Tampa

My friend, Dee, is in Tampa, Florida, on vacation.

Canta y No Llores
Originally uploaded by goyishekop.

My father said every block in LA starts with a used-car lot and ends with a liquor store. In Romania, every block has a currency exchange, because it's cheaper to pay the conversion fee and buy Dollars or Pounds than to watch inflation turn your Lei to vapor.

Tampa has an urban-architecure pattern, too.

A decade ago, I was a consultant on a project for Tandem, where the final phase was in Tampa. I was in the second group to go. For the week before, every phone call home from the first group was sprinkled with references to the strip clubs. I thought they were kidding.

Then I flew down. There was one on every block.

The first night, I asked my co-workers which one we should go to. They shuffled their feet, then confessed they hadn't had the nerve to go.

I hurried down to the lobby and asked the concierge the name of the most tasteless strip club. He looked at the head bellhop, and they said, in unison, "Mons Venus."

"Is it close?"

"Oh, about two miles."

"That's close. I'll just walk."

"No! You can't walk. It's not safe."

"Okay. Can you get me a cab?"

"No, no. You don't need to do that. We'll just have the shuttle take you."

The shuttle?

As I stood there, he called the airport shuttle on his walkie-talkie,
and announced that he had a hotel guest who wanted to go "to the Taco Bell."

It was a Mariott -- a Mormon-owned hotel chain.

I realized instantly that (1) they had a code word so their observant guests
wouldn't be shocked and (2) they had enough guests who wanted to go that they
needed a code word.

Sure enough, the driver took me right over, as soon as he returned from his
next airport run.

Once inside, I bought an overpriced beer and had a nice conversation with one
of the strippers, who was trying to get me to buy a lapdance. We talked about
how many women worked there -- how many per shift and how many shifts -- and I did a little quick math, multiplying by the number of strip clubs I'd seen.
I conclude half the adult women in Tampa are strippers.

A few other things I did the arithmetic on:

• Every single stripper was attractive. They weren't all my personal taste, but they were all cute. It wasn't a room full of old, blowzy, bleached junkies.
• About half of them had tattoos, and a third were pierced. This was before tattoos and piercings were "in."
  
• All of them had fancy hair-dos. I don't mean on their heads. They were all shaved in interesting, eye-catching ways.

If what you have to display is your body, and you can't decorate it with clothes, you'll still decorate it.

She eventually decided I wouldn't buy a lap dance and moved on.

I usually regret the things I didn't do more than the things that I did. I now know I should've bought the lap dance, just to see what it was like.