Awkward Things I Say To Girls

Those of you who’ve dutifully checked my recently unupdated blog have suffered enough, and deserve some sort of an awkward oasis to quench your thirst for ridiculous things I have said to girls.

It’s time to write about the time I went to a strip club and got a lap dance.

—

“Oh geez, what do I do? How does this even work?”

“Well, the first thing you need to do is to take everything out of your front pockets and put it in your back pockets.”

I was out with some acquaintences on a bachelor party. It was maybe two summers ago. As bachelor parties go, this one was entirely unsuccessful in its intended purpose because the bachelor, a coworker with a cubicle contiguous to mine, didn’t show up. (We didn’t see or hear of him too much after that, until he was arrested later in the year for attempting to kill his then-estranged wife. Three times. That we knew of.)

But, seriously, the lack of a bachelor is no reason to call off a perfectly good bachelor party, right? Right.

I had a pretty good idea where the evening was headed, and, look, I wasn’t going to argue with the chosen itinerary. I’d never been to a strip club before, but I sure do like girls, so I figure that qualifies me for admission. So we had our dinner and beers, stopped at the ATM, and rolled into the strip club in a few carloads.

Imagine this: I’m sitting at the back of my group of seven-ish friends in an armchair with wheels on the bottom, sipping on an $8 bottle (as in, 12 oz.) of Budweiser. My friends are looking at the dancers, periodically moving closer to the stage to put dollar bills in front of particularly interesting (to them) nearly naked women.

Me, I’m looking the other direction, at the bartender. She is wearing all of her clothes, and, honestly, looks nothing like the girls who are stripping. She looks intelligent. That isn’t meant to disrespect the strippers. It’s just that even Hannah Arendt wouldn’t look particularly luminary if she were near-nakedly crouching down to collect scattered dollar bills off a darkened stage. I’m thinking of asking her if, like, she wants to get a cup of coffee or something (the bartender, not Hannah Arendt), when one of my friends comes up to me.

“Do you want to get a lap dance?” he asks. I mean, is the answer to that question ever going to be no? Actually, I can think of several situations where I might say no.

“Wait, why? Not really. I mean, maybe.”

“Well, look, this girl over here heard you have never gotten one before, and she really wants to give you one.”

I’m sure she does. “Which girl?”

“That short one, with the dark hair and glasses. Do you want a lap dance from her?”

Wow, good freaking guess. “Yes. Yes I do. Wait, how do you even do that?”

So there I am, in the sort of sparkly darkness that you can just tell would be incredibly depressing to see suddenly lit up to normal wattage, getting lap dance tips and pointers from a new acquaintence. Nothing in the front pockets is key. Just ask her for a lap dance, she’ll take you in the other room and tell you where to sit. You give her $20. When the next song starts she’ll do her thing, then you’re all done. Just: don’t touch her. At all. Anywhere.

Okay, sure. That’s easy enough. I look over at her. She winks at me.

Oh god, I have no confidence anymore suddenly. Well, Justin, you had better go get this thing started, or it’ll never happen.

That is when I walked over to a nearly naked stripper, sitting and talking to another client in those plush rolly armchairs, and said to her, with about the same pitch and tone of voice, rising at the end to fully enunciate the question mark, that you’d use when offering someone a stick of gum, acompanying the query with a shrug of my shoulders:

“I think I need a lapdance?”

—

“That’ll be $20.”

I got out my wallet to give her the money in advance, trying to think of something conversational to say to take up the time remaining in the current strip-club micro-song. She had already taken me by the hand to a dark booth in another room. My eyes alit on my “wallet,” which is actually just a binder clip clasping bills to a few cards and my license.

“Do you like my wallet?” I say with an ironic self-deprecatory glance, indicating the binder clip as I handed her the $20 bill.

Pointing at a garter (I think that’s what those things are called, but I was initially thinking “thigh-scrunchie”) overflowing with neatly folded and organized denominations of various sizes, she asked, “Do you like mine?”

I laughed uncomfortably.

“So you’ve never had a lap dance?” she asked me, settling down next to me in the booth.

“No, I’m really not sure what’s going to happen.” I said.

“Well, look, I do some tricks, but don’t worry. I’ve practiced a lot.”

Uh, tricks?

That’s when the next song started. She grabbed ahold of the back of the little booth behind me and slid onto my lap. “Slouch down and spread your legs.” she said. “Spread them more!” Okay! They’re spread! What is happening!

Oh god. She’s upside down. What if I have to catch her! But I can’t touch her, though, right? Do you think there’s an exception for the life of the stripper? I’m going to drop her for sure. She’s going to sue the hell out of me. Then everyone who hates strip clubs will know that I went to one, and everyone who loves them will know I dropped a stripper on her face. Everyone is going to hate me.

“Relax!” she said, and turned a few more flips on my lap.

—

To this day I have absolutely no idea what was happening on my lap that night, but there’s no question that the poor girl was extremely athletic and burning one hell of a lot of calories. The thing was, though, the best part was when she just put her face really close to mine. Nothing that happened in my lap was nearly as interesting.

Honestly, the whole thing made me just want to go make out.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 2nd, 2007 at 10:46 am and is filed under Awkward Archive. 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.