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Memory of a Simpler Time and a Better Woman
I never understood what strip bars where all about and so I started going to some. The bars I went to were more like cafes on the road and most of their clients were truckers and traveling salesmen. After buying a meal and having a drink, I watched the girls, some of whom were very beautiful—or at least very sexy, very compelling. I grabbed myself a lap dance from a woman I found very lovely. I asked her for another and another and then it clicked for me. What I was getting was a sexual simulacrum. She moved against me. I was not allowed to touch, of course, but she moved against me, touching her body to mine, stroking my face with her hair, breathing warm breath into my face. I smelled her hair, her perfume. I was slowly intoxicated in the booth. Whenever she moved her breasts and her neck and face close to mine, she talked to me like a lover, she made lover noises, she was mine. She did something that even some lovers had never accomplished. She hypnotized me into a state of acceptance that I was back home, in my lover's arms, in her embrace, able to access not just her but her body, her mind, her soul. Like a song or scent that evokes the memory of a simpler time and a better woman, this dancer—whom I know was a single mother who needed to commute an hour each way to be there, as we had had this talk too—was able to—in her seduction, in her soft cooing of sweet nothing and breathy feelings of pleasure being with me—bring me to a place of feeling not just like a stud, but like a man: respected and desired. And there is really no price that I can place on that sense of acceptance. It is a feeling so strong that it overwhelmed the obvious artifice of the experience. The lie. The simulacrum.