Joel looked back over his shoulder to see Dee had stepped down onto the ladies’ table, and people, including his bandmates, were tucking bills into her bra, her garter belt, the edge of her thigh-highs. He turned the corner so he didn’t have to see, asking the bouncer to go back stage and wait. A fifty in the palm and he was granted access.
Here, Joel waited until he heard the applause and whistles from the crowd, and Dee came through the curtains, clothes in one hand, plucking money from her body with the other. He didn’t say anything, and she looked up just before she went back through the other doors to the dressing area. “Joel,” she said, in a voice that was weary, and not sharp with surprise. “Oh, man,” she sighed.
Joel just hunched his shoulders and nodded. “Yeah.”
Dee shoved the money into the pocket of her tear-away pants and pointed to a door on the far side of the room. “Come in here.” She led that way and Joel followed, not able to keep himself from looking down her body, down her back, her buttocks, her legs.
Through the door was the “special” room, where men who paid the price could get a real lap dance and some one-on-one attention. A small wet bar was to the right, the floor was covered in a plush, white carpeting and there were two chairs along with two poles that sparkled in the white and green light. Joel opted not to sit, as he didn’t want to know what bodily fluids had been expunged there. Dee leaned against one of the poles and just looked at him, waiting. Joel stared at her, determined not to speak first. But she was making it hard on him. He sighed. “Fuck it, Dee. Why the hell didn’t you tell me?”
She shrugged nonchalantly, slipping her button-down on over her shoulders. “It didn’t seem relevant, I guess.”
“Not relevant?” Joel pressed his fingers to his temples. “I had to watch you, Dee. I watched my fucking brother touch you.”
“I can’t help it if men touch me-”
“And I can’t even believe ...” he paused. “I thought maybe we had something, you know? But this is your job to make people feel good. You’re a stripper-”
“I’m a dancer,” she emphasized, cutting into his sentence and pulling away from the pole, a finger pointed accusingly at Joel. “You think this is easy for me? You think when I stepped out and saw you in the front it made any of this easier for me? It fucking killed me, dude.”
Joel wrinkled his brow a moment. “You saw me?”
“Of course I did. But I need this money, okay? I can’t just bag it and come back some other time. These people see you got a weakness and they’ll prey on it.”
“But why, Dee?” He watched her lean on the back of one of the chairs, folding her arms across her chest. “Why do you do this? You’re a veterinary nurse, right? Isn’t that enough?”
She chuckled bitterly. “Right, yeah. Veterinary nurses get the big bucks.” She looked over at him. “I’m putting myself through grad school, remember?” she whispered.
“Yeah, grad school!” Joel exclaimed. “People who go to grad school aren’t supposed to have to be strippers!”
She shushed him. “Joel, please. Nothing’s worse than a smart stripper. You’re gonna get me fired.”
Joel set his jaw hard and looked at the floor. “I thought you were a ‘dancer,’” he finger-quoted. Dee shook her head, turning away from him and reaching up to tug off the blonde wig. “Do they ever touch you?” Joel asked. “All those guys coming to see you every night. Do they ever ... try anything?”
“Joel, you saw our security. No one’s gonna touch me.”
He looked around. “Even back here?”
She looked over her shoulder and squinted at him. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, guys back here paid a lot to get here, right? I guess I thought ...”
“Thought what?” her tone was accusatory now. “No one’s gonna get near me unless I let them.”
“Yeah, and how many, besides me, have you let get near you lately? I mean,” he chuckled, but without mirth, “considering our long courtship-”
The words were out of his mouth before he could stop them, and by the look on Dee’s face it was the wrong thing to have said. She was beyond angry. She was past that, on to hurt. She stood up straight, walking to stand in front of him, waiting, hands on naked hips, until he looked her in the face. “I haven’t been with anyone in a long time,” she growled, just above audible level. She looked as though she wanted to continue, but instead she just looked down, looked away and backed off. “This’ll fucking teach me to go on old feelings from adolescence, now won’t it?” she murmured as she turned to walk away, but Joel grabbed her arm.
“I’m sorry,” he said quickly.
“No you’re not.” She tugged at her arm, but he wouldn’t relinquish it
“I am. I’m sorry,” he insisted. “It’s what anyone’s gonna think when they see ... this,” he said, looking her up and down.
“Why?” Joel paused, looking into her face to see an actual countenance of confusion. She really didn’t know, didn’t know how men’s minds worked, how separate feelings and morals, and sex could be.
Joel shook his head, looking down at her. “Cuz you look hot.” He glanced down at her again. “Too hot. The Pope himself would wanna do you right here in the champagne room.”
“I look hot in this?” she peered at him skeptically.
“Well, sure.”
“And in the scrubs? How’d I look then?”
Joel smiled in spite of himself. “You looked hot then too.” He let go of her arm. “I think I liked you better in those.”
“Really?” Her eyebrows went up in surprise.
“Yeah.”
Dee folded her arms again and thought about that. Her eyes welled with a sudden onslaught of tears. She touched her face, not knowing where the tears came from or what to do with them. Joel reached forward and embraced her, holding her until she felt brave enough to pull away. “No one ever recognizes me in the real world, you know?” She spoke into his chest. “I take off the fishnets and see these same guys at the vet hospital, and they have no idea who they’re talking to. I mean, I like it that way, but just the same it’s so disheartening, knowing that they would have to actually look at my face to recognize me later, and then no one ever does.”
After speaking a few soft, comforting words, Joel felt an urge to defend his sex. “Well, men can focus only on one thing at a time. When they’re here they’re thinking, ‘body, body, body,’ and not so much about anything else.”
“I know,” she sighed. “The face and the mind don’t matter at all.”
“To some guys, no.”
“And you?”
She felt him chuckle an implied, ‘of course it matters to me.’ “Well, it’s kinda hard,” Joel said, touching the skin that tautly covered her collar bone. “The rest of you is so distracting ...” He kissed the divot in her throat, in the middle of her collar bone, then the spot over where her pulse beat feverishly.
“Doesn’t get you off the hook,” she whispered as she wrapped her arms around his neck and pulled closer as he nipped at her neck.
“What will?” he asked, words muffled by her skin.
She pulled away abruptly. “We go someplace we can all dance.”
Joel tugged her close again as he shook his head. “Uh, no. We don’t all so much dance as nod to the beat.”
“Too bad, we’re going dancing.” Dee pulled away from him and gathered up her things. “Consider it your punishment. Wait here for a minute.”
She disappeared before Joel could continue his protest, and five minutes later she returned without the wig, without the fake eyelashes, without the body sheen, and dressed in black and white hounds-tooth pants, black creepers and a black camisole-style tank top. She shrugged on a black, puffy coat as she came through the door. “Wow, that was fast,” Joel said.
“You learn a couple things in this profession.”
Joel tugged the edge of her tank top down to cover her tattoos, only to have it ride back up when his sweaty palms slid over the fabric, gripping her sides, resting his hands on the edge of her pants. “You look good,” he said, leaning forward to steal a kiss.
“Thanks. Let’s go get your friends.”
Joel planned his return to be a measured amount of time after Dee had made her off-stage appearance, going to join the girls at the table adjacent to where his friends were sitting. Billy had been right; the girls were friends of Dee’s from town, supporting the show, getting into the act. It always brought the best tips.
“Hey guys,” Joel murmured as he rejoined the group. No one responded right away, all eyes fixed on the girl on stage.
“Uh, yeah, hi,” Felix murmured. He slid a shot of Jack Daniels Joel’s way. “Catch up.”
He downed the shot as Dee leaned over to talk to Paul. The two of them spoke for a good five or ten minutes, Paul laughing, smiling, charmed by her as much as Joel had been. Paul never took his hands off the back of his chair, just cocking his head to hear her better and nodding when he understood. Joel heard a snippet of the conversation, as his name prefaced it, and his ears perked up. “Joel, yeah. I met him earlier tonight and I said I’d take you guys someplace to dance.”
“Dance?” Paul asked. “I dunno if you could call it dancing.”
Dee smiled. “He said that too. But this place is gonna be lame in about twenty minutes cause the punk-rock runway ends.”
The look of distaste on Paul’s face was feigned, but it looked as though Dee bought it. “Hold on, lemme ask.”
The word got passed around the circle, Paul nodding knowingly at Joel, who shrugged. And it came back affirmative as a plan. “Awesome, let’s go.”
Dee took them to a place downtown, sitting in the passenger seat as Felix navigated the narrow streets. She told them how she’d gotten into Good Charlotte as a teenager, back when they’d just begun to play shows. She’d caught a show in a church basement once, but hadn’t kept up on it all. Then, out of nowhere, while skipping a class in undergrad, she’d seen them on MTV. She’d stared, confused, wondering why the faces looked so familiar. It was only when the name faded onto the screen at the end of the Motivation Proclamation that she’d understood. And again, regardless of good intention, she’d managed to lose track of them in a harried world. Now here they were, staring her in the face.
Felix parked in a hidden lot and they walked up on the back side of the club. “Lots of hipster kids here,” Dee said, looking back at everyone as they walked up to the door. “So if they recognize you, they’d never admit it because it’d fuck up their cred.”
“Nice, so we get to pretend to be normal for a day,” Paul said.
“Exactly. Thought you’d like that.”
Inside it was dark, as clubs usually are, with purple walls and floors, black accents in the black-marble bar top, black buffed walkways, black stage where a DJ blasted house beats. “I like this,” Billy said to Dee.
“Glad you do. I used to work here, so free shit on me. Just mention my name.”
“Nice.”
After the boys were all settled in, scamming on girls and getting drinks, Joel sidled up beside her and put an arm around her waist. “How’d it all go over?” he asked, referring to his bandmates.
Dee shrugged, looking down at her feet. “None of them recognized me,” she murmured with a hint of sadness, thinking, no doubt, about the comment she’d made earlier about not being recognized in the real world.
“Well, in this case that’s good,” Joel said into her ear. “That’s good.” He kissed her neck and fit his body behind hers to move to the beat with her. She made dancing easy. She guided his body with her own. Her hands reached back to touch his thighs, her head turned to look up into his face. He kissed her there, in the middle of the dance floor. “You feel so good,” he murmured.
Dee smiled. “You can dance just fine, Joel.”
“I’m in good hands.”
“You want a drink?” she asked, breaking away from him just when he began to get excited from the gyrations, the friction and the heat. No doubt she’d felt it. Maybe it was why she broke it up. Too early in the night.
He stuttered a little before he found his voice. “Yeah,” he replied. “A drink, yeah.” He watched her dance all the way to the bar, leaning next to Paul, who was waiting on his Jack and ginger. They turned to one another and spoke. Dee never stopped moving. She was moving her ass to the music, even while talking, shifting her hips, stepping on the low brass railing, leaning over the bar to relay her drink order to the bartender. Paul sipped his drink and watched her intently as she did this, her pants riding very low on her hips as she bent over the bar. Paul then came over to Joel, glancing back as he walked.
“Nice,” Paul said to his bandmate, as they both watched her. “She’s fuckin’ smart.”
“Yeah, she is.”
“Met her today?” Joel nodded. “Going out with a stripper,” Paul chuckled, and Joel looked over at him, his eyes wide in fear. “Nice,” Paul repeated, grinning as he watched her bop side to side while waiting on the drinks. He looked over at Joel as he smiled sheepishly. Paul clapped him hard on the back. “Benji style.”
“Don’t tell anyone,” Joel said.
“I won’t.” Paul sipped his drink, a pensive look on his face. “You didn’t just meet her tonight, did you?”
Goddammit. Paul was so damn insightful. Joel shook his head. “No.”
“Did you know?” He referred obliquely to the stripper-side of her.
“No.”
Paul shrugged. “A girl’s got her reasons.” Then he looked down into Joel’s face as Dee began coming back across the floor with a drink in either hand. “Don’t fuck it up.”
Joel smiled softly as he watched her move, thinking, that’s for me. It was always the strangest feeling, seeing someone walk down the street, down the runway, across the room – someone you thought was beautiful, sexy, magnificent, and thinking in your head that they were coming for you. A strange, yet wonderfully surreal feeling. “I won’t,” he replied, though he barely remembered saying it, and somewhere in his mind he knew it was too quiet for Paul to hear. She got within arms-reach and he leaned forward and kissed her hard on the lips.
“Wow,” she murmured into his mouth, then pulled back. “I was only gone, like, 5 minutes.”
“Too long,” he replied and kissed her again, pulling back to grin at her. She handed him a drink. Billy and Felix had wandered up in the mean time, and Dee decided to play gracious hostess.
“C’mon, you should see the rest of the place,” she said. She never stopped moving. As the music shifted through tempo changes, she shifted with it, dancing through the crowds as though they didn’t even matter.
Dee led Joel, Paul, Felix and Billy through a wide, double-doorway into the front room. This would have been the dance floor and bar they would have seen first had they come in from the main entrance. The front wall was all glass, opening out onto Fourth Street, the busiest in town. And in that front window was a long swing, in which a scantily-clad girl swung, her back to those looking in from the street, her bare feet inches above the crowd inside. Men stood mesmerized, drinks in hand, staring up at this club-paid woman as she swung. She had a blank expression, much like the one Joel had seen on Dee while she owned the strip club runway. He could only imagine the pandemonium that may ensue if this were to be done at a typical bar, with jocks and G’s trying to grab her, touch her, grope her. Here, they stood and watched, trying not to ogle, but failing anyway. Joel himself was momentarily stunned into inaction. “Joel?” Dee said, tugging his arm.
“Yeah?” He turned his attention back to Dee.
“You like her? Her name’s Cinnamon.”
Joel arched an eyebrow. “For real? Or is that some sort of stage name?”
Dee laughed. “No. Her folks actually named her Cinnamon. Talk about picking out a career for your kid before they’re even born.”
“Yikes.”
“Can I get her number?” Paul asked.
Dee shrugged. “She’s kinda married, but you can ask her.”
Joel tugged Dee toward the bar as he’d finished off his last drink. They ordered double-shots of Jameson over ice and cringed when a siren went off overhead, red and white lights flashing. “The hell is that?”
Dee checked her watch. “Wow, already?”
Two panels in the ceiling opened up, one on either side of the bar, and cages dropped down into view. Inside each was a woman, in the same tiny, black outfit as the girl on the swing, gyrating and dancing to the music. In the cage to the left, Benji danced with the woman, the same goofy smile Dee had seen on Joel painting his lips. The woman gripped the bars and looked down at Dee, grinning and waving. She waved back. “Oh, what, you used to dance here too?” Joel asked.
“Used to,” she shrugged. The look on Joel’s face was incredulous. “It’s a journey, getting to where I am now,” she sighed. Joel looked back up and watched his brother with the go-go dancer. Ever the exhibitionist. Joel was so different. He preferred peace, privacy. This was why Dee’s occupation seemed so foreign to him. She showed her body to everyone, but her soul, it seemed, her inner-workings she had reserved for someone special. For him. It was almost even more meaningful, coming from someone like her, when she spoke to him candidly, let him touch her softly. No one else got to see her vulnerable that way. She was an object with a hard, unbreakable shell when she was on stage, on display. At home, in his arms, she was soft and malleable.
Dee was worried. She watched Joel watching the dancers, waiting for him to get angry and walk away. But he didn’t. His brow was slightly wrinkled, thinking, as he gazed up at his brother. “How much did he have to pay to get in there?” he asked.
Dee shook her head. “I dunno. Maybe a fifty?”
“What about us? Could we get in there?” He grinned mischievously.
Dee giggled and clapped her hands, then she took Joel’s face in her hands and kissed him on the lips. “Absolutely.”