At the end of the three months, I finally found the dirty old granddaddy of them all -- the Clermont Lounge. It made sense that the last strip club I went to was the polar opposite of the first one I entered. Established in 1968 and situated on seedy Ponce De Leon Avenue, the Clermont Lounge is tucked under the Clermont Hotel, a place that rents rooms by the hour, if you want. The ceilings are so low that I'm sure tall men have had their pompadours and Mohawks flattened. There's wood paneling throughout. Cheap gin is served in urine-test plastic cups. The women's toilet is separated from the strippers' dressing area by a piece of sheer material hung from the ceiling.

As for the strippers, they're almost incidental. You might even forget about them until you get up to grab a drink from the bar, and you're confronted with a gyrating ass in your face. There's a dance floor, beyond which I'm told female patrons who are so overwhelmed by the sheer glamour of it all can rip off their clothes and begin their stripping careers on the spot. Like most stories about the Clermont, this may or may not be true.

But the stories are plentiful. There are rumors of a mother-daughter team working the joint, as well as a congressman's ex-wife and a trained wrestler. The star of this den of iniquity is Blondie. Folks will tell you she's 60 years old -- but she does not look it. She looks about 20 years younger. Then again, this is the kind of place where a stripper would lie about her age to add to the giddy perversity of the atmosphere.

Blondie is also a pioneer of the tit-punch. Usually reserved for festive occasions, such as bachelor parties, birthdays and the death of wealthy relatives, it involves ramming a gentleman's face in her ample bosom, and punching her own tit repeatedly, looking strangely like Fred Sanford in the process. She also crushes beer cans between those resilient mammary glands.

On the subject of body parts, you have never seen so many peculiar body types on display. Bulbous asses with flat pancake tits, squat legs and long necks, sexy mamas who are 4 feet tall and 4 feet wide. The women dancing listlessly on the bar could be fry cooks at the high school cafeteria or the salesperson who demonstrates hardware products at the mall.

I went to the Clermont for a goodbye party in 1999, where we bought one guy a lap dance. Unbeknownst to us, when a lap dance is purchased, the dancer will use whatever song is blaring from the jukebox at the time. Consequently, our friend was treated to a naked, writhing Jezebel, attempting to coerce a boner to Ray Parker Jr.'s Casio classic "Ghostbusters." Afterward, whenever there was a lull in the conversation, one of us would thoughtfully inquire, "Who you gonna call?"

The Clermont Lounge is the Baltic Avenue, the Wal-Mart, the Spam sandwich of the strip world. Charles Bukowski could have written 300 short stories here. Tom Waits could have sung a million melancholy notes here. But it got me thinking about the only real similarity between the glitzy Gold Club and the seedy Clermont Lounge, the common thread that connects the high-end, celebrity-soaked club and the low-end, freak-infested club. The answer is hidden in this one small fact: In both places, the women's bathroom is connected to the strippers' dressing area.

And that's what makes it the ultimate archaeological tour for a gal. The fact is, no strip-club owner would ever allow men to see that side of the show -- no matter how low-grade the illusion is. Men can salivate and stare at any number of saucy body parts onstage, but backstage is strictly off-limits. Backstage is a place that plays host to the humble, dreary rituals behind the sexual fantasy. No male strip-club patron would want to be exposed to the deodorant with tiny armpit hairs clinging to the top, wadded-up tissue and used douches in the wastebasket, teary calls home, or complaints of cramps and sore tits. It destroys the magic: The swish of the curtain reveals too much.

But women already know about all this. The curtain was pulled back for us from the onset. We have already caught the Floridian mermaid at Weeki Wachee going off to the side of the tank to steal a gulp of air. We know which shoes make us tall, which bras make us buxom. We know that Tampax doesn't really instill enough confidence to prance around in white clothes like they do in commercials, and that coverup never really conceals a bruise on your face.

So it doesn't matter if women see this side. We live it, daily. We are always catching glimpses of bra straps fixed with a safety pin, dark circles from staying up all night with a sick baby, dark roots hidden under a scarf, disappointment over a birthday gift. It is these familiar observations scribbled in a pink diary, the uninspired monotony of our daily routines that link us together. And sometimes, it's comforting to sit back and appreciate the sweetly mundane pact of dull little secrets that all women sign, whether they know it or not.

In August 2001, the Gold Club became the property of Uncle Sam after a long, celebrity-filled racketeering trial. The last I heard, the city government was going to tear down the big black building and turn the property into a park.

I'm all for it.

I'd like to think of the ex-Gold Club strippers taking their kids to the park. I picture them walking along on their slender legs, pushing baby carriages and lifting little Jenny or Joey onto the swings, careful not to scratch their chubby arms with a long red fingernail.

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