Strippers and Covid: A love story
I wasn’t going to share this story, mainly because it doesn’t cast me in the best of light, for a variety of reasons, and I gotta figure at some point I’m gonna find someone else to date down the line, and when I do, and she finds this post, I’m not sure what I’ll say. But you know what? It’s Mardi Gras day and there’s no fucking Mardi Gras. And that’s not because of the sleet of ice on the ground or the frosty wind in the air, it’s because of that incurable disease known as human stupidity, and I’m all up in my feels about it. And since this story directly relates to all the above, more or less, and because I just don’t care anymore, I’m gonna share the story. Enjoy.
We begin where most stories about stupidity begin, with Tinder. Yes, there I am, in bed on a cold fall morning on my phone frantically swiping left and right like a man dying of a certain kind of thirst. Can you picture it? Good. (Just don’t picture it too well or then we’ll all get depressed.)
Anyway, it’s late November, when the infection rate in the city is high and climbing higher, the wind chill is low and sinking lower, and my match rate on Tinder is damn near zero and only getting worse. But then, on that cold morning, still in bed, I match with someone. Not just anyone, mind you, but a “hot girl”. Now when I say “hot girl”, I don’t mean that I find her attractive, although I do, nor do I mean that she’s objectively attractive, although she is. I mean that of the four photos she’s put in her profile, all of them scream “I’m a hot girl and live a hot girl party life”. Think Paris Hilton but tanner and with more meat on her or think Kim Kardashian but paler with less meat on her. Her pics are of her out hitting the clubs, posing with her other hot friends in hot tubs, out on the beach in a bikini looking like she was made to live on the beach. Now, there’s nothing wrong with any of this, it’s just these are not usually the kind of women I match with. Usually, at my best, I match with the “cute intellectual” type of girl, the kind who wears framed glasses and hated Woody Allen before he was canceled. I’m not complaining, I love those women and those are the only kind I can usually make a connection with.
Now I know judging a book by its cover is a losing endeavor, but I’d be lying if I didn’t scan this hot girl’s profile and assume me and her live extremely different lives. Which is fine. Nothing wrong with that. But again, rarely do I ever match with these types of people. And when I do, they almost always turn out to be robots created by scammers trying to get my money. So of course, that’s what I assume now. BUT, it’s so cold in my life at the moment, and I can’t find much reason to get out of bed, so I send her a message anyway because why the hell not?
Do you want to hear a Harry Potter joke?
This is generally my go to line because, well, more often than not, I’ve found women are down to hear a Harry Potter joke. And this person, robot or not, is no exception. Sure, she replies a few minutes later. And thus begins a bewildering messaging conversation that will last six days and end with one of the most surreal moments in my life. But I digress…Throughout the first day of texting I’m pretty certain this person is in fact a robot, because she responds with as few words as possible which seems very robot-like to me. Here are some choice responses from her after asking her a question.
OK
Hey
Can u
Yes
When
So yeah, my radar is up for sure. But just as I’m about to give up on this hopeless endeavor, she surprises me by sending me her number and telling me to text her. This is a very un-robot thing to do because robots do not have phones. Of course, now I’m thinking she might be catfishing me or something, but again, what the hell, why not? So we start texting instead of messaging, and that’s going… alright, I guess, if you can call the above monosyllabic style of texting alright. It was around day two when I start asking her to have a drink with me, but she dodges the question for the next couple of days, claiming that she’s always working. Now my radar is definitely up, and I start to ask her where she works.
Bourbon Street, she texts me.
Bourbon Street is not a place of work, I tell her, it’s a street. Could she be more specific? She tells me she doesn’t want to because if she does maybe I won’t like her anymore. I’m not even sure I like her now, I remember thinking at the time, but I assure her I don’t judge people for what they do as long as they aren’t hurting anyone. She still doesn’t want to say, so I ask if she’s a dancer, and she admits she is. That’s fine, I tell her, nothing wrong with that. And I mean it, there is nothing wrong with that. Except it seems kinda dangerous during a pandemic, when your job is to dance up on guys who may or may not be infected with covid. It would be pretty stupid of me to try to get close to someone who did that right now, right? I decide it is and decide that I should end whatever this is and not waste any more of our time. Then she sends me a new text.
“Maybe we could meet tonight?”
Somehow this changed everything. Sure, she’s undoubtedly a health risk, but still, she wants to meet me and she’s a hot girl and… who says I have to always be the responsible one?
Sure, I reply. Where?
Why don’t you stop by my work tonight?
Aaaaaaand my radar is up again. I think long and hard before sending my next response.
Look, I’m just gonna say this. If this some kind of trick to get me to show up at your club and buy you lap dances I’m not down for that. I’m just letting you know now.
She assures me that’s not the case, she just works all the time and this will be the best way to meet. Should I abandon this whole thing right here and now? of course. Do I? No, of course not.
So that night I park my car on a french quarter side street and began to make my way toward my fate, whatever it might be. As soon as I open my car door I regret forgetting my coat at home. There is a brutal wind in the air tonight, one infected with ice particles that nip at every bit of exposed skin. Not a great night to forget your coat. But I did forget my coat. I did not, however, forget my mask and as I turn onto Bourbon Street I find myself immersed in an army of my inverse. Swarms of revelers protect themselves from the cold with their sweaters or jackets but do not protect their mouths from the pandemic disease that surely swims invisible in the air around them. Yes, they are raw-dogging the oxygen, letting it pour into their lungs unfiltered, screaming and singing and laughing and avoiding eye contact with me, the man with no jacket and no mouth, with goosebumps on my arms and a look of remorse on my half covered face. Where the hell am I right now? And what the hell am I doing? Who were these people in my city, caring for no one’s safety and only looking for some quick fun? And am I any better than them, carving my way through this stampede of ignorance just to reach out for a fantasy that surely will blow up in my face? I should turn back right now, while I still can…
Where r u bby?
I continue my way down Bourbon, pushing past the party goers and my better judgement. Five minutes later, I arrived at her club and pay the ten dollar cover fee.
“You have to wear a mask to get in,” the burly man says to me as he takes my money.
“I’m wearing my mask,” I tell him. He looks up from the stack of cash in his hand to find I’m telling the truth.
“Oh sorry about that, I’m just used to saying that because no one here-”
“Yeah,” I say, cutting him off, “I noticed.”
He pulls back the velvet rope and lets me in. Inside, the club looks like something from a Kubrick movie. It’s one of the smaller, gnarlier clubs on Bourbon and illuminated with dark red light, giving the place an ominous tone.. It’s also triangle shaped, with the entrance hallway starting skinny and then opening up more and more to reveal a bar, a collection of small tables with chairs, and of course the stage for the dancers. All of it, painted red. This alone would be a bit creepy, but when you factor in that everyone inside is wearing a mask… let me tell you, if you’ve never seen an almost naked woman dancing seductively on a pole while wearing a white mask over her face consider yourself lucky. That image will be burned into my mind forever.
A hostess leads me to an empty table close to the stage, and I sit down amongst the very few other customers who are already there, all staring up at the action while salivating inside their fabric of covid protection. Again, a group of leering men wearing masks is not a pretty sight…
Comin out now, she texted me, after I tell her I’m at a table inside. My eyes are now glued to the door in the way back of the club, past the stage, waiting for her to come out. I feel the butterflies in my stomach, each one of them yelling up at my brain to leave while there is still time. I ignore them. The door opens. A woman comes out wearing practically nothing except her mask. She looks good, except the mask. This is so weird. What the hell am I doing here?
“Hey baby,” she says to me as she takes the seat next to me. “Nice to finally meet you.”
“Likewise,” I tell her, and then out of pure instinct I ask if she wanted a drink. She nods her head and I ordered two whiskey cokes and just like that I’m out thirty six bucks. We sip our drinks silently, watching the show on stage, occasionally trying to make small talk in brutal fashion.
“This seems like a fun place to work.”
“It’s alright.”
“Worked here long?”
*Shrugs shoulders*
Finally, what I feared would happen happens, as she turns to me and through her mask asks, ”So you want to buy me a dance? It’s only forty bucks.”
I pretended not to hear this at first, and pick up my drink and sip through the tiny stirring straw for a long time. Finally I turn and give her a look. It’s a look that says it all.
Are you kidding me? I told you specifically that that wasn’t what I was looking for. What the hell? It’s not easy to convey this entire look with only half your face, but I feel like I accomplish this rather impressively. What’s even more impressive though, is her response, which is also nonverbal, a simple shrug of the shoulder with a certain look of the eyes. All of which clearly seems to convey: What do you expect? It’s historic times, a global pandemic. Nobody is coming into strip clubs anymore, I got mouths to feed at home and I’m desperate. Hell ya I tricked you, I’m in survival mode, we all are!
I tell myself I should get up and leave right now. But if I had done this I probably wouldn’t be sharing this story now. Cast the first stone if you want, but when you see an exposed voluptuous leg resting against your own after months of isolation… it’s hard to think rationally. “Fuck it,” I say, before finishing what was left of my fifteen dollar watered down whiskey coke, “let’s do it.”
She takes my hand and guides me past the stage, past the door in the back she had emerged from, and up a tight flight of stairs. A minute later we are in one of those small private rooms on the second floor, and I’m sitting down on a couch that has way too much cushion, and she hits play on a song that I know will start and end this private dance. The song is some slow r&b number that I really don’t care for, but I forget all about the song as she begins to grind up on me. I don’t feel turned on by this at all, it just feels awkward. No, worse than awkward, i feel a dull numbness inside me, like numb to the point of death. In a word, not fun. The wall opposite the couch is entirely made of mirrors, and midway through the song I look away from her shapely body to our reflection and I see something I will never truly forget. In the mirror, I see a scantily dressed woman performing a kind of act of fake intimacy with a man, both of them wearing masks, both of them with dead, joyless eyes. In the reflection I see no happiness, no warmth, instead I see an act being carried out as if for no reason but an unexplainable obligation to the past, to when things like this were supposed to happen, back when things were normal.
When the song starts to fade away, I swear I can hear something I should not be able to hear. It’s the sound of the revelers on Bourbon Street, going wild past the walls of the club, rejoicing in the infection that rains down upon them. Jesus, I think, how is this city ever going to get back to normal?
“Did you enjoy that baby?” my tinder date-turned-private professional dancer asks me.
“No.”
“Do you want another one?”
\“Yes.” I hand her more money and she hits play on a new song and begins to dance once more. I try to avoid the reflection this time, but I can still hear the noise from Bourbon Street. There’s no tuning it out.
HAPPY MARDI GRAS
