Titter Bar

It was Greg's birthday last week, and he came to see me as a "birthday present to himself." Greg's been my on-and-off regular customer for a good 2 years now! He's generous, a non-rapist, and generally good company. On his birthday visit, he put a small cash gift to me in an envelope, along with perhaps one of the cheesiest Hallmark cards I've ever seen in my life. You know the kind, with a raised pastel flower motif along the front and embossed gold lettering spelling out some corny-as-hell poem about belonging together, growing old together, enriching each other's lives. The kind of card you gag-gift someone! He waited for me to read the card, which I primarily regarded as a "cash holder," but it's clear he thought otherwise. "I read that card, and I knew it was for you. It just spells out exactly how I feel about you. I couldn't have said it better myself." Over the next hour of his visit, he repeated no less than four times how "perfectly" that card summarized how he felt about me.

Like I said, he's a good guy. I'd put him low on he list of awesome guys I've met stripping. The hot half-Asian dude who became politicized as we'd drop antiracist political chit chat between lapdances, Irish Gold, Hot Guy (this intensely sexy construction dude from Serbia who I should have been paying for lapdances), Chester Brown guy (a funny lawyer dude who'd gift me graphic novels from my wishlist every time we met up), and the studly Chicano "friend" I made at the strip club all rank much higher than him, though.

Actually, he's starting to annoy me.

He'll make these stupid jokes and wait for me to laugh at them. For example, he asked me if I was going to be working last week on Friday the 13th. When I told him no, he asked, "What, are you a triskaidecaphobe?" I suppose he thought the punchline of his "joke" was knowing that there's a word for the fear of the number 13? Anyhow, I didn't laugh, but he started chuckling pretty hard. When he saw I wasn't laughing, he said, "You know what that means, don't you?" And I said yes. And then he stared me down, waiting for a laugh. Eventually, I obliged.

He does this all the time. He'll make some remark that he finds funny, start laughing, and then - if I don't laugh - he'll explain the joke to me. Greg! It's not that I don't get the joke! It's that it's just not funny! I swear, next time this happens it's going to come to some kind of standoff - picture his sweaty brow...me, twirling my hair in tension, a tumbleweed rolls through the club. Will she laugh, or won't she?