Keeping Glen Close

Glen came by after another of his extended absences. He used to come by every other weekend with his friend and employee, Chuy a jolly Mexican man, but recently Chuy stopped drinking. Since he now has to do everything soberly, Chuy lost interest in long evenings at the strip club. When Chuy refused to continue accompanying him, Glen brought another one of his friends/employees to his weekend haunt along with a couple of the friend’s girlfriends. Glen seems to primarily hang out with men of color. I don’t know if it’s because he owns a business largely dependent on manual labor, which tends to fall upon the backs of minorities-- or if he has a penchant for flavor. When I see Glen with his friends, I can’t help but think that he is the answer to the question “which one of these is not like the others?” He’s a meticulously groomed white man who looks like he could walk directly from the strip club back to the office for a one-on-one consult with investors. His friend is a slightly younger black man dressed in a black button down and black shorts with bright gold chains around his neck and a red baseball cap for a pop of color. The girlfriends he dragged along look like they shop exclusively at Fashion Nova. Glen was having a ball with a table full of mixers and a couple water bottles of vodka, grinning from ear to ear when he saw me after I finished a half-hour room with another guy. One thing I’m grateful for with Glen is his lack of neediness. He doesn’t badger me for my time or get jealous when I’m in the middle of another sale when he arrives. I’ve had clients literally walk out the door when they realize that I’m not immediately available at their beck and call. Glen knows to hang out, enjoy the atmosphere, and tip fairly in my absence. While Glen was enjoying me, I noticed his friend and the women looking bored. My club isn’t a turn up club, it’s a lounge intentionally set up to encourage white businessmen to feel relaxed. Ballers aren’t exactly throwing stacks in the air so much as discreetly handing you a single hundred dollar bill to get your attention. The other thing is that we have blatantly racist policies set up to discourage black folk from congregating at the club. There’s a dress code, and dancers are prohibited from playing rap music. To be clear: 99% of strippers love rap music. We would all be bumping mumble rap if we could, but we tend to have to settle for the watered down remix of whatever songs we actually want to play. His friend and the Fashion Nova babes decided to dip early, which left Glen to “party” alone. To his credit, he stayed a while after they left trying to rid his wallet of leftover $1’s.

Cut back to Thursday evening. Glen hit me up to see if I might be working Friday, but I was booked to speak on a literary panel that evening. I asked if he could come by Saturday, but he told me he was flying back to Indiana Saturday morning. I’d come down with a cold after three days of nighttime outdoor shoots (to clarify, non porn related), and I wanted nothing more than to avoid working. But, I knew Glen was good for at least $300, so I scraped myself out of bed and arranged to meet around nine.

I arrived early out of habit. I hate getting to work after eight. The early bird gets the worm, and I’m rather fond of the idea of thinking of men as worms. Perhaps you remember Rob from another one of my stories. He’s the batshit older white man who began playing passive aggressive mind games with me that ended in one of my few client breakups. I broke up with him because the entire exchange was causing me more anxiety than I was getting paid for. Anyway, to this day, Rob continues popping by the club, looking troubled whenever he notices that I’ve arrived for my shift. Thursday, the DJ put me on stage when I was in the middle of getting ready, and Rob happened to be sitting directly in front of the stage. I performed my set and watched him out of the corner of my eye. The club was projecting a football game on a screen to the left of the stage and petty old Rob turned his elderly neck entirely away from me to watch the football game. I think his hurt over the breakup had solidified into a self-righteous indignation so great he was willing to risk his spinal alignment to avoid paying me any attention. I almost chuckled at the display of fragility, except that I was feeling quite physically fragile myself. I couldn’t fully breathe out of my nose, and the set left me more winded than usual. Rob left not long after my set. He didn’t want me to think that he was leaving because I had made him uncomfortable. He left when all of the dancers were called backstage for Showcase, so that he could slip away into the night like the spineless creature he is. For my part, even though I was feeling like a slug, I looked flawless, like black Sailor Moon. I texted one of my regular papi’s to come visit, hoping that between Glen and Papi, I could check out early with my minimum in the bag.

Glen arrived right as the DJ called me on stage for another set. Chuy always used to beg me to “do the Spiderman,” by which he meant that he wanted to watch me do all of the acrobatic stuff. I was not feeling like an acrobat by any means, but this was the pattern Glen, Chuy, and I had established over multiple visits. I did my best, considering my body wasn’t having it, and Glen tipped reasonably. It felt almost like everything was happening too quickly. Glen arrived, then suddenly I was on stage, and then shortly after I was in his lap making small talk to extend the interaction even though we didn’t have much to talk about. On his end, Glen was attentive if a little subdued since he had come alone this time.

Him: I don’t really like this place. I just come here to see you. I missed you.

Me: I missed you too.

I hugged him, because that’s not a very believable thing to hear a stripper say, if you’re at all in touch with reality. I do miss certain clients, including Glen who’s pleasant, and I like groping his dick because he has a nice thick penis. Contrary to popular belief, many strippers do have opinions about dicks since we are in the dick handling profession, even if we do so over pants. For a while, Glen was popping by every other weekend to see me. Then he took a long hiatus but spontaneously washed up again after his sabbatical and it took me by surprise. I’d thought he was over the whole thing because it was one of those unrequited love situations. He had feelings, and I had his money, along with some feelings that could at best be described as a conditional fondness.

Me: How have you been?

Him: Good. Busy.

Me: How’s business?

Him: It’s been great. Just signed a big contract for a project out in Florida. Pensacola, so it’s not Miami or anything, but still nice.

Me: Especially this time of year.

Him: How’s your sister?

Me: She got into a scooter accident and wiped out once, decided to push on and try again, then proceeded to wipe out a second time. Now both of her knees are fucked up.

It’s hard for me to talk about my sister with she/her pronouns, but customers don’t understand what it means to be nonbinary. They get overwhelmed by the confusion of shifting gender identities and the overall modernity of the world today and their erections deflate.

Him: Ooooh! Yikes. That sucks. Those scooters are dangerous.

Me: They are. When are you leaving on Saturday?

Him: I’m leaving at 10 a.m.

Me: That’s early.

Him: Usually I take a redeye.

Me: Well, I guess it’s not early. Comparatively. You get to sleep in!

Him: I do.

Me: Do you have an apartment out here or do you stay in hotels when you’re in LA?

Him: I rent a place in El Segundo, not too far from here.

Me: That’s nice.

Him: It’s convenient. Only costs about ten bucks for an uber from the airport, and then I have my stuff and my car. I don’t even really have to pack much. I bring a laptop, some toiletries, and a change of clothes in case my plane gets delayed.

Me: That’s great. Do you hire a maid service to clean your apartment?

Him: I’m actually a pretty clean guy on my own. Although, Chuy might move in with me, at which point I’ll probably hire a maid because I’m not cleaning after him. I don’t mind cleaning up after myself, but--

Me: It’s different cleaning up after other people.

Him: Exactly. What’s new with you?

Me: Not much. Still writing, podcasting, acting and all that. It’s been going well though…

I gave him a cursory rundown of my latest ventures. Relationships with clients mirror other kinds of relationships where you have that initial unquenchable desire to Know Everything about each other, but then once all of that information has been covered and you’ve been acquainted for some time, you find that there’s less and less to talk about. Glen isn’t breathlessly discovering new things about me. We have our established pattern and it works well enough for both of us.

Him: You ready to go dance?

Me: Totally.

He took me for a half hour and picked the same booth we’d chosen last time. Glen likes to watch me “cum”. I have actually cum in front of him before, which was a fun erotic adventure for the both of us, however lately I’ve been faking orgasms. It’s a sad thing to do: perform an orgasm, but actually coming is emotional and leaves me in a different headspace than where I’d begun initially. I feel vulnerable as opposed to impenetrable. I need emotional aftercare, which is not something one can consistently expect in the club environment after the dance is over and money’s been exchanged. Glen is caring and all, but he likes to dip after our sessions. I recently made a conscious decision to stop sharing my orgasmic energy with clients, and instead provide convincing fakes for whoever wants it bad enough.

I started off my dance in the traditional lap grind kind of way until he lifted me off of him and placed me on the couch so that he could watch me perform that sacred glorious act of masturbating to “orgasm”. He watched, while I put on the show and tried to include him as best I could. This session, I “orgasmed” once, then because we had so much time remaining on the clock, I went for round two and “came” again. Even though I feel like I understand men and their sexuality in a unique way only sex workers understand, I still don’t think I truly understand lap dances for 95% of men. I don’t know why they come back. I don’t know what exactly I’m providing that flips some switch in their minds and convinces them to empty their wallets time after time. Somehow, whatever I’m doing works. At the end of the session, Glen was happy. He handed me something like $100 in twenties. He hadn’t come or anything, in fact I noted his boner waxing and waning like the moon. We hugged and he tells me he’ll be back in town around the 7th. He took a seat back by the stage and places the rest of his $1’s on the stage in front of a beautiful new girl with long wavy hair and a svelte modelesque body. I felt a pang of jealousy out of nowhere. I know I can only be myself, and I have plenty of confidence, but no matter how beautiful you are, humans will always crave variety. I don’t know how much longer I’ll see Glen, if ever again, but that’s always the case with regulars. We see them until we don’t. Some people crave rituals and consistency, but the strip club offers you the chance to choose-- to sample as many flavors as you might fancy.

After he placed his $1’s on the stage, Glen made his exit. I watched him leave from a corner where he couldn’t see me. He doesn’t like to leave with small cash on him, which I appreciate since too many customers cling onto their remaining cash claiming they need it to “pay for the cab” home, as if anyone pays for cabs or ubers with cash. He left, and I wondered what any of this means.