The Three Strip Clubs and I

The Three Strip Clubs and I: A Story of Love, Loathing and Like
(The attached people in this story shall remain nameless, to avoid any potential relationship issues that may arise.)

Last night, some guys Geo knows through work invited us out with them to a bikini bar (in Jersey it's illegal for strip joints to serve liquor if the girls get nekkid). We normally go to Lace in Nyack which is topless (though we haven't been there in awhile) but I figured we could pretty much go anywhere as long as it wasn't a juice bar. Tony and Mike J came over to hang out and I convinced them to come along too. I say "convinced" because a) Tony was tired and already asleep on my living room floor b) Mike is uncomfortable at strip clubs because he feels "they're degrading to women" and c) Geo thinks strip clubs are a waste of good money AND he drove over 400 miles yesterday for work. I knew they'd have fun once we got there and started drinking though. I mean come on, what hetero guy REALLY doesn't have fun surrounded by half-nekkid women.

So we met up with his crew at Lookers in Elizabeth. The place was clean, the girls were hot and the drinks were reasonably priced. Plus they had a pool table. We really could have settled in there all night. Especially since I fell into platonic lust with one of the strippers, a Columbian hottie named Melanie who resembled an actress I can't quite place yet. But of course, after many drinks, Geo's friends started getting restless and horny. So they decide to go to another joint, one that was "grimy."

Unnamed Guy (who obviously doesn't know me very well): We want to go to another place, but it's kind of grimy.
Me: Grimy?
Unnamed Guy: Grimy. You might be offended by it.
Me: As a supporter of cleanliness?
Unnamed Guy: Well you know... it's grimy.
Me: As in, I'd walk in wishing I had Lemon Pledge and some Windex?
Unnamed Guy: Well...
Me: Or as in, you can get blowjobs in the back for a twenty?
Unnamed Guy: No blowjobs, just a place where you can touch.
Me: The girls versus the seats or walls of course, because the place is grimy.
Unnamed Guy: Um, yeah.

After that of course, everyone kept throwing the word grimy around. Naturally, every time I said it I used those annoying finger quotations. For some things it's just a must.

So much to my sorrow, we left Lookers and Melanie behind and hit up some random spot in I don't know where. It looked like they had taken an abandoned garage in the middle of the industrial part of town and turned it into a ghetto strip joint. I mean this place was GHET-TOE. The floors looked like they were caked with every bodily fluid under the sun and it just hardened with age. The liquor bottles looked like they were often used as props by the strippers. The customers (our group excluded of course) looked like the dirtiest, horniest men ever to pick up prostitutes on 1 and 9 by the Lincoln Tunnel. And the strippers... oh God they were the scariest and skankiest of all. The ones that had teeth still weren't passably attractive. And let me tell you the idea of women without teeth is a lot better in jokes than in reality.

Against my better judgement I used their restroom that also doubles as the employee dressing room. Inside were two strippers whose combined weights exceeded the starting line-up of the Knicks. When I finished and came back out, making especially certain that I didn't accidentally touch the door handle with my bare hands, half of my group was already waiting outside the club. You know a strip club is awful when it doesn't satisfy the standards of horny, heterosexual men who are already drunk.

Mike, Tony, Geo and I piled into the car and waited for the other two guys to get into theirs. We had lost the other two guys from the first bar en route, we figured they decided to skip the foreplay and go right to the whorehouses. The remaining two guys stood around outside our car because they didn't know where to go. They were flipping through the um, catalog of strip joints we had received at Lookers and trying to decide which ones were geographically convenient. We of course watched from the car and made snarky comments.

Mike: Geo's co-worker in the leather jacket looks like Lawrence Fishburne in The Matrix.
Me (sticking my head out the window): HEY MORPHEUS!!! LET'S FUCKING GO ALREADY!!!
Mike (laughing): I can't believe you just called him Morpheus!!
Me: What, you started it.

20 minutes later, we were pulling into the lot of Breathless in Rahway. Our expecations weren't too high, but at least we knew there was no way in hell it would be worse than the other place. We rolled up to the bar, ordered some drinks and tried to catch up. There was something sobering about the other place that made us want to quickly banish it from our minds. Geo's other co-worker Not Morpheus quickly got into a minor altercation with the thick bartender over his card. Morpheus, managed to piss her off even further by eating the lemons and limes straight out of the containers like they were peanuts. But we quickly got into the groove of things.

Other notes:

-Mike was drunk and quickly got over his whole dislike of strip joints. As a Jewish person he still doesn't approve of such flagrant monetary waste but at least had a good time.
-Tony and Morpheus kept stuffing dollar bills into my hand to stuff down the shirts or into the thongs of dancers they liked. I spent a whole lot of singles, but none of them were mine so what do I care.
-Morpheus was wasted and kept thinking Geo was holding back because of me. Geo tried to tell him that I didn't care about crap like that, I'd gotten him lap dances in the past at Lace. But Morpheus was so drunk he couldn't comprehend it. One time, he gave Geo a dollar and told him to give it to the dancer in front of them. Geo responded "EEEW no, not her" to which I told him not to be mean like that. He gets like that when he's drunk, he yells shit out loud like no one can hear. Morpheus then drunkenly told me I should just let Geo enjoy the stripper he just insulted.
-Mike found his future wife, but she was a bit uptight. I won't post here what he said he'd do about that but you can figure it out I'm sure. "She says her name is Yummy." "I wonder what her real name is." "What, you don't really think it's 'Yummy'?"
-Mike spilled So Co all over my purse, which Tony tried to smooth over by saying "It's your two favorite things Riss, liquor and Prada." But that didn't allay my annoyance because everyone knows spilling liquor is like burning money.
-Geo stuffed a dollar bill down my shirt while I was trying to talk to him. "Did you even hear anything I said?" "Um... well no. But you were leaning forward and..." I wasn't mad of course. I don't understand women who complain about their husbands being pervy. Better he makes those sexual overtures to you rather than someone else right?
-I realized last night how truly spoiled we are by Lace. I mean half the girls at the last joint just take the money from the hands of the customers. And Morpheus was begging for a lap dance, to no avail. And they're pretty much fully clothed whereas at Lace the top comes off. You spend more but you get more I guess.
-Mike says the girls at the second joint looked like the managers went "Some guys are turned on by ugly ass women. We need to make those men happy."
-On the way home, Mike was sitting in the front seat and Geo was driving. I was discussing something and Mike was playing dumb. Finally Geo turned to him and said "You're gonna get hit." Which made me laugh (but I didn't hit him).
-Those hangover prevention pills you get at GNC ("Chasers") really work. They are my new best friend. I love them and the person who invented them. They are a person after my own heart.

Some things I heard that you DON'T want to hear at a strip joint EVER:

"That stripper on the pole looks just like John Kerry!" (Mike)
"Does this drink taste funny to you?" (Geo)
"I picked that wet dollar I just gave you off of the floor." (Tony)
"They have a seafood buffet here on weekdays. Want to try it?" (Some random guy)
"Look that one has cottage cheese!" (Geo, Mike)
"This pool stick is sticky." (Morpheus)
"That stripper has the ass of a 30-year old but the face of a 90-year-old." (Mike)

Good times.