Men come from Mars, but they end up at Venus

“Do you want a dance?” she asked. As a result of my currently frugal financial situation, I mustered up some coy way to say no.

She persisted, now appealing to Ted and our other buddy. “Why don’t I get two of my hot girlfriends and we’ll have ourselves an orgy?”

“I like orgies,” our friend said, “but I lack funds.”

She shoved her boobs in his face as a comeback. Then she slid over to me, sat in my lap, and proposed a dance again.

I asked her how much. She said $25. I thought about it, but not for too long.

“I don’t have any money,” I said, “and I have to buy my mom a birthday present.”

She pouted.

“Maybe I’ll get her a lap dance,” I said.

She scoffed at my joke. Not funny. Finally I told her maybe later, and she sauntered away.

This was the first of many women we poor interns were forced to fend off at the Mons Venus. Our first mistake was taking a seat on the leather couch that lines the outer wall. This was lap-dance territory (or, in the case of the man right next to us, naked-woman-back-massage territory), and we three men were prime targets for the scantily clad predators.

So we moved to the seats on the edge of the stage, where we figured we could stretch our singles a bit longer. One thing that’s better about Mons than other nudie establishments I’ve visited is the lack of a drink minimum. Considering that fully-naked joints can’t sell alcohol anyway, it always kills me to spend $14 on two glasses of cranberry juice. That would never happen at the Mons (overlay faux-yuppie-aristocrat British accent here.)

The other impressive thing about Mons Venus is the attractiveness of the girls. I don’t know that they are “The Most Beautiful Girls in the World,” as the advertisements claim, but the base level of attractiveness is certainly higher than at that strip club I once visited on a lark in Powder River, Wyoming (pop. 51).

These girls weren’t just good-looking, though—they were persistent, too. I must’ve been approached by 10 girls asking if I wanted “a dance” or “to dance.” Several of them grabbed me and pulled me from my seat before I had a chance to tell them I had no money. There were two consistent reactions to my explanation: they would either pout like little girls, or laugh in my face and scurry away.

In fact, we began to get the paranoid feeling that we were the laughing stock of the whole place, because we were those guys who kept deflecting girl after girl.

“Smile!” one girl on stage told Ted. “If I had a naked girl in front of me, I’d smile.”

She made a good point, so I put on my silliest grin and gave her a dollar. She laughed.

I gave our next visitor $3 and told her to do the funniest thing she could think of to Ted. “Be creative,”I told her.

She returned a few minutes later and began flirting with Ted, telling him that she wanted to get him naked. She unbuttoned his shirt slowly. She stole his glasses and put them in inappropriate places. She put her hands under his t-shirt and rubbed his stomach. Then she pilfered his button-down and put it on before dancing all around the pole.

“She wears it a lot better than I do,” Ted commented.

Later, after she returned his shirt and Ted had gone to the bathroom, the girl sat down next to me. “Was that ok?” she asked, eager to please.

“Yeah, it was great, thank you,” I said.

“No problem—it’s fun to be creative.”

“Well, yeah,” I said. “What’s the most creative thing you’ve done here?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “Giving guys kisses, pussy in the face, nothing really.”

“Well I’m glad you got the opportunity to put on a show,” I told her. “Thanks a lot.”

She lingered for a bit, and I wasn’t sure if she was waiting for more money or more conversation. Either way, she had literally stolen the shirt off Ted’s back, and I wasn’t about to let her do the figurative version of that trick to me. I thanked her again, and she said goodbye.

Meanwhile, Ted had gone outside to take a call. There he met Toni, who was visiting from Chicago for the express purpose of auditioning at the Mons. “Are you here alone?” she asked him. “Oh, I was hoping you’d give me a ride back to my hotel. I don’t have any cash for a cab. I’m from out of town.” Ted lied and said he was in no state to drive, but expressed his sympathy.

“Can you believe this shit?” she asked Ted. “I get up onstage for twenty minutes, and the lady tells me I didn’t make the cut. Do you have any idea how long I’ve been in this business?” Ted didn’t want to hazard a guess.

“Those chicks look like skanks anyway,” she continued. “And now here I am, out on the street with a million pounds of makeup on. I look like a hooker.”

“No you don’t,” Ted said, hoping this was the proper response. “Anyway, this joint isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Doesn’t live up to the hype, does it? And Chicago’s a great town.”

“You got that right,” she said, lighting a Marlboro light. “This isn’t my scene at all.”

They shook hands. She seemed mollified. We left shortly thereafter—Toni was gone already, hopefully safe in a cab somewhere—but we returned to pick up a receipt. (This was, after all, a business expense.)

“You guys want a receipt?” the pregnant lady at the door asked, as though we’d requested some sort of deviant sexual favor.

“Of course,” Ted said. “We’re at work right now.”

--Brian Reed & Ted Scheinman