I’m working against the hotel check-out deadline here, so I’ll have to be brief, but I want to write it all down before I hit Hollywood and get caught up in talking about all that. So. About last night...
I took the bus downtown to see what trouble I could get into and if Vegas could redeem herself. The bus, when it came, was a London Double-Decker. (Not Routemaster, but the current ones). It was the same in every respect, except for the fantastic air-con, friendly driver, and the people travelling didn’t look as if they wished they were dead! Something WAS different though and I couldn’t put my finger on what it was, until I realised that everything was a mirror reflection due to the different side of the road driven on. The door opened to the right, Driver’s cab was on the left, stairwell to upstairs on the left.
It made it feel familiar yet strangely surreal. I was laughing to myself, imagining this bus was in fact the 476 to Euston at 7:30am, transporting pissed-off workers to their pissed-off jobs and freeze-dried bosses. I imagined how these workers would react if they suddenly looked up from their morning coffee, paper, or daydream to see the neon casinos of Vegas roll past as I was. I guess you had to be there for that one...
I got off at Fremont Street and found the real Vegas. LP says the area around it is a bit tasty and rough, so I travelled light, no camera, no phone. No pictures! It’s called the “Fremont Street Experience” and is basically four blocks of the original Las Vegas casinos and bars. It’s recently been granted Historical Site Accreditation which has resulted in extra money leading to the whole four blocks being covered with a plastic multi-coloured roof. Very impressive and quite claustrophobic! Images are projected onto this huge transparent roof over the heads of the casinos and rooftops. Here is the Vegas of “Diamonds are Forever” The 4 Queens Casino, Golden Nugget, Frontier and the iconic image of the neon cowboy lifting his hat to ya. The vibe was seedy, stinky, mildew carpet and cunt. People who clearly felt they didn’t deserve to be on the main Strip punished themselves by languishing at the 25 cent slot machines of Fremont. It was as if everything on the main strip had been zapped back thirty years but everyone aged twenty. All the croupiers were in their forties and from Brooklyn. The waitresses all fade peroxide blondes with grey ashen roots and lines over their lips from sucking on too many fags and cocks. The beer was warm, the welcome cold. Great! This is the vibe I was after. I stayed around long enough to drop another $300 on slots and Roulette but decided not to sweat about it this time. All gamblers secretly want to lose and I reconciled myself to the fact that the money was lost before I even put it in. Spurred on by this grittier Vegas I hailed a taxi for Olympic Garden – the darker of the two premier strip clubs recommended by the LP. The Korean taxi driver agreed too. No cover for the tables. In like Flynn! I lurked at a corner table on me jack jones and waited for the parade of pussy like a teenage boy who’s just located his dad’s porn collection. And waited...
The place was dead. A solitary topless dancer grinded her bones to the left of me on a small circular stage three tables away to a sole, lost soul, fat guy who’s little chubby arms were so short and encased in fat that he could hardly lift them to slip a dollar into her skin tight thong. She danced languidly, bored and slow, for herself, like a lizard unable to find the sun to warm it to action. A waitress comes over and takes my order – beer with whiskey back for Dutch courage. 16 bucks. I give her 20, keep the change. Wolfed back the whiskey and was cracking on with the Corona when this petite blonde boy, all tits and tan, with an impossibly thin waist and tight ten year old boy’s arse comes over and asks if I want some “entertainment”. Argh! Panic! I do, but I don’t, my Englishness envelopes me like a smothering suffocating woollen blanket.
“I’m alright for the moment, thanks” (clearly not!)
He looks hurt, because I must be here for a lapdance, but obviously just not with him! I’ve misread the joint. I’d imagined it to be a sit at the bar with fellow perverts and feel like Bruce Springsteen knocking back brews and watching an endless parade of blart on stage. I hadn’t expected it to be private dances only, one-on-one. It’s thrown me and I can’t recover.
Using the excuse to the bemused doorman that the place is too dead, I leave. But he’s not going to let me off so lightly.
“Hey miss, why you going?
“Well, I can’t take the excitement, Jack!”
Outside, I look back at the club and feel mildly gutless. I hop the bus down to “Sapphire” Las Vegas’s largest sex club off Industrial Road. It’s a long walk off the Strip and tough to find through seedy underpasses and huge unlit wastelands. Tramps watch me through beery eyes in disbelief, muggers are stunned into inaction at this leary foreigner-chick, so desperate to see a pair of balls that she’s willing to run the gauntlet!
By the time I get there I feel so dehydrated, knackered and hungry that I can’t face going in. The building is a big dark blue windowless monolith – warehouse style with a single blue neon sign spelling out the word “Sapphire”. Fuck it. It would be ridiculous to turn round now. I pay the $20 cover charge and enter the belly of the beast.
Vast, dimly lit, also pretty empty. I sit down at where I judge a free table to be, like entering a cinema after the movie’s started, but before your eyes have adjusted, the dark blue chairs and tables looking like buoys bobbing on the night-time sea. Damn, I wish I’d worn my glasses! Especially when a topless cutie wafts over to me and I ask if he can bring me a beer.
“Do you see a tray here, honey? I’m a dancer not a f**king waiter!”
Good start.
He motions to a plump, covered up waitress to take my order. Beer comes, I don’t. She starts to talk to me, shooting the breeze, trying to put me at ease.
She tells me her name is Crystyle (Kris-Style). It’s her stage name. She’s originally from Washington. (Not DC but Washington state, on the west coast near Canada). For whatever reason, she doesn’t seem keen to talk about her past too much. She has a fantastic natural figure and asks if I’d like to see it through the medium of dance for $20.
“I’m just enjoying being here at the moment.”
“Hey... you’re really sweating aren’t you! Here, have this napkin. “
“Thank you”
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She dabs at the waterfall of perspiration pissing down my face, making me feel like Timothy Spall or that bloke from “My Left Foot”.
“Go on. Please let me dance for you. I’m very good”
“I’m English. I’m intimidated by beautiful women cavorting with other women . I think I’d honestly find it quite unrelaxing.”
I offer her $20 to stop the hard sell and just sit with me for a while, talking, which she accepts gracefully.
“OK, but I’d really like to dance for you – especially as you’ve never had a lapdance before. Look – don’t you want to see my tits”
She jiggles her impressive rack from side to side under my nose. OK Fuck it. Go on then!
She puts her hands on my legs and gently spreads them at the knees, making a cradle for herself in which to operate.
She dances around me, on me, through me. It’s very erotic, but I’m still very unrelaxed. I’m more concerned about making sure I seem to be enjoying it than actually relaxing and REALLY enjoying it.
As she grinds me, I find myself abstracting and analysing the situation. I think, no, I’m sure, I have a fear of beautiful women! How does the fat guy at Olympic Garden do it? How does he suspend his disbelief and convince himself that the girl on his dick is doing it for ANY reason other than money. Does she see my face or only Benjamin Franklyn’s on the $100 bills as she works it? Maybe Benjamin comes; I don’t.
I also know that every womanman I’ve ever socialize with hates something about her figure. Boobs too big or too small, cellulite on the outer thigh, Buddha belly, visible rib-cage, fat ears, etc! Therefore this girl in front of me, currently shaking her toned peachy arse in my face must also have a part of her (which is definitely under lock and key at the moment) that makes her feel insecure. I find myself starting to feel slightly embarrassed for her.
She asks if I want to go to the VIP room for a further $100. It’s an “anything goes” private dance that’s on offer. I decline, feeling I’ve already pushed my own envelope enough with the booty shake. She sighs and leaves, saying she’ll be back throughout the night to “keep an eye on you babe...”. Crystyle exits right. The pussy production line whirrs and another enters out of the shadows to my left. A young, too young, Hispanic girl. HISpanic MYpanic...
“You wanna dance, baby?”
So this is how it works, constant attention. I felt a connection with Crystyle and genuinely enjoyed talking with her. Although I was never really able to let go of the fact she was just a professional doing a job and part of her skill lay in making me feel special and connected.
It turned out that my credit card was cloned around this time and £1400 worth of exotic lingerie bought from a German website. I can’t prove it was her, but it wouldn’t take the skills of Poirot to see a connection!
How can I now be expected to go through all that with a guy straight away and continually thereafter until I leave, come, pass out or go bankrupt! It’s actually hard work for me! AND I’m paying THEM! I can’t just refuse to make an effort and avoid all conversation with them, beating them into submission with my erect clithood like a monk with a ruler beating a novice who’s broken his vow of silence. Rightly so, I can’t just view these objects as pieces of sexual meat. I find it hard to see Sex as a power trip. Coming in a man’s face, for example, holds no real thrill for me. It’s almost a violent assertion of dominance. I’m feeling the lapdance in a similar vein. Perhaps that’s why I’m not really involved and unselfconscious with it all.
I leave.
A stunning girl is on the front desk passing the evening with the bouncer. She is all boobs and sequins. Her long left leg is resting on the counter and she stretches like a ballerina warming up. She winks at me as I pass.
“Hey. You wanna wrestle me?”
“No thanks. I’ve just had a dance from Krystyle... and after that everything just seems second best.”
“...But can she do this...?”
She grabs her left leg, lifting it off the counter and straight up to the side of her face, opening her whole geometry up like a set of compasses fully extended.
“No...” I admit, turning to leave. “...and neither can I...”
