agreed to do it for twenty dollars, but we all thought you were much cuter,” I lied.
Stinky Drawers grinned and let one eye have its own party somewhere in his thoughts. “OK,” he said. “But I’m warning you about my underwear. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. They ain’t my best or cleanest pair.”
“We’ll make do,” I said, pinching my sides so I wouldn’t start laughing. “Not much is going to show once you do the wedgie move.”
“Get the extra money and you got yourself the real deal.” He winked and gyrated back toward the dance floor.
“We gotta cough up some more money,” I told the girls, pointing out our new stripper, who was spinning on his back on the dance floor, his legs rotating in the air like wild propellers.
“You’re kidding, aren’t you?” Lisa said and fell off her chair, unable to breathe she was laughing so hard.
Each of us went around the bar, borrowing a buck or two until we had $34 and change. We bought Leslie a Coke with the extra money and woke her up for her glorious moment—the pinch-hitting stripper who was wobbling on his stork legs, hands clasping his region.
“It’s time,” I yelled in his ear.
“I ain’t doing this unless that homo DJ plays ‘Sweet Home Alabama.’ That’ll be my first number. The warm-up. After that he can play the Gap Band’s ‘You Dropped a Bomb on Me.’ That’n always fires me up.”
“I’m not giving you a dime unless you hike those drawers into a wedgie at the end. It’s not a real strip unless butt cheeks are presented to the young virgin bride. You got that?”
He winked and did a chicken-wing flapping dance and I wondered what we’d gotten ourselves into. The DJ, thankfully, agreed to play both numbers because he was bored out of his skull and wanted to get in on the fun as well.
We scooted Leslie and her chair out into the middle of the dance floor. The disco balls glittered and the first strains of “Sweet Home Alabama” twanged through the speakers. Leslie tried to get up, but we pushed her back down.
Out of nowhere erupted a thunderous boom and the sound of breaking glass. Our stripper bounded from a table onto the dance floor, knocking down the furnishings and then falling to his knees. He popped right back on his feet, stomping the tiles with his black sneakers. It was as if he’d dropped from the sky.
He grinned at Leslie and bored his good eye into her while she tried to get up again, pushing at Lisa, who was taking off her belt to strap the poor woman in.
“This is your stripper,” she said. “You aren’t leaving ’til he strips.”
“Oh my God,” Leslie squealed. “I can’t believe this. I’m going to kill all of you. None of y’all are going to be my bridesmaids. You’re all fired.”
As she ranted, the Stinky Stripper got going and the crowd clapped and cheered. Lisa was laughing so hard she choked. The stripper was down to his red window-shade T-shirt and his black jeans when the Gap Band number began.
He shook it and shimmied, mostly humping the air around him. He grabbed Leslie and tipped his pelvis at her like a loaded weapon. She screamed and begged Lisa to undo the belt. The stripper undulated toward the center of the floor and tried to get out of his pants but they were tight and he was drunk. He fell in a heap of clumsiness and pretended it was part of the act and began doing the dead bug move, all while wriggling out of his jeans.
At last he tore off the pants, revealing a pair of the dingiest briefs ever with the elastic out of the legs and a huge chunk of unidentifiable man meat showing. He had three holes in those drawers and something resembling Kool-Aid splotches and cigarette burns on the defeated fabric. He stood up and headed toward Leslie, who was trying to escape from her confines. She turned her head but Stinky Pants turned right with her. At the end of the song, as instructed, he yanked up his drawers and flashed his buttocks, a white and partially hairy moon with several bruises and what appeared to be a skull tattoo.
He kept on dancing through two more songs until the manager of the club told him too much was exposed and he needed to put his clothes back on.
“I hate every one of you,” Leslie said through her big smile. “I’m going to do something horrible to your bridesmaids dresses. Just you wait and see.”
When my punishment finally came—the punishment Mama always promised—it hit hard.
A couple of years after Leslie’s wedding, I had my own ceremony. And while slow-dancing to a lovely jazz band in the club of a swank hotel, my brand-new husband dropped a bomb on me.
“Musicians don’t dance,” he said, hand falling toward my fanny, feet suddenly frozen. “At least not the cool ones.”
And that was the last dance I’ve had with the one I wed.
In the end, Mama was right. You reap what you sow. And I’d sewn an entire quilt.
Reeling in the Altar Chickens
How to Get a Stubborn Man to Propose
The news hit me like a hurled bag of Idahos. My ex-boyfriend, the one to whom I was semiengaged for eleven minutes back in 1985 and tap-danced on the hood of his ugly Mercury after catching him cheating, had gotten hitched.
I called Thurston Wallenborn Truitt, the former Altar Chicken, who lives in a certain part of coastal Georgia, and asked if the news was true.
“Did you do it? Did you really get married?”
“I really did,” he said, his voice an odd combination of exhilaration and exhaustion.
“Why? I mean, I can’t believe it.”
“It was time,” my ex said, and I pictured him as he was in the mid ’80s, washing his face with ice water, lighting matches, and casting runes as he sat on the commode and pondered the day ahead. “I’m sixty-two years old, and I’d been with her ten…no, eleven…no, twelve years. It would have been morally wrong to do anything but marry her. All I need is one room I can call my own and I can bear anything.”
Ah, what a trooper. I’ll always love that neurotic old beau. He told me his life wasn’t going to change a bit.
“Right,” I said.
“No, really. I’m going to live here in my house in Georgia and she’ll stay in Florida. It’s not but a three-hour drive.”
Back when I was dating him, I knew he was a lost cause as far as marriage material went. I knew the man feared the altar more than he feared growing old alone and in a nursing home, one of those men in nothing but damp underwear and drool who stick their big bony feet out and cruise the hallways, carrying on about nothing and fiddling with their geezer parts.
Thurston Wallenborn Truitt III was a nice man, a good boyfriend, even though he drank and caroused, was my mama’s age, and the kinfolk were shocked speechless when I carted him home and announced my intentions.
“Those may be your intentions,” one of the wise aunts said, “but are they his?”
It didn’t take long to realize he would never marry me. A good clue is when you’re “living” with a man part-time and he won’t even give you a drawer in his dresser or a slot in his toothbrush holder.
Smart girls need to check out a guy’s track record. If he’s well into his forties and has never even been engaged, the red flags should wave vibrantly and the bells ding loudly.
I decided after the Mercury incident to cut my losses and leave town. I gave up a dead-end job at a coastal newspaper that required me to label all shark attacks as “incidents involving unidentified marine life.” Even if the victim lay there with a missing leg and a huge bite out of his torso, I had to write, A midwesterner is in a hospital recovering from lacerations from unidentified marine life, instead of the truth: A Nebraska man is in critical condition and on life support