Georgie was at it again inside Peaches & Cream, a Northwest Atlanta strip club. The place was dark and cozy, and five minutes away from Interstate 85.
Instead of responding to his desperate pleas to pay her extra for a private party away from the safe haven of business at the club, the olive-skinned stripper from Lebanon continued to ignore the wrinkle-faced man. She twisted and twirled her bare hips and ass in front of him to Ludacris’ hit song, “Money Maker.”
Georgie reached out from his chair, and placed his large brown hands on her smooth thighs to pull her closer to the erection that was quickly rising inside of his pants.
“No, you don’t touch me!” the stripper turned and barked at him as if he were an unruly child.
Georgie was confused and looked up at her from his chair. “Well, you touched me. What’s the difference?”
Her long, limber body; light-brown eyes, baby-smooth face, and thick brown hair all added to her scintillating allure. But she was all about business.
“I give you a dance, but you are not to touch.”
Georgie sized up the foreign stripper and didn’t like her attitude. No one else at the club spoke to him that contemptuously. And her hard foreign accent made it seem worse.
He snapped, “Well, go on somewhere else then. Lap dance your ass out of my face. You don’t deserve my money.”
The man may have been unattractive, but he still had a healthy ego. And he figured he worked too hard to be told what he could or could not do by a stripper.
The woman grabbed her bra and panties from where she had placed them on the small round table and began to redress in haste. But Georgie was already eyeing the next performer nearby, who had a much larger ass.
“This one here is more my type anyway. She got an ass I can hold onto.”
The Lebanese stripper stormed off toward the dressing room without another word. And it didn’t hurt Georgie’s feelings at all. He still had money to spend for attention.
“Hey, baby girl, come see about me over here,” he told the next woman with the large rump shaker. He took out a large wad of dollar bills and waved them in her direction.
“What, you got something you wanna give me, Daddy?” the stripper teased him. She was a satiny-smooth, dark-brown woman, in a hot-pink bra and panty set with white lace. And boy, was her ass round. It looked like two chocolate bowling balls had been pushed together.
Georgie told her, “Yeah, I need you to sit up on this brown pickle and help me count these dead presidents.”
“Are they dead Benjamins?”
“No, but they could be if you treat me real nice for it.”
The brown stripper smiled. “Well, what do I need to do to make that happen?” She began to work her thick brown legs inside of his at his seat, undaunted by his awful looks.
“You gotta do a little more than lap dance to get them Benjamins. But if you want ’em, you can definitely get ’em.”
The stripper grinned and continued to work her rhythmic hips to the bass-thumping music, while spreading the old man’s legs wider at his chair.
To his surprise, she asked him, “How many Benjamins you got on you?” She began to wiggle out of her hot-pink panties and bra like a magician performing a rope act.
Georgie raised his wrinkled brow and wondered if he had finally found a willing stripper to take him up on his fantasy.
“How many I need to make it happen?”
The huge-assed woman continued to strip, dance, and smile, while the old man’s full erection began to leak with anticipation inside his pants.
“I’ll let you know if you treat me nice,” she quipped.
“Treat you nice how?”
She looked at his large wad of small bills. “How much money is that? You may want to add some Lincolns to it, at least,” she added, in reference to five-dollar bills.
Georgie laughed it off. “Well, let’s see how well you dance for me first.”
As the next pulsating song popped on, the stripper backed up between his legs and began to bounce her naked ass up and down against his hard-on as fast as a bumblebee’s wings.
“Shit, girl, you gon’ make me drop the bomb up in here. Save some of that action for later on for these Benjamins.”
The stripper ignored him and continued to bounce her rump shaker against his crotch. But her strong tease only made Georgie more desperate.
“What time you get off?” He could already imagine himself sticking her between her two bowling balls from behind, quick and powerfully, while she bent over the bed of a cheap hotel room. But the stripper shook her head and continued to ignore him.
“You hear me?” he pressed her.
She finally turned to face him, while still grinning. “Baby, I can’t go anywhere with you. So don’t worry about when I get off.”
Georgie looked up at her, confused again. “Well, how you expect to get these Benjamins you want?”
“By dancing, honey.”
In a knee-jerk reaction, the old man shoved his right thigh into her naked ass and snapped, “Shit, you know got’ damn well you ain’t gettin’ no hundred dollars for no damn lap dancing. Where the back rooms at for privacy?”
Peaches & Cream didn’t even have a back room. The strippers there made all of their money out in the open.
The woman jumped up from him, appalled. “Baby, you need to be happy I even came near your ugly ass. Have you looked in the mirror lately?”
She stepped away with her bra and panties in hand before Georgie could respond.
“Bitch,” he spat toward her bare back. He still had his money in hand, so he began to look around the club for his next solicitation. Gyrating panties, bras, pussies and titties of every hue, size, and shape were all around the club. However, each man had to wait patiently for an unattended performer to move in his direction for service.
But on the other side of the club, the two strippers Georgie had already miffed, were informing the boss and his team of bouncers about the man’s crassness.
“Yes, and he keeps talking about paying us outside the club. And it creeps me out,” the Lebanese woman explained with a cringe.
Johnny, a tall, slick-haired, older white man, wearing a button-up shirt and slacks, had heard enough. He nodded his graying head and told his bouncers, “Okay, get him out of here, and tell him not to come back until he learns to abide by our rules and treat these ladies with respect.”
Georgie was so focused on propositioning the next dynamite stripper for something more than lap dancing, that he never saw the two huge bouncers approaching him from his right. They were both dressed in all black and towered over six feet.
One of the bouncers kicked the right leg of Georgie’s chair to get his attention through the distraction of music and exotic dancing.
“All right, let’s go. You’re no longer welcomed here.”
Georgie grimaced and asked, “What I do?
The second bouncer, who moved to the left side of his chair to surround him, was even less cordial.
“If you don’t get the fuck up right now, we’re gonna carry your ass out. Now act like you wanna walk out on your own while you still have the chance.”
You can’t talk to your elders like that, Georgie thought to himself without voicing it. But when he viewed the bitter looks of ill intent on the faces of the two monstrous bouncers, he realized he had no choice. So he climbed to his feet to walk out on his own.
“I still don’t know what I did wrong,” he mumbled on his way out.
Neither bouncer responded to him. An explanation wasn’t their concern.
“Well, I should at least get my money back if I’m not allowed to stay.” Georgie pouted.
“Hey, Sherry, Johnny said to give this man his ten dollars back,” the bouncer in front informed the older white woman behind the cashier’s booth at the front entrance.
Sherry looked the wrinkled older man over and dug into the register to pull out a ten-dollar bill without a word.
“Tha
nk you,” Georgie told her.
Once the two bouncers made it outside with him, the lead man informed him, “Next time, you learn how to treat the women here with respect, or don’t bother to come back. And we do know what you look like,” he added.
Georgie joked. “All right, I’ve learned my lesson. Can I come back in now? I got ten dollars.”
He waved the money he had gotten back from the cash register in his right hand.
“Not tonight you’re not. You’re lucky the man is allowing you to come back in here at all. Because I wouldn’t. A bad apple is a bad apple.”
Georgie said, “Yeah, well, that’s why you’re not the boss. And a real boss knows that good business is good business.”
Both bouncers ignored Georgie’s continuous comments and returned inside.
Georgie turned and walked toward his car, feeling incomplete and lonely.
“Shit. Maybe I should’a been easier on those girls.”
He climbed into his silver Jetta in the parking lot. The man remained unmarried with one grown daughter, who lived in Macon with her relatives. Her mother had gotten pregnant after dating Georgie for two months after she had graduated from high school twenty-seven years ago. Her highly religious family didn’t believe in abortion. Nor did they believe that George Tatum was a good match for their daughter. So they decided to move to Macon, raise their granddaughter on their own, and marry off their daughter for a more virtuous family, while cutting all ties to the father of her first child.
Georgie had been a bitter and untrustful man ever since. Why give your heart and soul to a woman and family who could break it so callously? So he became a scavenger of porous relationships with no ties or commitments, and found himself falling into a ridiculous fetish for strip club dancers.
With the night still young at a quarter past midnight on Thursday, Georgie drove a few miles down the road to Pony Rides, a larger, brighter and more raucous strip club. He pulled up in the massive parking lot to think it over.
“Only problem with this club is that these white girls ain’t got no ass in here,” he said out loud, while climbing out of his car. “Then again, they usually have a few black girls mixed in, and a few Spanish ones.” So let me go in here and see what it looks like tonight.
At the entrance door, the cashiers and bouncers stopped him and asked him for a membership card.
“Oh, shit, I forgot about that,” Georgie informed them.
The white strip clubs liked to deal more with their usual customers.
“You left it at home?” the white male cashier asked him. He looked like a tall basketball player.
Georgie hesitated. Did they have a computer list of names? He presumed that they didn’t. It was a damn stripper club. So he went for broke with his hunch.
“Ah, yeah, I accidentally left it at home, man.”
“Well, I gotta charge you a ten-dollar entrance fee.”
Georgie shrugged. He had just gotten a ten-dollar bill back from the door at Peaches & Cream. So he dug back into his pocket and handed the cashier the bill.
There was a different style of music in the place. They were playing Britney Spears talking about being a “slave for you.” There was a different type of energy and lighting in the club as well. It was much brighter with a much larger stage in the center of the room. The white-girl ratio was three to one, with nearly twenty white girls, three black, two Latinas, and two Asians.
Georgie didn’t feel as comfortable in this club. The competition for the limited black women in the room was steep. All of the fantasizing white men wanted them.
“Hey ah, you wanna dance, sweetheart?” the first big-boned white girl asked him as soon as he took a seat away from the main stage. Georgie never cared to be all up in the middle of things. The chairs and tables that were placed against the walls allowed him a chance to ease out of the bright lights.
He looked over the meaty, blonde-haired, white woman in sequined gold panties and bra, and he imagined that she could break his damn leg, if she accidentally fell on him.
How the hell they let a big-ass white girl like her in here? he questioned.
“Naw, baby, let me buy a drink or something first. I just got up in here.”
“Okay, I’ll come back around and check on you a little later then.”
“Yeah, give it some time though,” he responded. Once she walked away from him, he mumbled, “A whole lot of time.”
Then he began to survey the room to see if he could find what he liked.
Good God, look at this Asian girl! he mused excitedly. She look as pretty as a doll baby. And she’s working that little thing, too.
He watched as a petite, Thai stripper worked her hips to perfection at the far-right end of the stage. She was much smaller than what he normally preferred, but if he got a chance to talk to her, he was willing to pay for her sexiness alone.
“I bet she get all the business up in here,” he mumbled. The woman was that cute.
A heavyset white man at the table to his right overheard him and laughed. “You’re talking about Cindy, aren’t ya’?”
“Who’s Cindy?”
The man pointed to their right. “The China doll up there on stage.”
“You sure she’s Chinese and not something else?” The Asian stripper had a strong tanned hue that hinted of a browner country.
“Well, yeah, she’s probably ah, Vietnamese or something.”
“Whatever the hell she is, she’s bad,” Georgie stated.
The white man laughed again. “You want me to call her over here for you when she’s finished dancing?”
Georgie looked at the Asian beauty again and noticed how many eager men were tossing dead presidents in her direction on stage. He figured at least ten different customers would want her services as soon as she stepped off the stage.
“Are you sure she’ll get anywhere near us back here. We might need to move the hell up to get a crack at her,” he joked.
The man shook his head and grinned. “No, I know her real well. She’ll come. But if she comes, she’s used to being paid well, I’ll tell you that. So if you can’t afford it, then tell me now and I’ll leave her alone.”
The man sounded like an in-house pimp. Georgie looked him over. “How much she asking to dance?”
The man shrugged. “Fifty dollars is a good starting amount.”
Georgie chuckled. “And how much do you get out of that, ten, twenty percent?”
The man looked appalled. “Excuse me?”
“You heard me, how much do you get out of it? You over here making the deals for her, right?”
“Nah, it’s nothing like that. I know what she’s used to, so I kind of look out for her.”
“Yeah, that’s what I mean. So what does she kick you back for looking out for her?”
The man looked embarrassed by the question. “I mean, I don’t really ask her for anything like, you know, a percentage of what she makes. But if, you know, she wants to offer me something—”
Georgie cut off the man’s ramblings. “So, what else does she do? I mean, I got more than fifty. But I’m not giving that up for her to dance around me in circles and shit.”
The man nodded and changed his tone. “Well, what do you have in mind?”
“What can the little girl handle?” Georgie asked him.
The man began to laugh. He looked Georgie in his face for a moment of candor. “She can handle a lot for the right price. But how much can you handle?”
Okay, so he is a pimp, Georgie told himself. I wonder if the rest of the people in here know that. “Okay, so what exactly are we talking about—fucking?”
The white man looked around the bright room before he answered. The next hot pop song was pumping through the club speakers, Lil Wayne’s “she lick me like a lollipop” anthem.
The man answered in lowered tones, “You don’t make enough to fuck her. We’re talking your whole week’s salary.”
Georgie felt offended. “How the hell yo
u know what my salary is?”
Suddenly, the man stopped paying attention to him. He went back to watching Cindy entice the men from center stage.
Shit, Georgie thought. I wonder how much he’s talking. I never thought I’d end up dealing with a side-stage pimp.
He felt the whole idea was awkward. He would rather deal strictly with the women. Otherwise, he may as well had been picking up a hooker from the street corners. But he figured the strip club dancers were sexier. And he could see exactly what he was getting before offering to pay for it.
Finally, the man leaned back in his direction calmly. “Make her a respectable offer, and I’ll let you know if it’s good enough.”
What the hell does that mean, “a respectable offer?” Georgie pondered. How much does he think this girl is worth?
When Cindy made her way from the stage and into the midst of eager customers, she casually looked over in the direction of the heavy-set white man at the back. Her look was so smooth and effortless that no one suspected anything. But when the heavy white man shook his head just as casually, Georgie recognized it as an obvious sign of a no-go.
Shit! They’re really working this thing, he realized.
The man then stood up to leave. “You have a good time,” he commented, before he moved near another man who was eyeing the Asian beauty. Georgie watched him as he sat down and began another conversation.
So she’s doing double time in here. But these motherfuckers have to know that. How could they get away with that?
Georgie imagined that someone would surely screw up sooner or later and create a leak. So he figured it must have been a fairly new game that they were playing.
And if that’s the case, this opportunity may not last that long in here. She may be kicked out to find another place to scheme in, he presumed.
Time was of the essence. Georgie figured it was now or never. The Asian beauty and her smiling charm was calling out to him as he continued to watch her entertain the ready and willing customers inside the room.
Three hundred dollars. I’ll start from there and see what he says, he decided. He hadn’t even bothered to order a drink yet. And by the time he got up to make his move in the girl’s direction, Cindy began to give a lucky man a very satisfying lap dance.