It’s been a long time since I’ve been to a strip club. The co-workers of my first job, along with the pres­i­dent of the com­pany, were the ones took me to my first. They made it a point to “ini­ti­ate” me when they found out I had never been. I still look back on that mem­ory fondly, because I was so young and green, and they wanted to get me over my inexperience.

But it was never some­thing I did with any fre­quency. You always look at those guys, seat­ing by them­selves at the head of the table with a beer in hand, think­ing, “Is this bet­ter than what you have at home?”

After all, strip clubs are never really about the girls. It’s about being out with your friends, when your par­ents think you’re at a movie1. They’re like con­certs. You could sit at home and lis­ten to a CD with stu­dio qual­ity sound, but there’s some­thing dif­fer­ent about the atmos­phere of a live experience.

It’s easy to grow past the appeal of strip­pers though. There’s no per­son­al­ity there. Even Playboy mod­els have likes and dis­likes. The fur­thest a strip club goes is by say­ing, “Here’s Porsche, and she used to be an air­plane attendant”.

Don’t get me wrong; I love the female fig­ure. But there’s no appeal in a stripper.

Random cops

In the park­ing lot at one strip club, we were wait­ing for the rest of the group to arrive in their cars.

Suddenly, two peo­ple come out of the dark­ness, shin­ing a flash­light in our faces and flash­ing a badge. Turns out they were plain­clothes officers.

“You boys aren’t doing any­thing bad out here? No drug deal­ing? You want to pop the trunk there?” Only the last ques­tion wasn’t a question.

My friend popped the trunk. Aside from a car shade, it was com­pletely empty.

“Look at that”, he said, in a mock­ing tone, as if we weren’t cool enough to be doing any­thing illegal.

I see a piece of tis­sue paper on the ground, and I want to pick it up and say, “See look, just garbage. We’ve got noth­ing”, but I decide to leave well enough alone, think­ing of a les­son I learned when I was a kid…

One time in high school, my friend was smug­gling mag­a­zines out of the school library with­out check­ing them out by hid­ing them in his binder. He would walk through the sen­sors and set them off, then open his bag and move each item in his bag piece­meal through the sen­sor in front of the librar­ian, only he’d do it slightly below the detec­tion area and make her believe it was a false alarm. I was with him one time, and not being privy to his tech­nique, I said, “Let me check your binder for you” to speed up the process. He ignored me, I dropped the point, and he got away, but I almost got him caught.

So the cops get into a van and drive off, and I see another friend bit­ing his nails and shak­ing like a leaf. He’s a big guy, some­one I didn’t think would be afraid of the police, so I ask him what’s wrong. It turns out he had a nick­el­bag in his pocket, and when the cops were dis­tracted with the car trunk, he threw the weed onto the grass, and cov­ered it up with a piece of old tis­sue paper so that he wouldn’t have any­thing drugs on him if they searched us.

And if it weren’t for that one child­hood les­son I learned, I would have picked up that tis­sue paper and got us all in trouble.

Asian strippers

I would never, never seen more guys clam­or­ing, rac­ing up to the stage than when they would announce Asian girls. I never under­stood it. Perhaps it’s because they always seemed to be the most cre­ative in grab­bing bills off the clients.

Blind Caucasian bouncers

Being of a race that gen­er­ally looks young for its age is a double-edged sword. It’s great when you’re older, but it also means that you may get carded well into your 30s for movies, bars, and strip clubs.

One time, we were four Chinese guys. The bouncer asks for ID. Someone pulls out his friend’s dri­vers license who’s a year older (and there­fore, of age). The bouncer looks at it and lets him in, when he looks noth­ing like the pic­ture on the card. Do we all look alike to white people?

Then I hand my dri­vers license to the same bouncer and he starts scru­ti­niz­ing it. Looking at it from dif­fer­ent angles. Scratching the sur­face. After what feels like five min­utes, he even­tu­ally lets me in. And I was the only one with a valid ID.

Toothless washroom attendants

I could never fig­ure this out, but some strip clubs have these tooth­less wash­room atten­dants who would turn on the taps for you, hand you a fresh (I pray) towel, and open the door for you on the way out. You throw a cou­ple extra bucks his way in a lit­tle dish loaded with change.

I always won­dered if the atten­dants were a char­ity case. A home­less per­son they hired to add an extra ser­vice to the cus­tomers. After all, the real mar­gins in strip clubs is in the alco­hol. There’s no cover, just the under­stand­ing that you’ll buy a drink or two.

Foxy Boxing

To keep things inter­est­ing, along with the long held belief that women fight­ing is some­what sexy, cer­tain strip clubs would have two strip­pers fight­ing in their under­wear, and brand it “foxy box­ing”. Unfortunately, the box­ers were often far from dainty. And as it was said in Seinfeld, there are a cou­ple things the human body sim­ply does not look good doing.

  1. Some of them had ring­tones set for their home num­bers, and just the ring would set off a round of teenage spite [↑]