren’t merely naked and pretty; they were naked, and they were pretty, and they wanted you. Or maybe I should say me; they wanted me. Not just me, of course, but me and everybody else. Just like the Palace, scathing rock music blared and a DJ narrated the stage events, which were continuous. He named the women—Honey, Sugar, Carol—and bellowed his impressions of their acts, as if to keep our attention.
“Would you look at Carol go!” he said, as Carol, a small woman in a nightie, did the splits, and then, losing the nightie, slowly raised her small, lithe body upwards via the propulsive magic of her shapely thighs. “She is a beauty!”
At the back of the stage, another woman—Deirdre—made her entrance, and another after her. There was a never-ending stream of women, and they were all pretty; they would have been head-turning women even fully dressed, though I can’t say I ever saw them fully dressed. And when the stage became crowded, one would make her way down into the audience to say hello, shake our hands, and maybe rub her nipples across our chests. Or not. It all depended on what you wanted to do, and what you wanted to pay for. Because nothing happened for free. A pack of cigarettes was eight dollars, a beer was nine, a table dance was $15 and a couch dance was $25. A blow-job shot, wherein a woman pretended to have oral sex with a test tube full of vodka, then stuck it in her cleavage, and then you drank it—I can’t remember what that cost, actually. But it didn’t really matter. Money loses its cachet in the Manor; it can’t compete with sex. Money can’t even compete with the idea of sex. Spend $300 on a new dishwasher and your pen drags over the check; but spending that much getting a pretty woman to be nice to you, really nice to you, is painless. Take my money, please! Just do what you just did again.
I was on a budget, though. I couldn’t do everything. I had just enough money left for a couch dance. A young woman from Kansas named Julie sat down at our table, and, in a pleasant way, told us what a slow night it had been, but how “we could change all that.” She looked like she was from Kansas. She had short, auburn hair, fresh white skin and a farm-girl smile, and she was clothed in what looked like a large pink tube sock.
She was playfully tenacious, this Julie. She wouldn’t leave the table. “Come on,” she said, “let’s have us a couch dance. Why not? You won’t be disappointed. No one has been yet.” And though I had my eye on someone a bit taller, well, Julie really wanted to give me a couch dance, and it seemed impolite to say no.
I wanted company. Naked company. For as pleased and relieved as I was to be done with that first marriage, I was alone for the first time in years, and I hated it.So she took my hand and led me back to a small room where it was just her and me and a couch.
I sat.
“Comfortable?” she said.
I wasn’t, so I sort of slouched, and removed my glasses. We could hear the music a room away.
“Van Halen,” she said. “I’m ‘Hot for Teacher.’ Perfect.”
She removed the pink sock, and beneath it she was completely naked, save for some nearly invisible panties. Her breasts were lovely and round and she had little freckles everywhere. She danced. She really seemed to like Van Halen, she moved so easily to the beat, and she smiled, listening, looking at me. Then she moved closer and put her hands around my neck. She stared deep into my eyes, and then she dragged her nails down my arms, gently, and she grabbed my thighs tight. She rubbed her breasts against my lap, and pushing herself upwards on her hands she let her breasts travel the length of my torso, past my lips, where she paused, so I could smell her. I did. I took a deep breath. She moved down and up and down again. This sort of thing would repeat itself until the end of the song, with a couple of variations, and though I knew that the song would end, probably sooner than I wanted it to, and that I would be paying her $25 for being nearly naked with me here for almost three and a half minutes, that was OK. I wasn’t thinking about the time, not then; it was all about the moment, moments wherein I could let myself go and actually believe that what seemed to be happening was happening. I was a 40-year-old man, divorced. My son was asleep in a strange bed half an hour from where I was sitting. I wasn’t dating anybody yet, no one seriously, though I would start dating someone soon, and I would marry her. But tonight it was just me and this woman, and in the moment I could believe she really liked me, and that I really liked her, and here we were together in this dark room, on a black leather couch, about to love each other. I could mesh this make-believe moment with a real one from my past, and when that happened it all seemed so real, as it must have to Shelly and Colin, moments transcending the garish, twisted reality it actually was. I thought of the aquarium earlier that day, when you could really believe you were in at the bottom of the ocean. And that virtual ride we went on—but for the lack of wind through my hair, it might as well have been a roller coaster. A lot of modern life is like this, just one facsimile experience after another. And the trouble isn’t distinguishing between these experiences: The trouble is caring whether they’re real or not. I mean, a real roller coaster might have been better than the fake one, but there wasn’t a real roller coaster in sight.
This is just to say that my night among the naked women was a magical one—my night of virtual happiness. It turns out I wanted more than a room full of breasts: I wanted company. Naked company. For as pleased and relieved as I was to be done with that first marriage, I was alone for the first time in years, and I hated it. But here, in the course of a few unsustainable and fabricated moments, I loved and I was loved. It worked for me. Nipple derbies will be around forever, because no one’s going to frequent a club where you can experience the sensation of virtual loneliness: We all know what that feels like, and we feel it way too often. Beneath (or above) whatever is dirty, exploitative, and ugly about these places, they’re about much more than a craven wanting; they’re about being wanted. And who can put a price on that?
—Published November 24, 2009
