Have you ever had a conversation about the Dewey decimal system with a naked woman?

[KB.]

A friend of mine just now refered me to these forums, glad to see there is a writing and poetry section. This is the latest of 38 stories I have posted since late March. I think the link to the myspace page where the others are located is somewhere in my profile. Hope you enjoy.



Bridgekeeper: What... is the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow?

Arthur: What do you mean? An African or European swallow?

Bridgekeeper: Huh? I-- I don't know that! Auuuuuuuugh!

Bedevere: How do know so much about swallows?

Arthur: Well, you have to know these things when you're a king, you know.

~Monty Python and the Holy Grail

Ever feel that way when you ask a question, the Auuuuuuuugh!, part anyway? That has nothing to do with anything I may write tonite; it was just stuck in my head.

If a woman has to choose between catching a fly ball and saving an infant's life, she will choose to save the infant's life without even considering if there are men on base.

~Dave Barry

**For the record, I have never shared this story with anyone till now.**



I dated a stripper for awhile, seven or eight years ago. It's different, and I feel like talking about. Plus there is a story to be told in it. I from time to time have trouble sleeping, always used to like the hours after midnight the best. Still do for the most part. Willie sang about it, it ain't no good life, but it's my life. Her real name was Angel, which is pretty damn funny in an ironic way. I don't remember her stage name. She was nineteen, but said she was almost twenty, maybe 5'7", dark hair which she wore shoulder length, tan, blue eyes. Skinny as a rail, but athletic looking. She had nice legs, real nice. No tattoos or piercings in weird places, just one in her bellybutton. She was a student at a university in Kentucky, English Literature was her major. She wanted to be a Librarian. Now she wasn't putting herself through college by stripping naked for every redneck, out of work mechanic, and credit card rich, late 50's, mid-life crisis having small town doctor. She was stripping because her sister was married to a man that was running a meth lab, and she was trying to get her and her nephew out of town. The sister couldn't do it because the husband was always around, at least that is what she was told. She figured she could do this thing, with the greasy locals for awhile, suck up her pride, and take care of her sister. It was cash, it was decent money, and it was quick. It killed her eventually, indirectly I suppose but it did regardless.

Angel and I hung out together for a little over a year, I would visit her at work on the weekends, and we would meet up sometimes during the week somewhere in the middle of where we lived. Now, I detest strip clubs (if you feel like making some comment because you know better, shut up), really I do. They are a good place to watch people though, and I love to watch people. They are even better than a bar, because most of them don't serve alcohol, you have to bring it with you and then pay outrageous prices to bring it in. Most folks are too cheap for that.

People, men and women both tend to show a certain side of themselves when around a multitude of nakedness. There is the guy who will sit right up front where the current lady is dancing to what ever song happens to be popular at the time. I believe TLC's No Scrubs was the song of choice for this moment in strip club history. Now even here you have three different types, you have Mr. Broke Ass who wouldn't throw a dollar on stage if it was on fire, you have the guy who is just there to lecherously observe the one girl he came to see, and he always has a single or a five spot for her, then you have the guy who treats the employees like they are melons at the grocery store, he usually doesn't get to hang around for very long.

You have the guys that rarely ever make it up that far, they just hang around in the back, in a corner out of the light. They may go up every once in awhile but they are there because they are a friend, a significant other, or just bored. Lastly there are the guys in the middle, that is where mid-life crisis and his ilk hang out.

Strip clubs aren't like they are pictured in the movies, unless you end up in one with valet parking and bathroom attendants. Angel made a lot of money, she had been doing this thing for about nine months at the time, and she had managed to save almost twenty grand in cash, and was getting ready to get her sister out of there, but her Mom was in a bad wreck, and had no insurance, there went ten grand just like that. Now she was looking at six more months probably.

When I was there she spent too much time hanging around with me in that corner, missed a lot of money. She said it didn't matter, there would always be more to be made. Hunter S. Thompson would have been proud, here sat an overweight welder and a skinny stripper talking about Emerson, Camus, Noam Chomsky, the logic of the Dewey decimal system, and the possibility of the world as we knew it being purgatory. The stripper pole, disco lights, drunken hillbillies, and three women singing about men that fell short of par just added the right flavor to it all.

Have you ever had a conversation about the Dewey decimal system with a naked woman as you sat fully clothed? Try it sometime, you might get a few crazy looks the first hundred or so woman you talk to, but I bet there is one somewhere who can talk about it. Don't cheat though, make sure there is at least one drunk hillbilly, sans yourself, and two disco balls involved in the plan.

There is a world wide committee that comprises the the editing power of the Dewey system. Worldwide I said. She loved to tell me about it, she could list the classifications, she didn't drink, use drugs, and only would occasionally smoke one of my cigarettes if I had a menthol. She told me she kept her sanity by memorizing and repeating in her head that list of numbers and what ever knowledge was stored between the decimals. We spent a lot of time talking about The Myth of Sisyphus, which is one of my favorites. We also talked about Tupac and his use of Iambic pentameter.

This place as far as I could tell was pretty clean, didn't break any laws, and the owner took care of the girls, but like any other establishment, that is service oriented, stays open later than most, and has a naturally high turnover rate, drugs were a huge problem. That is why I patronize these places and don't work at them. I have enough temptation in my fairly normal every day life. She always managed to deny those demons.

She turned 21 the same month I turned 23, and sometime in there we managed to take each other out for a real date. I drove to Kentucky and we went to a movie, High Fidelity, and to a decent place to eat. Now High Fidelity holds a tight spot in my heart, wonderful movie, John Cusack is awesome, it centers around women and music, Lisa Bonet sings the Peter Frampton song Baby I Love Your Way (thanks for finding that for me, I listen to it almost daily), and it made me want to own a record shop eventually. She had one drink that night, a Long Island Ice Tea, which was exactly what I had on my 21st birthday, and I had just one on mine as well. I didn't drink anything the night we went out, wanted to be on my best behavior.

She had one month left she figured at her night time job. She was past her goal that she had set to give to her sister. I had met her Mom after our date, and she was a nice woman, but lost in the world. She was a little crazy, old school crazy, not the kind that can be easily diagnosed or medicated. You could see it in her eyes.

Angel thought Sisyphus was a fool, I thought he was the most noble literary creation ever. She said if she had been him she would have told that boulder to go bugger (yes she said bugger) itself after about the tenth trip up that mountain. I wonder if she ever realized how even more ironic that was than her name. I told her, that Sisyphus was a hero, and that even though the definition of futility is doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result, that made him even more of a hero. He cheated Death at his own game, every damn day. Camus thought it absurd, I thought it hard headed, and I like hard headed.

There is nothing quite so surreal as having conversations about Sisyphus telling boulders to bugger themselves, absurdity, Death and his fairness, purgatory, and saving sisters and nephews; while drinking a three dollar diet coke in a plastic Dixie cup in a strip club at two in the morning.

April rolled around and she had her money plus the extra she was saving. I left her that weekend and she told me she would see me in a week, after she got her sister out. When I got back the next weekend she wasn't there, and she didn't answer her phone. The owner told me she was sick, and that when I came in to apologize for her not being there. He gave me my cover charge back, a diet coke on the house, and I went home. The next weekend she was different, physically and otherwise. She had that telling sunken look around her eyes, her hair was a mess, and she looked thinner. Her tan was a little faded. She didn't mention Dewey one time, but I saw her mouthing the words to whatever song was playing as she was on stage. She called Sisyphus a ****ing idiot, not just a fool. I found out eventually that her sister had taken the money, some twenty three thousand dollars cash, and had given it to her husband, who then instead of paying bills, or buying the baby some clothes, managed to snort it all up his nose.

Apparently she had managed to find her own white horse to ride as well. Such a worthless damn drug. I tried to talk to her about it, but she was done, broken, her soul was withered up. That quick. The naked Librarian want to be, judge of Sisyphus, Noam Chomsky groupie, and lover of Camus, had become just a junkie stripper. She overdosed the week before Mother's Day in 2000. I got a call, after she had already been buried or cremated, I don't even know. I got a call to come up to the club, that they had some things for me from her place. There was a large manila envelope, it had a copy of the soundtrack from High Fidelity, a Kahlil Gibran book, The Madman: His Parables and Poems, she knew how much I loved reading Gibran. There was also a letter, and a 24 karat gold ring with the words "To My Sisyphus" engraved on the inside. I found a clarity in why she had described him as a fool at first and a ****ing idiot later.

The letter was nice, it was written before she started her swift decent. She said she planned on asking me to marry her as soon as she was done with her sister's relocation and all it involved. She talked about how much she had always hated reading about Sisyphus, but then how much I reminded her of him when I looked and talked to her. I don't know why she thought that, it was never a hard task to be around her, but maybe she knew things I didn't. She talked about the cost of opening a small business and what it would take to make it work in some of the small towns around our two locations. She also talked about the extra money she had saved to help me do it if I wanted to give it a shot.

I tore that letter to tiny pieces and then burnt it. Needed to be cleansed of it. I kept the ring for awhile, but finally just left it in an ashtray outside a random building in Houston. I've said to a few folks that marriage was something I never thought about till recently, and it was mostly truth. I have been asked three times, once in a letter by a woman I could never answer, once by someone in Houston who talked in her sleep using five or six different languages to do so, and once more since then. Almost a year to the day between the first two, and seven years between the second and most recent (which was more of a simultaneous asking). I still ain't married and don't figure to be anytime soon. I lied about the thinking of it because I needed too at the time. No intentional wrong doing was involved.

The week all of this came to its conclusion I managed to find myself flying through the air in a two thousand pound, 82 Mercedes Benz 300sd turbo diesel (damn I miss that car). I figure it flipped at least twice, it ended up on its roof, the back window pierced by a guard rail, and I found myself in jail. It was the absolute worst day in the year for a son to find himself in such a place. That day eventually led me to Houston. Houston has a strip club called St. James Place, it has valet parking, bathroom attendants, and a pretty nice lunch buffet.

I haven't been to a Library since she died, and I haven't been to a strip club in at least six years. I only miss one of those places.

I'll leave ya with a little information about armadillos.

"By the way, armadillos carry lots of diseases, including leprosy. Only about 5% of wild armadillos have leprosy and something like 95% of humans are naturally immune anyway, but still, it's probably best not to try to pet them!"

~Becky

[mominiowa]

A very good read.... Keep them coming...:driving: :-6

[koan]

Very nicely told.

If she is real then you managed to keep the best parts of her alive. It's sad to think of all the people lost to cocaine. What they wanted to be and could have been all stolen away.

[JacksDad]

Nice.

:-6