Princess was sitting with Beth near the bar, patting Leon and letting him lick her face.  When John called her to the stage, she pouted her lips and gave the dog a farewell hug. 

When Michelle walked in, she greeted Beth and Leon at the bar.  The student was wearing tight jeans and a short sleeved collared shirt.  Her short hair was spiked up.

“Hey, how are you?”

“All right,” Beth said.  “Busy.”

“Isn’t your semester over?”

“Yeah, but I’m taking summer classes.  I’ve got to if I want to graduate in four years with a triple major.”

“Oh.  Oh wow.”

“Eh,” Beth said, lighting up a cigarette.  “It’s nothing.”  She offered a smoke to Michelle, but she waved it away.

“Hey,” Beth asked.  “You seen Viv?”

“I just got here.  Maybe she’s not here yet.”

The girl sucked her cig.  “She wasn’t in our room when I got home from class.  I thought she’d be here.”

“Maybe she had an errand to run.”

“Maybe.”

The two girls sat there for a moment, the only movement coming from Leon’s lolling tongue and the wisps of smoke rising from Beth’s cigarette.

“I better get to work,” Michelle said.

“Don’t let me stop you.”

As Michelle walked past the stage toward the dressing room, she noticed Angel dancing jerkily around the pole.  A middle aged man sitting at the stage handed her a dollar when she approached him.  She stopped dancing and looked at the bill for a few seconds, then began shouting at the man.

Michelle couldn’t hear what she was saying over the din of The Caribou, but she was becoming more irate by the second, eventually throwing her arms up and kicking a sloppy foot in his direction.  A bouncer stepped in between them and blocked the blow.

Julie saw it all from her seat at Willy’s table directly adjacent to the stage.  Angel, teeth gnashing, irises two black pupils, began to shout.

“I said fifty dollars right now!  I danced two songs for you.  You need to give me my money!”

“What?  What are you talking about you crazy bitch?  You danced on the stage!”

Angel turned to the bouncer, trying to look at him, but her eyes kept missing their target.

“Doug, this fucking deadbeat just sat there and got two songs off of me and now he tries to give me one dollar.”

“She was dancing on the stage!” the man was yelling.  “I didn’t even talk to her!”

Doug stood silently with crossed arms.  He looked back and forth between them and scowled at the man.

Julie couldn’t take it anymore.  She left Willy and went to talk to the bouncer.

“She’s crazy,” Julie said.  “She’s been dancing on the stage this whole time and this poor idiot’s just been sitting here, not knowing she’s blown out of her mind on meth.”

“You bitch,” Angel said, flinging a wrist toward Julie.

Julie dodged and walked back to her seat.  She checked the armband she had positioned over her bite mark before sitting back down with Willy.

“They’re easy to deal with,” she said.  “At least, the ones you can predict.”

“Which ones can’t you pwedict?” Willy asked in high falsetto. 

“Well.  Princess.”

“Pwincess?  She the bitch who hates you?”

“Yeah.  She left me this cryptic fucking note.  It said some spooky shit trying to scare me.”

Willy shook his head.  “That bitch makes me so angwy.”

“Me too.”

Crystal, thin and high, walked by and tried to put her arm around Willy.  He removed it.  After being ignored for several seconds, she walked away.

“What else is new?” he said to Julie.

“Not much, except that other dumbass, Laura, you know, Bunny Lu or whatever, she’s gone.”

“What do you mean gone?”

“She went to the fucking Dominican Republic with some sketchy customer.  I tried to warn her about sex trafficking, but she didn’t listen.  She’s gone and she’s probably in some brothel hotel now, fucking dirty tourists for nothing.”

“Serves her wight.”

Julie sighed and sipped her club soda.  “Yeah, I guess.  But it’s frustrating.  They just won’t listen.  I try to help them and they don’t even care.”

“Some people are scum,” Willy said.  He breathed deeply and adjusted himself.  “They get what’s coming to them.  Don’t feel bad.  There’s no weason.”

“I’m trying.  I’m trying.”

Michelle’s body ached as she danced, and she was drunk.  She could barely bend over to accept a dollar without losing her balance. 

The few men at the stage’s edge seemed to be entranced by her breasts, if not her moves.  She fantasized of being able to dance like Samantha as she kneeled on the edge of the stage to collect a tip.  Her garter snapped down over the bill, and the music and noise of the club was filling her head so completely that she wasn’t even startled by the sound of a man shouting.  When she noticed the noise, she turned around to see a customer yelling at Abe.

“That bitch of yours fucking sucked my face off in the booth!” the young man shouted.  He had a darkly bitten bruise on his neck.

“See, something like that happened to me, I wouldn’t be complaining,” Abe answered.

The man pointed to his jaw.  “She grabbed my mouth and was pulling it open.  I think my neck is sprained.  I could sue you.”  He threw his hands in the air.  “How am I supposed to go home to my wife like this?”

“Well, maybe you should have thought of that before you came into a strip club.”

The customer’s eyes widened, intensely white.  “I don’t expect to get assaulted when I come to a club!  She’s never gonna believe I was just at a strip club, she’ll think I’ve been to a hooker.”

Abe scratched his chin.  “I think I understand.  You see son, that’s where your problem lies.  You need to develop trust in a relationship.  Now, my Claudia and me, we’ve both done some crazy shit, but in the end, what we have is trust for one another, and that’s why we’ve been together all these years.”

Angel was standing behind Abe, her head lowered.  He put his arm around her.

“My Angel didn’t mean to hurt anyone, did she?” Abe asked.  Angel shook her head.  Her teeth were clenched tightly; she didn’t speak.

Abe continued, “Now, if this dance got a little out of hand, I can give you your next one free.  You can pick from any of the girls and it’s my treat.  But The Caribou is a place of love.  We don’t want to muddy that love with talk about suing anyone.  In fact, if you want to bring your old lady down here, I’ll give her a free dance, too, and explain the whole mess.  Our Angel just gets a little over excited sometimes is all.  No harm in that.  We’re all only human.”

The customer groaned in exasperation.  “I just.  God.  That bitch.”  He groaned again.  “Fine.  Look, as long as you’ll tell her what happened that’s fine.  Only she isn’t going to want a dance, so you better not bring that up.”

“You want hers then?” Abe said.

The man sighed.  “Fine.  That’s fine.  Whatever.”  He left shaking his head and muttering.  Abe gave Angel a pat on the shoulder and ambled back to his office. 

Angel noticed Michelle watching her and made a hideous face.  She held up a shaky middle finger, shouting some unintelligible curse word before walking away.

I really do hate strippers.  Every one of them.  I really, really do.

Filed under: Julie Han, Michelle, Princess, The Caribou, Vivian, Willy by Jade