2.0somethings

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Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Fell in love with a stripper

Posted by Chris in , , , ,

SkylineLast weekend, two of my friends from Boston made the long bus ride to New York to stay at my place. It was a spur-of-the-moment thing — they were on spring break and had called me at 11 Friday morning asking if it was ok if they came down that night.

One of them had already been to my apartment once. It was an accident, really — he had missed his connecting flight from New York to Utah and there was nothing for him until the next day, so he gave me a call. This was his fourth year in Boston, and one of my coping mechanisms when I first moved here was to say “I’ve lived in a city for the past four years, and this is really no different; it’s just bigger,” so as much as I felt the differences in culture between New York and Boston (and missed the latter), I guess I had intentionally ignored any differences in scale.

He cleared that up pretty quickly. He went on and on about how big the buildings were. Which seemed funny to me for a second, until I started looking around and realizing he was right — I guess I had just stopped noticing. It was pretty easy to keep him entertained — he was legitimately impressed by the size and design of a Best Buy. It was unlike any of the Best Buys they had back home, I guess. And, to be fair, it is-I had always thought of it as showy and unnecessary, but he felt honest-to-goodness awe. “There’s a third floor?” he asked, seeing more escalators down. It was like you traveled back in time and showed some settler from the 1700s a toaster. To you, it’s just a stupid little toaster, and you’re almost embarrassed to be showing it off like it’s supposed to be something special and you forget what’s going on: bread is being toasted before your very eyes! Outstanding!

All he had wanted to do that one night he was there was sight-see. We wandered around Times Square (we went into Starbucks where I showed him a real live price-gouging), found Rockefeller Center (he wanted to go ice skating; I talked him out of it by saying it probably cost $30, and even though I was exaggerating, I found out later that it really does cost exactly $30) and we went into a Duane Reade underneath the Empire State Building so that he could truthfully say that he had been inside the Empire State Building. But this time, the two of them would be here for a little longer, and I knew that sight-seeing wouldn’t cut it (they were on spring break, after all), so on Saturday night (after a day at the Museum of Natural History) I took them downtown.

I didn’t know where I was going downtown, but the idea was just that there are more young people going to bars there than up where I am (my neighborhood is pretty much dead after 10:30, except for a few people walking around with stunned looks on their faces like they think they’re in a disaster movie — “this is New York City, where are all the people?“). We walked around looking for a decent bar, and then the wind picked up and it was freezing and we started looking for any bar. Which we found, after a while — some run-down tourist-trap theme place. I sat next to a drafty window.

This is what we did for a while: found a bar, stayed there for a while, then-determined to see as much of the city as was possible from inside the bars of one small neighborhood-set out for another. And we saw a pretty wide variety of places: after the aforementioned tourist trap, there was a jazz bar, then a refreshingly unpretentious hole-in-the-wall, then a big kind-of-club completely packed that I can only describe as a den of rape (one of my friends asked why a place like this that wasn’t fancy at all had bathroom attendants. And then I may have rushed us out of there by deciding when we were almost done to wait outside for the two of them to finish up, saying that I had been shoved by my last meathead) and finally a gay bar (an accident; I was OK with it, but was a bit mortified by the giggling and visible discomfort of my by this point pretty intoxicated companions).

Then we headed to the subway station. We were about to swipe through when a guy walked up to a little snack stand inside, picked up a bag of Cheez-Its and sprinted up the steps, nearly falling all over himself in his rush to get away with his 35 cent burglary. The guy behind the snack counter didn’t care, of course, because it was 35 cents, and it’s not like it’s coming out of his paycheck. The burglar could have walked away slowly and at worst would have gotten a “hey, you’ve gotta pay for those,” but under no circumstances was there going to be the kind of pursuit he seemed to be expecting.

The three of us had a good laugh about it as we were waiting for the train, and we had a good laugh about all the other weird people we had seen that night. One of my friends said, “you must have so much fun here.” I didn’t know what to say, because I didn’t think that I do. Even having seen everything I saw that night — I didn’t get it. What was it about this night that couldn’t have happened in Boston, or any other city? (OK, it couldn’t have happened in Hartford. That city is unofficially evacuated every night at 6 until 9 the next workday.)

I worked the next night until midnight and joined my friends at a bar not far from my apartment. It was a pretty nice place, and we played pool for a while, but I was about to fall asleep on my feet, so I went home and instructed them to call me when they were on their way back to my place. They told me it wouldn’t be long, so I got back to my apartment, fell asleep at about 2:30 and didn’t wake up until they finally called at almost 5.

They were in quite the mood when I went to meet them in the lobby. The doorman — who had liked me up to that point — eyed the three of us suspiciously. We went up the elevator and they told me they had been to a strip club. I made fun of them, of course, for having decided that talking to real girls was too difficult and that it would be much easier to just pay one of them. But they let it roll right off their backs. Because, you see, they were in love.

They told me about a stripper named Nikola, who was either a girl right off the boat from Russia or a camera. She was beautiful (?) and smart (???) and pretty and one or both of them were going to marry her. I wondered aloud if she had been kidnapped and shipped over here as a sex slave and they shouted at me, defending her honor (at five in the morning, shouting about the stripper they loved; I wonder which neighbors woke up and what they think of me) (luckily I don’t see or talk to any of them). It was kind of eerie the details they remembered about her-the color of her dress (red) and hair (brown, almost black) and eyes (green-I don’t know what kind of lighting this strip club had, but it must have been one hell of a place). Lying on their respective air mattresses/recliners, they were practically moaning with separation from their true love. It was kind of weird.

They were joking, of course (though maybe not as much as one might think). But there really was something that kind of made me a little-I don’t know, jealous? It’s not that I wished I had gone to the strip club. I would have been completely uncomfortable there for all the obvious reasons (making myself complicit in the commoditization and debasement of sex, trying to ignore the feminist gender-equality objections, dealing with mad-creepy strip club patrons). But that’s also the point — I would have stared at my shoes and tried to work up the courage to sneak out the door and run home because there’s something different about me that would have kept me from forgetting all that heavy, no-fun stuff and having a blast like these guys.

They left the next day, saying they hoped they could come back to New York soon, because it was unlike anyplace else they had ever been. Which I welcome — I had a good time too — but I couldn’t wrap my mind around what it was about their time here that had been so different. There are strip clubs in every city, and there are strip clubs in a lot of low-class suburbs too. (The Berlin Turnpike is peppered with them. Now there’s a place that hits every demographic: tons of stores and strip malls for the parents; fast food places for the kids; mini golf/go-kart/batting cage places for teenagers and sex shops, strip clubs and seedy motels for the rest.) As far as I could tell, their New York weekend could have taken place entirely in Boston and they wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference (besides the incredible disparity in subway systems; the T is one thing I will never miss).

But that’s wrong. I’ve been trying to maintain my sanity here, and in doing so, I had made this city into just an extension of all the places I had been before (it’s a bigger Boston, I said; culturally, it’s like if Connecticut had a city). When really, it isn’t. Not at all. It’s a completely unique place, and my survival instinct may have helped me cope, but it also made me miss everything special about the city: its scale and its unbelievable heterogeneity — I mean how did we accidentally find five completely different bars in a few square blocks? If I spent a weekend here, I would have caught on right away. Instead I repressed it, in the interest of surviving long-term. Which has helped, but now I’m thinking about the cost. Freud says you can banish the memory but the emotion stays — and maybe that’s why I’ve found myself walking around, jaw hanging open, utterly bewildered without really knowing why. So at the risk of becoming even more bewildered than I normally am, I guess it’s about time to notice where I am.

Chris Sartinsky is a writer for the Onion News Network and keeps a fine blog of his own. Read his previous 2.0somethings columns here.

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