The next day at noon she went home and I swam in the
ocean for a while and then had a desperately-needed nap; in the evening I took
a taxi and the Goose and her room-mate at a different street full of bars
somewhere.
The Goose’s room-mate was nearly as
tall as her but a bit slimmer; she had red hair and a kind of air of sad
dignity that I liked a lot.
(I wonder if she thought the same
about me. It would be nice to think it was an air of sad dignity and not just plain
old chronic depression.)
They wanted to go to an American
style rock bar, which seemed like the last kind of thing a couple of Russian
girls would like – full of pastel shirt wearing fratboys, and some bozos on the
stage were doing Bon Jovi and Nickelback covers, not even ironically – but it
turned out they liked the food there and we ate burgers and onion rings on the
back patio.
The Goose’s roommate was in fact a
retired stripper; her boyfriend the policeman gave her enough money to live,
although I didn’t quite get why she didn’t live with him. Maybe he was married
or something.
She was also an illegal, from
somewhere in Siberia, and she asked me a lot of questions about my recent time
in Russia.
“I very miss my home country,” she
said, sadly and dignified-ly.
I told her more about my life as an itinerant English teacher and I could tell she was charmed.
"You're more interesting than most Americans," she said.
I told her more about my life as an itinerant English teacher and I could tell she was charmed.
"You're more interesting than most Americans," she said.
I explained that I was about to go back to the Kingdom to work and they both suggested that, since I wouldn’t be seeing
any girls for a while, we should go to a strip club.
“I’ll take your word for it, you
girls know Miami.”
I’d been to a few go-go bars in
Bangkok that were fun, but the American strip clubs I’d been to in Memphis and
New Orleans were dank and depressing, where not-especially-attractive women wheedled
money and drinks from you while most of the men in the audience looked like
serial killers in training.
It was always so different in the
movies, where gorgeous women twirled acrobatically around poles to cool tunes
while well-dressed gangsters and undercover cops made important agreements.
The entrance to the club didn’t
inspire much confidence; they busted the guys in front of us for having fake
IDs, and actually seemed to take them outside to turn them over to the cop car
parked outside. We paid our entrance fee and moved through the dirty curtains.
Inside, gorgeous women twirled
acrobatically around poles to cool tunes, while well-dressed gangsters and
undercover cops made important agreements.
“Oh my god!” I said. “It’s just
like a strip club in a movie!”
“Yeah,” said the room-mate. “I
think it was in a couple of movies, actually. BAD BOYS, I think. I like Will
Smith.”
We saddled up to the bar and
started drinking Patron tequila. I paid for everything.
The women got more and more
gorgeous and more and more naked as the evening continued. There were stripper
stages all around the floor, all around us, and naked women – who were
uniformly beautiful and well-built -- were scrambling up and down brass poles
like spider monkeys. Two perfect specimens covered in glowing body-paint did
some serious Cirque-Du-Soleil twirling-around-while-hanging-from straps stuff,
that led to the floor beneath them being completely covered in cash by the time
they were finished. The cool tunes blasted.
And the crowd were nearly as
attractive as the strippers, across the spectrum of Miami’s ethnic mix, all
shades of well-dressed and smiling men with strippers writhing in their laps or
buying drinks for the table or laughing. Even the old guys and the frat boys
seemed relatively classy. But maybe that was just the Patron talking.
The room-mate negotiated with a
friend of hers to give me a lap-dance, although with the buxom Goose and her
room-mate sprawling against me, I hardly felt I lacked contact.
Soon I was on a sofa in a
walled-off area, a Ukrainian brunette writhing against me clad only in a
g-string.
“Implants?” I asked, rudely.
“Yeah,” she said. “You like them.”
“They are nice,” I said. “The
technology on those things has improved a lot.”
She unbuttoned my shirt and kissed
my stomach and rubbed her tits against me.
“She said you used to be a
teacher.”
“I still am.”
“You taught in Russia?”
“Yeah.”
“Did you fuck any of your
students?”
“Oh, well. Yeah, but it wasn’t like
it was a real school. We just taught English.”
“That’s hot. I’d have fucked you if
I were your student.”
And then the two songs I’d paid for
were finished and she was gone, and I noticed she gave room-mate a kickback
from the $50 I’d paid.
I smiled. Everybody had an angle.
At about 2:30am a friend of the
Goose – a big cheerful Hispanic guy – was driving us home. I was piled in the
backseat with the Room-mate, and she sprawled against me and I put my arms
around her.
She leaned her head back and kissed
me.
As the big jeep went around a turn,
she flopped away from me, and then turned to me and said, “Why do you have your
arms around me?” She squinted at me and made a cat-scratching gesture at me.
I smiled and politely moved to the
other side of the seat. She soon sprawled against me again, and I kissed her
neck and she wrapped her arms around me and squeezed.
Then she looked up, and gagged.
“Uh oh, she’s gonna puke,” I said.
She held her head in her hands and
moaned.
The Hispanic guy pulled the car
over in a parking lot; she got out and walked around a little, and then said
she was fine and got in the car again.
She sprawled into my lap again.
I patted her hair. “It’s okay.
Everything will be okay.” She was semi-conscious now and mumbling.
They invited me to go back to their
apartment with them, but I just went into my hotel and fell quickly to sleep.
I slept until noon, and lingered on
the beach; in the evening I dropped the Goose an SMS asking how they were
doing. “We r chillin u want to com watch movie here with us?”
I didn’t, particularly. I felt like
I wanted to be by myself.
I took the bus into South Beach. I
had a beer at an outdoor café and walked around and tried to find places I
recognized from MIAMI VICE. I watched the sun go down and had a beer and a club
sandwich and fries at an art-deco diner and then walked, hungover and feeling
vaguely at peace, among the cheerful crowds of tourists thronging the streets
of South Beach, giving way to the various trendies of the evening. They didn’t
look nearly as cool as they thought they did, most of them, which comforted me.
Just a middle-age guy taking a walk
with his hangover.
COMING SOON! REQUIEM FOR A VAGABOND!
Because the world is ready for stories about me failing to get laid.
