Strip Club Experiences

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 []

9 comments

  1. Have always been hor­ri­fied by those places.

    I’m like that com­ic who said, well first you might look all inter­est­ed, and then you start won­der­ing, Does she make mon­ey???? Why’s she work­ing here? Does she have a kid?.…??? and you’d just come right straight down.

    • I was about to say that most guys brains stop think­ing at “BOOBIES”, but I think I’ve actu­al­ly seen that com­ic before, and I believe he was a male too.

  2. I think going to strip clubs once in a blue moon is fun times. It’s not a place to take too seri­ous­ly, just let loose and enjoy the time with who­ev­er you go there with.

    Laugh at the creepy ones, the ugly ones you can’t believe are strip­pers, enjoy watch­ing the ones that dance well. Sign up to dance for a free t‑shirt, what­ev­er. Oh, the things I do for free t‑shirts. Oh! And DVD play­ers.

    But, I am known to be crazy that way. That’s just me.

    • Exactly…if you don’t take them seri­ous­ly, it’s easy to get past the myr­i­ad of issues asso­ci­at­ed with strip clubs and enjoy your­self. Unfortunately, I don’t think they give free t‑shirts, let alone DVD play­ers, when guys sign up to dance. They’re so sex­ist at strip clubs!

  3. You would total­ly deserve more than T‑shirt!

  4. One time I was in a strip club in Montreal, there were some strip dancers who were real­ly pro­fes­sion­al in their dance, and they real­ly gave it their best. They could have been pro­fes­sion­al dancers. And there were nev­er any Asian strip­pers back in those days.

    The way you want­ed to talk back to the cops reminds me of the time you were caught dri­ving with expired papers. You always sound so anti-estab­lish­ment, which is not how I see you. You guys have some­thing against cops or what :)

    • I find that a lot of peo­ple give cred­it to strip­pers (or the good ones, at least, who put on a show), because it can be quite an acro­bat­ic and phys­i­cal activ­i­ty.

      Perhaps it’s a part of my youth that still leaves me some­what anti-estab­lish­ment, or the fact that I feel like I should­n’t be harassed, because I’m not doing any­thing wrong. It’s the impli­ca­tion that I’m a drug deal­er, or what­not, that I don’t like.

  5. I enjoy going to strip clubs with my guy friends. I always have a good time and it seems often that the women tend to be more at ease when I’m around–they dance a lit­tle clos­er, stay on the stage a bit longer. Maybe they think I will reign the men at the table in if they get out of hand.…who knows? At our local club we have an ama­teur night every week where you can dance to win a prize of $250. No strip­ping is necessary…just get up there and strut your stuff! Audience par­tic­i­pa­tion deter­mines the win­ner and I shout and cheer for every­body who gets up there! Even if they can’t dance you got­ta give them props for hav­ing the guts to do it!

    • I would guess that strip­pers would feel less creeped out if a guy has a girl with him…it’s like an unspo­ken lan­guage between girls that says a guy is okay.

      Hell, for $250, I’d dress up like a woman and get up there!

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