Congratulations Obese Exotic Dancer!

America traditionally discriminates against its tubbier exotic dancers, which is bullshit.  Being a little bit bigger isn’t actually a valid reason to say that someone hasn’t got it “goin’ on.”  But Houston isn’t the nicest place to be a dancer in general, so your treatment hasn’t necessarily been any worse than anyone else’s in that market over the last few years.

You’ve made enough in tips from sad, desperate truckers to keep the lights on in the one bedroom apartment you have sex with an incredibly sad landlord with once a week in trade for rent.  The two of you cry afterwards usually.  It’s kind of beautiful, in a weirdly exploitative way.

It’s been enough to sustain you, but the jeers of the crowd, the sly looks and sniggers as men call you over to dance on their friends laps as a “gag,” a joke, look at the fat stripper…  It takes its toll.  It makes you drink and eat, which keeps you fat, tired and unhappy.

Today a group of Japanese businessmen will be coming to town.  They’ll be visiting your strip club while engaged in a series of business transactions aimed at purchasing most of Houston.  It truly is a buyer’s market down there.  While there they’ll do as Japanese businessmen usually do: they’ll go to as many strip clubs as possible and spend astounding amounts of money on watered down drinks and lap dances.

These businessmen, emerging from a culture of restraint, will find the excess of American forms and breasts liberating.  They’ll throw money at your compatriots, treasuring the massive fake breasts assaulting their faces and the sumptuous rumps grinding just above their groins.  It’ll be a bacchanal experience they know well, one they’ve come to expect in a million strip clubs across the Bible Belt.

When you enter to begin your shift, the businessmen will be well and truly shitfaced.  At the sight of you, their jaws will drop.  You will be, in a perfect moment, the excess they have dreamed of every night, the excess they hope to capture and bring home to Japan with their purchase of most of Houston.  One of them, Hideki, will be unable to take his eyes off you.  He will also lack the courage to throw money at you for a lap dance.  But Shinji, the cruelest of his co-workers, will notice his entrancement and, in a moment of kindness intended as cruelty, recruit you to dance upon his friend’s lap awhile.

Hideki will sit there, speechless, entranced, enraptured by your bulk and beauty as you writhe above him with surprising dexterity.  When you finish your time together you’ll rise from his lap to return to the floor, but Hideki will grasp your wrist.  His grip will be tight, but in his free hand he’ll clutch a bundle of money.  This free hand, and the money within it, will be trembling.

You’ll smile at him and return to his lap.

You’ll lose track of time above him.  You’ll emerge from the room and, halfway through your shift, tell your manager that an emergency came up at home, that the gas company detected a leak and that they need you to be home so they can enter your apartment and prevent the entire development from exploding.  You’ll grab Hideki’s wrist and lead him out the back to your Honda, taking him through the dressing room.  His eyes will never leave you throughout the journey.

When the two of you make love he will lay beneath you in fearsome reverence.  He will mutter at you in broken English, promises of love and fortune.  The next morning when he tries to give you money you’ll press it gently back into his hand and leave your cellphone number with him. You won’t believe for a moment that he’ll find it in himself to call you.

When you hear from him months later, it will be a shock, a delightful shock.  When you hear his proposition you’ll be filled with trepidation.  He’ll invite you to come to Japan, to live with him in Spartan comfort.  Your mind will race.  To choose between the comfort of the expected and the possibility of joy experienced over one night again and again in a new, dangerous place is never easy, but your mind will be settling as you open your mouth to reply.

At this point the prediction becomes hazy.

Congratulations Obese Exotic Dancer!