First Place Short Story

Alma's Night on the Town
by
Jennifer P. Mullins

            As soon as the lights went down and the announcer introduced Mike the Mechanic, Alma Bates knew that she had made a big mistake.  She had heard a preacher say one time that God always placed good Christians just where He wanted them to be.  "When you find yourself someplace where you don't want to be," he said, "just ask yourself  'Now why does the good Lord want me here?'"  Well, Alma was pretty sure that the good Lord did not want her here in this bar preparing to watch a full grown man take his clothes off to entertain a bunch of silly women, and right now, she didn't feel much like a good Christian anyway.

            The evening had started out to be an innocent enough outing.  Alma's youngest daughter, Patricia, was home from medical school for fall break, and her sister, Alma's oldest child, Sarah, had wanted to take her and their two best friends out for a night on the town.  Patricia was all for it, but, sweet child that she was, she insisted that Alma come along with them.  Alma assured her that she did not mind staying at home with her two grandchildren, but Patricia and Sarah ganged up on her.

 "Mom, I only have a couple of days," Patricia said. "I want to spend as much time as I can with both you and Sarah."

"Come on, Mom," Sarah said. "Jim can watch the kids for one night.  We deserve a girls' night out every now and then."

"Well, what about Gwen and Marla?  They might not want an old woman tagging along to slow them down."   Alma couldn't stand to be where she wasn't wanted.

"They won't mind, and I don't really care if they do," Sarah said. "It's Patty's evening and I'm the one who's driving."

Alma wanted to relent.  She was pleased that her girls wanted her to go with them, and she loved having dinner in a good restaurant every now and then, but there was one matter that still troubled her.  As if she read her mother's mind, which sometimes Alma was convinced she could do, Sarah set her mind at ease.

"Now, Mom, don't go worrying about the drinking thing.  You know I won't even drink coffee when I'm pregnant, much less booze."

"And, if I had more than one glass of wine, I'd fall asleep, and my head would fall into my dinner plate," Patricia said.  Like most medical students, Patricia was always sleepy.

It wasn't her own girls that Alma was worried about, though.  She knew neither of them would do anything to embarrass her, but, although she loved them both, Gwen and Marla were a bit too wild for her taste.  She could just imagine spending an uncomfortable evening watching the two of them tossing back drinks and laughing like two hyenas.

Alma felt certain that Sarah and Patricia must have talked to their two friends about her aversion to excessive drinking, because on the night of the dinner, they were both on their best behavior.  True, they both had a couple of drinks, vile looking green concoctions they called Marguerites, but neither of them seemed drunk, a little tipsy maybe, but it certainly could have been worse.  However, just as Alma was beginning to think what a lovely evening it had been after all, she noticed Gwen and Marla whispering and giggling like two teenagers over something they were reading off of an advertisement carousel on the table.

"What?" Sarah asked.

Marla flipped the carousel over so that Sarah could read it.  "Let's do it," she said.

"I don't much think so," Sarah said.  She passed the carousel around to Patricia, who read it and immediately started choking on her coffee.

Alma, who had thought they were debating whether or not to order some huge, decadent dessert said, "Well, I believe I might try a little of whatever it is."

When the four girls began laughing hysterically, Alma demanded to know what was so funny about pictures of desserts.

"Its not just pictures of desserts, Mom," Sarah told her, wiping tears from her eyes. "Tonight is ladies' night in the bar, and they have a show with exotic dancers."

"Exotic Dancers? You mean strippers?" Alma asked. "Why would ladies want to watch strippers?"

"They're male strippers, Mrs. Bates," Gwen told her.

Alma had heard of them, of course.  She had even seen some of them on TV shows, but she could not believe that real women actually participated in such goings on.  She was absolutely shocked to hear her two sweet daughters start discussing going to see this show as if they were talking about seeing a movie.

"The show starts at 10:00 and it's 9:30 now.  If we hurry and finish, we can make it in time to get a good seat," Sarah said.  "Let's do it.  I've always wanted to do something wild like this."

"Me, too," Partricia said. "This may be the last chance we ever get."

"Well, I'm certainly not going," Alma said, when she realized that they were serious.  "You all can just drop me off at a movie or take me to the mall."

"The mall's closed, Mom," Sarah said. "And it's too late to see a movie."

"Well, then, I'll just wait in the car."

"You can't do that, Ma," Patricia said.  "We just won't go." Alma thought she looked disappointed.

"Come on, Mrs. Bates, be a sport," Marla said. "This is Patty's special evening and she wants to go.  She's probably not seen a naked man since she started med school."

Alma chose to ignore this nasty remark.

"Mom, they don't actually strip down to nothing, you know," Patricia told her. "They keep their underwear on."

Alma hated to be a wet blanket.  She had enjoyed the evening with these young women, and the best part had been feeling like she was part of  a special group of friends.  She felt almost young again herself, and she wondered what it would be like to be wild and spontaneous and not to worry about what people thought or what might happen.

"O.K.," she said, "but if anyone from my church sees me, I'll never forgive you girls."

"Oh, I doubt anyone from your church being here, Mrs. Bates," Gwen said.

Sarah laughed. "Yeah, and if they're here, then they're doing the same thing you are, Mom,"  she said.

So this was how Alma ended up seated at a tiny table in a smoke-filled bar full of shrieking women screaming for Mike the Mechanic to "take it all off," which he wasted no time in doing.  Before you could blink your eyes twice the young man, who didn't look a day over nineteen, had given his breakaway coveralls one quick pull and snapped them off. 

Alma had thought he would stay up on the stage to dance, but that was not the case.  No, he came down right into the audience of women, who proceeded to go completely wild and act like stark-raving idiots, at least, in Alma's opinion.  Some of them were up dancing, while others were brazen enough to go right up to Mike the Mechanic and stuff dollar bills into the little drawers he was wearing.  Why, Alma wouldn't even have called them drawers.  They looked more like one of those contraptions that men wore under their bathing suits.  He might not have been naked, but he might as well have been.  Those drawers left nothing to the imagination.

Just when Alma would not have believed that she could have felt anymore uncomfortable, Mike the Mechanic danced right over to their table.  Gwen and Marla both went crazy.  You would have thought that he was Michael Jackson or some other famous person by the way they were acting.  Gwen got up and started dancing with him, and Marla stuffed a five-dollar bill, five-dollars, mind you, into the waist band of his drawers, which, by the way, was way, way down below his waist.  Sarah and Patricia were laughing and cheering them on, and Alma was looking for a hole to crawl into, when he suddenly moved in front of her.  "You get away from me," she told him, but he couldn't hear her over all the screaming women, and she could tell he wouldn't have listened to her anyway.

Now, if Alma hadn't been there and someone else had told her what happened next, she just would not have believed it.  She would not have believed that any young man, even one who stripped down to his skivvies for money, would do such a rude thing, but she was there and she saw it.  As a matter of fact, you might say she had the best view in the house when Mike the Mechanic turned and began shaking his backside right in her face.  "Why, he is just a feisty little brat of a boy," Alma said to herself.  Well, she had raised a feisty little boy who could be a brat when he wanted to be, and she had had two little brothers who were just as bad, and she knew how to handle bad little boys.

In the days that followed that evening, Alma would remember that she had realized the inappropriateness of her action before she could stop herself from completing it.  The slap landed smack in the middle of Mike the Mechanic's shimmying little butt with a resounding pop.  Even in that din of noise, those who did not see her slap his rump, heard her do it.  Well, it seemed to Alma that the bar fairly erupted in hoots and laughter.  Gwen told her later that she had almost wet her pants.  Her girls, however, did not laugh.  They knew the truth.  They knew that Alma had meant the slap as a rectification, not as a flirtation. 

Alma was sick with embarrassment.  Even if Gwen and Marla had gotten rip-roaring drunk and danced on the table, she would not have been this embarrassed.  She wished that she had followed her first instincts and just stayed at home, but then something happened that made her think maybe that preacher had been right after all.  Mike the Mechanic, whom Alma suspected might have been slapped on the fanny a few times before tonight, wheeled around and looked her right in the eyes, and suddenly Alma knew, as well as if he had leaned over and told her, that something about her reminded him of his own mother.  She saw a look of genuine regret on his face, and he mouthed the word "sorry" to her.  She felt downright sorry for him, so she gave him a quick nod of her head to let him know that she forgave him.  Had she been a gambling woman, she would have bet money that this would be his last night in this place.

The rest of his performance was pretty subdued and Alma could tell that he cut it short, because there was a lull in the show before the next dancer came out.  Alma paid no attention to him or to the other two who followed.  She simply sat with a little satisfied smile on her face and thought how lucky for Mike the Mechanic that the Lord chose to place her here tonight.