A True Story

By Nicholas James Chapman Paget
Having wasted many an hour watching my Peel pub “team-sized” pitchers be depleted and harassing all the too-young-to-drink-anywhere-but-peel-pub-girls who, because I could hardly see straight and had my shirt uncharacteristically tucked-in would hardly tolerate my usually tolerable advances, an increasingly attractive and blurry young woman who I had been making eyes at came up to my friend and I and invited us to join her friend and her at a strip club to celebrate her recent graduation. How could I have refused such a rare and promising offer? My friend was hesitant in view of the “grandeur” of the girl with whom he had been relegated as result of my unnatural expedience at calling dibs (I never ride in the back seat of cars either, it’s a valuable talent) but, inasmuch as distracting the fat girl is the only duty friends of my generation have ever had to know, he drained his glass in one fell tilt and led the charge towards St-Catherine.

I held my new date’s hand as we walked and when we entered the dive I asked the monstrous statue of a man at the top of the stairs if we could have a discount because it was our three year anniversary but to no avail. We paid for admission and were escorted to the only seats worth having; perverts alley: close enough to smell the stripper’s depravity, broken dreams, self-loathing and sweat. As the hardly eighteen-year-old Quebec folk dancer peeled the practically postscript pleather off of her precious and petite form, I realized that I had put myself in an unfavourable position and was now faced with a conundrum: do I buy this semi-attractive hook-nosed, sunk-eyed girl I arrived with a beer, or should I stuff this five dollar bill twenty dollars deep into this ripper’s g-string? While I pondered this existential quandary, it struck me that I had unintentionally and simply second-naturedly locked eyes with the young vixen now splayed out on the sweaty metal eye-level stage and as a result, she was giving me some extra attention.

When the song ended, the stripper (whose name I would like to think was Starla) got up slowly, gathered her things and without breaking our heart-melting eye-contact, (titty-bar heart-melting, not real life heart-melting) she left the stage. Now my date, who was sitting beside me while the stripper and I engaged in what can only be described as ocular semi-consensual sodomy, politely excused herself and walked towards the washroom. I watched her as she walked and realized that in the sleazy red haze of strip-club light this blue empire-cut silk dress she wore allowed the shadows of her curves to flash and dance with each graceful step she took. Accordingly, I made a bold move; I leaned over to this renewedly desired woman’s overly-voluptuous friend and after a little pleasantry I said something along the lines of “I want to steal your beautiful friend away from you tonight.”

She laughed and I knew she would pass the message on. By this time my friend had had quite enough self-imposed sexual frustration for the evening and told us that, regrettably, he had to go. He took his leave just as my date sat down between her friend and I at which point her friend whispered something in her ear. By this time the dancers were all either worn out, off the clock, or privately milking the now plastered clientele for their coke money. I leaned over to the girl who I had realized was my last drunken hope of sloppy, regret-it-the-next-day, be-made-fun-of-by-my-friends, give-a-fake-phone-number-and-pray-she-forgets-where-I-live sex and I told her to send her friend home and to join me at my house for a glass of wine (I do actually have a bottle of Oyster Bay chilling in my fridge for just such an occasion.) In the brief moment of focus I had conjured to say this and was now struggling to maintain, she looked at me pityingly and said: “Sorry, She’s staying at my place. I can’t leave her. But you can call me…”

I broke: I had sustained some semblance of sobriety for the previous seconds but now I was free of that burden and I laughed out loud as I stood up, and finished my beer. I wished them both a good evening and as I walked past Starla (who was now on a 300 pound Philippino man’s lap) towards the exit I hollered to my esteemed fellow clients “Have a good one gentlemen” to which the general reply was the grumbling sound of people seeking sexual gratification at a strip club; a sound reserved for people deeply involved in ironic self-defeat. I stumbled out onto St-Catherine wobblier than when I had last walked on her and I headed West toward home lamenting that the lascivious part of my Thursday night was over when I was approached by an acne-scarred degenerate Asian lad outside of a door surrounded by neon lights that I had passed a hundred times before. The little dude was around twenty and he struck me as being just the type of shit a strip-club might hire to lure people in. Pleased as punch to have any encouragement to continue my lechery, I followed him in and down the stairs into a hell hole no bigger than the average public washroom with six or seven stalls.

The only other person in the place who looked like a fellow customer saw us as we entered and he and I shared the look that says “we’re in a den of depravity; don’t judge me and I won’t judge you.” Emanating from the stalls that had been plastered almost floor to ceiling with pictures of pseudo-attractive women trying desperately to make money without having any skills were all the sounds of a good time being had. My new friend led me into a stall and turned on the two television sets which lit up with four different pornographic videos on each screen depicting exactly what you would expect them to depict. He said that we were to wait and he took the one seat in this tiny cubicle that was really only big enough for one person and he pointed towards the screens and asked me if I liked the girls. I noticed but was too polite to mention that his hand had brushed past the front of my pants as he had pointed. Still spinning drunk and concordantly one-track-minded, I asked when I would get to see the live girls to which he replied “soon” and quickly changed to subject to the fact that I was particularly interested in one of the pornographic quadrants which he pointed out, again brushing past me and making slight contact with my pants. This time I attributed this inappropriate contact to the cramped quarters in which we found ourselves.

Moments later, he pointed to the screen again, and this time there was no mistaking the fact that this contact with my reserved-for-me,-my-doctor-and-females-only-area was no accident. I calmly explained to my hideous acquaintance that there would be trouble if he could not keep better control of his hands. Hearing myself say this evoked a frightful epiphany: there were no girls coming. Taking stock of the situation, I decided to flee. I stepped out of the stall and closed the door on the little gremlin who was still inside insisting that the girls would show. When I got out into what can hardly be described as a hall, I saw the man I had figured was a fellow client looking at me and almost laughing to himself as if he knew something I didn’t. So I asked “What’s the fuckin’ deal here, where’s the girls at?” He laughed a little and said “He promised you women?” I said the specific kind of nothing that says “Why the fuck else would I be here?” at which point he was kind enough to explain that there are no live women and that this place is only for viewing movies in the booths. Half-way through thanking the-holy-mother-of-Christ-almighty-and-all-that-is-good-and-holy that I had not sat down or touched anything while in the stall, I turned to this honest man who clearly did not work here and asked the obvious question: “If there are no woman and you’re not in a stall, why are you in here at all, my good man?” To which he very kindly and very casually replied “Oh, I’m here because I like to suck guys’ cocks.”

“That’ll do it.” I replied instantly putting everything together and, trying not to seem rude by running away when this man who had been so helpful and who was in his own way questing for perversion (which fostered a kind of kinship between us I suppose), I walked towards the door. Before leaving, I turned and said “Party on, gentlemen” and I heard his sympathetic laugh amongst the similar but deeper and more pathetic grumblings than I had heard as a response to my salutations at the strip bar. I tripped as I fell out of the door onto St Catherine which drew the attention of the person walking by who looked at me, looked at the door I had just exited and looked away. I asked very simply and without any aggression or threat: “yeah, so I’m coming out of this piss hole, what of it?” She stopped, looked, smiled and that is how I met the lovely Jessica.

She looked at me and smiled a smile that hinted that she had had enough to drink that night to find me funny, but not enough to make my story end either in uninhibited passion or in something that could be used against me in a court as a confession. She laughed as she said “I’m not judging” and I walked up along side her and we began heading westward; her trying to figure out if I’m just a pervert, and me trying to fool her into believing I’m not by making light of the awkward circumstances of our meeting. We spent the next hour talking while seated at a picnic bench in a sketchy dimly-lit park beside a congregation of sleeping and stinking homeless men, women and dogs. When her bus eventually arrived, she put her number into my phone and she looked up at me and smiled. I liked her smile and wanted to keep it. I smiled at the thought and then I kissed her in a PG-13 kind of way. I watched her get on her bus, saw that the sun was coming up and finally, I made my way home. I hope that you have enjoyed my story and that you have learned something from it. As for me, I have learned nothing but a pretty girl’s phone number and so I’m going to apply that lesson and I will call her right now in the hopes of living a sexier story for you to read next time. Adieu.