I didn't think that picking out the stripper would make
me feel like throwing up. As the Best Man, I knew there was
never any question: I had to get a stripper for the bachelor
party. But I still felt nauseous when I left that little
house where I picked out which woman would take off her
clothes in front of a group of drunk men.

I asked Graham's friend Patrick to go with me to help
pick out the woman. He didn't know the real reason. I told
him it was because I was nervous, which was partly true. The
other part, the part he didn't know, was that I had no idea
how to pick out female strippers since I'm gay.

So I picked up Pat and we went down on that July
afternoon to pick out the stripper. I remember I hadn't
organized very well because it was the day of the bachelor
party and I still hadn't gotten a stripper. The experience
taught me one thing: you can get a stripper within about an
hour, day or night. Better than Lenscrafters.

We drove to a not-so-bad part of town and parked in
front of the house. It was nothing like I expected. I had
pictured something dark and mysterious, maybe with boarded-
up windows and graffiti. Instead, I was looking at a tract
home that could have been in Better Homes and Gardens. My
grandmother could have lived in this house. I wondered
briefly where my grandmother got her income.

The woman who answered the door was wearing a tie-dyed
moo-moo and wooden beads around her neck.

"Hi, honey," she said with an ever-so-slight Southern
accent. "Come in! And you brought a friend. Good. You'll
make a great choice. We've got the greatest girls in
town."

Pat and I followed her through the surprisingly mundane
house, exchanging glances of "This is kinda crazy" as we
went. The house was immaculate with family pictures on the
walls. We arrived in a large family room with a piano. A
photo album was sitting on a music stand.

"Here are the girls, boys," she said as she flipped open
the photo album. The first page and every other page was
filled with four pictures of these women, all in two piece
bikinis, all photographed through gauze, and all looking at
the camera with their best "fuck me" look. I started to
sweat as she pointed out the first woman.

"This," she continued, "Is Sara. She's a very sweet
girl. Out from Oklahoma. She wants to be an actress." She
was pointing to this enormous-breasted brunette with a boa
around her neck.

Pat looked at me. "Sa-ra," he said, dragging it out in a
two syllable way implying, "I like Sara."

"Um, I think my brother prefers blondes," I managed. I
never thought it would be such a meat market, almost
literally. We were picking out which human body we liked
most. I had to pick out a woman's body that I thought he
would like. My stomach churned in pre-vomit spasms.

"Blondes, huh?," the woman asked. "Well..." She flipped
a couple of pages. "We have Joanne. Your brother might like
her. A natural blonde." She pointed to a blonde with hair
down to her nipples which were erect through the fabric of
her bikini. Her butt was sticking out in what must have been
inviting for a heterosexual man.

"Graham might dig her," Pat said, giggling slightly. He
was enjoying this far too much.

"Maybe," I said. "I think he likes shorter hair than
that."

"Doesn't matter anyway, boys," the matron said. "She's
not available Friday nights. Sorry. But I do
have...Tina."

She flipped the page. Pat took one look and then looked
at me, eyes wide with excitement. "Tina!," he said. He
wanted Tina.

"Y'all will like Tina. She's one of our most popular
girls. She's out at the local university, earning money on
the weekends to put herself through. She's a great
entertainer."

Tina was young and pretty with short hair, kind of a
dark blonde. What sold her to Pat was her eyes which were
bright and expressive. And her breasts weren't a hard sell,
either. They were big and had to be fake. Gravity didn't
work like that.

"We'll...take her," I said. I got out my checkbook and
signed over $200 for an hour's work. I never felt so
misogynistic in my life. Female flesh as a commodity. My
stomach rolled.

"That was fun," Pat said as we left. He had this
lascivious grin on his face. He really had enjoyed it.

Pat drove us home. I felt too sick.

-------------------------------------------------

Guido drove up with Tina in the passenger seat. Guido
was the name my brother's friends called the bodyguard of
the stripper. He was a 250+ pound guy who, we speculated,
packed a handgun under his blazer.

Patrick and I were waiting in the parking lot when the
late '80s Camaro drove up, lowered of course. The
passenger's window rolled down and there was Tina. I
recognized her from the picture but she looked different
when she wasn't pictured through a gauze lens.

"You guys waiting for someone?," she asked.

"Yeah," I said. "We're waiting for Tina."

"I'm Tina," she said. "And that makes you...Peter?" She
was reading from a scrap of paper in her hand."

"That's me."

"We'll park and meet you inside," Guido said.

Pat and I walked back into the hotel room. Graham didn't
officially know that there was going to be a stripper, but
he expected that there probably would be one. No bachelor
party would be complete, I learned from Graham, without a
stripper. He just didn't know what she looked like.

She took an hour in the bathroom to get ready. Literally
an hour. Guido stood outside the door, keeping guard. I
don't know if he expected us to try to knock down the door
and rape her. I felt strangely relieved, though, that he was
there. I didn't know what horny drunk heterosexual men were
capable of. Or maybe I did and that's why I was relieved
Guido was there.

She never smiled. The entire night, she never smiled. I
don't know if it was her personality or the job she had to
do. I do know that it unsettled me, just like looking
through that book of women. Her eyes didn't smile, either.
Just that sadness that cut through even my alcohol buzz.

She did the typical stripper things, coming out of the
bathroom, shaking her breasts, wiggling her hips. She made
everyone sit around in a loose circle, some on the floor,
some on the bed, my brother in the only chair in the hotel
room. Everyone had dollar bills and as soon as she was out
of the bathroom, she had money in her bikini.

As she danced, my brother's friends showered him with
money, putting dollar bills in his shorts and down his shirt
and on top of his head-anywhere they knew she would put on a
good show getting the money from him. My brother blushed a
deep red from the time Tina walked out of the bathroom until
he passed out that night. When she over, he blushed a little
deeper and couldn't wipe the drunken smile off his lips.

And there I was, forced to sit in the circle because I'm
the Best Man and I've organized this bachelor party. Pat
reached over and put a dollar bill part way down the collar
of my shirt. It's my turn to blush. I thought quickly and
said, "Save it for the groom." I took out the dollar and put
it in Graham's shirt. He knew I was gay and he could tell my
discomfort from across the room. He smiled at me in that way
only my brother can do which tells me that he knows exactly
what's going on. I smiled back.

But it wasn't enough. The drunk men saw Pat giving me
the dollar and in their heterosexual logic decide to shower
me with money. Ted, who until tonight had been the quietest
of Graham's friends, suddenly became the most vocal and
shouted, "The Best Man! Come on, baby! Show the Best Man
what you've got!" Ted and Patrick and all the other guys
mistook my protestations to be shyness instead of gayness. I
wanted to yell out, just once, "I'm gay. You should be
spending your money on someone who will enjoy this." But I
had that talk with my brother already and tonight is not the
right time to come out to his friends.

Tina noticed the shift in attention like I would imagine
a good stripper should. She got off my brother's lap and
shimmied her away across the circle to where I was. She was
completely topless now but still had on her bikini
bottom.

I was sitting on the bed. She started playing with my
hair, running her long nails through my hair, her breasts as
close to my face as possible without touching my lips. The
whooping and hollering got stronger but my attention shifted
to the woman in front of me and away from their shouting.
She ran her hands down my chest, my stomach, my legs. I was
the same color my brother had been since but I didn't have
the presence of mind to smile like he was. I was too busy
being awed to smile.

As she sat down on my left knee, I felt the temperature
rising. She sat spreading her legs over my thigh. Through
the skin-tight material of her bikini, I felt the heat from
her vagina and anus sink down onto my bare leg. This would
give a straight man a raging hard-on, I thought. This head,
this closeness would make a straight man hard. I sat there
with my own flaccid dick. The only place the blood was
rushing was my face. I felt no sexual arousal, just
embarrassment for myself and for this stripper dancing on a
gay man's lap and the people around me, the men around me.
She got the dollar bills the men had thrown on me and moved
on to dance in someone else's lap.

-------------------------------------------------

She left exactly on time, as though she had a timer. No
extra time for no extra money. She and Guido left using the
back way.

The party wound down. Graham passed out in the living
room. Pat helped me clean up the small stuff before we
crashed on the sofa.

"I liked Tina," Pat said.

"I'm glad," I said. "Graham seemed to, also. Thanks for
helping me pick her out."

"My pleasure," he said. "Really-my pleasure." He smiled.
"So how did you like her, Mr. Best Man? You didn't seem so
thrilled when she did her little dance on you."

"Yeah, I was pretty embarrassed," I said. "Let's just
say she wasn't my type."