The Wilderness Years - Stripper Lessons vol. 1

Sometimes in a story you gotta forgo the strictly chronological, sometimes in a story you gotta use a title to get it started somewhere even though the female lead isn't a stripper, oh she worked at the club but she was the bartender, one of those Rust Belt girls of solid Teutonic stock with a bit of the Isles thrown in, the British Isles that is, when she would walk from one end of the bar to the other none of the guys would be looking towards the stage, we would pause as if admiring a piece of fine art, she was the rarest of women in a place like this, she was beautiful and personable and down to earth, she knew how to work without making her customers feel as if they were being worked, i'd bet she made more than the girls dancing most nights...

Of course our young, dread locked, weed slinger was smitten from the first night he pushed open the door and saw her standing behind the bar smiling, her asymmetrical haircut dyed black and red, it was as if she had walked out of a John Hughes flick, our boy fell in love much to easy back then or what he at least thought was love, i was still in the phase where i was known but not that well known down the bully as they say, i tipped well and was quiet, yeah some of the girls knew my name and knew i could find things and i had begun to help one or two of them out, one in particular but that's a post for another day, once Mel showed up i would wander down and split my time between the bar and the stage, i'm sure some of the dancers were jealous of her, not because i wasn't spending all my time passing out dollars but because alot of guys were spending more time at the bar, tipping Melanie, i made it a point to eavesdrop and listen for her schedule, on her off nights i'd ask the other bartenders when they were working and of course since i was the polite kid they'd run down the whole weeks schedule, i made it a point to come down on those nights, i made it a point to get there early, before the crowd rolled in, the pipe dreams of a low-level lovesick pusher...

For those who've ever been a regular at a strip club you'll know there's a lot of second-rate soap opera shit going on, the girls talk and the regulars talk and the regulars talk shit on each other and the girls talk shit on each other and the girls talk shit on the regulars and the regulars talk shit on the girls and well it's a never ending cycle of human bullshit, i was smart enough to try and stay away from it and i knew some of the older gents who were regulars and some of the metalhead/half-ass biker dudes hanging out weren't my biggest fans though my only crime at this point was tipping well and being polite and quiet, i was usually on my own and on the wind down, Melanie seemed to take a shine to me, not in the she was gonna fuck me sorta way but more in the i wasn't a creepy asshole sorta way, i remember her saying one time that she wondered why i hung out there, said she didn't think i had much problem finding a girl, i smiled and said i didn't really have much trouble in that department, i said i liked hanging out and studying humanity, it was a place of vice with an unwritten set of codes and laws that one either played by or was shunned, i was fascinated by it, she laughed and opened my beer and said, it's never dull when you're around you know that? i most likely blushed...

Of course over the next few months i never saw her anywhere other than tending bar at the strip club, i wasn't stupid enough to believe she had any interest, i was nothing more than a nice guy, it wasn't an original schtick, there was a whole school of thought on the subject, the nice guys who hung out at the strip club, they bought the girls drinks and shied away from the stage but still managed to tip, some heavily, but the "nice" was just an act, the angle was the hope that at some point one of the girls would be attracted to said quality, now and then this set would piss and moan about who the girls were seeing and were always ready to lend a sympathetic ear to the girls when the latest love of their life fucked them over, and while i was polite and "nice" i had still managed to cultivate an "air of mystery" as i was later told by a dancer, at least in the early days, and the early days consisted of the first few years... yes you read that right, where else do you think you can find a handful of half-assed criminals and wanna-be gangsters? a shitty strip club of course, it's where we went to blow the excess dough, at least if we were smart enough to have any , and hopefully not get sucked into the dream of g-strings and  pasties and glitter and stilettos, and i'll admit that was a fine fucking line one had to walk...

So i'd sit at the bar on the slow nights and Melanie and i would talk, what did i really know of her? i knew she was raised by a single mom and didn't have much to do with her dad, who she made sound like a bit of a lovable fuck-up, she and her mom had bounced around, Florida and Georgia for a bit, then north and into the Rust Belt, how she ended up here wasn't an accident, she had left behind an ex-boyfriend and band to get away from her bad habits, figured a place where she didn't know anyone would work, keep her on the straight and narrow, i laughed and mentioned that maybe her current place of employment wasn't the wisest of choices, she smiled... and it didn't take long, one does not have to be a particularly observant when well versed in the habits of a transient hood, Melanie had made some friends... and those friends helped her out, a few weeks later she was gone, she had quit one night, she didn't say anything to anyone, she had lasted maybe four months? she worked out a her last few shifts and then one day was gone... or at least i thought... when she pulled her Houdini there were endless numbers of questions and rumors about her whereabouts, most met with indifferent shrugs from the other bartenders, then one slow Monday night i casually worked her into a conversation, the old bartender was back to cover, she smiled at me and leaned in, she thought you were a character, she's still around, just trying to get her shit together again, you know how that goes... i slowly nodded, yeah i said, i did... (to be cont.)