It’s Not Supposed to Be This Way
I’m taking a quick pull off a brushed steel flask full of something that tastes like a cross between rum, old scotch and jet fuel, then tossing it aside and taking a chaser deep breath of freezing cold air that both burns my throat and makes my nose hairs crackle like cellophane. I put my keys in my back pocket and head for the door. The biting icy air turns each step into a task, my shoes making their muffled crunch as I leave a guilty trail of footprints in the frost coating the asphalt.
There’s a rail of a guy sucking on a cigarette under a weak cone of amber sodium light, the bronze tip burning defiantly in the savage cold that grabs my testicles by the base and yanks them up into my pelvis. He’s got a hard look in his eye, though he looks away from me, giving me no more than the subtle nod of acknowledgement men exchange in places like this.
No guy wants to talk to another man in a “gentlemen’s club.” We’re not here for conversation, asshole. We’re not here for your story; we’re not here to chat about the day, or the horseshit of work.
We’re here to be someplace else entirely. Someplace not here or now or her. Someplace forlorn, dimmed by time, tinged with regret, considered with possibility. Someplace that has nothing to do with some stranger with a cock.
I grab the pale silver handle of the door, the heavy wooden door with no window and a stenciled sign that declares what clothing patrons will and will not be allowed to wear when they trade money for forgetting. I exhale and pull it open.
The smell of sweat mixed with spring berry blossom air freshener and tinged with peppermint and loathing washes over me in low tide of positive air pressure that leaves me feeling greasy as I hand the doorman a ten-dollar bill and ask if some ridiculously-named girl is dancing tonight. The names are always a little off, things parents should never consider and yet you know you’ve met a girl cursed with one anyway. Bergen. Summer. Jubiliee. Mariah. Names that once you associate with a stripper will forever be a stripper’s name, a name you’ll hear being introduced to an aunt or a secretary and suddenly in that split second as you shake hands you’ll be on a couch, bathed in red light with technobass throbbing at the base of your spine and a nearly naked girl grinding against a prick desperately trying to find its way free as you stare into her eyes framed by the hair she has tousled in her hands or her tits bouncing in your face with three strings of Mardi Gras beads hanging loosely between them. You’ll swallow quickly and give a weak smile as you say hello while trying to conjure up another mental image that is far less lascivious, thrown rudely back to that less prurient setting.
Photo © Deborah Taranto
When the doorman points the girl out, you’ll remember… remember who she reminds you of from faraway and certainlynotnow. You’ll begin the kabuki dance of smiling those false smiles, asking her if she would be willing to give you a dance. She’ll take your hand and give you that generous lead back to her handler at the desk who will clinically arrange the matter. You’ll exchange a smattering of tokens or chits or–god forbid–gauche paper money, and then your chosen girl will lead you back to the room/booth/couch of your choice to begin her grinding, her gyrating, her ritual of Lethe. The dance that will take you to that place in your skull where you consign things to rot in an oubliette.
And when it’s over, you’ll stand, adjust your now flush junk and replace that lusting mask of remembrance with the small faux smile you’ll wear back out into the common room. You’ll banish the memory back into the prison of your mind and leave it there for dreams and the lonely bottom of bottles until its screams demand you return here and drag it, filthy and whimpering, back to the light of consciousness for three or four songs. You might linger a moment, have a drink, something to wash down the rancid taste of regret or disappointment that’s built up in your mouth. In the end, you’ll go back to whatever life you had before, trying so diligently to forget.
No, it’s not supposed to be this way.
Peter Grey is an international man of mystery. He tends to disappear in a puff of smoke, no matter how carefully you train your eyes upon him.
