does when I know she’s going to say something brutally honest.
Something truthful that can’t be denied.
Something I don’t want to hear.
“No.”
CHAPTER 12
Instead of taking Honesty’s advice and talking to Sara, asking her out or making small talk to get to know her, I decide to take a different approach, one successfully taken over the course of history by so many human men.
I go to a strip club.
“Hey, honey,” says a brown-haired cutie in a black G-string and a black mesh bra who sits on my knee and tells me her name is Bambi.
Bambi is nineteen and says she’s earning money so she can go to college. Which is a load of crap. She never intends to go to college but will instead use the money she earns here to buy a BMW and then end up working as a cocktail waitress at a martini bar in Jersey.
I’m at a place called Scandals in Queens, just on the other side of the East River in Long Island City. More like the Jersey warehouse-style strip clubs than their uptight New York City counterparts, Scandals is a little more hands-on than the clubs in Manhattan, which is why I like to come here.
Not that I go to strip clubs all the time. Just whenever I get the chance. It’s kind of like homework for me, a place where I can go to find humans in their most primal element. Some of the places are a little seedy and can occasionally get rowdy, like this one, but I understand why human men enjoy going to strip clubs.
Beautiful women dressed in not much, walking up to you and sitting on your lap, smelling like yummy. Not to mention the private rooms and pole dancing and naked flesh in Technicolor abundance. True, the strippers are being paid to be nice and flirtatious and desirous, but technically, when you go out on a date with a woman, you’re paying for it, too. And unless you’re Greed or Frugality or a tightfisted bastard who insists on going Dutch, you’re going to spend about as much money on a date as you are at a strip club.
Of course, if you and your date don’t connect for whatever reason, you’re stuck on the date for at least a couple of hours until it ends. You can’t just walk out after paying the cover charge and say, “Thanks a lot.” And when the evening finally does come to an end, chances are your date won’t rub up against you, give you a lap dance, and brush her breasts against your face and say, “Oops.”
“Oops,” says Bambi, as I slip another twenty into her G-string.
I’m sitting in the lounge area, back in the shadows in one of the booths that ring the outer edge of the club. In the center of the club, a circular bar surrounds the dance floor, which provides for maximum intoxication while you watch the endless parade of women removing their clothing as they dance around the pole.
From my vantage point, I can view the entire bar. That is, when Bambi’s breasts aren’t in my face. In the middle of the afternoon, there aren’t a lot of customers, just a dozen middle-aged men who are all looking at a lonely future full of ESPN, pepperoni pizza, and Internet porn. But then I spot a familiar figure sitting at the far side of the bar, someone who wasn’t there when I came in an hour ago.
Once Bambi is done with my lap dance, she asks me if I want to adjourn to one of the VIP rooms. It’s very tempting. And it’s not like I can’t afford the treatment. But I’m not so desperate I need to pay for a hand job. So I tell her I’ll pass, slip another twenty into her G-string, then grab my Jack and Coke and head over to the bar.
The figure sitting at the end of the bar nursing a bottle of Budweiser looks more pathetic than all of the other doomed men in the club. He glances up from his beer, looks over and sees me with his baggy, bloodshot eyes, and offers a wan smile.
The thing about Failure is that he’s manic-depressive.
He also has a perpetual half-grown beard, his unwashed hair is limp and greasy beneath his faded Chicago Cubs hat, and his chinos are so wrinkled it
Something truthful that can’t be denied.
Something I don’t want to hear.
“No.”
CHAPTER 12
Instead of taking Honesty’s advice and talking to Sara, asking her out or making small talk to get to know her, I decide to take a different approach, one successfully taken over the course of history by so many human men.
I go to a strip club.
“Hey, honey,” says a brown-haired cutie in a black G-string and a black mesh bra who sits on my knee and tells me her name is Bambi.
Bambi is nineteen and says she’s earning money so she can go to college. Which is a load of crap. She never intends to go to college but will instead use the money she earns here to buy a BMW and then end up working as a cocktail waitress at a martini bar in Jersey.
I’m at a place called Scandals in Queens, just on the other side of the East River in Long Island City. More like the Jersey warehouse-style strip clubs than their uptight New York City counterparts, Scandals is a little more hands-on than the clubs in Manhattan, which is why I like to come here.
Not that I go to strip clubs all the time. Just whenever I get the chance. It’s kind of like homework for me, a place where I can go to find humans in their most primal element. Some of the places are a little seedy and can occasionally get rowdy, like this one, but I understand why human men enjoy going to strip clubs.
Beautiful women dressed in not much, walking up to you and sitting on your lap, smelling like yummy. Not to mention the private rooms and pole dancing and naked flesh in Technicolor abundance. True, the strippers are being paid to be nice and flirtatious and desirous, but technically, when you go out on a date with a woman, you’re paying for it, too. And unless you’re Greed or Frugality or a tightfisted bastard who insists on going Dutch, you’re going to spend about as much money on a date as you are at a strip club.
Of course, if you and your date don’t connect for whatever reason, you’re stuck on the date for at least a couple of hours until it ends. You can’t just walk out after paying the cover charge and say, “Thanks a lot.” And when the evening finally does come to an end, chances are your date won’t rub up against you, give you a lap dance, and brush her breasts against your face and say, “Oops.”
“Oops,” says Bambi, as I slip another twenty into her G-string.
I’m sitting in the lounge area, back in the shadows in one of the booths that ring the outer edge of the club. In the center of the club, a circular bar surrounds the dance floor, which provides for maximum intoxication while you watch the endless parade of women removing their clothing as they dance around the pole.
From my vantage point, I can view the entire bar. That is, when Bambi’s breasts aren’t in my face. In the middle of the afternoon, there aren’t a lot of customers, just a dozen middle-aged men who are all looking at a lonely future full of ESPN, pepperoni pizza, and Internet porn. But then I spot a familiar figure sitting at the far side of the bar, someone who wasn’t there when I came in an hour ago.
Once Bambi is done with my lap dance, she asks me if I want to adjourn to one of the VIP rooms. It’s very tempting. And it’s not like I can’t afford the treatment. But I’m not so desperate I need to pay for a hand job. So I tell her I’ll pass, slip another twenty into her G-string, then grab my Jack and Coke and head over to the bar.
The figure sitting at the end of the bar nursing a bottle of Budweiser looks more pathetic than all of the other doomed men in the club. He glances up from his beer, looks over and sees me with his baggy, bloodshot eyes, and offers a wan smile.
The thing about Failure is that he’s manic-depressive.
He also has a perpetual half-grown beard, his unwashed hair is limp and greasy beneath his faded Chicago Cubs hat, and his chinos are so wrinkled it
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