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 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.

Thonglateer Extraordinaire

Because I’ll be busy for the next few days as I sit and stare unblinking at a computer screen, I thought I’d keep the blog active by offering you all a sneak peak at my latest opus. It’s called ‘Thonglateer Extraordinaire!’ and I think it’s the most honest account of life on the North Wales stripping circuit. It also happens to be my autobiography.

Gabby is the mastermind behind the book, and she’s even designed a cover for it in anticipation of our flogging it all my gigs in the next year. The first chapter covers my early life and the training that goes into becoming a successful man of the thong. Today, I’m posting the first part of chapter 1.

Thonglateer Extraordinaire!
By
Chip Dale

Chapter I

The Five Mysteries of One Eye Buchanan

I’ll mention it only once so we don’t have to mention it again: yes, I know who I look like.

I’m sure it’s as much a curse to me as it’s a blessing to him. But believe me when I say that I know nothing about the Liberal Democrat’s policy on second homes in Wales and I’m also certain that Lembit Opik doesn’t know the first thing about indulging female fantasies involving pots of home-made raspberry jam and a plasterer’s trowel. Or if he does, I’m sure he keeps it out of his manifesto promises.

Which just backs up the point I’m making: I’m not him and he’s not me. I mean, if I was him, would I be stripping for a living? Okay, perhaps I would. I really can’t say. I’ve not met the man. But I do know myself and I know the path I have taken to become the most successful male stripper in Wales. And if that’s the story you want to hear, then you’re in luck. That’s the story I’m about to tell.

The path that led me to my start on the Welsh stripping circuit began one October night in the nineteen eighties when a baby was born with unusually well-defined abdominal muscles and a delight in shaking his unreasonably large genitals at all the nurses. There, you might say, the legend was born and I’ve hardly changed since. I’m still covered in baby oil, only now the nurses are often drunk, it’s usually Friday night at the Green Dragon Tavern in the heart of Bangor’s town centre, and instead of my blanket, I’m to be found swaddled in a plumber’s outfit or dressed like a bare-arsed cowboy.

With the name Chip Dale, I suppose stripping was in my stars, or at least as far as taking your clothes off for a living can be said to be augured by an alignment of the spheres, if you’ll excuse the early and totally unwarranted descent to the double entendre. There are few jobs that a man can do in Wales when he’s blessed by fantastic good looks, a body sculpted from Italian marble, and a personality to match. The fact that I disliked underwear from an early age merely added to the unusual set of circumstances which led to my declaring to my family on my sixteenth birthday that I was moving to Bangor to become the best know thongman on the face of the Welsh earth.

For the record, I was christened Crispen Walter Dale. I normally tell people that my mother was inspired by the St. Crispen’s Day speech from Henry the Fifth but I intend to be nothing less than honest with you. I was actually named after the Crisp’n Dry adverts from the seventies. My mother had an addiction to fried potato snacks, which is probably why I was known from an early age as Chip.

My life as a stripper began in my formative school years. I’d always take longer than the other boys whenever we changed for gym and I remember the PE teacher once putting me on report for taking off all my clothes when we were only meant to be changing into our pumps to watch some actors perform Shakespeare in the gym. But that was me. I knew what I wanted to do with my life and I took every opportunity to prepare for it.

It was, I see now, an unusual decision for a young man to make but stripping was my calling and I could never betray it. I remember once being given one of those computerised career tests just before I left school. When my results came out of the printer, I was shocked to see that it had recommended veterinary work. I demanded to see the career’s advisor and I marched indignantly into his office to ask him why male stripping wasn’t an option. He just turned white.

‘Why would you want to become a stripper, Dale?’ asked the man in a grey suit and topped by a wayward combover.

‘Well, sir, I think I have what it takes.’

He ran a finger around his collar, looked nervously towards his office door and then slapped down his hair which had leapt up in apparent shock. Only then did he stand up and quietly close the door before leaning his weak back against the frosted glass which magnified the rattle in his chest.

‘And what do you think it takes to become a stripper, Dale?’ he wheezed.

‘A big personality, sir.’

‘A big personality?’

‘Oh yes, sir. A big personality and rhythm.’

‘Rhythm?’

‘To dance, sir. I don’t reckon you can’t be a male stripper if you can’t dance.’

‘I suppose not,’ he said, his throat suddenly sounding quite dry. He walked slowly back across the room and sat down at his desk where he began to sort career pamphlets for people wanting to work at the Bradford and Bingley. The poor man. I can see now that he was well out of his depth. I don’t suppose he would have known what to say if I’d gone in there wanting to become a nuclear physicist or a Bavarian bugle salesman. ‘Well, so long as you think you’ve got what it takes,’ he muttered finally and shifted his glasses on his nose. ‘I mean, I wouldn’t like to stand in your way, Dale, but you must understand that I can’t recommend this choice of employment. You never heard it from me.’ He briefly smiled and gave me a flash of tobacco stained teeth. ‘You’ve not considered office work? The Bradford and Bingley offer a very reasonable pension plan.’

‘Office work?’ I shifted uneasily where I stood. ‘I don’t think a big personality and a dexterity about the hips suit the Bradford and Bingley, sir.’ And as if to prove my point, I demonstrated the Chipster’s hip-swivel that would later become one of my signature moves.

‘So, you don’t like the idea of office work at the Bradford?’ he laughed, hesitantly.

‘Of course not, sir. I was born to strip.’

‘Were you? Well, good luck to you, Dale. We all have out crosses to bear and I can see that yours is bigger than most.’

‘You can say that again,’ I replied and gave him another thrust of my hips.

‘Yes, well, could you please stop that now?’ he asked, the slight flush that had reappeared on his cheeks now disappearing for good. ‘And I’d prefer it if our little conversation doesn’t go any further than this room. Wouldn’t like it said that I recommended a lad take his clothes off for a living.’

‘I quite understand. I don’t suppose you get many people coming in here saying they want to become a male stripper.’

He laughed and took off his pen top for no apparent reason before realising his mistake and screwing it back on.

‘No, no, you are quite unique, Dale,’ he replied, shaking his head. ‘But so long as you think you’ve got what it takes I don’t want to dissuade you. To tell you the truth, dissuading people isn’t my job. I’m here to give you all positive vibes.’

‘Oh, I’ve got positive vibes, sir.’

‘I can see that, Dale. And good luck with them. Good luck with your big personality, your sense of rhythm, and your positive vibes. I can see that you’ve got what it takes to be… to be… er…’ He looked down a paper on his desk as he almost whispered. ‘A male exotic dancer.’

‘Of course, sir. I don’t suppose it does any harm having an enormous penis.’

He looked at me long and hard. ‘No, Dale,’ he said, with a look of utter envy. ‘I don’t suppose it does you any harm whatsoever.’

I was given special dispensation to leave school early that day and I never went back. Nor did Mr. Morris who I’m told arrived at the staff-room complaining of feeling unwell and went home soon after lunch. He was never seen again. Some say he retired to a monastery but others say he went to live in Thailand before he died after spending five years indulging in untold carnal delights. Some say he just back a Liberal Democrat. I don’t like to think my interview had anything to do with his disappearance, though when the nights are long and my spirits depressed, I often think of Mr. Morris, his grey suit, his combover, his weak chest. I wonder if the Thai air did him any good, or whether once touched by Chip Dale’s dream, he couldn’t live with himself. In a way, you might say that just the dream of being the Chipster had killed a lesser man.