I am not a pervert. Let’s dispel that notion right now. Just because I gave in to an impulse and stopped at the Lion’s Lair Gentlemen’s Club does not make me some kind of degenerate. I am an average man, no different from any other 72-year-old who worked 45 years in the accounting department of the Aetna Insurance Company, whose wife Wilma lives in an adult foster care home called Idlewild Manor and has not spoken a word in two years, who is separated from kids and grand kids by hundreds of miles and a wide gulf of apathy, whose baby brother Herbert, at age 68, has terminal cancer and at most six months to live. No different at all. There are millions like me.

My name is Joe. What could be more average?

My visit to the Lion’s Lair, chalk it up to curiosity. And, OK, maybe loneliness. And, OK again, maybe a little horniness, yes, even in my eighth decade. A point of pride, if the truth be told.

I’d spent the day down in Garden City with brother Herb and his wife Jackie, and was on the long drive home, two hours of dodging semis on the Interstate and then an hour of solitude on a dark two-laner, when ahead I saw the sign for the Lion's Lair looming as bright and enticing as Sin City itself, inviting me in to ogle the topless dancers, to indulge in unspecified but exotic “VIP extras,” and to browse the toy store where, I suspected, one would not find anything made by Mattel for little tots. I turned into the parking lot, nearly deserted, and pulled the Taurus up next to a big Harley of the kind ridden by beefy men of ponytails, tattoos, and leather. After a few moments assessing the odds of being mugged, or otherwise relieved of my cash on hand, I went inside.

I won’t take too much time describing the place, the Harley guy behind the counter, the lethargic dancer caressing the pole on the stage, the two gentlemen locals nursing Budweiser longnecks. Suffice it to say that, having turned over a couple of twenty-dollar bills for the V.I.P. treatment, I found myself in a little room lit only by a red overhead bulb. There was an overstuffed chair I didn’t feel good sitting on, but I sat anyway.

“I’m Renee,” said the girl who’d led me into the room.

She was cute in the way a little bug can be cute, a tiny thing, couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred pounds. She wore a bikini, red with white polka dots, and red flip-flops. I noticed a toe ring. She was probably 18 or 19, the same age as my granddaughter Jennifer.

“Do you know the rules?” she asked.

“No, I never did this before.”

“OK, you can touch me on the arms and legs, but you can’t put your fingers inside my bathing suit.” She had a country-smart quality to her voice. She pronounced “your” as “yer” -- “can’t” and “cain’t.” “No kissing,” she said. “And you can’t touch my tits or crotch.”

She kicked off her flip-flops, sat down on my lap, facing me, wiggling a bit, nestling her little bottom into my private area.

“I work for tips,” she said.

“Can I touch your hair?” I asked. She had long, pretty hair.

“Yes, you can touch my hair.”

“Can I touch your face?”

She tilted her head at me.

“Why would you want to touch my face for?”

“Can I kiss your shoulder?” I asked.

“You can kiss my shoulder. But not my face.”

“Gotcha.”

“Fifteen minutes,” she said.

She reached over to a boom box, hit a button, and the little room was filled with loud noise, music of a sort, I suppose, lots of bass booming and thumping. She put her hands on my shoulders and began furiously grinding herself into me in rhythm to the music, moving her hips in a circle, fast and hard, around and around her little bottom went, her eyes closed, her head bobbing, keeping time. I put my hands on her upper arms and held on for the ride. After a minute or so, my lap began to hurt.

“Can you slow down a bit?” I said, close to her ear so she could hear me.

She slowed her grinding to about half speed.

“Even more,” I said, “and not so hard?”

She slowed her hips down to a lazy, sensual back and forth, a movement that quickly caused me to become aroused. I put my hands on her narrow thighs, stroked them with my fingertips, getting as close to her bikini as I thought I could get away with, then put my lips on her shoulder. I was very hard now, and I wondered if she could tell, if she could feel me through my trousers, and that’s when I felt a very pleasant little shudder down there, a minor victory, a message from my body that, yes, I was still alive. I would have been happy if it had ended then, but Renee was going to give me my full fifteen minutes worth. Finally she stopped moving her hips, reached over, pressed a button on the boom box. The room was suddenly silent. She slipped off my lap. Stepped into her flip-flops.

“How was that?” she asked.

“Good,” I said. I took a twenty out of my wallet and handed it to her. She folded it and stuck it into her bikini top, in the space between her little breasts.

On my way out I nodded toward the Harley guy, and he said, “Come back soon.”

In the dark of the Taurus, I sat for a while thinking about what I’d just done, not feeling very good about myself. My time with Renee wasn’t the kind of thing I’d share with the guys I meet every morning at the McDonald’s. After a while, I fished my cell phone out of my jacket pocket and called my dying baby brother. Wife Jackie answered.

“He’s gone to bed, Joe,” she said. “It’s after eleven.”

“That late? I didn’t realize.”

“And I’m headed there myself, soon as you hang up.”

“Sorry, Jackie,” I said. “But I forgot to tell him something.”

“Tell me, and I’ll tell him in the morning.”


I didn’t really have anything to tell my brother right then, and when I tried to think of something plausible, my brain turned to stone. Not a thought there. Not even a glimmer.

“Well,” I said. I could think of nothing beyond that.

“It’s late, Joe,” Jackie said.

“Well,” I said again, and then, “Wilma told me to tell Herb she thinks about him often.”

What part of my brain that came from I’ll never know.

“Joe,” Jackie said, “Wilma hasn’t said a word in two years. She doesn’t talk.”

“If she could talk, I’m sure she’d say that. She’d say Herb is in her thoughts.”

“Joe, Wilma has no thoughts. You know that.”

A woman came out of the Lion's Lair, and for a moment I thought she was coming to my car, but she walked past me, tottering on high-heels.

“Well, Good night, Jackie,” I said.

“We’re gonna lose him, Joe,” she said.

“Yes, I know.”

“Sixty-eight is too damned young,” she said.

I had no answer for that.

I fired up the Taurus and pulled back onto the road, leaving the Lion's Lair behind me. I fiddled with the radio a bit, searching for the sound of a human voice, someone to keep me company the rest of the way home, finally settling for a preacher coming through the crackles and pops from what sounded like a long way off, maybe Texas, maybe Mars. He seemed to be talking directly to me when he said we could bring our troubles to Jesus, leave them right there at His feet. Our burdens He’ll bear, the preacher told me. Our sorrows He’ll share.

Well, I may be an average Joe, I surely have my weaknesses, and my share of ridiculous moments, but I am not stupid. And I was not buying any of it, this message of comfort and hope, not a single word.