Free A Guardian of Innocents by Jeff Orton Page B

figured it was probably starting fights or maybe grabbing a pair of silicone jugs during a lap dance.
    “So which one do you work at?” I asked.
    “Hunter’s Den.”
    My stomach turned over when I heard that name. The Hunter’s Den was a hang-out spot Kimber had listed as one of Galen’s favorites.
    Could he get me in? I wondered. True, I was about sixteen months away from being twenty-one, but maybe he could sneak me in the back door (or vouch for me at the front door.) We were about two weeks into rehearsals when I finally found my huevos and inquired about whether or not he could.
    His response was unexpectedly jubilant, “Sure, man! I can getcha in! No problem.”
    “You know I’m nineteen, right?”
    His expression fell into disappointment, but I saw the joke form in his mind before it ever had a chance to slide out of his mouth.
    “Shit, really? Damn, I thought you were fif teen.”
    With tongue in cheek, I smiled a little bit to be polite. Truth was I was more than a little sensitive about my baby face, peaches n’ cream complexion. It’s always made me look younger than my age. For women that might be a good trait, but it sure as hell isn’t one for men.
    *          *          *
    Per Bo’s advice, I took some of my spending money and bought some nice, stylish clothes at one of the more pricey stores at the local mall.
    “You wanna look like you got some money to spend so the girls will pay attention to you,” Bo explained, “Cuz if you don’t, they’ll take one look at that man-child face of yours and say, ‘Hmmm, didn’t he bag my groceries at the store last week?’”
    I didn’t want to smile at that smart-assed remark, but my facial muscles betrayed me by stretching my lips into a half-smirk. I was figuring out that Bo loved to find a person’s soft spot, the underbelly, that one thing he could exploit that would drive his victim nuts.
    I was one of five men that arrived together at the Hunter’s Den that night after rehearsal. There was me, Bo, another guy from theatre named Lloyd and two guys from Bo’s band that met us in the school parking lot.
    Bo was the designated driver, and we arrived at the strip club in his gargantuan, box-shaped van. While the vehicle’s outside was covered in hail dings and various rust formations, it spoke volumes about Bo’s mechanical abilities when the van (though a relic probably from the seventies) ran with only moderate engine noise.
    Through the mind’s eye of my adoptive father, I had seen strip clubs. I thought I knew what to expect: sleazy skanks dancing around poles drunk (and probably high) while the DJ churned out mostly country tunes with a little bit of classic rock and maybe some 80’s hair metal. Before I walked into the Hunter’s Den, I had no fuckin’ clue there even was such a thing as an “upscale gentlemen’s club.” 
    The women of this club weren’t the glossy-eyed junkies I’d prepared myself for. They were very likely the most beautiful girls I’d ever beheld in person, outside of TV and movies. The club itself was immaculately clean. The floor was carpeted, with not even one piece of trash or cigarette butt blemishing it.
    We found a table and seated ourselves in some large posh leather chairs. I spent the next twenty minutes or so enraptured by the scenery, forgetting my reasons for coming here. The entire place was dimly lit with animal-head trophies adorning the walls (not that I’m into that shit, I don’t find much sport in killing innocent animals from a safe distance) and the dance-techno music pumped out a constant bass from the speakers you didn’t so much hear as felt.
    Bo turned to Lloyd, visibly frustrated, “Take those damn sunglasses off! This place is too damned dark for you to even see anything. You’re too much of a tight-ass to be Howard Stern. Quit trying to be cooool .” 
    That last word fell out of Bo’s mouth with the disgust of a guy who’s trying to shake an amorous dog