The article, Memory of a Simpler Time and a Better Woman, begins with, “I never understood what strip bars where all about and so I started going to some.”
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.
