Beat Palace

Beat Palace

He wasn’t expecting to pay a cover charge on top of everything else. No, it didn’t occur to him but then what had at that moment? Or in the preceding drive to? He dropped his friend off at his hotel in Toluca Lake. The bars were closed and he was a little buzzed. Maybe he was a lot buzzed. He might have gone home. Should have.

He drove up Lankershim instead. He pretended he didn’t know where he was going. Didn’t want to think about it. He thought about it anyway, but he kept it to the third person. She used to work there, his ex. Well, actually, it was only one shift and then she claimed that it rubbed her the wrong way. Left a bad taste in her mouth. Said these things without realizing how it sounded. She came home with over three hundred dollars for a three hour shift and said she never went back.

His friend Gabe went there too. Often, it seemed to him. Gabe brought it up whenever the guys talked about going to a strip club. Gabe would appreciate the fact that he was going there now. Shades of blue camaraderie. He would bring it up casually the next time he saw him.

He passed the Italian Deli opposite the place. He and his friend Mike ate there often. It was good and plentiful. Huge fresh sandwiches for five bucks - came with two salads and a soda. He wished they were open now. He had skipped dinner and gone to the go-go bar with his truck driver friend instead. His friend was in town for a couple of nights, hauling for a new rock group. Whenever he came to town they drank in titty bars and if there were any substances to be had they had those too. It was like going back in time with his friend, back to the high school where they knew each other daily.

During their lunches he and Mike would sit there, across from this place, eating their Italian sandwiches and fixing on it’s facade of white stucco trimmed with a blue awning. It was more or less aptly named Venus Faire, he thought, which made it Greek rather than Roman. Of course Aphrodite didn’t rhyme with penis, though he consented that the goddess of love and beauty had many names, depending on whom you asked, and many faces too. Just sit there long enough, like he and Mike did, and you would know what he meant.

In the parking lot he checked his wallet. He had eighty dollars. It was almost as though he had planned it. He got out of his car and hesitated. He double-checked the lights and the door locks. It was three A.M. and there, in the back of that place under the single street light he was weary with that crummy feeling that you get sometimes. He looked at the cars. Any nice ones he saw with personalized plates he imagined belonged to the porn stars within, whom he also imagined.

Inside the door, a man sat on a stool in front of an electronic cash register and collected the two dollar cover. There were doors everywhere and carpet, a maze of carpeted hallways and doors, some open and advertising, others were lowered in dark session. Harry asked after the bathroom. He followed the door man’s directions and stood at the urinal sensing that all around him everything was touched by cum. This thought mildly made him want to wash his hands and leave and then wash his hands again once he was outside, somewhere else.

Harry walked around the place until he had realized he had made a complete tour. He approached the doorman again.
“How does this work?”, he asked.
“You need to go to the front and get change. He’ll get you started”

Harry followed his directions to the front. The doorman was good. He was helpful and patient and gave good directions. It would be hard to be patient with men in a place like this Harry thought. When men reached this point, you couldn’t expect very much of them. And if they were drunk, they were helpless. Clearly the doorman had a hard job.

Harry passed the open and closed doors for a second time. Some of the doors had glass panels. In these rooms there were high upholstered benches, like massage tables, and a girl spread out among her clutter on top of the bench with a pillow, some fast food wrappers, purse, make-up, hair brush, articles of clothing. Some would look up and smile at you as you passed. Every one of them was flipping the pages of a glossy woman’s magazine. And there they were, sitting, looking, flipping, sucking on candy, in their bikinis under an unflattering light, casually on display and for all that Harry knew this was exactly what they did all the time, here and at home in front of the television watching their daytime programs. He looked at these girls sitting there and he pictured the high school bedrooms of the girls he had known that closely.

Harry looked around briefly as he stood at the counter for change. The walls were wallpapered with video porn boxes. There were a few displays in the middle of the floor too - unadorned, stacked together box islands of glossy cock, cunt, hair and painted nails. Fuck and suck and floor and little by way of anything else. No fluff, no tables of silly toys or gels, no rubber dolls. Just boxes of the same thing over and over again - cock in hole, tongue in hole, fist in hole, black hole, white hole, woman’s hole, and man’s hole. And tits. Big tits. Little tits. Lots of tits and shiny, cum splattered cleavage. Belly cum. Cum in the crack of the ass. Cum in the hair. Everyone was a specialist here.

Harry repeated his question to the man behind the counter. “How does this work?”
“First time?”

Harry stammered a little and mumbled something about once a while back.

“Here we have what they call New York style sex shows.”

Harry nodded. He had been to Times Square before they ruined it, had sampled a few shows there, drunk and way back when.

The man behind the counter began slowly. He was patient too. He talked ten dollars here and ten there, one on one, private dances, private booths, phone lines, two for Tuesdays - it all sounded good to Harry. He changed one twenty and then a second and then decided to change everything that was in his wallet.

At this point it was up to Harry to settle upon a dancer. This is what one did and Harry was one. Everyone here was. You could divide the world on this point: those who would ask their friends to help them move, and those who wouldn’t, and on either side of the line everybody was delusional about sex.

Harry passed the man whose job it was to clean out the booths after each show. He carried a stiff broom and some cleaning bottles. What was there that could be swept away, he wondered? He thought of Sisyphus. This man’s hell was to sweep up the never-ending pain and joy of other men.

Harry nodded to the doorman and made the route of the hallways again. It seemed darker the third time through. After a complete turn Harry made for the bathroom again. He made faces in the mirror and straightened his collar and wondered if there were cameras here in the bathroom. He suspected that they were everywhere in this place. Private booths and private dancers, it said everywhere. Privacy only happened during sleep, behind eyelids, deep in dream. Harry flipped a coin to decide between the blonde in the cellar room with the fake bricks and leather shackles, or the Latina girl with the legs to here.

Harry paused in the door light outside of room four.

“Would you like a show?”

He looked down from her face and squinted at the tattoo on the girl’s hip. It looked like a holster. She got up from the massage table and moved closer, stepping into the hallway and motioning toward the adjoining door, to the customer’s booth. She smelled nice to Harry.

“Go in and make yourself comfortable.” she said.

Harry looked inside - a cube the size of a closet. He went in. There was a phone on the wall and a stool in the middle of the floor space. He fished two tens out of his pocket and put one in each of the two slots. The mechanical curtain went up and the girl bent over and spread her ass cheeks for him, all the while turning back to look at him. Harry wondered if she could see him or if this was an act. He wagged his tongue at her. She did it back. She could see him just fine, although she didn’t always look at him. Sometimes she seemed to look past him, over his shoulder where his shadow might be. It wasn’t very comfortable to be looked at that way.
The girl walked into the glass and pressed her tits against it. She danced against the glass like that, with no music, and stepped out of her g-string. Harry noticed the glass on his side which was separated from her glass by an air space. His glass had dried up gism all over it. He tried not to look at his glass. The girl had long brown legs. Harry looked at her legs. She had another tattoo on her ankle, a heart or something, someone's name. She turned around and arched her ass up into the glass, pressed it up there and leaned forward onto her massage table. She took one hand and then the other and rubbed them along her inside thigh stretching her long fingers along the crack of her ass and all the while pressing and wiggling. Harry liked this view of her the best. It was the most persistent vision of a woman’s rug that he had - that from behind and slightly lower. He got off of his stool and crouched down on his ankles. He followed the straight line of her legs up to where her ass and thigh came together at that perfect little cup of half moon. This was the center, this fleshy spot right here, it was the CHI, the confluence of east and west, of earth meets sky, of past and present - where our mortal selves break with the divine, and so this image remains forever fixed like the glossy pages glimpsed at as a boy in a clapboard cabin in the muddy bottoms of some running joke in some remote corner of the world, and again and again this image, this holy view of a woman, this perspective of the camera’s in which the lens is working from the same line of sight as that of a midget, but really only a young boy and so hence it’s power, hence the submission, hence the mystery and the confusion and the delight, for since at least the advent of bipedal apes the entrance to the womb has been placed on two living pedestals, the variety of which may boggle the mind, but ultimately it is a shared function that they all impart and that is to forever hold the pussy in sway above mans’ head.

The girl moved away from the glass and for a moment seemed surprised not to see Harry sitting there under the light. She quickly found the top of his head down in front and held it with her eyes. Harry felt foolish now. He looked up at her. She was lying back on her massage table, hanging her legs to either side and working her hands over her stomach and throat. Her room was well lit and he could see right into her pussy now. She was shaved and she had a large clitoris. It was wet. Harry concentrated on the sticky region. She wouldn’t ever quite touch herself there but she could move it around from inside somewhere and it flexed and kind of winked at him, puckered and relaxed, smiled and then sneered. The girl gyrated and flexed and arched and strained and pulled back on her knees with her hands and then she got up and leaned on the wall, smiling at Harry. She picked up the phone on the wall. Ah yes, the phone Harry remembered. Earlier he had made a note of it. He picked up on his end.

‘Hello I’m Yola“, she said.

“Harry.”

“Are you comfortable?”

Harry nodded. Suddenly everything was changed. He had penetrated into her room. Before, it was all dead silence. It was like watching fish in an aquarium or being in a chat room. Nothing but the hum of the apparatus- air pump or computer - the heavily blanketed monotony of swimmer’s ear, and when Harry picked up the phone, it was like all the water had been drained away. He could hear again. He could hear her breathing and her feet shuffling. He could hear the ambient sounds of another person.

“Just breath.”, he suggested.

“Don’t you want to talk?”

“No. I mean, this is fine.”

“I’m lonely tonight.”, she whispered.

“I guess so.” He was getting annoyed. He decided he wasn’t here for conversation.

“Do you like this.”, she asked, running her hand in circles around her breast but never touching her nipple.

“Yeah. Do more. Let me see it.”, he demanded, realizing that the only way to keep her from talking was to hang up the phone.

“What do you want?” She blew into the phone and gave out a low, quiet moan.

“Come closer“, he suggested. “Down here“, he said, tapping. “Against the glass.”

She moved in to the window and put her full mouth up to the glass, pulling back her lips as she got closer. Her tongue appeared from the back of her throat and she ran the tip of it over her bottom lip and in one heavy, wet sigh she took his cock in her mouth and lifted her eyes up at him. She ran one of her hands over the front of her thighs, her fingers spread across the skin and making white impressions as she drew her hand upwards toward herself.

“Yeah. That’s it. Touch yourself baby. Keep going.” He liked the way he just spoke, receiver in one hand, cock in the other.

“Like this?”, she purred, as she grazed her chops.

“More“, he demanded. “I want to see more.”

“What baby? Like this?”

“Lay a hand on your box.”

“My what?”

“On your pussy. Let me see you touch your pussy. Touch yourself cunt. Play with it.” Just then Harry felt all the air being sucked out of the room. Her voice fell flat and sober, like she was repeating something someone else told her to say, like a hostage on television.

“I’m sorry we aren’t allowed to do that here.”

Then she smiled, which seemed even more asinine.

Harry hung up the phone. The connection with the living was broken. The room filled up with water again. Harry sat there on the stool holding his cock. He gave it a few more uneven strokes while she lay back on her elbows, her knees up, her lips parted, her head falling to one side, her eyes somewhere else, her hands remotely over her body.

As the curtain lowered Harry could see his perfect reflection in the glass. He stood there a while and watched a small red light blink on the wall next to the slot where you put the money. He looked down at his cock which had curled under. He put it away and undid the deadbolt on the door, stepping out into the carpeted hallway. Yola had already made herself comfortable. Her door was open and she was propped up with a magazine inviting the next one. Harry glanced up at her. She looked like a plant, like something that had grown there in that sick yellow light. She looked at him as though she had never seen him before, and then she smiled blankly at his passing shadow, saying goodnight through her made up lips.