Write Using the Word 'Coffee' 'Hallowed' 'Anticipation' - Michael Lisboa

“...the pump or my mouth?” she asked.

“Your mouth, please.”

How did she get here? He couldn’t get the question out of his mind. What twisted path brings a woman like her to a place like this? It just didn’t computer. When he’d read about it on the internet, he thought it must be an urban legend. But then a friend, a real-honest-to-God-I-know-him-in-real-life-not-my-buddy’s-cousin friend had told him about it and he had to see from himself. So he blew off his usual after-dinner coffee with his roommate to make the trip to Jumbo’s Clown Room.

Jumbo’s is a Los Angeles institution. At some point it may have been a legitimate strip club where women undressed to rap music under purple lights. Those days had long since past it. Now the girls had to pay for their own songs from dinged up, but admittedly eclectic, jukebox adjacent to the bar. It took its name from the collection of clown dolls gathered unobtrusively along the top of the bottle shelf behind the bar. It was dimly lit by rope lights that perhaps at one time were lovingly tucked behind rails and under ledges, but had since started to droop and hang like long-in-the-tooth dancers. But the red vinyl booths had stood the test of time. The dancers were usually friendly. Drinks were cheap. Jumbo’s was not without its charms, and Tom was here in anticipation of a charm that no other “gentleman’s club” he was aware of offered. Rumor had it that during the day, she plied her trade with children, too. Those lucky, lucky children.

“Your mouth, please,” he replied. Tom had been intimate with dancers before. At least as intimate as one could be with a paid employee and no touching allowed. But he couldn’t believe what happened next. She placed it – this is actually happening, he thought – to her lips and began to blow. It was long and someone without her gifts might have struggled with it, but she was pro and it inflated and came to life in her capable mouth.

“Wait!” Tom struggled to get the word out.

“What is it?” She seemed surprised that he would interrupt.

Tom felt embarrassed and adolescent. He wasn’t used to making requests like this.

“I never told you what I wanted.” He was nervous. Was he even allowed to make requests?

“Oh, right! I’m sorry! Usually, the guys are more interested in what I’m going to do onstage than at the tables. They seem to take that for granted. Did you want something special? I can do just about anything.” She seemed genuinely excited by the challenge.

Tom thought. He knew that anyone could do a dog. He’d seen someone do an orca at Sea World. What’s something weird and linear and alive?

“I’ve got it... how about a camel?” He’d always been obsessed with the looks of camels with their fatty, watery humps, arching necks and bulbous phallic noses. They were, in his mind, bizarre marvels of evolution.

Her eyes lit up. “I’ve never done a camel before! It might take me an extra song... if you want two humps that is.”

He smiled, “If you can do two humps, it’ll be worth an extra song.”

Without another word, she straddled him and went to work. She tied off the first balloon and went to work on a second. And then a third. She had magnificent lungs. She inflated the tools of her trade with all the effort a normal person expended exhaling. Once she had 6 balloons inflated (they hung from her g-string where a normal dancer might have damp wrinkled dollar bills), she went to work with her hands. They were tiny and gifted. They wove and bended the squeaky rubber of the balloons in the same manner that Tom must have imagined God himself (herself, maybe, after witnessing the craftsmanship before him) wove together his veins and arteries in the beautiful line sculpture that was the human circulatory system. Macy Gray’s “Oblivion” rang in his ears. It was childish and exhilirating to watch her work. He was 8 again. He was 38 with a stripper in his lap. And she was making freaking balloon animals. It was real and it was a joy to watch the artist work.

He realized he wouldn’t be paying for a second song out of obligation. She had been challenged and like anyone who took pride in their work, she was going to be damned if she didn’t get a two-humped camel completed in the three and a half minutes afforded by the propulsive beats of Gray’s paean to loneliness (or was it aloneness?). She struggled for a moment. The humps and legs were done, but she needed a neck. Time was running short. Expertly, she pinched of the tangled mass where the neck balloon needed to go in her right hand and drew another balloon, a gold one, from her g-string. It was full of hot stripper air the second it met her lips. The song was ending. She had 3, maybe 5 seconds. She worked feverishly, her hands a blur. And where once there had been a mess of rubber architecture and loose ends, there was now a fully formed and unmistakable camel as the final beat kicked out of the speakers.

Tom exhaled and laughed. How long was he holding his breath?

“There,” she said defiantly. “A two-humped camel.”

“Thank you,” he said. “I hope you won’t take it as an insult to your craft if I go ahead and pay for the second song anyway,” he added sheepishly. He didn’t know if he was being magnanimous or a douche.

“Insult, shminsult. I ain’t doin’ this for charity,” she replied.

And with that Tom was back in reality. He was a 38 year-old man accountant in a strip club on a Tuesday night with a balloon animal in one hand and two twenties in the other.

She excused herself and moved on to the next customer, her balloons dangling from her hips like a ridiculous rubber rainbow skirt. Tom downed the last of his whisky and Coke and got up to go home. But it occurred to him, as he stepped out into the cool night air and noise of traffic on Hollywood Boulevard, that somewhere in the hallowed halls of Barnum and Bailey’s College, if someone knew the trade she was plying here at Jumbo’s, they were either blushing or beaming with pride through their clown paint.