Whenever Abby traveled, she bought books. It was somehow more exciting to discover an interesting book when she was far from home, even the same exact book she might find in a bookstore in her own town.
Maybe when most people thought of San Francisco, they thought of sea air at bayside or delicious scents wafting out of North Beach cafes. But Abby thought about the mysterious mustiness of vintage bookstores or the clean-page smell of big bookstores like City Lights and Modern Times.
She was three stores into her shopping trip today—or, as she secretly liked to think of it, her “literary orgy.” She visited at least a couple of favorites each time she came to San Francisco and tried to find at least one or two new bookshops to explore. She might manage to hit six or eight stores today if she timed it right, and then tomorrow she’d head home—clutching a cloth bag of treasures or lugging a box.
She’d only found one purchase so far, but it was a gem—in a tiny, dusty nook of a bookshop on Polk Street, she’d found an old picture book of strippers and burlesque queens. No photo in it was newer than about 1965, and some went all the way back to the turn of the twentieth century, where the women wore body stockings to create the illusion that they were nude.
What a find! Abby loved books best when they transported her somewhere else, and with this one, she didn’t have to imagine the dancing girls with their sequins and huge feather fans—they were right there before her! She found the closest coffeehouse and sat dreamily sipping a cappuccino, carefully turning pages. She’d never been to a strip club, but the filmy outfits and racy high heels fascinated her. Look at this one, she thought. If my grandmother had been a burlesque dancer, she might have looked like this. Or what if she herself had been born in another era? That might have been Abby herself onstage, opening for beautiful blonde Lili St. Cyr.
San Francisco just made her feel this way—that anything was possible. After her reverie had faded, she finished the last sip of coffee and walked the few blocks to Kayo, a bookstore she’d never visited before. Stepping inside, she gasped—this shop seemed to have nothing but old pulp paperbacks!
From every shelf, glamorous dolls and bitchy babes gazed or snarled out at her. A few were menaced by monsters, a few were being ravished by pirates, but most of them were the focus of the cover all by themselves—or, in the lesbian section, in twos. They were redheads and blondes and brunettes, slinky in evening gowns or seductive in lingerie. They were gorgeous! Abby began making her way through the endless stacks of books, mostly fiction but interspersed with some midcentury pop psychology.
Shocking Exposé!
The World’s Oldest Vice!
Transvestite Secrets Revealed!
What Every Young Wife Must Know!
Innocent No More!
Even the Kinsey Reports and Bulfinch’s Greek and Roman Mythology had been published with lurid illustrations.
Abby walked sideways down a whole row, reading titles and drinking in the brightly colored covers. Almost every one had a gorgeous woman on it. Just change her clothes and she switched from Amazon Pagan Queen! to Sorority Sis Unleashed! The bookstore had been deserted when she came in, except for the guy behind the counter, so she almost dropped the small stack of paperbacks she’d picked out when she got to the end of the row and nearly bumped into a small, smiling woman, who stood as if waiting for Abby to reach her. A man stood behind her, smiling too.
“Oh! Excuse me!” gasped Abby. “I didn’t see you there.”
“I guess not,” said the woman with a grin. Her sweater was buttoned tightly over curves. “You’re the biggest bibliophile in town.” She said it like it was a kind of tasty fetish.
“Yeah, we’ve seen you in the last three stores,” said the man, who had on cuffed trousers and a vintage rayon shirt with a little tiki face embroidered where another shirt might have a pocket. Abby noticed disconcertedly that his nipples showed through the soft fabric.
“We’re bibliophiles too.” said the woman. “But we’re taking a break and going over to North Beach now. Want to come along?”
Abby blinked. “Are you going to City Lights?”
“Nope, the Lusty Lady. You should go. You’ll like it. I saw you snagged that excellent old stripper book down on Polk Street.”
Abby flushed. “Have you guys been following me?”
“Oh, sorta,” said the smiling girl. “I’m Lila, by the way. This is Daniel. C’mon, pay for your books. We’ll get a cab.”
Out on Post Street, a Veteran’s taxi waited, with Lila seated inside and waving her in. Daniel held the door. Abby felt a little like she was heading through the looking glass, but they seemed okay. Actually, “okay” put it way too mildly— they were both really hot. Abby climbed in—once Daniel had seated himself, squeezing her against Lila, she told them her name.
“Want a drink first, Abby?” asked Lila. “We can take you to Spec’s. Or Vesuvio! Kerouac’s old hangout!”
“No,” said Abby, feeling like she’d had a drink already. “Let’s just go.”
She expected a club with seats. But the Lusty Lady had nothing but booths. Abby looked around in confusion, but Lila took her hand and pulled her into a corner booth. Daniel followed them in and locked the door, then pulled out a ten and fed it into a machine on the wall. The kind they have at the Laundromat, thought Abby—but that thought seemed so incongruous here; she didn’t say it out loud.
“It’s a peep show,” Lila explained. “We just watch through the window, see?” The window slid up with a whir when Daniel put the money in, and Lila pointed to the stage on the other side, where the women from the pulp covers seemed to have come to life—big hair, high heels, lingerie half-on, half-off. They sashayed around the stage just like the women on the books would do if they could move—like they owned the place! Some of them made slow, seductive dance moves, while one curvy blonde woman just stood and ran her hands across her pale skin. It looked like she might be about to masturbate.
Abby’s eyes grew wide—there was a Hooters back home, but absolutely nothing like this.
“I used to work here,” said Lila. “The dancers love it when women come in, and couples. Daniel and I come here a lot to show off for them. I thought you’d like to see them, and if you feel like it . . . ”
“ . . . you can put on a show for them too,” Daniel finished for her. “Some of them like to watch.”
“Anybody’ll get into watching,” said Lila, “if you give them something to see.”
Lila began unbuttoning her tight, clingy sweater. A black lace brassiere slowly emerged, and she wiggled her shoulders just a little in the crowded booth, just enough movement to get the sweater off her shoulders. This caught the eye of a dancer, who drifted closer to their window, looked in at the three of them, smiled, and began to dance.
Abby didn’t know which way to look. The dancer wore almost nothing—just high black heels and a black boa made of fuzzy Marabou feathers. She teased her nipples with it and pulled it oh-so-slowly between her legs, so it covered, and then revealed, her neatly trimmed pussy. Abby had never seen anything so sexy. Except maybe Lila—who stood right next to her, breathing warmly on her neck and leaning back into Daniel for support. His hands came up and caressed her lace-covered breasts, making Abby want to reach for them too.
“You can touch,” Daniel whispered. “I told you, they like it when we put on a show.”
Lila’s breasts felt heavy and warm against Abby’s palms. She’d never touched a woman like this—except a thousand times in her mind. She’d gone to girls’ school with Colette and had adventures in Paris with Anais Nin; she’d read Herotica and let her fantasies run in every direction. With Lila’s breasts in her hands, Abby felt somehow ready to have them there. She slid her palms in tiny circles until she felt Lila’s nipples come up, until Daniel got involved, working his fingers swiftly to remove Lila’s bra.
Lila threw her head back against Daniel’s chest and sighed deeply. He bent down to kiss her, and she pulled her skirt up to her waist. The tiny room was so tight that the back of her hand caressed Abby’s pussy on the way down—she couldn’t even tell if Lila meant to do it. By now, Abby felt wildly overdressed too. “Can you help me get out of some of these clothes?” she asked, and Lila and Daniel both helped pull her sweater over her head and off. Then Lila unbuttoned Abby’s jeans. Over her shoulder, Abby saw two more dancers come to join the first one, who still looked into the booth as if waiting for the show to start.
But just as Abby turned to see who else had arrived, the window began to close!
“Damn!” said Daniel. “Has it been this long already?”
“Time flies when you’re having fun. . . . ” said Lila, dreamily.
Abby burrowed in her jeans pocket for cash. She still had at least a twenty. “There!” she said when she’d managed to fish it out. “My turn!” She fed the bill into the slot, which sucked it smoothly away . . . and the window rose again.
There was the sensual blonde, still touching herself. There was the small-breasted girl with the Marabou boa. A Latina with long, wavy hair peeked over her shoulder, and Abby could see a statuesque African American woman across the stage, looking over their way.
“Abby, when you said ‘My turn,’ what did you mean?” asked Lila in that dreamy, turned-on voice. “Do you want to play?”
Abby nodded—she would have said something too, except Lila’s lips covered hers right away, soft and wet, licking and nibbling in one of the most arousing kisses Abby had ever experienced.
“Abby,” came Daniel’s whispered voice right next to her ear, “open your eyes!”
Doing so, Abby saw two of the dancers kissing each other right through the window, almost like they were mimicking the show they saw in the little booth. Also, impossibly large and close up, Abby saw Lila’s lashes, the waves of her dark hair. She let her hands range along Lila’s body, touching everywhere she could reach, her hands sometimes finding skin and sometimes the texture of Lila’s clothes. She could fit the cheeks of Lila’s ass into her palms—they seemed just a little bigger than her breasts—and she touched naked skin when she cupped them, because Lila wore no panties. Behind Lila stood Daniel, his cock hard beneath the fabric of his pants. Abby touched him too. How much could they do in here? She whispered the question.
“As much as we have room for,” said Daniel. “We might not actually have quite enough.”
“But we live right around the corner,” said Lila.
“That way we don’t have to worry about running out of money for the machine.”
So Abby gave herself up to the pleasures of touching them, and feeling two sets of hands on her, until the time she’d bought with her twenty ran out. They left a little gaggle of dancers bending down to wave through the slowly closing window.
Lila and Daniel really were bibliophiles. Their apartment was a tiny warren of bookshelves with a big bed. Abby dropped her book bags inside the door and stepped inside.
AUTHOR’S NOTE: The Lusty Ladies now own the place! As of July 2003, the exotic dancers at the Lusty Lady Theatre (where I used to work, back in the day) are San Francisco’s newest worker-owned cooperative business. Congratulations to them!