My friend stands outside the club, underaffected jeans slunk over her body and smoke on the way to her mouth. She looks dubious but sweet and I am happy to see her. My new Rock and Republic shirt is making me look a bit haggish, its green and black too hard for my face. I like it anyway. The parking lot is full of ghetto, boys slinking by in oversize Cadillacs and voices yelling like sharp edges.
"Eater!" someone says, loud but not shouty, and I know instantly he is talking about me. "Go get some mashed potatoes, bread maybe." He's behind me, hanging out of a car and close enough to touch. The skinny of my jeans and tight designer top suddenly embarrass me a little. I'm so thin that a baller is trying to feed me soup.
I laugh a little but ignore him, and my friend and I go into the club. She looks nervous, out of place maybe in all this fuckable flesh because she has buried her own in nondescript. She's 5 feet 9 inches of motherhood-softened bodacious, with strawberry blond hair down to her butt. We'd never attract the same guy, I tell her later, but you could definitely work it if you wanted to. I picture her in '50's dresses and flaring things, her breasts pushed to overflowing and her laugh as thrown back as it always is. I hope for her a little but then relax. She has her husband, and he loves her.
I love checking out the women here. We're at a strip club, where one of my best friends tends bar, and I'm constantly looking over my shoulder at the butter-smooth girls and their black lit bathing suits. Wow, I think, that is a really nice, tidy little cooch. I totally want one of those. My friend reminds me that I am not 21 anymore, and that my own has seen the battering end of two babies' heads. I frown a little but try to give up the worry.
So far my favorite thing about this place is that the women look a bit like me; some of the women anyway. There are thin, small booby girls up there getting paid to twirl on a pole and arch their tiny backs, and this relieves me of some pressure. I have begun to see myself as aged, gross, finished and unwanted over the years, but the skinny strippers strike me as empirical evidence to the contrary. Somebody out there wants my skinny shit, and that is cool with me. One point for hotness and the eventual hope of coupling.
Later, in the bathroom, I see a few of them free of the black lights. There are, in this more honest light, bruises, mosquito bites maybe, ripples where they aren't officially meant to be. There is everydayness all over them, normality and accessibility and comparability, and I realize again what I always have to remember: the women who look polished have to spend time polishing. Whether it's black lights, makeup or boob jobs, the shit takes effort and management.
So it's okay that I don't wake up looking like a fresh little stripper.
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