I tried to pretend I was just dancing with my college pals...

... and squinted my eyes until the room was a blur of colors and shapes – repeating splotches of pink and brown punctuated by little black triangles. Positioning myself as far away as I could from the bank of slowly winking windows, I tried an abbreviated version of my standard club move but my limbs refused to bend naturally and I stumbled, brushing against a dancer named Velvet.

“Hey,” Velvet said and backed up as though someone had just tossed her a dog turd.

She rolled her eyes and turned away when I opened my mouth to speak.

“Sorry. I’ve never done this before…”

“No shit,” Velvet said as she turned her backside to one of the windows, bent over and pressed her ass up to the glass.

The sarcasm might have rolled off, had I not already identified the sturdy, porcelain-skinned amazon as the alpha female of the group. Wearing nothing but leather wrist cuffs, thick black eyeliner and black nail polish, she looked down on her pack with a mixture of vigilance and aloofness. Her shoulder length black hair was highlighted by a white stripe on either side of her face. I had decided she was the perfect combination of feminine symmetry and rock and roll attitude. Everything I thought wanted to be.

I heard snickering coming from the opposite corner and felt the un-sexy grin on my face morph into an even un-sexier grimace.

The only Black dancer in the room -- toned and hairless except for the tight curls on her head -- smiled sympathetically. “Don’t sweat it,” she said. “By the end of the shift, this will feel so natural, you’ll walk out onto Kearney in nothin’ but your pumps.”

She grabbed her breasts, squeezed them together and flicked her tongue towards her left nipple in perfect time to Prince’s “Little Red Corvette.”

… you’re the kind of woman who believes in makin’ out once, love ‘em and leave ‘em fast….

“You new?”

“Yeah. I’m Linda,” I said.

“I’m Coffee. That your real name? You may want to pick a stage name… it helps keep this out of your real life,” she said pointing with her eyes to the windows.

I decided not to tell her I’d come to the Lusty Lady looking for a real life. Instead I said, “Well, I haven’t actually been hired yet. Celeste is evaluating me right now.”

Coffee put her hands on her hips, backed up and looked me up and down for a long moment. “Don’t worry, baby, you’re hired. You don’t need a degree from Julliard to work here. You just need to look fuckable. Sometimes not even that…”

“What?!” Coffee suddenly yelled at the corner window, “you wanna see some pussy?”

A pink, goggle-eyed man wearing a white dress shirt with a red tie flung over his left shoulder was holding his alert penis in one hand and gesturing impatiently towards Coffee and me with the other.

“Watch this,” Coffee said winking at me.

She shimmied up to the window just as the screen was coming down, turned and leaned her back against the pane. When the window reopened, the viewer was greeted by a wall of brown flesh.

I heard pounding and stifled curses from the other side of the window.

“You gotta let them know who’s in charge here,” Coffee laughed. “They’re paying for the privilege of seeing you in all your feminine glory. If they don’t show the proper respect, don’t show ‘em nothin’! This is YOUR show!”

Show? Say, I liked the sound of that. It made me feel less like I was dabbling in pornography and more like I was pursuing a real – if forbidden -- art.

“Shut the fuck up!” Coffee yelled and thumped the wall with the back of her stiletto-heeled foot.

The window closed and didn’t reopen.

“Damn right,” Coffee said and moved on to another window.

…baby you’re much too fast….

Emboldened by Coffee’s act of feminist indignation, I ventured out of my corner and stepped into the middle of the mirrored room. I shifted my weight from one foot to the other to the beat of the music and watched as the other dancers bent and twisted their bodies around the windows, offering A- and B-side, gynecological views of their nether regions.

I knew I was expected to ‘work’ the windows and wondered whether I’d be able to find the courage to approach the sweaty, slack-jawed faces peering in at me. They creeped me out. In another setting – say, a coffee shop, bank or grocery store – I might not even notice these men. They had all the trappings of normalcy – shirts washed in Tide, glasses prescribed by optometrists; watches by which appointments were kept, wedding bands by which loyalties were promised. But in this context, they might as well have had “Deviant” scrawled across their foreheads. (And what, I wondered, was scrawled across my bare butt? “Education: Some College?”)

Without meaning to, I made eye contact with one of the booth occupants… a young African American man whose trousers lay crumpled somewhere out of view. He kneaded his penis, which lay curled under a pair of women’s white lace panties. The delicate fabric was so bright against his dark skin that I paused for a split second to admire the effect. This was interesting. I realized that I knew a secret about this stranger that his mother, brother and guidance counselor probably didn’t know.

There was suddenly something about the glassy eyed rapture of these men, dropping their sticky quarters into slots just to get a look at my crotch, that piqued my curiosity… in that, ‘is-that-a-birthmark-or-just-an-ugly-tattoo’ sort of way and I knew I was going to have to loosen up if I wanted to stay for the duration of this experiment (for that’s how I’d come to think of it… even if I had no idea what it was I was trying to prove).

I began to study Velvet, hoping to cultivate a version of her cool indifference. Even with her face inches from whatever man she was entertaining, she seemed unmoved by the stirrings within the booths... didn’t even flinch when a wad of semen splattered against the window pane like some giant science fiction bug. She seemed unaware that she was interacting with anything but her own reflection.

I realized I was beginning to mimic her body movements and caught myself when I noticed Velvet watching me watching her in the mirror. Now I had a bright red face to compliment my stupid grin.

… The way you make me feel… You really turn me on… You knock me off of my feet…

A faded, pink curtain separating the “stage” from the entrance hall parted and a short, thick woman with frizzy dark hair and large, low hung breasts entered the mirrored room. A petite blonde quietly laboring on all fours next to a corner window abruptly stood up, turned away from the dazed face in the window and -- leaving her seventy-five-cent-suitor hanging -- exited through the same curtain.

“It’s her first night, too,” Coffee said indicating the new arrival. Percy… Perry… baby, what’s your name again?”

“Persephone. Greek Goddess of the underworld…”

“Right.” Coffee rolled her eyes. “This is Linda.”

“Awesome scarf,” Persephone said reaching out a plump, unmanicured hand. Fingering the purple silk wrapped around my waist she said, “Can I play with it for a minute?”

“Uh… sure… I guess.”

“Jesus Christ. You don’t have to give up pieces of your costume,” Velvet said. “That’s not cool… Per-seff-PHONY.” Velvet emphasized the third syllable and gave her a what-the-fuck look.

I felt the warm glow of social advancement wash over me.

“Just for a sec,” Persephone said unfazed. Grabbing the scarf, she snaked it across the floor, between her legs and around her waist. Then she hopped from one window to the next, shaking her shoulders and dragging my scarf behind. One by one, the windows -- which had been opening and closing in 15 second intervals – closed. Except for the one next to Velvet, none of them reopened.

I noticed with relief that, with the arrival of Persephone, the pecking order seemed to shift. Watching the woman lurch around the room like an amateur log roller, I no longer felt the most awkward, least talented, unsexiest dancer in the room. Compared to Persephone’s short bruised legs, mine were long and elegant. My previously unremarkable hair, soft and silky next to the home-permed nest on top of Persephone’s head. When one of the middle windows reopened, I moved forward in slow, slightly more confident steps until my torso and crotch filled the frame. Grabbing the handles on either side of the window, I moved my hips in long languid circles and glanced at Velvet. when, after closing, the window immediately reopened.

…pull up to the bumper bay-bee….

To be continued....