My Birthday by Chip Dale: An Account of The Missing Six Hours Compiled From Contemporary Sources, Friends, Family, and Police Records

Sharp. There’s no other word that adequately describes myself early on the evening of the 13th October, 2007. Freshly oiled, shaved, and with the anti-fungal cream still damp between my toes, I was in no mood to take any fashion prisoners. This was going to be a seek and destroy mission against the entrenched sticks and squares at the heart of Bangor town centre. From my vast wardrobe, I’d picked out the right clothes for the job. My killer lime green suit was to be assisted by a bright blue t-shirt with a large luminous lemon on the front and a mission to pacify the opposition. The logo beneath the lemon read, ‘Well Wrinkled’, as indeed was I down below where, hidden from view but not from mind, my loins were wrapped in my favourite thong, cut in silk with a single diamond sewn onto the front of the pouch with my name beneath it. It’s a Grenva, which means, as you probably know, it was made by Europe’s premier thong makers. Some people say they are pouch makers to Prince Philip, himself, though nobody has been able to prove as much.

With the star dressed for the evening, the secondary cast were also doing their best to look good for such a special occasion. Gabby wore a little figure hugging dress that did little to hide her womanly assets nor the razor-sharp stilleto strapped SAS-style between her buttocks. My agent for six years, Danny Piles, turned up at seven thirty, dressed in a full tuxedo with a tasteful purple cummerbund. Ten minutes, the three of us walked into Rotters.

I’d chosen to celebrate my birthday at the local nightclub in the belief that most of my friends would make it. I was not to be disappointed, but as soon as I appeared at the door to the disco, the room erupted with cheers from people I’d never before met. Apparently, the news had gone around Bangor about my open invitation to celebrate my birthday and scores of people thought they’d come along to press the Chipster’s flesh and get that most pious of individuals monstrously drunk.

Deluged with offers to buy me a drink, I was soon necking bottles of spirits with more enthusiasm than the not inconsiderable alcoholic community of Bangor. Men with purple noses and stains on their trousers would have been unable to keep up with me as I sucked Bangor dry of the liquid hard stuff. Soon I was overcome by the emotion of the evening and things began to get hazy. Luckily, Danny was on hand so we might now put the last minutes of my sobriety at around eight o’clock:

You were out of your skull by nine, Chip. That’s when you began to call yourself the best blogger in Wales and threatened to beat up anybody who said differently. We all laughed but then you turned nasty when a stranger called you Iain. Gabby managed to calm you down but I think you weren’t yourself after that. The rest of the evening was tainted by that incident.

As easy as it is to take Danny’s account as the truth, Andrew Morris, the barman at Rotters, tells a quite different story.

I’d say you were already blotto by eight thirty. I’ve never seen a man pour so much vodka down his throat in such a short space of time. You told me you were the best stripper in Wales but you were disappointed that people always think you are Lembit Opik. You said you’d always wanted to meet the man just to see how handsome he is. Then you began to ramble on about the state of Korean rubber and how you once taught Chuck Norris to throw a thong with his big toe. I just thought you were pretty far gone and I didn’t think you were going to last the night.

You might have noticed that the two accounts don’t add up. Or, at least, they don’t until we get to one important detail: both Danny and Andrew confirm that I’d begun to take my clothes off by nine thirty.

‘You were dancing topless with all the ladies around nine forty five,’ says Danny.

Andrew puts it a little earlier than that. ‘You didn’t have your shirt on when I saw you around nine thirty and it wasn’t much later than that when somebody told me that you’d got completely naked and were asking people to rub ice cubes on your lemons.’

However, Gabby tells a different story.

Chip, you embarrass me for last time. No more drink. You take clothes off for money and not for hobby. I’m just amazed you lasted until ten o’clock before you get naked. Those girls are just cheap. I don’t know what you see in them, with their big fake boobies. I saw you dancing with them. Hands all over them. You lucky I didn’t come over and cut it off. But it was your birthday…

Victoria Niles was my dance partner, so I thought perhaps it would be best to ask her the time I disrobed. I only know this because I was lucky to find her phone number written in lipstick on the inside of my thigh. She managed to confirm Gabby’s part of the story.

You were pretty drunk, Chip, but we all were. I can never say no to a hot body and a gorgeous face. And you were so naked. And it was kind of sweet the way you were drooling over me and kept asking me if I thought newts were fish or reptiles. It was your way of connecting, I guess.

Eleven o’clock seems to be the point when the action moved outside the club. A notice from the local police station asking me to drop in this morning to pick up some items of lost property gave me chance to talk to the two officers who stopped me around that time. Said PC Smalls:

We were responding to a report that somebody was standing naked on the end of Bangor Pier playing the trombone. We were too late to catch you there, but we did find you later standing in a fountain outside The Royal Tandoori Restaurant. You were wearing noodles on your head and were telling everybody you were Tommy Dorsey but, to be honest, sir, you weren’t doing a very good job with the trombone. You were much closer to Tommy Ball.

His partner, PC Timbleby, has five more years on the job and is a grade 4 pianist. His version sounds much closer to the truth.

It was definitely Angels by Robbie Williams and for a beginner on the trombone, you were doing a first class job. It was a shame about your being naked in a public place, otherwise we could have left you alone. You put your thong back on and that was the last we saw of you.

What happened to me after that is harder to explain. I apparently rang Danny on his mobile at twelve o’clock to ask him about seaweed. Again, the details elude me but Danny seems to think there was some method to my madness. ‘You were not alone but I have no idea who you were with,’ he says. ‘You were insistent that you needed to eat seaweed, though I could here voices in the background that sounded Chinese.’

I’ve rang around the local Chinese restaurants and none of them serve seaweed. Gabby too is at a loss as to my whereabouts.

I go home at eleven o’clock when you didn’t come back from club. I in bed and first thing I know if finding you on computer this morning. There is mess in hall, which Gabby clean up and Mr. Morris from downstairs says you sick on his decking. That is all Gabby know except Chip is stupid stupid man.

Even though my thong has been returned to me and I remember a few more facts about the evening, I have failed to fill in a few missing gaps. I don’t know who the trombone belongs to or how it came into my possession. My enigmatic mention of seaweed at the end of my last post of the evening is also unexplained. I’m beginning to think I should leave it like that. Perhaps I don’t want to know the truth, in case I discover the police are investigating a man seen swimming with Bangor’s dolphins with the hope of finding romance.

A Penitent Man

Dear Christ. I’m never going to drink again. Let me say my apologies now to everybody who I pawed, in a blog sense, in the early hours of the morning. The comments I left on your blogs are my dribble on your collar, my sweaty armpit over your shoulder, my stinking garlic bread breath in your face. I feel so terribly bad about it. I can’t honestly remember how many blogs I visited, I seemed to go on for hours. Some of them I haven't even visited before. I just know there were a lot of them. I even dimly recall visiting 'The Wife in the North' but I’m not going to look. I don't want to know what I might have written. I have never been so drunk before in my life. My head is aching, my guts aren’t great, and I’m typing this with one finger, pressing so very gently on the keys. Anything more sends pain shooting through my eyeballs.

I’m thinking of deleting my two drunken posts from last night. They are an embarrassment. I might yet keep them, if only to remind myself how very understanding you have all been in your comments. I really am sorry. This won't happen again.

Gabby is not pleased. There’s a dried pile of Chinese noodles in the hall and the place stinks of soy sauce. The neighbour from the ground floor has already been up to see me. Somebody has vomited over his decking. I think it was me. You probably think it was me. Fortunately, he can’t prove it was me. The oddest thing is that Gabby came out of the bathroom this morning carrying a trombone. I don’t know where I got it, or who it belongs to. I’m going to leave the problem until tomorrow. For now, I’m going back to bed.

I'm so very sorry and so utterly ashamed of myself.

godnight

okay i;m going to bed now. I am feeling better. i was sicka little out of the window. i love you all. you are all lovely people becasue you know that I love you . i dont mean to be selfish but i nknown i sometimes dont reply or leave comments or i moan. but its becasue i care. i workk so hard and youi know me
#
I care.

YOu are all my BEST frtiends. no. no. shush. you are. i love you all.

i am going to bed. .if fdfd o seawead.

HERllo Yoou Lovely Peeople

reggdf

Howdy…………………….

Who said tht rule number one about blogging is that yoyu don’t post when you are drunk. Ruddy Iain Dale I siuppose. Big heded bugger with all his fekcing readers. But when a man has enjoyed his birthdays and hadd only a teeeennnny weeennny bit of drink to be had, so I did, I say hang the tussocks off a rhinonscerous and say hello to all my friends out therte where the blogs life. Hip hip hooooray. It's my birdday!!!!!!!!!!

So howdy. BIG CHIP DALE HERE AND REPORTING FOR DUTY. I’m a little tupsy. Got type quitely cos Gabby’s asleep. Don’t want her to wake up. Shhhhsssss. Shes going to go mad when she sees what I’ve done to the carpet in the hall. But it’s not sick. It’s Chinese. Looks like sick but its nnoodles and something else I don’t what it is and i dont now how to spell it if i did. What exacty is waterchsnut?

Anyway. That was a bloody good night. Drink? I drank but not a lot. And I kept my clothes on. Well, not all my clothes and not all night. But I only took them off when I was asked. And I won’t hear a wordd said about the local constabularyaryy. Lovely men who let me off with a caution. But welsh policemen asre so very nice when it comes to things a man likes to do with a trombone. They made me put on my thong and stop blowing it late at night. My trombone not my thong. Bet you din’t know I played the trobone. Neithetr did I until I tried. Bloody good instrument. made a bloody raket like Tommy Dorsey eat your heart tommy.

Big lungs. Small lips.

Who said I’m drunk. You dirty rotten bastards. you mean Chip Dale’s got his balls out for nothing? Nothing in my thong tonight0. Professional dfisgrace… not even a fiver. Nothing down there but waterchestnuts and noodles. tasty.

Goind to bed. Very tired. Smell of garlic bread.

Love all of you. Ms barok in hacknee, moopsa, little cuddly Stevey at the Dairy Referandem, elberyy who says he’ll kill all of us and he probably means it. Mr gruff, Momantery Aneamic. Mind going. Colin the australian. And shades who didn’t wish me happy birthday. Why didn’t you wish old Chippy a happy birthday? bryn aappleyard who never comes to see me though i levae comments about his cat hat. Lord Higham who probably calls himself Dorothy now or something like that. HE'S IN RUSSIA! d… And eren the people who read but don’t talk to me. Why don’t you talk to me? Don’t you like me. But I love all of you….. LOVE ALL OF YOU! But did nobody like my bernie clifton story? I MET BERNIE CLIFTON!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Oh, gab’s wak,ing iup.

Gotta go. Chat soon.

Yours sincerel.y

Chippy Dale. King of the world!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

(I feel sick)

Happy Birthday Big Chip Dale

Rather hard to believe, isn’t it, that this dapper young Goth with slight acne and a mild fungal toe infection would later become the Welsh stripping sensation known as The Chipster? And it all seems so many years ago now. Long before I damaged my spine lifting that overweight traffic control officer at her hen party. Long before I met Romania’s answer to Combat Barbie. And before I began to tell you all my stories here at Chip Dale’s Diary. Not all of you have been with me along the way, so I think it falls to me, as the longest serving resident, to be the first person to wish myself a very happy birthday.

Happy birthday, Chip, old sport!

Since it’s my birthday, I’m sure you’re all wondering what to get me. Perhaps you’re thinking of something in fur, large in the pouch, and with a couple of straps the width of dental floss. Well, you can forgo the expensive gifts unless the seats are in leather and it goes from nought to two hundred in nine seconds. Can money buy love? Well, I suppose it can if you happen to play in the right of midfield for Manchester United. However, here are Chipster Central, I want simpler things. A few comments would be nice but some success beyond my stripping career would be even better.

I’ll be out of communication range for much of the day as I’ll be hosting a little drinks party for a few friends at the local. Feel free to drop in if you’re in the area. Not only will you get to meet some of the biggest names in Welsh thongdom but, of course, the drinks are on me!

Bernie Clifton's No. 1 Fan

The green marker pen scrawled across the luminous orange sign read ‘If you give the Devil an inch, he’ll be your ruler’. It was pasted on the stone face of the old Methodist church that was hung some way back from the road where the bus turned into the station. Small hick town. Or at least, that’s what I thought. Blue collar. Middle America. Only it wasn’t. It was just the end of a thirty minute bus journey through some of the sorriest estates in the country. That’s the time it had taken to get me there. Half-an-hour having my fillings, my bones, even my wits shook loose by the cantankerous old engine. Half-an-hour of the scenery working my imagination even looser, of track-suits crouching outside bookmakers, Christmas decorations hanging from houses like dead bleached ivy, a rare patch of green grass with a sign planted into the dead centre. ‘No Ball Games’.

The bus smelled of piss and ointment, and new hairdos, blue rinsed perms as stiff as the pubic hairs on a porcupine. There’s a rule of thumb you can use when travelling by bus in small towns. The other people have free bus passes for a reason. They're pensioners, they are morbidly poor, or they have something seriously wrong with them. I’d been the only one paying money to the driver. Then I had settled down and listened to a woman with skin like a testicle describe her friend’s throat abscess. A guy in a seat ahead of me took no notice of the details but passed his time picking the scabs from his forearms which were covered by some mysterious rash. He was bull necked, brow at an shallow incline, balding. He looked like he could laugh off a beating with a tyre iron. He was the sort of guy you wanted as a friend, not as an enemy.

In these estates, as run down as they are, there are always signs of opulence if you look for them. Fifty inch LCD screens light up living rooms, kids carry mobile phones worth almost as much as their trainers. A brand new Bentley Continental GT is parked beside the rolled down rusted blinds of a refurbished bookmakers. Yet the town had also changed a lot since the last time I was there. New government money had gone into new architecture that I found myself liking for once. A new façade on the railway station was abstract, black, herringbone, acute against the sky. A steel needle loomed over the shopping centre. I liked all the small touches that had dressed up a town that prides itself on having at least one cultural highlight in its own museum of public transport.

Yet the most abstract thing of all was yet to come.

My imminent birthday had taken me there. After an hour, I’d walked a full circuit of the town and I was coming out of a small independent bookshop, one of the rarer things to find in any small town these days, with a copy of Martin Amis’ ‘House of Meetings’ in my hand. Preoccupied as I put the book in my rucksack, I turned back into the heart of the town centre. I walked slowly past the pub where, in my student days, I’d hang out with friends, and past the entrance to the old college which is in the process of being knocked down. And I was full of these slightly wistful thoughts as I began to walk behind two men.

The first man carried a bucket and, beyond that, I remember very little about him. My attention was too taken by the other. He was wearing the bottom half of an ostrich outfit, with thin tired orange nylon tights hanging a little loose on legs not built for public display. He had an edgy look about him, nervous, oddly wound up, like a boxer about to go into the ring. He was full of terse movements, ready to put on a performance. He held the ostrich’s head up, twitching it occasionally with a bit of metal fashioned into an imitation harness and reins. I smiled at the outfit and began to walk past them when the second man flicked his hands and the ostrich head reared up at me. Instinctively I jumped back but the head anticipated my move. It twisted and went to peck my behind like it must have pecked hundreds of behinds before mine. I was about to smile, to laugh, to say something funny...

Then I took in the guy’s face.

You have to know that Bernie Clifton is something of a hero of mine. It’s probably why I failed to react as I would have hoped I would react. I didn’t shake his hand. I didn't say how much I’ve loved his act. Nor did I say how much I loved watching him when I was a child. I didn't say how I only got through so many miserable school weeks in order to watch him every Friday. I didn’t say how much I admired his spirit, his character, his comedy. I didn’t say how glad I am to see that he’s still going. I should really have told him to put something on over his charity t-shirt and ostrich tights, and that it was too cold to be raising money for charity on a cold rainy day at the beginning of October. I didn’t do any of these things. To my shame, I didn’t even put money in the bucket. In fact, to tell you the truth, I ran off. I crossed the road and spent the next ten minutes looking back at this great comedian, hamming it up for people, many of whom didn’t know who he was.

And I was standing there in the rain, a few feet from one of my earliest comedy heroes.

Eventually I had to walk away but, in every shop I went into, I would find a way to say that I’d just been assaulted by Bernie Clifton and his ostrich. A few people knew who I meant, but others looked at me blankly and I had to describe in ten words or less the career of the comedian who came to fame on Crackerjack.

CRACKERJACK!

I suppose it’s one of those old deep admirations that’s hard to describe. My comedy heroes today are Larry David, W.C. Fields, Groucho, Woody Allen, or even relatively unknown comic writers such as S.J. Perelman or David Nobbs. But none of those men had a say in how I grew up. Bernie Clifton did.

He is also a comedian hard to fit into a category. 'Anarchic' only begins to do him justice. Perhaps that’s why as children we loved him. Back then, proper comedians told jokes, with their thumbs tucked in deep-blue crushed-velvet waistcoats, with large vulgar rings on their equally large vulgar fingers. In the glare of the spotlight and a halo of tobacco smoke, they would sweat from bad health or, perhaps, as we now like to think and hope, self-realisation that they were fat, obnoxious, xenophobic misogynists whose days were gone. Yet even if Clifton came up through the same clubs, he was somehow different. He was childish, he was a buffoon, he was... He was whatever he still is. He was silly, unpredictable, and in as innocent a way as you could get at five to five on a Friday, he was totally dangerous.

The ostrich was and is a comic masterpiece, but unlike Rod Hull’s emu which had some notional pretence of being real, the ostrich is pure comic over-statement. Rod Hull never gave away the game. There was never a hint that it was a fake arm holding the bird. There was no such pretence with Clifton and his ostrich. It’s as though he doesn’t want you to believe it is real, which makes it something else. It is more like a surrealist masterpiece, some totally non-rational being that leaps out and assaults you. It was modern comedy before there was modern comedy. Without the costume, Bernie Clifton would be jailed. And he would probably deserve it.

I didn’t think any of these thoughts at the time, though I had the capacity to say them if asked why I was standing, dumbstruck, in the centre of this extremely working class down in the rain on a Thursday in October. And I might have also have said that Clifton looked older than I remembered him; that the costume was looking more bedraggled too. I might have said it was a rainy day for grey faces, for grey clowns. But nobody did ask me what I thought. And that really did not matter.

This town is one of two of my youth I sometimes go back and visit. The other is ultra-modern, with expensive shops, and it aspires to have a cafe-culture around its new arts and cultural centre. It is full of people who aspire to something better, or at least, aspire to a lifestyle designed by Debenhams. But this town… this town is working class and grim. On the way home, the bus stopped at some traffic lights. I looked out and saw a small man with a clenched face, more chin than lips, walking through the traffic. He was wearing a horrendous yellow and purple woollen hat and he carried two plastic bags filled with food, cigarettes, lager. He was oblivious to the traffic, walked slightly flat footed, caught up in his own world as he smoked the last of a fag end. He reminded me of my grandfather I’ve only ever seen in photographs. It made me think again of the two towns, of the other town which represents what I’d like to be, and that town which told me something about what I’ve come from.

Clifton is of that same world, where knock kneed men in yellow ostrich costumes can walk the streets. I used to hate the town. Today I found a reason to beginto like it again.

I just wish I’d had the nerve to say some of this to the great Bernie Clifton.

Thonglateer Extraordinaire Chapter 1, Part 3

Eventually, my relationship with Flora waned and we went our separate ways. We had, by that stage, got to know each other on a very intimate level, though with the python always in the room I’d say the sex was good but not great unless you were into wildlife. The end slithered into view once I told her that there was one too many pythons involved in our relationship. She took it as an insult to her pet. I just claimed it was justifiable pride in my body.

Now the years have eased the hurt, I can see that so much of my success is owing to Flora. Without Flora, the stripping phenomenon known as The Thonglateer might not have happened. Flora was the first person to teach me that stripping is an art. Some argue that wiggling your hips and waving your genitals at an audience doesn’t take that much skill. The same people have never tired to make a living out of it or they’d know how easy it is to take an eye out. The physics involved in matching your hip thrusts to the natural swing of your testicles would make Einstein pale. Not that I suggest that Albert ever waved his pipe at an Austrian audience but I think you get my drift, if not my swing.

Stripping isn’t easy, even for a young man born without a single natural inhibition. You might even say it was more so until Flora who taught me that the tease is more important than the nudity. For the rest of my skills, however, I owe a huge debt to the second important person in my professional life.

‘You must have a mentor,’ said Flora after she’d come back off stage one night shortly before we parted forever. She was naked and the glitter of stardust rode the sweat slaloming down the twin inclines of her breasts.

‘I have you, don’t I?’ I said, helping to uncoil the python from her shoulders.

‘I can’t teach you everything,’ she answered as though bothered by my presumption. ‘You need somebody who knows the ins and outs of male dancing. Here,’ she said, thrusting a piece of paper in my hand. ‘Go to him. He’ll teach you everything you need to know.’

The name on the paper was that of Tony ‘One Eye’ Buchanan, one of the old school dancers who had fallen out of fashion with the rise of the techno-strip. Flashing lights, the return of disco beats, and advances in smoke machine technology: they had all led to a new breed of dancer who replaced those who still practised the traditional form of the strip. Men like Buchanan had fallen foul of the new tastes. A man had to have something more than a couple of glittering baubles. I hadn’t heard of him in many years and doubted if he was still alive. I was sure his baubles no longer glittered.

A day later, I said goodbye to Flora at Bangor station and headed south to Cardiff where I intended to find the greatest stripper in living Welsh history, the ‘king of the testicle swing’, Tony ‘One Eye’ Buchannan.

My search didn’t begin well. On a damp, unbecoming morning, I was mugged outside Cardiff station and had my belongings taken from me. I had tried to fight back but it was another hard lesson. Knowing how to strip like a karate master doesn’t mean you can fight like one. Two guys roughed me over, took my notebook full of ideas, as well as three pairs of my best training thongs. It took all of my resolve not to drop my shoulders, walk back into the station, climb on a train, and return to the safety of Flora. But something in my heart had been stirred by the very thought of being taught by a stripping legend. Picking myself up, I checked that I still had my money rolled up in the security thong I always wear on long journeys, and with the scrap of paper still lodged in the deepest corner of my pocket, I set off, walking to the outskirts of a grey and unwelcoming Cardiff.

It took me three hours walking through the rain before I finally reached the house. It was a huge disappointment. Standing on a dingy corner at the edge of the city, the house was more like a mausoleum in a city of crypts. It resembled the home in the TV show ‘The Munsters’. In the wet murk of an afternoon in early Autumn, the house carried foreboding as though it were a mere undercoat to the more overt threats it possessed. I wondered if this was what became of all the great men who personified dying forms of art. Had all the great silent comedians retreated to similar decaying houses in unvisited corners of cities?

A pizza box packed against the gate leaked old cheese and grease over the hinge but did nothing to prevent the yawn of metal as I pushed the gate open. I walked up the overgrown path, my feet sending a brown ale bottle rattled across the concrete before it rode the cushion of lawn’s unmown edge.

The door opened before I reached it.

‘Who are you?’ shot a voice.

I barely recognised him. A grey vest, a body that had grown slack with age and abuse. His six feet six inches were no longer the embodiment of male power. They were a testament to how tall men can sometimes dwindle horizontally. He was stick thin, the flesh nagging his bones like wraps of wet cloth.

‘Are you One Eye?’ I asked.

He looked at me with his bright blue instincts shining bright in the dying light. ‘Nobody had called me that in nearly five years,’ he whispered. His voice recovered with a lean spring to volume. ‘What do you want? I ain’t doing gigs any more, if that’s what you’re after. And I don’t care how many bottles you’re offering me this time. And if you come again, I’ll report you to the RSPCA and tell ’em what you’re wanting me to do to those poor donkeys. I won’t do it again, I tell you. I won’t do it again!’

‘No, no,’ I said, hastening to explain myself. ‘Flora Betteridge sent me. I’m Chip Dale. I want you to teach me to become the best stripper in Wales.’

The figure wavered as he examined me.

‘How old are you, son?’ asked One Eye, finally, his mouth in slack lipped amusement.

‘Seventeen,’ I said. ‘I’ll be eighteen in October and I want to be ready.’

‘Ready?’ he laughed, revealing teeth once perfect but now chipped as though they had been chewing on bottles for too many years. ‘You want to be ready for what?’

‘Ready for the ladies,’ I answered truthfully. ‘I’m going to dance for them on the night of my eighteenth birthday and I want them to know that I’m already the best stripper they’ll ever see.’

The skin on his arms rippled as he laughed.

‘They’re tear you to pieces, son,’ he said and moved to close the door. ’Go on. Clear off and don’t come back wasting my time.’

I stepped forward, full of that indignation that had sent my old career’s teacher to a life in Bangkok brothels. ‘If you won’t teach me,’ I said, ‘I’ll dance on my own. It might take me years and I might make mistakes, but I’m going to learn to dance the old way. And I’m going to become the best stripper in Wales.’

He leaned on his door and sucked air between a gap in his teeth. ‘Sheesh,’ he said. ‘You know I was one considered the best dancer and you have the guts to come to my door and tell me that!’ In a single motion, he pulled a set of dentures from his lower gum and wiped his nose on the back of his hand. He then rubbed the teeth clean on his vest as he inspected me. The teeth returned to his mouth with an audible liquid sigh. ‘You’re too damn cocky to teach.’

‘I can be humble,’ I said. ‘But if you won’t teach me then I’ll…’

He waved down my protests and looked to the street. It had started to rain again and my already wet clothes had begun to repel more moisture.

‘Come on inside,’ he said. ‘If I’m going to interview you, we might as well be comfortable and dry. You like pizza?’

‘I’m watching my weight,’ I said, thinking it a good thing to say.

‘You’re full of the right answers, aren’t you kid?’ said One Eye, closing the door behind me and pushed me on through the house.

‘So, you’ll teach me?’

He stopped and gaze me the eye as though taking my measure. ‘You might have something about you,’ he said and nodded me through to the front room.

The interview was the oddest I’ve ever had in my life. It took place in One Eye’s living room, a museum to the old days of male peelers, as we men of the thong were known in the old days. Bill posters were tagged unevenly on all the walls and over the windows, and various props of the stripper’s trade littered the room. The were workman’s helmets, cowboy outfits, a full set of plumbers tools. A faded Zorro mark was hanging from a mirror frame, and a Red Indian costume was moulting in the corner of the room where it would die now that Rain Dance routines are no longer considered acceptable in the days of the modern Native American.

A full length photograph of One Eye, mid strip, caught my eye, hanging above the fireplace as if providing evidence of what this shambling mess of a man had once been. His hair having thinned and gone grey, One Eye had lost nearly everything that had once made him the dream of every Welsh housewife. Only his eyes remained, those bright blue pools that rarely showed warmth but had convinced so many women that he was the answer to all of their dreams, if only for a night.

‘Sit yourself down, Chip,’ said One Eye, settling himself in a seat in front of a large TV screen. ‘You like The Bill?’

I said that I didn’t own a TV.

‘Best show on the box,’ he said and smiled as though waiting for me to add something. ‘Well, you’re not here to talk D.C. Lions, are you? You want to be a stripper and you want old One Eye to help you. Is that right?’

‘I want you to be my mentor. I want you to teach me everything you know.’

‘And what would I get for doing you this very great service?’

I felt in my thong where I had five hundred pounds. He seemed to misinterpret my gesture.

‘You’ve come to the wrong place if you’re into that sort of thing, my lad,’ he said. ‘I’m always been one for the ladies and nothing else. Not even donkeys, though the money was good and I was a little drunk…’

‘No, no,’ I said, pulling my money from my trousers. It was the only money I had in the world and looked so miserable in the glow of his TV screen. ‘I can pay you, if that’s what you want?’

‘Money?’ he laughed and raised his hand to the room. ‘Why would I want money? I’m happy with everything I’ve got.’

‘Then teach me and prove that you did it right all those years,’ I said, inspired by the room and the posters. ‘If you teach me, I can show the world that there’s still room for men who can dance sexy and don’t need smoke and mirrors to entertain the ladies. I can prove to the world that baby oil and a plumber’s wrench is all that it takes.’

He nodded as I gave my speech and at the end of it he reached down to the side of his chair and brought out a bottle full of clear liquid. He pointed it at his lips, paused as he noticed me watching him, and them casually tossed back a swig of what I later discovered was vodka. He immediately yawned and his eyes began to water.

‘You have to know what I want before I agree to teach you,’ said One Eye his lips pulled tight into a grimace. ‘You understand this isn’t going to be easy? I ain’t no schoolteacher. You live here with me. I work you hard. You learn hard. And then when you’re done learning, you work to pay me back. You work to tidy this place up. Make it look respectable again.’

‘You want me to do your housework?’ I asked, feeling insulted that the skin that I had worked so hard to keep tender, even during my geological days, would be jeopardised by manual labour.

‘If you want to be the best dancer, you’re going to have to work for it. And I’ll be wanting you to fix my plumbing. And any odd jobs. The roof needs repairing and then there’s the drains that need cleaning.’ He laughed as the disgust began to register on my face.

‘You think that’s a bad deal?’

‘It doesn’t sound good,’ I replied.

‘Well if you think that, you got no right to claim to be the best stripper in Wales. How do you think you can strip like a plumber if you’ve never worked as a plumber? You think you can take off your clothes and look like a grocery delivery man if you ain’t delivered groceries? No you can’t. It’s impossible. Not until you’ve gone out and walked the beat can you even begin to pretend to be a real policeman.’ He nodded his head. ‘I’m going to teach you, Chip, and by the end of my training, you’ll have wished you took some easy job working in a bank. You’ll come to hate me but when I’m done with you, you’ll be the best male stripper in Wales or my name ain’t Anthony ‘One Eye’ Buchanan.’

The New Catalogue Arrives

You find the Chipster in the mood for litigation. As you can no doubt see, my complimentary copy of J.D. Williams’ new Autumn and Winter catalogue landed on the doorstep today. What else can I say except that promises were not kept by the industy leaders in the larger sized gusset. I never wanted you to see me like this. It’s somewhat humbling, especially since I thought that I’d had a zero-Y-front clause written into my contract.

The picture was taken when I was much younger and in a bad place. It was actually a few months ago when I was stuck on the corner of Poverty and Flat Broke. There’s a well worn bench there where my cheeks regularly rest. The last time I found myself struggling to raise cash, I agreed to do a little male modelling to help pay the bills. I’ve done catalogue work before but it has usually been for high quality menswear or the occasional bit of crotch work for ‘Thong Monthly’. Most of the pictures of the lower half of men’s torsos you see in that magazine are of me. Most of the buttocks too. I’ve also done other work for Argos and for all of the major retail catalogues. That’s me you see in shots of tightly packed swimming trunks. It may not be as well known as being the Face of Avon but being the Speedo Crotch is still a kind of fame.

As is usually with the J.D. Williams gigs, I had to travel up to the studio in Manchester where I spent a day changing in and out of different items of clothing, striking random poses, and having my picture taken. It was towards the end of the morning session when we did the underwear shoot. I’d never before worked for Keith, the photographer, so I was a bit hesitant when I came out of the changing room in just a vest and pair of high band y-fronts.

‘How do you want me?’ I’d asked him as I took my place on the set.

‘Just point into the distance as though you’re hailing a bus,’ he replied, barely bothering to look up from his camera.

I peered over my glasses. ‘As though I’m doing what?’ I asked.

‘Hailing a bus.’

‘In my underpants?’

‘What’s wrong with that?’ he asked.

I thought about an old Groucho Marx line. ‘What a bus is doing in my underpants, I’ll never know,’ I said and wiggled an imaginary cigar as I did the Grouch walk. I can’t imagine how I looked. Or looking at the above picture, perhaps I can…

Keith just gazed at me, the huge camera resting on his hip. ‘Are you going to point like I tell you to or do we have to get another model?’

I hitched up my underpants which had sagged at my Groucho. I said I would do what he said but it went against all my instincts. There might be little I’ve not done wearing just my thong but I would be seen dead signalling for a bus in a pair of Y-fronts. Not even in Manchester where that sort of thing isn’t frowned upon as it should.

‘Look, Chip, love,’ said Keith, ‘I am the photographer and you are the model. If I tell you to stand as though you’re being given an enema by a midget, you will stand as though you’re being given an enema by a midget. Capiche?’

I did more than capiche. That was the sort of instruction I could work with. ‘Oh, like this?’ I asked, hitting the slightly mannered pained look.

‘Perfect!’ he cried and shot the photograph you see at the top of this post.

It was only at the end of the day, as we looked through all shots, that I noticed how well I had indeed caught the look of being given an enema by a midget.

‘Oh, that’s much too realistic,’ I said, pointing it out on the digital lightbox. ‘And I’m beginning to regret allowing you to shoot me in those pants. They don’t do the Chipster a bit of justice.’

‘Perfectly good shot,’ Keith replied, though I was beginning to think he was growing tired of me.

‘But I look too much like I’m being given an enema by a midget. That’s not how I’d like my many fans to think of me.’

He sighed and raised his glasses to prop them on the top of his head in that way that all creative types sometimes do. ‘Look, you don’t like it. Fine. We lose it.’ He clicked on the picture and dumped it into the Mac’s wastebasket.

‘You are a true gent,’ I told him as I picked up my coat. I shook his hand and was on my way.

Since that day, I’d heard nothing until this morning when Gabby found the catalogue.

‘What Chip doing?’ she howled and fell backwards reeling with laughter.

I picked the catalogue from her fingers and saw my picture.

‘He was a very bad photographer,’ I explained. ‘And to make matters worst, they can’t even spell “briefs” correctly.’

I dropped the catalogue to the floor but Gabby rescued it before I had chance to stamp on it.

‘No, no,’ she said. ‘We keep it. We show people what Chip looks like in underpants.’

‘I’m sure people aren’t interested,’ I said.

‘Chip,’ she said, smoothing out the page. ‘You look lovely. You look just like you being given enema by midget.’

A Pubic Service Announcement from Chip Dale

I’ve spent a hellish two days trying to calm down a distraught Romanian. When she heard Gordon Brown announce there’s to be no general election this year, Gabby began to sob incoherently. I was in the middle of some pretty exotic yoga positions at the time so it took me ten minutes to untangle myself before I could get to her. By then, she had cried herself dry and she explained in her cracked, fragile voice that she had put a rather large wager on a November election.

‘I was made promises,’ is all that she would say until she went to bed early on Saturday night.

Sunday lunchtime, I woke up and found Gabby sitting in front of the TV watching Adam Boulton on Sky News. She was wiping tears from her eyes, which I took as a pretty good sign that she’d been crying again.

‘Exactly how much money did you bet?’ I asked as I picked the raisins from my Alpen.

She seemed to shrink, her collar bone becoming more pronounced, like twin punctuation marks bracketing her head.

‘Less than fifty pounds?’ I asked, hopefully.

She shrank again and the inverted commas become more like semi-colons.

‘I thought it was certain,’ she shrilled in a quiet timid voice. ‘I had been made promises, so I bet all of it.’

‘All of what?’ I asked.

She resembled ET as she stretched out and her finger and pointed to the spare room.

‘All of it,’ she repeated. ‘All of it.’

My heart took a tumble down three flights of stairs as I realised what she meant.

‘Not my thong money?’ I cried, rushing from the room.

In the spare room, I lifted the loose panel beneath the radiator and shoved my hand into an empty space that still smelled of pineapple oil and stale sweat. My thong money had all gone. Months of pouch cash.

I returned, distraught, to Gabby who was crying again.

‘Do you know what you’ve done?’ I said. ‘Are you aware that the UK economy is now awash with money that smells of my loins?’

She tried to smile. ‘I can pay you money back,’ she said.

But that was hardly the point. Money is less important than loved ones, friends, and quality of life. And it means nothing when there’s a real national emergency. My unique smell had been sitting in the pockets of lesser men and women who might not be able to cope with the Chipster’s musk.

And that’s why I’m now issuing (and wearing) a Amber Thong Alert. Go to your wallets and purses and smell your cash. If the notes smell distinctly of pineapple, do not use them in any circumstances where you might not wish to breed with a stranger. The notes are potent. Return them to your local bank or destroy them. Do not place them near your loins. Avoid all contact with skin.

‘Do you really think that is necessary?’ asked Gabby as I went to the window and set off an air horn. I just squeezed it again and waited for the echoes to fade before I shouted my warning to the people of Bangor.

'May the Lord have mercy on their souls,' I muttered, though, by then, Gabby was crying again.

Tony Curtis's Pineapple Chunks

Because I consider myself a professional, I rarely talk about my life on the stage. To you, it might seem exotic, but for me, it’s just a well hung normality dressed in a leopard-print thong. When you get down to the nuts and bolts of it (and there, I think, you have a most perfectly appropriate euphemism for the tools of my trade) the business of stripping is pretty routine.

I get to the club about half past nine at night and go straight to my dressing room where I strip off and rub myself down with pineapple oil. Then I choose an outfit for the character I’ll become for the evening. It usually depends on my mood and what kind of humour I’m in. I know that if I dress like a postman, I’ll have plenty of remarks about pushing envelopes into slots, delivering packages, or filthy comments about the size of my sack. My plumber outfit doesn’t get half as many comments and the policeman’s fewer still. My traffic warden gets the least, with the ‘you can write my ticket any time’ being about the best I can expect.

At five to ten, I usually go and stand behind the curtain at the edge of the stage and watch the end of the warm-up’s act. As it get closer to my moment to perform, I begin to feel the familiar sensation of nerves. It’s not the fear of failure as much as the anticipation of mediocrity that worries me, but as soon as I hear the first strains of the theme to The Persuaders, all my doubts disappear. The adrenaline hits my system like a drug injected strait into my thong. I’m suddenly the most confident man in the room as I run out to the sound of female glands snapping open to release the pheromones that rise above the crowd like a great cloud of animal musk.

Over the years, I’ve got my act honed to perfection. The Chipster’s magic is in the detail. So, as was the case last night when I was dressed like a cowboy, I’ll run onto the stage, pull out my imaginary pistols and point them at a few ladies at the front of the crowd before blowing smoke from my fingertips. The ladies love that authentic cowboy touch. As I say, it’s the details that are important. Only then do I begin the slow and elaborate dance number that will end with a thong flying into the back row ten minutes later.

In that respect, last night was pretty much like a normal night. Even when I was stood waiting behind the curtain, I could hear that the room was buzzing, loud with the excited ladies of Bangor’s income tax office, all waiting for The Chipster to make his usual 10PM appearance. I didn’t disappoint John Barry’s Persuader’s theme put me straight into the zone. Adjusting my cowboy hat one last time, I jumped out into the spotlight and my hips hit the rhythm straight away, swaying to those great sweeping strains. In my mind’s eye, I was Roger Moore about to dance with a bald Tony Curtis. And there, I think, you have another most perfectly appropriate euphemism.

So, I danced. My hips swaying, my hips thrusting, my thong swinging, my buttocks clenching. It was a typical routine expertly performed and the ladies loved it as the ladies always love it. After ten minutes, the thong had gone and our old friend, the oily Tony Curtis, was bouncing around and loving being the centre of attention.

Then it was time for me to end my routine and get Curtis out of the room.

The way I usually finish my act is to choose the one lady who has looked the most enthusiastic throughout my performance and to reward her with a special shake of my hips. Tonight I picked out a woman in the front row who had a most unbelievable look of rapture in her eyes. She couldn’t stop staring at me.

I slowly wiggled my way over to her.

‘Show the Chipster some love,’ I said as I took her hands and placed them on my hips.

‘Oh!’ she squealed suddenly, her eyes not blinking as they took in the sight but her hands immediately squeezing my hips. ‘Shake if for me honey. Show Shelia the good stuff.’
And then, as is usual, her hands slipped down and grabbed hold of my buttocks.

That happens most times and I’m used to having my behind pawed. I just think of it as a massage and the ladies usually enjoy it. she smiled as the ladies always smile. Only unlike most woman, who usually look to their friends for encouragement, this woman couldn’t take her eyes off the little bald headed monster called Curtis.

‘You go the moves, honey,’ she said, giving me another squeeze.

None of this stuck me as being all that odd. I was in a familiar role and I was only too happy to dance at bit longer for somebody who seemed to have a particular thing for the Chipster.

Only, I must have been grinding my hips for a minute or so before I noticed something moving at the side of her chair. I didn’t give it much mind at first, it being so dark in the room, but then it moved again and I saw a head pop up beside the woman’s lap. It was a dog. A big, dumb, friendly-looking dog!

Now, there’s a strict ‘no animals’ policy in force at the Green Dragon. Not that we usually need to stop people bring pets into the place, but you never know with some of these lonely women. Sometimes ‘Little Fifi’ can’t stay at home without ‘Mumsy Mummy’. Only, this wasn’t the sort of dog you’d call Fifa. It was a hefty beast, a bit bedraggled, and, besides, it had a jacket on.

I say it was a jacket. It was actually more like a bright yellow sash with reflective patches.

That’s when I realised that it was a guide dog. And the woman who had been nose to chin with Tony Curtis for the last few minutes was obviously its owner. It was no wonder she’d be starting so intently as Curtis. She didn’t even know he was in the room. The woman was completely blind.

I looked down at her smiling face, a bit shocked at my predicament. It altered my plans. There was no way I could just pull myself away from a blind woman who was so clearly enjoying herself. And she had quite a grip on my buttocks. I doubted if I could get away if I’d wanted to.
I looked around at all the other woman who were shouting, whooping, and enjoying themselves. What could I do? I looked at the dog and the dog looked at me. That’s when I thought I better make the most of a difficult situation. I thought I’d show a bit of kindness to her dog and use that as my chance to run for the stage.

I gave the dog a friendly pat on the head and the dog, all friendly, licked my fingers and carried on licking it until I pulled my hand away.

Only now, of course, my hand is all wet and I’m still trapped in the grasp of a woman who could see neither me nor Curtis. I thought I’d give it another minute of dancing, so I looked to the ceiling, took a deep breath and started on some hip thrusts which just made every woman in the room scream even louder. All that is except one. She just kept on staring. And then she started to tickle me.

I don’t know how to describe this politely except to say that she was tickling the balls of Tony Curtis’s feet.

I know what you’re thinking and I thought it too. Tickling a man there, even a stripper, is such an odd thing to do. In fact, it had never happened to me before. A lady might occasionally try to touch something that shouldn’t be touched but that’s part of the business. Rarely do they tickle the balls of Curtis’s feet. What made it odder was that all the time she was tickling me, she didn’t take her hands from my behind.

That’s when I realised that there was no way the woman could have been tickling me.
I suddenly went cold. I could barely bring myself to look down, fearing what I might see. But as the tickling before more enthusiastic, I realised I had no choice. I had to look.

I immediately saw what had happened. In moving her legs apart to pull me closer to her, the woman had left a large gap through which her guide dog had pushed his head and was now busy, down below, licking me clean of pineapple oil.

I really don’t know if I can go on…

This is getting into areas where I never thought the Chipster would go. This is the stuff you hear about from friends who ventured into the wrong newsagents in Amsterdam. You don’t expect to see a stripper dancing for a blind woman while her guide dog licks pineapple oil from a stripper’s business accessories. Or at least, you don’t expect to see it going on in Bangor. All I do know is that strippers have lost their licenses for doing lesser things with animals.

I was in a precarious situation. Not only was I facing profession ruin, I didn’t fancy pulling myself away from the animal too quickly. If you’ve ever tried to take a bone from a hungry dog, you’d know that they’re likely to take a last nip at the departing meat. It made this one of those situations in which legends are born. Unfortunately, it was also the sort of situation in which legends die. Or at least have something bitten off.

I decided the best policy was one of negotiation.

‘Excuse me,’ I said to the woman.

‘Oh, you’re not going?’ she asked, her hands tightening on my behind.

‘No, no,’ I said, ‘I was just thinking – and I know this is an odd time to ask you this – but do you happen to own a dog?’

‘I do own a dog, yes, why?’

‘And did you bring your dog with you this evening?’

‘I did,’ she smiled.

I nodded as I tried to concentrate. ‘And did you leave your dog at the side of your chair?’

‘I always do. Macca’s never far away.’

‘That’s what I thought,’ I said. ‘I think it’s your dog that’s currently licking me.’

‘Licking you?’ she asked. ‘Licking you where?’

I struggled as I tried to concentrate. ‘Higher than my knees, lower than my nose,’ I said, thinking that the situation was bad enough without being vulgar about it.

‘Oh,’ she said, apologetically, ‘he can be so naughty.’

My hips froze. ‘He?’

‘Of course he’s a he. That’s why I call him Macca,’ she explained. ‘I named him after Paul McCartney.’

Things could only have got worse if was actually the ex-Beatle licking me clean down there. I felt my stomach clench and my hips slow to a gentle grind.

‘Well, he seems to have a taste for pineapple oil,’ I said.

Her face peeled apart as a smile spread across her face.

‘He loves pineapple,’ she said proudly. ‘I always give him pineapple chunks in his bowl. He loves pineapple chunks.’

‘Yes, well, there are two chunks I hope he doesn’t fancy chewing.’

She suddenly looked impatient as I tried to ease myself back.

‘Oh, don’t stop now,’ she said, ‘I’m enjoying this.’

I felt like crying. ‘Is there anything else he likes except pineapple?’ I asked.

‘He loves chocolate drops.’

‘Well he might get an extra big chocolate drop if he doesn’t let me go,’ I said, feeling my nerves get the better of my stomach which clenched and made my bowels shift uneasily. ‘I don’t suppose you have chocolate drops in your bag?’ I asked.

Her hands slid from my body but by now I didn’t dare more.

‘I think I do,’ she said, feeling for her bag. ‘Here you go,’ she finally said, handing me a small bag of milk chocolate buttons. ‘What you going to do with them?’

I ripped open the bag and filled my hands with the chocolate treats.

I barely looked down. I didn’t think I could bear to see what the dog was doing. Instead, I lay my hand next to the dog’s head and waited.

I seemed to wait an age before he moved. And I don’t think I’ve ever seen Tony Curtis look as happy as he did when the dog went for the nibbles. I grabbed Macca by his collar, took his owner’s hand, and placed one into the other. And then, with the briefest wave to the crowd and ran to the stage. I didn’t even stop to pick up my clothes.

‘What’s wrong with you?’ asked Stan, the stage manager as I flew past him. ‘You were a while out there.’

I couldn’t explain. From somewhere below the stage, a dog gave a long mournful howl, as though regretting the biggest pineapple chunks never to have graced his dish.