61 Frames Per Second by John Constantine Today in Nerve's videogame blog: Street Fighter. The movie. A new one. With that chick from that Superman show. Don't act like you don't know what I'm talking about!
The Remote Island by Bryan Christian Mad Men's January Jones struts her stuff in Vanity Fair. Plus: Damages returns, the latest Gossip Girl guest star and Donna Martin capitulates.
The fifteen minutes before a male stripper performs are the worst fifteen minutes of his night. Sometimes he's holed up in a men's room stall, trying to ignore the guys hanging out by the urinals. Other times he's sitting on some girl's freshly made bed, staring at the baby pictures on her wall, while she and her friends giggle downstairs. Either way, he doesn't have a whole lot of time. And somehow, he has to get his dick hard.
A man named Tango is explaining this to me, and now he stops and exhales. He's a stripper, and he dresses like it: baggy jeans cinched up high on the waist, square-toed black motorcycle boots, a black T-shirt and a black handkerchief over his bald head. I ask him if he brings a porn magazine to shows, to make the preparation easier.
"Yeah," he says, almost defensively. "You have to. Because you've got to concentrate. It's hard work. Plus you have everyone saying, 'Yo, you're on next — hurry up!'" Few dancers want to admit it, but many have to use penis pumps in order to achieve backstage erections. Magazines aren't always enough.
After that comes the worst part: "You tie it up. Most guys use pantyhose." Tango is a polite, soft-spoken guy, and I sense that he doesn't really want to talk about this. But he takes a deep breath, and then explains how it works, slowly and precisely, as if he's teaching a class. "You have it erect. Then you tie it up by the shaft, at the end. Then you tie it around the sac. If you do it wrong, your shit will go down, and you'll look like a little inchworm out there. And if you tie it too tight, you'll end up in the hospital."
A tied-up dick stays long and swollen, but it's not really erect. It hangs from the groin, neither stiff nor flaccid, like a stuffed sock. "After a while," Tango explains, "it gets numb, because the circulation stops. So when you're out there, you're just thinking, let me hurry up and take care of this show, so I can untie my shit." Tango wants to make sure I understand the terminology. Once you've tied off, you put your dick in a "beefer," a fringed satin tube attached to a jock strap. Not all strippers beef up: some go onstage wearing a "pouch" — panties, more or less — which doesn't require any preparation. But if you want to be showered with crumpled-up bills, you'll probably have to show your dick — a maneuver known as "flashing" or "pulling out." And if you're going to pull out, you need to beef up.
she and her friends giggle downstairs. Either way, he doesn't have a whole lot of time. And somehow, he has to get his dick hard.
