Perfect Gentleman by Brett Battles Read Free Book Online

 
     
     
     
    You won’t like me.
    Whatever. I’ve stopped caring.
    I’m not a bad guy, but you’re not going to believe that. People like you never do. You hear about what I do. You see how I live. You think, sleaze or deviant or something like that. Maybe you’re right. Maybe I ’m all those things . I certainly don’t think God’s waiting for me to show up at his front gate.
    Again, it doesn’t matter. This isn’t really about me, is it? It’s about Joseph Perdue.
    Now there was a guy you should really hate. A real asshole. But you people only choose to see one side of him. You made him out the hero. Someday you’ll probably call him a martyr for the cause. For the American way. That’s what happens to the dead, isn’t it? No one cares about the truth.
    I remember the first time he came into the bar.
    That’s not really surprising. I remember every time someone new comes in. It’s part of my job. First I need to make sure the guy (they’re always guys) doesn’t look like an obvious problem. If he’s too drunk or too belligerent or has got a bad rep, I point him to another bar and say they got a special show that night and he shouldn’t miss it. Works every time. If he doesn’t seem like he’ll be a problem then I size him up, figure out how much we can expect to get out of him and what he might be looking for.
    On the evening Perdue came in, the usual pop crap was blaring out of our far too expensive sound system. Occasionally, I’ve been known to sneak in an old Skynyrd album or The Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd. God, I love that record. But the girls always protest and I seldom make it through “Speak to Me ” before I have to flip back to Lady Gaga or Gwen Stefani or the Black Eyed Peas. When Perdue walked in, I’m pretty sure the song playing was “Perfect Gentleman” by Wyclef Jean.
    Perhaps I should have taken that as a sign.
    It was a slow night, a Tuesday. Our big nights are Thursdays, Fridays and Mondays—the first two because around here everyone is ready to start the weekend a little early, and Mondays because that’s when we hold our weekly body-painting contest. Nothing like some fluorescent paint, some beautiful young women, and a few black-light tubes to fill up the place and bring in the cash.
    Event evening or not, we still had a full complement of girls, somewhere between twenty and thirty at the beginning of the shift. That number would depend on how many girls were sick, how many had found someone for an extended absence, and how many just didn’t show up.
    No idea what our exact total was that night. I do know that Ellie was there. She was up on the stage with five or six others grinding away. But I’ve gotta say, whenever Ellie was on stage, it was as if she were dancing alone. That was her power. She was a superstar. The killer body and the killer personality and that killer something that wouldn’t allow you to take your eyes off of her.
    You don’t see a lot of superstars. Maybe one or two per bar. Ellie was our one.
    In strip bars in the States, the girls had routines, elaborate moves choreographed to the latest hip-hop favorite. But not here.
    Of course, my place really isn’t a strip bar. And it’s nowhere near the States. It’s in Angeles City in the Philippines. Perhaps you remember Clark Air Base? Used to be the biggest U.S. base outside of the States. The old main gate is only a couple miles from the door of my bar.   But then there was Mt. Pinatubo erupting ash over everything, and the Filipino people threatening to erupt in anger if the U.S. didn’t withdraw.
    We withdrew.
    Well, the government did. Us ex-pats, we stayed. And over the years we’ve been joined by more .
    This is the part where you realize you hate me. Yeah, my bar is one of those kinds of bars. A go-go bar. At my place, you can watch them dance, buy them a drink, talk to them, and then take them out for the night or for a week if you want. You just gotta pay the bar fine, and