(no subject)
Sheila was the most dangerous thing in Rick's life.
Every Friday night, she'd threaten his ability to live. Her weapons were not her clothes, not her body, but how she took her clothes off her body.
The club, called 'Headlights,' was a medium-sized affair, nested in the midst of bars, hotels, gas stations, and the highway. The savvy strip club consumer might make use of each one in a single night. The club's exterior, with its faded paint and sporadic peeks of underlying brick wall, was neither particularly attractive nor well looked after. But every Friday night, cars filled its parking lot.
(Rick had to take the bus.)
'Headlights' was the most frequented strip club in the tri-state area. Men loosened their ties, guzzled their liquor, and opened their wallets to fertilize the catwalk by sprinkling greenbacks. The building's exterior, unattractive, unkempt, was the polar opposite to the ladies that worked under its roof.
'Headlights' was only half an hour away from the most populated university campus in the tri-state area. Barely legal women shimmied out of their clothes, gyrated on stage and pole, and touched themselves while stuffing cash into their G-strings.
The lights in the place, the music in the place, both were, at times, attempts at simulating the tempo of a heartbeat. The lights on the main stage would change colors, flicker, whirl around the girls and around the room while they were dancing. The club had amplifiers stitched throughout. Bass-heavy hip-hop invariably came pounding out of the speakers, sometimes shaking each man down to the teeth. The only place these men could have heard anything louder would be in war. Here, Rick felt at home.
Rick wasn't a soldier. Rick had never set foot outside of the United States. He found comfort in the club because, once upon a time, he had parties much like this in his parent's house.
The parties were paid for by his parent's money - before they'd kicked him out. The closest Rick came to seeing that kind of money anymore was when he'd see it on the stage of this club. And it was Sheila whose luscious body cracked open the most wallets.
And this is why Sheila was such a danger to Rick: Sheila was not a thing; Sheila was a pole dancer. 'Sheila' was the name on the pole dancer's birth certificate, but on Friday nights she became a woman who wore and robustly displayed tear-away clothing and high heels at work. Moany master-mixes and a vibrant round of strobe lights would announce 'Headlights' main attraction: 'Vanity.'
And, sitting in the front row, sometimes after having to shove and push, Rick would feel his heart jumping out of his chest.
She would dance so badly. Not for lack of skill, but lack of humility, decency, shame. The things she did on the pole and the stage made every man in the place hoot and holler. The things she did on the pole and stage would make Rick grin, gasp, and wheeze.
Rick's heart, a donor heart from a teenaged boy, and the last material gift his parents gave him, was not the problem. It was the rest of Rick's body that was the problem. His white blood cells ganged up on the new heart, knew it wasn't Rick's heart, and took great offense. They would have liked to destroy this invasive heart, though all it wanted to do was pump blood.
All Vanity wanted to do was shake and grind. Her dreamy body, bared, bounced and jiggled in pleasing ways. All the men gave up their money whenever she got close to them, and some would toss it on stage adoringly even after.
Rick was the only guy clutching tightly to his money. He wanted to give her every dollar he had, but might just collapse if he didn't have a hand pressed right above where his adoptive heart would be. The lights forced his pupils wide, the pulsation of the music vibrated throughout his body, and this girl took everything that was left. His heartbeat belonged to this girl.
With teeth grit, he'd eventually manage to toss the money on the stage. The boy's heart, he thought, would have him feeling even younger than he was, would have him playing sports and wearing sleeveless shirts, would have everything from jail bait to MLFs salivating over him. Instead, it beat and beat like crazy for Vanity, as though it was the first time he'd seen a girl naked. And at least as far as his heart was concerned, it could've been the case.
It felt like he loved her, in a teenaged, hump hump sort of love. She possessed all the same qualities the other girls he hump-hump loved had: She could fill out a sweater and miniskirt; every other man wanted her; and cash came to her as though she were money magnetic.
It was one night like that, at 'Headlights,' when Rick didn't have enough money to get wasted at the bar that he began to think seriously about his old life, the never-ending party, the money, the women. That was where the trouble started. That was when he decided he'd have to get money to start his own club, and that was when he decided he'd have to steal Vanity away to do it.