The third time we were at the strip club, my friend pulled out a CD he had burned containing ten songs, including Micheal Jackson’s Give It to Me. Songs dedicated to a stripper he was madly in love with.

Imagine, two 20-year-old boys.

Sneaking at the strip club used to give us so much gas. I was in the driver’s seat, my friend Jojo (yes, like the manga Jojo) on the side, perfumed from socks to the tip of his hair, dressed in black with a white shirt.

We’ll call her (the stripper) Billie Jane (as in MJ’s song).

If she was beautiful?

O, boy, it can’t be explained.

Fine, slender legs.

White as milk. From the East. I can’t remember if she was from Poland or Romania, and that doesn’t change because she certainly would have passed for one of the sexiest and most remarkable women in any country.

What she was doing there, we never knew.

We knew her part of the truth, but nothing she confessed could be taken as true.

Wait. A step back.

Back then, I was engaged. Her name was Anima, which in English means Soul. My and Anima’s story will not be divulged here, it will only be said that at the time of the escapades at the Strip with Jojo, we had already been together for a couple of years.

The intention was certainly not to betray Anima.

Jojo and I shared the same passion for manga, although he actually introduced me to that world. We also played together in a kind of band that consisted solely of the two of us. His aunt had an attic where there were drums and an amplifier. Very often we were there to play after school. We were bound together by our passion for stories and music, two topics that were always on our lips.

One evening, Jojo jokingly asked me about going to a strip.

I replied that I couldn’t, that if Anima found out, well, I would get in trouble.

One evening we drive to the Navigli, in Milan, and he brings up the strip club story again. I try to dissuade him but, in the end, out of curiosity, we end up on the other side of the city, in an area full of clubs of that kind.

We choose one.

Ten euros each.

I thought it was just for that night, but then we were hooked. And we went back again.

The Strip club we chose was very sober, and we liked the fact that there was a relaxed, non-creepy atmosphere. And the girls who were doing the show, or inviting you for a drink, were young and courteous.

It felt like a dream to us.

I was not happy about going for the second time. It was a long way, and I was starting to feel guilty.

The first time I hadn’t done anything wrong, apart from watching the shows and having two drinks with Jojo, we had rejected any approach with the girls. If you’d had a drink with one of them, you could have stood next to her, maybe she’d even let you touch her, stuff like that, nothing indecent.

A drink with one of the strippers would cost you three times as much, but at some point, we wanted to try and talk to them.

It was during our second time that I found out that Jojo had fallen in love with one of the strippers.

When Billie would come on stage and dance, all hearts around would stop. She was simply remarkable.

We talked to two girls. We found out that many of them were college students and that the job paid well, especially if the customers bought drinks.

Jojo and I ended up separated until I saw him with Billie. He had been looking for her all night and had finally managed to buy her a drink. You must know that she was sought after by everyone, it was hard to get there first. Jojo, however, had no problem talking to her even while she was with one of the many customers.

She granted him a drink. Then Jojo, in order to be with her more, asked me for money, because I was working but he was not.

He told me he would pay me back, but I didn’t care.

In the car, at five o’clock in the morning, on the way back to Magenta, Jojo did nothing but talk about her, and begged me to go back as soon as possible. He begged me for an hour and even the following days. I couldn’t take it anymore.

In short, Jojo had fallen into Billie Jane’s trap.

She seduced customers, promised to see them again, to be with them, to want their company, even to the point of confessing a deeper interest. And Jojo was convinced that Billie was interested in him.

So, we return.

I’m angry with myself because for the third time, I have to lie to Anima, and I don’t like it.

Honestly, there was someone I liked there. A foreign girl, with a hard accent, I think she was Russian, I don’t remember well. Sort of a Marilyn Monroe look-alike, which she imitated a bit. If Billie was the star of the Strip Club, Marilyn was the runner-up.

I mean, Jojo has this CD for her. As we arrive, he sees Billie and goes straight to her. They talk for a few minutes then she leaves, patting him. He gets ready for the show.

The music starts, and Jojo is galvanised because she is playing one of the songs on his CD, which is Give it to Me, one of Michael Jackson’s most striking songs.

With her moves and stripping, she destroyed us all. We were his slaves. Such devastating beauty in such an obscene, lugubrious, and mischievous place seemed a paradox.

After that, Jojo disappears to go to her.

I’m with Marilyn, looking at her fake breasts. After a couple of drinks, she asks me if I want to touch it. I tell her yes, and I touch it. Weird. Exciting, though.

I only see Jojo every ten or fifteen minutes, he comes to ask me for money because he has run out of pocket money.

For the two hours Jojo spent with Billie, I paid two hundred and fifty euros, plus mine with Marilyn I think I came to five hundred.

Marilyn was seductive. She was looking for a rich man. She asked me how much I earned, I lied to her and said three thousand euros a month (it was partly true, I was an estate agent and sometimes I earned that much). For her, however, that was not enough. She wanted to find a rich man, who could support her and get her out of that crappy life as a stripper.

And hers was but one of the many stories there.

Marilyn used to say that she was the longest-lived, that the others stayed for a year or two to save up a bundle of money and then disappeared once they finished university.

She, on the other hand, with her stunted Italian, had lived at the Strip for several years and dreamed of leaving like all the others.

I like to think that Marilyn has made it, that she has found the man she was looking for and is living in a house with children. In short, she has realised her dream.

Jojo, on the other hand, was lost.

By the end of the night, he had convinced himself that she loved him. I don’t know what Billie had promised him, what I do know is that Jojo begged me to take him one last time because he hoped to get her number or be able to take her out.

So, we returned.

This time, however, Billie was elusive, and Jojo hardly had a chance to talk to her.

In conclusion, he finally realised that she had set a trap for him to come back, to get more money out of us.

That last evening we went home in silence. The excitement of the past evenings had faded into resignation.

We never spoke of Billie after that. Not even today, twenty years later, when Jojo and I massage each other, do we remember those days.

Those days were a kind of counterbalance, a way of growing up, of poking around this world of fictions and guilt, of entertainment and role-playing.

Of course, Anima found out everything. He found out from a receipt she found in my car. When she asked me where I had spent two hundred euros, I told her it was a gift for her.

What a rude lie, right?

She, however, had read the name on the ticket, and curious had looked it up on the internet, thinking she would find some clothing shop or comparable spot.

Instead, she found the strip club company.

She slapped me and didn’t speak to me for two days.

Our relationship didn’t end, I repeatedly apologised to her, and anyway, she never found out that Jojo and I ended up there four times, and not just once.

Lies. Lies. Lies.

It was horrible to lie to her. Even if I had told her the (full) truth, we wouldn’t have broken up. I am certain of that. 

We were together for four years. Then I had to let her go, and it was difficult to tell Anima that love was over. But that’s a story for another time.

As kids, we are easily deluded. The lights, the glares, those things that shift the shadows of our loneliness, that feed our curiosity and excite our limbs, stir in us the desire to try, to discover, to claim what is rightfully ours.

The experience of life.

To tell you the truth, if I went back, I would enjoy those moments without any restraint, I would have explored that world more lavishly, only to abandon it once my curiosity was fed.

And you? What you would have done?