Dancing at the Scorpio

While rummaging through my closet, I found a tee shirt that evoked a treasure of old memories. The tee sported a poorly drawn picture of a scorpion and bore the name of the establishment from where I purchased it – Scorpio. Under the name were the words - dancers, pool and cold beer, 3416 N. May, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.

The original Scorpio was an old two-storied building located at Villa and N.W. 23rd, across the street from the Shepherd Mall. The bottom floor had a bar, several pool tables and a dance floor – a wooden structure raised about three feet off the floor. Music played while the mostly male customers shot pool, drank beer and watched the dancers perform on the raised structure.

The female dancers all wore the equivalent of a bikini with no exposed nipples, buttocks or pubic hair. That was downstairs, the action upstairs quite different – at least I had heard. Not everyone was allowed to go there. Nudity in Oklahoma City, at the time, was banned and rule breakers treated harshly by the authorities.

Most of the young men frequenting the bar were baby-boomers. Many had survived the dirty war in Southeast Asia, partaken of the many illegal drugs so readily available there, and had visited the nightlife of Saigon and the brothels of Bangkok. Oil exploration was turning the City into a boom town, the young men of Oklahoma, and those pouring into the State because of the boomtown prosperity, an adventurous bunch and ready for a change from the ways their fathers did things. The Scorpio was there to provide that change.

I remember the first time the stairway guard allowed me and my friend Mick to go upstairs. I tingled with excitement and to say that electricity filled the darkened room would be stating a stale cliché that didn’t come close to expressing the pure sexual exhilaration constricting my chest and shortening my breath. A Bob Seger ballad wailed through the darkness as a pretty blonde girl gyrated, totally naked on the stage, both exposed and swathed by the reds, blues and greens of a dancing strobe.

Upstairs was a clone to the downstairs with one essential difference – the dancers performed totally nude. Each young woman danced to the music of three songs. They performed their first song, like the downstairs dancers, in bikini-like costume. They would remove their top toward the beginning of the second song, and their bottoms during the beginning of the third song to the captivated attention of every young man in the place.

About this time, the Supreme Court ruled that nude dancing is not pornographic. After having their hands rapped by several adverse court decisions, the City removed its ban on nudity. Nude dancing soon became common in clubs around Oklahoma City, the Scorpio moving to a new location on north May.

Totally nude dancing continued in Oklahoma City until the Supreme Court ruled that cities could regulate activities that the majority of the people did not approve of. I don’t think a vote to regulate nudity ever occurred but the local police began operating as if it had. Oil prices had begun to collapse, ending the oil boom and Oklahoma City’s boomtown mentality. Baby boomers were older and most, by this time had their own children. No one much protested the end of an era.

The Scorpio no longer exists, but the building that housed it remains. Ironically, it is now the home of a Vietnamese pool hall and domino parlor. I smiled as I pulled on the old tee shirt, a little too small for me now, but still in good shape. Yes, an era has ended but I still have my memory of the first time I climbed the stairs at the old Scorpio, not knowing what to expect, but spellbound with youthful anticipation.

Gondwana

Meeting Clive Cussler

I was incensed when my oil company went belly up at the end of the last oil boom. I had never before faced total failure and I felt emasculated, both mentally and physically. Anne and I had an IBM AT, the state-of-the-art personal computer at the time, and an early word processing program called Framework. Unable to save my ailing oil company, I began writing an expose instead to tell the world what we had endured.

Within ninety days I completed a novel of a hundred and twenty thousand words. The book, a total disaster, still resides in my trunk. I’ve read it since and it is still horrible, but it taught me one thing - I truly love to write, even if I never make a penny doing it.

Realizing my shortcomings, I began reading every writer’s magazine I could buy, and every how-to book of writing that I could find, or check out from the library. One day in the Daily Oklahoman I saw an announcement for the annual Oklahoma Writer’s Federation Inc. (OWFI) meeting. Anne and I barely had money for groceries at the time, but she somehow scraped together the money for me to attend.

The first meeting that I attended was at the Lincoln Plaza, defunct for perhaps the last ten years. It was going strong at the time and there were probably two hundred writers in attendance, including Clive Cussler the keynote speaker.

After registering on Saturday, I went to the main hall, like everyone else, to hear the President of the OWFI launch the conference. I found an empty chair at a large table. I was the only man at the table and I got my first lesson in Writing 101, learning that most of the authors in the world are females. The women at my table were all romance writers and they all knew each other. It’s a true but little known fact that there are more romance writers per capita in Oklahoma than any other state in the Union – I’m not making this up!

The ladies at my table were all wonderful. When they asked me what I had written, I had to tell them, “Not much.” It didn’t matter because they had all been there. Everyone has to start somewhere and they were all supportive.

The chair beside me was vacant, perhaps the only vacant seat in the entire large room. As I was talking to the women at my table, someone took the seat beside me, banging into my chair as they did. I turned to see a slender man in a white shirt and blue jeans. He was a good looking man with a trimmed beard and I could instantly see the attraction in the eight sets of female romance writer’s eyes when he spoke.

“Hi, ladies, hope I’m not disturbing anything.”

“Not at all,” the woman next to me said, almost poking out my eye as she reached across me to shake his hand. “I’m Glenda so-and-so,” she said.

“Glad to meet you,” the man answered. “I’m Clive Cussler.”

Every woman at the table practically swooned. I never got a chance to speak but I’m sure that I was Cussler’s biggest fan at the table. Having grown up with Jules Verne, Edgar Rice Burroughs and H. Rider Haggard, I had just finished reading Cussler’s wonderful adventure novel Cyclops and I thought that he was the second coming.

Later, when I listened to Cussler’s keynote address, I learned that nothing comes easy in the writing world. He was in his forties before he ever had a book published, and then only after tricking an agent into representing him. When he finally told his agent of many years what he had done, the man was so angry that he walked out of the expensive New York restaurant in a huff.

Cussler was rich and famous when I met him, but you wouldn’t have known it by talking to him. He was humble, courteous and as down-to-earth as any long-haul truck driver. Yes, he was a real gentleman and hey, the romance writers at my table liked him too!

Fiction South

Mortals Such As I

Marilyn and I took my Dad to Pearl’s for brunch recently. He has Alzheimer’s and sometimes has good days, sometimes bad. Hey, it’s real life.

Fall is my favorite season, maybe because I was born in October, the day before Halloween. I was listening to a radio program and the lady announcer said that she and her family love Halloween, but not the supernatural or satanic aspects of it.

There are no satanic aspects of Halloween but there are many supernatural, ghostly and other-worldly facets of the holiday. Like life itself, there are components of the holiday which we can never explain.

My Dad’s Alzheimer’s for instance, while devastating to all involved is something very natural, but something mere mortals, and certainly not I, are ever likely to understand.

Gondwana

Old Friends and Ex-Lovers

While digging through a box in my garage I found an old photo of me and ex-wife Gail. With us were three of my four best early friends. The picture was taken at the Vivian bowling alley, a business defunct for thirty years. A wave of memories swept over me as I gazed at the faded photo causing me to ponder all my friends, ex-wives and ex-lovers.

Gail is long gone; I haven’t seen her in years, but I still stay in touch – although infrequently – with Tim, Rod and Wiley. Although married three times (a fact I would have never dreamed) Gail is my only ex. Anne and I were married twenty years when she died. Marilyn and I are still married. While I only have one ex-wife I have a slew of ex-lovers. About the only difference is a signed marriage license.

An ex-lover is not simply someone you once had sex with. During the pre-AIDS era one-night stands were commonplace and I had my share of nameless and faceless encounters. An ex-lover is someone you were close to for months, or maybe even years, and someone you remember vividly. I can count my ex-lovers on one hand.

No matter how memorable they were, all my ex-lovers and ex-wives are long gone. It’s different with my friends. As I look at the old photo I realize all my friends - while they may be far away - are all still around.

Gondwana

Literary Pets

Princess, my solid black pug is my newest pet and I have a hard time writing sometimes because she constantly demands her rightful place in my lap. Since she is the first pup or kitten that I have had in a while, I had almost forgotten the same insistence all my other pets once exhibited.

Kitties Chani and Hamlet were with me, one of them almost always on my lap, during the months it took for me to write Ghost of a Chance. Likewise Lucky, too big to be a lap dog even though he wanted to be, slept at my feet as I worked on A Gathering of Diamonds, Murder Etouffee and Big Easy, Tabitha or Rouge trading off for time in my lap.

King Tut, Mad Max and my other cats also did their tour of lap duty and I wonder now if I would have ever finished the books without them. As I think back I realize I was never far from a trusted friend as I wrote.

How many other writers have literary pets? I wonder. I’ll have to worry about the answer to that question later because right now my thighs are growing numb and Princess needs a treat.

Louisiana Mystery Writer