I Could See Her Again, But Probably Not Any More

I Could See Her Again, But Probably Not Any More

(c) 2007 Jon Donlon
I recently spent a little time reconnoitring the Disney layout in Orlando. The scuttlebutt is that that outfit runs a tight ship, but it’s always a good idea to dot the “i”s and cross “t”s in terms of checking things for one’s self. We plan to bring in a cart load, or more properly, a bus load, of students next year. First we went to see Disney Sport, than on to get a gander, first hand, at how a great American university organizes its intramural sporting options.

After Florida it was necessary to fly up to Chicago and drive down to the vast, sprawling corn fields of “down state,” to the enormous campus of the University of Illinois. Two of us visiting from a prestigious private Japanese school would be beating the bushes, chatting up the faculty, and checking into local accommodation. The U of I campus is a costly complex, dense with resources. At one point an information specialist (librarian) mentioned in passing that the school’s library was “no longer the third largest in the country,” meaning that counting books was hardly meaningful in today’s world of electronic media. Yet, to be in the top five is not that shabby after all.

For all its egg-head trappings, C-U is still down to earth. I was able to do bed rock research when breaking ground in Controversial Leisure (the field I carved out in Leisure Studies). Previously, Leisure Studies, the scholarly pursuit of the understanding of the phenomena of human leisure, tended to be sunshine and apple pie. “What about what people really do?” I wondered. Before I settled into my current curiosity about travel and travel narratives, and cultural tourism, I codified lots of areas of “purple” leisure. I talked to cock fighters, coke dealers, and strippers, for example. Eventually I wrote publications informed by field research on areas including cock fighting, fads, and prostitution.

I talked to one stalwart of an unsavoury yet popular genre in C-U. Krystal Lynn, star of stage and screen. She was dancing the night I taped our interview at the town's finest, and only, strip club, and had at that time featured in more than 15 hard-core pornography videos.

She arrived late.

She told me earlier on the phone that she was "making the circuit," performing for just a few nights each along a vast series of clubs throughout North America and in Canada. "You might not know it," she giggled into the mouthpiece, "but that's where the money is." Then, thinking a moment, she said, "in cash." Of course I have no idea why being in cash would be better.

But in broad daylight, far from the hoochi-coochi pole and the sticky bar littered with change, cigarette packs, half-filled glasses and empty hopes, yet fully pickled men, she was scheduled for an interview with the local radio station and then a "signing." I'd never been to a stripper's signing before but, since I was working on research about strippers and their impact on the local economy [example eventual publication: “Attraction of the Naughty - Gentleman’s Clubs as a Tourism Resource,” with J. Agrusa] I thought I should find out what such a thing was.

The bookstore, in reality, was an adult video shop with a small, though selective, array of so-called sex toys and broadly humorous gag gifts. It also hosted a rotating kiosk of "patch pocket books," expensive paperback books cheaply produced and apparently not spell-checked or proofread. This is one area where the computer did kill print media.

Novelty was not a virtue of these novels, I soon found, flipping through them as I cooled my heels. They eschewed variance from a boiler-plate formula, each focused closely on a particular category of audience and offered a sequence of minutely described scenarios. After a moment I began to wonder just how many different ways oral sex could be described.

My Victorian curiosity and marginal academic interest was extinguished by the unmistakable sounds of stiletto heels tap-tap-tapping across concrete. I’d worked my way through undergraduate school, partly as a bartender. As a result, my autonomic nervous system had long ago been taught to slip into a perfect balance between fight-or-flight at the noise. Few women would be in such a shop, fewer still in heels. Krystal Lynn, at that moment, rounded the end of an aisle and rapidly closed the gap between us. Except for being obviously very fit--she must work out all the time I guessed--and very sexily dressed, the actress was almost peculiarly normal in shape, height, and weight. The name was obviously a thin fiction.

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