| Jun132008 | You Smell Like Stripper |
Where was I? Right, the strip club in Vegas.
So here we were at Olympic Garden on a Friday night. It was my first time in a strip club but I’ve seen enough crime dramas to know what one looks like. There’s the stage where the girls slide around on poles and there are the seats where everyone gets lap dances. Titties everywhere.
The girls turn to me, “We’re going to go upstairs and the guys are going to stay here. Do you want to come with us?”
“Let me guess, upstairs are the male dancers.”
“Yup.”
So that’s how I started talking to the guys, J and R. I had only met them an hour prior in the hotel room but here we were sipping on our drinks and staring at some topless girl hanging ten feet in the air. J and R are black. I’m Asian. Evidently, strippers have about the same amount of tact as airport security because two minutes after sitting down, we’re approached by a black stripper and an Asian stripper. Actually, I was approached by Asian strippers all night long. I must have looked like fresh meat. Next time I go to a strip club, I will bring Bob, my creepy white guy friend, and send all the Asian girls to him.
Our hotel suite at The Palazzo
After two drinks or so, I cave in and start talking to one of these girls. I don’t really have my defenses up and we’re making small talk and she’s not listening to a thing I’m saying. The girls are upstairs getting their dances and the guys beside me are getting their dances and well, what the hey, I’m no Puritan so I ask for the next song. That she hears. Oy. I’m cautious enough to ask for the rules of the establishment as well because I don’t know how things work in Vegas but I know strip clubs impose certain rules of engagement on dances and it would hurt me more if I didn’t ask.
“There are no rules,” she laughs. She makes some inaudible joke that ends in the word, “bed.”
She begins the lap dance to the tune of some terrible generic rock song that is too old for me to recognize. I’m kinda jealous that J got his lap dance to that Soulja Boy song. The dance is, um, ok. Her skin is covered in countless amounts of lotions, her perfume is sickly sweet and her accent is about as delicate as an anvil on a dewy Autumn morning. It’s exactly like when there’s a drunk girl dry-humping you and all you can think about is how not-drunk-enough you are. On the plus side, I now know what fake boobs feel like.
“Is that your girlfriend over there?” The stripper flicks a glance to the side and I follow eyes. The girls who said they were going upstairs are now downstairs. They laugh. I laugh and look embarrassed. Mercifully, the song ends and the stripper earns her twenty.
We mill around and chat whilst R gets a nice crisp fistful of one-dollar notes and heads to the stage. F jokes about taking a photo and I get that weird feeling in my stomach. I’m aware that cameras in a strip club are a very bad idea but at this stage, I’m kind of bored of having my wallet milked and I’m ready to go back to the hotel and sleep. I’m sure all they’d do is ask to see the camera, escort us outside and then we could look like heroes by saying we got kicked out of a Vegas strip club. Sadly, none of this happened, no one pulled out a camera and I bought another gin and tonic.
After it was made blatantly clear to us that you need to be buying drinks, buying dances or preferably both, we left the club and split into two groups. My half went back to the hotel to crash, the other half went to Fatburger.
Saturday afternoon, I crawl out of bed and into the shower. I have a clear idea of what I want to do today. First thing is to eat at In-N-Out. This might sound ridiculous to you but we don’t have In-N-Out in Seattle but we do have Californians and all these Californians keep telling me how they miss In-N-Out. This is what’s known in some circles as word-of-mouth. I got my hands on a Double Double (two patties, two bits of cheese), some animal-style fries (fries with cheese and thousand island dressing) and a Neapolitan shake (chocolate, vanilla, strawberry side-by-side not all mixed together). It was a perfect American burger meal. Also, it was worth it just to hear the laugh from the hotel guy manning the taxi line when we told him we wanted to go to In-N-Out. Jack likes to get his burger on.
Saturday brunch at In-N-Out
The rest of our trip involved wondering around the strip, spending almost $1000 on dinner and having champagne for breakfast. Yes indeedy. Modern day Vegas only earns its name of Sin City if you regard gluttony and high prices as sinful.
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