Club Gabby

I had an odd dream last night. I was on my way to see Clive James, who for some inexplicable reason, was living the life of a mysterious recluse in a Kowloon shanty town. I had to go through some strange Daliesque doorways to reach him, which led me to a glass elevator that began to rise diagonally over a landscape of 1930s New York, sepia tinted and wholly photographic. When I reached Clive, I found him to be extremely pleasant and a very gracious host, despite living in squalor with an Argentinean housekeeper and a large Afghan hound with long blond tresses which kept attacking me whenever I clenched my fists.

That’s when I began to hear the sound of clicking.

Try as I might, I couldn’t stop thinking that it was coming from my hips. Clive thought so too. A lifetime spent doing high kicks and hip thrusts can wear a stripper’s hips away in half the time of your average Premiership footballer. It’s why so many of us have so much titanium inside us by the time we’re thirty that we're less human than a Terminator. Clive told me that it was an omen of what’s to come and a reminder to keep myself well oiled and my joints lubricated.

Only then did I wake up and realise that there was nothing wrong with my hips, which were running as silky smooth as ever. Clive had also disappeared, which was the biggest disappointment because I had so many things to ask him.

Then I heard the clicking again and realised that not all my dreams were insubstantial. Some mysterious clicking force had descended on the apartment while Clive James had been explaining the mysteries of literary punditry to me.

I looked at the clock. It was horribly late for a weekday morning, nearly half-past eleven, but then I remembered that last night I’d over indulged myself with the alcohol and a sad French film involving the innocent murder of young rabbits. Pulling on a fresh thong, I walked through the apartment, following the sound which I could now clearly tell was coming from the living room.

‘Whow!’ said a voice as I turned the corner past the bathroom. ‘Check out those buns! Rock solids at twelve o’clock!’

I turned around and found myself face to face with a young woman wearing a long black leather overcoat and a beret perched on the top of her head.

‘Who are you?’ I asked, oblivious to the fact that she was looking at my thong as though she was having a religious experience. It happens to me all the time.

When she straightened herself up she resembled a rather lascivious stick of liquorice.

‘I’m Jonjo,’ she said. ‘Who are you?’

I thought her question defied reason so I chose not to answer it. ‘And what are you doing in my apartment?’ I asked.

‘Hey! Stay cool!,’ she replied, guiltily waving her arms around like Eve juggling invisible apples. ‘Don’t get your thong in a… in a…’

‘Twist?’ I suggested.

‘Hey! Cool. Twist, yes, twist. Don’t get it in a twist.’

‘And I asked what you’re doing in my apartment? And what the hell is that clicking?’

‘We’re here to celebrate words!' she said. 'You know? How great they are… How much we enjoy using them to… you know… to express… you know... stuff…’

‘We?’

She waved her hands ambiguously. ‘Don’t get plural on me. I is we.’

That ‘I is we’ bit was enough for me. I turned my back on Jonjo and walked into the main room.

Sitting on the floor, around the sofa, across the chairs and some sitting on the window seat, were an assortment of the oddest people you’re ever likely to find gathered in a stripper’s apartment on a Thursday morning. They were completely oblivious to my presence as they were too busy clicking their fingers as they gazed at the figure standing at the middle of the room.

It was Gabby, holding my copy of the English Auden in one hand and a large crocus in the other.

‘The crowing of the cock’, she said – or more precisely read – ‘though it may scare the dead, call on the fire to strike, sever the yawning cloud, shall also summon up the pointed crocus top, which smelling of the mould, breathes of the underworld…’

At which point the crowd began another chorus of clicking and Gabby danced around in a circle waving the crocus over their heads as though it were a magic wand.

‘Ahem,’ said the only cock in the room qualified to crow.

Gabby turned to me and smiling hugely waved the crocus at me.

‘Morning Chippy!’ she squealed.

‘What the hell’s going on?’ I asked, in no mood to be won over by a high pitched Romanian with a crocus. My injured foot was beginning to throb and I could still feel the teeth of an imaginary Afghan hound in my arm. Even the memory of Clive’s reassuring words to his dog (‘it’s only rubber, Mildred’) could do nothing to calm my agitation.

‘Hey, is it time to get down to our undies?’ asked a woman sitting on the end of the sofa. ‘That would be so cool. So cool and Frank O'Hara...’

‘Well I’m not joining in,’ replied a gaunt man in black sitting beside her. He was giving me one of those looks as if to suggest he was in awe of the Chipster’s perfectly honed body. ‘There’s always somebody who wants to bring muscle to a gathering of minds…’

‘Who are these people?’ I asked Gabby.

‘My poetry club,’ she said and anointed them all with a wave of her crocus.

‘What?’

‘Oh, you’ll get to know all the names,’ she said. ‘They’re here to read poetry. Aren’t we, everybody?’

The room filled with more of that insufferable clicking.

‘Will you all stop that?’ I snapped. ‘And what’s that you’re reading?’

She held up the book. ‘Oh, I took it from your poetry shelf,’ she replied. ‘We play poem game.’

‘A poem game?’

‘Like drinking game but it involves poems.’ She looked at my face and must have recognised the look of mild curiosity. ‘We take turns,’ she began to explain.’ We each pick a poem at random and then we read it. Then we rip it out and eat it.’

‘You do what?’

‘It’s poetry, Chippy! You wouldn’t understand.’

‘You know,’ said a voice from the crowd. ‘We internalise the mystery… It's ruminatio of the word...’

‘You’ve been eating my English Auden?’ I sobbed, snatching the book from her crocus scented fingers. ‘Do you know how much this cost? It’s a Faber & Faber…’

‘And very tasty it was too,’ said a man sitting on the window seat. He was picking his teeth with his little finger. ‘I’ve just eaten the Night Mail and it went down lovely,’ he said. ‘That passage between Beattock and Glasgow went really smooth.’

‘It was all downhill,’ said some wit from the sofa. I glared at the gaunt man before I flipped through the torn edges of my ruined volume. All the shorter verse were gone and some sections of the longer poems had teeth marks where somebody had nibbled away the page, sometimes almost up to the spine.

‘You’re all heathens,’ I cried as I threw the book to the floor. And then, without another word, I turned my thong on the crowd.

‘Cool cheeks, man!’ said a voice to my rear but I gone past the point where a sane man cares anymore. Soon, my head was buried beneath the cold cotton fabric of my pillow. I was back in bed again, oblivious to the sound of the clicking fingers, which now marked the digesting of another classic of the English canon.

I consoled myself by trying to imagine what Clive James might say about the terrible age we live in.

The Chipster Uncovered

In the end, I’m glad I struggled to my adult learning class this afternoon. It was one of those funny episodes that can easily cheer up an aging thongman’s week.

Mrs. Rust began the lesson by taking the register. There were twelve us in class this week and mine was the second name to be read out. When she’d finished, Mrs. Rust closed the register and the first thing she did was turn to ask me about the best way to treat a fungal toe infection. What could I say? I had no way to avoid the question and so, in my guise as a chartered manicurist, I tried to answer her the best I could.

I should never have lied last week about what I do for a living. I’m useless at pretending to be something I’m not. Which is perhaps why I nearly gave the game away when I suggested that a cure might involve, as a last remedy, the surgical removal of the infected toe.

‘You’d recommend the amputation of a toe in a case of athlete’s foot?’ she asked, shocked to the last twist of her already grey hair.

‘Oh,’ I said, loudly so the rest of the class could be sure of my authority in this matter, ‘that’s only in the rarest instances. Grown men have been known to lose legs when athlete’s foot has gone untreated for too long.’

Well, she fell silent for a few moments before she started the lesson. I thought I’d got away with my sham but I soon realised that she doubted my story when she announced that we’d be reading the Auden poem which begins ‘At least the secret is out’.

At Last the Secret is Out

At last the secret is out, as it always must come in the end,
The delicious story is ripe to tell to tell to the intimate friend;
Over the tea-cups and into the square the tongues has its desire;
Still waters run deep, my dear, there's never smoke without fire.

Behind the corpse in the reservoir, behind the ghost on the links,
Behind the lady who dances and the man who madly drinks,
Under the look of fatigue the attack of migraine and the sigh
There is always another story, there is more than meets the eye.

For the clear voice suddenly singing, high up in the convent wall,
The scent of the elder bushes, the sporting prints in the hall,
The croquet matches in summer, the handshake, the cough, the kiss,
There is always a wicked secret, a private reason for this.

We silently read the poem a couple of times before we went though it as a class, but it didn’t take long before Mrs. Rust began to ask me some very odd questions.

‘What kind of secret story might be “delicious”, Chip?’

‘Why do you think it’s the lady who dances and the man who drinks, Chip? Wouldn’t it have been a better secret if it were the other way around? Why might a man want to keep it a secret that he likes to dance?’

‘Do men always have a wicked secret, Chip?’

After half an hour of this, it had all became a bit embarrassing and I’m sure the rest of the class were beginning to suspect that some hidden meaning lay behind all these innuendos.

In the end I could take it no longer when she asked: ‘Do you think men keep secrets because they’re ashamed, Chip?’

‘Ashamed?’ I answered. ‘Ashamed! There’s no shame!’

And with that I jumped up on the desk.

It was quite a sight to see. Even with a bad back, I began to grind my hips as I started my world famous inverted thong strip.

‘Is there anything to feel shameful when you’ve got a body like this?’ I asked as I began my routine by revealing my magnificent torso. ‘Is there anything to be shamed about when you’re Chip Dale, Bangor’s most famous Thonglateer Extraordinaire?’ And with that I did my patented hip thrust that usually drives the ladies crazy.

Of course, I didn’t give them the full strip. There were women in that room who were there to read Jane Austen, but I was down to my underwear when Mrs. Rust brought the class to order.

‘Thank you for setting us straight, Chip,’ said Mrs. Rust with a knowing smile on her face.

The class roared their disapproval as my impromptu performance came to an end and I settled myself back in my chair, suddenly feeling like I was Mrs. Rust’s star pupil.

‘You never struck me as a man who understands toes,’ Mrs. Rust explained as she waited for the room to fall silent. ‘Not with hips are as lean as a Shakespearean sonnet and thighs with all the meaty presence of a novel by Sir Walter Scott.’ And with that she opened her book of poems. ‘Now, Chip, what can you tell me something about this poem’s rhyme scheme?’

In Bed With A Pot Noodle

Can any sight give you more cause to feel pity than that of a ruined stripper with a painful lumbar region, lying in bed, having spilt a beef and tomato Pot Noodle down his front while trying so earnestly to understand the finer points of English poetry?

This sums up my Friday morning and it’s not the sort of life I ever though I’d ever blog about.

I know you’re only here for the tales of greasy thongs, the pole dancing, and my life among the aerobically sound ladies, and I can see why a few of you have dropped off, fearing that this blog has become the equivalent to a Samaritan drop in centre or those benches at the local indoor market that attract the madder kind of vagrant. Well, I’m only blogging about my life and at the moment, I’m forced to play the role of the invalid.

I still look bloody good in a thong though.

The doctor commented on as much when she came to see me this morning. She confirmed that I’ve aggravated my old injury caused last year by my lifting a nineteen stone traffic warden above my head. The good news is that she thinks that bed rest will bring about a quick recovery and she even thinks I might be dancing again in a week or two. I’m going to take it as my chance to get as much of my reading list read as I can.

Although the prognosis is good, this latest episode has only confirmed my doubts about the long term security of stripping as a career. I need another string to my bow, not least in order to earn a decent wage. I don’t see why a man with my skills can’t earn at least £100 a week, perhaps even more. It’s not much to ask for, is it?

To be honest, it was all put into perspective last night when I was watching the Comic Relief version of ‘The Apprentice’. The thought came to me again this morning when I discovered a wonderful new blog called Blockhead Magazine. Reading the Blockhead view of the show prompted me to think about my situation compared with the kind of money being flaunted by super rich celebrities.

The money being given to charity was beyond anything I have known or could imagine. A friend of Trinny Woodall’s agreed to donate £150,000 instead of the paltry £100,000 she’d originally promised them. We also saw John Terry and Ashlie Cole give something like £5000 each to see Anne Robinson put in some stocks.

Now, I know what you’re thinking, and I appreciate the sentiment too, but no matter how good the cause (and can there be any better than the lynching of Anne Robinson?) the flaunting of that kind of money, implying its insignificance, is obscene. A nurse or a teacher would earn £5000 before tax in three months or more and though it does a charity some good to see wealth being distributed their way, the sense that we’re living in a country that’s gone slightly mad is all too apparent.

It leaves me here, as my painkillers begin to wear off, to quote this Auden poem I’ve been struggling over all morning:

It’s no use turning nasty
It’s no use turning good
You’re what you are and nothing you do
Will get you out of the wood
Out of a world that has had its day.

Carpe Diem

Disaster.

As I write, the clock says it’s ten minutes past ten. If things had gone according to plan today, I should now be about to snatch the last inch of silk string hiding my modesty and reveal myself to Bangor’s late night crowd. I was due on stage ten minutes ago.

So what am I doing, sitting here and typing on my laptop? I’m a bit embarrassed to admit it, but I tore a muscle this afternoon.

It happened when I was reading Auden. In fact, it happened because I was reading Auden. If I’d been reading any other book, none of this would have happened. I knew this education was a bad thing. I also blame Robin Williams.

It happened like this. Gabby’s still chasing up singing work (I know what you’re thinking but you’ve got to give the girl marks for trying) so she left me at home to get to grips with my literature assignment. I sat myself down and opened my brand new copy of The English Auden. I thumbed my way trough a few pages until I found myself a shortish poem to get me going.

After struggling for half an hour, mumbling the words as I read, I began to realise I was doing something wrong. don’t know much about poetry but I was damn sure Mrs. Rust wouldn’t have me mumbling. And that’s when I thought about Dead Poet’s Society, the film. It’s a great movie and one of my favourites until the guy from Robocop blows his brains out. That’s not important, though. What is important is that I thought about the film and decided that if I really wanted to understand my literature coursework, I really needed to read the poems aloud and, preferably, while standing on a table.

The only table I could do it on was the kitchen table but I’ve never been a man to let little details sway me. I climbed up on the kitchen work surface and began to read out the poem in my best literary voice.

And, do you know that it actually helped? The words jumped from the page and I could see their every meaning. It was like I’d just been awakened into a new and beautiful world.

Almost as beautiful as the pool of tea that I slipped in just as I was about to hit the last rhyme.

I fell from the table, cracked my skull against the dishwasher and my back against the edge of the tumble dryer. The pain was excruciating at first but eventually eased into a dull throbbing pain I knew only too well. I had aggravated the injury that kept me out of stripping for much of last year.

A Romanian Compromise

I’ve just dropped in to report that Welsh / Romanian relations are as strong as ever. It’s been a morning of clearing the air and making new resolutions, at least half of which I intend to keep.

I had to promise Bangor’s chief bootlegger that I’d to try to take more of an interest in her hobbies and she agreed to go easy on the fermented spud juice. The only compromise I’ve been forced into making is to agree to go with her to one of her night courses at the local community college. That's where I've been all morning. Fighting my way through adolescents, filling in application forms, picking up my reading list. It was a world I’ve never seen before and, though it pains me to admit it, I quite enjoyed myself.

To be honest, I didn't expect to come back with a reading list. I was hoping for something a bit more manual. After a long argument where I tried to explain the benefits of learning how to become a plumber, Gabby demonstrated the very good reasons (they had knuckles) why I should join her Literature for Beginners course. I don’t mind that too much. Reading a few books can’t be that difficult and, as I’ve said in the past, we strippers tend to be a literate bunch on account of the long hours we have to wait between performances.

My only doubts now are about the books on the course. The list is longer than my arm and I’m a bit worried that there are no classics on there. There’s not a single Tom Clancy or Frederick Forsyth, for example. Not even a Stephen Leather or Jack Higgins. Instead, I’ve just been to the local bookshop where I had to spend a quite ridiculous amount of money on a copy of W.H. Auden’s poetry, which judging from a quick glance, is a bit light on terrorists, lacking in gun fights, and in fact, anything to keep a Welsh stripper interested. I mean, I have to ask you: do you think the guy even looks like a proper writer? Where's his U.S.S. George Washington baseball hat or his shooting jacket? He's not even smoking a cigar while posing with a high powered rifle.

Anyway, this afternoon we’re off to buy the rest of the books. I’ve reached the point now when I'd even settle for a Jeffrey Archer.