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Close Call

Book Guy

I write it like I mean it, but mostly they just want my money.

I've attended strip clubs here in New Orleans several times in the last eight months, or so, since I moved back here. On more than one occasion, my discussion with strippers has ended up with a gentle surprise that we live in quite a similar area of town. The way things are, right now, in the rental market, especially after Katrina, it's no surprise that there are odd arrangements in a lot of houses that previously weren't rentals, so I kind of thought nothing of it.

Well, recently a friend from down the street decided she'd have a moving-out party. I knew this nice woman from her daily walks with her dog, past our house and to the nearby park. We struck up a friendship because, it turns out, we've studied in the same graduate field, and she has a good background in this town that might help me get a tide-me-over teaching position. When Katrina hit, she rearranged all of her priorities and began working as a waitress, a bartender, and now a maitresse d'hotel at a swanky 5-star restaurant in town, even though her hope is to get back into that kind of teaching.

She and her roommates came down to our door and knocked and invited us to a "Seven Deadly Sins" event. My mom and dad -- with whom, for all intents and purposes, I'm living -- agreed to attend. I did too, at the time. Mom would go as Sloth -- pajamas, it's easy; and dad as greed -- pictures of recently indicted NOLa politicians and dollar bills pinned to his shirt pocket, also easy. I hadn't thought up an outfit.

Well, the night for the party came, and I just felt like, geez, I really don't want to go to a grad-student type party with my mom and dad. It's bad enough, having to ask mommy to do the laundry after hurricane Katrina, now I just don't want to have to meet strangers and explain to them what a loser I am. So, I hemmed and hawed and eventually just begged out of going to the party. I wasn't up for it, and I kind of suspected it might be embarrassing for me, especially among people who are like my former peers, in the academic world of teaching English language and literature. I didn't want to have to explain myself.

So, I did my own thing, mostly hung about the house. Well, my parents, hippie trendsters that they are, were the lives of the party, to hear them tell it. And when they came back, they knew a whole heckuva lot more about the backgrounds of the hosts than I had known. Like, for example, one was the manager NOT at a 5-star restaurant, but at a strip club in town; and another was a dancer there.

Imagine, my pipe-smoking habit AND my strip-club-going habit all outed to my mom and dad by a woman, who might have claimed to be bartending at Brennan's Palace Cafe, and by her roommates, who all work at strip clubs downtown.

Well, now I know what clubs to avoid, because I know the people who work there. Or what clubs to GO to, I guess.

Geez, the life I live. :) Gotta get a longer-term job and my "own" place sooner rather than later. I had let it slide -- it doesn't really bother me, living "at home," because I essentially have my own small business going and I am living in a wing of the house rather than "with" the parents directly. Essentially I'm in a granny flat, so it's more like normal. And after Katrina, everyone got up-ended, so we're more tolerant of non-traditional living arrangements here than we would have been before the storm. But really ... that was close ... whooooooosh ...