Life with Cap'n: Putting the Boob in Boob Cruise

Do you have a colorful past, too? Here's a chapter out of mine.

Not the actual boat, but it looked a lot like this.

When rent came due that day in late August, 1991, and all my money had been siphoned off by tuition, textbooks, a car note, pizzas, and the occasional six-pack of diet Coke, I accepted an invitation to do a Boob Cruise. Why not? It was $500 up front, plus whatever tips I was able to marshal, and three other girls would be there. We’d been hired to entertain a bunch of middle-aged yachtsmen or air traffic controllers or retired dentists.

Didn’t know. Didn’t ask.

At 2:45pm the following day, I parked my car and dragged a suitcase containing heels, makeup, three canisters of hairspray, and half a dozen thongs up a gangplank. Sure enough, about fifty men were waiting. They looked super pleased with themselves, these wearers of plaid golf vests and jaunty tam o’shanters, men in whose dentured mouths words like “gal” and “hepcat” found safe harbor. They’d hired strippers! Their wives didn’t know! They were bad boys having a naughty adventure!

I was introduced to the man-of-the-hour, everybody’s favorite birthday boy, Cap’n. Cap’n wore a white Captain’s hat, a navy sport coat, and sat in a wheelchair. When I gave him a chaste peck on the cheek, the men went wild. Someone suggested I kiss him a little lower, which is when I made a beeline for the dressing room.

The three other girls were already in various stages of undress: one in bra and panties, one in bra, panties, and full makeup, the last one dressed and smoking. “Gahdamn,” she said, eyeing me up and down. “How much you pay for those?

Experience had taught me not to bother explaining myself to people who have no interest in knowing the truth, so I just said, “Hey.”

“I’m Candy,” she told me. With her cigarette hand, she pointed to the others. “That’s Monique and Brittany. Say, what are those anyway, a triple Z?”

Rule number one: always make friends with the other girls. Bad things happen when you don’t. Girls who piss off other girls get things said about them, things like, “Looks great, doesn’t she? You’d never know she’s had three kids.” Or “Boy, I hope I look that good when I’m forty.”

Monique and Brittany were used to having guys drooling over them. Both were gorgeous and I could tell they didn’t see this as anything but an opportunity to make money. But Candy was a mess. She had a tooth missing that you caught sight of when she laughed—which she did a lot of while I was undressing. She had a bad home perm. Mostly, she had a long leather bullwhip that went with the dominatrix outfit.

“Guys eat this up,” she said. “You’ll see. They’ll act all shocked when I’m out there, but half of them will look me up later.”

I didn’t know what to say. My silence seemed to irritate her like everything else about me.

“What the hell are you wearing?’ she sneered.

“Um … a dress?”

“A dress,” she said in mocking falsetto. “Don’t get any ideas, Boob Job. You’re just the warmup act.”

On the way up to the deck for our show, Monique whispered to me, “Watch yourself.”

“Why?”

“Candy hates your guts.”

Brittany danced first. We watched from the galley while Candy paced and smoked, the whip trailing behind her. “No one’s going to be impressed with your bolt-ons,” she kindly informed me.

Monique went next, giving ole Cap’n an eyeful while he sat grinning in his hat, front and center where they’d parked him. The men liked Monique. She had a way with them, a little bit flirty, a little bit naughty. She exited with a fistful of dollar bills.

“Watch and learn, Boob Job.” Candy elbowed me aside and strutted onstage. Ker-whapp went the whip.

All fifty men went silent.

Now, I hadn’t been doing this for long, but it didn’t take a lifetime’s worth of experience to see these guys didn’t want anything aggressive or even overtly sexual. They wanted cute girls who pranced around and made them feel not-so-invisible, like maybe under different circumstances they might have had a chance. But Candy hadn’t bothered taking the temperature of the room. She was wearing chains, leather, and a dog collar. A tattoo of a demon baby screamed from a flame-bouquet on her thigh.

The quieter they were, the louder she got.

“I’m going to spank you hard!” she shouted. Ker-whapp.

Bending over in front of Cap’n, she waved to him from between her legs. Then she turned around and shimmied her boobs at him. “Like those, don’t you? Every inch of these babies is real.” She cracked her whip once, twice, and then something terrible happened. She got it wrapped around Cap’n’s neck.

Someone yelled, “He’s choking!”

Cap’n’s eyes bugged out. His fingers clawed at the whip. Candy tried to make it seem like part of her routine, but when all the men started yelling and pulling, she pulled, too, which only made it tighter.

Someone managed to pry the whip out of her hand and unwound it from around Cap’n’s poor mottled neck. “Go away,” he growled at Candy. “You’re done here.”

Candy spun around and left. But now she was coming at me full bore like a truculent rhino, obviously determined to relieve her frustration on me.

“Save yourself,” Monique whispered, and then she pushed me onstage.

I looked at the men. The men looked at me.

“Listen,” I said. “I don’t have to dance. If you’d rather—”

“No, no, you come on down,” a man said.

I danced over to Cap’n, who still looked pretty dazed from his non-erotic asphyxiation, and a flurry of bills rained down. I knew Candy was watching, and I knew she’d make me pay.

I stayed and chatted with the men as long as I could, knowing Candy was going to stab me with a high heel the minute I set foot in the dressing room. But when I finally zoomed in to gather my things, she was nowhere to be found.

“Boy, does she have it out for you,” Brittany told me, equal parts indifferent and amused. “She said she’s going to make you wish you were dead.”

“Great,” I said.

“Her boyfriend is head of some biker gang. Do you have a boyfriend?”

“No.”

“Maybe you’d better get one.”

On my way out, one of the men gave me my base pay of $500 and then another $500 on top of that. “For being such a fun gal,” he said. As I came down the gangplank, I saw a big, scary, leather-vest-wearing dude standing next to two slightly less scary-looking dudes, and I knew right then and there they were going to take my money and anything else they felt like helping themselves to, only they were going to be smart about it and wait until I was clear of the boat.

The parking lot looked more sinister at night. I could see my car where I’d left it. But could I outrun Candy’s biker boyfriend?

Monique and Brittany split. Who could blame them? They didn’t want their money stolen. The Boob Cruise guys were all back onboard. I wouldn’t have asked them for help anyway. What were they going to do—give the biker a stern talking-to? Besides, this was my money. I’d earned it. Like hell I was going to let them punk me.

I took my time walking to the car, refusing to show the fear I felt. My key was already in hand. But I could feel them closing in, and I was still twenty feet away.

“Gimme the money,” Biker Guy said. His voice was a mismatch, higher than it should have been. “In fact, just gimme your purse.”

Terrified, I ran.

Biker Guy may have been big, but he wasn’t fast. I had only one shot to line up my key and get it into the lock. One shot. And I nailed it.

I threw myself into the car, slammed the door and locked it. All three bikers were pounding on my windshield. One smashed a spiderweb in the glass, but I got the car started, floored the gas, and left them in a rooster tail of dust.

Funny how much emotional relief sweeps over you when a dangerous situation has passed. Ten miles down the road, figuring I’d put enough distance between me and the bikers, I pulled over and let myself cry. I may have been book smart, but I wasn’t terribly street smart, and neither are a lot of young people who simply don’t have enough life experience to avoid trouble.

Here are some other things I was too young to understand:

1. Higher education should never be cost prohibitive. Education is a human right.

2. Housing? Also a human right. The average cost of an apartment right now is $2000. Back then, it was cheaper, but comparatively speaking, not by much.

3. Healthcare is also a human right, especially in the richest country in the world.

4. If I’d had enough money to survive, I never would have been on that boat. Even in 2022, women still make 70 cents of a man’s dollar. We pay a “pink tax” on items like razors, shampoo, tampons, dry cleaning. And now we don’t even have access to reproductive healthcare?

Never regret the things you do for love. I adored college and wish I’d had enough money to continue. I loved writing, which required lots of unstructured time. That meant finding a job that offered both time and money, which is the only reason I’ve never regretted my tenure on the stripper pole. In fact, I wrote a book about it.

But you have to ask yourself what kind of society we live in when these are the options. When a promising young woman has to turn to stripping in order to get herself through school. Looking back at it now, I’m appalled—not by my decision, but by a country that refuses to provide affordable housing, national healthcare, and low-cost education to its citizens.

As Americans, we’ve suffered so long under the delusion of our own “superiority,” we’ve forgotten that the rest of the civilized world offers all three of those things to its people.

Imagine if I—and others like me—had been given those options.

Imagine a better world.

Copyright © 2022 Stacey Eskelin

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