Big Al's and Alice's
Adventures in the Skin Trade
I was hanging out in the warm-water pool after aqua-exercises that I do with a group of women mainly in their 70s but possibly a little older and also a sprinkling of assorted younger women and even a mother and daughter duo whom I took for sisters. They were both dressed in Goth outfits and the mother had her hair pulled back in a severe bun and bright red lipstick, while the daughter had a round and smiley face. They were pleasantly pleased to hear me ask whether they were sisters, and the mother’s face broke persona and she smiled.
Then the class ended, and as I said, a few of us hung out so as to discuss Big Al’s strip club in Peoria. I have no idea how the topic came up, but one woman who is younger than most of the people, maybe in her late 50s, gave the impression that she had been to Big Al's. She said they would falsify your bill so it looked like you had taken your client to some place other than a strip club for lunch.
I said, "So you've been to Big Al's?" She said no, but she knew someone who knew the score. Another woman wondered whether Big Al was still alive because she heard somebody shot him. I said I didn't know but I had been to Big Al's years ago, where a scrawny little gal, about 45, who was working her way through graduate school, served me and my friend Brad and asked if we wanted a private dance. We declined and ate our hamburgers and then moved to the stage with our beers while an outstandingly gorgeous and fully formed and completely naked graduate student in all her glory came out. I just about dropped my beer stein while my friend Brad pulled out a bunch of one-dollar bills and started feeding them to the young lady.
Then he suddenly slid a dollar bill in front of me and the gal came over and bent over and rubbed her astonishing breasts in my face - AHHHHHHH!!! I instinctively reached up and put my arms on her shoulders - just touched them - and she immediately drew back sharply and said, "NO HANDS!!!" I was horrified and looked around to see if there was a bouncer ready to grab me and drag me out of the place. Then I looked over to see Brad laughing his arse off.
The ladies liked that story and the teacher said she had gone to the Kappa strip club, out by El Paso, one time. She said it was quite sorrowful: it was Amateur Night, and there was a 45-year-old woman struggling to get into a prom dress and get it zipped up so she could then take it off. The gal was already drunk before she came on, and it just got worse. We all had a big laugh out of that - silently thanking God that we were not that person. I threw in that my home town of Streator, Illinois, used to have two strip clubs - Grandma's and Pappy's - and the teacher said that was awful - they could have at least gone for less incestuous names.
I later told a female friend and my sister about my conversation with the water women, and my friend told *her* story of going to Big Al’s and seeing female and *male* strippers. The rest of us Memorial Day picnickers made all kinds of ribald remarks. And when I told my sister, she *too* had a Big Al’s story, except it was Big Alice’s she visited way back when with her bridge club, of all things. She said it was just upstairs from Big Al’s and when they went in, there was only one male stripper, a skinny scrawny guy wearing a G-string and tube socks. I guess he was hoping to hit the big time - ya know, “If it plays in Peoria.” She said it was the funniest thing she had even seen.
And those strip joints in Streator? The last strip show I saw in Streator was on New Year's Eve back about 1974 when I was living in a shack in Kangley, Illinois. It was Pappy's (now called Teke's and very respectable now). They first had a lowdown dirty slutty girl, who warmed up the randy crowd of animals and anthropologists in attendance that night, and who served to introduce a gorgeous Amazon Queen of a woman in flowing rsilver fox robes, who made the natives shrink back in unison and then howl to the rafters. These scenes have been played out in girly shows and hooch and cooch dances all across this mighty nation for eons. I filled my pockets with free roast beef sandwiches and went back to Kangley. :)