The Wilderness Years - No Cover pt. 1

The first time i was ever in a strip club i was 17, an all nude place near San Diego called Les Girls, it served no liquor, my friend who had hooked me up with this trip (for scraping and painting his parents house) and i would drive down from Orange County near Irvine in our host's brown Lincoln Town Car with a cooler of Corona in the backseat and blasting Ice-T's Rhyme Pays on the tape deck, the place played porno on the walls and was a fucking dive located on one of those shitty city blocks i would come to know so well, the first time we went our host took us, an older gentleman who wrote computer code (this being 1988) had given us each a 20 for our first private dance, i can remember standing in the dimly lit hallway between the stage area and the private rooms, a bright light shining out of from the teller's booth where a girl gave you change, i was standing and holding my 20 in my hand like Ohio's finest rube just come out to the really big city, it was in this hallway where Goldie, not her Christian name but a stage name i remember damn near 30 years later, all six strawberry blond feet of her, proceeded to pin me against the wall with her ass and started grinding on me, she then asks me if i was looking for a private dance? to this day it is still hands down the best sales pitch i've ever had the pleasure of being the mark of, but before i could say sold my friend is practically begging her to take his money and she plucks it from his one hand, then takes his other and leads him back towards the private rooms...

Now i can attest to the fact that up to that point Goldie had not been my first choice, there was a blue-eyed brunette working that day and if there is one thing i am just a fucking sap for it is brunettes with blue or green eyes, not that i've ever discriminated but that combination fucking buckles the knees, and so instead of taking sloppy dance seconds i sought out the brunette and got my dance from her... when it was done i took my seat back at the stage and about 10 minutes later Goldie was back, she sneered at me as she dropped her bra in my lap and then worked the room, i waited anxiously with my stack of George Washingtons and by the time she got in front of me she was naked and grinning at me as she lay on her back propped on her elbows, she swung herself around onto all fours and suddenly her long hair was draped over me and her face was an inch from mine, she smelled like stripper, like a wonderfully cheap and fruity body spray, she whispered that she still needed to give me my private show and i mumbled yeah and then she flung her hair back and moved on to the next guy...

About the time i began to take an interest in the female form my dear mother made my old man sell his porn stash, and a fine fucking stash it was, mainly Penthouse and Hustler circa early to mid 70's to the early 80's, the day of the garage sale she had to put up some more signs that morning and her last words to me were that she knew how many and the exact order of those magazines in the garage and i best not touch them, i remember staring at the entry door and breaking out into a sweat i wanted to look at them so bad, it was akin to leaving a rock in front of an addict and telling him not to touch it, but i didn't, still i was pervert or just a normal teenage boy and so imagine the look on my mug as i sat in this place, a few scant years later, while naked women danced around me at the tender age of 17 1/2, (a side note: after the trip i sat at the kitchen table one afternoon and wrote down all the places i went and shit i did in Southern Cal and train wreck trip to Vegas, including all my sojourns to Les Girls which amounted to more than a few, a lot more in the few weeks i was out there, i then left the pages on the table where my mother found and read them, i can still see the smirk on my old man's face as he told me the news, your mother enjoyed reading about your travels son, there was that light dawning on marble head moment and then he handed me the pages, you might want to hide these... or burn them, he said in his stoic way, and then a smile crept across his face as he walked away...

And so she came off stage and i made my way back to the hallway with my own 20 this time and once again she pinned me to the wall with that glorious ass, there was a moment when i thought i might run out the door but in what was becoming a more common theme in my wayward youth i decided to see what would happen next, and so she lay down on a bed and i sat in a chair and she began dancing, the music was pumped in from the stage area and since it wasn't deafening we talked, what i else could i do? i tried to distract myself from the fact there was naked 23 year old woman in front of me, it didn't work and like any teenage kid i tried to steal glances, Goldie knew, and when it was finished i got another one, what did you expect from our young mark? i'm sure the smart money wasn't getting put on the Ohio Rube but then the second dance ended and i got up to go and she stopped me, she smiled and said sit down this one's on me, by the time that dance had ended she had given me her phone number and real name and work schedule and what days she was off and best to call, i don't remember what we talked about, she seemed to like my innocence, Christ i was naive as fuck and maybe she knew it, when she asked how old i was i calmly said 20, she told me she was 23, i told her i was here looking at colleges, she told me she grew up here, she was tall with a pointed face and her front teeth were slightly crooked, by the time i came rolling out and back into the club it had been over an hour, my friend and our host looked at me, the host grinning and my friend gobsmacked when i told them what happened, i think they thought i was bullshitting, i produced the number and showed them, still wide-eyed at what had transpired, my host laughed over his shoulder as i rode in the backseat, that number's real kid you're my hero... a few days later after a couple few beers i called... and it was...

One might be asking what the fuck is he on about now? what's he doing? what happened with Goldie?  and i would reply that i'm providing background, a point of reference so to speak, this suburban teenage kid had always been fascinated and drawn to the seedy and now as a grown man or at least appearing like a grown man though still feeling like a kid, had moved to a seedy neighborhood, to run what we'll politely call an illegal start up business, and now discovers that he lives just a half a block from two g-string and pasty strip clubs, one to the left and one to the right, now i'm not gonna lie and declare some sort of noble intentions when i began patronizing the places, i wanted to look at girls and pass the time, unwind a bit from the gig, i soon realized though that if you're going to delve into the human condition you have to get out and mingle among the humans and this place provided an up close view of the brilliance and malfunction of the lovely world in which i lived... and they both served .25 cent slices of pizza, .35 for pepperoni.. but i'll get to that...