bought Hang an ice-cream cake instead) had five hundred and change on the table that Hang could consume another plate of food and keep it down for a period-established after a tough and bitter negotiation-of forty-five minutes. A number of side bets bypassed that issue altogether and focused on which would come up first, the shrimp, the penne, or the cheese.
“I have fifty on the cheese,” Johnny confided to Boone as Hang was devouring his third plate of buffet food.
“You have seventy-five that he's not going to throw up at all,” Boone said.
Johnny said, “I'm trying to make some of it back.”
“You think he's going to yank?”
“You don't?”
Well, yes, but you have to take up for your guy.
The next hour made its way into San Diego strip club lore as everyone in the entire club-horny guys, plain degenerates, sailors, marines, bartenders, waitresses, bouncers, and naked women-stopped what they were doing to observe a twenty-one-year-old soul surfer struggle to keep the contents of his bloated stomach right there in his stomach. Even Dan Silver took a break from counting money in his office to check out the scene.
Boone watched as Hang's face turned a little green and beads of sweat popped out on his forehead. Hang shifted in his chair; he reached down and touched his toes. He took deep breaths-at Johnny's suggestion, based on two trips to the labor room with his wife-he panted like a dog. At one point, he let out an enormous belch…
“No vomit, no vomit,” High Tide quickly said as several of the official judges looked closely at the front of Hang'sJERRY GARCIA IS GOD T-shirt.
Hang managed to, well, hang.
The crowd counted down the entire last minute. It was a triumph, a ticker-tape parade, New Year's Eve in Times Square with Dick Clark as half of the onlookers counted the numbers and the other half chanted, “Hang Twelve, Hang Twelve, Hang Twelve…”
Hang's face shone with victory.
Never before in his life had he been the object of this much attention; he had never won anything, certainly never won a lot of money for himself or other people. He had never been the hero, and now he was. He was glowing, accepting the pats on the back, the congratulations, and the shouts of “Speech, speech, speech.”
Hang smiled modestly, opened his mouth to speak, and spewed trajectory vomit all over the innocent bystanders.
Johnny won his initial bet, plus the fifty on the cheese.
It was the only even semi — fun time that Boone had ever spent in a strip club.
But if Tammy were a nurse, he thinks, we'd be going to the hospital; if she were a secretary, we'd be going to an office building. But she's a stripper, so…
“You don't have to come,” he tells Petra, praying she'll take him up on the bailout offer.
“No, I want to.”
“Really, it's pretty sleazy,” Boone says, “especially in the daytime.”
If a strip club at night is tedious, in the daytime it's the birth of the blues-third-string strippers grinding halfhearted “dances” to a mostly empty room scarcely populated with lonely alcoholics coming off graveyard shifts, or horny losers figuring (wrongly) they have a shot with the C-team girls.
It's horrible, and, annoyed as he is with Petra's type A bullshit, he still wants to spare her the full hideousness.
She's having none of it.
“I'm going with you,” she insists.
“There won't be any male strippers,” he says.
“I know,” she says. “I still want to go.”
“Oh.”
“What do you mean, ‘Oh’?” she asks.
“Look,” Boone says, “there's nothing wrong with it. Personally, I think that-”
Petra's eyes widen.
Totally striking. Amazing.
“Oh, ‘Oh,’” she says. “I understand. Just because I'm immune to your Neanderthal anticharm, you jump to the conclusion that I therefore just have to be-”
“You're the one who wants to go to a-”
“On business!”
“I don't know why you're getting so worked up,” Boone says. “I thought you were this politically correct-”
“I am.”
“Look, around here it's all good,” Boone says. “I'll bet half the women I know… well, not half, okay, a tenth anyway… of the women I know play for the other-”
“I do not play for…” Petra says. “It's none of your business whom I play for.”
“For whom I play,” Boone says, correcting her. “Dangling… uh
…”
“Preposition,” she says.
Otherwise, she doesn't talk to him the whole way to the strip club.
Which makes him wish he'd thought up the lesbian thing a lot sooner.
34
Petra's quiet for the whole drive.
Which is a relatively long one, because the club, TNG, is all the way up in Mira Mesa, in North County.
Boone takes the 8 east, then turns north on the 163, through the broad flatland of strip malls, fast-food joints, and wholesale outlets. He turns onto Aero Drive, just south of the Marine Corps air-training base, and pulls into the parking lot of TNG.
TNG is the name of the club, and the stripper cognoscenti know that the initials stand for “Totally nude girls”-as opposed, Boone thinks as he parks the van, to partially nude girls, or sort-of nude girls. No, the owners of TNG wanted to make sure that prospective customers knew that the girls were completely, absolutely, totally nude.
“It's not too late for you to wait in the van,” he tells Petra.
“And potentially miss meeting my Alice B. Toklas?” she asks as she gets out. “No way.”
“Is she a friend of Tammy's or something?” Boone asks.
“Never mind.”
They go in.
All strip clubs are the same.
You can dress them up all you want, create any dumb gimmick you can think of, go for the down-low sleazy or the “gentlemen's club” faux sophistication, but at the end of the day it all amounts to a girl on a stage with a pole.
Or, in this case, one totally nude girl on a pole and another totally nude girl unenthusiastically writhing on the stage without the benefit of a pole.
TNG has no pretense at sophistication. TNG is a bare-bones, stripped-down (as it were) stroke joint (same) where guys come to look at naked women, maybe get a lap dance, or, if they're feeling fat, go with a dancer behind a beaded curtain into the VIP Room to get a “deluxe lap dance.”
The club is pretty empty at this time of the day. This is a working guy's hang, and most of the working guys are working. Two marines, judging by their haircuts, sit on stools at the stage-side bar. A depressed-looking salesman type, playing hooky from his calls, sits alone, one hand on a dollar bill, the other on his lap. Other than that, it's just the bartender, the bouncer, and a totally nude waitress serving her apprenticeship on the floor before she can make the giant leap to the stage.
