This is not my guide to enjoying Pacers.  My guide to enjoying Pacers would go something like this:

1. Figure out how to get in free or at a reduced rate, such as a friend with free passes or a web promotion.
2. Bring cigarettes, extra if you actually smoke the things.
3. Bring women friends if possible.
4. Buy 9-dollar domestic draft pitchers (Miller lite or Coors lite or some other crap beer).
5. Sit on the adorable enclosed patio in the back and leave your cigarettes out on the table.
6. Inevitably, a stripper will ask for a smoke. This is her break, so don’t start shoving dollars in her underwear. Instead enjoy her company and the atmosphere. If you’re lucky, enjoy watching her flirt with your girlfriend.
7. Don’t sit and stare near the stage unless you have cash to throw on it. That’s just rude.

Anyway.

So, I carry around a little brown notebook, call it “Life Odes” written in large letters on the front. The first page is a sketch of a “Juicy Fruit” shaped lip balm, which I colored highlighter yellow. A few pages in you’ll find a lipstick kiss (my own) and a bucket list. The first entry is checked off: “stripper bites my vagina.” I had emphatically created this page to break the news to my friends; I threw down the open notebook on the table and slid into the booth.

Backtrack: We’d gone to Pacers for a fetish night, which seemed to be a regular Pacers night supplemented by a few kinky ‘performances’ and several well-undressed patrons.  That is to say, the only way I could tell some of the attendees from the strippers was to look for their purses. Staff swept up dollar bills with a push mop to make way for an awkward latex fashion show. The seemingly unrehearsed women fell onto the stage like cattle out of a gate, and milled around without choreography in the slightest. I needed a drink.

(Of course, Rubber Doll did much better than the latex models. Her acts this night included pulling pom-poms out of a slit in the front of her nude-colored latex one-piece, shooting silly string from a Madonna-esque bra, and blasting sparks off a two foot steel rod she gracefully strapped in front of her hips. It all sounds silly, but there’s something delightfully radical about a woman spraying a predominately male audience with silly string, sparks, and other substances.)

Back to that drink I needed. My friend offered his tab; apparently he knows the owner and the whole bill would be comped at the end of the night. I didn’t hesitate, and ordered a shot of Jame-o and a whiskey coke to start. “Oh, and a White Russian.” The generosity didn’t end there. After I finished my drinks, my friend offered to buy me a lap dance. Perhaps because I had a good free buzz on (let’s admit it, free buzzes feel better than paid-for buzzes) and because I like new experiences, I accepted.

Our stripper didn’t quite understand the arrangement. In an accent not unlike Katya Kazanova’s she explained, “I do him; I get him started for you.” Perhaps she thought we meant to go in together, which I assume is against the rules. “No,” I said in her ear, “I don’t care if he gets off. I want you and he has the money.” Or, at least, this is how I paraphrased myself when my friend asked me later how I got her to cooperate. “I don’t know what you doing, girl,” she replied, “but keep doing it.”

She ousted another pair from the 3-walled leather cubicle, which I felt weird about for about 5 seconds, and sat my friend across from us in the opposite booth. Normally I might object to letting a guy watch me get tantalized by a woman in her panties, even if he did pay for the dance, but I like this guy. He threw up thumbs and grinned at me when I peeked past her shoulders.

I assume she did the usual lap dance-y things but my brain just likes to remember that she nibbled on my crotch. Yes, at some point she bent down and chewed on me through my red pants. Somebody told me later that they don’t usually do that. Well I figured as much! This was after she made out with me, her tongue whirling like a windmill. The only other person to kiss me like that admitted to a history of sex work; do they teach this at the Academy*?

“Hey Katelyn, want a stripper kiss?”

The stripper didn’t quite finish exploding my mind, because some musical cue scared her to the stage. I sat close and watched her dance. “Don’t fall in love,” my friend said. I laughed, but threw all my dollar bills at her.

Epilogue

I want to say I enjoyed the performances, went home, and slept well. I can’t. We stayed after closing for what I’ll call “amateur-hour.” The ‘amateurs,’ a.k.a. my friends, got their chance to jump-up on the stage and fling themselves around the pole. The owner’s wife gave me an iPhone and told me to take pictures of her. Maybe I just felt artistic but I stood up on a chair and took 237. Also later I hit people. Also later we went to my friend’s suite at the Hard Rock Hotel and gabbed ’til 7:30am.

Outgoing text, 3:49AM: What is my life I don’t even.. Just after-partied at the titty bar. Made out with a stripper, beat a boy with a belt, tied a girl to an X and spanked her

When I flopped into bed – after we closed the door to our windowless bedroom and put a towel at its base to block out the light – I moaned to Katelyn, “we are such irresponsible, bad, bad children.” Yet the next night I slapped my thighs and chanted, “Party party party!” So we did.

*Poor attempt at Firefly reference. I am finally watching it for the first time!

For more tales of my debauchery, attend my performance at the Whistle Stop Bar, Thursday May 30th, as part of the showcase, “America’s F*&$% City,” hosted by So Say We All. Link to facebook event.