I'm not sure who I am looking for, so I sit in the darkest part of the room, which is in the back, at a small two-person table behind everyone else. I expected the hundred or so people to be largely middle-aged creepers and sketchy greasers. Instead, they are fashionable men and women. Mostly couples and groups of couples clustered around tables. Very respectable, upscale. I am here alone.
The first performer steps on the small stage promptly at midnight, with the nightclub now completely dark but for a single spotlight on her. She begins dancing to bumps and grinds music, wearing a turquoise bodice, bikini panties and garters with black sequined hose. She's also somehow balancing a two-foot high feathered headdress. She has a killer body. Her moves are suggestive, jutting her hips from side to side. She shimmies, makes her breasts quiver. She smiles and winks.
After several minutes of mildly naughty poses and moves, the buttons open, the bodice comes off. She shakes her ample breasts that are covered now only by nipple pasties of some sort. The song, I think, is "Every Baby Needs A Daddy." Her breasts are so heavy they swing from side to side. Whistles and yells erupt in the darkness. Her name is "Velvet Valentine."
She isn't the one. So I sit through more five-minute routines of the seven-member Bon Ton Burlesquers, who are resurrecting strip shows from vaudeville's golden years. Most of the performers -- they are young, glamorous and busty -- finish in pasties and minuscule panties. In the audience, the men of course are ogling. The women look on with secret envy, wondering what it would feel like to parade on stage, like Velvet Valentine, under a white hot spotlight with bare breasts sweating and swaying, their naked ass in full view of a hundred pair of eyes as they bend over and show themselves. Each woman is thinking, if they were on stage, would the men have to shift in their seats, as they're doing now, to hide their growing arousal at seeing them nearly naked?
For me, even more erotic than looking at the sequined performers is watching the women watch the performers. You can see their hesitancy, mixed with shameful desire. These women, at least some of them, are sweating nearly as much as the dancers.
And then she finally comes on, next to last. I know it's her the second she steps into the spotlight. She's different. The crowd applauds politely, but they, too, sense something askew. For one, she's a little older. Instead of a burlesque costume, she wears a simple black mini-dress, barely long enough to cover the top of her thighs. Something you'd see on the dance floor at a late-night club. She's sporting a black wig, fishnet hose, fuck-me heels. Though attractive, she's not bosomy or curvy, at least not enough to match the other dancers. And the dress doesn't quite fit her, a bit too large and loose for some reason. It's all just slightly off.
She begins dancing, not to a traditional burlesque number, but to M.I.A.'s "Paper Planes," a loud but catchy urban down tempo rap song, with anarchistic lyrics, where about every 20 seconds, a heavy and loud drum beats four times quickly -- dum, dum, dum, dum -- which is meant to mimic gunshots in the song. On each drumbeat, she arches her back and pushes her pelvis out lewdly. The only problem is that her timing is off by a half second. The audience applauds anyway.
But something else. The other performers make daring dips, sways and naughty bend-overs, all the while teasing with completely innocent "Who Me?" smiles. Her look -- and it seems as if she's peering intently into the eyes of each audience member -- is coolly non-committal. There is only a slight smile. Nonetheless, her eyes get the point across: "Watch me."
She sits down in a straight-back chair at the very front of the stage, picks up a sheet of white paper from the floor, crosses her legs and, though seated, continues moving in rhythm to M.I.A's song. She folds the sheet into a paper airplane, taking her time as the audience waits, then cocks her arm back and launches it, sailing into the darkness over their heads. Everyone chuckles. She holds her index finger up, clearly indicating "Wait a minute." She picks up another sheet and does it again, still rocking to the beat of the song. The audience seems confused, a little uncomfortable. She lifts her arms out from her sides, parallel to the floor, with her palms up, and shrugs her shoulders, arches her eyebrows at the crowd. The look on her face says it all: "This is what I do. This is who I am. Accept it."
She flies a few more paper planes into the audience, then stands up, and with her back to us slowly pulls the short black dress over her head, inching it above her arms. She turns and her breasts, somewhat small, are bare but also tipped off with nipple covers. She dances harder, taking few steps, mostly just swaying and rocking, then jutting her pelvis out four quick times with each new dum-dum-dum-dum. She's moving so fast, those small breasts, which droop and look surprisingly heavy, move all over the place, weaving quickly right to left, and then up and down. At times blurridly bouncing before us. She isn't teasing. She's putting it out there for everyone to see. Each man in the place is fantasizing about peeling those sequined nipple covers off her creamy white breasts with his teeth. Maybe some women are too. As the song winds down, there's no grand finale. She calmly slips the dress back on over her head, kisses the air to say goodbye and walks off stage.
I can see it in their eyes. Most women in the audience, in their Jovani cocktail dresses with Charlotte Olympia clutches, are shocked at someone so average in endowment giving us such a tawdry display. She's defying the rule: if you don't have it, don't flaunt it. But it's envy that's really eating at them. She's not slick, not as graceful, nor as pou-pou-pi-dou as the other dancers. There's no pizzazz. What she has is something else, a subtext, a sexuality that's not playful. It's raw sex. Rather lewd. The women can see that. She will do what they are too afraid to do. She's dangerous. And they know it. They talk among themselves quietly because their dates and husbands wouldn't understand.
Her stage name is "Moist Lips." I slip out after her performance.
* * *
It's two days later, a rainy Sunday morning, and I'm still thinking about "Moist Lips" as I sit in Mellow Beans, my favorite coffee shop in Hoboken. I live only a few blocks away in an apartment. I'm reading The New York Times and waiting for Alexandra, hoping she won't stand me up. This place is a favorite of mine, partly because of the front window view: on this morning a foggy Manhattan skyline across the Hudson River in the distance.
At 27, I'm already a creature of habit. I like cozy coffee shops like this, which is why, when I met Alexandra some three months ago, it was at this very table on an identical foggy, rainy Sunday morning. By 10 am, its wooden floors and simple tables are always crowded with families, along with old men who live by themselves and drink their coffee hot and black. Then there are young couples usually sitting beside me, sipping vanilla almond lattes. You can tell they stayed up all Saturday night having ridiculously raucous sex. It's written all over them. I can smell their sex. Or maybe it's just that I can tell because any and all raucous sex has escaped me for a long time.
But everything has changed now. I have met Alexandra. Life has become complicated.
On that morning three months ago, my table had the only vacant chair when she came through the front door. She asked if it's okay to sit. Since I'm painfully shy and haven't really talked to an attractive woman in weeks, I'm already flustered. "Well, sure," I say, moving my newspaper to make room for her. My eyes are on her briefly, then back down on the article that I'm now only pretending to read.
She said I look like a regular, so what could I suggest to drink? I panic. What if I pick something awful. "The Guatemalan Chajulense is a decent fair-trade drink." Excellent, she says. But I'm totally guessing. She heads to the counter to order it and a vegan muffin.
