Pictures of Houses with Water Damage: Stories by Michael Hemmingson Page A

next to me. She asks if I would be kind enough to buy her a drink. I say sure. She says, “Can I have a double?” Why not. It costs $10. My beer: $5.
    “You’re good looking,” she says.
    “Thanks. You tell that to all the guys.”
    “I mean it. Honestly, we don’t get many good-looking men in here. Take a look.”
    I look at all the other men—one in a wheelchair, the others in their 50s-60s, one in a plumber’s shirt, all overweight. Two of them, however, sit in a booth with five dancers. They are all drinking.
    “You look like trouble,” my dancer says.
    “I’m not.”
    “I mean, like you could get me into trouble.”
    “I won’t.”
    “My name is Angelfood. Would you like a couch dance?”
    “Not yet.”
    She says couch dances range $20-40 per song, depending on the “quality” of the dance.
    “The sign out front says ‘do not touch the dancers.’”
    She grabs my hand and puts it on her left breast. “Yeah, well, that doesn’t mean we can’t touch you.”
    Physically, I am not attracted to Angelfood; she is too top heavy for my personal preference, but I do like her youth and innocence, faked or real. I buy a couch dance from her. She asks for the $20 upfront. She is indeed new; she is not very good at this act—or not as good as I am used to, as I expect. Here is a case where I apply symbolic interaction to a couch dance: the meaning it has for me, how I interpret her dancing and react to it. Angelfood goes through three positions of dancing: in my lap, her back facing me; straddling me, allowing my face between her breasts; standing up, her back to me, her rear end close to my face. She goes through these motions several times, mechanically, and I do not respond in a positive way. When the song is over, she asks if I want another. I shake my head. She asks for a tip. I give her $5. She asks if she can sit with me, if I would buy her another drink. “I won’t be offended if you say no or want to sit with someone else,” she says. I tell her I want to mingle.
    Avoid other dancers sitting by moving from table to table, watching the stage show. There are always two women on at the same time, each at either end of the stage, by the pole.
    A large group of young women, all blonde, walk in. They are from a bachelorette party, or a sorority. They are slumming. They look at the dancers and turn up their noses.
    A dancer on stage interests me. She has the body type I’m attracted to; her hair wildly sticks out, and she looks angry. Go to the edge of the stage and hold out three $1 bills. She allows me to place them in the front of her g-string, allows me to touch what little pubic hair she has. She presses her breasts into my face and goes, “Oops.” She grabs one of my hands and puts it on her rear end. “How about a dance later?” she says.
    She joins me. Buy her a double drink—vodka and Red Bull. Says her name is Brianna, “but my real name is Cheryl,” she lies. I know how dancers use the “this is my real name” tactic as manufactured intimacy, to make a customer “feel” as if he is getting something special, a sneak peak into her secret life. I don’t tell her I know all the tricks because I have dated exotic dancers, lived with one for nine months and another for three.
    She says she is a single mother, has two sons—one is seven months, the other is three years old. “My little men,” she says proudly.
    “You look pretty good for having given birth seven months ago,” I say.
    She seems to blush. “Thanks. I work out.”
    Both her children have different fathers. She is twenty-three. Like Anglefood, she wants to go to college in the near future. “This is a college town,” I say.
    “I’ll go to IVT first,” she says, which is Indiana Valley Tech, “then transfer to IU or Purdue—or as I call it, Purdon’t.”
    I gesture to the group of sorority girls. “What’s their story?”
    She shrugs. “Who knows, who cares. College bitches, lesbians,