A few years ago, I told a friend a sad story about the one time I went to a strip club after being dumped. She quietly listened and then made an emotionless observation: “You make the women in your life do a lot of emotional work.”
“Do you think so?” I replied.
She slowly shook her head, her point having been made.
This person was, and is, a very close confidant of mine. She forgives me for my shortcomings, and I return the favor. She gives me advice and vice versa. For instance, she once dated a guy who called himself a “feminist,” and I warned her that was a potential red flag.
“He could be a real asshole,” I said.
“Aren’t you a feminist?”
“Yes.”
She was the first friend I told I was sober, back when I was convinced no one would love me if they found out I was in recovery. Later, when I told her I was going to group therapy for men, she cheered me on. She accepted me even when I didn’t feel like I belonged anywhere. I can see now how blessed I am. To have a friend. We support each other, even if we don’t always talk. I want her to be happy, but most of all, I want her to be her true self.
Anyway, I’ve always prided myself on having platonic relationships with women as if that was deserving of some international humanitarian award. She frequently likes to point out that I shouldn’t feel so superior about hanging out with other human beings and not trying to have sex with them.
Now, I’m going to tell you a sad story about this one time I went to a strip club after being dumped. If you’re not interested in reading further, here’s the gist: Never cry in a strip club because no one cares.
It’s 1999.
Astoria, Queens.
The song of the summer is “Higher” by Creed, a greasy pop-rock band that sounds the way a long road trip smells. The song is a sentimental fist-pumper about bro hope. I hear it approximately 10,000 times. There’s a war on in Eastern Europe, but most people don’t care. America is the envy of the world. Rich, loud, and mighty. White heterosexual cisgender men shall inherit the Earth.
Astoria is a modest neighborhood with cheap rents, a diverse population, and a working-class feel — but my kind was already moving in, college-educated fugitives from the suburbs. It was already home to a sizeable Greek immigrant community, with an Irish pub on every block. There wasn’t much room for the cast of Friends.
It’s 1999 and I am walking down the street in slow motion, even though I can taste cocaine oozing down the back of my throat. To my left is Frankie, and to my right, Danny. We are almost arm-in-arm, parading down 31st Street underneath the elevated train. We are on a mission.
Frankie is a big, bald bruiser with dim eyes who is famous for fucking every bartender in Queens — and I know this because every night when he’s good and pissed, he whispers in my ear, “I’m famous for fucking every bartender in Queens.” I don’t know what he did for a living, but he always had money for liquor and drugs.
Danny is a cop, I think. He could have been full of shit. Danny says he works undercover in Washington Heights and lives with his mom on Ditmars near the park. He has a badge that looks pretty authentic, and every so often, he’ll ask some kid at the bar if he knows where he can score weed, and when the kid responds, boom, Danny shows him the badge. He laughs, the bar laughs, I laugh.
I’m no different from the guys he fucks with, but I’m one of the boys. It is 1999, and I don’t call my sick dad or reach out to my friends who know me and love me or tend to any of my relationships, really, because I’m too busy hanging out with fellas whose last names I do not fucking know.
So we’re hurtling past 24-hour vegetable stands, pizzerias, and this old-school Greek restaurant that serves lemon potatoes whether you ask for them or not to a nearby strip club because that’s what you do when you have a broken heart.
You see, she had dumped me. That’s what had just happened a few days before. The who’s and the what’s aren’t that important. I was boring, and she wasn’t, and that’s the story. There’s more, of course, but that’s what’s pertinent.
This was not the first time I had been dumped, and it would not be the last. I have many theories as to why my relationships used to fall apart, but let’s agree with an old therapist of mine who used to sigh deeply and tell me I needed to love myself. He was right, but he never told me exactly how to do that. So what was the point, Bill?
She bailed because she was not interested in safecracking. I was a near-empty safe-deposit box anyway, maybe a couple of empty airplane bottles of booze rolling around, some loose change, barely legible words scribbled on a cocktail napkin — I use to write down any happy thoughts I’d have when wasted and then read them in the morning. Insipid little affirmations. “Today is the first day of the rest of your life,” and “everything happens for a reason.” Shit like that.
The last time I asked her why she broke it off, she whispered, “What are you doing?” and hung up before I could answer. I had been talking to her on a payphone in the rear of the pub, and I bet she could hear Creed play in the background.
It’s good that she hung up, too, because my answer would be sudden heaving and sobbing.
She knew, though. God bless her. It would take another eleven years of drinking to realize I am, in fact, an alcoholic and not a misunderstood poet. It turns out most people had understood me completely the whole time: I was a drunk.
I had moved to New York from Texas four years earlier and found meager employment at a small magazine company. While I patiently waited for personal invitations to the salons of Manhattan’s intelligentsia, I hung out with dudes from the neighborhood who normally hated young dudes like me who grew up beyond the Hudson.
These men immediately liked me because we had one thing in common, and that was alcoholism. They treated me like a pet, a monkey who could drink shot after shot of tequila without all the salt and lime nonsense.
The bar was dark and safe. It was a place where men could show their emotions by the light of the jukebox without anyone remembering that they did. It was the local where you’d find grown men licking each other’s wounds at two in the morning, and then sixteen hours later, they’d pass each other in the grocery store and barely make eye contact.
That’s where I met Frankie and Danny, and we drank together, and when I told them my girlfriend wasn’t picking up the phone anymore, they dragged me to look at boobs because erections are like magic wands.
They listened to me whine until we paid the cover. Then, it was every man for himself.
I loved her, or at least that’s what I told myself. I loved that she was patient and optimistic and honest. I was none of those things.
The first time she quietly told me she wanted to see other people, I tried to defend the relationship by yelling out, “I never cheated on you!” She was unmoved.
I followed that up with, “I love you.” But it was too late, and I didn’t, really. I loved how she remembered to buy toilet paper for my apartment, how she took care of me, held me, and asked me if I was okay because I was not okay. God, all of that must have been exhausting.
There are still mornings when I ask myself what I’m doing, but now I have an answer. I’m getting up, I’m brushing my teeth, I’m going for a walk and repeating these words under my breath: “I am worthy of love.” I say it over and over and sometimes I hiss it like a cornered snake.
I am learning to be intimate. I guess it’s a lifelong process. The first step is using that word, saying it aloud, looking at the other men in group therapy, and telling them, “I want to be intimate with the person I love.” Intimacy is one of those words that sits in the mouth like a glob of phlegm.
I think of intimacy as a grandmother’s loveseat, one of those couches slightly too big for one person and too small for two. It’s too many people squeezing into a hatchback, and someone has to sit on your lap for a trip that will take too long, no matter the difference. Intimacy is your credit card getting declined at a fast-food restaurant, and the cashier and the person behind you in line, and the person bagging burgers all looking at you. You can feel their eyes; all you want to do is disappear. But you can’t. You only have one choice, and that is to breathe. To be. To make it to the next moment. Intimacy is thinking, “I am safe,” and believing it.
The strip club was strictly for locals only, a narrow, shabby bar with back rooms populated by topless women who would grind against you for $20. Touch a tit without permission and get your fingers broken. It was an illegal operation, but I guess Danny knew that.
Almost immediately, Frankie started talking about his dick, getting his dick this and getting his dick that, and Frankie was always horny because men are supposed to be horny, and sometimes gender norms are soothing. He gave me a snort in the bathroom before forgetting about me. The last time I saw him, he was being led to a backroom room where he would pay extra to beg.
Danny had already polished off a bourbon and ordered another when his beeper went off. He left in a hurry because his mother was sick, and she only beeped him when she needed help with her oxygen tank or the toilet.
I was alone, with naked ladies. On his way out, Danny patted me on the back and winked, as if I was going to get lucky. I was not going to get lucky. Strip clubs aren’t about sex. Sex isn’t about sex.
The power dynamic inside a strip club is the same as outside, which is to say, heterosexual men have most of the power, just read any issue of The Wall Street Journal if you’re a man who needs proof, again, that our gender has it pretty good. Like, just read the names — lots of Bills and Jeffs and Steves, you know?
In Queens, during that time, there were all sorts of clubs, classy ones with expensive cocktails down by Queens Plaza and filthy clubs with hot and cold buffets. They were mostly all nude, but I remember one where the dancers wore pasties, which anyone can wear because we all have nipples.
A strip club sells a fantasy, money for glitter, a fair exchange. It is honest work. The fantasy is shockingly surprisingly simple, too. When I’m at a strip club, I am unburdened. I am seen and unseen. I am funny and sexy and I am nothing. I watch a dancer spin on a pole, and I think, “She’ll save me.”
It’s a ridiculous thought—a selfish one. This is her job. She is a human being, and I am terrified I may be one, too.
Later, in the champagne room, she tells me her name is Amber, and I believe her. I’m going to introduce her to Mom one day. It’s a solid business, monetizing rage and sorrow and loneliness. But that’s capitalism.
I cannot speak for the experiences of women who work at strip clubs. I once knew a strip club owner in Manhattan who seemed to treat his employees with respect, but what do I know? He was nice to me because I worked for a men’s magazine then, and he wanted free press. His girlfriend was a model.
He bought me drinks, slapped my back, and smiled, but then, one night, the drinks weren’t free anymore. He watched me pay for my booze from a distance, and that was that.
I don’t want to come off like a killjoy, though. Strip clubs — like bars — can be fun the way novocaine is fun.
The nameless club wasn’t fun, though. This was a temple of the unhappy. There were no poles. The dancing happened on couches in the shadows. The music was Sinatra, European pop, and “Higher” by Creed. I had never seen so many men with mustaches. One old dude with a regal white beard looked like a general who’d ordered war crimes. A man at the end of the bar looked at me as if I was personally ruining his neighborhood with soy lattes, and pugs, and hipster bars serving fruity beers.
Our first date had been at a bar, naturally. This was before she would learn that I’d prefer all our subsequent dates be at a bar. But for that moment, we were meant to be. We laughed. We listened. She took me home with her. The morning after, I made fun of all the fancy shampoos and conditioners that cluttered her shower. A few months later, I’d make the same joke, only it was about my shower and her shampoos and conditioners. The bottles were still in my shower. Empty. I didn’t have the heart to throw them away.
They reminded me of her.
I am rarely amazed by my regrets but what if I had just said “yes” to all the people in my life who asked gently, directly, with hearts full of love, if I needed help. What if I had one that? Would I have suffered so much? Would I have caused so much suffering?
The club bartender was not a dancer. She had never met or even seen Frankie before. She looked slightly older than me and wore a plain T-shirt and jeans. I ordered a gin and tonic and nursed it as the small club got louder and more crowded. I ordered another gin and tonic and smiled at the bartender, who, like any good barkeep, could keep one eye on me and one eye on the next alcoholic. I thanked her and smiled again. She moved on, and I started to cry. Blubber. I covered my face with a shaky hand. I didn’t want a lap dance. I didn’t want a woman to pretend to think I was funny. A dancer tried to comfort me by asking me to buy her a drink and I told her I was broke, I was broken, what am I doing?
I have a distant memory of my childhood in Virginia during one of the summers when the cicadas woke up from their nearly two-decade naps. They crawled out of the dirt screaming for others, ancient critters hungry to molt and mate. I found one of their exoskeletons attached to a tree, and I thought the shell was the insect. I even kept it as a pet for a few days until I saw an actual cicada, and I felt bad for the shell.
The bartender did not feel bad for me. She snapped her fingers in front of my wet face to get my attention. “You don’t belong here,” she shouted and it was a question. I shrugged. I wiped tears off my face and mucus on my pants. Again: “You don’t belong here.”
“What?”
She didn’t repeat herself. I looked away and did not see Frankie or Danny and when I turned back the bartender was gone and then a large pair of hands guided me out of the club and back onto the street.
Twenty years later, I would tell my friend this story, and she would wince because men are given so much at birth, and we’re still so angry and miserable. A few years after that, I would bring up strip clubs to a group of men who, like me, have spent their lives avoiding eye contact with our loved ones. These are men who have hidden inside pornography and brothels and sometimes in plain sight, smiling robotically during dinner when asked, “How are you?”
How am I? I’m scared. I’m furious. I’m lost and alone, and if I say these things out loud, I will be seen and feel flayed, exposed, nerves like wind chimes dancing during a thunderstorm.
I do work with these men. I help them, and they help me. I belong with them. We are safe.
Grief. Friendship. Jazz hands.
My debut memoir, ‘Theatre Kids,’ is now available for purchase.
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Look how happy I am (don’t worry, I’m dead inside.)
This post originally appeared on Medium and is edited and republished with author's permission. Read more of John DeVore's work on Medium.