LITMIR.BIZ

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speak over the God mic, and flung all the other men in the class onstage, where they opposed my friend Ruby in her quest for a place to sleep. It was a sort of no-room-at-the-inn situation, which went surprisingly well the first time around, and heinously the second, when the professor made me repeat what I’d improvised. After class, the Boxer came up to me and told me he thought it had been “not bad.”

      We shared other classes, it turned out. One was with my most beloved professor, Martin, a Guru in his own right, who always carried about twenty-five pounds of obscure and wonderful books in a beaten-up leather bag and delivered his lectures in a distinctive growl. Martin and I were close cohorts, often drinking wine after class and trading volumes. He had a pack of young male acolytes, who could usually be found trailing behind him, hoping that some of his elusive combination of brilliance, eccentricity, and badass sense of humor would rub off on them. In one of Martin’s classes, I read aloud a prose piece about the ridiculous loss of my virginity, and the Boxer laughed so hard I thought he might have a coronary. He asked for my phone number, and though Vic had again admonished me for giving it out, I did. He’d laughed at my jokes, goddamn it. My ego was enamored. Also, even though I’d seen him carrying a well-thumbed paperback of Raymond Carver stories, never a very good sign in a prospective boyfriend, I thought that the boxing made up for it. It gave him a certain working-class appeal, a grounding in the physical that convinced me that he’d never try to knock me out with references to Rushdie.

       We went out to a sports bar (a sports bar! I rejoiced. It was so not my taste, and since I thought my taste had historically sucked, anything in opposition to it seemed like a great idea) and watched baseball. He had another friend with him, who was possibly there to evaluate me. I was wearing the wrong thing. Red dress. Far too sexy for a bar full of televisions and beer. I feared that my dress made me look desperate, and so I spent the entire evening tugging at it, trying to make it less bombshell and more windbreaker. Not possible. The Boxer said almost nothing to me the whole night, and I went home, feeling dweeby.

      When the Boxer called me later that week, and asked if I wanted to meet up that night, I was surprised, but pleased.

      “Meet me at six,” he said, and gave me an address on Broadway. Maybe he liked me after all. I could see myself liking him. He was intelligent, funny, and a gentleman! He hadn’t even tried to kiss me on the first date! I revised my opinions of him, and decided that he was just old-fashioned. Nothing wrong with old-fashioned.

      LATER THAT NIGHT, I walked down the street in search of our meeting place, expecting dinner, and maybe a play, given that we were roughly in the theater district. The neighborhood got less and less likely as I walked. I checked the address. Maybe I’d gotten something wrong. There was nothing on this corner. Nothing, that is, but something called Flashdancers, A Gentleman’s Club. I’d seen this place advertised on the tops of taxis, a busty blonde in four sequins and a smile, offering herself up to traffic. Despite the fact that the sign was neon, I deluded myself into thinking that “gentleman’s club” meant the sort of dark, oak-paneled bar where you might find F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway drinking expensive scotch and smoking tobacco peddled by cigarette girls. I didn’t think I could just walk in. Probably, I thought, I wasn’t even allowed. I walked up to the big, bald guy standing outside, and nervously asked him if I had the right address.

      “You wanna go inside?” He grinned at me. Gold tooth.

      “I’m supposed to meet someone. But is there a restaurant? I think I might be lost.”

      “Yeah,” he said. “We have an all-you-can-eat buffet.” He winked, in a friendly manner. I looked at a sign posted next to the door, advertising the buffet. I felt happier. This was good news. Maybe it was one of those secret New York places. There was a club downtown, for example, that you had to access through a tunnel that started in the storage room of a grocery store. The clammy, dark passageway was the epitome of creepy, but if you had enough faith to get through the vault door at the end, you hit paradise: an old speakeasy, with swing music, velvet couches, and great martinis. I couldn’t imagine that the Boxer would actually take me somewhere sleazy. We had to go to school together, after all, and it’d be too embarrassing. I peered into the dark hallway beyond the door, but couldn’t see anything.

      “Do you think he’s inside already?”

      “Shit, I don’t know. You wanna go in, or you wanna stay out?” The bouncer was looking impatient.

      “I guess I’ll go in.”

      “That’s twenty bucks.” He stuck out a palm as big as my face.

       I’d never been to a bar that had such a big cover charge before. I dug in my purse, but I only had eight dollars.

      “Only because you’re a chick. Get in before I change my mind,” said the bouncer, waving me in for free. I wadded my money into my purse and ducked through a curtain.

      AT THE END OF A SHORT HALLWAY I found a holiday inn dining room: metal chairs with wipe-clean burgundy upholstery, small fake-marble tables, and little fake-crystal vases with fake flowers in them. A steam table against one wall, loaded with metal trays of anonymous fried objects. It would’ve been the kind of place I’d often ended up at during family vacations, had it not been for the fact that it was strewn with naked women.

      Freaked out, I looked around for the Boxer. No sign of him. I went and got a dangerously bargain-priced glass of wine, averting my eyes from a woman who was sitting with her essentially bare bottom on the bar. I surreptitiously wiped my glass with a cocktail napkin, drank it down, ordered another, and fled to a table for two, hoping that the Boxer would appear quickly. Maybe he’d misunderstood what kind of place this was.

      I’d only been to one strip club, and it had been in Idaho. I’d been dragged by some vagabond acting intern who’d thought it was local color. He’d neglected to understand that I, too, was local color, that these were my people, and if those things were immaterial, that I’d also been drastically underage. The strip club had been converted from a finger steak restaurant, but the vinyl booths and sawdust floor remained intact. The strippers had gyrated piteously around a PVC pole in the middle of the room. “Gyrated,” though, was too strong a word. Most of them had looked to be on serious drugs. They’d alternated between nodding off and racing about like wild ferrets. Sometimes they’d served as waitresses, bringing paper baskets of finger steaks. People ordered them. People ate them. People went to this place on purpose. There was a prominent sign posted: the torch lounge assumes no responsibility for consequences of viewing. I didn’t blame them.

      The only other stripping I’d seen had been with Zak, at a downtown cabaret that had been wildly, briefly hip. There’d been a woman dressed in a couple of plastic holly leaves and a tutu, shaking her thing to an Ani DiFranco song. Another woman had dripped hot candle wax all over herself while chanting Hail Marys. A woman dressed all in white feathers had brought out a guitar and sung a country-western ballad entitled “Did I Shave My Vagina for This?” Most bizarrely, there’d been a woman who’d billed herself as the Last Burlesque Show. (“Oh no,” Zak had whispered. “Oh no, oh no, oh God no.”) She was in her eighties, and fully dressed, at first, in a Dale Evans cowgirl suit. The Last Burlesque Show did scary things with a baton. By the time she’d gotten down to her tasseled pasties and spun them in opposite directions, Zak and I were both paralyzed, I with wonder, he with horror. The next act had been a belligerent woman who’d held a flashlight beneath her chin, campfire-ghost story-style, angrily reciting Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy.” When she’d finished, she’d trolled the audience for tips, and, discovering Zak, shone her flashlight on him, and demanded his wallet, yelling that she’d noticed he was cheap. We’d fled into the night, Zak fumbling for his asthma inhaler as we hit the street, me suspecting that it had been the last time he’d trust me to take him anywhere.

      My glass stuck to my table. My ass stuck to my chair. I didn’t want to stand up and walk out because I was hoping that I’d become invisible. I was completely embarrassed. If this was not just a miscommunication, if this was intentional, it was because the Boxer had assumed me to be wilder than I really was. I regretted that red dress. He probably thought that I was this kind of girl. What kind of girl was this, though? I had no idea. I was on my third, desperate glass

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