Bottoms Up

For a brief period--sometime between graduate school and the rest of my life--I lived next door to two strippers. Which wasn't what they told me at first.

"Cocktail waitresses," said one.

"An unbelievable drag," said the other. "You have no idea."

I met them outside my apartment about a week or two after I moved in: a pair of rent-sharing women in their mid-20s, both blonde but otherwise incongruous.

"I'm sure it's not so bad," I told them, as if I knew what I was talking about.

"Trust us," they said in unison, and fell to giggling.

Rachel and Lesley. Cocktail waitresses. If you think about it, they weren't actually lying all that much. Cock. Tail. Tips. The tools of their trade.

"So where is this place?" I asked, being neighborly. "What's it called?"

"Oh, you don't want to come in there," Lesley assured me.

Lesley was the bigger of the two. Much bigger, actually. I admit that she terrified me, towering there in the grass behind my apartment. The sunlight gave her bleached hair a slick, lemony sheen. Easily 5'9", 5'10", she was an enormous girl, not fat so much as husky, her ample hips and thighs rippling as if an undulating current had been frozen underneath the skin. If women are ever admitted into the N.F.L., Lesley will make a terrific linebacker. Nevertheless, she possessed a curious masculine appeal--that and an absolutely stupendous set of tits. Truly first rate. In due course, I was to learn she had a little boy named Bruno, who, at the ripe age of three, was understandably unaware what a disaster he had for a mommy, though I think he suspected something. Rachel, on the other hand, struck me as both harmless and alluring, in a crisp teenage way. Her hair, in contrast to Lesley's, was naturally blonde, cropped at the neck and moussed into a gummy spike at her forehead. She looked like a hot high school number, cozy and suburban in cutoff jeans, bikini top and unbuttoned oxford shirt. Her fingers were jammed into the pockets of her shorts and she rocked back and forth on her stiff legs. I have no doubt Rachel went through a horse stage; I'm willing to bet her sport in middle school was gymnastics; she was the product of a quarter century's intake of diet soda and peanut butter. She was conventionally pretty, her pleasant face marred only by a slight Germanic underbite.

"No, really," I persisted. "I'd love to go. I'm new in town and I don't know anybody." In fact, I'd been desperate for a reason to get out of my apartment and this seemed as good a way as any.

Rachel smiled at Lesley, as if waiting further instruction: Clearly, old Lez here was the leader.

"It's a strip bar," Lesley told me. "We're cocktail waitresses at a strip bar--nothing but creeps and low-life scum. Spics everywhere, them your basic greaseball jerks. Save yourself the trouble." She'd pegged me already. I was a safe bet. No way, she'd told herself, is this guy the strip-bar type. Too timid. Too provincial.

The lady had a point. I'm not the strip-bar type. Then again, she was a pathological liar. The facts went as follows: Tuesday through Saturday, from nine P.m. to five A.m.--like nocturnal secretaries--Rachel and Lesley stripped to their smiles at a place called Bottoms Up, located in southwest Homestead right off the expressway. Basically, the place was a box and a parking lot; it had a lone front door and gratuitous cast-iron bars across its bricked-in windows. A bad place, to be sure, redolent with bad karma. Absurdly, it was sandwiched between Blockbuster Video and a Wal-Mart shopping plaza.

The sign out front guaranted those brave enough to enter an All-Nude-Revue. As if to underscore the sincerity of such a pledge, three silhouetted Nudes performed a Dionysian jig inside a martini glass. In addition, Pool and Darts were offered as alternative attractions in the event one grew bored (but how?) with the All-Nude Revue. I confess to being stirred the first time I saw Bottoms Up. I passed it every day to and from work, and as I am--sociologically, at least--white, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant, I experience a WASPish thrill whenever I am confronted with a remnant, however insignificant, of Gomorrah. Those cast-iron windows haunted my imagination; that sign tickled the underside of my prick. What went on in there? I wanted to know. Were the women really naked? Did they let you touch them? What were they thinking as their tits swayed brazenly under the lights? (I was imagining all this, you understand.) These thoughts, and others like them, coursed through my brain twice a day, five days a week.

And so I was more than a bit surprised when, one night on my way home from work, I espied my two lovely neighbors dashing across the street en route to the forbidden lair.

Wow, I thought, what a coincidence! Imagine running into them down here! They were dressed casually--shorts, T-shirts, Tretorns--and under their arms, they carried overnight bags. For all the world, they looked as if they'd just returned from the mall. I honked as I sped past, but without so much as glancing my way, Lesley raised her arm and flipped me the bird. Just like that. At first I was unnerved, but then I quickly realized that to her, I was just another honker, simply one of an entire race of automotive rodents that no doubt riddled her otherwise placid existence.

I looked into my rearview mirror and caught a last glimpse of them as they kissed the bouncer by the door and sauntered inside Bottoms Up, bags slinging. Cock and tail. Brick windows. Pool and Darts. My mind raced and I put two and two together. Holy shit.

•

Two nights after I'd found them out, Rachel and Lesley asked me to help them move a couch into their apartment. It was a Sunday night, hot and muggy in that broad, persistent way of Florida summers. There was beer. We made a party of it.

"How's work?" I asked, not without some satisfaction. I imagined this was how parents felt when confronted with a child's subterfuge.

"Man, I've gotta get out of that place," Rachel said, handing me a Budweiser. "No shit, I'm serious."

"Oh, pipe down," Lesley called from the kitchen. "You're not going anywhere, kiddo."

Rachel rolled her eyes.

We were sitting on the new couch, a lush blue sofa sleeper that Lesley and I had somehow hoisted from the bed of her pickup, dragging it grunting and cursing down the hall and squeezing it through the deceptively narrow front door of their apartment. I was ashamed to realize that Lesley had frankly out-muscled me. Twice I'd dropped my end. Twice.

"Why do you want to quit?" I asked, delivering the line as if I'd read it somewhere. "Aren't you making enough?"

"Oh, I'm making plenty," she said, curling her shorts-clad leg into her chest. A smooth slope of underthigh widened into a buttock and then disappeared into the couch. "It's not that. It's the people. Weirdos like you wouldn't believe. Just sitting and staring. Get a life, you know? And they don't stare at your--um, at the dancer's face, or even her boobs. They stare somewhere else."

"No kidding?" I asked, sincerely curious. "Where do they stare?"

Rachel looked at me coyly, fluttering her lashes. The gesture seemed to say, Take a guess or, perhaps, Wouldn't you like to know? I wasn't sure. What I did notice was the slight smile tugging at her lips as she followed my gaze: For the past two minutes, I had been openly gazing between her legs.

"They stare at the Pussy," Lesley announced, entering the room with two beers dangling from a six-pack ringer. Evidently, they were both for her. She plopped down and fixed her gaze on me. "Innat what you'd look at, Davey boy? The old pussy?"

Silence. Invisibly, the air conditioner hummed. "Maybe," I said.

"Don't you know?" she asked, popping open one of her Buds. "Or should I show you where the thing is located?"

"Oh," I said, forcing a smile, "I have a pretty good idea."

In a manner of speaking, I was getting my ass kicked.

Coming to my rescue, Rachel stretched a leg across the couch and kicked Lesley playfully. "Jesus, Lez, be cool."

"Oh, I'm just playing with him," Lesley chirped, her face aglow. "You know I'm just playing, don't you, Dave?"

In fact, I didn't know she was playing. I didn't know that at all. But to let on that I couldn't take a joke was surely to invite more of her invective, so I said, "Hey, man, of course."

"Well," Rachel said, "OK, then." We all drank our beer. I wanted to stand up and say, Hey, fuck you, Lesley, OK? Just (continued on page 136)Bottoms Up ((continued from page 80) how dumb do you think I am? I wanted to do that, but I didn't do it because I was afraid. Clearly and palpably afraid.

Rachel burped demurely. "Anyway," she continued, "what I mean is, what is it with men? No offense, David, I don't mean you. I mean men in, you know, general."

Lesley snorted and said, "God, Rachel, you don't have a clue, do you?"

"Pardon me?"

"I'm serious, honey. Don't you know by now? Haven't you figured it out? Watch this." She turned to me, stared me straight in the eyes and said, "Hey, Dave, we're lying our asses off. We're not cocktail waitresses. We're dancers. Nude dancers." Without taking her eyes off mine, she reached for her beer.

I was clearly being outcooled here, plain and simple. But to save face, I Performed a not very convincing shrug and said, "I'd figured as much."

Lesley sent a current of venom my way. "What's that supposed to mean?"

Changing strategies, I stammered, "I saw you guys Friday night. You were walking into Bottoms Up with your work clothes under your arms."I let this sink in in full anticipation of their amazement: A conjurer in our midst! But only Rachel evidenced the slightest twitch of surprise. I charged forward: "When you said you cocktail-waitressed at a strip bar, I thought, Now, why would a strip bar hire cocktail waitresses when they already have strippers?"

Actually, this piece of logic had only just occurred to me.

"Well," Lesley informed me, "sorry to burst your bubble, Sherlock, but there are cocktail waitresses at Bottoms Up. Have you ever been to a strip joint?"

"Sure," I said, imagining with satisfaction how nimbly this admission would slip through a lie-detector test. What I mean is, it was true: One night in college, I went to a topless place called Charley's with some buddies. We were doing some male bonding. We'd also, prior to entering, done a fair number of bong hits in a friend's car. I remember a woman in crotch-high cutoffs writhing on stage to a song called Rock You Like a Hurricane. I also remember throwing up an order of potato skins in one of Charley's graffiti-infested stalls.

"So why'd you go?" Rachel asked. Lesley was sitting back and smiling into space.

"It was something to do." Which wasn't too far from the truth.

"But why a strip bar?" Rachel wanted to know. "What's the big deal about seeing naked boobs?"

I gave the question some serious thought. I wanted to let them know I was above bourgeois morality, above archaisms like sin and decency. Besides, the question was an interesting one: What was the big deal?

"Well, it's not just the naked, er, chest," I told her. "I mean, let's face it: A boob's a boob. That's not it at all. I think what guys get off on is the fact that they are watching a woman take off all her clothes in a room packed with other men. It's like, I've been in restaurants or whatever and a woman will walk in, and from out of nowhere, this little voice will say, 'I wonder what she looks like naked.' You know the voice I'm talking about? It's the same one that says, 'I wish I had a million dollars' or 'I'd like to punch this guy in the teeth.'So when you're at a strip bar, it's like that woman you're looking at hears what you are thinking and says, 'You really want to know? OK, I'll show you.' Which is pretty mind-boggling, if you think about it."

Boy, I was rolling now; man, oh, man, was this interesting.

"I mean, this woman you don't even know is going to undress for you," I continued. "And why? Because you want to know what her body looks like. You and all the other people in the bar. And because you've paid her to take her clothes off, which, of course, is another thing: the money. If it were free, it wouldn't be nearly as interesting."

"Same goes for cocaine," Lesley said, laughing.

Rachel shook her head but didn't say anything. Was she impressed? Did she admire my critical acumen? Was she aroused by my liberal openness?

"Well," Rachel said, "all I know is, women don't do that stuff."

"Oh, yes, they do," Lesley disagreed.

"OK, right, they do. But they're not as bad as men."

"Not as bad as men?" Lesley repeated. "Are you kidding me? You can't be serious. Where have you been? Women, honey, are worse than men. Worse by a mile." She was sitting up now with her new beer, as if to create a space around her. Implicitly, Rachel and I diminished ourselves, giving her room. "Honey, not only do women go to strip bars, they go to strip bars and act like animals. Have you ever been to one of those places? Have you? It's a goddamned orgy in there. Women hoist up their dresses, flatten themselves on tables, suck cock right there with the whole crowd cheering them on. Something clicks in their brains, I don't know, they just go ape shit, like they've never seen a dick before."

Rachel and I looked at Lesley in amazement.

"You're full of shit," I said tentatively. And yet, I was almost willing to buy it. Who was I to say her nay? Me? Hardly.

"Full of shit?" she said, though without malice. She was clearly enjoying herself. Addressing me, she said, "Let me tell you something: Women are worse than men when it comes to fucking. Period. We think about it more, talk about it more, have dirtier mouths, can do it longer--you name it. And let me tell you something else: Deep down, you know it, bub. You know it and it scares the shit out of you."

She let this hang for a second. No one argued. "For instance, take some chick whose husband can't get it up when she wants to fuck. If she lets him know she wants it, if she reaches under the covers and grabs his prick, what do you think happens? The guy's as limp as Jell-O. It's like, I don't know, she's out of control or something. So you take this chick and you put her in a room full of chicks like her, all of them fed up with handing it out to some asshole who thinks he's the only dick in town, and all of a sudden, out comes this sexy piece of ass, all muscles and buns, and what does he do but strip down to black undies and a bow tie. And the thing is, he doesn't do it because he wants to fuck these chicks, though, for all I know, he might; the point is, he does it because these chicks want him to do it. He's doing it because they've paid him to do it. That's what it all comes down to. They're getting it exactly when they want it. Which, in real life, never happens--not in my life, at least."

Here she stopped, her words hovering in the air. No one knew what to say, least of all me. It was probably my place to object, I don't know; maybe Lesley was just "playing" with me again. Nevertheless, I felt...oh, six inches tall, give or take an inch.

"Ok, now, do you guys want to know a secret?" She was smiling now, dissolving the tension. Boy, did this girl know how to command a room. "Remember how I said I once saw a woman in one of those places give a stripper a blow job?"

We nodded, Rachel and I. No arguments here.

(continued on page 168)Bottoms Up (continued from page 136)

"Well, guess who that woman was?" She smiled impishly and lifted her beer. "Bottoms up," she added, winking.

Suddenly, Rachel came to life: She sat up with her mouth agape. I felt abandoned. "No way," she said. "No fucking way. You never told me this, Lesley."

Told her what? I was having trouble following all this, my mind still focused on the poor guy who couldn't get it up when his wife fondled his prick.

Giving us each a private, conspiratorial glance, Lesley took a dramatic pull on her beer. "There I was with my sister, girls' night out and all that, and, man, were we wasted. We'd smoked a joint and snorted about a gram each and were working on our third or fourth Long Island iced tea when all of a sudden, the stripper dude snakes his way over to our table, clearly excited. I mean, we could see it bulging there in his undies, right? So what did I do? Well, what do you think? I crawled on top of the table--understand, I was wasted--crouched there on all fours and pulled them down. Boing! Just like a jack-in-the-box. The whole room, from out of nowhere, explodes; everyone starts chanting, Suck it! Suck it! Suck it! and I was like, what the hell, you know? I mean, he was just standing there, shaking his ass, his prick ticktocking back and forth under my nose like a metronome, and these broads were climbing on tables and shouting and stomping and I thought the goddamn roof was going to cave in, and so, fuck it, I did what they told me. Right there in front of everybody. And what do you think these broads start doing? They start counting. I'm not shitting you, the whole room starts going, One! Two! Three! Four! like they were watching a game show, and from across the room, this black chick who couldn't stand it any longer rushes up behind the guy--I'm seeing all this from around his hip, you see--and she grabs his buns, takes a cheek in each hand and gives them a Charmin squeeze, and she's making these moaning noises the whole time, groaning stuff like Suck it, honey! Suck it till it's dry! So I did. I sucked him till I choked. The crowd got more jazzed, they were going, Thirty-five! Thirty-six! pounding the tables, stomping the floor. Anyway, at forty-one, I decided we'd both had enough. Me and him both. So what do you think happened next?"

Well, I wasn't about to answer that one. No way. But Rachel, bless her heart, gave it a shot: "The place got raided?"

"No, silly," Lesley snapped, exasperated. "I mean, did I or did I not swallow?"

Now, that one I did take a shot at. I figured it was 50-50, right? "Easy," I said. "You swallowed."

"No!" she erupted. "Wrong, buzz, you lose. I didn't swallow. But I didn't not swallow, either. Listen to this: What I did was sit up, spin the guy around by his shoulders and offer him to the chick behind him, this snazzy black chick in a purple dress. And so she drops to her knees--crack! right there on the tile--and sucks him dry, dry as a bone. And did she swallow? You bet your ass she did. Yessiree, good to the last drop."

•

Much later that night, after Lesley had whirled out of the apartment on the arm of yet another Bottoms Up stripper called, alternately, Alex or Star (one name, just take a guess, was her Bottoms Up nom de guerre), Rachel and I did some redecorating in her room, which, to my mind, looked sufficiently lived in as it was, which showed how much I knew.

"I want to put this painting over my bed," Rachel told me, displaying for my visual enjoyment an enormous pastel drawing of a bottle-nosed dolphin emerging from a foam of ocean water. "Think you could hold it up while I see how it looks?"

I had to admit it was quite beautiful--its lush washes of blue and green and the glossy white strip of translucence highlighting the animal's tumid flesh. No question about it, the girl had talent. So, as per my role, I bestowed upon her the line for which I had clearly been summonsed:

"Did you do this?"

"What?" she asked, a smile betraying her feigned insouciance. "Oh, that. Jesus, years ago. Junior, sophomore year or something, I can't even remember now."

"Hold on a second. You went to college?" I tried to swallow back the incredulity in my voice, but it was too late.

She regarded me with scorn.

"Yes, I went to college. Is that so hard to believe?"

"No, no, no," I insisted. "I just thought you said you...I don't know, I think I was thinking of Lesley." Surely, I thought, Lesley didn't go to college.

But Rachel was kind enough to wave my sycophancy aside--why, I have no idea. What she did instead was rather astonishing. She absolutely, with no prodding on my part, opened up to me. Just like that. She sat down on the floor where she had been standing, picked at the carpet and began opening. Here's what I learned:

Rachel had, in fact, gone to college, in the lush environment of northern Connecticut, and, no surprise there, majored in art; in the space of two years, she had acquired a fondness for Joni Mitchell and an adeptness at painting dolphins, but it wasn't long before she started looking for something else. And so, when she was offered a job at the Miami Seaquarium, she packed her bags and moved south, where she served as a dolphin trainer for a year, seven to ten shows a day. But at five dollars an hour, money got tight pretty quickly, the rent went up and all the usual etc., so she went looking for extra income. Nights at Bottoms Up, she assured me, were fantastically lucrative--and tiring. After a few weeks of moonlighting as a stripper, the Seaquarium began to complain. With a potential hourly wage of $35, Bottoms Up came out on top.

That was three months ago.

"But I don't mind," she insisted. "Not really, anyway. I know I won't be doing this my whole life. I just act like I'm someone else when I'm up there, which is true, in a way: That's not me, Rachel Coleman, dancing in the nude, but Ashley Park--my stage name--this sexy chick who can fuck the shit out of a pole. The pole--I'm sorry; there's, like, this pole at the end of the stage and you sort of, I don't know, fuck it, I guess. Guys get off on it. But sometimes I get kind of spooked, you know? Like last Friday night. I was perfectly sober and I was just dancing like usual and from out of nowhere, it suddenly occurred to me, Man, what am I doing here in the nude in front of all these guys? It was just so weird."

What--she thinks that's weird?

"But now that I'm sharing rent with Lesley," she continued, "I can save even more money, maybe enough to buy a car after all. And as soon as I do, I'm packing up and moving to Oregon."

Presently, we did a bit of stripping ourselves--went bottoms up, as it were. But we didn't fuck. Not really.

"No, David," she pleaded in the dark, her pastel dolphin looming above us, "not so quick. I need to get to know a person before I...well, you know."

Curious, this in-bed shyness. I mean, the girl did strip for a living.

The fact is, I wasn't so sure I was ready to sleep with her, either. Not that she wasn't arousing. God almighty, was she ever. Her hips were a bit squarish and her bottom had a sad, deflated flatness to it, but her skin was luminous and smooth, her legs sturdy and nimble and her breasts tumid and perky. Besides, she came absolutely alive when her clothes came off--a case of bringing the office home, I suppose, but not really. The thing was, I genuinely liked her. I found her smart, lively, interesting, strong-willed, funny and terrifically arousing; I was utterly capable of falling for her. And once I realized that, there in the nude in her girlish bedroom, I found I strongly disapproved of the way she made a living.

"You're better than Bottoms Up," I told her after the "Should we fuck?" question had been sufficiently settled in the negative. "You really should quit."

"I know, I know. I will--I told you I would already, remember? When I say I'm going to do something, I do it."

"Good," I told her. "That makes me feel better."

"By the way," she said, sitting up, all of a sudden, "that reminds me. I've been meaning to ask you what you do for a living. You never told me."

I thought about this for a second and then said, "I'm setting up contacts." I was suddenly afflicted with a full bladder. "Hey, how do I get to your--"

"Wait a second. What's that supposed to mean? How are you paying rent?"

I plopped back down on the pillow, holding my breath. "I wait tables," I admitted finally. "At a place not far from Bottoms Up. Right off U.S. One."

She thought about that for a second or two and then said, "Didn't you tell me you have a master's degree or something?"

"Yes," I said. "I have an M.A. in political science."

We both remained silent for a few moments. Rachel finally broke the silence by saying, "Oh," and with that, I slipped on my shorts and went back to my apartment.

•

Two nights later--or three mornings after, I should say, as it was easily six A.m.--Rachel paid me a surprise visit. I had left my door unlocked in the hope that she would do exactly what she did, and when she tiptoed into my bedroom, I feigned sleep, though, in fact, I was wide awake. In the dark, with one eye slightly opened, here's what I saw:

A Woman enters a Bedroom, places by a Dresser an overnight Bag filled presumably with work clothes and takes off her Sneakers, one foot at a time, balancing on one leg like a sleeping flamingo. We see her unbutton her cutoff Jeans and squirm out of them, revealing two slightly flat but nevertheless arousing oval Buttocks, each accentuated by the frilly black Thong serving as Underpants. We get a closer glimpse of this garment when the Woman unbuttons her Shirt, which opens like drapery and presents to our view two 24-year-old Mammary Glands that only hours before had been instrumental in earning the Woman a not-too-shabby $225 in wages, tax-free. Then the Woman lifts the Covers and crawls into the Bed, which is filled with a not-really-sleeping Man.

Man: Ummggrrffnth....

Woman: Are you asleep?

Man (rising from the bed and rubbing his eyes): Rachel? Is that you?

Woman: Oh, you're so full of shit, David. You weren't asleep.

•

For the next two or three weeks, Rachel and I were devoted bed partners. She generally slept at my place, as Lesley was slowly becoming unmanageable. Her baby sitter, a mysterious woman known only as Aunt Doddie, had finally had it with Lesley's creative financing, so Lesley's hitherto invisible son Bruno was living there full time. The child had himself a full-time Mommy--and a Mommy who couldn't work nights anymore. With no money coming in, Lesley responded as any financially strapped single mother might: She considerably increased her daily intake of cocaine. Boy, was she a mess. Boy, was Bruno a mess.

Eventually, she found a new baby sitter; the problem was that the woman--an adorable Hispanic grandmother named Mrs. Monteleagre who lived upstairs--agreed to watch Bruno during the day only, and so Lesley became one of Bottoms Up's handful of day strippers. As you may have guessed, there isn't much money in day stripping--folks generally like to read the newspaper with breakfast. Most of what she made went directly to Mrs. Monteleagre; the rest went to an enterprising cocaine dealer who also lived upstairs, and who'd found a lucrative new customer in lovely Lesley Lupis.

Meanwhile, Rachel and I made love, smoked cigarettes, spun plans, imagined scenarios, worked out finances. But we grew tired of reminding each other that nothing much was happening with our lives. As a result, our conversation began to turn toward Lesley's dramatic disintegration--a neutral source of encouragement to us both.

Or at least I thought it was neutral.

"God, Rachel, you have got to get out of there," I said one night. "She's determined to bring you right down with her."

"I'm fine," Rachel assured me. "It's a bad month for Lesley and she needs a friend. I can't walk out on her--what about Bruno?"

"But you've already poured all your savings into the entire rent, the electric bill, the phone bill. What about your car? What about moving? Her coke problem isn't your problem."

"Look," Rachel said, "Lesley's under a lot of stress. It helps her cope, she says--Which is bullshit, I know, but she helped me out when I got fired at the Seaquarium; she took me to work every night--I owe her my support is all."

"Support?" I shouted. "Lesley needs treatment, not support. I can't believe---"

"Hey, just fuck you, all right?" She sat up and wrapped her arms around her legs. "You don't know shit. You wait tables, you're still mooching off your parents--yes, you are, don't feed me that bullshit. If your folks quit bailing you out each month, you'd be in worse shape than Lesley is. You have no idea what it means to be on your own, completely self-sufficient, nobody supporting you or putting shirts on your back. Not only does Lesley have herself to worry about, she has Bruno. It's harder than you think."

I didn't say anything at first; I was taking in the fact that Rachel sounded like a grownup.

Finally, I said, "She needs help is all I'm saying."

To which Rachel said, "And just what do you think I'm trying to do here?"

A few minutes later, she got dressed and went home.

•

I never saw her again after that.

For starters, one of my "contacts" came through. I was hired as a management trainee for a wholesaler in Miami that specialized in children's toys and restaurant supplies. I quit my table-waiting job and started putting in 55-to-60-hour work weeks, driving all over Miami in hopes of persuading some toy retailer to start carrying a new Mario Brothers video cassette. I also wasted hours and hours trying to peddle a table-waiter beeper system no restaurant in its right mind would waste money on. On Friday nights, I went drinking with my old waiter buddies.

Since I was working days now and Rachel worked nights, it was no major feat not to run into her. As for Lesley, I never saw her, either--or Bruno, for that matter. Each night, as I dragged my tired body past their apartment, I stopped and listened for some sound to drift through their door, but I never heard a peep. I began to wonder if they even lived there anymore.

And then, one night--a Friday, actually--I was getting soused with the gang at my old restaurant and I started spilling my guts about Rachel and my little summer adventure. I had never told anyone--not even my closest friends--and it was so wonderful to get it all out in the open that I literally felt something lift off my shoulders. Talking about her made me miss her. Granted, I'd been missing her for months, but this was the first time I'd admitted it. What's more, as I gave her name public utterance, I also lent her a reality I'd been suppressing all fall. My new life as a "management trainee," my new clothes, my new acquaintances, all of it seemed suddenly unreal and unsubstantial. What mattered was Rachel, in my bedroom, squirming out of those cutoff jeans.

What happened next was something of a blur. One minute, I was at the bar at my former place of employment and the next minute, I was within breathing distance of the Bottoms Up bouncer I'd seen Rachel and Lesley kiss that day last summer. I stood there at the door with my I.D., waiting for the guy to recognize me. But then I remembered I'd never been to Bottoms Up.

We tumbled inside, all five of us; the place was appallingly small, about as spacious as a medium-sized lecture hall. The stage extended from the bar like an enormous outstretched tongue and was tipped at the end by the pole Rachel had claimed she was rather adept at "fucking." On it, a woman I vaguely recognized writhed and undulated in time to the European synthesizer music pulsating from the loud-speaker. In one corner, under bright lights, two men played pool. MTV flickered from the bar TV.

"So Dave, where is she?" someone said.

"Seriously, dude," someone else joined in.

But I was having second thoughts. "Awlet's get out of here." I started maneuvering my way toward the door.

But on my way out, I ran into Alex, a.k.a. Star, who, I was stunned (and not a little flattered) to find, recognized me.

"Rachel," she said, as if that were my name. She'd just finished dancing and was heading back to the dressing room, her tiny things--a pair of crotch-splitting shorts and a bikini top--clutched modestly over her chest, thereby leaving the glistening moss of her pudenda bare as God had made it.

"Right," I said. "Rachel Coleman. We're pals. Is she here?"

"Here?" Alex, a.k.a. Star, said. "God, she quit ages ago. Went to Connecticut or something to go to school."

My heart sank. Now I knew I wanted to go home. Immediately.

"How long ago was this?" I asked.

She hesitated. You should know all this, her look seemed to say. Or maybe all she meant was, Can't you see I'm naked? "How long? God, I don't know, a month, two months, something like that. It was after all that shit with Lesley."

"What shit?" I wanted to know. I tried to will myself sober.

"Forget it," Alex, a.k.a. Star, suddenly corrected herself. "Look, it's great seeing you, but I've got to run. Have a good time." And with that, she disappeared behind a curtain, her plump bum quivering behind her.

I got a Jim Beam at the bar and sat down at a table by myself, trying to piece together this new information.

Suddenly, a high-heeled shoe smacked down next to my arm. As I looked up, I felt pressure on my shoulder, and before I could get my bearings, an enormous woman in a one-piece minidress had hoisted herself, pumps and all, onto my table. Whoops and hollers came from the bar.

"You asshole," said a familiar voice. "I knew you'd come crawling in here eventually."

Looming above me, her face foreshortened above the stately cliff of her chest, was none other than Lesley Lupis, back on the night shift. I couldn't think of a single thing to say.

"Well, a howdy-do would be nice," she sneered, and began grinding away on my table. Her dress--what little there was of it--clung to her as if she'd been sealed in the thing. "Some neighbor you are. You live next door and I haven't heard shit from you in months."

"Same here," I said, which was intended to mean Hello.

"Whatever," she said into space; by the whoops from the bar, I surmised that Lesley had been "purchased" for me by my thoughtful friends. Reading my thoughts, she said quietly, almost tenderly, "She bolted two months ago."

"I didn't know that," I lied.

"And why the hell not?"

It was a good question. A valid question. What was I supposed to say? I clutched the side of the wobbling table, watching as Lesley's spiked heels chacha'd dangerously close to my fingers. I waited for the moment to dissolve. At the bar, my friends grew unsettlingly quiet.

Lesley's heel scraped across the table and came down hard between my thumb and forefinger.

"I can't believe you didn't have the guts to even show your face," she was saying. "Or call. I mean, we were next door. And what gets me is she thought you were this nice guy. 'But, Lesley, he's really this, he's really that.' I said, 'If he's got a prick, he's a prick.' And I was right. You're a prick."

But my drunkenness emboldened me, so I looked up at her face. She wasn't moving anymore; her hands were on her hips and her hair was wreathed by the overhead lights. "She never came by to see me, either," I pointed out.

"Because you threw her out!" Lesley snapped. An old codger at the next table looked up for the first time: All this time, he'd been staring at his drink, so as to honor the territorial rights of my purchase, I suppose.

"That's bullshit," I said, slowly feeling absolved of responsibility. "She told you that?"

"She didn't tell me shit," Lesley said. "Nothing at all. She helped me pay off some debts and I found her a ride to Connecticut. End of story. She split for school, is living with her parents or something, and I haven't seen her since." She looked over at the bar and I looked with her. One of my friends was waving an unidentifiable bill. He looked pissed. "God, what an asshole," she said.

"No kidding," I said. I suddenly experienced the frightening realization that this towering woman still lived next door to me. That realization inspired in me a tentative hard-on. I chanced my first look up Lesley's snug, crotch-high skirt and I saw that she was wearing leopard-skin panties that only partially covered the brittle French cut of her pubic hair. I detected on her the faintly sour smell of urine. Her thighs were glossed with a light layer of sweat.

"Well," she said finally, "nice shooting the shit, neighbor, but I've gotta make a living. My boss is starting to wonder what I'm doing, so here's the deal: This is going to cost you twenty extra bucks. You understand?"

In fact, I did not understand. In my drunken state, I grew suddenly indignant--Rachel or no Rachel.

"Wait a second," I said. "I thought those guys already paid for it." It was getting easier and easier to stand up to her; the reasonable side of my brain told me, You're doing fine, Dave.

"They did," Lesley said, grinding in earnest now but still staring at the same vague spot in the middle of the room. "They paid money to see my tits. But remember that little voice you told us about? The one that's been asking you what the woman's body looks like? Naked? In front of the guys? Well, that little voice has to cough up another twenty dollars or no dice." She pulled a shoulder strap down and my friends began to whoop again; the old man looked up, too. "It's the money, remember? That's what makes it interesting. I'm keeping this interesting for you, Davey boy."

I thought about that for a second. I looked at my friends, I looked at the old man, I looked round the bar. Everyone's attention was focused on our table. Even the petite Asian woman preparing to take the main stage seemed captivated: Clutching a Teddy bear (part of her act, I presumed), she waited at the edge of the stage and regarded Lesley with a bemused, admiring gaze.

My head hummed furiously. So did my prick. Jesus, I had a boner in a strip bar--one of the cardinal no-nos, Rachel had once told me. There was no way I could get up without being detected, but there was also no way I could sit there and let Lesley grind forever, fully clothed. For now, we were the entertainment. The whole bar was depending on us.

The old man at the next table said, "Let's see it, honey--get the lead out."

"You got about five seconds," Lesley hissed, "and then I'm going to poke this heel into that little thing behind your zipper."

Hollering issued from the whole bar now. Pool cues were pounded, Funky Cold Medina burped through the sound system and my hard-on was evidently not going away. This woman lives next door, I told myself.

"One..."Lesley said, dropping another shoulder strap. The shouting got louder.

"Two...."

I shifted in my seat, stretching my leg.

"Three...."

With what I hoped was insouciant ease, I plucked a 20 out of my wallet and gingerly slid it between the twin towers of Lesley's glossy thighs. Verily, my left hand did not know what my right hand was doing.

Lesley smiled and brought her undulations to a halt. Slowly she crouched, her solid knees nearly bumping my shoulders. Her heady smell--sweat, cigarettes, bourbon--engulfed me.

"Not only are your friends pricks," she said, "but they're suckers."

She stepped rather gracefully off the table and smoothed her dress. Meanwhile, Miss Teddy Bear was mounting the stage, Elvis Presley's chestnut of roughly the same name accompanying her as fanfare. I held my breath, waiting to see what was going to happen, but Lesley simply reached for my Marlboros on the table and helped herself to a butt.

"Wait a minute," I said, "what are you doing?" I was unable to hide the panic in my voice--honest to God, I had no idea what this woman was up to.

"I'm leaving," Lesley informed me. She drew the cigarette under her nose and smiled smugly. "God a date. I only came in to pick up my pay check."

With that, she fluttered her fingers in farewell and began weaving toward the front door.

"Hang on a second," I called. She turned around and grinned. I wanted my 20 back, but I didn't dare ask for it. Instead, I stayed right where I was, pegged to my seat by a doggedly persistent hard-on. "You mean to tell me you aren't even working tonight?"

She turned around and shook her head. "Haven't you figured it out yet?" She called back, the unlit cigarette dangling between her lips. "Honey, I'm always working."

"'Not only do women go to strip bars, they go to strip bars and act like animals.'"