Once Upon a Time in Germany: Girl From Ipanema
Posted: December 1, 2011 Filed under: Frankfurt, Nightlife, Storytelling | Tags: Brazil, Disney, Frankfurt, Funny, Girl From Ipanema, Red Light District, Samba, Threesome 2 Comments »2006
I had just gotten back from my tour in Iraq and planned for a sleazy night on the trashed and ransacked streets of Frankfurt, Germany’s Red light District.
The town was my Mecca.
My friends and I didn’t feel comfortable anywhere else. Which is funny because almost everyone else we knew felt the complete opposite about Frankfurt. They were afraid.
Yes, it has drug dealers, crackheads, pimps, prostitutes and tyrannies, but what major city doesn’t? To be afraid of a city that’s searing with questionable sorts, back alley mischief, and a soul sucking sex business, is to be afraid of what truly makes you human!
So it’s not crazy at all that me, Raul and CG were in Frankfurt this night to look for a stripper named Kelly…right?
Kelly (Which can’t possibly her real name) has a lot of history with the crew. And for that, she deserves her own origin story. But for now, just know that she was a beautiful, dark-haired, brazilian exotic dancer, who hung up the thong and lacy bra for a short time to live life as a bartender. And where does she set up shop?
Bar Ipanema
The Brazilian themed bar was squished between a Doner Kabap stand and a hotel. The place immediately reminded me of the song “Girl From Ipanema” by Asturd Gilberto and Stan Getz
When we walked in I was half expecting to see a group of Cigar Aficionados discussing tobacco trades and making cat calls toward uninterested girls wearing colorful short skirts. I know those generalizations are trifle, but everything I knew about Brazilian people before that point came from the couple Brazilian strippers I knew, and the segment in the Disney movie “The Three Caballeros” where Donald Duck visits Copacabana and gets taught how to samba…by this lady.
I didn’t see anything I expected see. I guess the bar itself looked more like the cartoon than anything. Lots of colorful banners and vintage drink ads with pin-up girls posing with lit cigarettes between their fingers. But the patrons were the same heartbroken Germans, looking to feed off the twinkle slowly fading in the eyes of the women of the night. Home, sweet home.
When we met eyes with Kelly, she was both pleasantly surprised and kind of nervous, but so were we. We had no idea how to talk to a stripper with clothes on. It was like trying to talk to Santa Claus in the summertime. Do you ask for gifts? Or do you just make small talk and hope he’ll just give you one? What can you possibly bring up?
“You look good girl!”
Yup…her looks. We complemented her like her clothing was her “new outfit” and her exposed chocolate skin was the comfy “hoodie and jeans” we were used to seeing her in.
It was awkward, but it made sense. Up to that point we had never seen her that way. It was almost sexier. Raul, who was closet to her out of all of us, continued to play catch-up as I sat at the bar and CG, um, wandered.
I was blown away when I turned to my left to see a sexy blond American woman, sipping a mixed drink and staring my clothes off. I calmly said hello and began to introduce myself, politely ignoring the fact that she just had sex with me in her mind.
She returned the hellos and started a textbook round of flirtation.
Flicking the hair? Check.
Touching his forearm? Check.
Laughing at all his stupid jokes and sounding abnormally interested in his job? Check and Check!
She told me how she was travelling throughout Europe to finally escape her crazy mother and to see what lies beyond South Bend, Indiana. She wasn’t the smartest, but the way she put her words together was refreshing. Her clear and precise wit enthused me, reminding my starving ears that there’s more out there than foul-mouthed female soldiers and Thai girls who only speak in yells.
The woman seemed to have scooted closer with every syllable. So now a hand that started on my forearm,
“I’m so glad that you serve our country,” she said, winking.
suddenly ended up on my leg.
But before I could even say anything about her newly place hand, a man sits to the right of me. And guess who he was?
Her husband.
I yelled in the inside, but played it cool. I didn’t want to get into a fight. But as I introduced myself and the woman happily explained that the man next to me was her man. Then things got weird. First off, this guy sat close. Not “let me make you uncomfortable so you walk away” close. No. It was more like, “this other side of you seems uncomforted, how about I give you a thrilling convo on this side while my wife gives you one on that side!”
The writing was on the wall, but I didn’t see it. The man who looked like a younger version of Bill Nye the Science Guy sat almost snuggle-close to me as his “Wife” still continued to flirt with me. Then it hit me.
“They’re BOTH flirting with me!”
I wasn’t positive, but my confusion was enough to make me more nervous than I planned on being that night. So I rose off my seat and went straight to the digital jukebox. I stood there, pretending to scroll through songs, attempting to formulate an idea that could get this woman alone. But my fate seemed dismel when I over heard the woman say,
“He has a cute ass huh?” And the man say, “Oh yeah, definitely!”
My friends and I got out of that bar as soon as possible.
And till this day, I never knew what the “couple’s” plan was. But all I know is that I put myself in the line of fire of sexual predators, just to see a stripper with her clothes ON! Such is life.
Well worth it?
“Hey Carl, Did You Know the word Karaoke is Japanese for Empty Orchestra?”
Posted: September 13, 2011 Filed under: Frankfurt, Storytelling | Tags: Candles, Frankfurt, Funny, Germany, Mariah Carey, Red Light District, strip club Leave a comment »Heidelberg baby!
So here we are in Frankfurt again…
Strip Clubs. They can teach a man a lot about himself, or nothing at all. It’s a serious vortex of visual stimulation and continuous regurgitating consumption of that fuzzy warm feeling you get when you fall in love. You may see that as a contradiction, but it’s not. It’s just Frankfurt.
I have a lot of stories I can tell, (and I plan on having all of them told through this blog…eventually) but I’ll just start somewhere in the middle…
She punched me in the kidney’s. Don’t worry about reading that sentence twice, It’s true. I somehow made a woman…sorry, a teenager, so angry at me that she not only badgered and harassed me every chance she got, she also gave me a right hook. I didn’t know how to respond at first. I was more surprised than I was angry. Like hearing a younger relative swear for the first time.
“Did he just say mutha fucka?”
It was a dirty hit-and-run. She didn’t make any eye contact, but I knew it was her.
I looked at my two best-friends who stood at the bar just as baffled as me. But they knew the pot was going to boil over eventually.
“That bitch is crazy Usher!”
I hear these things like that from friends all the time. But in the search for meaningless sex and midnight comfort, the marauder is unleashed and nothing else matters but the kill. But what happens when the prey becomes the predator? And I don’t mean like the ones Chris Hanson helped catch. I mean the fast, lean killing machines that sliced, diced and disappeared. Like the one Arnold had to fight after all his token black friends died.
Did you see how big Bill Duke’s gun was?!
I snapped out of my confused dazed and pursued the young lady with no plans. I didn’t know what I was gonna say or do. I caught up with her before she fled down the stairs to the bathroom.
“What’s wrong with you? I did nothing wrong to you at all! Things just didn’t work out and I’m sor…”
Yeah. You will never know what I was about to say, because I was slapped…in the face, hard. Not girl hard. But like, real person, all the weight from the hips hard. If she waited she would have probably heard some form of a sorry. But just like a teenager, she was very impatient.
But again I was left in an awkward situation where I was not really angry, but shocked. Like when your 80-year-old high school librarian farts while you’re walking behind her.
“So that’s what the 1800s smelt like…”
In a mad dash to make sense of what had just happened, my brain handed all the motor movements to my inner darker half. It was weird. It was like I was sitting in the passenger side of my car while I watched an angrier version of myself drive.
He (the darker half) decided that it would be a good idea to pick up a glass candle holder.
“I don’t think this is a good idea” I said, “Maybe we should just calm it down and think about how this could get us in trouble.”
My angrier self didn’t say much back. He snarled a bit, mumbling profanities under his breath, but he never acknowledged my softly stated opinions of his forthcoming actions. He just raised that candle holder like a grenade and bite that invisible pin from the side of it. I was only able to grab the wheel for a second, allowing me to blow out the candle within, right before it left our hands.
Luckliy it didn’t hit the girl…Vicky. I was aiming for her I know that much, but I was never good at baseball, badminton, rock skipping or grenade throwing. And I’m glad. When the candle reached the floor it shattered in hundreds of pieces. The proximity of the candle to Vicky’s head was close enough to make her forget that she had to pee. Immediately after the candle exploded, Vicky did an about-face and came back upstairs, passing by me and giving me the strangest and most fearful look I had ever seen. I had scared the piss out of her, probably literally. I was terrified that a bouncer or bartender had seen it, but none of them did. The only person who saw was the bathroom attendant, who quickly came upstairs and told me,
“It’s not nice to throw things at girls.”
I blame his lack of urgency on our language differences.
But I nodded gently, apologized 15 times, scooped up my buddies and exited the premises.
I was a wreck so we headed to our sanctuary, Lido’s Gentleman’s Club.
I was drunk and remorseful and needed something to get my mind off of my hurt face. Jenny, a blond Brazilian dancer, was finishing up her second dance. This girl was always a joy to see on stage. Just imagine if when a basketball game got boring, the 92′ Bulls Michael Jordan would come in and just clean house. 4th Quarter last 10 minutes style. That was Jenny.
The woman who came after her was Dominican. A spicy, hourglass shaped dancer who didn’t take crap from anyone. She was usually mean and hard to read, but when she saw me she immediately asked me how I was. I blubbered out some of the highlights of my evening and I could see that she wasn’t just a robot dancer there to gobble up everyone’s cash. She was a robot dancer who had some feelings programmed in her so sad guys could believe that for one song, she was a real human being. And that song was “One Sweet Day” by Mariah Carey and Boyz II Men. I sang it from the top of my lungs, serenading Dominican through her whole dance. It was hauntingly beautiful. I had so many mixed feelings when I walked in there. I wanted to fight, cry, hide and just explode. But instead, I took part of in a R-rated version of a Glee episode and lost my voice in the process.
I think there should be more musicals done about strip clubs. And there definitely needs to be some Karaoke/nude girls combo. Japan, get on this!
