The following comes from a dream. I was in college, and this
was an assignment. The subject was not the perfect woman in the dream. The
topic remained vague and undefined in the way dreams can be as the story
shifted to me making out with a girl who was not the perfect woman in the back
of an inflatable school bus. Before it could turn into a wet dream, it shifted
again, and I was trying to find a place to park the bus. I never got back to
making out with the girl before I woke.
The perfect woman, three perspectives.
On a blueprint, the perfect woman would be shown front view,
side view, and back. Dimensions would
define the ideal hip to waist ratio, the height, and the proportions of the
facial features. Notes would specify the weight, eye and hair color, age, and
other characteristics.
The poem describes the perfect woman with lips like hot
coals, eyes as blue as the sky. She is untamable like a storm whose passion
swells like the sea. She is an enigma that twists all heart desires.
The cat defines the perfect woman as one who feeds it every
day. The person who brushes her fur, pets them when they want but leaves them
alone when they desire.
In the dream, I was supposed to compare the merits of each
perspective. I am not going to do that here. There is no perfect woman, though
I have met some better than others. They change before your eyes. We all change
with time.
* *
*
Saturday Tinkerbell, her boyfriend, and another friend I
will call Teach met up for dinner in downtown Plymouth. After dinner, we all
headed for Flight Club. A strip club, both Tinkerbell and Billie worked at some
point in their career. There is a story in my book about a time they performed
the club at the same time.
The club was busier than we expected. I said at dinner, the
only girls who will be working need to pay rent or buy drugs. Teach is a
long-time regular of the club. He still goes every weekend. Teach would tell us the backroom cost and
behavior of every dancer as they rotated onto the main stage. He called it
gathering information. He is definitely a transactional customer.
Tinkerbell’s boyfriend explained it best. Teach was in there
every weekend, but none of the dancers, bartenders, or shot girls came up to
just talk to him.
Teach wanted to make sure everyone was having a good time. Tinkerbell’s
boyfriend kept saying the bar had turned into a Penthouse. A now-closed strip
club closer to the eastside of Detroit. I took offense to that. It was nothing like
Penthouse. I spent a lot of nights at Penthouse, and this was nothing like it.
There didn’t seem to be much money flowing. Dollar bills
would occasionally fall from the sky. Several girls carried buckets with them
to collect the money. Something you never saw at Penthouse. Dancers don’t make
their money from that. They make money from taking guys upstairs. We didn’t see
much of that happening.
I watched the girls from behind the downstairs bar with the
others. Some dancers were pretty. Most were not, at least not to me. They all
had a hard, jaded look to them that I found off-putting. Definitely not like
Penthouse.
I tipped one girl on stage. She had long brown hair and a
pretty face. Her body was nicely proportioned but soft. Typical of several of
the girls. The two smaller, fit girls were foreign and didn’t speak much
English. I am a talker and didn’t feel like fighting with a language barrier. Tinkerbell
seemed more disappointed that I didn’t take a girl upstairs. I think I would
have been disappointed if I had.
