The Strip Joint

I became an evangelical Christian in 3rd grade. As of 2018, I’m an agnostic/athiest. You can read about that exciting journey in my prior post, “A Serpant and Eve Walk Into a Bar”.

I didn’t just attend church on Sundays because my parents made me. I threw myself into it: Sunday School stories, confirmation classes, Bible camps, even two years at the Lutheran Bible Institute after high school and a year on the road with a Christian band and drama group.

There was no room for the world and “secularism” to sneak in sideways. I was well cocooned from such distractions.

I had untreated (and undiagnosed) ADHD at the time—and wouldn’t learn I had it until 2005—but my mental health kept everything in a fog and made everything feel like an innocent blur, even when things weren’t.

Maybe a week back to living in Scottsdale after three years away, I reconnected with my long time Christian friend, Andrew. He was the straight-laced type, quoting Bible verses one minute, grinning conspiratorially the next.

We walked out of church and got into his car to hang out one Sunday afternoon.

“Ever go to a strip club when you were in California,” he asked.

That still makes me laugh.

If you’ve grown up inside the church, one of the unwritten rules they don’t teach you is that no matter how much the church or your Christian family blocks the “fallen world’s vices” from you, the “corruption” comes quickest from the person in the pew next to you.

“Of course not,” I said.

His reponse was downright gleeful. “Dude, I’m gonna hook you up. Seriously. Let’s go.” Girls taking off their clothes? Ew, I thought. “Okay,” I said, not wanting to be a weirdo.

I went in, but it was awkward and I felt lost. Loud music, neon shadows, women who moved in rhythms I didn’t recognize, a small non-alcohol bar to the right. I felt like an outcast.

Thinking back on it now, it seems like my pivot moment that afternoon would have come from something obvious: the first topless woman I’d every seen in real life who looked me in the eye, the first lap dance, or some obvious awakening. Nope. See if you can tell.

A woman approached our table, greeted Andrew by name, and asked if we wanted to buy 15 minutes with one of the dancers in the back roomn for $50.

“Uhmm…” I stammered.

The thought terrified me. Not out of fear of it happening, but fear of the unknown. I’d had a girlfriend (my first) in Bible School, but the most we’d done was French kiss. I was still a virgin and had no idea how I’d handle being alone with a stripper for 15 mintues. The brain fog was particularly thick. I didn’t know what to do.

“I’ll go first,” Andrew said, standing up.

“Making the big sacrifice,” I said, using humor to make myself more comfortable and have a sense of control. Stalling always helped by buying time to figure out things.

He pointed to a dancer just coming off the stage, handed our server some cash, then followed the dancer through a side door into who knows where.

I did not want to be pushed into doing this. I’d cave if Andrew kept pressuring me. I took more than $50 cash out of my wallet and stuffed it in my back pocket. When Andrew came back, all “Dude!” and smiles, he plopped down and told me I was next.

I showed our hostess my empty wallet and said I wanted to but just couldn’t afford it.

“You have a credit card?” she said.

She fell right into my plan.

“Yes!” I feigned. Handed her my card. It was well over my credit limit so I knew it’d get denied. I’m just too smart and too clever for your manueverings, Andrew, I thought. A minute later, she came back.

“Okay, Joey. You’re all set.”

What the what?! “But… It’s over the limit,” I said.

“Oh, anything $50 or less we don’t have to run a credit check,” she said with a knowing smile.

Shit, I thought.

Forced to choose, I pointed to a girl whose stage name I don’t recall. She had a short stature, blond hair, Canadian white skin, and a maybe 18 or 19 year old face that felt approachable.

Minutes later, I’m sat in a folding chair pressed up against the long side of a wood table. On either side those padded office dividers seperated my cubicle from half a dozen other tables and chairs. She stood on the table in front of me, just like the other cubile dancers who stood on their tables and danced for their customers.

Though topless, my gaze consciously fixed on her green eyes. I won’t look down, I told myself.

“Okay, honey,” she said. “Here’s the rules: You can’t touch me here (she indicated her breasts), here (she tapped her butt with both hands), or here (pointed both fingers at her crotch).

I noded in understanding, arleady decided I wouldn’t do any of that.

She took off her bottoms.

I didn’t see that coming, I thought, surpressing a giggle tinged with terror.

It’s a blur in my memory how we got from there to my head held by her hands against her breasts, but I’m sure it was a blur then, too. My lips pressed against her smooth skin as I enhaled hjer scent of honey and cinnamon. It consumed and coated my psyche. But instead of arousal, I felt something I didn’t expect.

Loved. Cared for. Adored. Valued.

That was new to me.

Maybe it shouldn’t have been, but it was. (I know now why that was, but that’s another story.) The noise of the club blurred. The fog of ADHD and church shame lifted for one strange, otherworldy, crystal clear heartbeat. I wasn’t being tempted. I was being held.

Yeah, she said that was off limits. I remembered that, too. But I was smitten. So when she guided my hands around her waist to her ass, I followed along.

For years, I could summon her scent if I closed my eyes and remembered. Once, a decade later, I swear it drifted into my car for ten seconds at a Scottsdale stoplight.

My head to her breast, my hands on her butt, my mind and heart lost in belonging, I blacked out. When I awoke, I was seated again. She smiled at me and danced in slow motion hypnoticly warm waves.

“Times up,” a low growl announced and broke my spell, acconpanied by a bouncer’s monster hand on my shoulder. “Okay,” I said, about to stand up.

“Would you, maybe…?” the dancer said.

I hesitated. I didn’t understand.

She made a face that said told me she didn’t want me to leave. Knowing my card didn’t need an approval, I gave it to the bouncer. Mintues later, I was good to go.

She looked surpised, exposed somehow, but cautiosly sat in front of me, legs folded, her hands folded in front her. inches from me.

For 15 minutes that felt like 1500 we talked, laughed, and… bonded?

“Times up,” the bouncer said.

I put my hands on the table and made a motion to move, but she wrapped her hands around mine. “Do you want to do something sometime?”

Now I was the confused one.

“Do you mean…” I stammered, at a total loss as to what she meant.

“I don’t know. Something,” she said.

“Are you uhm, asking me out?” I was sure that wasn’t it.

“Yeah,” she said.

Strippers don’t ask you out—at least not in any story I’d every imagined. But she did.

As Andrew and I walked out of Scottsdale’s Dream Palace (still there), he gloated in his successful corruption of my Christian character. “Pretty sweet, right?!” I took a piece of paper out of my pocked and popped it open to show him up close to his face what it said, “Samantha Virginia,” he said [for her privacy, I’m leaving out her last name].

“She gave you her real name and her number?!” His grin slid away. “She did NOT!”

I smiled SO big. And laughed.

I’d learn later, on our first date, that she’d never asked a customer out before, but that “there was something different about me”.

For years, I’ve thought that the pivot point of this whole story—the church friend asking me to the strip club, the no money trick that failed, her asking me out, the irony that the “corruptor” walked out empty-handed while I walked out with something rare—was when I showed him her phone number.

As I write this, I see the clarity through the fog. Maybe you already sense it too.

It was when my head was pressed against her chest. The warmth, her perfume, the impossible tenderness inside a place designed for transaction were just the prelude. My pivot was when I felt seen and adored. Loved. Something I’d never felt once at that level in all of my Christianity before or after.

After that moment, everything unfolded just as it did the way it did.

That’s where the joint stripped, where the barrier between what I thought love had to look like (transactional, performative, conditional) and what it could be. Where lust turned from sin into a doorway, opening into my deeper lust for love: love that accepted more than it condemned.

Sometimes the stripped joint is the one that holds on the tightest.

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