We Can Be Alone in VIP

If I drink ten White Russians cause the cream makes an okay dinner on a hot night the weekend after the 4th when we’ve got two bachelor parties and a swinger’s meet-up in the club, I’ll tell you I’m Russian—but leave out the Jewish part. Because the Dolphin 2 is like, just a few miles east of Portland on 99, and I saw a skinhead with a swastika patch pined to the back of his black bomber jacket at the Hotcake House a few months ago. And that was in Southeast, not all the way out here, where there are a few too many Ford truck dealerships, and white guys who look like they cook meth in their Ford trucks, for me to drink fewer than ten White Russians on shift. And the last fucking thing I fucking need—that anyone needs, really—is to tell some Nazi I’m Jewish with my tits hanging out as if my entire soul wasn’t already a dead giveaway. 

If I drink ten White Russians it’s because my work wife Amber (real name Lauren) tells me we need the extra energy from all the sugar to slink, on wet palms and purpled shins, across the painted wood of the main stage to Fuck Me Like an Animal—which DJ Climax plays like, seriously, every hour. And which I especially need after that one guy with the patchy beard who, while sucking too hard on the straw protruding from his Long Island, inspects me from bellybutton to sky and says, “your face is beautiful, but your body…” 

When Amber and me finish our ninth and sixth White Russians of the night we’ll offer you a double in VIP—$40 per song, per girl. It’s twice the price cause there’s no bouncers in VIP baby, which means anything can happen in there. And in this case, we mean we’ll kind of lightly grope each other’s boobs and maybe make out for like 15 seconds. Not that we don’t want to for longer, it’s just that we don’t want to like, perform our sexuality for you? 

If I drink two White Russians on Tuesday day shift, it’s because the only other breathing, pulsing bodies here are Emily Foxxx, who’s sipping a Kettle cran and spotting cocks in Erotic Photo Hunt, and Giselle, who’s smoking menthols in the minor pen. And the contractor they hired to re-tile, in cotton candy-pink, the women’s bathroom. And who tells me his name is Paul, and that he’s on his lunch break for the next 30, and that his wife of 24 years left him two weeks ago. 

And he doesn’t know exactly why, but he has his suspicions. And have I seen the new tile, how pretty it is, how he’s finally finished the wall around the mirror. And he wants to buy me one of whatever I’m drinking, maybe a dance. And he wonders if there’s anywhere around here we can be alone. 

Josey Rose Duncan’s writing is featured in the anthology Love is the Drug and Other Dark Poems, and in publications including Jellyfish Review, Unbroken Journal, and sPARKLE + bLINK. She’s read at series such as Litquake, Red Light Lit, Literary Speakeasy, and Bay Area Generations, and served six years on Quiet Lightning’s board. Josey lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her family.