My colleague and I differ on this particular issue. The strip club has never held any real attraction for me. My argument essentially boils down to this: I have seen nude women before, and while they can be quite a sight to behold, the idea of beholding them with a group of depressed and/or desperate strangers makes me want to slink toward the exits before I even get inside. That, and the fact that my current lady would drag me out to the pavement and turn me into beef jerky with a hammer if she ever found me in one. Which is part of why I like her, by the way.
That being said, sleaze has a value. What is it? I consider myself a strict traditionalist on the subject of vice, in that I prefer the traditional and time-honored vices: whiskey, general-ruckus-raising, and the company of hammer-wielding women. For a Christmas party I recently discovered something called Chatham Artillery Punch, a recipe dating to the 19th century that was apparently concocted by some dangerous Georgian artillerymen to spice up the banality of playing with explosives. It is essentially three bottles of hard liquor poured into two bottles of sparkling wine and then seasoned with a pound of sugar and all the lemon juice in the house. While not "cheap" in the true LCL sense, I was able to keep a houseful of veteran drinkers sated for approximately eight hours with one bowl of the stuff. It is roughly 60 proof, which sounds low until you consider the fact that people are drinking it in SOLO cups.
But back to sleaze. Cheap is good. That's the whole point of this blog. My colleague is right about the "middle path" approach: take, for example, Beam's Eight Star, which is the meth-head stripper of bourbons, so low in quality that it cannot legally be called by that name. I do not drink Eight Star, not because I consider myself above its furniture-polish flavor but because the additional fifty-nine cents buys me an equal volume of Old Crow and the vast improvement is absolutely worth it. If it were a dollar a fifth you might find me singing its praises. Everything, even in LCL, is a trade-off. Were the meth-head strippers paying me to watch them, I might reconsider.
So what sleaze is acceptable, then? Allow me to paint a picture of my perfect personal blend:
I'm in a room at a party. There's a dirty wood floor or some peeling linoleum or something equally hideous, surrounded by things that are not quite old enough to have come back in style. The table leans to one side because it's got a busted leg and no one remembers why. The only light is a naked bulb dangling from the ceiling, but the room is crowded as hell and loud as conversations fight for dominance. Sitting at the table, I've got a glass of Crow in one hand and my lovely lady sitting on my right knee, drunk and talking to my neck. We're playing Omaha High with a quarter buy-in and my colleague across the table is laughing because I'm losing so I flick a quarter at him that bounces off and hits an empty glass in the sink. Downstairs there's a riot of music so loud it blends together into an indiscriminate raucous mess, some crappy band beating their instruments with shovels. About this time an old friend of mine stumbles in in a ratty green dress, throws open the fridge door and demands to know where all the beer went, when some no-name crasher tells her he shot-gunned it she grabs a spent can from the countertop and throws it at him, my colleague lights up a cigarette and deals another round, and my lady bites my ear and says something unrepeatable.
Just my personal unwashed heaven.
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