San Diego is a Navy town, and, like most military and many college towns, it has its share of strip clubs. I was there on a business trip, and I needed some R&R, so I browsed through the phone book. There’s a chain of clubs that, like some hotel groups, seems to deliver a fairly consistent product across the country within the vagaries of local ordinances; I picked one of the chain’s locations in San Diego by the simple expedient of being able to find its street on my Hertz map of the city.

I’m happily married, and I visit such establishments when I travel on business not to get laid but to pass some otherwise very lonely time. I watch the girls dance, I buy a few drinks for some of them, and I try to strike up intelligent conversations. The latter is not particularly difficult, in this or other clubs I’ve visited; a few of the dancers fit the definition of vapid, but most of them are quite bright and some are students earning their way through college.

This club is set up much like some others in its chain, small round tables with barely-padded chairs surround three sides of a stage that’s backed by a mirrored wall. There’s a row of more comfortable chairs on casters close to the stage, separated from it by a walkway and a narrow shelf to support drinks and ashtrays. On the stage there are four floor-to-rafters brass poles in a narrow diamond pattern; the center two, about four feet apart, are connected by a horizontal pole section set seven feet off the deck of the stage.

Around the other three walls of the room, up a couple of steps from the main floor, are partially partitioned areas with couch-like seating and painted plywood boxes that have brass poles rising from their tops to the ceiling. Those boxes are six feet from their corresponding couches, and there’s that walkway between the stage and the closest seats for the same reason. Aside from the constraint, universal in California and rapidly spreading across the country, that nudity equals no alcohol in such clubs, the local law in San Diego is that the dancers, when exposing even as much skin as one would see at the beach, must be at least six feet from their customers. When doing a non-nude couch dance, known in some places as a lap dance, a girl can brush her hands or body against or otherwise touch a customer, but the converse is absolutely verboten. These San Diego clubs are paranoid about losing their licenses, and touching the girls is a surefire way for a customer to get himself bounced.

The financial arrangements between the dancers and the club are interesting. In addition to shelling out $100 each year for an entertainer’s license, the girls not only do not get a paycheck, they have to pay the club a certain amount each shift for the privilege of working there. They get to keep their dance tips and most of the money paid to buy them drinks, but the club takes a slice of each personal-dance fee and the girls are expected to tip the waitresses who hustle drinks for them.

The Beach Boys got it right, though; California girls are special. While this club has a sprinkling of thunder-thighs and pneumatic centerfold candidates, the mix differs from what I’ve seen in most places around the country; the majority of the dancers here are slender, firmly-toned hard-bodies. Regardless of shape, the girls all look and smell fresh and clean; a concession to sell razor blades, body powder, fragrances, and cosmetics in the club would be worth a fortune. Some of them dance to slow songs, while others choose more up-tempo cuts, but the end result is the same, an impressive display of luscious young female flesh for an overwhelmingly male audience.

Just as in any random sample of 30 people the odds are better than 50-50 that two of them have the same birthday, the chances are that among the women working in a strip club there is at least one who is kinked the way I am. I like to discuss experiences, my own and those of others, with people who share my special interests, and occasionally I get lucky. Some dancers advertise their orientations, and I thought things might be looking up when a girl mounted the stage wearing a spiked collar. After she had danced her way down to the bare essentials, she was wearing the collar, high heels, and a set of chain-connected, tweezers-type nipple clamps. I tipped her as she left the stage, and when she came out of the dressing room after rearranging her clothes I invited her to join me for a drink. Initial appearances can be misleading, and I’ve found it’s always a good idea to proceed with caution.

“You were wearing some interesting adornments. Are they for real, or just for show?”

“Oh, they’re for real,” she said. “Do you play?”

Nothing subtle here, I thought, but I never hesitate to make my situation known. “My wife and I both play,” I told her. “How long have you been in the scene?”

“A couple of years,” she replied. “I started when I was sixteen.”

Then I fell into the first-impression trap. “Do you have a regular top?”

“I used to bottom,” she said with a smile, “but I just top now. I’m thinking of becoming a pro Domme. Which way do you play?”

This 18-year-old with visions of sugar-plum dollar-signs still has a few things to learn, I thought to myself. Like the fact that collars are a symbol of submission, and Dominants who understand what they’re into don’t wear them. “I top,” I said dryly. Now that we had ruled out any possibility of mutual play-interest, we continued to chat about various aspects of D/s and the state of the scene community in San Diego.

Each DJ at the club is a combination of a music-and-lights controller and a carnival barker, with a line of patter exhorting patrons to avail themselves of the various semi-private dance options, each of which, needless to say, has a price tag. I had pretty much tuned out the current one’s pitch until something changed in his tone and I found myself drawn back into the larger surroundings.

“And now,” he announced with a heightened vocal fervor, “the 1995 showgirl of the year...” I perked up a bit. In a place like this, I thought, the showgirl of the year, even from a couple of years ago, should be worth a look. “ ... and the 1996 and 1997 Po’Lympics champion...” What the fuck is a Po’Lympics? But I had no time to puzzle that out, “ ... this is...” a long dramatic pause, then, in a voice lowered half an octave in pitch and reduced to a hoarse whisper, “ ... Tabitha!”

I watched a slim woman stride confidently up onto the stage on open-toe mules with five-inch spike heels, and I knew instantly that Tabitha was as different from the other dancers as night from day. Blonde hair a shoulder-length shag rather than a mane, disdaining a lingerie-style outfit in favor of a short, shimmery dress, older, more mature, and totally comfortable in her milieu, Tabitha moved with a poised, vibrant energy. She quickly demonstrated, with feline grace and lithe athleticism, what the term Po’Lympics meant; some girls had used the brass poles as occasional dance props, but for Tabitha they were erotic weapons. Her charismatic blend of bold sauciness and sinuous sensuality was bewitching; she made the other dancers appear to have been sleepwalking through their routines. The ambient tension had suddenly become electric; conversations died, and I sensed the atmospheric change as her animal magnetism grabbed and held the focus of every person in the room, dancers and customers alike.

Five breathtaking minutes later, Tabitha slipped back into her dress, came down off the stage, circled the walkway collecting tips, and headed for the dancers’ dressing room. I pushed my heart back down from my throat by sheer will-power, sipped from my coke, and tried to redirect my thoughts by asking the Domme wannabe still seated beside me, “Do you know if any of the girls working here bottom?”

“There are a few.” She identified one dancer as a life-long submissive, suggested another as a possible about whom she had heard a few idle comments, and then she blew me completely away when she said, “ ... and Tabitha, from time to time.”

I couldn’t believe my ears. “Tabitha? Tabitha bottoms?”

“That’s right,” she confirmed, and I discovered that the minimum time needed for the mind to transform a mild vanilla attraction into a raging D/s-bdsm fantasy can be too short to measure with anything less precise than an atomic clock.

One of the waitresses approached to ask if I wanted to buy the collared lady another drink, and when I shook my head absently both of them left to prowl the rest of the room. Tabitha’s performance had apparently been a high point for many of the customers, because quite a few left immediately afterwards and the place had quieted down considerably.

When Tabitha came out of the dressing room, I offered to buy her a drink and she sat down beside me. She drank coffee as we talked, and I learned some things about her, including her age and the fact that she had a three-year-old daughter. Eventually, I turned our conversation in the direction of my fantasies.

“I understand you sometimes bottom,” I said as casually as I could manage.

Tabitha nodded her head. “I love a good flogging. The endorphins cut in and I just drift away; I have no idea where I am or what’s happening around me.”

We talked about different kinds of play, she shared a couple of her previous experiences, and we discussed creative ways to avoid, for obvious reasons, marking her during a scene. I had no idea where the conversation might end up, but I do have one unusual method of putting prospective play-partners at ease and I didn’t hesitate to try it. “I write scene stories,” I told her. “Would you be interested in reading some of them?”

“Sure,” she replied. “I like to read, but I haven’t been able to find much along those lines.”

“Wait here,” I said, “I’ll be right back.” I went out to my rental car, grabbed a 9”x12” manila envelope from my briefcase, and was back inside in less than a minute. As I handed her the envelope, I explained, “Both of these stories are reality-based. One’s a first-meeting tale, and the other’s a scene I did with my wife last August.”

Tabitha surprised me by opening the envelope, pulling out the pages, and starting to read. She quickly became absorbed, and I could tell from her reactions, which were a fascinating mixture of facial expressions, non-verbal sounds, and body language, that she was relating to the female narrator-character of my first-meeting story. After a few minutes, I told her I had written that story prior to the actual meeting, sent the first part of it to the lady involved as a way of reassuring her that I understood her fears and concerns, and eventually used the rest of it as my script for the scene.

“You didn’t tell me that before,” she said. The look she gave me was brief but intense; when she turned back to her reading, I sensed that I had somehow grown in stature in her eyes as a result of the insights into the female submissive head-space I’d expressed in my writing. Shortly thereafter, she stopped reading and put the stories back in the envelope. I looked at her questioningly, and she said, “I’ll finish reading it later, at home. I’m getting to the good part now.” I had to chuckle at that; she had gotten past the build-up to the actual first-meeting scene, and it was apparently starting to turn her on.

While we’d been talking and then sitting together while she read, a few more customers had drifted in, and I wanted to spend more time with her before she had to start circulating through the crowd. One of the more interesting features of this particular club is that a customer can ‘rent’ a dancer for a half-hour of relatively private interaction. All within the rules, of course, but there’s a back room with a small stage at the requisite distance for nude dancing, comfortable leather couches for lap dances, and lower volume from the sound system to facilitate dialogue. When I told Tabitha I wanted a half-hour rental, her response gave me a warm feeling.

“I don’t like to do that when the club is busy,” she told me. “The price for half an hour is equivalent to four couch dances, and I can usually make more in the time of 10 to 12 songs out here, but for you I’ll do it. Let’s go.” She took my hand and led me to the VIP Room, then stepped back out briefly to inform the on-duty manager of the arrangement. When she returned, one of the waitresses was following her, and I agreed to freshen both our drinks. Tabitha pointed out her favorite couch, and she sat on the edge of the stage across from me while we waited for the drinks. We were the only people in the room, and we continued our conversation on a variety of topics. Time passed, and after about 20 minutes she asked if I wanted her to dance for me, and if so, how.

I’d not yet seen Tabitha do a couch dance, and I was eagerly anticipating the experience, but I had been sitting a long way from the stage and my eyesight is not the greatest. “I’d like you to dance nude for one song,” I told her, “so I can see all of your beauty up close. Then you have to get dressed again, because I want to be even closer to you.” How corny can you get? I told myself. Still, her smile looks awfully genuine; under the circumstances, perhaps she can accept sincere, non-drooling flattery as a compliment.

Beauty is in the eyes and the mind of the beholder, and I won’t even attempt to describe how beautiful Tabitha looked to me as she stepped onto that small stage and started to move in a slow, sensual way. The dancer out on the main stage who had selected the next song unwittingly cooperated; the music was a soft, gentle ballad that was just what my fantasy needed. Tabitha teasingly lifted her skirt for just a moment, flashing the thong she wore underneath, then made love to that brass pole in a way that made me achingly aware of my fantasy desire.

When she whisked the dress up and off over her head, I saw for the first time that Tabitha had more than just a tongue piercing; there was a delicate silver dumbbell at the base of her semi-erect left nipple. She turned her back, bending over to waggle her firm behind at me, and slowly slid the thong down over her sleek thighs and shapely calves. When she gracefully collapsed onto the stage and opened her legs in a startlingly shy-like manner, I caught sight of a second delightful surprise, a tiny gold ring at the midpoint of her left inner labium. I leaned forward, straining to memorize every line, every curve, every square inch of her body.

After that song ended, she dressed quickly. I sat back on the couch and removed my glasses, setting them aside; I knew I wouldn’t need them for what was about to happen. I confess that I remember few details of her physical movements during one of the most enjoyable experiences I’ve ever had. My most vivid recollections are of her face, so close that I could count the tiny pores in her skin; her bright blue eyes, gleaming with the inner knowledge of the gift she was bestowing by her presence; her hair, brushing lightly along my arm as she changed positions across my lap; her lips, moist and oh-so-kissable with their bright pink gloss; and the heady ambrosia that is the scent of a woman who is keenly aware of her own sexuality.

Tabitha had told me she would be working on a specific night a few days in the future, and I’d been sitting in the club for about an hour when she arrived just after ten that evening. She came directly to where I was sitting; I rose to greet her, and she offered her cheek for a quick kiss.

“I’ve had a few drinks,” she confided. “Would you order a coffee for me? I’ve got to do a couple of things, but I’ll be back in a few minutes.” She hesitated, then added softly, “I finished reading your stories.”

There was alcohol on her breath, not overpowering but noticeable. “Did they work for you?”

I swear I saw a hint of a blush in her cheeks. “Definitely,” she told me, then headed for the area where the dancers’ dressing room and club office are located.

I caught occasional glimpses of her as she moved about that area, and I became concerned when she did not return. The DJ started to announce her as the next dancer, then broke off and quickly covered when he realized she was not standing by the stage ready to perform. I motioned to one of the club managers, using the rapidly cooling coffee on the table before me as my reason for inquiring.

“Is Tabitha all right? She asked me to order her a coffee, but she’s been in the back for quite a while.”

After giving me a quick eye-flickering checkout, he assured me that she would be right out. Then he headed for the club office, and a few minutes later Tabitha walked over and sat down next to me with a bit of a sheepish expression.

“Are you okay?” I asked her.

“I’m fine,” she replied, “but I don’t really feel like getting up on that stage tonight.”

I wasn’t sure whether I really believed the first part of her response; alcohol can affect people in lots of different ways. Nevertheless, she clearly wasn’t completely under the influence, and if the second part of what she said was true, I was possibly in luck. “How about going in the back room?” I asked her.

“Sure, let’s do that,” she replied, and she sounded happy that I had suggested it. In the brighter lighting of that space, more like a well-lit living room, I saw that her skin, a light golden tan only a few days earlier, was bright red; she had, she whispered, spent too long in the club’s tanning bed. Then Tabitha was stretched out across my lap on her tummy, her pert bottom tilted up, moving slowly in time with the music. I was again enjoying that up-close view of her undulating body when she put her lips next to my ear and whispered, “Do something a little bit naughty.”

I was stunned. Fantasy was one thing, but she was inviting me to touch her. As discreetly as possible, I moved my left hand and slid my fingertips up the soft surface of her thigh; her skin was hot from the sunburn and as smooth as a baby’s behind. As my hand moved past the crease where her thigh joined her buttock, I felt her press upward against my palm. Emboldened, I raised my hand a few inches and then brought it down, lightly but smartly, across the sweet spot of her left ass cheek.