TENNESSEE LAP DANCE

The following was transcribed from an audio recording I dictated to document my road trip in early 2006, West to East coast…

8:00pm – E. Memphis: just drove along the outskirts of Memphis. Saw a gorgeous sunset coming in and as I decided to videotape, the CD player hit on the Grateful Dead’s GOIN’ DOWN THE ROAD FEELIN’ BAD, as appropriate a soundtrack as I have ever stumbled upon. So I filmed during the whole song rolling down the highway with the magnificently resplendent pink, purple and orange sunset in the viewfinder. As I made the loop up and through Memphis, the storm I had been following since breakfast became tangible as it lit up the sky to the East as it bludgeoned its way to Nashville and points beyond.

Wait, just now I saw the Platinum Club’s marquee on my right as I passed an offramp. Shit. I knew it was nearby. I’d stopped here at this well-advertised Gentleman’s Club on my last cross-country drive. Of course, this was my one planned stop for the whole trip this time.

(I take up a few hours later where the tale left off)

I proceed to the next offramp and decide to look for possible hotels. There were tons of them just off the highway so I sat by the road reading the AAA rundowns. I thought if I went to the club for awhile and didn’t get too smashed I’d just drive on East and get as close as I could to Nashville. If, by chance, I had too much fun and didn’t want to drive any farther, at least I’d be just one exit away and would know which hotel and ramp to go to.

So I pulled into a BP station and changed my clothes in the parking lot, putting on slacks and a long-sleeved shirt instead of the old road clothes I had been wearing. Gotta look at least presentable for the ladies at the Club.

I went inside to get a bottle of milk (wanted a frappacino but they didn’t have any in this provincial burg) and asked Lanasha where I could get a good steak. She mentioned the place next door but I’d noticed it was packed.

“How is Tops BBQ, across the street?” I queried.

She loved it, “I eat there almost every day.”

So I crossed the highway and chawed a succulent if simple pulled pork sandwich with a slice of American on a hamburger bun with slaw on the bun and fries. Not on my diet but what the hell. Not bad and cheap. Around $5 with a drink.

Then it was off to try and find the Platinum Club. Took me about 45 minutes of circling around. The exit I’d missed coming East I couldn’t find again in a quite circuitous bundle of turns and reversals. Couldn’t find my way there for the life of me for awhile. Slippery little devil. 30 minutes later, I found it virtually ½ mile from where I started. Ponce de Leon never had such trouble. All I want is a fountain of youth.

At the front desk, I hit the ATM, paid my entrance fee and noticed an 8x10 picture frame on the counter with a beautiful auburn-haired young girl named Dakota featured as “Dancer of the Month”.

I found my night vision once inside the inner sanctum and gauged the right position to get a full view of the stage while having an extra seat close to me for a friendly visitor. Sitting down at a table stage right, I ordered a Heineken (no mixed drinks here) and grokked at the tall blonde woman on stage. Long legs, tattoo’d lower back and right above her g-string in the front. Great, large C, almost D breasts with luscious, large, puffy pink nipples, each with a little barbell thru them. I gave her a couple of dollars.

I soon forgot about her because next up was an incredibly sexy redhead, fair-skinned, petite young lady with a stunning, tight, gymnast’s body (not the veiny weight-trainer type, more naturally toned, i.e. young) with a simply spectacular, small but round ass that I couldn’t take my eyes off of. She had the tiniest little titties and small, perky, hard rosy nipples. Her face was the heart-breaker, very much like a more classically pretty KT, my past young muse from a few years back. Wow.

I walked up while she was still on stage and tipped her towards the end of her 2nd dance and said, “Come see me when you’re done.” I wasn’t about to let this one latch onto another drooling patron before I got a chance to spend some, uh, face time with her.

When the music stopped she came right off of the stage and over to me, forgoing the usual walk to the rear curtain, disappearing backstage to freshen up and have a smoke and a drink before sauntering out to mingle with the money.

“Are you ready for a VIP?” “Sure,” I said, trying not to act insanely eager. Generally, I am not at all inclined to take up with a lady who cuts to the chase and gives no small talk before the VIP pitch. But since I’d made the first move and she knew I was ready, she did just that and I leapt.

Since I’d been here before two years ago I knew the drill. I also know that the girls here make up their own prices for VIP dances.

She took my hand and walked me back to one of the small alcoves off of the main floor. No doors, so a handful of people in the main room outside, if positioned in just the right seats, can watch what goes on in the private rooms as can the bouncers and waitresses who walk by occasionally, so nothing too out of control goes on. But once inside you forget all of that. There are other treats to concentrate on.

We sat down on the couch and the music outside from the stage is loud and pumpin’. This was Dakota. Very sweet and open and sexy. We talk until the next song starts. “What are your rules?” I ask before things progress.

“My only rules are that I insist you touch me continuously and that you can touch me everywhere but here,” and she pats her crotch and pulls out her G string to show me her precious little pussy. As most clubs on the east and west coast don't allow for any touching unless you pay the big "champagne suite" fees, this was tres cool. I told her when I was there before I had noticed that the girls made their own prices. She said basically, it is $40 a song, 3 for $100 and tips if you so desire.

“I finally figured out what Tips means, do you know,” she says playfully. “It means ‘To Insure Priority Service’”. We both giggled at her scripted cuteness. Not something you get everyday in these joints.

We agree to three dances to start. Luckily they are long songs. She is naked except for the tiniest G string. A tattoo of her real name Jennifer under her hair on her neck. A small tattoo on her lower stomach (flat, tight, w/ little jeweled ring). I don’t know what the tattoo was because every time she was pointing it in my direction I was looking at her totally shaved, thin-lipped beautiful pussy that she would expose to me, pulling her g string away for a few brief moments. Sometimes she slid finger and nail softly, slowly over her moist clit. My heart was racing trying to keep up with the pulsing organ a bit further south.

She is ungodly sexy and really responsive to any movement I might make, which is minimal…my hands glide over her and she leans into them, I pinch her nipples softly and she whispers, “That’s right” in my ear.

She turns her ass to me, grinding her warm crotch against my hardness. I rarely get real hard for long in these places, too much strangeness and distraction. For me, it is usually about getting all of the visual and mental playthings and then taking the memory home with me where I can really let the imagination fly for the next few months but this petite dynamo really shook me.

Not that being virtually celibate for two years after the best sex in my life is any reason why I might be excited by this but you do the math.

I kneaded her small, tight fleshy ass with my hands and softly ran my thumb down the edge of her butt crack spreading her cheeks. I throbbed like a lion jumping for an antelope shank…sorry, whew…She turned to me and put her hand on my shoulders, pushing herself up until her nipples we inches from my lips, her amber locks hung down around my face and she moved closer and put her nipple against my open lips. I licked it into my mouth for a quick suck and she slowly pulled away, popping it out of my mouth. She slid down to the floor and bowed her neck at my crotch, rubbing my hard cock and balls with the back of her head through my pants, shifting them from side to side with the movement of her head…I wanted nothing but for her to slide my hardness out of my pants and into her mane of luxurious soft hair and then into her curvy lips…at that moment, I thought of the picture I have of my cock in Erin’s hand against her face and I almost shot right there. That would be a first for me in a club. But, Dakota’s tongue up my stomach to my exposed nipple pulled me back into the present moment.

The dances here are so much more touchy than any other joint I’ve been in. I’m glad I don’t live in Memphis, I’d be in big trouble and incredibly broke. She came up with her lips within an inch of mine, stared me in the eyes and whispered, “I get the impression that you are a booty man.”

How she knows that I haven’t a clue (was I purring whenever she pointed that thing at me?) but I doth protest not. She turns and rides me reverse cowgirl style and with her hands slids mine from her upper thighs to her ass, pointed right at me. In a couple of minutes she slids up with her perfect asshole three inches from my face. I kiss her cheeks and her lips kiss up and down my legs. Eventually, the songs are over…I’m warm, tingling.

She says, “We’re supposed to charge just to sit with you between dances but I don’t if the guys are cool.” Now, I’ve never heard THAT one but it is inventive and smart. Usually the girls either just stay and hang if there has been any chemistry and they think they’ll get more dough out of you. She sat for over 30 minutes. We talked about the other two girls I’d had dances with two years ago: Pearl, the 19-year-old girlfriend of the owner, “She’s not here anymore.” And Lacy (whose name I didn’t know), the older woman who propositioned me drunkenly to take her back to the hotel after her shift for $300 for a shower and blow-job etc. No thanks. She was very scary, drunk, Southern slurring girl. “She was fired last week for the same shit. You can’t do that. I had a guy offer me $500 to go back to his hotel and I told him, I don’t do that and that is solicitation so if you don’t want me to call the cops you’ll desist.”

“It’s not solicitation if you don’t charge him.”

“Ha, I sure didn’t suggest that.”

Funny. She said she is studying to be a meteorologist, wants a weather job in a big city but is majoring in Geology so she can teach high school. I said, “If my high school teachers looked like you I’d have flunked out of everything.”
We danced three more dances even more exciting than the previous and I tipped her $50.

I was hooked. I was contemplating even another round as I watched her take her next turns on the stage. Then, I realized that I couldn’t go to the ATM for more bread because I couldn’t find my Debit card. SHIT. I had no recollection of where I last used it (it would’ve had to have been gas but I get gas 5 times a day on the road and had no idea where I did it last…).

I went outside to search my packed car and nothing. Back inside, she had the DJ grab a flashlight and look around my seat where I’d been before we hit the lap dance room. I really didn’t think that I’d lost it here but I wanted to be sure. Not a good place to lose a credit card.

When I went back in and told her I had to go look at the gas station I was last at, I found a receipt in my wallet for a station in Memphis that I had no recollection of stopping at so I figured it had to have been where I lost it.
She said, “If you don’t find it, come back. You can stay with me tonight. No solicition, no charge.”

“No sex?,” I said.

“I didn’t say that did I,” was her reply accompanied by a little curve of her lips at the corner.

“You don’t know how great that sounds.”

“Yes, I do,” she whispers in my ear.

“Only one problem, the woman back East I told you I was heading to see? I’m saving myself for her.” Obviously, the dumbest decision of my life.

“You’re serious?”

“Yeah, it’s been two years and you tonight is as close as I have ever come to diverging from that path.”

“Wish I had a guy like you.” I was of course, snickering a bit under my breath thinking, “I wish Erin could see it that way.”

Erin had told me long ago that if I was interested in going to strip clubs to get it out of my system before we ever become exclusive. More rules.

Truthfully, I love looking at naked women, love touching them and when this is the only outlet I have for it, it is worth every penny.

When I was going to clubs a lot while I was married, my wife didn’t know how often I went but she knew I went. I’m sure it must’ve bothered her but she knew I wasn’t doing anything dangerous. She had been to the clubs with me and would be more pissed about the money than the women. Granted, we weren’t having much sex much less any flirtation or anything and I was looking for an outlet so as not to bother her all the time. And I never had sex or head or anything in all those visits. A coupl eof drinks, a coupoe of dances and lots of flirting with beautiful, albeit naked women.

So I went back to the Circle K where the gas receipt was from and I did remember that I’d rushed out of there when a homeless woman headed toward me asking for money and I must’ve dropped my card but I didn’t see it. I went inside with one last hope and when I got to the register, the girl had it sitting right there. “Someone turned it in not 10 minutes ago.”

Lucky me. So I got on the road at midnight and drove East on I-40 figuring I’d drive a couple of hours and find a place to stay. Get closer to Nashville so I could get home in time for my big date in NYC with Erin. Of course, I jerked off twice by the light of my radar detector between Memphis and Nashville wishing I'd had the balls to go back and take Dakota up on her offer. But I was in love with Erin and somehow that was all that mattered. Ah, the good life.

MISTRESS MARY QUITE CONTRARY

Mistress Mary quite contrary / How does my hard-on grow?
Quite, handily thank you / as your smile does show.

~

And she is indeed, quite contrary. But then again, aren’t we all?

My Sexless 1960s...

Not exactly a love-in, my 1960s. But, being born in 1956, I guess that was acceptable since I was just a fledgling pervert gradually sniffing around the perversion tree. Didn’t know much about anything sexy as a kid. It just wasn’t around in the culture. Too young. Too sheltered.

Remember, we were still ensconced in the days of TV couples in separate beds.

I do recall my Mom, making Dad draw a “dickie” of sorts, no, not a penis, but a turtleneck shirtfront to cover the cleavage of a model pictured on the front of a Dukes of Dixieland or a Firehouse Five +2 LP. I remember seeing it before she made him censor it and being completely enthralled. Probably a good move, Mom.

The model was wearing a straw hat and a striped man’s dress shirt opened to the waist and tight Capris. No nipples showing, only cleavage, but WOW, it was something. I also recall that my Dad, who had been a vice cop, had a stack of four or five LPs in the hall closet that they had confiscated. They were up on a high shelf with the old Deanna Durbin albums of 78s that he didn’t play anymore. They were “Stag Party” records (not only the genre but the label, I believe). Off-color humor that I really didn't get when I snuck them down and listened to them...nothing you don’t hear on the Comedy Channel these days or even on network TV for that matter. Somebody named Bert Henry and I think there was even one by Redd Foxx and this was years before "Sanford & Son".

I remember going with Mom, my grandma, my six-year-old brother, and my two cousins who were my age (nine years old) to see the movie “The Great Race” at the El Rey Theater in Alhambra and there is a scene when Natalie Wood comes out of the water soaking wet in her clingy, white, Victorian bloomers thing and a kid yelled out “A-HA, look at de booozums”. That cracked us up and of course to this day when the four of us are around each other we crack up when someone says this.

Also when I was ten and we went to see “Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid” and my brother created a fuss because he didn’t want to go. “You and Dad just want to see it because it’s dirty.”

What the hell was he talking about? I found out, when Katherine Ross opened her nightgown for Redford, all backlit and whatnot. Though we didn’t really see anything, my, how I wanted to. The funny thing was that after all of his complaining, it was the other picture on the bill was the "dirty" one (ah, remember when ALL movies were double bills?). The first feature was “Marlowe” with James Garner and when the scene with a stripper twirling her pasty tassels came on, my brother high-tailed it up the aisle “to the bathroom”. Mom told me to follow him, which pissed me off so I walked backwards up the aisle to not miss the scene. I’m no fool. And who was at the top of the aisle peeping through the curtains but my seven-year-old little brother. Always a step ahead of the rest of us, even then.

Other titillating childhood memories that pop up are the distinct memory of the first breasts I ever saw…my older cousin Michelle, who I just loved – “My Michelle” I used to call her.

She was babysitting us once and we were all bouncing and wrestling on my folks' bed and I remember she was wearing a yellow, gauzy nightgown. At one point, she bent over to tickle me (oh, how I loved her wild laugh) and I could see down her neckline at her bare breasts. Small handfuls, pink tipped in the soft light filtering through the fabric. I wasn't sure why, but I had to try to catch another fleeting glimpse. I’ll never forget it though I wasn’t even sure why that was interesting to me at the time. It was probably because I didn’t have any myself.

My family didn't run around naked so the one time I remember seeing my mom's boobs stands out. She was taking a bath and my Dad brought me in to say goodnight. Also I remember seeing my Dad's penis just once. He was standing shaving his face and I walked in accidentally. I remember thinking it was huge and I realize now that it was soft and average and looked pretty much like mine does now. At the time, I was completely amazed and jealous. I was ten. I'm sure I took showers with him when I was really little but I don't have any recollection of that.

I also remember walking in Hollywood with my family somewhere near Grauman’s Chinese Theater, the greatest of the Hollywood movie palaces, and I recall seeing a “pretty woman” with what looked like a mustache. Ah, the joys of growing up in Southern California; if it’s not Ricky Nelson and his pregnant wife Chris at Denny’s, it’s cross-dressers on Sunset Blvd.

I’d had big crushes in grade school on Sage N. in 3rd grade, Mrs. Weinholdt’s class – that girl could play a flutophone...until she miraculously developed a foreign accent overnight, which spooked me. She eventually married a good childhood friend of ours.

In the 4th and 5th grade, it was Alise P. who was a doll, thin, sporty and blond and I was way too shy to ever approach her (she eventually married a wild neighbor of mine three years older than us and had about a million kids – whew, dodged that bullet).

Out of my reach at this time was Liz McF who was wild, always had boys after her and a bit too aggressive (i.e. advanced) for me. One of the first “smokers” then “stoners” a few years later, she hung with a wilder crowd earlier than most of us. But, she had dimples. The first in my long line of attraction to dimpled girls. I wonder if that’s what drew me to Charlene, my ex-wife…yes, I've had a long proclivity for dimples. Unrequited dimple fixation that needed to be quenched.

So, these are the pre-pubescent, roots of my teen angst. I was a bit too young for the swingin’ ‘60s. Missed all of that free love and most of that open lifestyle experimentation…okay, so I made up for lost time a bit in the late 70s and in my late 40s but those are two other bags of worms…I sure absorbed the concept and influence of the freedom ethos through the media and culture though…the music and even advertising became more sexy and women and teens had more freedom than ever before…we thought we could actually speak our minds…anyway, I’m sidetracked, back to the sex stuff….

In 7th grade, I remember being on the lawn in the quad at lunch and hearing Franny tell us that a girl's privates were called "Virginia". He later spent some time in prison, coincidence?...I think not. He was immediately corrected by one of the jocks who had older sisters and brother, "No, you idiot, it's "virGIna (sic)." The female mystery organ had come up in a conversation about Lucy H, who it was rumored had been caught in the girls’ bathroom counting her pubic hair. She wasn't in there very long.

I also recall missing classes while I waited for my uncontrollable hard-on to die down as I sat in the library, praying that no one would notice. Oh, the glory days of hourly spontaneous erections. I like to say now that I was constantly infatuated with a breeze. Didn't take much.

We spent a whole lot of time trying to “catch a beaver”, i.e. see girls' panties as they sat with their legs open. Gary P. was such a hawk-eye that he claimed to have x-ray vision and could tell what color panties a girl was wearing before he caught a real glimpse. He even named everyone’s dick a funny nickname. Somehow I don’t remember mine, though I think I was Rod. I recall there was a Mortimer (Lenny R, I think) and Garry C’s was Flip because he has a different turn on the end from his circumcision scar. Now, Gary P's real claim to fame was that he claimed to have seen our hot (or at least fairly young) Social Studies teacher’s beaver. He claimed Miss Garrett sported, “a puffer”. As did Cathy R. For you, with little experience on the beaver trail, this refers to girls with MAJOR hair down there. Remember, these were the days before bikini waxing and landing strips and the like. So to be "a puffer" you had to have some intense forestation going on.

The thing about going to our particular Junior High was that it brought together kids from, not only the three elementary schools in the district, but the Catholic school as well. So there was a huge influx of cute girls who you somehow felt you might have a chance with since they didn’t know you like the girls you’d spent the last six years being ignored by. There were kids whose names you had heard over the years from students who transferred into your school or through their delinquency legends. There were also kids who you had played Little League with or gone to church with. It was a time of budding friendships and suddenly new cliques and alliances were heating up. Somehow, many of the kids who just 3 months before had been your good friends would be off in their own new worlds and just a passing glance for the rest of your days in school.

Then there was the trauma of not only having lots of new and exciting girls to drool over but they were freshly bursting at the seams. Where had all the skinny, flat-chested girls gone? You know, those silly, frivolous, foursquare and jacks playing girls who we'd pick on in class and ignore the rest of the time?

Someone had injected them with curves and height and funny smiles that didn’t mean what they used to. And they dressed better. The light shone through their hair much more enticingly. They seemed to walk in slow motion across the schoolyard with their books pressed against them where you somehow instantly realized that you wanted your hands to be. They giggled incessantly, their heads swirling around to look over their shoulders at…no, not us, but the older 8th grade boys.

These boys were the bane of my existence. All tough and smiling and confident, knowing something we were sure we needed to know. We hadn’t the vaguest idea of what they knew but we were ready to find out. My biggest trauma is that I was completely infatuated with Donna B., one of these girls from outside my particular grade school, i.e. my previous world.

Donna was beautiful, with wavy, long, blond hair and she wore neckbands, and vests (I remember distinctly a navy blue sweater-vest and a long sleeve yellow dress shirt underneath with hip-hugger jeans)...a very cool, stylish not hippie but hip-type thing at the time. She never gave me the time of day. Oh, the occasional smile and a couple of brief fleeting conversations. But I always tried to sit a the lunch table with her friends and sit across from her so I could be just one or two people away from her.

I remember that the day we were having our class photos taken, I was wearing a ludicrous outfit that my good-hearted Mom had put together for me to wear. I was a 7th grader; a nobody and in my yellow shirt, sweater vest, yellow socks and pants, I DID look like a banana. What was my mother thinking? Donna's older brother Dick (appropriately), decided that he'd point that fact out as I stood next to the goddess that was his sister. Nice.

They had dances at school but I never went to one. No reason to. There was no one I deemed approachable and what did I know about dancing? All the girls I was friends with (a couple who would speak to me for more than a sentence or two, had boyfriends). I did go to my first party and drank my first (half of a) beer, which I walked around with all night not wanting to get drunk but wanting to be seen with a beer. It was in a house on Emperor by the school and I walked there with my friend Gus. There was a band set up in the kitchen that played “Aqualung” by Jethro Tull and Allman Brothers tunes.

Thus began a harrowing year that would repeat this same sickening pattern when we arrived as freshman to high school two years later.

But, in between, there was the New World: 8th grade - 1970-71.

RUMI, I AIN’T (HERE I AM)

Multiple times
Every day
Since I’ve met you
More so of late
I picture
Imagine
Visualize
Feel my cock
The cock I’ve spent a lifetime running from
Obsessing over
Clinging to
Afraid of
The cock you’ve gripped
Tightly in your small hands
Fitting, like no other
The cock you have stroked and caressed
Smiled at lovingly,
I have pictured it
Up to the hilt
Balls deep
Stopping
Diving into that moment between thrusting movement
Inside you
Your tightness
Enveloping
Blood of your passion
Engorged around my tumescence
As I flex over
And over
Again
Your entire body
Wrapped up
Engaged
Focused
Gripping my towering
Vulnerability
The rooted flesh
Of my manhood
Stopped, as far as I can fathom
Into your body
As your squeeze
Tightly around me
My mind zeroed in on the infinitesimal space
Between our beings
As close as humans get
To being someone else
To truly embracing the us in we
The I in you
The me in be.

Until I do
You must break me
Break me like a wild horse
Whip the fight out of me
Slap the smile from my arrogance
Lick the tears from my fear
Squeeze the pain from my psyche
And I from you
Until the hesitance of our humanity
Shatters
In the bliss
Of our flesh entwined
Our hearts breathing
Timeless
Unfathomable
Floating
Now,
Wrapped
Into
Around
Beginning and ending
Where all begins and ends.

-- S.F. 3/28/08 – for MMMM