Friday Night at the Chocolate Pussycat

You would think that a bar named The Chocolate Pussycat had some class of some kind. You would be wrong; George’s taste began and ended when he put up the sign above the door. The Chocolate Pussycat is your basic LA sleaze joint. It isn’t grubby and grimy; the place is clean. The decor is cheap formica table tops and barrenness. George offers his customers what they want and can afford – antiseptic sleaze. It’s not my sort of place but I go there; George is family of a sort.

I dropped in last Friday to check out the dancers. The Chocolate Pussycat has something for every taste. There is a pool table. There is a bar with a TV. There are projectors running non stop porn movies on two of the walls. And there are nude dancers. The place isn’t big enough or classy enough to have a real runway. What George did was to put up a big mirror on one wall. In front of the wall is a platform about five feet wide and three feet high that runs the length of the wall. One dancer at a time gets up on the platform and struts her stuff in front of the mirror.

Friday was a slow night. Most of the crowd was sitting at the bar watching the olympics on TV. Every once in a while one of them would turn around and check out the dancer for a bit before returning to the much more enthralling business of watching sports. There was a couple of guys playing pool; they would check out the dancer every once in a while but you could tell that they were interested more in pool balls than boobs. There were about half a dozen guys sitting at tables who divided their attention equally between the dancer, the TV, the movies showing on the walls, and their own conversation. It’s always that way. George sanitizes sex with boredom.

When I got there the first dancer, Linda I think her name was, was just finishing. Linda had the build to be a stripper and you could see that she had been trying to turn the crowd on and that she just wasn’t getting anywhere. I took a table next to a wall where one of the movies was playing. I sat down next to a picture twice life size of a woman giving head. I was reminded of the line about watching a woman perform fellatio is like watching a turtle mindlessly swallowing its prey.

Linda gave it up and the next dancer came on. She was something special. She wouldn’t have made it as a stripper – she didn’t have enough in the tits and ass department. What she had was a dancer’s build, slender with muscular legs and a lot of agility. Linda had tried to turn the crowd on; you could tell that this one didn’t give a damn about the crowd and whether they were turned on. She was there to dance and dance she did.

You could tell that she had had ballet training. She was doing an interpretive dance with a lot of ballet moves in it. I don’t think she even saw her audience; she was all focus, wrapped up in a world of her own in which the dance was all. It was truly beautiful and nobody there gave a damn; they weren’t watching and wouldn’t have appreciated it if they had been.

I finally got tired of nursing my beer and got up to leave. As I headed out the door I waved at the dancer and she waved back at me. I’ve always liked watching her dance. She’s good. I’m really proud of my sister.