Thrill-Bent Read online

  “A lap dance,” he takes a long draw of his non-Shirley Temple in preparation for his opening statement, “according to the time-honored tradition that prevails in this sinful city, of which I am by turns puff-chestedly proud and red-facedly ashamed, involves nothing less and nothing more than two simple features: a lap and a dance.” He pauses for effect, gazing at me with a direct flirtatious-ness that defies me to judge him, as I achingly want to do, as nebbishy and all too clever. “Now, ‘Whose lap?’ you ask. And how do you define ‘dance’ in this context? Those questions are trickier and more difficult to gauge.”

  “Does she touch your dick?” I ask, hoping to derail him just a little.

  “That depends,” he says, unruffled. “She sits on your lap and wiggles around, so yes, some part of her inevitably touches your dick. But if you’re asking ‘does she give you a hand job?’ the answer is no. These matters are rarely so defined, although of course there are rules, spoken and unspoken. But let’s begin with our glossary of terms. Whose lap? Yours, of course. The tops of your thighs, your groin area, the part of your torso below your belly button. A diameter of about a foot and a half square, depending on how hefty a person you are.”

  “Let’s just say the size of a large cat,” I offer.

  “Yes, that’s right. As a matter of fact, I’m glad you brought that up. When a cat sits in your lap, its belly presses against your belly, right?”

  “Well ... yes.”

  “So, in a way you could say the cat’s lap is coming in direct contact with your lap. Your laps are forming a union.”

  “I think I see what you’re getting at.”

  “I’m merely suggesting that if this were a true Socratic dialogue, the question of ‘whose lap?’ might deserve further investigation. But for our purposes, let’s just agree that the lap in question belongs to the paying customer.”

  “The ... client?”

  “The customer. This is not therapy, darling.” He smiles at me and narrows his already narrow eyes like the Cheshire cat settling into my lap for a long face-off.

  “I’m sorry, I guess it seemed like therapy for a minute there because you were the only one who got to talk.”

  “Shut up and let me finish.” He smiles. “The definition of ‘dance’ is really the meat of the matter here, is it not? I mean, what you really want to know is what the girl does once she is comfortably installed on the ‘lap.’ And I must say, of the lap dances I’ve witnessed either first-, second-, or thirdhand, the most surprising thing about the lap dance is that it actually does involve choreography.”

  “Not jazz hands?” I inquire, oscillating my palms Ben Vereen-style.

  This gets a quick laugh, a monosyllabic burst. “Not exactly. But the hip movement, the getting up and sitting back down, the readjusting, the squirming are all performed very much according to the rhythm of the song that happens to be chosen by the DJ on duty, usually culled from a ‘young-urban-contemporary’ songbook. Often a little ditty by Beyoncé, Britney, or Mary J. Blige. Occasionally they go back as far as Terence Trent D’Arby, but not usually. And the dance continues for the length of one song. Sometimes the choreography even includes low-impact, high-profile acrobatics.” He raises one eyebrow. “You know, handstands and jack-knifes and such. The rules are that you cannot touch the girl. She can touch you, but she is not supposed to touch your naked genitals. If either arrangement is broken, a very mean bouncer with little or no sense of humor will arrive at your table in the blink of an eye.”

  “Wow, that’s very ... challenging. So you just lean back with your arms dangling at your sides? And how much, on average, would you be paying for this service?”

  “Well now, that also depends. For a standard lap dance performed in your seat in the nightclub, with other customers a few feet away, the price is generally twenty dollars. For a lap dance performed in a semi-private area of the club, a more intimate experience which sometimes lasts a bit longer, for two songs perhaps, the price would be more like forty. If you like the girl, and you appreciate her choreography, you can just keep giving her money and she will keep dancing on your lap. Until her name is called for her turn to dance onstage.”

  It occurs to me that he seems to know a lot about the phenomenon for a neurotic, well-to-do Jewish tax attorney who not five minutes ago purported to be completely vice-free. “So ... they take food stamps in exchange for lap dances?” I ask, wide-eyed.

  He looks at me squarely with his lips pursed like someone’s tsk-tsking grandmother, and I can see a tiny phantom fingerprint on the right lens of his glasses, its abstruse spiral glowing in the gaudy dive-bar light.

  “Come on,” he says, snatching my purse and jacket from the back of the barstool. “I’ll take you to Zazzle’s.”

  I light a Djarum Special that I cribbed from the pack that was wedged inside the cup holder on the passenger side of this baby-shit-green sports coupe. I haven’t smoked a clove cigarette since 1978, when I used to wait in line outside the Tower Theater in San Diego, dressed as Magenta, for the doors to open for the Midnight Madness Rocky Horror screening, the one where they would let you in free if you were wearing torn fishnets. This particular clove cigarette might have hailed from 1978, in fact, judging from how it stinks of caramel-coated sweat socks and the way it’s bent in the wrinkled middle to resemble a lanky, unsymmetrical penis. I absolutely need to stick something in my mouth right this minute—it could be a brick of Bubble Yum or an old Certs with Retsyn, flecks of foiled paper still stuck to its concave belly button, if that’s what I had mined from the cupholder instead. I can feel that I’m starting to tip the scales of discretion; I recognize the imperious feeling of carefree contumacy taking over my blood’s path from chest to neck, neck to brain, brain to mouth. Here I am, in a car with a stranger who is indeed strange but seems at the moment to be somewhat less strange than my own punch-drunk travel choices. I came to Las Vegas to visit the High Roller, the coaster high atop the Stratosphere space needle hotel/casino. They’re tearing it down to build a bigger observation deck a thousand feet above the ground, and no one seems to mind. I guess in Las Vegas there is so much turnover that the destruction of a merely ten-year-old roller coaster doesn’t even raise eyebrows. I was just having a pre-ride, shot-of-courage cocktail to take the edge off, and now I find myself on a sleazy fact-finding mission with a clean and sober lilliputian who seems uncontrollably driven by lust, but not exactly—and I’m both relieved and intrigued when I realize this—lust for me. The first inhale of the stale, Indonesian, practically fossilized cigarillo tastes as sweet and mean as an underage hitchhiker on a two-lane highway. The familiar desire that it calls up in my nether regions reminds me that I am old enough to remember Oingo Boingo concerts.

  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 tee
th 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 be
st 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?”