It started in a strip bar, in the middle of a lap dance. Jack Stanley had come in from the first cold of the year. The woman between his legs was vaguely Latin or native. She knew the con that marks every stripper the same way raised fur marks a beaten dog. She moved with snake-like precision. Her ass slowly slid from the middle of his shirt to the crotch of his pants. His dick became noticeably stiff when she ground her cloth covered pussy between his thighs. She smiled at him warmly enough with eyes that had all of the feeling of a shark. Her face was young and still pretty but dead somehow. The attempt at affection in her expression seemed hopelessly out of place. The song on stage ended, "Hey baby, you want another dance?" she asked licking her lips in the dry and bitter hopes of breaking even with the night's tips. She had lost her Catholic guilt of showing her body off in this flesh museum where she exposed herself to those that she hated. When she would come home, she would sneer at the ceramic saints on her coffee table, "what good you do me?"

"I only have ten dollars on me for a beer," Jack stated. "Then I have to run up town," which was true. "Hope we can do this again though."

"Maybe next time baby" the girl muttered as she walked over to a white haired businessman in a grey suit from Seattle who Jack had spoken to earlier. He had a wife and two kids and had been on the road for far too long and seemed to be disconnected from everywhere he visited. For him, it was a life of hotels, fatty food and stale cigarettes. The old timer's face was a dark red that signified high blood pressure. This was his last night in town before he returned home where he was little more than a stranger these days. "I've been to every strip club in America," he would state matter-of-factly to anyone who would listen. "Arizona is where the real peaches are." Then turn back to the woman on his lap.


As Jack slowly slipped into the buzzing energy that only cheap beer could provide. The lights around the stage started to blur and for the first time since he got there, two things occurred to him. First, every strip club across America are and always were savage aquariums. The role of the girl’s is not dissimilar from that of the piece of flesh at the end of an angler fish’s stock. The men who come to these places generally have the blank stare of doomed pray moments before getting consumed. Beauty here is danger that often is ignored. Some over zealous asshole gets to existed and starts grabbing at one of the girls. This is when a rather large neck less bouncer who looks as if evolution has passed him by, comes in and throws him out.

The second thing that occurred to Jack was that, for many, this is the end of the road, the last place before you hit skid row. On a slow night, old men from the OTB would wander in and spend the little money they had left. They would grin at the girls with toothless smiles as drool ran down the sides of their mouths. For many of the old timers, this was a way to waste time before the next race started. They were all harmless, rarely reaching above the levels of minor pests. The girls seemed to like them in an almost inherently mothering fashion. They usually were never around during the busier hours. Young thugs liked to harasses them or the bouncers would kick them out for the higher paying customers. The OTB is closed now, and they seem to be little more than ghosts these days. Their next stop is the shit hole of 191 street. Still junkies, booze hounds and thin faced con men come in to get off on a quick lap dance.

He looked around him, who were all these faces? Where did they all come from? They seem to come from no particular time, no particular place. The skinny kid who was vaguely Indian or Pakistani, the two college students who were dry humped on the extended couch and then the old timer who wore his three piece suit like a CEO and yet kept goosing the oldest of the dancers. Perhaps it was the joint he smoked before he got there or it could have been the third beer taking its toll but all of the faces seemed to lose their features in a blue fog. There were not saints or devils here, only mud crawlers of desperation and human extraction in the great kidney.

Over Jack's shoulder a terrible ruckus broke out. Turning around, he saw a small Mexican girl bawling out a Chinaman who looked bewildered. "You motherfucker! Gimme my money. I don't do this shit without getting paid!" One of the bouncers came over to handle the situation but in the end had to keep the man from being pummeled. He was unable to pay the twenty dollars for a lap dance. He swore someone had stolen his money. "Look.." said the bouncer, "why don't you leave now." The situation seemed to be in order when Jack decided it was about time for him to leave also. He slipped out the door into the night air then headed up town to find a bathroom to lose himself in his soft release.

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