The Chip Dale Story: Chapter 1 continues...

Chapter 1 continues...
(WARNING CONTAIN EXPLICIT SEXUAL DETAIL)

I, of course, survived the dream long enough to make it a reality. At sixteen, I entered the local community college where I began to study to become a geologist. It wasn’t that I had any serious ambitions to work with rocks – or at least not of the sedimentary, igneous or metamorphic varieties – but I had to do something for the two years before I’d be allowed to strip for a living. The way I saw it, the local college's geology course gave me chance to indulge the passion for the countryside I’d enjoyed since I’d been a child. I loved to wander the Welsh hills with my geologist’s hammer in my hand and a knapsack on my back. And in the summer, I’d strip off down to my thong, which I’d taken at the relatively young age of fifteen, and worked hard hammering away on cliff faces. That’s how I first began to hone the physique that has served me so well. I can’t recommend it enough. Looking for geodes, ammonites, and pre-Cambrian trilobites is the finest way a young man can get the body of stripper.

Yet my sixteenth year was so very frustrating to me and my seventeenth birthday the hardest day of all. I still had another year before I would be allowed to dance professionally. Little did I know that the year would prove to an ideal way into the trade. It would prepare me in ways I would never have anticipated.

I was working out in the Bangor countryside one day in the middle of summer. I had found myself a particularly nice stretch of metamorphic shist in a quarry I’d often visit and I’d stripped off and had been working the rock face hard to see if I could find some particularly large minerals so I might test their hardness according to Moh’s Scale. I’d just found a pretty big garnet when a voice hailed me from high above the cliff.

‘I say? Excuse me? Young man? Could you give me a hand?’

Good natured if perhaps a little naive, I dropped my hammer with my backpack and clad only in my thong I climbed the rocky bank. At the top, I found a lady sitting in the shade of a Welsh Tourist Board monument marking the spot where Tom Jones’s uncle had taught the boy to sing.
The woman was of the typical raven haired buxom type you usually find in Welsh quarries at the height of summer. Only this one diverged from the norm by being on the heavy side of thirty and had a bold design of a peacock tattooed on one of her magnificent breasts.

‘I’m so sorry to take you away from your rocks,’ she said, shielding her eyes from either the glare of the sun or my sweating body which was just as bright. ‘My name is Flora, like the flowers. And I seem to have got myself stuck on this here statue.’

‘I can see your problem, Flora,’ I replied, having quickly worked out the woman’s predicament. ‘Your underwear has become trapped on Mr. Jones’ pick. If you’ll allow me, I’m sure I can release you in a thrice.’

‘A thrice?’ she smiled. ‘How quaint. Such a nice word and such a nice boy. I’d be most grateful.’
I caught her glancing at my thong but since it was one of the finest that money could buy, I didn’t think much about it at the time. Nor did it occur to me until many years later that if she had got herself tangled on Tom Jones’ uncle’s pickaxe, she couldn’t have seen me below the edge of the cliff. Nor could she have known that I was a young man. But faced with raven haired buxom peacock-tattooed women, a young man tends not to think rationally. I certainly didn’t think rationally as my fingers took hold of her strap and I began to work it free of the head of the pick.

I blame my innocence that I didn’t fully understand the mechanical operation of female underwear at the time. In these more enlightened times, the British Stripping Union tests you on these things but, back then, as a young Tom Jones gazed on, I yanked too hard and suddenly the whole of my life changed in one glorious moment of understanding.

‘Oh dear!’ gasped Flora as the strap to her underwear fell away and she became as abundant as nature and three times as pink. And do I hear you ask about nipples? There were certainly nipples. In fact, two of them, as large as the tins to Fray Bentos chicken pies.

‘I’m so sorry,’ I said, trying to avert my gaze but, not knowing what I was doing, trying desperately to push her breasts back into her dress. She unfortunately misinterpreted my actions as being what is now known as ‘a come on’. She grabbed me and dragged me to the floor.

‘You did that on purpose,’ she said, thrusting her lips to mine.

I tried to squirm free. ‘I did not,’ I promised her. ‘There seemed to be some kind of hooks that came loose when I tried to pull you from your entanglement on Mr. Jones’ pick.’

‘You can entangle me any day,’ she replied as she went for my thong.

‘Steady there!’ I cried, trying to move out of her grasp.

‘Don’t you want to come closer?’ asked Flora.

The question left me a little confused. I’d come out that morning looking for hard Welsh shist yet I had found yielding female flesh which I didn’t figure on Moh’s scale of hardness, not even below talc and gypsum. I looked up at the young Tom Jones but he just gazed back at me, his loins tight in their copper stretch pants.

‘Or do you think it’s wrong for a woman with needs to seek out a man with such a magnificent body?’

‘Well,’ I replied. ‘It’s not unusual…’

And there, on that sacred spot of Welsh history, I fell under the spell of a hot musk on a summer’s day in Wales.

I never touched my geologist’s hammer again.

+++

Of my first sexual encounter, I think there’s little need to dwell any more. I would get to know Flora Betteridge quite well over the following months. It was Flora who introduced me to the North Wales stripping circuit. It turned out that she was herself stripper of some note and had found moderate fame for her novelty act involving a Burmese python. She had been at the quarry that day collecting sand for a Cleopatra’s Asp routine that was her trademark.

Flora had been working in the stripping business nearly fifteen years when I met her. In that time, she had removed her clothes in ever corner of the world and jiggled for potentates and princes. She told me that her python has almost as many air miles as Michael Palin but I’m sure Palin hasn’t been to some of dark places her snake had visited. It was Flora who first introduced me to the professional side of exotic dancing and it was she that first gave me tips that have been handed down through generations of strippers. It was Flora who first explained to me the secrets of the stripper’s art.

The experience that’s perhaps worth recounting in full is the first time I shaved south of my navel.

‘You must be smooth down there,’ said Flora one day after I’d sat in a coffee shop and explained how I intended to be the best male dancer that Wales has ever seen. ‘Chip, you must do more than take pride in your body,’ she said. ‘You must learn to groom it. There’s no point in it looking like a wig makers funeral down there.’

I didn’t quite understand the reference myself, as male grooming wasn’t something I’d ever given much thought to. In those days, men were hairy where it counted and like all true Welshman, I took my lead from the Tom Jones whose body had never seen a razor.

‘But Tom keeps his clothes on,’ explained Flora when I mentioned this fact. ‘If you want to succeed, there must be no hair down there. No male stripper has ever succeeded by leaving himself with a Rod Hull.’

A Rod Hull, I should explain, is what strippers in those days called unshaven testicles.

‘Not even a small one like a moustache?’ I asked.

‘Certainly no moustache,’ she said. ‘Do you want women to swoon or point out that your Rod Hull looks more like Tom Selleck?’

Later that day, I could barely sit down on my Telly Savalas. But I had learned a lesson the hard way. Aftershave was never meant for those parts.

Flora had laughed when I told her about my first attempt at male grooming but I owe her so much of my success for putting me straight. She introduced me to creams and lotions that would do the job just as well. But for a few painful hours, I had thought my dreams had come to an end with a single splash of Old Spice.