Despite the lack of resonance I'm feeling, I decide to sit down next to her. I guess Pedro and the plum left some sort of intimidating impression on me, otherwise, I can't tell why I would ever sit on this couch. On her right sits another man, roughly my age, who seems, besides me, to be the only man that picked a white button-up shirt as his attire for this night, which was supposed to be a glorious one. He looks happier and way more at ease compared to me. 'Why am I sitting here? What the fuck am I doing here?' I'm asking myself, while I feel this pressure inside my body. In my mind, I'm comparing this pressure, with how a woman must feel when she is pregnant. I came here, being impregnated by lust, trying to give birth to one of my shadows that lingers in a room inside of me, where society and all its conventions have no access to. But now, sitting on this damn couch, getting my thigh stroked by a woman that never believed in dentistry, I'm starting to come to terms with the fact that tonight, this pregnancy is about to end in a miscarriage. ‘What the fuck am I doing here?’
My pulse climbs again this mountain as I'm starting to understand what is about to happen here. The light is being dimmed, even more, a new song, even worse than the one before, is being played and the plum approaches the pole, which is decorating the center of the dance floor. Her time has come. The plum strip show is about to happen. Finally or, sadly. Depending on whom you ask in here. I stay with my opinion that she is way too old for these type of things. There should be a universal pole dance law in place, forbidding women with a certain amount of wrinkles in her face to ever touch a pole and charge money for it, I'm thinking. I reminisce about my €80 entry fee and what else I could have done with it. There was a commercial by a charity, which I spotted the other day, claiming it would cost only €40 to save a life in Africa. And here I am now, watching these two old white breasts stroking a pole in an unpopular swinging club, somewhere in Portugal, all while I could have saved two beautiful black twins, somewhere in Africa. Bravo!
The strip show continues, and I'm carefully watching her movement and the way she carries herself, sliding around this pole with her 10 cm high heels on. I need to give her some credit even though I struggle somehow finding the right words for it. Maybe for the effort. Or maybe, for the past potential that used to be there. I can imagine how, at a time, when her body didn't show any plum resemblance yet, this pole and these heels used to be her key into a world full of decadence and successful businessmen, who liked to spoil her with material things, after they got their naked part of the deal. Time took this key from her one day like it does to all pretty ladies. Time threw that key overboard into the inevitable ocean of evanescence, and she jumped right after it trying to catch it again and again, without notable success to this day. No anti-aging cream, no surgeon, and no dance pole can prevent that key from hitting the ocean bed. Thinking about this, I almost feel sorry for her. Maybe, it was not her fault. Maybe, we are to blame; we men, by tricking pretty ladies into betting all their chips on their beauty, and making them believe this winning streak will last forever. Sadly, it doesn't.
Physical beauty serves the eyes. And the eyes of humans are little hungry monsters. Monsters that like to eat only one thing and one thing only: Symmetry. Like a dog loves to chew on a bone, our eyes enjoy chewing on symmetry; the more, the better. We simply can't get enough of it. Take the face of Kate Moss, for instance. It's like a five-star dish for these two monsters inside our face, especially for the heterosexual men among us. Scientists discovered that the length and width of a face, as well as the distance between and women's mouth and her eyes, determines how attractive she is to men. Ms. Moss apparently got extremely lucky the day that God handed out facial length and width measures because the distance between the middle of her eyes and her mouth is about 46% of the width of her face, which is supposed to be the "golden ratio". The face of this pole dancing plum in front of me, however, has, apart from those oval over-sized earrings hanging from her lobes, literally nothing golden to offer any more. Time has eaten her symmetry.
As she continues to chase her younger self on this pole, with movements that were not invented for a body aged like hers, she starts looking in our direction. We, the three people on this purple couch, are having the courtside seats in this arena of filth. No one is closer to the action. I'm feeling a bit like Jack Nicholson in the Staples Center or Spike Lee in the Madison Square Garden. Probably more like Mr. Lee, to be honest, since the Knicks seem to have performed equally bad in recent years, just like the plum is now. She starts walking up to us. I'm surprised how stable her walk is, considering her age in combination with those stupidly long heels she is wearing. Personally, I never had a thing for heels; it never did much to me, seeing a girl walking around all stiff and unnatural like that. Marilyn Monroe supposedly said once, "We owe the man who invented high heels so much." I never had a clue what she was talking about until I read again about some scientists that claimed high heels make women's feet look more petite and therefore overall, more attractive to men. Well, I'm a man, and one of the coolest girls I ever dated, came in flip flops to our first date, and instantly gave birth to a butterfly in my belly. But that's maybe for another story. Sure is, I would have made Marilyn wear some Birkenstock's before starting to penetrate her.
So, as the plum arrives at the sofa, she grabs the hand of the other guy and pulls him towards a chair that Pedro, in the meantime, has put right next to the pole. A new song is being played, and she starts lap dancing on the guy who might share with me the affinity for white button-up shirts but certainly not the taste in women. Some people start whistling and yelling little sounds of excitement while her ass takes a hike up his lap, planting a little lump between his legs. I stare at the grin he parked in his face and discover, to my surprise, that it's really a genuine one. The muscles in our face have always fascinated me; they are like a lie detector. I can always tell by someone's facial expressions how close they live to authenticity in a given moment. A fake smile relaxes fast, too fast. On a genuine smile, the corners of the mouth go back calmly and smoothly, to its neutral position, it relaxes slowly. As I keep witnessing this, for me, rather tragic performance, I can clearly see that the guy is genuinely happy and pleased. Pleased by a woman that I named plum the first minute I caught sight of her; a dry plum to be exact.
I feel like an alien that is stranded on a planet that is illiterate to the language of sex and erotic. Where lust is a hyper-inflated currency, making anyone a millionaire, whipping his ass with bills whenever his hormones hand him a dose of horniness. An alien always feels lonely. A feeling of loneliness can only flourish when there is, for whatever reason, no ground or space for sharing. We share by communicating, mostly through language, which is mostly transmitted spoken or through our bodies. My genitals clearly speaks Suaheli compared to the others in here, so how on earth would I ever be able to communicate and share anything in this cave?
Next to me, still sits the lady with the crooked smile, still rubbing my thigh, still refusing to see a dentist. Just like the interior design of her mouth lacks order and alignment, I am starting to lack some patience. Nothing of what my five senses have been absorbing in the last 70 minutes has been really to my liking, and something is telling me that the worst is yet to come if I don't take immediate action. The little mathematician inside my currently confused brain starts doing his job and calculates the probability of me being next in line for a lap dance, like the one I am forced to watch right now. Considering the fact that I'm the only remaining male on this couch, which feels like a substitute bench, the chance of me being the next player on the lap dance field seems alarmingly high. So high that my heartbeat starts mimicking some dub step rhythm and I actually start feeling a bit scared. "I need to get the fuck out of here" is what my inner voice starts shouting. The thought of me sitting in the middle of this dance floor, being watched by all these horny eyeballs while a dry plum slides down my crotch, lets my heartbeat go even higher, approaching more and more the tempo territory of some ‘drum n bass’ track. This cocktail of emotions my spirit is sipping on right now doesn't taste well- I feel scared, disgusted, and ashamed all at the same time. Not good. I need to leave. Now!
I stand up, fast and assertive. In doing so, I brush off the lady's hand of my thigh, who then tries to stop me by reaching for my wrist, while mumbling some, for me, indigestible syllable salad. She is obviously trying to convince me that I should be staying. That I should be patiently waiting for this present they got prepared for me. I quickly look back at her and can tell by her surprised look that she has no clue of how I'm feeling. She must really be thinking that I'm letting go of some sort of once in a lifetime chance here.
I rush to the cloakroom, just to find out that it's locked. Fuck. I just want my blazer and escape this place. I look around, trying to find someone who could help me with my dilemma, and see Pedro approaching me. He must have seen how I rushed off the couch and also seems surprised about my sudden change of plans. "What's wrong, my friend?" he asks. For a split second, I'm considering to tell him, that we are further away from being friends than the pope from ever using a pack of condoms in his life, but then, discard that idea quickly and just reply: "I need to leave. Can you open the door? I need my blazer." He pulls a set of keys out of his pocket and opens the door, visibly disturbed by my ambition to leave his cave. He almost seems to take it personally and wants to know, "Why do you want to leave? You don't like it here? What's your problem, my friend?" As I take my blazer off the hanger, I tell him that he doesn't have to worry about my problem and that all he needs to know right now is that I need to leave. He senses that I'm serious and decides not to continue his Q&A session with me. He assists me to the exit, where I decide to turn around for one last time and give this place a final look. One last observation that shall be burned into my memory forever, reminding me what I don't want in my still young, erotic life.
I look at the men in here, who are all still excitingly following the narrative of the plum's strip show. She seems to have found another victim that she is now arousing with her clumsy movements. It's a man in green shorts and a blue tank top, who reminds me again of the fact that I'm embarrassingly overdressed tonight. He also seems to have the time of his life, receiving what is, in my view, still Portugal's poorest pole dance performance. I stare at his happy face one last time, observing this sincere, lustful joy that is being displayed in there.
A line from my favorite rapper comes to mind and I whisper it to myself while I finally walked out of my
first swinging party:
"One man's pain is another man's pleasure.
One man's trash is another man's treasure."
Outside, I button my shirt all the way up to the collar button, grab my phone, and open the Uber app.
This time, it's me who orders the Uber,
not my dick.
Comments (0)
See all