Notes From a Sleazeball

As I was leaving the Gentlemen’s Club in Atwater Village the other day, a man in a passing car slowed and shouted, “Sleazeball!” and drove off.

When I got home from work that night, my wife said, “Well, how was it wallowing in filth for lunch?” She wouldn’t let me touch her.

You think it’s easy being a newspaper columnist?

All I did was visit a nude club in order to investigate the wider ramifications of moral decline near a suburban neighborhood, and ended up getting a lot of heat not only from my wife but from a total stranger.

I wasn’t in the place for longer than 17 minutes (well, maybe 22) but am beginning to feel as though I ought to wear a little bell around my neck and chant “Unclean” through the streets of L.A.

This all began when I started getting telephone calls from people in Glendale saying I ought to do something about the strip joint opening up in their neighborhood.

Actually, it’s in a Los Angeles industrial zone, but close enough to Glendale residential areas to cause concern among the Glendalians.

One of those who called had taken part in a protest picket. He and others carried signs in front of the place that said “No Porn” and “This Is SICK!”

It didn’t do any good. The Gentlemen’s Club opened as scheduled in a freshly painted, yellow and white stucco building with signs of its own that said “Live Nude” and “Girls, Girls, Girls.”

*

None of those who called had actually been in the club. They were going on the assumption that anything involving naked women was automatically lewd, a point of view dating back to biblical times.

Although L.A. doesn’t mind a little filth and impiety in its back yard, Glendale is not that kind of place, except for the guy who went to jail recently for stealing women’s underwear.

Most Glendalians do not steal underwear and confine their nudity to the shower or to certain times under the covers with a person of the opposite sex to whom they are legally wed.

If God were forced to live in Southern California, he would live in Glendale.

Realizing the intense moral purity of the town, I decided to see for myself just how much the Gentlemen’s Club outrages the common decency of those who live within its area of evil influence.

I paid $5 to a fully clothed lady in a booth and then stepped through heavy curtains into a large, dimly lit room with two runways surrounded by tiny lights. There’s a kind of surreal, cosmic glitz to the place, and I spent a few moments blinking and wondering if I had been transported through a twilight zone to hell or Las Vegas.

A dozen or so men were in the club during the noon hour, most of them seated around the rim of one of the runways. Contrary to what the people who telephoned me said, they did not appear to be drooling sex perverts. Most were probably transmission dismantlers or drywall plasterers, but some could have been X-ray technicians or insurance adjusters. I looked around for my cardiologist, but, thank God, he wasn’t there.

*

Liquor is not allowed in places that feature full nudity, but you can buy coffee for $4 a cup and other non-alcoholic beverages. A free lunch of pizza, fried chicken and some other things was offered, but it just didn’t seem right eating in the presence of naked women.

They have names like Bambi and Tiffany and claim they are doing what they’re doing only to save for college or to support their kids or to donate to their church. It’s a job.

They begin dancing scantily clad and end up with nothing on at all, writhing and flapping like awkward human pelicans in the throes of dementia. Sometimes they swing around a pole placed there for their imagination and amusement, other times they wiggle into positions that are less sexual than anatomically challenging.

Are the dances dirty? Well, women playing with themselves onstage to thumping rock music might be considered less than moral. But there was no finesse there, no grace, no passion of the spirit to ignite prurient fires. Erotica, properly presented, ought to inflame. The women at the Gentlemen’s Club only saddened.

I feel sorrier for them than for the community in which they perform, and wonder about the diminishing value of human dignity in an age that panders to the sleazeball in us all.

“Maybe you learned something,” my wife said later, after she’d forgiven me. I’m not sure we ever do.