Devil’s Lake

From the moment she’d entered the club with her friends, Linda hadn’t quite known what to expect. She’d heard about these strip shows, that the men took off every last stitch of clothing, but that kind of hearsay sounded like false advertising, or maybe wishful thinking—a way to pack women into this cramped space and fleece them on the drinks as they waited and waited for something they wouldn’t get. So far, it was proving to be true. In the hour they’d been here, one man after another had made a big show of stripping down to his g-string and leaving it at that. Linda felt both cheated and relieved. She should be getting more for her money, and yet the whole enterprise—her very presence in this place—was embarrassing.

But now here came the headliner, “Tricky Dick.” Linda could tell from the roar that greeted him that the Nixon mask he was wearing wasn’t the only thing he was known for. He left it on as he peeled off his blue suit piece by piece, the spotlights, turned all the way up now, shining on him as hard as a noon sun. Linda kept thinking the next thing he’d shed would be the mask, but his face stayed hidden behind those ridiculous rubber jowls until there was nothing left but a triangle of cloth around his crotch. The audience was wild by then, screaming at him to take off that last little bit, but he pranced around like a plucked rooster until he was good and ready. Finally he turned his back on them and shimmied out of his g-string, and when he whirled around and showed them what they’d been waiting for, Linda wasn’t sure whether everyone stomped and hooted for what was between his legs or the fact that it went with Nixon’s face.

Now he was jiggling every which way. Linda could hardly look at him. And yet she couldn’t not look. His thing was right out there in plain sight, asking to be stared at; you were supposed to stare at it, after all. She couldn’t believe how long it was, flapping back and forth against his thighs. Well, he was making it do that, twirling his hips like some girl with a hula hoop. She thought she could hear it slapping his legs. That was almost worse than staring at it.

She took a long drink of beer and glanced at her friends. Neither Susan nor Trudy seemed the slightest bit uncomfortable, and in fact Susan was staring hard at the stripper and cheering and whooping like a sports fan. Coming here had been her idea. “We could at least look at some guys,” she’d said. Linda had resisted her for weeks, until Susan said, “What are you afraid of? It’s not as if we have husbands to go home to.” She’d said it half like a joke, half like a dare, smiling at Linda with her you-know-I’m-right face. Linda couldn’t come up with any excuses after that.

Her beer was almost gone. Even though she’d promised herself she’d stop at three, she was already signaling the waitress for another. She was super thirsty—this club felt like a steam bath—but her hands needed the drink as much as her mouth did. She’d have given anything for a cigarette; this was one of those moments when she wished she’d never quit.

The stage was nothing but a platform, just high enough to let everybody see what they needed to. When the disco music thumped its way into “Hot Stuff,” the three women at the table right in front jumped out of their seats and started dancing along. A moment later they left their table altogether and sidled up to the stage so they were just inches away from the stripper—who, with great flair, finally pulled off his mask. The woman in the middle seemed to take this as an invitation and reached out to touch him, but he hopped out of the way, wagging his finger at her with a “naughty, naughty” smile and mouthing, “Not yet.” Linda couldn’t believe the nerve of those three—as if this were a private show just for them. But the guy was eating it up, grinning at them as he did his moves, even pivoting around and shaking his ass for them. It was a nice ass, from what Linda could see; not that she’d seen that many. The guy’s whole body was a piece of work, his arms and stomach and thighs perfectly muscled, his various parts adding up to the kind of shiny, smooth specimen you saw in Playgirl magazine. Linda would have thought only male models and movie stars had chests like that—and yet here was this anonymous guy in a no-name club in her own unremarkable city, showing her how naïve she’d been.

Linda’s beer came and she chugged a third of it right down. She could already feel the weight she was gaining, hating herself for blowing yet another diet but also thinking, Screw it. It helped that she was crossing over from having a buzz to getting plowed, her limbs heavy and her words sliding into each other as she leaned toward her friends and shouted, “Oh my God, can you believe that thing?”

Trudy laughed, but Susan was too busy watching the performance to say anything. When she looked again toward the stage, Linda noticed that even though the mask was gone, “Dick’s” whole head was still glistening with sweat. He looked nothing like Nixon, of course. In fact he reminded Linda of that lead singer with The Police—Sting. Susan saw the resemblance too; she reached across the table, grabbed Linda’s arm, and mouthed “I’ll Be Watching You.” They had talked about Sting, how attractive he was and that you never met guys like that in real life, that all the men they knew had big bellies or bald heads or brains the size of walnuts. Or else they had wives. Linda’s mother had told her again and again that she’d never find anyone if she kept being so picky, which was ironic given that her mother had so feared being alone that she’d married the wrong man and doomed herself to an early divorce. And was alone to this day. Linda understood that there were only so many Stings in the world, but there had to be a middle ground. She and her friends had done everything they could think of to meet the right men; since graduating from college they’d been taking adult-ed classes, and going on singles cruises, and placing ads in the personals columns. And now here they were, pushing thirty and still trying—and still meeting men who seemed like leftovers. They didn’t talk about what this implied.

The three women up front were leaning right over the stage now, so determined to touch that naked flesh that it was clear they didn’t give a damn about anyone else. The stripper, too, seemed oblivious to the rest of the crowd, even though plenty of women were running up to the stage and dropping money on it. Besides winking at his little harem, and thrusting his hips at them, and shaking his butt to their shrieks, he was even letting their hands graze his legs now and then. They must have been regulars, Linda thought, big tippers. Or maybe Tricky Dick was just an egomaniac.

Susan glanced around the table and said, “They’re blocking the view up there. I can’t see shit, can you?”

Linda shook her head, the drinks on the table swimming in front of her, as Trudy agreed she couldn’t see either.

Susan stood up and cupped her hands around her mouth. “Hey,” she shouted, “get out of the way!”

Linda tried to pull her back into her seat. “Susan, jeez,” she said. “Sit down.”

Susan frowned. “Why? We paid just as much as they did.” She took a long drink from her glass, plunked it down, and walked toward the stage. Trudy cheered as Susan marched up there, her height already attracting attention, but Linda felt like hiding under the table.

A second later Susan was standing right behind the ringleader, the one with the Farrah Fawcett haircut who was blocking everyone’s view. Susan towered over her, but Farrah didn’t know she was there until Susan tapped her hard on the shoulder. Farrah looked up, and Linda watched her smile freeze as Susan’s mouth said, Sit down. Farrah stared at Susan for a second and then turned back toward the stage, ignoring her.

Susan remained standing and put her hands on her hips. Now you really couldn’t see anything.

“Oh no,” Linda said. “She’s going to start a fight.”

“You’ve got to be kidding,” said Trudy, but Linda had known Susan since third grade, knew her ways of going after what she wanted, whether it was cutting in front of a long line or leaning on her co-workers until they gave up their brothers’ phone numbers. Sometimes there was collateral damage.

Linda stood up, bumping the table with her thigh and almost toppling the drinks. She stumbled toward the stage, where Susan was shouting something into Farrah’s ear. Women all around the club now were yelling for everyone to sit down. Linda was halfway to the stage when all three of those women in front of it suddenly huddled together like a football team, with Susan peering over their heads, still shouting at them. Linda hurried forward, almost falling when her ankle bent funny. (Why had she worn heels? She knew there’d be no men here.)

“Susan,” she called, stopping to shake out her foot. Things sounded different this close to the stage, the hooting women and the pissed-off ones and Donna Summer all blending into a single deafening voice as the song’s bass line punched at her sternum. Linda glanced back over the room, trying to orient herself. Maybe she should forget about pulling Susan away and just sneak out the door and go home. She’d be halfway there before her friends even knew she was gone.

All Linda could make out behind her were silhouettes, the faces of a couple hundred other gawking women mere shadows beyond the stage lights. Which, Linda realized, were now shining on her. Some of the silhouettes were bolting out of their chairs as they hollered for everyone to sit down.

“Hey, you!” she heard one of them shout.

Linda’s head swiveled as she tried to locate the voice.

“Yeah, Chubby, I’m talking to you,” it said. “You and your friends, get out of the way!”

Linda stood there, her shoes pinching, and stared out at the women in the dark. She might as well be in sixth grade again, that year of treason, listening to girls whisper behind her back as she blew up like a beach ball. All those ice cream sundaes she’d eaten, huge, double-scoop things, every weekend on the way back to her mother’s; her father across the booth at Brigham’s waiting for her to dig in, his face an apology as she glanced from his eyes to the condolence dessert in front of her; her lust for the ice cream and hot fudge and whipped cream so overwhelming that she almost couldn’t eat it, knowing it would taste like a culmination—like having everything again. And when it was gone, he would be too.

Trickles of sweat worked their way down her sides, between her breasts, behind her neck—over her whole fleshy body, it seemed. She squinted into the darkness, silently daring that faceless bully to shout at her again, but all she could hear was club noise. Coward, she thought. What a disaster this was turning out to be—another night reeking of failure.

She turned away and headed toward the stage, where Tricky Dick was in plain view now because Susan and the enemies were all kneeling in front of it. But now Susan wasn’t fighting with Farrah and her friends, she was huddling with them and laughing. Linda blinked; maybe the beer was playing tricks on her vision. She heard people shouting “Sit down!” again and realized they were yelling at her. When she ducked to get out of the light, the room teetered. She stared straight ahead, begging the floor to hold still, and saw that Susan wasn’t just talking to those women, she was taking something from one of them.

Linda walked in a half-squat until she reached Susan’s side and knelt down next to her. She was so close to the stripper now that he seemed huge, especially from this vantage point. In the hot white spotlight he hardly looked real. It was like staring up at the statue of David—if David had been better endowed. Linda never would have thought a man’s genitals could move like this, twirling and banging with such verve it made her dizzy. And yet it was hypnotic, too, like watching a dog spin in circles. She almost forgot everything else until Susan nudged her. “Here,” she said, holding out a can of Reddi-wip, “take some.” Her face was flushed and sweaty, strings of hair stuck to her forehead. “Go ahead,” she insisted, shoving the can into Linda’s hands, a mound of foamy cream in her other palm. She turned her head toward the women beside her and said, “They’ve done it before. They say he doesn’t mind.”

Linda glanced over at Farrah, who was nodding at her and laughing. Her own hands, and her friends’, were full of cream.

Linda took the can, its metal so cool that she touched it to her cheek and then her neck, catching herself before she pushed it down inside her blouse. She glanced up at the stripper, this time at his face. He looked at the can of cream in her hand and smiled, then winked and nodded as if the two of them had just shared a joke.

“The only thing is,” Susan shouted into her ear, “you can’t put the cream, you know…there.” She laughed, looking again toward Farrah. “That’s what she says, anyway.”

The stripper pumped his hips at them and then turned around so they could admire his back. The sound system was still blasting Donna Summer, but now she was singing “Love to Love You, Baby”—which prompted someone to shout, “Go ahead, love him up!” Shrieks and laughs filled the club, and then Linda heard other voices calling, “Yeah, do it,” and “Let him have it,” and “Smear him all over.”

Tricky Dick faced forward again and danced his way toward the edge of the stage. His eyes skipped over all five of them kneeling there, and then he strutted past them in a funky duck walk. It was a little sideshow, just for them. When he reached Linda’s end of the stage he lingered in front of her, his thighs flexed hard and smooth. She tried to keep her eyes there instead of on the thing they’d all come to see; it was too close to her now, only a few feet away. She waited for him to move down the stage, but he kept dancing in place in front of her. When she looked up at his face, he smiled so wide she could see his molars.

He was teasing her. Maybe even ridiculing her.

She squirted a small mountain of whipped cream into her hand but couldn’t bring herself to look up. The stage was covered with nubby blue carpeting, and she focused on it as the man’s broad, bare feet danced in front of her. “Over here,” she heard Farrah calling, and then her friends joining in with “This way, Dick,” and “We’ve got a trick for you.” It all sounded rehearsed; Linda was sure this little routine had been performed many times over. Is that why the stripper had singled her out—because she’d never done anything like this before? Was it so obvious? It was Susan’s first time, too, but she was joining in with the others now, calling, “You want us to come up there?”

He ignored them. Linda could feel his eyes on her as he danced, her own eyes suddenly, shamefully, filling. The carpet nubs blurred until they disappeared, until the man seemed to be hovering in deep-blue space. She blinked, forcing the tears back. The whipped cream grew warm in her hand.

She felt his feet slow as they stepped closer to her—so close that she let herself see them. And then she was looking at his shins, his knees—his body bending toward her—his face. The mean thing in his smile had disappeared, and now his face seemed bare. Bare in some way that his body wasn’t.

“Go ahead,” he said to her. He looked different this close, his cheeks perfectly hollowed, his eyes dark as chocolate. She could feel the heat coming off him. “Don’t you want to?”

Her nose tingled with the threat of fresh tears. She glanced around at the other hands full of whipped cream, envying and hating the owners of those hands for being able to take this so lightly.

Beside her, Susan shouted, “Christ, Linda, what are you waiting for?”

The stripper’s head snapped in Susan’s direction. “Hey,” he barked, “cool it. You’ll get your turn.”

He spun around and sashayed to the back of the stage, where, to satisfy the crowd, he raised his arms in a V and shook his prized behind. Linda listened to the cheering and wished again that she’d snuck out already. But it was too late for that.

When he turned around his eyes found her again, and then his feet did too. Her chest felt heavy, her limbs light, as if the weight of her whole body had gathered behind her ribs. And yet this was nothing, what he was waiting for her to do; she was nothing to him.

He smiled at her once more, this time almost sweetly, and leaned down so his mouth was at her ear. “It’s all right, babe,” he said, his warm breath a tingle on her neck. “I won’t bite.”

He was so close she couldn’t see him, he was just a fleshy blur, and so she closed her eyes. He smelled of juniper and fresh sweat.

When she opened her eyes, he was still waiting.

He nodded at her with his eyebrows raised, an almost imperceptible question. She hated him for singling her out this way, for condescending to her—for making some part of her want this. The accumulating weight in her chest was making it hard to breathe, but she went along with him and nodded in return.

He winked at her with such expertise that she could see he’d done this to countless other women. Had he slowly turned like this for them? Lingered with his back to them so they could watch the rivulets of sweat trickle over his muscles and pool in the divots below his waist? He was turning to face her again—were these his usual steps? Did he come forward just as Donna Summer sang, “Soothe my mind and set me free”? And did those women reach out to touch him, like this?