Free [sic]: A Memoir by Joshua Cody

associated—is best when shared with a partner. And everyone knows that these high-end Wall Street strip clubs are overwhelmingly populated, every night of the week, not by couples but by men, some single, but most in groups. It’s a stereotypical macho excursion, like the steakhouse, the gym, the hunt. You and six or seven of your buddies head over to the strip club and sit around Caroline or some girl from Romania or the Ukraine and everybody gets erections. What’s the point of this? And if big Biff over there gets a lap dance, everybody watches and cheers him on. Why? Why does Biff enjoy this? Is he proving to his colleagues that a beautiful unclad girl gives him an erection? And that if she rubs her clothed ass along his clothed cock he will eventually ejaculate in his pants? Why would Biff’s friends need to be reminded of this fact, and to, in turn, provide to Biff and to themselves irrefutable proof of their heterosexuality? I’m always reminded of being over at a friend’s house in high school. I didn’t know the guy well at all. He was some sort of athlete. I have no idea, actually, why I was at his place. It was like a friend of a friend of a friend, one of those. He was watching a porno, and his legs were spread wide, and he was rubbing his erection through his pants, staring at the television. I was, to say the least, uncomfortable. Then I wondered, is my discomfort symptomatic of prudishness, homophobia, repressed homosexuality, or simply a general lack of interest, at best, in another man’s penis? Bingo. I have my own to worry about. I don’t have the time or energy to take on another project. (It’s been noted, too, that football, that least gay of sports, consists of men watching other men dance around in tights and then crumple upon each other, tired and happy.)
    Feminists criticize strip clubs for the alleged degradation of women, but in my (admittedly paltry) experience the women play very little role in the equation at all. Which of course is, in its own way, degrading; but not, I think, in the way the critics mean: they’re thinking of the naked slave at auction, of Gérôme’s The Slave Market . Of all the strippers I’ve ever known, in fact, none felt degraded in this sense, although more than a few were somewhat mystified, or bemused, by the fact that they were actually paid to dance around and take off their shirts. (And just hold on—I’m describing a highly circumscribed, rarefied sector of the industry: these are very high-end, exclusive clubs, with sufficient security, etc. In other words, we’re not talking about Eastern Europe. That’s for later.)
    I didn’t ask Caroline too much about her stripping experiences because (a) neither of us found it particularly interesting as a subject, (b) I was more curious about her other day job as a dominatrix, and (c) we devoted much of our time to carefully fucking, because after I got the bad news that the six months of chemo did not in fact do the trick, we both were aware that in a matter of weeks I would be entering the hospital with a slight chance of never coming out, and with the certainty that there wouldn’t be much fucking for a while, coming out or not. And I say “carefully” because, like every stripper I’ve ever fucked, coincidence or not, she had hepatitis B, and I had to be careful of that due to my already compromised immune system, which was shortly to become more compromised before being entirely eradicated—the ultimate strip tease, further than even Caroline and the girls went. Even deep kissing can be a little dangerous, so we were careful indeed, even when, after a discussion over caccia e pepe on the finer points of Japanese pornography—during which this professional dominatrix savored the irony that she was personally a confirmed submissive—we fucked outside on a SoHo street, her hands gripping the cold metal pipe of scaffolding. That pressing, that pressure, the tightening of the air into one’s ears,