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.

The Other Side of Washington

I'm so sorry. Once the drink hit The Chipster's system, it pulled a plug and he slept a good five hours.

It was probably for the best. Now my fingers are hitting all the right keys and I feel up to telling you what happens when a naive Welshman accepts an offer to perform in a place he doesn’t know. I should never have taken that job on the other side of Washington and I'm disappointed with myself for failing to heed the first rule of stripping: you should always get to know the person who has asked you to get naked.

As you might recall, I’d had some offers to do some freelance work here in the US after my spectacular success with the Neil Kinnock stripping routine the other day at the conference. Well, tonight I went to my first booking and it taught me a very important lesson in humility. I probably won’t leave my hotel room again until it’s time for tomorrow’s flight and I intend to stay here listening to my MP3 of Tom Jones singing about the green, green grass of home.

The offer of work came from a man I think it only wise to call ‘Bill’. He’d come up to me after my routine and offered me $5000 for a single performance. I won’t go into too many details but he appeared to be the typical good-hearted American. Pleasant. Dignified. Wholesome. He even claimed to have Welsh relatives. He was also tall, heavy, barrel chested, and fighting two losing battles with a heavy paunch of a stomach and what I guessed was a dwindling growth of hair on his head. He’d remedied the latter by shaving himself bald and the former by wearing loose fitting clothes. If you need to picture him more clearly, think of him as I thought began to think of him: as a bald Dom Deluise. Anyway, Bill bought me a drink after the show and explained how much money there is in ‘the Washington circuit’. And since I got on well with the guy, it was only natural that I would agree to do at least one of the gigs he’d set up for me.

The address he gave me was on the other side of the city. I never thought much about it at the time, but I did think that the address was unusual. Again, I have to be careful. I don’t want to spread rumours about people but the place didn’t sound like the typical club for exotic dancing. They usually have some exotic if slightly sleezy name attached but this was only an address.

At seven o’clock last night, I took a taxi from my hotel here in the centre of Washington DC and fifteen minutes later it arrived at the address on the city’s suburbs. It was only when I got there that I discovered the reason why the club lacked a name. It wasn’t a club at all. It was a private residential address.

I don’t want you to misunderstand me, though. I’m not saying it was a normal house. This was a private estate, sealed off behind iron gates. The taxi dropped me off just as a long black limo turned up and the white iron gates swung back. The music and laughter of a party drifted down to the road so I slipped inside, nearly catching my bag of clothes and props on the gates as they closed.

The house was what we’d call a mansion back home in the UK. Here it was one of the smaller places, in a few acres of lawns, tennis courts, swimming pools. I could see that Bill had done well for himself and thought many happy thoughts as I walked up to the house.

I was wondering what Gabby would say about my earning $5000 in a single night. I was so full of these thoughts, I didn’t hesitate when I reached the open front door. I just walked right in and made myself at home among the revellers.

After ten minutes of searching, I finally found Bill, who welcomed me with typical American sincerity. He threw his hands around me and dragged me to the bar where he poured me a drink of something brown and expensive.

‘So glad you could make it, Chipster!’ he cried. ‘We don’t often get somebody from the old country come to entertain us. Come on through and meet my friends. I’ve been telling them all about you and that great routine you did the other night.’

You’ll probably see why I was feeling so pleased with myself. This was just fantastic luck to make such a friend in my first visit Stateside, and it was only natural that I played the grateful guest. I smiled and fawned as I was introduced to more people than I can ever hope to remember. It probably amounted to about forty people, all of obvious wealth and all around Bill’s age, which put them in their early fifties. It all felt rather odd, given that I was there to perform an exotic dance,. but for $5000 I wasn’t looking to complain. I’ve said before what an open and tolerant society American appears to be.

‘So, when do you want me to perform?’ I asked Bill after about an hour of sitting chatting with his guests. I was still feeling slightly out of place among so much wealth. I still carried my bag of costumes and props and I wasn’t dressed for a party, stuck in my faded jeans and a Bangor tourist board t-shirt.

‘Oh, we want you to dance for us as ten o’clock on the dot,’ said Bill. Which relaxed me. It probably relaxed me too much. I knocked back my drink and then knocked back a few more as I spent another hour getting to know some of Washington’s elite.

When ten o’clock finally came round I was well oiled – in the alcoholic sense – and feeling extremely limber. I probably wasn’t in a fit state to dance but I had a job to do and there was still a small matter of $5000. Bill told me to go and get ready upstairs and promised to ring a bell when they wanted me. I was to come down the stairs and perform on the lower steps, which was good enough to me. For that much cash, I’d dance anywhere and in front of anyone. Excited by the prospect, I raced up the stairs and quickly changed into my Neil Kinnock gear. Then I waited for the bell to ring.

It felt like I waited ages before a strange electronic chime came echoing from out of the ceiling. Now, as you know, The Chipster rarely needs a cue to perform. It was showtime!

I came out of the bedroom and found the house in darkness. I got to the top of the staircase and looked down to where a circle of light illuminated the bottom steps. This was it. As I entered the light, it was at once unreal and yet so very familiar. Slightly drunk, I started my act. I missed a few of my moves, avoided the difficult turns, and without my prop lectern, I didn’t give them my ‘we’re alright’ opening. But still, I danced as well as I’ve ever danced when slightly drunk at a party.

And all was going well until the exact moment I pulled off my thong. I expected the usual roar of appreciation or a round of applause. Only, at that precise moment, just as I had reached the climax of my act, all of the lights suddenly came on!

I mean, every light.

The room was flooded with light.

Bright, bright light that left no place for neither shade nor shadow. But what was odder than anything was Bill. He came bouncing towards me, a huge grin on his face and the whole of huge corpulent body naked. Did I mention he was bouncing? Well he was bouncing. And not only was Bill bouncing along as naked as American’s faith of democracy, but every one of his guests was stark naked too. I was standing naked in front of forty naked Americans. You can imagine my horror. They don’t prepare you for moments like this in the Bangor boy scouts.

Luckily, they do prepare you for moments like this when you join the Lib Dems. I attribute my party membership with the reason why I kept some wits about me. I held onto my thong like my life depended on it, even as I recoiled at the sight of so much white flesh coming towards me. That’s when Bill grabbed me. I tried to move back up the stairs but his grip on my arm was too strong and grew stronger.

‘What’s the rush, Chippy, old pal!’ he said. I could feel him brush against my leg. I didn’t dare look down.

‘I’m not that kind of stripper!’ I protested.

He laughed. A broad kind hearted American laugh. Nothing on earth has every struck so much fear into me.

‘And what kind would that be, Chippy?’ he asked. ‘What kind of stripper are you?’

My mouth was thick with fear.

‘I have a Romanian girlfriend,’ I explained.

‘That’s good, Chippy,’ says he. ‘I’ve got somebody here with some Romanian blood inside them. Perhaps you’d like to meet him?’

The smell of alcohol and sweat was suddenly too much. My head began to spin as Bill guided me towards a female corner of the room that looked to have suffered particularly badly sagging in the five centuries they must have amassed together. ‘Don’t tell me that you men of Wales don’t know how to party!’ cried Bill and pushed me into the arms of his grateful guests.

The smell of rich perfume and aging desire brought me around. I dragged myself from the cloying arms, scrambling for a clear space. Hands had reached to but had slipped from the slight oil I always use before I perform. A women beside me screamed with delight, which only helped to work me free of my confusion. My situation was this: a door on the other side of the room stood open, but to get to it I would have to work my way through a throng of naked bodies including that of my host who was watching me with his arms spread as though ready for my dash for freedom. I looked the other way to where a window was open and looked out onto the garden. It was only open a foot or so but I could only see the green of the grass beyond it and in the distance, the gates to the estate. I didn’t waste a moment. I ran for the window.

I jumped head first through the narrow gap and I barely made it. A terrible pain bit into my loins as I caught myself on the sill. More pain came from my rear where the window catch scraped skin off my buttocks. Perhaps it was the drink, perhaps it was the fear, but I smiled at the pain. I was happy to feel alive, to feel the fresh air on my skin, and to hold my thong in my hand.

At this point, you must be wondering how it is that I always seem to find myself fleeing naked through the streets at night. Believe me, I’m beginning to wonder that too. Once I’d jumped through that window, I ran for the gates and without a thought about my modesty climbed over them. Only then did I stop and pull on my thong, and wearing only that, I carried on and ran for the highway.

Two hours later, dusty, scratched, mocked by passing drivers and having narrowly escaped some 'Texas fun' with some guy who drove a yellow pickup truck, I was worn out by running when I finally managed to flag down a police car and tell them my story. I had to make a complaint at the police station, though they’ve told me that there’s little chance of a prosecution since I’d gone to the house voluntarily. I think they didn’t want to get involved and looks were exchanged when I gave them Bill’s description. It wouldn't surprise me if he was something bif in the city and, in fact, the cops seemed only too happy to get rid of me. They gave me hot coffee and a pair of those white paper overalls they give suspects. And then they even drove me back to the hotel.

So I’m now back in my room and I’ll be glad to catch the plane back tomorrow. My Neil Kinnock costume is no more, lost out there in Washington DC’s suburbs. All I can say to you is if you live in Washington DC, or visit this city, and you do see a big fat bald man wearing a ginger wig with extensive bald patch, then don’t approach him. And for goodness sake, don’t accept an invitation to any of his parties.

It’s been a traumatic experience but I’ve just found an old copy of Jules Verne’s ‘Journey to the Centre of the Earth’ in the hotel foyer. I intend to read it until it’s time to come home. I don’t know what got me through this terrible episode but I’ll be glad to see Wales again. I’ve really missed Gabby, despite her habit of hoarding root vegetables. But I do think I’ve performed well and that I’ve been a credit to the country.

And in a strange way, though I think I’ve done you all proud, I think that Neil Kinnock would be proudest of all.

America really did love to see him get naked.

Oscar Tips Golden Thongs

As one of Wales’s top entertainers - Tom Jones claims he sells more records but I know who the ladies really appreciate - I often get privileged insider knowledge about the film industry. Being a very generous man (and read that how you like), I don’t see why I shouldn’t share my Oscar tips with you.

This year, all the smart money is going with Helen Mirren. The Chipster’s tip: Put all your money on The Queen. I don’t mean that literally. And I don’t mean thrust wads of cash down the front of Her Majesty’s dress. I mean bet a some notes on The Queen winning a few gongs at the Oscars. Mirren has never won an Oscar but she’s living with the top Hollywood honcho who directed Ray and as Gabby always says, living with a successful man is bound leave its mark on a woman. I’ll definitely be tucking a little something away for Helen. And for Gabby too. She’s such as sweet thing…

For best film and director, I wouldn’t be surprised if Scorsese finally gets the nod. In my opinion, he’s not yet made the definitive Scorsese movie involving a hot male thongman from Bangor and his Romanian girlfriend caught in a passionate romance while chased by the Welsh Mafia. But it’s also getting boring waiting for him to win an Oscar and if they don’t give him it this year, he might as well come and retire in Bangor instead.

Eddie Murphy might be the surprise winner in the Best Supporting Actor category. The academy will probably want to reward him for the fact he never made a fourth Beverly Hills Cop movie. The Chipster’s second top tip: Eddie Murphy should make a fourth Beverly Hills Cop. The third one was so terrific! I’ve never seen a strip joint captured on film with such realism.

For best picture in a foreign language, I expect Efter brylluppet will win. They make good films in Denmark and good bacon too. My instincts tell me this will win. I know nothing about the film but my favourite thong smells vaguely like bacon. It is obviously an omen.