OUT OF FOCUS

Uncle Larry

I had just finished working a fifteen-hour shift as a chef in a caterer’s kitchen the night I first stepped into a strip club. I was expecting to find a smoke-filled bar with black walls and cheaply strung neon signs shadowed by lonely perverted men gauking up at a shabby stage were distant-eyed, heroine-thin strippers gyrated wearily to the Divynal’s, I Touch Myself.

 I was visiting my girlfriend, Nikki, who had just started working as a cocktail waitress at the club, the same club rumored to have had Demi Moore hiding out in a V.I.P lounge researching her role as a dancer for the film, Striptease.

A tuxedo-clad, security guard escorted me into an environment rivaling Hugh Hefner’s Playboy mansion. I was led into an elaborate, brass-filled foyer by another tuxedo-clad employee and behind a circular counter stood two very exotic Hawaiian-Tropic like girls selling glass-encased fine cigars and pipe tobacco to Armani suited gentleman, not the poor, perverted men I imagined wearing the same faded corduroy jacket stained after last night’s drunkenness.

I sat down at a lengthy marble and mahogany bar. Lining the walls were pictures of beefy intimidating men with cracked noses; advertisements of upcoming boxing matches on big screens for an all-inclusive price equaling a plumbers weekly paycheck. Neighboring the ads were images of semi-nude flawless female bodies available for your very own special sports-themed bachelor party. Baseball caps not included.

I spied naked flesh from every angle; girls giving lap dances enticingly with one leg up on a lounge chair, girls on stage in provocative Cirque de Soleil poses, girls intertwined with other girls throwing back tequila shots. I was stunned. How could there possibly be so many naked beautiful women under one roof on one block in one city?

 “This aint no kitchen, huh?” Nikki, interrupted, my mouth still agape. Nikki was not one of those beautiful club girls. She lacked the chemically altered breasts, the color treated hair and the over-whitening of a Hollywood smile. Instead Nikki was pleasantly thick around the hips, sporting the voluptuousness of a Botticelli woman; the upper half of her did not outweigh the bottom half, and her hair was naturally chestnut brown, think and long.

“You get used to it”, she said folding money into a rocks glass sitting on her cocktail tray. “It’s no different than Friendly’s. You serve the same faces, scoop the same ice cream except here you don’t have to clean up after anyone’s mess. And you make in one week what they make in one year”.

Who needs money like that, I thought. I was comfortable living in my upper east side rent stabilized studio apartment that had a working dishwasher and glimpses of northeast lighting. The only downfall was the occasional cockroach or the stiletto wearing female living above me. I managed to pay the bills on time. The rent on time. Who needs money like that? I needed money like that.

“You, of all people, would do great here, ” she pressed on.

“Why me?” I frowned.

“Because you wouldn’t take this job seriously. I know you. You’d never get pissed off. You’d be joking around the whole time,” she spoke convincingly while counting back more change. “A twenty? Cheap bastard.”

“A twenty dollar tip is great for one drink? I asked surprised. “A 30-year single malt? Top Shelf? I don’t think so,” Nikki huffed.

 “Did you have a good night?” I asked.

 “Four. Four fifty. Cash”, Nikki shrugged.

Now that I thought of it, I was a bit overcrowded living in my upper east side rent stabilized studio apartment that had a dishwasher that occasionally worked, one too many roach infestations and a drunk, lead-footed tenant living above me. Grant it, I’ve been working the champagne so that always helps.”

“Are they hiring?” I asked.

 Nikki smiled. “It’s bonus month on Wall Street”.

 I showed up for work the following Friday and drank while I was at work. The first week, I would catch myself surveying the club, hoping to find something that I disliked besides the grueling ten-hour shift in mandatory 4 inch black stiletto heels and a uniform consisting of a sleeveless tuxedo shirt with plunging neckline tucked into nude stockings and black thong bikini bottoms, accessorized with a red bowtie and cumber bun. On one occasion, I had my manager ask me to take my newly purchased heels off so he could measure them with a ruler. The first night, I remember coming home and thinking my feet will never see another pair of stilettos but the money influenced me into thinking otherwise.

I would cab it home at four a.m. and immediately recount my money on my area rug. The first week I worked four nights and grossed $1,200. Cash. That was a third more than my monthly rent.

Life was good. I was mentored on the finest tequilas by men who looked like Congressman I had seen on CSpan while working out in the gym.

Well into the Christmas holiday swing, the money was only getting better. While I had told the catering company I was taking time off for traveling, I prayed every night that one of my former co-workers would not show up for a college buddy’s bachelor party.

Six months into the job, my boss asked me if I wanted to make hundreds of dollars for a three-hour afternoon spent with a quirky V.I.P customer.

 “Don’t worry. Its not watchya think,” he teased. “You can keep your clothes on and your month shut. Play along with his game and it’ll be like you flew to Vegas for the afternoon”.

That afternoon in the V.I.P room, a middle-aged boozer who had a fetish for cocktail waitresses surrounded himself with four, Happy Hour Bombay and tonics. Uncle Larry, as he was so wrongfully nicknamed, paid me 500 dollars an hour for three hours in the V.I.P. room. We would do this once a week with a different girl.

He reached into a small Duane Reed bag and pulled out a pair of new bobby socks.

“Can you please wear these for me?” he sincerely asked. He handed me two additional hundred dollar bills. This reminded me of something that you would see in a crime scene on America’s Most Wanted. The killer made his victims where Bobby socks until they bled to death.

It was just socks for God’s sake and if this is what really turn this lonely soul on, big deal. I put on the socks and crammed my tows into my stiletto heels, longing for my kitchen clogs. Uncle Larry ran his hand up my ankle, releasing a like high-pitched groan.

“Can you please dance for me?” he asked childlike. He held out another two hundred.

 “I don’t dance, Larry-"

 “Uncle Larry,” he insisted.

 “Uncle Larry. I serve drinks”.

“Pwitty pwitty pweeze?” he asked like Elmer Fudd.

“Can I get you something from the buffet?” I asked, stalling.

“Not with your clothes off. Just dance”, he begged resting the two hundred dollar bills on my tray lying beside him.

 I had watched these girls dance for weeks now. I mean, what wasn’t much to it. Churn the hips like your churning butter, turn around and flip your hair. Squeeze your breasts with your elbows as you purse your lips and bat your eyes like he’s the only one’s in the room. Well, in this case, he was.

I moved to Aerosmith’s, I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing. It was my dumb luck that it just had to be a sappy four minute and thirty-nine second ballad. I don’t know if it was the fried calamari from the Happy Hour buffet that was making me nauseas or the three shots of Patron that I downed for another sweet hundred. I hugged the toilet three times after I got home and passed out by midnight.

I showed up for work the following day after being “back in town from my life-affirming voyage”. I grabbed six crates of colored bell peppers from the walk-in. I had approximately three hours to wash, deseed, grill and julianne six crates of bell peppers and assemble Grilled Foccacia Pizza hors d’oeuvre for three hundred people.

I put on my starched chefs coat, checkered pants and apron and began setting up my station. I looked down at my feet and realized that Uncle Larry’s Bobby Socks were still on my feet.

I guess everyone has their fetishes.

Greetings from the Jersey Shore

We called it the army camp, the rocky beach secluded by giant sand dunes and military barracks, a getaway where my friends and I cut class, smoke what we thought was “prime pot” and listened to the loud decibels of 80’s Big Hair Rock; Bon Jovi, Def Leopard and Quiet Riot. We would finagle dime bags filled with pot seeds or “shake” from Produce Bill, a local vegetable wholesaler who ordered the same 12-inch roast beef sub each time he came into Mulligan’s Deli, the place we occupied our previous summer months.

When you are sixteen and unaware of your true sexual prowess, asking a hungry blue collar male in his thirties how he would like “his meat sliced” carried massive sexual overtones, so much it lead to a steady supply of free mediocre weed. It was a watered down version of our own Coyote Ugly, teasing and manipulating our male customers in exchange for things the law wouldn’t allow us to buy. 

The Army Camp became symbolic for losing ones virginity and earning ones manhood; the initiation into adulthood. We had spent nights lighting bon fires, drinking Bartles and Jaymes white wine coolers and smoking Virginia Slims while contemplating life’s great unknowns; why is it that the first sexual experience a female loses something while a male gains something? These were topics of conversation that arose between community puffs with my female posse.   But today I was alone.

Today, I am alone because our horrid, six-foot history teacher Mrs. Myldal, who we referred to as Ms. Midol, caught me read-handed bumming a drag off of a community smoke being passed around in the girl’s bathroom. Principal ‘tight-lip’ Landry sentenced me to five days of what he considered punishment; suspension. With two parents working, suspension to me meant a five-day, all-expense paid vacation to the sunny, syringe-filled, beaches of the Jersey shore.

I swam alone. I listened to music alone. I ate a popsicle alone. I later found myself in front of a payphone alone.  It was after school hours and I knew that in ten minutes my best friend, Jen, would be walking through the double doors of her Victorian style kitchen, and would make her first call to this pay phone; our designated pre-cell phone era communication headquarters.

Jen didn’t call.  Maybe she and the girls got a case of the munchies and walked to Tim’s Variety Store where they loaded up on 10-cent mini favorites like Charleston Chews and Bit-O-Honeys, the gluey hard candies that yanked at your molars. Perhaps they would follow up with a chocolate peanut butter shake at Gay 90’s, our favorite after school eatery whose management never questioned the dilation of ones pupils. 

The phone still didn’t ring.

“Hey, need a ride?” Calling from the driver’s seat of a red Mazda RX-7, was a sexy Mike Reno look-a-like, the lead singer of Lover Boy, who sported the most historically sexy red leather clad ass.

He moved with an entourage, an equally cute friend in the passenger’s seat and a less-than-equally-cute friend in the back seat.

“Sort of”, I said. “Main Street’s fine.”

“Any plans?” the lead singer asked. 

I smiled coyly and thought this one over like a dreaded Iowa Tests of Basic Skills math equation:

If a Mazda RX-7 is leaving the station at noon and traveling east at 65 miles per hour and a train has left the station at 11:30 am and traveling in the same direction at 120 miles per hour, at what point would train meet up with the Mazda?

I sure as hell didn’t know nor was did I want to be left at the station.

“No plans”, I smiled, wrapping my beach cover around me, grabbing my beach bag and hopped into the backseat of the Mazda.  In the front seat, Lover Boy’s friend was busy concocting the perfect mix of Absolut Vodka and OJ.

“Cheers”, he announced, handing me the carton that held a heavily poured Screwdriver. I gulped down more than my sun-drenched brain could handle to the sound of Bon Jovi’s, Living on a Prayer, blasting through the car’s tiny speakers.

We approached Main Street.

“This is fine guys.  Thanks.” I shouted over the guitar solo.  In the rearview mirror, I saw the eyes of Lover Boy whose stare acknowledged that he had heard me.  He adjusted the mirror so I could see him mouth the words, “We’re going for a ride”.

A quick nervousness came and went in my stomach.  I figured chances are Jen and the girls were not waiting for me and the other alternative would be to go home.  I opted, without choice really, to go for the ride.

Twenty mile-markers later, the alcohol was animating the Mazda’s every move, my head  hanging out the window like an excited dog on his Sunday drive.

As Lover Boy pulled the car over in front of an immaculate, vanilla-colored condominium complex, a handful of guys were leaving the building.

He finally called himself Sean.  Maybe I was too inebriated to ask but hearing a name took my nervousness away. As he escorted me through the front door of the condo, it felt like a real estate agent’s model home. Ignored and out o place, I felt like the home-buying client getting an unexpected tour of an undiscoverable place I had no intention of buying. 

“Where’s the drumbeat coming from?” I asked Sean. Like an overly anxious real estate agent eager to lock the sale, Sean finally spoke, “Now this is the room you have got to see.” 

This was definitely not the room that I wanted to see; the stale stench of male teenage laundry, broken accordion blinds tugged too often by drunk hands, forgotten coke cans and empty beer bottles tipping over side tables.  A dirty spotted comforter. He locked the door.

For the first time, the face that now had a name turned dark and uninviting.

“Why are you hear?” he asked.

“Where’s the drum beat was coming from?” I asked, my irritability masking my suspicion.

He placed two hands on my shoulders and whispered, “You’re one dumb fuckin’ bitch. A little fuckin’ dick tease. Walkin’ around with your little titties bouncing around us guys.”

My sarong-wrapped self hit the hard, squeaky bed. My mother used to tell me that of her three kids, I was the one that had the temper of all three wrapped into one. Where did that temper disappear to?  Why was it failing me when I needed it now?  Was it my innate desire to please, the free-spirited, non-confrontational one in the family?

His 180-pound body felt hard and suffocating, and disturbingly, titillating at the same time. 

“I can handcuff you to a fuckin’ bed.  Who would find you? Huh, who would find your skinny virgin ass?”

He pushed himself off me and started walking toward the door, unlocking it.

“I hope you learned your lesson”, he said.  The door shut.

I didn’t want to stop and think about what had just happened knowing that these are the very moments in life that you are supposed to stop and think about.  And I was not one to conform.

Outside, as I was walking aimlessly, humming to Loverboy’s hit song, Working for the weekend, I looked beyond a giant billboard that read, Greeting from the Jersey Shore, to the glowing red sun sinking behind it. Everything was OK, I thought. I just needed to find my may home. I shook the song out of my head and thought to myself, I wouldn’t be buying Loverboy’s next album.