#11: Wingman Chronicles Part III: Lap Dances and Emmy Award Nominated Accidental Wingmen

Oprah calls it secreting. Religious types call it praying. Psychologists call it delusional and put you on meds. I call it common sense: ask and ye shall receive.


Wingman Red, she of blues-singing sexual dalliances, casually mentioned a few months ago that she'd never been to a strip club and would like to go, unknowingly sending that request into the universe on an Oprah-shaped comet in the process. Fortunately, I was standing close enough when she did this it to be included in the return.


A personal note on strip clubs:


1.) I love 'em. I've never denied my significant other the right to go and ogle some boobies, with our without me there. Though I will say they have more fun when I'm there, because girls have more fun at strip clubs than guys. Period. Guys, if you don't believe me, bring your two most fun-loving, sexually secure wingwomen to the club next time and see how different the experience is. We're like a vagina-ed bridge between you and your fantasy, because no good female wingman will let her male counterpart be a creepy customer while she's around, and strippers know it. They will flock like sequined moths to an Alabamian bug-zapper in mid-July.


2.) I, personally, can't get behind the feminist argument that ALL strippers are being degraded. And I'm not getting into that argument here, so moving on...


3.) I may or may not have brought Alex to the strip club for his birthday several years ago and ended up onstage with a bottle of champagne giving him a special birthday dance with the help a stripper named Violet who I kind-of-sort-of-maybe-hooked-up with in the bathroom for half and hour while Alex swigged beer and watched. May. Or may not have. Done that. 


Alex may or may not have called it the best night of his life. This is all hypothetical.


4.) As a former Hooters girl, one who never felt degraded by her job (except the scrunchy-socks part of the uniform--any adornment that gives even the leggiest women cankles should be illegal), I'd be a hypocrite to turn and bash anyone whose sex appeal has contributed to a paycheck.


Personal note on strippers over.


Red and I met up at an innocuous Irish pub for a low key evening--minimal primping, no expectations. Beer, girl-talk and bar banter. We were about two drinks deep when QB walked in.


Now. What to say about QB? QB is a very well-known and lusted after TV actor. We call him QB because he's a chiseled hunk of Quarterback-looking manflesh grown in the woods of Maine, topped with a Ken-doll style head manufactured at The Hot Professional Athlete Manufacturing Firm of America (affectionately known as HPAMFA, which is coincidentally the sound many women make when QB walks into a room). At some point this tall, square-jawed piece of magazine-worthy Americana decided life as an athletic all-star didn't offer nearly enough immediate fawning gratification--so he switched to acting. Successfully. He is very pretty, very loaded and very unfortunately has a tattoo of a jungle cat on his shoulder.


He is also very much not my type, which is why we hit if off on a non-fuck-me level after working together on a freelance gig, settling instead into the kind of random dude-banter that tends to be my base form of communication with any guy I am not trying to bed. He is very fun to get drunk with, if you happen to run into him--which you will not, knowingly, because I'm not stupid enough to tell you what TV show he's on.


I gave him an appropriately obnoxious "Whatssup, playa playa!!" from our corner of the bar (yes, I'm a real lady), signaling he should come sit with us. QB smiled, then tripped over the two bridge-and-tunnel-bimbos who were already trying to suck his dick.


Soon our quartet (he had a wingman too) were having many brews while he sucked down many vodka-sodas. Red kept giving me the well-concealed but still entirely hilarious "OMG WE'RE GETTING DRUNK WITH _________ FROM THAT SHOW ________!" look. And I was shooting her "Don't get too excited" looks back, because QB is married.


QB is wedded to one of those scorchingly hot antelope-women with three miles of leg and Sahara-flat torso, one that has no right being as legitimately talented as she is when she's already been given other assets for social leverage. (She's also a TV actress, because that's what you do when God makes you an antelope-woman with no visible pores.) To the best of my knowledge, they both have industry-standard marital vows, which means they occasionally cheat with their co-stars but genuinely love each other. And have really photogenic make-up sex.


NO, this is not the post where I check "sleeping with a married man off my list," so untwist your panties and keep reading.


Anyway, we're all drinking. QB's wingman ducks out to go home to his wife, but QB is a "bachelor for the weekend," all by his lonesome while honeypie is out of town filming. So we all keep drinking. The conversation goes the only place it could foreseeably go: Canada.


Canada is known for its waterfalls, that song from the South Park movie, syrup...and strippers. Why strippers? I dunno. Probably because the native tundra-like temperatures mean the stripper's nipples are always more alert and appealing than that of their southern, American-grown counterparts.


As a connoisseur of strip clubs, I get off on a stripper tangent with QB ("I once sliced my cornea on a rogue piece of body glitter." "Yeah? Well I hooked up with the stripper at my ex-boyfriend's birthday." pause. "And he didn't marry you?" "Well, see...."). Finally, Red looks at QB with subtle but palpable feminine wiles armed.


"I've never been to a strip club. Ever," she says, casually stirring the foam on the pint glass rim with one finger.


God I love this woman.


"Really?" QB replies, hooked. "What, you're some kind of feminist?"


"No, not at all. I'm a grad student. I can't afford a train ticket home, let alone a strip club," she laughs, Irish eyes smiling. Grinning even. I pick up the slack.


"Yeah, it's true. She's never been. God, isn't it so sad this pale, pink, porcelain skin has never been baptized by the cleavage sweat of a Ukrainian undergrad in a pink thong," I sigh, placing my head against her bosom for effect.


"Yeah. This is sad." QB's eyes are distant, thoughtful. And he is not pondering the economic implications of the proposed Obama health care plan.


"Well, c'est la vie! Another round?" I ask, waiting to see if he'll take the bait.


"We should go," QB says, eyes on us again.


"Go where?" Coy. Play coy.


"The strip club. We should go. Red, we should pop your cherry."


"QB, you are a married man," I say, resisting. "You'll get in trouble."


"I am a bachelor for the weekend, my wife is trashed in some bar in Houston with a bunch of production assistants trying to sleep with her and she loves strip clubs," he replies before swigging the last of his drink and placing the glass decisively on the bar. "We're going. Red, get your game face on."


We plan a totally pointless, semi-elaborate ruse where Red and I pay and exit first, meeting QB a few minutes later at the side door of a conveniently located strip joint so no random photogs snag shots of QB leaving a bar (or entering a strip joint) with two random girls who are not his wife. The VIP bouncer, clearly fresh off his win from the Ving Rhames Look-a-Like Contest, ushers us in covertly, whisking past the red velvet rope and into the thumping, subterranean lair of sin and glass surfaces below.


We're led around the carpeted manse, eventually escorted to a dimly lit banquet near one of the stages, where a smiley blonde with black-light reactive white panties is showing everyone how firemen get from Point A to Point B when the elevators are down. Only she's doing it with her back arched like a Slinky down stairs, both hands free to wave at two drooling Neanderthals at the base of the stage.


After a brief visual sweep of the floor, which is littered with black leather lilypad-like risers topped with gyrating lap-dance blossoms, we pick our preliminary favorites and proceed to kick it classy:

12 bottles of Coors Light and $300 worth of lap dances.

What? I said he was from Maine. He was paying, so it was his choice.


Two hours, many, many slurred words, and the lifestory of a girl named Zora later (she, of course, took a shine to Red, bonding over their shared love of Chekov no doubt), it was time to go. We were crossing into that drunken no-mans-land where hormones and alcohol bring parties invloved dangerously close to sleeping with people they shouldn't. Though I was far more interested in leaving with Anya, the pixie-brunette who kept putting her strawberry lipgloss all over my neck, than I was with QB, just to set the record straight.


We thanked QB profusely, sprung for his next lapdance, and left him there with what I am convinced is a totally average boner. (Sorry, but God just doesn't give that much pretty a massive wang too. Djimon Hounsou is the exception to this rule.)


"What just happened??" Red asked as we made it outside, sudden gust of wind blowing her mane of red hair around and making every guy, and even me, stop and stare. "I mean, like. WHAT. JUST. HAPPENED?" Her eyes were wide and incredulous and glazed with lust and cheap beer.


"You just had your virgin strip club experience, loved it, may marry Zora, and that guy from that show you love treated you to it." I lit her cigarette, and we started hand in hand down the Avenue, Brooklyn-bound.


"This stuff doesn't happen in real life," she said on the exhale.


"It does if you have the right wingman."