Cheerleaders Gentlemen's Club - Gloucester City, New Jersey

this is a story about trust

“In the strip club chillin so nonchalant” — Gucci Mane

A white girl with face tats and long, bleached cornrows rubs my belly, tells me she’s had four miscarriages. Maybe she’s touching me, a stranger, for better luck the next time around. Maybe she just wants a tip. What good is hustle without audacity, anyway? My face, aglow against the stage—a wide open mouth where angels writhe like haunted tongues—invites such violations of personal space.

“Seven months?! Damn mama, I couldn’t even tell!”

She senses a bitch like me in a black turtleneck drinking water at a strip club bar at 7 PM with her husband (who is also drinking water) probably likes to be told she’s skinny. She senses right.

“My name’s Lucky!”

“I can tell,” I joke, pointing to the shamrock inked beneath her right eye. Lucky has big Mugshawty eyes that tell frantic stories without beginnings or endings. Blue, insectile. Millipede legs for lashes. Maybelline in the yellow tube, I suspect. Been there, stolen that; my eyes aren’t so different from Lucky’s by the eighth coat.

I’m only flirting with Lucky because the club’s a drag—real fentanyl vibes—and I came for action. “I thought I’d see some titties tonight,” I grumble, to which she pulls down her dress and pushes her B cups together and winks. We both laugh. “Yeah, we’re really more go-go here! That’s why I like it.”

The disappointment of a failed mission settles in, and I scan the bar with loud confusion, the kind that shouts, “WHAT THE FUCK IS THE POINT OF THIS CAN ANYONE PLEASE EXPLAIN?” Nobody knows what it took to get here. To Cheerleaders in Gloucester City which is basically Camden which is basically two planks of wood nailed to a broken window.

The bar encircles the stage. Not a soul is throwing money. “If you miss and it lands behind the bar, it technically goes to the bartender,” Lucky informs me. It’s almost impossible not to miss, the gap between the bar and stage oceanic. I’d like to speak to the manager but I respect the foreign territory and keep sipping my water, taking it all in sans boobs. The woman in the corner is nursing a whiskey and she looks exactly like Harper from Industry. When she stands up, I see that she, too, is a dancer unless that’s just how people dress for strip clubs I mean go-go clubs? Gentlemen’s clubs? I wouldn’t know. It’s my first time. I think to myself, that’s so Harper. Always with the double life. I am searching for my own alternate reality.

—

Andrew and I embarked on our journey around 5:30 PM. My friend Gianna was throwing a party for her 30th birthday, and it started early to account for the three pregnant invitees but also because Gianna is smart and wants to get stoned and crash peacefully before 11. She sent these hilarious e-vites with a picture of Ice Spice whom I’d realized, upon receiving the invitation, I’d already forgotten existed; pop culture zips by without so much as a parting wave. I loved “Munch.”

So there we were, parked outside her place, the dark winter evening rolling over the cemetery beside us, when I pulled up that very e-vite to find the party was the following week. Gianna wasn’t even home to share the laugh! So Andrew and I whipped it back to Jersey.

Another 30-minute drive ahead of us, I wasn’t ready to give up on the night. Late stage pregnancy primes you for resignation by way of your body losing everyday battles, like tying your shoes. I slip in and out of the same GORE-TEX ASICS every day without touching the laces. Still I, someone whose primary motivation for anything, pregnant or not, is acting against bullshit restrictions, would not be stopped.

“We should go to the strip club,” I suggested.

Ok. Got it out. No immediate regrets. Good sign, I thought.

Andrew looked at me with the hesitation of someone who’s been tested before. Someone who doesn’t want to say the wrong thing. There are no right or wrong things with me, though. Just things and unpredictable weather patterns that’ll blow them in any direction. (Funny how the direction is almost always south…)

“Really?” he asked, probably trying not to look too enthusiastic.

“I mean, we’ve gotta check that box before the baby comes, and we’re already out.” 

We quickly realized we didn’t have enough cash. And driving back to our place to grab more took just enough time to talk ourselves out of it altogether. I felt deflated pulling into the driveway. “At least the Knicks are on!” I noted with forced cheer.

I went to the bathroom and came out with a change of tune: “Nah, fuck it. We’re going.”

– 

One of my earliest musical memories was being in the car with my parents, listening to “The Beautiful People” by Marilyn Manson, when my dad joked to my mom, “good stripper song.” We owned a wet tshirt ass dive bar in the middle of nowhere so this was normal banter. I didn’t know what he meant, but I knew what he meant, if you know what I mean?

The tattooed, cherry-scented stripper persona ballooned in my mind over the years, and I would meet them and love them but still, somehow, never made it to a club. I always had a boyfriend, and I was always anxious. Couldn’t bear to enter a domain where warm-bodied erotica steps on your neck in a seven-inch spiked pleaser and urges you to love yourself, to watch and learn and make art of a body you hate. Yes, strippers held a certain power that I couldn’t invoke, notwithstanding all evidence to the contrary which every sexy flirty person is, by the gloved hand of social graces, forced to acknowledge.

Now that we’re acknowledging things, you should know this: I don’t trust my husband. No offense to him, of course. He’s never done anything to warrant suspicion beyond working from home while I go into the office. It’s just that I would jump into his skin if I could, my obsession something beyond romance that penetrates the dermis, fuses bodies. And because science hasn’t caught up with my urges and I must exist alongside him, staring and sniffing and AWOOOOOOGAing like a cartoon, I cannot relax.

Trust sounds so relaxing, impossible thing it is. I look at the early morning sky and see the moon and sun competing for space and realize I can’t even trust the time of day. How do I get by in love?

A few months ago, I found myself at work with my AirPods in, listening to our home security camera, trying to make out the voice of a woman. The voices! They were whispering to me, alright! I stuffed my laptop in my backpack and power walked to the train, tweaking off pregnancy hormones and the wild determination to catch him in the act. Stood before the whiteboard of my mind, charting how I’d make it as a single mom. Cans of soup, fortified cereal. There is a woman in my home I know I heard her. Naturally, I cracked and FaceTimed him halfway to the train and he answered immediately, gleefully. “Just on my way home, I’ll see you soon!” What a production. We have since sold the camera on Facebook Marketplace by my command.

In “On Fear,” the poet Mary Ruefle writes, “The impulse toward order is born of fear and desire, and the impulse toward chaos is born of the same.” And couldn’t we call that impulse “control?” Watching my husband’s location and suggesting we go to the strip club are the same thing, one in a trench coat with a bulletproof vest underneath and the other, a trench coat and thong. Self-preservation versus self-annihilation: you either feed the need for control or you destroy it. Cheerleaders was one good step toward destruction. I feel lighter since.

–

“This is kinda boring,” I say to Andrew after Lucky takes a hint and moves on to other patrons. 

“The best part has been the bouncers,” he notes. And I agree. Cheerleaders has some great fellas working the door. Well worth the $10 cover.

“Ride” by Ciara comes on, and a thick girl in the tiniest baby blue g-string and triangle top takes the pole. Finally, someone who’s here to put on a show. She’s on all fours, spanking herself, and I shout “YESSSSSS” and lean my big belly across the bar to make sure my cash hits the stage.

“I LIKE HER,” I say to Andrew, and we nod in accord and maybe feel like something has been accomplished here tonight in Gloucester City.

The dancer bends down to collect her cash, and her left boob pops clear out from her top. She smiles, doesn’t bother adjusting it.

Note: Dancer’s name and identifying details adapted for privacy/safety.