Disclaimer: I should apologize in advance for any stylistic atrocities or lack of clarity which ensue—it has been some time since I’ve written for any kind of public audience. Pretty much anything I have put down on paper (or on screen, as it were) in the last couple of years has either been for myself, in an email, or homework assignments for my class. So bear with me, and let’s hope for the best.

Now, I’ve only been to a strip club once. And, as you will see below, it was not a particularly good experience. It was an edifying one, I suppose. But it was far far from fun.

A bit of stage setting before I get into this story. As those of you who know me can testify, I am not exactly the most calm, cool person in the world. I get nervous and anxious quite easily, especially in social situations. And especially when it has anything to do with women. The reasons for this unfortunate condition I will not go into here. Suffice it to say, I’ve had exceptionally poor luck with women in all respects, except that of friendship—I seem to be pretty good at that part of it. But at the time of this story, I had been unintentionally celibate (like, really, totally celibate) for slightly less than 3 years.

So then how the fuck did I end up at a strip club in the early morning hours of a Monday night?

Disclaimer 2: In light of my intoxicated state during most of the events described below, I have taken some slight liberties with the truth, and filled in gaps where required. The basic outline of events, however, is most definitely accurate, even if the details might be a bit off.

That fateful night began with basketball. For most people, the night of April 4, 2005[i] will be remembered as the night the U of I men’s basketball team, after a tumultuous tournament, lost the championship game 75-70 to UNC. Given that U of I had not won an NCAA Championship since 1915, or even been to the Final Four since 1989, the atmosphere on campus was already rather rambunctious. I remember that the police actually greased the street lamps [insert juvenile masturbation/phallus joke] along the main thoroughfare of Campus Town in order to discourage people from attempting to climb them in celebration. In retrospect, there is something delightfully ironic about a night starting out with a bunch of drunken cheering and hooting at big, sweaty males running up and down a court and ending with the same behavior directed at naked, sweaty females strutting up and down a stage (of sorts).

I had been invited over to my friend Sally’s[ii] apartment to watch the game with her and some of her college friends. This was still my first year down in Champaign-Urbana, and being new to the area and without many friends, I welcomed an evening spent in the company of others, all drinking for a common purpose. And drink we certainly did. By the time the game was over, I was somewhere between tipsy and hammered—too drunk to drive, certainly, but still able to function reasonably well. Now, had U of I won that night, things would most certainly have been different, as there would have been no pain to escape from. Had they simply been slaughtered, it would have been more tolerable. But no. They didn’t just lose, they lost a close game, one they could have won. And as any sports fan knows, these tend to be the most painful losses, because victory—and in this case the championship—was within your grasp, and it slipped away in those final agonizing moments. More drinking was required.

My friend lived quite close to a bar called the White Horse. As far as campus bars go, this one is pretty tolerable. It generally isn’t über-crowded—it had a bit more a pub feel to it than most campus bars—and one could actually talk to other people without screaming at the top of ones lungs. Not everyone at Sally’s apartment came with us to the bar, and it ended up just being me, Sally, Sally’s hot Indian friend (whom I will hereafter refer to as HIF), and another guy (who was a bit of a semi-total-douche, and who will hereafter be referred to as STD). This was actually a bit of a weird experience in itself. HIF and STD were really not the kind of people I tended to get along with very well. Particularly STD, who seemed like he belonged in a frat house—I was perpetually waiting for him to slip some girl a roofie and then disappear for the rest of the night. I also ran into a student of mine from the previous semester who, apparently due to the inspirational nature of my beard, had started growing one of his own, and really wanted to talk to me about it. Something which I obviously was not particularly interested in. Though, truth be told, I can’t deny that I felt a modicum of pride (or something) that my magnificent beard had inspired another young man to grow a beard of his own. On the other hand, I feared that this was probably the only thing he took away from the class. But I digress.

How the idea to go to a strip club came about I truly cannot remember. I know that in the disclaimer above I said I would fill in the gaps, but I wouldn’t even know where to start here. In my memory, the transition from the bar to the strip club is like an act of god or something—it just happened. About the only thing I feel confident about is that it was STD’s idea. It certainly was not mine, and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t either of the girls’. I also don’t remember how I was convinced to go along with this. However I’m sure my high level of intoxication, which was now well into the hammered zone, made it relatively easy to convince me. Further, given my endless capacity for rationalization, I probably told myself that even if there were any number of things wrong with strip clubs, maybe it is something I should nonetheless experience for myself. And so I was on board.

But things got weirder before we left. While we were waiting outside the bar for the cab, it somehow came about that I had not had any sexual contact (including kissing) with a woman in about 3 years. The wonders of pity. Normally pity is not something I enjoy—it’s not something most people enjoy. But in this case, I was all for it, as only moments after this revelation, HIF started making out with me right there on the curb! About thirty seconds went by before she stopped (probably she opened her eyes for a brief moment and felt the sheer terror of seeing my bearded, bespectacled face at a zoom level no human being should have to endure). Amazingly, still reeling from the shock at what had just happened[iii], Sally then started making out with me too. (Well, not quite.  Due to her equally high level of intoxication, Sally botched it a bit and our teeth kind of mashed… she apologized immediately, and awkwardly.)

And yet there was still more surprise to come before our arrival at the strip club. In a perfect preface to what we were about to see, during the taxi ride Sally and HIF simultaneously flashed STD and I. What the fuck was going on?!?! Like the idea to go the strip club, I have no fucking idea how this happened. What could possibly prompt these girls to lift their shirts and bras for a few second to show us their breasts?!?! What were they trying to accomplish exactly? Did they think I had doubts about whether those suspiciously breast shaped convexities in their shirts were actually breasts? Were they just so proud of them that they simply had to share it with us, like someone showing off their well-toned muscles? This is clearly a behavior I will never understand. Even more so than the decision to go the strip club, this seems like some kind of metaphysical anomaly—a brief pause in the laws of nature, a rupture in the fabric of socio-sexual space-time. (I think I’m taking this analogy a bit too far.) I know this sounds terribly cliché, but unfortunately it is true: the whole thing seemed like some weird, fucked up dream, one that in this case would just leave me feeling somehow guilty. I wasn’t supposed to be seeing this. And it was made more absurd by two things. First was the reaction of the cab driver, a woman, who didn’t seem the least bit bothered, and even laughed a bit. Clearly this kind of activity was well within the norm for her, and nothing makes a weird experience weirder than other people treating it as normal. The second was STD’s reaction. While I was aghast and confused, he was cheering it on as if we were still watching the fucking basketball game. I didn’t know what the fuck to do or think or feel, and here was this guy just unambiguously excited, not the least bit perturbed that we were getting our own version of Girls Gone Wild, right down to the not-only-is-this-morally-wrong-but-deeply-unsexy quality of those videos. And they did this while we were driving down Green Street, in plain view of anyone who happened to be watching our cab go by. A fact I believe HIF was aware of, causing her to briefly point her chest towards the window. I suppose she was just trying to be fair—you gotta bring enough for the whole class, right?

I was still engaging in an unquestionably vain attempt to recenter myself and figure out what the fuck was going on when we arrived at The Silver Bullet[iv]. From the outside it resembled every creepy “adult bookstore” you have ever seen on the side of the highway—one story, basic square, drab architecture, and a crappy, relatively discrete neon sign. Those signs are the best. They have to be prominent enough to be seen, but they generally don’t overtly advertise exactly what they are—it’s this fantastically weird line between publicity and shame, like they know what they do is wrong and/or creepy, but they gotta get the message out anyway. I’m sure there are many strip clubs which don’t follow this rule (like the Bada Bing in The Sopranos), but I feel like ones that are directly embedded in a residential area sort of have to. This subdued approach also I think allows those who are entering the facility to feel like there is a bit more discretion than there actually is.

The inside itself was basically what you would expect. You walk in and to the left there is a lot of empty space filled with tables and such, and a bar set in the back left corner. To the right is the “stage”. In lieu of a wall on the right, it was mostly a dark curtain. The stage went along much of the right wall, with a section protruding into the front-center of the room, which I will just call the runway, for lack of a better term. There was a pole in about the middle section of the runway, and another one on the part of the stage next to the curtain. The walls were painted mostly black, I think, except maybe the back wall, which was a bit lighter.

When we arrived, the place was about half-full. But this was hard to judge, because it’s not as if the people there were spread about the tables as one would expect in a bar or restaurant—they were disproportionately gathered towards the stage, particularly the runway, where there were a few topless girls dancing and moving about in what felt like a bad imitation of every stripper scene I’ve seen in a movie or TV show. And the men were all cheering and hollering and all that. There was also a guy on stage, lying down, with one of the girls over him doing something that can’t quite be described as a lap dance because, as I noted, he was lying down. At one point I remember she was kneeling over him, with her legs set on either side of him such that her torso was directly above his waist—I expected them to start dry humping (or maybe not that dry) at any moment.

The girls really weren’t that attractive. Not that they were ugly in any way, they just weren’t the ridiculously fantasized ideal of strippers that we encounter in the media—these were basically just normal girls, except topless and sweaty, and with slightly larger than average sized breasts, breasts that were flopping around in ways that seemed neither natural nor particularly comfortable, like fish flopping around on land.

I could feel the anxiety mounting from the moment we walked in. Everything about it bothered me. The dark colors of the walls and curtains and furniture made me feel like this was some secret underground activity which isn’t and shouldn’t be sanctioned by society. The way all these men were leering at these women as if they were nothing more than sexual objects. And god, the pole dancing! For some reason I had never really registered how disgustingly Freudian pole dancing was. I mean, fuck, these naked girls are literally wrapping themselves around a long shaft! I wouldn’t have been surprised if the top of the pole occasionally (and too quickly, I might add) shot off some hot, white ooze into the crowd—no wonder these things are standard issue for every strip club in the world. In the middle of all this I found myself thinking—and I know this is going to sound weird and maybe even controversial in a way that I’m not sure I can defend—that what I was witnessing was one of the closest things we have in contemporary American society to a minstrel show, except this was about gender not race. Quite simply, this all freaked me the fuck out, and my mind starting racing a mile a minute…

… look at all these poor girls who are probably just normal people with normal aspirations reduced to parading their bodies in front of a bunch of fucking creepy small town hicks from central Illinois who seem to have no fucking problem treating and thinking about women as nothing more than vehicles to fulfill their sexual desires and half of whom probably have a girlfriend or a wife to go back to in which case what the fuck are they doing here when they could be home in the presence of a woman who probably actually cares about them but who they probably also objectify because how can someone who so unabashedly enjoys paying to see half naked women who they don’t know walk up and down a stage not also objectify to some degree all the women in their life and fuck it’s so fucking sad that these girls can find no other reasonable source of income and are in some sense forced to do this to put themselves through school or support a kid even but then maybe they aren’t forced at all and maybe they actually enjoy this and find some kind of empowerment in this because they have a degree of control over these pathetic guys that maybe is difficult to find elsewhere in life and certainly it’s hard to find other equivalent type jobs and maybe I should be happy for them and for women that they have this option that they can choose and are not really forced into that pays them so well and kinda sorta even exploits sexism to their financial advantage but is it really worth making a bit of money to sacrifice their dignity to the disgusting perverse things going on in these guys heads right now and I can’t imagine that they would find this to be an empowering activity if they were really aware of what these guys are thinking and how they are seeing them but fuck maybe that is just being totally presumptuous of me and they are probably totally completely aware of the sick disgusting things going on in the heads of all these fucking losers and maybe they even relish it in some fucked up way but isn’t that relishing itself fucked up and perverse and unhealthy but christ who the fuck am I to think that these girls’ dignity is being robbed somehow and doesn’t that just make me as worse as anyone because by seeing things in that way I am completely denying them agency and control and how they see things must play an important part into whether this is really OK or acceptable but I have to think that were it up to women there wouldn’t be such things as strip clubs because there must be something a woman would always rather be doing right there has to be and so maybe it’s the fault of capitalism and the free market and this is like the problem with selling kidneys or something but what are they selling exactly and but fuck if we stopped it would all these women find other work and perhaps it’s overall better this way because they are able to support themselves with this money and in the end that’s probably better for women and feminism and this is just a short term sacrifice or something but that doesn’t make it fair for these girls standing right here in front of me and oh fuck now STD is getting up on stage and doing that same thing with the lying down and some part of me wishes that were me up there because fuck let’s not fucking kid ourselves those are some nice tits fuck I shouldn’t be thinking things like that fuck fuck fuck me and Sally and HIF seem amused but not really bothered by all this and I really need a fucking beer I think I feel a panic attack coming on and why is it that I am clearly way more disturbed and conflicted and deeply uneasy about all this than the two girls I am with and perhaps I shouldn’t be disturbed at all and maybe this is all just good harmless fun despite nothing about this feeling harmless or fun but it should be especially for me I mean shit what the fuck this is probably the closest I will get to seeing a naked woman for years at the rate I’m going and of all people I should be enjoying this as I’m getting what I have been fantasizing about the last three sexless years a naked sweating gyrating female but I’m not enjoying this fucking at all and I’m starting to shake and I don’t think I can handle this much longer and I have to fucking get out of here right fucking now but god this is so cliché and like something right out of a bad movie where the pathetic sensitive liberal guy can’t even handle the sight of a naked women and then goes home to his little liberal hybrid and does philosophy and cries when he watches movies and tells his friends how offended he was at the dirty strip club and what the fuck have I become this is so ridiculous and but so fuck it fuck it just fuck it I don’t care I just have to get fucking out of here right fucking now before I really lose it…

Luckily Sally and HIF were pretty understanding (STD wasn’t very happy with me I don’t think). I don’t remember how long we were actually there, though it couldn’t have been more than like 45 minutes. I know it was enough time to finish like half a beer that I had gotten to try to calm myself down, which clearly didn’t work. When I dropped off Sally at her place before walking home, we shared a really awkward kiss, and had I wanted to, I’m confident that I could have taken it further. Instead, I went home and slept uneasily, wondering if I had done something wrong that night. To this day, I’m still not sure.

[i] It would be kind of creepy if I could remember this date off the top of my head. But, no, I looked it up online. Sadly, I can easily remember the score of the game that night.

[ii] Just in case—and this is pretty improbable—anyone reading this essay knows this person, I have altered her name.

[iii] Yes, I realize that this kind of thing is par for the course for many or most men in their early 20s, and I suppose the level of shock and excitement I felt at that moment is testament to the truly pathetic and depraved state of my love life. Quite frankly, it is embarrassing how high my heart rate probably jumped at that moment. But so it goes. Everything is relative, right? I’ll keep telling myself that…

[iv] This name is just too easy to pick on. I think it speaks for itself.

- Torff