Strippers in Atlanta

I went to Cameron's bachelor party night before last. It was fun- the strippers weren't gross.
Well, any more so than any pretty girl who wiggles her nibbly bits on guys noses for dirty one dollar bills. Strippers are gross. I lied.
The strippers kept telling me I needed to tip or get away from the rail, but that's where Cameron was, so I just pretended I was deaf and talked funny and pointed at my ears. Guys kept peeing in the garbage cans in the bathroom, which was fucking weird. Also, there was a really fat guy with a tray of cheap cologne and lotions and shit who squirted the soap in your hand when you used the sink and I think wanted tips but didn't say anything to the guys who kept peeing in the garbage cans. 

I have found that paying attention to the strippers is against the spirit of the thing. Either you are coked out of your mind and full of whiskey and think the whole thing is swell, or you drink bud lite and try to stay away from the tables, and just watch, because the setup is unhealthy and pretty weird, and there are 100 guys hoping the stripper offers to go get coked out of her mind and drink whiskey with him. Now- Saturday night- we visited a true Atlanta institution (apparently): the Clermont Lounge.
A piece the newspaper did recently dubbed it 'The stable where old strippers go to die'.
Not only were the strippers on an island in the middle of the smokiest most gnar-drawling bar I've evr drank $1 PBR in, they were, almost uniformly, over forty and wobbling around like PCP had the better of them. One grandma wore a little red riding hood outfit, then a Krispy Kreme getup, and crushed beer cans between her tits. This place was both horrible and inherently honest, stuffed beneath a weekly-rate hotel on a run of Tattoo parlors. I got the inside of my lip tattooed.
The rub was- the joint filled up with an old Cuban DJ in a fuzzy white Kangol hat and more happy, drench-sweating gorgeous twenty and thirty somethings in rockabilly dresses and sunglasses and snappy shoes than I have ever seen, and danced like the paving stones were coming out of their streets and howled and gave dollar bills to women that looked as if they'd cut their hair that morning with a grapefruit spoon.
It was the best bar I've ever been to, and the girls were sharp and quick and danced too well for me and the enormous lesbian bartender put me in a headlock and called me Cuddles at one point. All I did was order a drink, and she dragged me onto the bar by my neck and called me Cuddles and told me I could have a job cleaning the dancefloor, as she gave me a painful noogie and people laughed at me. I am still confused, but the Clermont Lounge was pure 1950's debauchery- the kind of thing I imagined as a small boy when bad things were described to me.
When I first heard punk rock, or metal, I remember being reeeeaaaally disappointed, because they were candycane tame in comparison to what I'd imagined. I eventually found bands to redeem my imagination. It took longer to redeem strip clubs. That place was fucking dynamite.
Oh... there's a tattoo parlour next door.