Minding One's Manners

This is something I've had kicking around in my head for a while, but was spurred onto the page in partial response to @Foxxx's Thoughts Stirred by Stripclubs

Ah, the gentlemen’s clubs. In my younger days, I spent… well, no. If I was still doing it, it would be far too much time, but there’s a time to every purpose under heaven, and your late teens/early twenties are the perfect time to be throwing large chunks of your paycheck at women wearing less than small pieces of cloth.

But now it’s mostly the nostalgia, thoughts of a time when I might have genuinely appealed to them, because the fact that I no longer do is a very important point, one that I’ll get to later. See, I know their jobs, I’ve done their work. No, not gyrating nearly naked on a stage to a bass beat, but the rest of the job, the hard part.

Sitting and chatting up the lunatics to pay the rent. I worked for seven years at an eikaiwa, an English conversation school. Part language instructor, part social worker, part babysitter, part whore, listening to, feigning interest in whatever the customer student had to say. Bored housewives, looking to kill time in the afternoon. Their children, so that mom could do the grocery shopping and get a cup of tea in peace. Businessmen who left work early every Saturday night to catch the last lesson of the day, the one that ended at 9 pm.

The mentally ill.

No, really. One of the schools I worked at was near a large psychiatric hospital, and the doctors there would recommend their patients take English lessons because it would give them a chance to socialize with people who were not allowed to show annoyance, or insult them, or even break off the conversation. No matter what. And no, we weren’t trained or qualified for this sort of thing, and yes, the complaints of people who were still wearing their hospital ID bracelets and occasionally barking were taken just as seriously as any other, and entered into your permanent employee file.

Just be nice. Just keep smiling. Just keep talking.

So I sympathize with the young ladies at the club, and try to be a model customer on those rare occasions when I get together with my buddies and pay a visit. Would you like a drink? Yes, I’ll probably be getting a private dance, but not right now, thank you. You’re also a teacher, really? Ever run into a student? Oh, how about a parent? Yeah, that’s gotta be weird, I’ve had stalkers at my job too.

But the thing is, the important thing, of course, is that ring. Now, I’m no Mike Pence, I don’t dress up like a girl scout and suck off the gardeners while my wife pegs me with an unlubricated daikon radish, but I do try to limit my time with members of the opposite sex in circumstances that might arouse suspicion. Chatting with an attractive girl half my age in a bar might be looked at the wrong way, and if she found something genuinely attractive in my misshapen, underfinanced, and slightly pedantic self, there could be a real problem. As long as it’s a purely professional relationship though, where I give her money and she says nice things about my Uniqlo shirt and lets me see what she’s got under hers, well, that’s all on the up and up, as far as I can see.

But there was a problem once. I slipped, broke the rules. Blame it on too many years of teaching I guess. When I started at the uni, the gyaru (gal) look was all the rage. Miniskirts, fishnets, tight crop-tops, too much makeup. Believe me, I wanted to look, it was a struggle, but I learned to keep my eyes where they belonged, to avoid even the suspicion of sexual harrassment.

And that night in the club, when I was talking to Chantalle, respecting that Chantalle was just someone that Denise (or whatever her real name was) put on when she took off her clothes for work, that she was, like everyone else, just trying to get through the day, the week, the life, keep food on the table, but when I was talking to her there in that semi-private booth where nothing could happen, and she said…

“I don’t want to sound weird or anything, but all this eye contact? My boobs are down here, dude, and it’s rude not to stare.”