She Has Steve Buscemi Hair (And Eyes)
I end the week with a little extra money in my pocket. Perhaps my son’s bills were not quite as harrowing as they had been in past months. I don’t know. It’s likely I forgot to pay something. Anyway, since I don’t believe in saving toward retirement and there are no original Clive Barker paintings or graded Rusty Kuntz cards available to me at the moment, I have no alternative than to get my ass to the strip joint and throw this money away like an idiot.
It goes without saying exotic dancers can’t help but love me. You see their eyes glaze over with bliss the moment I slide the five-dollar entry fee to the counter girl. First thing I say once I have the ladies’ collective attention is “which one of you beautiful ladies are looking for a little DP action?”
Responses vary. I assure them “I’m just asking because you’re not going to find a better looking Dumb Polack in the entirety of Northern Alabama.”
I’m usually right in this assertion. One time I was wrong. One time a guy at the pool table raised the hand he wasn’t using hustling his balls and said “hey, I’m Polish.”
Maybe he was more handsome than I. Only marginally, though. We both had the same pinched eyes and corncob nose. That fake ass Roman Polanski toupee might have put him over the top for the ladies. He probably had more money in his pocket if he was slinging quarters around on billiards.
Regardless, southern dancers are far more personable than their northern counterparts. Down here, the ladies are capable of showing flashes of kindness. They’ll ask if I’ve been keeping my A1C levels down. They express the hope that my overtime hours have been painless though abundant. Northern strippers tend toward the cantankerous. One dancer at the Industrial Strip on the outskirts of Chicago famously told me to get the fuck out of her way. Somehow, I was in her way, sitting at the bar innocently drinking an Okocim. The same night, a different woman asked me “what the fuck are you looking at?” which seems to be counterintuitive as far as conversational gambits go. I was actually looking at the stiletto strapped to her garter belt circumventing her thigh thick as the pillars of the Parthenon. The Region rule of thumb governing knives carried at all the titty flops was that the blades were not allowed to be longer than the wielder’s cock. A stupid, arbitrary rule that relegated me to carrying penknives most of my sporting days.
Anyway, the last time I showed my face at Uncle Buck’s Booty Bungalow, I straight up had a bad time. I got button hooked by a Filipino law student in a red g-string who after filling me in on her schooling, immediately launched into the exotic dancer’s version of a gofundme page for the movie she planned to write, direct, and produce. It centered around the west coast groupie culture during the late sixties.
I’m not one to shit on people’s dreams, but this… seemed destined to fail.
“I want the movie to start with this song,” she said. “Have you ever heard it.”
She whipped out her smart phone and played the first painful minute and a half of Cream’s “White Room.”
“Are you familiar with it?” She asked.
I practically wrote the fucking song. Between that song and Eagle’s “Hotel California” if I had two songs that I could choose to erase off the face of the fucking earth. Those two and I’d throw in Grateful Dead’s entire catalogue.
But I don’t want to be that guy. The type of guy who can’t suffer a teenager to wear a Nirvana T-shirt without talking about how I gave Kurt Cobain his first guitar. You know the type of asshole. The type of jackass who interrogates anyone foolish enough to show the least hint of fandom. Oh, you like Smashing Pumpkins? Name five songs off Rhino. Yeah, I can’t be that guy. But I can’t not be that guy just a little bit.
“If you like that played out song you should listen to Disraeli Gears. ‘Tales of Brave Ulysesses’ will blow your little mind.”
Perfect. Asserted my cultural superiority without coming across as a complete fuckwit.
“I’ll give it a go. But I think I got all the songs picked out I want for my movie. You want to take me back for a private dance. All the proceeds are going into my movie.”
I would have thought when I asked the bartender to give me the cheapest beer she had on draft, that would have been an alert to all and sundry that I would not be entertaining the option of a hundred- and fifty-dollar private dance. Me sitting in darkness showing inhuman restraint while the poor woman endeavored to touch me as much as she could tolerate will making as little contact as possible.
“I’m not sure my short money will put much of a dent in the budget…”
“Oh, we’re gonna go low budget guerilla filmmaking, for sure.”
“For a period piece using classic rock tunes that require acquiring the rights…”
“There’s parts of LA that haven’t changed at all since the ‘60’s. That’s where they film all the period pieces.”
Fuck. I stared at my Michelob draft. The dancers were supposed to be listening to my line of bullshit. I came in wanting to talk about my latest collection of short stories. It’s a goddam shame my life has come to this. Her will to conversational domination is unrivalled.
“You know, I managed to interject. “If you need someone to play a young Eric Burdon, I’d be game.”
“Oh, you’d be a perfect Eric Burdon.”
And there it was. The money I’ve given her thus far, all three dollars of it, wasn’t going toward her pretending I was attractive, or young, or interesting, or a crackerjack writer of short stories, poems, and columns. No. The money was somehow meant to twist reality to show that a 6’3 bald Polack could feasibly pass for a 5’2 Brit with mopish hair and a voice like Metatron. Her words lingered like the discarded crib of a miscarried baby. She didn’t even know who the fuck Eric Burdon was, yet somehow realized she just said something wildly absurd.
I felt sad. She felt mildly inconvenienced.
So, I bounce into Uncle Buck’s Booty Bungalow today feeling like the universe owed me a kind face and a patient ear.
The first woman I see resembles Penny from Big Bang Theory, and I hadn’t even drank six beers, yet. Strangely, the moment she sees me, she slips into the backroom where I can’t go without first fighting four big dudes with bad attitudes. So, I sit at the bar and order my cheap draft. I’m immediately accosted by a middle-aged woman with Steve Buscemi hair. Short, parted to the side the way the actor favored his hair in Reservoir Dogs. And, god help me, she had Steve Buscemi eyes. Just like the fucking meme. Watery, glittering Steve Buscemi eyes that would compel you to believe that if you didn’t tip her, she would totally understand.
My dad always told me there’s no such thing as an ugly woman, because he realized even in my early youth, I was not going to pull women into my orbit with a smile and wink of the eye. I still lead with my personality. And I prize a woman’s personality above all else. Which is why I’m at the strip joint instead of the library.
“Hiya. You been here before?”
“No. I… I… fuck, usually do my day drinking on the road.
“Well, welcome to Uncle Buck’s Booty Bungalow. I’m Sienna.”
“You can call me Polish Hammer.” I extend my hand, and she shakes it tepidly.
“So, Hammer, what brings you around?”
“Polish Hammer, please. You say Hammer, you could be referring to the Swedish Hammer, the Lithuanian Hammer. There’s a fucking Arapahoe Hammer running around here, if you can believe that.”
“So, how are you, Polish Hammer?”
“Well, my latest collection of–.”
“Let me tell you, my two youngest, Sierra and Marcellus have been driving me crazy. Won’t give me a moment’s peace. My eight year old boy is just like his father.”
“Yeah, my son’s half-retarded. Not like mentally. Not really. He’s employably retarded. Like he refuses to work.”
“Marcellus is up my butt, constantly. I can’t even take pussy pics while I’m at home. I gotta wait till I get to work.”
She spreads her legs, and I glance down. There’s a tattoo of a headless Tweety Bird on her inner thigh.
“You know where the head’s at?” She asks, her Steve Buscemi eyes boring into the center of my forehead. Even her teeth are jacked up. I can’t even…
“It… looks like it wasn’t even tattooed…”
“The kitty ate the head, Silly.”
“Oh, dear…”
“You want to go in the back for a private dance? I’ll show you some more tricks the kitty can do.”
“God, no… I’m sorry, I’m just not here for that.”
“Then, what are you here for, Polish Hammer?”
“I just… want to talk about my new book. A collection of short stories… that…”
“I’m good,” she says as she slides off the stool and fucks off to wherever Steve Buscemi looking strippers go.
Karl Koweski is a displaced Region Rat now living in rural Alabama. He writes when his pen allows it. He’s a husband to a lovely wife and father to some fantastic kids. He collects pop culture ephemera. On most days he prefers Flash Gordon to Luke Skywalker and Neil Diamond to Elvis Presley.
THE POLISH HAMMER POETRY CORNER is a weekly column, posted each Tuesday morning.
