Equality At The Strip Club

If anyone would end up having a profound conversation about disability in a strip club, it would be me.

This all started with a conspiracy the other day. See, if my friends and I told our wives that we were having a guys’ night out at the strip club, it would never fly – we’d be lectured, then resigned to staying home to watch the Lifetime network with our wives. However, if we said that we were invited to a “bachelor party,” we were free to go – after all, who wants to be known as the only wife out of the bunch who wouldn’t let her husband go to the bachelor party?

And, our pact to blatantly lie to our wives worked perfectly.

So, there we were at the strip club, and it was everything you could imagine – gold poles, multicolored lights, drifting smoke, and 4-inch heals everywhere. And, as is the case at strip clubs, there was a steady stream of women offering lap dances to us, at least one every two minutes, trying to drain our dollars in real time.

“Dude, check that out,” my buddy said, pointing to an extremely tall, slender, brunette woman in a skin-tight, silver-sequined halter top and matching hot paints.

I watched her for a moment, two tables or so from us in the foggy, seemingly dizzying club. She had a card in her hand that she showed the customer at the table, then tucked the card in her top, picked up a pen and pad off the table, and wrote on it, showing it to the gentleman. I looked to her lips to see what she was saying, but she wasn’t saying a word, just pointing at the note pad, as if wanting the guy to read it.

“She’s a deaf-mute,” my buddy said, looking at me, then back to her.

I watched her gesturing to the guy with her pad again, having written down something else she wanted him to read. “I think you’re right,” I replied.

“That’s weird,” my buddy said.

“This whole scene is weird,” I said. “A deaf-mute stripper isn’t any weirder than a stripper, in general.”

My buddy looked at me, raising an eyebrow.

“Really, if you think about it, there’s equality to it,” I added. “Why shouldn’t a deaf-mute woman strip?”

“I don’t know?” he replied. “It’s just weird.”

“Look at it this way, she’s putting herself out there with a disability well beyond what most would do,” I said. “I know it sounds crazy, but there’s some courage in that. Hustling guys for lap dances takes some gumption, so imagine doing it when you’re deaf and can’t speak.”

“Then, think what she could do if she put that fortitude toward other things in life,” he said.

“But, that goes for every dancer in here,” I said. “That’s where there’s equality in a warped kind of way – there’s no reason why one with a disability shouldn’t pursue any path, functional or dysfunctional.”

“So, is stripping going to be your new career path?” my buddy asked, smiling, picking up his beer.

“My wife begs me to put my pants back on, let alone a club full of strange men paying me to take them off,” I said, reaching in my pocket for more money for the next lap dance. “When you’re smokin’ hot like her with a disability, you make money. When you’re a weathered yahoo like me with a disability, you lose money.”

“That’s how strip clubs work,” my buddy replied, slapping me on the back. “And, aren’t they great!”

Author: Mark E. Smith

The literary side of the WheelchairJunkie View all posts by Mark E. Smith