A little strip club parable.

I didn’t go to the conference. Instead I stayed here and danced and had a great time and ate way too much candy at the halloween party. I also saw a favorite old customer and did a ton of dances for him, and met a really sweet and sexy new guy and did a ton of dances for him. Everyone that irritated me I told to fuck off.

Now I’m off to… somewhere. I’m still like, “left or right? North or south?” There are so many places to go and I don’t know which to go to. Wherever I go I want to hole up and read a lot and do lots of Qigong and talking to trees and eat good food and get some writing done. Maybe I want to venture into a town a little bit, but maybe not so much.

Here is a little strip club parable.

All the good spending customers had left and I was sitting at the bar with the hard core ho and a guy who was buying us drinks. Two seats down from me a tall scrawny guy was talking to the bartender. I wasn’t really paying attention because I was contemplating how wonderful it was to sit there and sip my lemon echinaccea juice in a room full of good food and happy people.

But then Hard Core Ho leaned over me and yelled at the scrawny guy. “Hey! Don’t talk to her that way!” New York accent and all, though a few barstools down to the other side an old man mumbled about her sexy Boston accent.

“Fine,” the guy said to the bartender. “This is over. We’re done talking.”

The bartender moved on to other things, and the guy turned to me. “I bet you’re going to be mean to me too.”

“Not if you’re nice,” I tell him.

“I’ll be nice.” He moves over to sit by me, putting his black felt coat on the barstool and sitting on it.

I introduce myself and get his name. I smile and reinforce him with my body language when he’s polite. The door opens behind him and I glance to see who’s coming in.

“Hey,” he says, “don’t look away from me. Look me in my fucking eyes when I’m talking to you.”

“Don’t tell me what to do.” My face is hard and disengaged. None of the submission or the passionate engagement of a fight that he wants.

“Fucking bitches,” he says. “You fucking bitches are all the same.” He leans towards me and keeps going on about us fucking bitches. Just when he leans close enough that I can feel his breath I put my hand up, against his chest.

“Go away.” I say it like a spell, like I say things when I know my intention is working with the universe and it will happen. He get’s up and walks to the corner by the ATM and lurks there, glaring at me. I turn away. Why reinforce bad behavior?

Soon, in the mirrors, I see Shell walking towards him.

“Hey Shell,” I stage whisper to her. “Just ignore that one, he’s an asshole.”

Shell gives me a disdainful look, sticks her nose in the air, and turns back to the scrawny guy. Shell is the kind of woman who doesn’t believe in sisterhood. Or she does, but she thinks she’s the only one pure enough to be in it. The rest of us are dirty whores trying to take her customers. This is an attitude that requires Shell to quit every month or two to prove how much better she is, but she always comes back.

I watch half assedly in the mirrors. She gets upset and sticks her chin in the air. He leans in, all passionately mad and wraps his arm around her waist. They continue this way for a while, Shell getting more and more upset and him more and more in her face. Soon she comes to the bar, chin quivering, to tell the bartender about him. He, of course, follows.

“You,” I hiss at him. “Quit picking on strippers. Get away.”

It’s like I’m some kind of Goddess. I say it and he scurries to obey.

He threatened to hit her, she says. I go get the manager. They call him a cab and the manager sits with him until it arrives. It takes the manager, the owner, and the bartender to convince him to leave when the cab arrives.

Shell sits at the bar in tears. That was her good customer, before, and now she’ll be deprived of his money. She won’t be able to pay her bills or support her kids. The girl doesn’t even have kids, but she’s in full hysterics over supporting them.

Honey, I tell her, there are other customers. Look around, there’s eight other customers now and I’m sure one of them would love a dance from you.

No, she says, all us whores sucking cock in the VIP room prevent her from making any money. We don’t understand how hard it is for her to hang on to a good customer with all us fucking whores around. Then she throws her lighter at me.

That’ll teach me to invalidate someone’s hysteria, huh?

She calls her boyfriend on the bar phone and explains loudly that she has to quit, she can not stand working with all these fucking whores a minute longer, and she will not be able to pay the bills and their cats will starve.

It’s okay, he tells her, she can always do some secretarial work for a friend of theirs who was just asking yesterday if she’d be available.

She starts shrieking. She will not work for that fat, stinky bastard. Not ever, not if it were the only job in the world. He’s so fat there’s mold growing between his fat rolls and cockroaches living in his ears and she’d catch all kinds of diseases and bugs and nastiness if she were to go near him.

Then her cab arrives and she flounces out the door, telling us all that we’ll never see her in this establishment again.

So, what is the way to true happiness and enlightenment?