The Vintage & Handmade Market 
I went to the Hustler strip club last week. What a blast! A strip joint is like a Ferris wheel: As long as you don’t do anything stupid and keep your hands inside the car, you will be rewarded with a spectacular view.
For me, the joy of strip bars is broken into two parts:
1. Watching scantily clad sexy mamas dance and undulate and generally be all hot and shit.
2. Watching how men behave in a room full of scantily clad, undulating sexy mamas.
Aside from gay-pride parades and sloshball games, strip clubs are unrivaled when it comes to watching men make jackasses of themselves. The creepy crawlers; the gropers; the old-man golly-jolly seekers; the loser lonelies; the wannabe pimp gangstas; the misogynistas; the inside-the-bar-sunglass-wearing, big-Dan-on-campus, 20-something yuppie twits—all seem to have no idea how to act in a strip club.
Maintaining an exceptional strip-club presence begins with your approach to a strip club: What you think it is. What you think it’s for.
Some guys, the loser lonelies for instance, wrongly believe it’s a place to meet women. The misogynistas think it’s a place where it’s acceptable to be rude and/or act superior to women. The gropers believe personal-space rules of the outside world don’t apply because chicks walk around half naked and pretend to like them.
My approach to the strip club, let’s call it a strip-club thesis, is this: A strip club is a place to engage in a little harmless fantasy; but be cautious because fantasy can be addictive, so, like everything else, strip clubs should be enjoyed in moderation—oh and be cool when you’re in there, cool?
Cool.
My strip-bar modus operandi is as such: Round up friends. Enter venue. Sit at bar. Order drinks. Watch stripper dances from afar. Get drunk. Have fun.
I like to have a stack of about 40 or so singles ready so when the girls come up to my stool with their “Did you see me dance?” rap, I can slip one in the bra and send them packing as quickly as possible. Otherwise, they’ll want to chat that dollar out of me, and, honestly, engaging in stripper small talk can be excruciating—for both of us. It’s why I don’t bother much with lap dances.
To me, there’s nothing more absurd than having a half-naked hot potato writhing over you as she recounts her most recent DMV experience in detail. I’d rather sit at the bar with the boys, laughing and drinking and doling out dollars to the “Did you see me dance” dames, and every now and then, when my fantasy dream girl emerges from behind the purple curtain—the soft-light sheen on her perfect bosom, ass, legs and mouth further fogging my Rumple-sopped brain—I make my way to a seat at the stage and throw money at her heels until she crawls to me like a lion and swallows my entire head with her cleavage.
Afterward, I go back to the bar to do more quality drinking and sassing with the boys, and not talking any stupid shit to the girls, or the bartender, and just being a normal person. I believe this is how one should comport oneself in a gentleman’s club. For those who are new to the stripper experience, or just plain lousy at it, here are five things you should probably not do in a gentleman’s club.
1. Hitting on the Strippers: Oh, yawn. Could you be more obvious? The chances of pulling an on-duty stripper are about the same as your chances of getting hit by lightning while being eaten by a shark, in the same place, twice. The exception is, of course, The Alphaclops male. The Alphaclops is a massive, walking, one-eyed penis-like creature that can lay the females of an entire metropolis at once and induce clitoral orgasm in a woman with only the whisk of wind he creates as he walks by. If you are not an Alphaclops male—and I guarantee you are not—don’t even try it.
2. Rudeness: I despise the strip-club misogynistas. They call the girls bitches and sluts behind their backs and talk down to them as if, by virtue of their chosen vocation, they are inferior, when really, deep inside, it is the misogynista who is inferior and can only feel superior to women in a venue where they’re being objectified en masse.
3. Eye-Contact Abuse: There’s a theory that strippers will like you better if you make a lot of eye contact. But eye contact is good in stripper bars the way eye contact is good in the outside world: In periodic, medium-sized doses only. Don’t be one of these bozos who dreamily gaze into a stripper’s eyes like they’re trying to pry open the window to her soul, crawl inside and creep to where her soul is sleeping so he can climb into bed with it.
4. Dumb Questions: This is difficult for me because I have a hard time keeping my inner journalist at bay. It’s one of the reasons I don’t like stripper small talk—because I always end up asking them all sorts of mood-killing questions like, “What does your father think of your career choice?” and “Which is your favorite brand of stripper-pole grease?”
5. Stripper Gifts: Never bring a stripper a present. It’s too losery, too stalkery. And you should shoot yourself in the ear if you ever compose a poem for a stripper.
O’ Mercedes
How you writhe
On the dance floor of my heart.
I love you.
Now what is your address?
That I may deposit a dead bird
on your porch.
Write to ed@sdcitybeat.com and editor@sdcitybeat.com. Visit www.edwindecker.com.
