One Fish, Two Fish, Strippers On Your Birthday

Three people have seriously attempted to give me lap dances in my life. None have ever been successful. I don't know what it is, but I don't like the idea of someone that I really don't know on a personal level thrusting their buttox on or around my genital area. It feels unnatural and kind of forced. When I think about all the lap dances that have been attempted in my general direction, serious or not, I actually am kind of embarrassed. That's not to say that I walk down the street and people just try and give me a lap dance, but college is weird, and people like to do things that don't really seem natural. If there's a thesis statement to this exposition, let's just get it out there: I am anti-lap dance. There it is, I said it.
My first attempted lap dance was at my eighteenth birthday party, which happened to be thrown by my best friend about a month after the fact. He elected that his girlfriend give me a lap dance because I had finally become a man. I don't really know what happened, but I wasn't feeling it... I sneaked out about two pelvic thrusts in and thanked her for her work, while also explaining that I just wasn't interested. It had nothing to do with her, but I'm just not your typical lap dance kind of man. I honestly think that the whole concept dates back to my mom's thirty-third birthday. It was just five days after her mother had died, and the whole family was still in disarray. Naturally, the only thing to do was move on, and through some pretty technical logic, my dad came up with a plan to get Momma's birthday rolling. He invited all of her friends up to the house for a small party, then pretended to get into a wreck. He came in with this young construction worker that he had "wrecked" with. He explained the story to Momma, hit the play button on our boom box/stereo as he left the room, and took Casey and I by the hands into their bedroom. Surprise. He wasn't a construction worker. He was a male stripper. As I heard the music and the women screaming, I asked Dad what was going on. All he said was, "C'mon guys. Let's go take a nap." It didn't make sense... this stripping business.
Finally, zoom forward fourteen years, and I find myself in a stretch limo. The nice woman who worshipped Karl Marx and spoke of the Illuminati in my post "Reasons I Decided To Not Accept My Open Invitation To The Illuminati" owned a limousine rental company with her husband. She said that the limo was for my birthday, so naturally, she invited the most random people imaginable to come along for the ride. Luckily, I was friends with a couple of people in there to begin with, but honestly, after enough Peach Schnapps, isn't everyone your friend? The night seemed blurry throughout, but eventually, our final stop was Mouse's Ear West... not to be confused with the now out of business Mouse's Ear East. It was a strip club that required you to be twenty-one to enter. I was twenty. In a weird turn of events, all of us made it in: me, the other two twenty year olds, my friend Amanda and her husband, Stef, three random guys I didn't know, and the ringleader herself. I proudly ordered myself a Sprite and stared mostly at the ground.
As the night progressed, the other two under twenty-oners would get thrown out: one for trying to buy one of the strippers, and one for trying to fight the bouncer. As the last surviving minor, one of the random guys came up to me and said, "Hey, man. I bought you a lap dance. Happy Birthday." Fantastic. All that I had ever wanted was to be ground upon by a lady who can pick up a roll of quarters with her... forget it. That's when I met Jade, a young stripper much less tanned and wrinkly than the other strippers. She had only shown her breasts once throughout the night, and I noticed. I respected her for that. She asked if I would like to step into the back for the dance, but I turned the tables on her.

"Could you just sit down, and we can talk?"

I explained everything to her. The sounds of next room stripping for my mother's friends, the failed lap dancing attempts at the birthday party, my phobia of STDs, and by belief that said STDs come from germs that we really underestimate. She told me why she stripped and how she was trying to pay back student loans. She never brought up the lap dance, and I wasn't about to. At the end of the conversation, she told me that I was a nice boy, and I thanked her. She gave me a kiss on the cheek (because if we learned anything from Pretty Woman, it was that strippers DO NOT kiss on the mouth), and it didn't even feel that dirty. However, I did go to the bathroom right after and wash my face with a paper towel... not to mention the subsequent times for the next two weeks.
As the night came to a close, we stopped the limo four times to let people throw up, and Amanda and I celebrated the fact that we were the only two that did not cause a problem at the strip club and/or throw up that evening. I vowed never to attend a gentleman's club again nor ride in a limo. I still have no idea how we ended up at a strip club, but I do cherish my brief time with Jade. I like to imagine that she has stopped dancing for the groceries and is now working a nice data entry job somewhere. As for the lap dances, I don't think I'll ever be comfortable with it. There's too many other things you can get on your birthday; I'll stick to the cake, and not the kind that Rihanna sings about.