This is a tale of sweaty man-gyrations, red-tassled g-strings and hot leather boots. Of cash, ass, sports cars and luxury villas. It’s a journey of epic proportions involving world travels, women and untold stories of debauchery resulting in vast riches.

In 1993 (yes, I’m old motherfuckers), I was a rising star in the world of amateur bodybuilding. Having won the Teenage Mr. Maryland and the Musclemania, I was featured on ESPN and in various bodybuilding magazines. In spite of that success I was horribly unhappy, having just bailed out of a 5 1/2 year relationship. To ease my pain and shake up my life, I packed my shit and moved to Florida. This would prove to be a brief but interesting experience.

I’d saved enough money so that I didn’t have to work for a few weeks and could just focus on my training. So, like any aspiring Mr. Olympia, I went out binge drinking every night of the week. It was really conducive to the enhancement of my physique, so I committed to doing it every night. I was very consistent. With this lifestyle it wasn’t long before I started to need an actual source of income. Back in Maryland I’d tried just about every job known to mankind and the only thing I’d really stuck with was being a bouncer. Resume in hand, I made my way through all of South Florida trying to find someone who required an intelligent, ambitious, professional who brought to the table vast experience saying, “ID please” and “I’m going to have to ask you to leave.” On top of all that I had, in my “Special Skills” section, experience with headlocking two people at the same time and dragging them out to the sidewalk. I was highly qualified. Apparently there were a great many aspiring bouncers in the area because virtually every bar, club and Denny’s had a full roster of trained monkeys, er, security people. I was beginning to get discouraged when I saw the light. Well, lights. As I was driving home one evening I saw a shiny object off in the distance. As I got closer it grew and grew in size until I realized it was not an object but a building. A building completely faced in reflective surface so that anyone within a quarter mile could look into a giant mirror. When I got within a few hundred yards I saw a sign, a beacon of light, if you will, and it read “Crazy Horse Too”.

Pull in, park, primp, penetrate.

I say “penetrate” because it’s really the only “P” word I could find for “go into the fucking joint”. Alliterate much?

Long story short, I go in and ask for the manager. Turns out this place is THE hot new strip club in South Florida. Over 20,000 square feet of black lacquer stages and shiny gold plated poles. Not one, not two, not three, but FOUR cages for housing the precious flightless birds widely known as strippers. Anyway, they gave me a job on the spot. $7 per hour plus tip outs from the girls. Doesn’t sound like much but I ended up bringing home like a grand a week. And I wore a tuxedo and waddled my stocky ass around the club making sure all was well. I looked like a penguin on steroids. Anyway, the job was cool for a while but, like any job, got boring and annoying rather quickly. They didn’t like to overstaff so they made me work my first 27 days straight. I had to call in sick just to get a night off. The manager yelled at me for not coming in so I told him to go fuck himself. Hence, I retired from Crazy Horse Too in just under a month. At this point I’d become “friendly” with most of the girls who worked there. One of them would get picked up every night by her boyfriend in his new Corvette. I was driving a Hyundai Excel with personalized license plates that read, “GetnBig”. You had no idea I was that cool, didja? The girl tells me that her bf is a male dancer at some club in Miami called ‘La Bare’. It sounded kinda gay but he had a Vette and I had a Hyundai with no a/c. A little gay-ness never killed anyone, right?

(INSERT TASTELESS HIV JOKE HERE)

I have no idea what it’s like to be a boy-stripper but I’m game for making car-with-a/c kinda cash. So I call. They basically tell me to drive my ass down to Miami so that they can look at me. Um, ok. What kind of attire does one wear when one is applying for a position where one doesn’t really wear attire? Will I have to get naked? If so, we can save ourselves a trip to Miami. I’m already sized-challenged in the groinal area. Put me in an air-conditioned room full of women staring at my pecker and they’ll think I’m a chick. You know how the dude in ‘Silence of the Lambs’ does the junk-tuck so he can see himself as a chick? In a room full of people my junk wouldn’t need to be tucked. It would cringe, cower and the crawl back up between my buttcheeks. From behind it would look like I was pooping a pee pee.

“Pull in, park, primp, penetrate.”

“cringe, cower and the crawl”

“pooping a pee pee”

What do these 3 phrases have in common? ANSWER: They are all mildly disturbing.

But no, I don’t have to get naked. They have “costumes”. So I hop in the GetnBig-mobile and head down to Miami. As I’m flying down 95 in my cars top gear, which is 4th, listening to the whine of my moped-like engine, shoulder length hair whipping me in my eyeballs (the windows were down cuz I had no a/c), I’m dreaming about my new job as an exotic male dancer. The hundreds of hot women, the wads of cash, the sex, the cash,the sex, the cash, the sex, the cash, the sex, the cash, the sex, the cash, the sex, the cash, the sex, the cash, the sex, the cash, the sex, the cash, the sex, the cash, the sex, the cash, the sex, the cash, the sex, the cash, the sex, the cash, the sex, the cash, the sex, the cash, the sex, the cash, the sex, the cash, the sex, the cash, the sex, the cash, the sex, the cash, the sex, the cash, the sex, the cash, the sex, the cash….

I almost rear end a mini-van.

Back to reality and arriving at La Bare. It’s actually connected to a female strip club which only adds to my fantasy. I go to work and make thousands of dollars while I revel in the adulation of hundreds of women. After work I count my cash and, as I walk to my brand new Dodge Viper, various hot strippers from the club next door beg to follow me home to my ocean-front apartment. There we have a giant Frank-and-fake-breasts orgy just before I doze off to the sound of waves crashing. I walk inside to find a small, empty club not completely dissimilar to the Crazy Horse Too, albeit one tenth the size. I’m greeted by the manager who looks like a worn out John Stamos. We shake hands, he looks me up and down and says, “you’re hired”.

All my dreams have come true.

He takes me to the main room and explains to me the process of becoming a Fabio-fabulous superstar of male exotic dancing. You must start off on the slow nights in order to build experience. Even then, you can only “work the rail”. There is a main stage for the featured performers who have worked their way off the rail. “The rail”, of which there were two, was a 4 foot high, 2 foot wide platform that ran about 1/3 the length of the room. At any given time two of the male dancers would be up on the rail, dancing in a sexually suggestive manner for the titillation of the female customers. This is in addition to the performer on the main stage who would put on a costumed and choreographed show. Now, you’d get tipped on the rail by women who liked your look, your charisma, the way you moved. And, if they really liked you, they’d ask you for a lapdance. Awwww yeah. Then you’re really making the bucks. Ten bucks, to be exact. Not this petty ass dollar at a time bullshit up on the rail. But an up-close-and-personal private dance for ten dollars a song. Holy shit! At 3 minutes a song I could make like…carry the 3, divide the 6, times pi, 43 percent of infinity…I could make like $86,000 a night!

YES!

Once you moved to the main stage and became a featured performer, you made even MORE money. And got more ass. Money and Ass!

YES!

When could I start? What do I do? How do I come here and collect my money and my sex?

He directed me back to the costume lady and said to find myself something to wear. I could start on Tuesday. Today was Monday. That meant I was going to be rich and get fucked by hot women TOMORROW! HOLY MOTHER OF GOD! I went to the back room where a haggard old lady sat sewing what appeared to be Liberace’s yarmulka. She looked at me and asked me how big my waist was. I told her it was about a 32. She turned to a rack full of sequined somethings and pulled out a piece of shiny pink cloth covered in what appeared to be fake diamonds. Bling for your thing. I was like um, no thank you. She glared at me and held it up anyway. The sides and back looked like they were made of dental floss and the blinged out “cup” area was um, HUGE. I laughed and said, “I’ll fill that with what?” She looked at me like I was retarded and said, “You don’t have to fill it. There’s a wire frame that makes it look full.”

Ok, now some people might think, “Cool, it’ll look like I’ve got a huge unit.” These are the same idiots who grew up bragging about the size of their cocks. Now, having a um, moderately sized (*cough* small) phallus, it always seemed to me like I’d be stupid for bragging about how large I was only to drop my trousers and have a girl go, “Do you have difficulty with size perception?” So I try not to do any false advertising. This fucking g-string was WAY worse than just talking about it. It was the ultimate bait-and-switch tactic. And it’s not all cute like putting a diamond ring in a refrigerator box. A chick is THRILLED when she finds that small item in a large container. Having sex with me is disappointing enough. I don’t have to kill it BEFORE we even start. I’m not one to overpromise and under-deliver. So let’s get this out of the way right now. My penis is small and I get tired easily.

Now anything above that is gonna be a nice surprise, huh?

Anyway, we find a more reasonably sized g-string. It’s bright red with tassles. The cup area is still a little roomy for my piece but the tassles help make it seem less so. I go home to beging mental preparation for my first night as a male performer.

Jump ahead 24 hours. I walk into the club, gym bag in hand, to find it pulsating to some sort of dance music. There’s one bartender setting up his area and I spy a dj up in the booth. The manager storms out of the back and tersely directs me to the dressing room. “Get dressed and up on the rail,” he barks at me. Wow, not exactly the star welcome I’d anticipated. I wander around until I find the dressing area. I walk into a tiny room with a few old rusty lockers and a cracked wooden bench. There are 3 guys already preparing for the nights festivities. I say hi and get nothing in return except for a nod from the guy closest to me. At this time I weigh about 200 pounds and each of my thighs measures about 28 inches in circumference. I’ve got a lot of muscle but I’m not super lean. So you can see my abs but they’re not cut all deep like these guys. The other major difference is that the 3 of them collectively weigh about the same as I do and they all have hair that reaches to the center of their backs. One of them reminds me vaguely of Sebastian Bach from the band Skid Row. Weird. As I’m extremely self concious I don’t really want to change in front of them but I do. None of them pays me any mind. While I’m adjusting my g-string so that it doesn’t dig directly into my butthole, I notice one of the other guys has the pink one I declined to purchase. I think to myself, “damn, he must have a friggin donkey dick”. About 2 seconds later I watch as he stuffs one of his socks into the cup to fill it out. I finish adjusting my ball sling, put on my black leather ankle boots and don the finishing touch…a cowboy hat. They have not authorized me to wear this additional accoutrement but I’m on the fastrack to main stage stardom. Let the lesser mortals work the rail like a regular dude. I’ll be riding a white stallion onto the stage, guns blazing, by Thursday. By next week the club will tear down the old sign and put up a new one that reads ‘La Frank’ in 6 foot lights. I will be king of all male strippers. Chippendales will call me offering a multi-million dollar contract for my own show in Vegas called Frankendales.

NOTE: As I wrote “Frankendales” it suddenly made me picture monster-ized versions of those cartoon chipmunks, Chip and Dale. Instead of being really polite and offering to let each other escape into the hole first,

Chip: “After you!”

Dale: “No, after YOU”

They’d rip the heads off of little bunnies and drink their blood.

END NOTE.

I exit the dressing room and walk down the hall to the club area. The lights have been turned down so the room is lit disco-ball style and the music is blaring. I’m prepared to walk into that place like a rockstar entering stage and be cheered by a crowd of hot horny women. As I scooch around the bar (all sexy male strippers like to scooch around things) and enter the room I stop short.

There are 3 women in the room.

One one side of the room is a lone chick who I can barely see in the dark. Closer to me are two VERY large black women sipping VERY large drinks. This does not bode well for my wallet or my sex fantasies. Ok, it’s early. It’s a Tuesday. It’ll pick up in a bit. I’ll just woo these women and take the hundreds of dollars I’m sure they’ve brought with them. Good practice for later when the rich hotties pull up in their Ferraris waiting to pay me for making them wet and then have dirty, dirty sex with them. Yeah, practice. As I am the ONLY guy out in the club area all eyes are on me. All 6 totally dead, indifferent eyes are pointed directly at me. So I hop up on the rail and suddenly realize that I have to dance.

I can’t dance.

Apparently I hadn’t quite thought this through. In my fantasy I had women, money and a hot ride. I had most certainly NOT fantasized about dancing. That’s kind of a problem. One that I must solve within the next few seconds or risk the derision and scorn of these 3 women. So I start to move. I don’t have any clue what I’m doing and I’m sort of doing a half white-boy moving my feet in and out dance crossed with a little bit of a breakdance. I try to do that thing that looks like you’re doing the worm but standing up. The women stare at me with a blank look. I feel like I’m trying to get a rise out of the Queen’s guards outside the palace. Nothing. I force myself to make eye contact but I can’t. I’m WAY too embarrassed. One of the women shifts in her seat and I think she might be about to pull out some money. She pulls out a tissue and blows her nose. It seems that my attempt at sexy gyrations have given her a runny nose. That’s hot. Moments later one of the guys that ignored me comes out of the dressing room. It’s sock-cock boy. Great. I expect he’ll man the other rail and entertain the lone woman while my soul is crushed by the two black ladies. No. For some reason he decides to join me on MY rail. To make matters worse, he starts fucking throwing down and dancing like he’s auditioning for Solid Gold. What the FUCK? I’m barely able to keep my feet moving with the music, my dumb g-string feels like it’s tearing my asshole open and these 2 women appear to actually hate me. I can feel it. They despise me. And sweatsock is dancing like his life depended on it while he stares these women directly in the eyes. Snot-nose lady gets up, pulls out her wallet and takes out some money. She squeezes out from behind her little table and approaches him. He leans down and kisses her on her greasy looking cheek. She smiles and puts a one dollar bill in his cup. (I wonder to myself if she felt the sock and thought he had cotton pubes). She turns to go back to her seat and he stands up, adjusts his man-panties and gives me a haughty look as if to say, “fuck you muscle-boy. this is MY rail”.

About 30 seconds later I realize that I’ve stopped dancing and gone catatonic. I hop down off the rail, walk to the dressing room and open my locker. The one guy that nodded at me says, “How’s it going”? I reply, “Left something in the car.” I put my jeans on over my g-string, throw on my shirt and shoes and exit. 2 minutes later I’m flying up 95 in my beloved Hyundai with the getnbig tags, butt-floss trying to climb into my colon, sweating from the lack of a/c.

My stripping career lasted approximately 8 minutes.

One week later I returned to Maryland, where men don’t dance with strings up their butts for a dollar.

And I still can’t dance.