holiday cheer!

I’ve got two thoughts for a merry Christmas tale of excitement to leave you all with, as I’m not going to be updating that often for a couple of days starting tomorrow, but I can’t decide between the history of the dumb bands I used to like and aspire to emulate and the tale of the most amazingly hilarious strip club that I’ve ever been in.
Well, as I look back over these options, it seems that one is so obviously appropriate for the holidays and one is simply not…So, here goes.

The Most Hilarious Strip Club I’ve Ever Been To
By
Brendan Kelly

In the fall/winter/spring (I don’t remember, but I know it was cold in a lot of places) of some year that predates 2005, I found myself in Ft. Worth, Texas at the Ridglea theater. We played a show there with our friends and tourmates in Hot Water Music. I don’t remember the show, but almost all shows in the greater Dallas/Ft. Worth area are a little crappy, so let’s just say the show kind of blew. It’s not important either way. What is important is that just down the road from the Ridglea, if you walk out the front door, cross the street and turn left is this white motel. The motel plays hardcore porn on three channels in every room. It’s not pay per view. It’s just straight up porn feeds included with the price of the room, which was, as per my recollection, about 23 bucks.
After the show, we retired back to the hotel and as almost always happened during this phase of our touring life, our roadie, Nader and I decided to head out to find some trouble. Often, someone else from our squad would accompany us, but the two of us almost always ventured out. Tour can be extremely boring and repetitive, and heading out to see what’s going on after we got settled was our little way of attempting to make the most of a day that almost always could otherwise be summed up as “woke up in a hotel, drove all day. Got to the club, soundchecked, played a show, went to a hotel, slept.”
Anyway, we headed out, just the two of us this time, but we didn’t have to go far, because right across the street was a shack that was advertising as a strip club. Now, strip clubs are expensive and frustrating and not that great to go to on tour. The exception to all these rules is when they’re obviously gross. And THIS place was so clearly busted from the outside that I don’t even think Nader and I had to so much as look at each other or speak…we just crossed the street and walked in on the most fucked up spectacle I’ve seen, maybe ever.
Okay, so the place was floored in two by fours, the bar was a cheap linoleum affair, the clientele was exclusively drunk Mexicans. The lights were up as though it was a McDonalds at two in the afternoon. There was no cover, the beers were two bucks and the shots of whiskey were three.
We approached the bar and set to work drinking and surveying the scene. The bartender was a fat lady who was super nice to us, (if memory serves, she even gave us a free shot of whiskey right away) and then we saw the stage.
The stage was made of unpainted plywood and had a waist high banister on either side made of two by fours. It wasn’t actually so much a stage as a runway. It was about ten feet long, two feet wide and it just started and ended right in the room. It wasn’t like it came out from a curtain or backstage or something. The nails weren’t well hammered in, and could have snagged a panty or teddy or something without too much trouble. I remember thinking “fuck man, that thing looks pretty unstable” before I saw any dancers even traverse it. We sat down at a table (at this point we were pretty stoked, because this place was shaping up to be TERRIBLE, which, for what we were looking for, translated to PERFECT) and waited for the first dancer.
Now, this is fucked up. Based on some pretty asinine stereotypes put forth by ignorant hicks, there’s no way to say this without sensitive people deciding I’m racist, and so I’m just going to have to say it and you can decide for yourself. The first stripper who came out looked exactly like a gorilla. She had the face of a gorilla. YES, she was black, but man, if she’d been white with the exact same face, she would have looked just as much like a gorilla. I’ve never seen anything quite like it. People say that Bush looks like a chimp, and I can see that, but not anywhere near as much as this woman looked like a gorilla. It was nuts. She was also way, way fat with tits the size of my torso. Dangerous ground, ettiquite wise, I know. Whatever. It’s all in god’s hands now…anyway…
SO, I decided that I absolutely had to give this woman with the gorilla face a dollar, but I didn’t know what to do…it wasn’t like a stage where you go sit at the base of it…it was this fucked up runway with a banister. Then one of the other guys in the place approached and held his dollar up, just standing there and she leaned over the banister and took the dollar. I followed suit only to realize, in a fit of horror, what giving a dollar entailed. She started at my wrist and licked my arm all the way up to my shoulder. That was what a dollar gets from the gorilla faced stripper at the budget club. A real arm licking. Nader and I were dying of laughter, almost unable to breathe. Then the next stripper came out. She had a giant crooked witch nose. You could see her pubes crawling down her thighs with her panties on. Then out came the girl who looked pretty cute until she took off her bra to reveal red infection lines heading out 360 degrees from both nipples, then this woman came out with the most fucked up stomach I think I’ve ever seen.
You know how when you stuff a Kleenex box into a garbage bag it leaves that point in the bag that doesn’t just go back? She had a point like that sticking out of the side of her stomach. She (garbage bag stomach) and the girl with the overgrown kudzu bush asked if we wanted them to give us a lesbian show, which would have probably been about as sexy as watching people barf on each other (which is what we probably would have been doing in response. A symbiotic show for the girls…ah well, hindsight being what it is and all…)
All the while this is going on, Nader and I are ordering more and more shots and beers and laughing and having a great time. We weren’t being dicks to these girls, because that’s just a crappy thing to do. They’re just working for a living, but we were quietly cataloging them for future reference…gorilla face, witch pubes, infection tits, garbage bag stomach…it was a real scene, man.
SO, here’s where it gets good. Last call comes and we each order two shots and two beers. As we’re finishing our beers, the bouncer comes over to tell us it’s time to bail. BUT there’s something odd about this bouncer. Hmmm…what is it? What could it be? Oh yeah, he’s a MIDGET IN A TUXEDO!
I’m not talking about a short guy…He’s literally a midget. And he’s literally in a tux. And he’s literally the bouncer and he’s literally kicking us out. SO, we said, ‘yeah, cool.’ And we left, and along with everyone else in the place, we headed back to the hotel. That’s right! That’s why the porn is free on the tvs in that hotel. All the strippers bring the dudes back over there for after hours gross fun. The place was sweating and groaning all night as I slept in all my clothes on top of the sheets wrapped in plastic.
The next day was uneventful.
Happy holidays. Send nudes.
BK