I hate bachelor parties. It's not that I don't like hanging out with the guys, 'cause I do, and it's not that I'm averse to seeing naked women dance around, 'cause I'm not, but it's rather that marriage seems like such an unappreciated theme of a bachelor party. They don't seem to revolve around the joy of finding your one true love as much as celebrating that you managed to last this long without having it happen. They're about being single, free, a roaming male stalking the plains of his existence in search of fertile ground upon which to sire his lineage. In reality, they look like a bunch of unappealing, raucous men who think they're the shit simply because women will grind against them for a couple hundred.
A guy's mind never goes near the fact that this women does this every night, for every sort of guy, and odds are, she's thinking about a movie she wants to go see or some poetry she read, maybe even the dreaded shopping list, all the while grinding against you and cooing seductively about how good you make her feel. I hated sitting at bachelor parties because I didn't want the girls to dance with me for money, and, unfortunately, for the girls it was always business not pleasure. So I sat in the crowd, minding my business, pretending to oh and ah with all the other homo superiors, in reality probably thinking about the same movie or same poetry that the girls were thinking about. In the end, I think the girls got the better deal, because at least they were getting paid to daydream.
Then, of course, like any idiot sitting upon his throne of pompous self-righteousness, I quickly found out how unfounded and easily collapsed that chair could really be.
My best friend, the groom to be, was getting his midnight "last lap dance of freedom" by some buxom blonde. It was in fact his fourth of the night; by his own insistence, it was midnight somewhere every hour. The other guys were chatting amongst themselves, talking about the girls, sharing stories about how they all seemed to look like some girl they had dated back at some point which they seemed a little fuzzy on, but they could definitely remember how good the sex had been, pretty much typical guy strip club banter when everyone's realized that the inside walls of their wallet were touching. I sat, of course, in the middle, trying to appropriately nod in appreciation of some chick a guy had met in a Hooters that had given him a new meaning in life, although apparently not her name, when the song came on. It was a slow, grinding beat, almost all bass, and I recognized it as an old country song my dad used to play. It had been remixed of course, all the point removed by some DJ who thought he was clever to spell his name with a backwards r, but it fit right in with the beat of the club. I was thinking of my dad playing this old song in his beat up Ford when we used to drive out to see my grandparents decades ago when she came on the stage, and all thoughts of my family slowly leaked out of my head.
She had jet black hair shaped around her head in a sort of pixie tomboy kind of way, hands jutting out from her hips as she walked onto stage, the backlight perfectly hitting her as if the club had invented a special kind of spotlight acclimated just to her body. On her head was a small, pink cowgirl hat, tipped back to highlight her face, and she matched the outfit with a pair of daisy dukes and a plaid halter top. I'm not sure if it was the fact that she was probably the most covered stripper in the place, or just the song she had chosen, or even the fact that she was the only who looked like she might actually be a cowgirl in real life, but I couldn't take my eyes away, not for a second.
She walked across the stage and began her dance, moving her hips to the beat, rubbing her hands down her white legs to the black boots she brandished, and the entire world seemed to drop out behind me like it had been a cardboard cutout, a facsimile of the real world just there to somehow justify this dream I suddenly found myself front row center for. She did all the normal dances I had seen throughout the night, but for some reason they looked like some kind of ancient, beautiful ritual that robbed me of breath while supplying other, more noticeable physical changes elsewhere.
Her song was over before I realized it, the last twangs of the country guitar playing loud as she calmly walked off stage, and I quickly grasped for every last sight of her before she disappeared behind the red curtain. She had been amazing, sensual, intimate, erotic, perfect. I found that I couldn't tear my eyes away, somehow hoping that she might pass by the curtain to parts backstage, or even that the music would start up again and this all would just keep replaying itself, over and over, the perfect dream.
Her hand on my shoulder might have caused me to jump if I had not been in a drunken stupor from her presence, but as such, I kept my calm and simply turned around to look at her. She looked different up close, more real somehow, but somewhat even more attractive. I tried to quickly think up something witty to say, something clever that would win her heart, but all I managed was a polite smile. I suppose I might have fainted right then and there, so I would take any victory I could get, no matter how small.
"Would you like a dance?"
Her voice was deep, not like the fake syrupy sweet Barbies strutting around the club, it was jazz deep, smoke in a bottle, sex distilled.
I nodded, another small victory, and she took my hand. It was at this point that I realized she'd never disrobed on stage, that one of the things that had struck me about her was that she hadn't actually stripped, it had been more sensual than erotic, yet somehow the fact that she hadn't strove to turn me on seemed to make it even hotter. It didn't really make a lot of sense, and I decided to just go with it and hope that no one woke me up, that I had forgotten to set my alarm and wouldn't find this wonderful world shattered by an insistent beeping telling me I was late for class.
The back of the club was situated around small booths, curtained all around, for the people who liked their dances up close, personal, private. She led me by the hand and I noted that she didn't even ask me if I wanted one of the expensive rooms with a bed, or the simple booths with a high backed chair. Instead she walked me straight to the most expensive room in the club, a room with it's own door instead of a curtain, a bed and a chair, and my mind didn't even conjure up anything above the ability to note how much money I currently had in my wallet. She sat me in the chair, smiled at me, and as she dropped my hand back down to my side she let her fingers trail lightly up my neck and through my hair, sending electric shocks through my system that could have powered Chicago for a month.
Her hips began to move, slowly at first, as if they couldn't find the beat they wanted, and then a little faster as the rest of her body got into it. Up close, I could see the hint of a tattoo all along the small of her back, and for a strange second I became slightly jealous of whoever had gotten to put it there, touch her so intimately. All thoughts were gone again as she stretched her leg up in front of me, sitting it on the back of the chair, and ran one of her legs up her smooth thighs, milk white in the black light of the club, finally letting her fingers come to rest just outside the seam of her tiny shorts.
"Do you have money?"
It broke the silence, in my mind and in the room, but only for a second before I was reaching for my wallet and fumbling it out of my pocket. I had barely anything, thirty dollars in lose bills, but she smiled and took it all out for me, tossing my wallet behind her on the bed. Placing each bill on top of the next, she spread them out, laying the fan of green on my lap, her leg still sitting so close to my head that I couldn't smell anything but the leather of her boot.