I Was Chosen

I said back in the post about the customer with a gun that I’d tell you about the other time I was scared in a strip club. Here it is.

I was running so late. It was back when I was going to school, running a business, advocating for kids, and dancing a state away on the weekend, so I was late a lot. Running in the door, the bouncer said, “hey, you’ve got a customer waiting for you.”

It barely registered. I was flying down the stairs to the dressing room doing all my make up shortcuts in my mind. There was a $20 fine if you missed your stage set, so rushing was important. Every stripper I passed said, “hey, there’s a guy waiting for you.” The housemom said it too. I barely got my outfit on in time to run to the stage and take it back off. It was the kind of place where the stage gets packed on weekend nights, and it was already packed. I was doing that thing you do, you know, where you do a little floorwork, get a tip, scoot over and do a little more and get another tip, going really fast trying to get all the way around the stage each song.

I accepted a tip in my garter (it was The Law, there: tipping is hand to garter only) and rolled to all fours in front of the next customer, shook my ass, turned, and held out my garter. “I have to tell you something very important, I need you to look at this…” he started to say, but I cut him off. I had a stage to get around. When I passed him on the next song he handed me his dollar quickly, shouting over the music: “I’ve written something on here and it’s very important that you read it.” Whatever. I rolled to the next customer.

Downstairs I dropped my pile of ones in the lockbox with my name on it and watched the housemom lock them up while I pulled my dress back on. It was busy, and I had money to make. Back upstairs the same guy was waiting for me. He had something important to tell me, he said. Time is money. Get a dance, I told him.

We went back to the dance room and he sprung for the forty dollar dance, the one where he sat in one of those lounge chair things. That’s how I happened to be crawling all over this guy when he opened his mouth and told me that he’d been sent by some, well, someones, to give me a message.

Suddenly it all clicked. I’d never seen this guy before in my life, him and his friends were from a place over an hour away, yet he’d known when I’d be working and had been waiting for me? I did my sexy-subtle little pat down. No guns, that’s always good. He kept talking.

The world would be destroyed in a few days by a giant meteor. Well, most of the world. I had been chosen for my superior ability to genetically mutate to survive the meteor. By who? Aliens, of course. 

Okay. That’s when I looked down and his skin was twitching, just like this guy in a movie that my friend had dragged me to see even though I told her I don’t like scary movies. In the movie, after his skin twitched and quivered like that, he just split open and a bunch of bugs burst out of him, and the bugs were aliens. I had an overwhelming urge to jump off of him and run screaming, but I stuck it out. At the end of the song he gave me a URL to go to, and I thanked him.

The world didn’t end, and I never saw him again.