The Language of Men (20 page)

On those long rides, he always drove. Sometimes I'd stare out the window, replaying scenes from my own childhood: that's where I jammed a stick in Marlon's spokes. That's where I used to play soccer. My father and I fished in that pond.

We drove for hours in Mom's Taurus. Our usual route: past the high school, over the train tracks, near the other side of town. We bought Taco Bell along the way and, afterwards, smoked the cigarettes we stole from our parents.

We often ended up at the garbage dump. Perhaps it was just a quiet spot to park, but we could have stopped at any of the parking lots or side streets along the way.
Why didn't the dump smell?
I wondered. A mountain of trash lay buried before us, and I could not smell one rotten egg, one container of sour milk.

Don crunched nacho after nacho, the incinerator's vaporous flame flickering from the torch at the top of the dump. I slurped my soda. All that lay beneath smoldered. Invisible gas rose up through the torch and burned blue as water.

SOME MEMBERS of Team Destructo and I started going to a porno shop/strip club off the Long Island Expressway called Sin-derella's. T.J. knew some older guys, and they made us all fake IDs, though we probably didn't need them. Sin-derella's didn't seem to follow many rules.

"Well, well," the skinny redheaded bouncer said, bending our IDs. "You boys are from Northport. Gotta come all the way out to Commack for some good smut."

We laughed, but the man didn't. He nodded a few times.

"Whack booths in the back, fellas."

We walked past the racks of video tapes and around the glass cases filled with dildos. We walked through the strings of beads hanging in the doorway to a large room with three wooden structures, almost like huts, painted black and edged in red neon. In the corner: an ATM with a five-dollar processing fee and a change machine, the same kind of machine I used at arcades when I was younger, except this one turned twenties into singles. The room was black save for red neon. Men circled the huts, featureless. We hesitated in the entrance.

"Fuck it," we said, with Jack Daniels on our breath, and we took out our wallets.

The huts had five entrances. One was locked from the inside. The others were covered with black curtains. Behind each curtain was a small room and a small window, shades drawn. Beneath the window was a dollar bill slot, like the kind found in a vending machine. George Washington's profile, green arrows showing how to insert the money. I stuck out my single, and the machine slurped it up.

The shade rolled open, revealing a young woman standing in a small, softly-lit room. At first, it seemed like I'd caught her backstage, an actress adjusting her costume, tightening her pink leather boots, then shifting her breasts within a black corset. I wondered if there was some sort of signal, something only she could see or hear, alerting her to my presence. Perhaps the signal was broken. She looked at me and smiled, puffed her cheeks in a long exhale. Biting a blood-red fingernail, she moved closer, each step emanating from her hips. I smelled her perfume through the glass.

We stared. She leaned against the glass, looking me up and down, then brought her eyes back to mine. I couldn't judge her expression, wasn't sure where it came from or what it meant. I almost wondered if the window was not a window at all, but a trick mirror, and she was not looking at me but seducing her reflection, attempting to surprise her image with sudden movements. Her eyes fell back in line with my own. She waited. She shrugged. She pointed down with two fingers.

I took out a wrinkled dollar from my pocket and stuffed it through the slot. The carpet at her feet was littered with crumpled green paper.

She smiled, and I understood better where her smile came from. She pressed herself against the glass. Peeled off one shoulder strap, then the other. Stuck a middle finger in her mouth, up to the first knuckle, then glided her fingernail down her chin, her neck, over her corset, her stomach—beyond the window frame.

I rose onto the tips of my toes.

A light above my window began to flash; the shade started to fall. She leaned over, lowering her head with the shade and I did the same, mimicking her movements. Lower. Lower. Her face shadowed; only her hand, fingers waving. The last face I saw was not hers, but the man's across the hut, in his room, staring through his window, dangling a dollar through the slot.

We had cased the joint for weeks. Slowly driving by after a movie, down the Expressway's dark service road. If we were feeling ballsy, maybe a loop through the gravel parking lot, hoping to glimpse a dancer strutting to her car and driving home totally naked.

"They're all fucking whores, dude," T.J. said.

We nodded, knowing that this was probably true and understanding, with utmost certainty, that conversations with T.J. were often one comment away from a fight.

Jim sat in the back, his short pants even shorter when sitting, revealing the length of his white tube socks. I was driving.

A man dressed in black save for chrome sparkling on his motorcycle boots walked out the front doors, yelling into his cell phone. He chewed a thick cigar. Waited. Reached into his pants, adjusted himself, then plucked the cigar from his teeth and resumed yelling. He looked around the parking lot.

"Let's go, guys," Jim said.

"Oh my god," T.J. said. "That guy is cool as shit."

I was in between Jim and T.J., compelled to balance the scale, appease everyone. I wasn't macho. I wasn't a geek. I was on the fence, that vast border between short pants and motorcycle boots.

I know I forced Jim to come to Sin-derella's. T.J. would've gone alone, if he hadn't lost his license for speeding. Something about Jim—his golden identity bracelet, white Nike sneakers, over-sized t-shirt exclaiming his first-drummer position in the marching band made Sin-derella's a little less intimidating.

On the surface, I was cooler than Jim. But I knew he had more confidence than I did. He'd strut through Sin-derella's in his short pants and bright sneakers, talking like Al Bundy from
Married...with Children.
"Check out the gazongas on her!" I'd turn red and walk away, while he stood there with a wide, goofy grin.

He was a spaz. We'd throw him into bushes or peg him in the head with tennis balls. No matter what we did, no matter how mad he got, he'd always come back for more. In a group, I'd pound on Jim just as hard as the rest of the guys. But when we were alone, I didn't. We'd talk. Sometimes he'd mention his father, how he took off when Jim was in elementary school. Jim told me he felt weird when his mother's boyfriend started sleeping over. I'd listen for as long as he needed, or at least until another friend came over.

Jim racked up thirty dollars in ATM processing fees. In the dark room, among the huts edged in neon, he returned again and again to the same window behind the same black curtain. T.J. and I smoked cigarettes, wondering what was so special about Jim's girl. We snuck up behind the black curtain, the music concealing our footsteps, and peeked in. We saw a woman's arched back, yellowed bruises along her spine. Jim pressed his face against the tip slot, moving his mouth. For a moment, we thought—no, they couldn't be. Jim pressed his palm against the glass. The song broke.

"...and that's kind of where I'm at these days," Jim said. The stripper nodded her head. The light above the window began to flash. Jim slipped a single through the slot. The shade came down.

"You're a fucking pussy, you know that?" T.J. said.

"Fuck you, guys! How long you been there?"

I shrugged. Neutral.

"Long enough to know you're a pussy. She's not your therapist, you idiot."

Jim held his arms out and looked around the dark room. "I don't see a sign anywhere. Do you, Anthony? Do you see a sign that says I can't talk to them?"

I laughed, but no one could hear it over the music.

"You
need a fucking sign. No joke," T.J. said.

"Whatever. Can we just go?"

"No way. Gotta hit Club Inferno."

With this I was clearly in agreement.

"It's too bright in there," Jim said. "Feels creepy."

T.J. laughed and looked at me. "Listen to him. Creepy."

We turned and left Jim standing alone in the dark room.

New York law stated that if your dancers were totally nude, you couldn't serve alcohol. I wasn't sure what difference a G-string made but apparently the penalties for noncompliance were high. Some clubs navigated around alcohol restrictions by serving juice and allowing customers to bring their own booze. Men in lumpy coats would belly up to the stage, wave dollars in one hand, and with the other, pour nips ofvodka into their cranberry juice.

A gorilla-necked bouncer encased in a white STAFF t-shirt guarded the entrance to Club Inferno. He bent and twisted my ID, waved it beneath a black light. He looked at me and smirked, then let me pass. Two drink tickets were included with the ten dollar cover charge, and the bouncer peeled them offfrom a giant spool; the same tickets Chuck E. Cheese used to load into Skee-Ball machines. I followed T.J. through the entrance and over to the bar, ripped off one of the tickets and redeemed it for a tall glass of orange juice. As we were about to head deeper into the club, we turned to see Jim jogging toward us, his socks glowing in black light.

The long runway, the "thrust stage," was wide at the base with a golden pole in the center. A group of Asian men in suits lined one side. A blonde woman crawled toward them, stopped, then slowly arched her back. They leaned against the stage, whispering to each other. One younger Asian man stood away from the stage. A big bronzed man with spiky blonde hair walked up to the young man and slapped him on the back. "Get your ass ringside!" he shouted. "This is your last chance!" The young man grinned like a child approaching an ice cream truck.

She slid off the pole, slinked over to the man, put his dollar between her breasts, grabbed his face and rubbed it against her. The men in suits leaned closer to the stage. The woman laughed. When she finished with the young man, she released his face, and he stepped back into his group of friends, shaking his head and fixing his messy hair with his fingers.

Once we all had our juice, we walked toward the stage and took a seat at one of the tables far away from the loud group. From there, I saw another section of the club, a balcony overlooking the stage. A row of leather chairs faced the wall, each one containing a naked woman—Asian, black, white; big breasted, small breasted; rail-thin, pleasantly-plump. They ground themselves into their customers. Only the back of each man's head was visible: bald spots like eggs in a carton.

We sipped our juice. Whispered. Jim and I giggled. T.J. stared at the stage. The blonde was replaced by a brunette. She leaned over the railing and shouted to the DJ.

"Okay, fellas. We got Misty coming to the stage right now. Come on, give it up!"

The next song was so loud it drowned the men's cheers; their open mouths and wide eyes exclaimed nothing but the club remix of Shaggy's "It Wasn't Me," a song that begins with a man asking his friend how to hide his affair from his wife, then kicks into pulsating drum machines and synthesizers. Misty strutted down the stage, popping her hips to the bass. Her small hard nipples, visible through a white sheer bra, were like pink rocks.

"Turkey's done," T.J. whispered.

At the tip of the stage, she dropped into a spread-legged squat, slowly undulating her spine as she rose and rose. Flicked her head left, right, whipping her hair, obscuring her face. Back up the runway, strands of hair clinging to her fiery lip gloss, she kicked one leg high in the air and then rested her shoe's sharp heel on the pole. Rocked her body up, down. Her heel slid down the pole, guiding her split to the stage; then she bounced several times, head thrown back, eyes closed.

The bronzed man strutted up to the stage, reached into his hip pocket and tossed a wad of singles in the air, at least fifty dollars worth. We smirked and watched the singles rain, draping her thighs, her breasts, her forehead. The man walked back to his empty table. The Asian group went wild; the young man, like a pro, pumped his fist in the air. Misty writhed on stage, stuffing dollars into her bra, her G-string, her boots. An older black man slowly leaned over the stage, dangling a dollar above her closed eyes. She didn't take it; her chest heaved, her body spent. Then her eyes opened, and the single charmed her head up, up, up until she clenched the bill between her teeth and ripped it from his hands. He watched her, rubbing his chin. The entire room stared at Misty, everyone nodding as Shaggy told us to imagine banging her on the bathroom floor.

As the song faded, she collected the rest of her singles into a pile, scooped them up, and trotted offstage.

"Give. It. Up!"

Misty returned to the club with a red boa wrapped around her neck, draped over her bare breasts. She weaved through the cocktail tables, easing herself between chairs, leaning in to run a red fingernail down a man's cheek. Nobody paid attention to the flat Asian girl on stage.

Misty headed toward us. Our sweaty glasses of orange juice stood in tiny puddles. She motioned to an empty chair and sat beside me.

"How you fellas doin' tonight?"

T.J. reached across the table and put his hand on top of hers. "Real good, sweetheart. Real good." My face burned. Jim covered his mouth.

She leaned back in her chair and nodded several times, as if bopping to a tune in her head. "That's good, baby. Got plans for the evening?"

I smiled and took several quick sips. I didn't want to stare. I didn't want to be rude. I didn't want to miss a thing.

"Lookin' at it, sista."

Misty nodded again and flipped the boa around her neck. She looked older up close and smelled like baby powder. She crossed her bare legs and rubbed the top of her thighs.

"Chilly in here, right?" Jim said. T.J. shot him a look.

She laughed. "Yeah it is. Always fucking freezing."

"Need something to warm you up?" T.J. asked.

"Depends what you had in mind."

I glanced at our reflection in the mirror.