Clip Joint

When I was a young lad, forty years ago, I grew a pair of balls and went into a Times Square strip joint. It was a time when Times Square was the vicious, nasty, sex-club center of the World. Peep shows, strip joints, live sex shows, and everything imaginable was being offered in the clubs and on the streets within that three or four block radius.

I went into the club, wide eyed and scared shitless. After buying a drink, I sat down with a "dancer" who suggested that she would give me a blow job (my first ever) if we bought a bottle of Champagne for $60. To which I agreed. We went in a corner of the bar, the waiter brought over the bottle, popped the cork, and poured a couple of glasses from the bottle of the cheapest champagne known to man. Needless to say, I never got that blow job, let alone anything else. I was tossed by an indignant bouncer ten minutes later to the curb, $60 poorer, and pretty much broke. Both sad and mad, I walked back to Grand Central Station happy that I had, at least, been smart enough to buy a round trip ticket so I could get home.

I find that the dancers in Centerstage to be cut from the same cloth as that first "dancer" who clipped me with the age-old Champagne Hustle forty years ago. For the most part I have found that the girls here way over promise and never deliver - to the point of becoming cute over the nomenclature of what she seemingly agreed to. Getting misled has been my experience the last three or four times I have visited, and that is no longer a bad sample, but a clear indication of how things operate here.