I recently found myself stranded in Rosarito, Mexico, for three days. It was no big deal, really-there are a lot worse towns to be stranded in. I spent the days working on my laptop and the evenings drinking in the various saloons along the boulevard.

On one particular night, ambitious-drunk blood coursing through my veins, I thought I’d go and get me a lap dance.

Not that I’m some sort of lap-dance addict. It’s just that, well, Mexico is the land of the permissive lap dances. Couple that with the fact that you just can’t get a proper lap dance in San Diego-what with all the bullshit restrictions and that confounded no-touch law, a lap dance that actually occurs on the lap is difficult to find. So I figured I’d treat myself.

But it was an awful experience. It wasn’t even a lap dance-it was really just an advertisement to go in the back room and get a blow job, because the whole time she danced, she kept asking, “We go back room, yes?”

“No thanks,” I would say. “This is just fine.” Then she’d wriggle and writhe some more and, after a few minutes, say, “We go back room now?”

“No back room, please,” I’d say again as her body continued to wriggle and sway.

“You like, yes?” she said, offering her breasts and nipples on a platter. “We go back room?”

“No,” I said, irritated. “No back room!” And I’m thinking, Jesus Christ, lady, don’t you know the second rule of the Strippo-cratic Oath?:

Thou Shall Not Nag (Which seemed like a no brainer to me).

Anyway, that was one bad lap dance. Not the worst, though. The worst dance my lap ever received happened last November, during my bachelor party, in a strip club in Las Vegas.

I was just sitting there with my pals, drinking and laughing and talking man-stuff when a blonde stripper approached and took my hand. “Let’s go, honey,” she said, leading me away. “Your friends just bought you a lap dance.”

She led me to a elevated stage that looked like a boxing ring but decorated with plants and aquariums and sexy lighting and HD TVs and several chairs, four of which were occupied by other strippers doing lap dances on other customers’ laps.

My stripper sat me on the chair, faced me, bent forward, bent her arms, placed her elbows against my shoulders for support, and put her face into my chest so that she looked like a preying mantis tearing into my ribcage.

Her bony elbows protruding into the fleshy area just below the shoulders made me wince in pain. She supported her entire weight with her elbows and the more she gyrated, the more her elbows dug in, making this the most pysically painful lap dance I’d ever received and a clear violation of rule number 8 of the Strippo-cratic Oath:

Cause No Harm (unless requested).

Just when I was thinking this thing couldn’t get any more miserable, she started chatting.

“So you’re getting married tomorrow?” she asked, her elbows finding deeper purchase into my upper breastplate.

“Yup.”

“Does your wife allow you to have lap dances?”

“She’s fine with it,” I said.

“I’ll never understand women like that,” she said with a sneer, her rump rotating, elbows digging. “I would never let my man go to a strip club.”

Oath Clause No. 13: No Wife Insulting.

“She knows it’s a harmless activity,” I said, defending my marriage’s honor as the stripper jeered. Then I realized, Whoa, wait a minute now. Why am I defending myself to a stripper? I mean, is this chick for real? A stripper is making me feel guilty for receiving a lap dance and insulting my wife for allowing it?!

Oath Clause No. 9: Camouflage Your Psychoses.

Once she was finished with her morality lecture, she launched into a soliloquy about her crappy childhood, and her crappy career, and her two crappy marriages that ended crappily. The woman was tri-polar, I figured, because she kept lurching in and out of three basic temperaments: Anger, sadness and joy.

When she talked about her ex-husbands she became red-faced and angry. When she talked about her new boyfriend (soon to be husband No. 3) her mood swung back to uncomfortable joy as she went on and on about how he was a great, good looking and he doesn’t go to strip clubs because he’s a man of character, and I’m thinking, Holy Christ, get me out of this freaking chair!

I looked across the room to see a red-haired fire goddess fanning her flames over a man with his head thrown back in ecstasy. She was running her fingers in his hair and burrowing her nose into his neck. Her elbows were nowhere near his shoulders. Her mouth was still. She wasn’t saying a word-a real student of the oath.

I looked back at my stripper-mouth flapping, elbows digging like the wretched mantis she was. I thought, but didn’t say, We have a stripper oath for a reason, lady–to preserve the illusion.

When you ignore the tenets of the oath, you shatter the illusion that you want me. You shatter the illusion that I am such a prime male specimen, random gorgeous women cannot resist undulating in my presence. When you ignore the oath, you shatter the illusion–you know–the illusion that I happen to be paying for.

And I looked back at the flaming red head and wondered, how did this happen? Of all the strippers in Vegas, how did I end up with this hypocritical, tri-polar, wife-insulting, elbow-digging, unrequested-pain-providing, non-psychoses-camouflaging, illusion-shattering, hypocritical, holier-than-thou morality lap-hag?

How, how, how?

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 25th, 2010 at 12:10 am and is filed under (love and sex), The Best of Sordid Tales. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.