Flight of the Stripper

By Paul McGuire © 2007

My brother and I were on the same JetBlue flight from JFK to Las Vegas. We both booked separately and ended up getting seated in 19D and 20D. He was right in front of me sharing a row with an old guy. My row was empty and just before the flight attendants closed the airplane doors, two extremely loud women with Fendi purses rushed in and sauntered down the aisles. One was a skinny black woman wearing oversized Chanel shades carrying a pink jacket. The buxom blonde wore a pink Juicy track suit and had the biggest and worst fake boob job I had seen since the days when I lived at the Redneck Riviera. Her tits look like she had two pugs stuffed in there. Her weathered face suggested that she had been living a hard life of booze, drugs, and whatever else accompanied life on the pole. Even the botox could not hide the fact that everyone on the plane knew that they were strippers. And they were seated right next to me in 20E and 20F.

"I think your brother got a better seat assignment," the WWII vet joked with Derek. "He got the broads while you got stuck with the old fart."

Despite all my bad airplane karma the last few months having to sit next to crying babies and having several canceled and delayed flights, I finally got lucky and had two NYC strippers on their way out to Vegas to work the clubs or various hooker bars for the weekend. Man, sometimes I fuckin' miss the underbelly of Las Vegas. Sometimes.

The strippers next to me looked good pre-flight, but by the time the plane flew over the Rockies, sitting next to strippers got old.

They retired to the bathroom every thirty minutes (on a five and a half hour flight) to snort lines of blow. The black chick carefully climbed over me. She was thin enough to squeeze by. The blonde was not as limber. The one time she did that, I nearly suffocated in a sea of silicon. The bitches never even offered me a bump.

They yapped incessantly and drank like AlCantHang and BigMike on a bender. The blonde guzzled Skyy vodka and Sprite while the black chick ordered double Bloody Mary's.

"Are you going to drink with us?" they'd squeal everytime they ordered another drink.

"Nope," I said. "I'm high right now. On Jesus."

I lied. I wasn't high on Christ, just generic Vicodin. But I discovered that when you mention the Lord's name in vain, annoying strippers tend to leave you alone.

"By the way, where you girls working this weekend?" I asked somewhere over Ohio.

They were not happy that I called them out on living the total cliche of a life of a stripper and one muttered, "I'm retired."

They constantly rang the flight attendant light which drew the ire of the crew who did not like to be bossed around by wasted strippers. On our descent into McCarran, one flight attendant got snippy with the strippers because they wouldn't stash their purses underneath the seat. The other fussed around with her Blackberry and wouldn't shut it off.

"So strippers don't have to follow FAA rules?" I muttered. Their act was old and I couldn't wait to get off the plane.

When we finally arrived in Las Vegas, the buxom blonde shouted, "Time to double down!"

"If you're working at the Rhino, tell Brandi Hawbacker that Pauly says what's up," I mentioned as I gathered my bags and rushed off the plane. I hope that I didn't contract hepatitis C or some other venereal disease.

Paul McGuire is a writer from New York City.