I never intended to become a pole dancer. My ambition had been simple. With a milestone birthday approaching, I needed something to challenge me as never before. Something that would prove I was still fit, still alive, still young. I would enlist in the Marines.
For weeks, I watched the 12-part Marine Corps recruiting video every day. I attacked the gym as never before until my self-administered score on the Marines personal fitness test (PFT) reached a respectable level. There was only one problem. The age limit for enlistment in the Marines is 28. The milestone birthday I was approaching was number 60.
If I couldn’t enlist, then at least I would try to become the oldest person ever to attempt Marine Corps training. My first call to the Pentagon was not promising. I was directed to the Marines’ Public Affairs Office. The captain who took my call addressed me as “sir” so many times that I began to feel like a revered grandfather from the days of the Confederacy. I explained my interest in attempting recruit training, intimating that with my long list of writing credits I would have no problem selling a story to publications like Esquire, GQ, Men’s Health, and Modern Maturity. After all, men my age were sending sons and daughters (and grandsons and granddaughters) off to war; my article would convey to my generation just what their country was demanding of them.
Even as the captain politely promised to get back to me, I was certain that in fact I had been directed to the Pentagon office specializing in cranks and nut-jobs. I was not to be deterred.
I eventually learned that a request such as mine had to go through TECOM, the Marines’ Training and Education Command. Soon I was in touch with Justin LeHew, TECOM’s Sergeant Major and a recipient of the Navy Cross. My request would first have to be approved by the Commanding Officer of TECOM and then the Commandant of the Marine Corps. It seemed like a stretch but no one had said it was impossible.
A few weeks later, I received a definitive email from Sgt. Major LeHew. With the Marines drawing down their numbers, it was essential that every space in training be allocated to someone who would go on to serve. Given that I had missed the cutoff date by 32 years that wouldn’t be possible.
After all the push-ups, pull-ups, sit-ups, and miles of running, this was hard for me to accept. I looked into recruit training for the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, and the Coast Guard. The watered-down standard of their programs did not represent the high bar I was seeking.
Three months later, I was introduced to former Marine Corps General (and now Secretary of Defense) James Mattis while on a story assignment. We wound up in several meetings together and often crossed paths in the hall. If anyone could pull the strings necessary to see my dream realized, it would have to be an insider and an iconoclast like Jim “Mad Dog” Mattis. With “A Hare-Brained Idea from Robert Strauss” as the subject line, I emailed him the pitch I had sent to Sgt. Major LeHew. The General’s detailed response arrived exactly four hours and 37 minutes later.
While admiring my “pluck,” Mattis explained that the Marines regularly get similar requests from “professional wrestlers, Olympic athletes, TV stars and others.” All are turned down. And while my PFT score was good for someone my age, the Marines use that score, General Mattis wrote, primarily to screen out “the physically decrepit.”
“The hand-to-hand combat would be quite an adventure for you as well since they are not adjusted for size of opponents,” Mattis added. “You could be matched with a strong 230-pound, high school or college wrestler or football player, whatever the random line-up of two platoons competing presented you with the luck of the draw…”
I am 5’7” and weigh 145 pounds the morning after Thanksgiving. When I last struck someone in anger I was in elementary school. Grudgingly, I began to see that my 60th birthday brainstorm could get ugly fast.
As a well-intended coup de grace, General Mattis added that my PFT score would not command the respect of younger recruits. I would wind up holding them back in their training, reducing their own chances of success. He signed off by wishing me well for my “admirable initiative and wonderful spirit of adventure.”
With Marine Corps’ recruit training seemingly out of the question, I began searching for something else to push the envelope as I headed into my seventh decade. About the same time, my wife decided to show friends an old photo that, in a particularly vain moment, I had had blown up to poster size. It was me, at 27, at the end of Kauai’s Kalaulau Trail, standing bronzed, buff, and buck-naked beneath a tropical waterfall that foamed white around my shoulders like an ermine stole. Six-packs were more modest in 1983 than they are now, but, adjusted for changing times, Channing Tatum of Magic Mike and Magic Mike XXL had nothing on my ripped abs. If the Marine Corps wouldn’t have me, perhaps, I thought, I could become the world’s oldest pole dancer.
Conveniently, the Pole Dance Factory, located just around the corner from our house in Barcelona, was offering an intensive four-day class for 50 bucks. Unlike the Marines, the Pole Dance Factory had no age restrictions. It was kismet. I signed up.
The following Monday, I boldly strode into the Factory. “Robert, you’re our superstar!” the woman at the reception desk exclaimed.
I had no idea how she knew me. She’d never seen me before. I took a look around. It wasn’t hard to figure out.
Eighteen lithe young women, maybe half of whom had been conceived in the same century as I, were casually stretching out on the wooden floor. Maria, the owner, explained that I was not just the oldest man ever to enroll, but the oldest person ever to do so. At the Pole Dance Factory, this made me an instant superstar.
I stripped down to gym shorts and t-shirt and began stretching at the base of the pole in the farthest corner where I was paired up with Sarah, a slip of a young woman. She slapped her tush and explained that she was a swing dance instructor at a club called Spank the Baby. She thought pole dancing might get her into better shape. She had, perhaps, one percent body fat.
After some preliminary chitchat, Lidia, our instructor, had us climb the poles. While some of the young women struggled to get off the floor, this I could do, arms only, with no trouble. (In elementary school, in the mid-1960s, I excelled at rope climbing—an Olympic sport until 1932.) Suitably warmed up, Lidia demonstrated the bombero, “the fireman,” our first move, which involved grasping the pole with the inside arm, taking a few loping steps, lifting the feet off the ground, and then gracefully twirling around the pole on the way to a soft landing on the floor. Having made the move, Sarah—with a sweep of her arm—ceded the pole to me.
With the enthusiasm of the teenager I no longer was, I made an aggressive jeté of the kind that Tchaikovsky never imagined when composing The Nutcracker. It was then that I had my first pole dancing Wile E. Coyote moment, the moment when Wile E.—suspended over a bottomless abyss—realizes that “TNT + anvil” is never a good idea.
My flawed combination consisted of boxer shorts, an unforgiving steel pole, and male anatomy. In the suspended half second before I plummeted to the ground, like Wile E., I’m sure a look of “uh-oh” crossed my face. I didn’t feel my body hit the floor. I was too focused on the fact that, suddenly and unexpectedly, I had four tonsils instead of two. In a cloudy, pain-shrouded sort of way, I could hear young, female voices gasping all around me “Oh—My—God.” (Actually, in this case, ¡Dios mio! or ¡Madre!) As I lay on the floor, pondering the ceiling while trying to recover my breath and dignity, time stood still. I reflected on the hollow ache that was radiating from my groin to my forehead and that had me frozen, paralyzed on the floor, as if rendered completely immobile by the phaser-like weapon of some sneering, comic book super villain. That was when, incongruously, I thought of the lyrics of Tonight, the song from West Side Story. “Tonight, the minutes seem like hours, the hours go so slowly…”
Some minutes later—after breath and life had returned—I rolled onto my side, stood up, and made as if nothing at all had happened.
Even as I understood that I would never be hired to work at the Bada Bing!, I soon mastered the bombero. What I could not master was my inner ear. I am someone who can read a book—without a hint of discomfort—while seated in the last row of a bus zigging and zagging over a mountain pass in the Andes. But swinging around the pole overwhelmed me with nausea. Having just recovered from my TNT + anvil incident, would I now have to run for the toilet with a hand clamped over my mouth? Just how humiliating was this going to get? Before the Marines turned me down, I had been worried about how I would survive the 11th week of training, which includes “The Crucible,” 54 hours of non-stop physical and mental challenges with little sleep or food. Thirty minutes into my special, promotional adventure at The Pole Dance Factory, I was wondering how I was going to survive day one.
Despite a dose of Dramamine, day two started out little better. I would do one bombero clockwise and then another counter-clockwise, hoping this would spin the bile rising in my throat back down where it belonged. It didn’t work. If I couldn’t handle pole-dancing 101, how would I ever convince the Marines to reconsider their decision?
Feeling as though I just had downed an entire punch bowl of Purple Jesus, the class moved on to our next move. Instead of simply hooking our ankles around the pole, we would now do so with one knee cocked around the pole and the other leg straight out, foot pointed. This was the come-hither move featured on The Pole Dance Factory’s logo. Sarah and most of the other young women took to this enchanting, sensuous move like crocodiles to water.
Attempting this, I realized another caveat the Pole Dance Factory had neglected to mention in its literature, which was that with each turn around the pole, the hairs on the inside of my thighs were slowly being stretched to the limits of their tensile strength and then, one by one, being yanked out by the root. This reminded me of the dental drilling scene so memorably acted by Lawrence Olivier and Dustin Hoffman in Marathon Man, only now with Olivier having been a sadistic cosmetician instead of a Nazi dentist.
As the self-inflicted, hair-by-hair torture continued, I slowly, agonizingly, became aware that humans, or at least male humans, have hair in the popliteal fossa, the area opposite the knee cap, also known as the knee pit.
To sum up, by the end of 90-minute class #2, the backs of my knees and my inner thighs were as hairless as a newborn mole and as red as if I had decided—for some unimaginable reason—to shave them with a scallop shell.
Waking up on day three, I had large, repulsive bruises in the most unnatural of places. The inside of my biceps. The inside of my thighs. The tops of my feet. My knee pits. I don’t know about you, but I have no muscle, no fat, and very little skin on the top of my feet. What is there to bruise? I have no idea but gangrenous splotches were spreading across them with grotesque colors from a bad Pollack painting. Had I turned up dead that morning, I’m sure the CSI/Barcelona team would have been stumped as to the cause of my death. Every inch of my body ached as if I had, indeed, gone hand-to-hand with a 230-pound high school wrestling star.
Still, I wasn’t about to give up. I shaved my legs inside and out. I doubled down on the Dramamine. Finally, the floor of the Pole Dance Factory, which had been raging like the Southern Ocean in winter, began to calm.
In class I learned how—by extending one leg straight out and cocking the other leg over the top of it—I could lay straight out in mid-air, hands free. Not even all the young women could do this. As I held the position, the three-alarm fire burning through the tender flesh of my inner thighs was, in part, quelled by young, feminine applause.
Heading to the Factory on day four I didn’t know what the future held. Had I found my calling? Should I enroll in the upcoming “Workshop with Pole Stars?” Would the Chippendales soon be calling?
My pole partner Sarah was absent on day four. Another young woman, one who had previously been training on her own pole, asked if she could share mine. Where was Sarah, “your girlfriend,” she wanted to know. Enchanted that she might even think that Sarah—at least 35 years my junior—was my girlfriend, I forgot, for a moment, about the Marines and the searing brush fire that had burned my body hair to the ground. Maybe, I thought, I’m not as old as I sometimes feel. Maybe, I thought, I’m not as decrepit as I sometimes imagine I look.
“Tell them how old you are,” Maria said to me at the end of class. I didn’t want to. I am in those twilight years of early old age when I can’t believe how old I’ve gotten. “Tell them,” she insisted.
“I’ll be 61 in three months,” I said. Several smiled. A few others put their hands to their mouths in disbelief. “See,” Maria said. “You are our superstar.”
As I left that evening, I thought that maybe in a few years, as I approach 65, I’ll contact the Marines again and show Jim Mattis what’s what. But what I’m thinking now is that if I work really, really hard, if I enroll in Dancing with the Pole Stars, that maybe, just maybe, Channing Tatum will cast me in Magic Mike III, which maybe he’ll call Magic Mike: The Senior Sessions. Or Magic Mike: Dancing the High-Fiber Diet. In either case, Mr. Tatum, if you are reading this, I’ll be ready for my close-up.
