Читать книгу Not Tonight, Honey: Wait 'til I'm A Size 6 - Susan Reinhardt - Страница 11

Mama caught my sister and me dancing one Sunday afternoon on the carport and rushed out spewing Bible verses about the sins of our ways. This was the early ’70s and thank God she’s not like that anymore.

“Sabbath dancing will lead to nothing but a bad reputation,” she said, cutting off the stereo and Partridge Family album, David Cassidy’s voice extinguished and replaced with an echo of silent scorn. “First this. Then blue eye shadow. Next comes French kissing and ear blowing.”

Sometimes children have to break their mothers in like saddles. After a couple of years of junior high and the screeching emotions of our puberty, my own Southern Baptist mama had whipped a 180 and was wearing half-tops, hitting the Moose Lodge and Country Club and dancing with my daddy after imbibing in a couple of bourbon and waters.

“It’s OK as long as you don’t slow-dance,” she said, amending the rules of How Not to Sully Your Good Name and Ruin Chances for a Rich Husband. “But if you do slow-dance, make sure the boy does more than stand there and press into you. Make sure his feet are moving and his hands aren’t sliding to your fanny. That looks hussified. Remember, slow-dancing leads to other things.”

Yes, Lord, it does.

And I’m here to tell you about them.

In fact, the dance floor has led to the downfall of many a woman—and a man or two along the way.

Back when I was a bit of a boozer and young enough to have Farrah hair and Locklear thighs, the dance floor was where love sparked, lust ignited, and the hearts of many a young man or woman fell to the wood floors and bled to death under a disco ball.

Mama told us to be agreeable if a boy asked us to dance. It takes a lot for them to get up their courage and it’s rude to say no or even no, thank you. My sister and I knew the pain of being uglyish in junior high and standing in a clump of girls, watching the popular sultresses being asked to dance as we leaned against walls and pretended not to care.

But my mama had no idea of the weirdo magnet implanted in our bodies, a microchip that drew hordes of duds, creeps, latent pedophiles, personality-maimed fellows, and future serial killers toward us—guys who would spot our Farrah hair from across the pulsating room and slide over to our table.

“Wanna dance?” a yuckster would ask, and a picture of my mother shaking her finger in warning flashed. “Better dance with him. If you don’t, it will come back and haunt you. Remember, they’re humans with hearts, too. Just God’s Unclaimed Blessings.”

So my sister Sandy and I danced with the eyesores of the world, the prisoners on work release and weekend furloughs, and the deranged or homeless who’d collected enough in their cups to dance in a bar and have a draft or two. Most of them were nice enough to share a single dance with. No harm done. But if one of them kept asking us over and over to repeat the mercy move, we had to take care of matters best we knew how.

And that is where the Howdy Doody dance comes into the picture.

“Watch this,” I said to Sandy as I rose from my chair to cut the rug and pull the Howdy Doody on a guy who’d tucked his plaid button-down shirt into pants yanked up to his sternum, the crotch of which split his scrotum into something resembling a pig’s hooves. I tried not to look at his cloven crotch because that always gives a guy the wrong idea and notions of future fornications.

Like a naughty twenty-two-year-old with skinny upper arms and no stomach goiter—a woman without the foresight to see that one day she would be forty-two and out of options unless one counts the advances and free swordfish from the seafood manager at Bi-Lo—I thought I was hot stuff. On the dance floor, I stuck out my teeth and all but brayed, extending one hand in a “Howdy” move, while doing a bit of the Hokey-Pokey combined with a John Travolta Saturday Night Fever pose thrown in here and there, that Statue of Liberty thing he does. I combined it all with a shock-eyed, crazed-woman grin and if I felt limber or tipsy enough, I’d arch and do a back bend and crab walk in a full circle around the guy.

At this point the men, even those with pig foot crotches and plenty of larceny convictions, would barely make it to the song’s end before hightailing it back to Nerd or Penitentiary Land. Sandy and I invariably employed the Howdy Doody dance on many occasions when plagued by the outcasts of the dance club world who weren’t satisfied with a single mercy dance.

The only bad part of that routine is that no cute men would ever ask us to dance once we’d pulled one of our best One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest performances. This was not nice, what we did. I knew it was mean. I knew one day I would be paid back for all this naughtiness. Mama told us countless times growing up we would reap what we’d sown. What comes around goes around. Make fun of someone and whatever they have, you’ll get it. Call the lady with the huge fanny a “fat butt” and you’d wake up one day with an ass that could cart bags of charcoal and russet potatoes.

But I wasn’t quite ready for the punitive end to this fun just yet. I had another round coming before I was willing to pay the price for my evil dance floor ways.

That time dawned when my dear friend Leslie was getting married and our whole gang threw her a bachelorette party, complete with a limo and stripper. Only she didn’t know about the stripper. We’d booked him through Fantasies Alive and were told he had “the complete package.”

“He’ll do three or four dances and take off everything but his G-string,” the woman on the phone told Lisa, maid of honor and in charge of arrangements. “He could be a Chippendale if he wanted,” the woman bragged. “You oughta see his G-string. It’s black with a red devil head rising out of his groin. And let me tell you, he’s loaded. He fills out both the horns, if you know where I’m coming from.”

Oh, how utterly lovely, I thought.

This stripper was to meet the party of wild women and bride-to-be at one of those cheesy hotel lounges where drunks and desperadoes hang out for the free hors d’oeuvres and house-brand hope.

Maybe they’d get lucky. They must. They keep coming back, these same types, clinging to the bars and the slim chance they’ll see eight sizzlin’ babes tumble from a black limo and enter this lizard’s lair.

Here we were: Leslie, the bride-to-be, oblivious of the stripper on his way to this hotel, and the rest of us pretending as if nothing was going on but good old girl fun.

We all danced and waited eagerly for the Best Western lounge doors to swing open and Mr. Chippendale with the devil horns to sashay in. We danced and waited some more.

“He’s an hour late,” Lisa said, using the pay phone near the restrooms to call Fantasies Alive and getting only a recording. “What’re we gonna do?”

“Give him another half hour,” I said. “Maybe he’s running over from another gig.”

“But Leslie’s already sloshed and is wanting to go home.” That was the problem with Leslie. She would drink her white Russians too fast and then konk out early.

I surveyed the dance floor, seeing three bald men in golf shirts shaking their flat, concave butts with three ladies who appeared to be divorcées searching for husbands or overnight company. There was Leslie, tottering about with Teri, both bombed and laughing at nothing. There was Diane and some greaser bedecked in gold chains and then there was…Oh, Lord have mercy, there he was…our answer. Here was our substitute stripper.

He was tall, pasty, and so wasted he was out there hoofing it alone, trying to mimic a combination Michael Jackson and that Lord of the Dance man, but looking very much like he knew the moves to my Howdy Doody routine. I inched in closer as the lights flashed from overhead and Earth Wind and Fire pounded from the speakers.

The lone dancing man went wild. I especially loved it when he jumped up and fired off an air split before crashing to the floor, scrambling on all fours during the part of the song about boogying down. His red tattered T-shirt rolled up over his enormous gut like a window shade yanked too hard and his paunch poured over his faded black jeans. Hairs sprang in sporadic mangy clumps from around his navel, which by the way, protruded like a big toe. He wore the expression of one about to give birth and grabbed a set of abs that could have housed four to six fetuses.

He wailed and wallowed on the floor and I reached down and pulled his besottedness to his feet. His eyes, each seemingly independent of the other, wobbled like something on springs, one rolling in his head and getting lost and finally reappearing and focusing on my face. “I need you to do us a favor,” I screamed over the music, taking him aside. This was when I noticed he perfumed the air with an odor that could kill locusts, a scent much like a cross between a urinal and unwashed skin folds.

“Whachu need?” he slurred, falling against an empty table and grabbing the railing. “I’m here to please.”

I wondered just who he thought he could please. “You ever stripped?”

“Stripping’s my middle name. I’s a professional at one point.”

I’m sure, I thought. “Listen here. The stripper we hired didn’t show up, and see that girl over there?” I pointed to Leslie, who was almost asleep in her chair. “She’s getting married next weekend and we need for her to have a stripper or it’ll be bad luck. Her husband’s getting one and we gotta balance the deal out. How much to strip? All we have is about twenty bucks left.”

I could see his eyes counting the drinks that would buy. “I need thirty and to run home and get my good underwear. I ain’t stripping in these.” He tried to pull up the band of his briefs, but I stopped him. “I got me some good-lookin’ Calvins at home.”

“We need you now. I don’t care what you’re wearing. Just dance around to a couple of songs and then take off a layer. We’ll give you a shirt to put over that one, and then you can throw off your pants. You know, sort of twirl them around. Do this in front of her face and when the second song’s ending, turn around and show her your glutes.”

His head toppled back as if his neck support had failed. I handed him my Michelob and he sprang to life. “I ain’t about to strip in these drawers,” he said.

“She won’t care. When it gets to the grand finale or whatever strippers call their last move, just shove your rump in her face and give yourself a wedgie so it will look sorta like a G-string real strippers wear. You gotta hurry. She’s falling asleep.”

“I ain’t about to give myself a wedgie in these drawers. Look here, you crazy woman. I been on the road, my band and all’s touring, and I ain’t had time to change in six days. I gotta run home and get my black Calvins, you understand what I’m saying? I ain’t gonna feel sexy unless I got on the right underwear to showcase my package.”

I did not want to even think about his package. “We don’t have time for you to run home and change clothes. I don’t give a damn if you’ve got track marks up to Maine in those skivvies. Keep them on and I’ll get you your thirty. Otherwise, I’ll ask that man over there to do it.” I pointed to a golfer type with fat red cheeks who looked one cigarette and erection away from a heart attack.

“Him?” The stinky potential stripper swilled the beer I’d given him.

“Oh yeah. Him. He used to do it full-time in Myrtle Beach.”

“That’s bullshit. He ain’t done nothing in Myrtle but eat fried seafood platters. Look at his gut.”

“He agreed to do it for twenty dollars, but we all thought you were much cuter,” I lied.

Stinky Drawers grinned and let one eye have its own party somewhere in his thoughts. “OK,” he said. “But I’m warning you about my underwear. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. They ain’t my best or cleanest pair.”

“We’ll make do,” I said, pinching my sides so I wouldn’t start laughing. “Not much is going to show once you do the wedgie move.”

“Get the extra money and you got yourself the real deal.” He winked and gyrated back toward the dance floor.

“We gotta cough up some more money,” I told the girls, pointing out our new stripper, who was spinning on his back on the dance floor, his legs rotating in the air like wild propellers.

“You’re kidding, aren’t you?” Lisa said and fell off her chair, unable to breathe she was laughing so hard.

Each of us went around the bar, borrowing a buck or two until we had $34 and change. We bought Leslie a Coke with the extra money and woke her up for her glorious moment—the pinch-hitting stripper who was wobbling on his stork legs, hands clasping his region.

“It’s time,” I yelled in his ear.

“I ain’t doing this unless that homo DJ plays ‘Sweet Home Alabama.’ That’ll be my first number. The warm-up. After that he can play the Gap Band’s ‘You Dropped a Bomb on Me.’ That’n always fires me up.”

“I’m not giving you a dime unless you hike those drawers into a wedgie at the end. It’s not a real strip unless butt cheeks are presented to the young virgin bride. You got that?”

He winked and did a chicken-wing flapping dance and I wondered what we’d gotten ourselves into. The DJ, thankfully, agreed to play both numbers because he was bored out of his skull and wanted to get in on the fun as well.

We scooted Leslie and her chair out into the middle of the dance floor. The disco balls glittered and the first strains of “Sweet Home Alabama” twanged through the speakers. Leslie tried to get up, but we pushed her back down.

Out of nowhere erupted a thunderous boom and the sound of breaking glass. Our stripper bounded from a table onto the dance floor, knocking down the furnishings and then falling to his knees. He popped right back on his feet, stomping the tiles with his black sneakers. It was as if he’d dropped from the sky.

He grinned at Leslie and bored his good eye into her while she tried to get up again, pushing at Lisa, who was taking off her belt to strap the poor woman in.

“This is your stripper,” she said. “You aren’t leaving ’til he strips.”

“Oh my God,” Leslie squealed. “I can’t believe this. I’m going to kill all of you. None of y’all are going to be my bridesmaids. You’re all fired.”

As she ranted, the Stinky Stripper got going and the crowd clapped and cheered. Lisa was laughing so hard she choked. The stripper was down to his red window-shade T-shirt and his black jeans when the Gap Band number began.

He shook it and shimmied, mostly humping the air around him. He grabbed Leslie and tipped his pelvis at her like a loaded weapon. She screamed and begged Lisa to undo the belt. The stripper undulated toward the center of the floor and tried to get out of his pants but they were tight and he was drunk. He fell in a heap of clumsiness and pretended it was part of the act and began doing the dead bug move, all while wriggling out of his jeans.

At last he tore off the pants, revealing a pair of the dingiest briefs ever with the elastic out of the legs and a huge chunk of unidentifiable man meat showing. He had three holes in those drawers and something resembling Kool-Aid splotches and cigarette burns on the defeated fabric. He stood up and headed toward Leslie, who was trying to escape from her confines. She turned her head but Stinky Pants turned right with her. At the end of the song, as instructed, he yanked up his drawers and flashed his buttocks, a white and partially hairy moon with several bruises and what appeared to be a skull tattoo.

He kept on dancing through two more songs until the manager of the club told him too much was exposed and he needed to put his clothes back on.

“I hate every one of you,” Leslie said through her big smile. “I’m going to do something horrible to your bridesmaids dresses. Just you wait and see.”

When my punishment finally came—the punishment Mama always promised—it hit hard.

A couple of years after Leslie’s wedding, I had my own ceremony. And while slow-dancing to a lovely jazz band in the club of a swank hotel, my brand-new husband dropped a bomb on me.

“Musicians don’t dance,” he said, hand falling toward my fanny, feet suddenly frozen. “At least not the cool ones.”

And that was the last dance I’ve had with the one I wed.

In the end, Mama was right. You reap what you sow. And I’d sewn an entire quilt.