Nothing Good Happens In A Strip Club

By Tom Poland

 

Or Does It?

 

Orlando 1982. Garry and I are sipping beers. “Where’s a good place to get shot,” he asks.

“Shots?”

“No, you know, shot, by a gun.”

“I’d say a strip club.”

“Me too. Let’s go.”

We didn’t care. Young, crazy, and adventuresome, off we go to a place with a cutesy name like “Foxy Dolls” or “Bare Assets” with neon lights and mirrors all over the place. A “gentleman’s club.” What a euphemism. Well, I suppose a super clean herby curby could serve as a vegetable bin.

Gentlemen’s clubs employ erotic, excuse the typo, exotic dancers. They’re supposed to be pretty. They serve drinks. They love tips. Lots of men go there and empty their wallets. Some women, too. It’s a unique brand of fun. Well, at least that’s the idea. The truth is your garden-variety strip club seems like a place where nothing good happens. It’s always in a bad neighborhood. Its typical gentlemen are the dregs of society, but not always. A lawyer got into a dispute at a club. As he drove away he shot a random bullet through the door. It killed the club manager. Off to prison goes counselor. Water finds its own level.

You walk into one and it’s easy to get an uncomfortable feeling. You get the notion that the overdressed urban adventurers are equally at home in orange togs. Ye, who love tattoos, visit a strip club and meet your tatted-up brethren. And what about those so-called exotic dancers? They keep plastic surgeons busy. You can see most of them five seconds before they turn the corner. They flaunt aliases that sound like some concoction of a beverage: Crystal, Candy, Sangria, Bubbles, Merlot, Cherry, Misty, and Champagne. Other names portray some character trait or outright innocence. Chastity, Sunny, and Trinity. Some names just sound, well, cool. Cheyenne, Destiny, Diamond, and Paris. (Mothers to be? Make a list of stripper names so you don’t hang one of these humiliations on your little girl.)

Orlando has a road known as the Orange Blossom Trail. It used to be famous for strip clubs. Still is, I’d surmise. We drove there, parked, and Garry and I walked into a place you might as well call “Bra Busters.” The smoke was thick, a blue haze, and beyond a frayed oriental rug was a stage with its infamous pole. A dark-haired woman had her legs locked around it hanging upside down, a fruit bat that preferred collards. Well, that’s what all the bucks tucked into her garter belt looked like. A bunch of collards or a head of lettuce.

An aging hostess sat us at a table by the stage. A smoker. “You boys out for some fun,” she asked in a low-octave voice. She sat us in what amounted to an assembly line, for here come the workers.

A brunette with hair like Demi Moore sidles up. “Buy me a drink? Want a lap dance, sofa dance?”

“Uh, no. We just want a drink.”

A curvaceous blonde with short hair like Annie Lennox slinks over. “Would you like to buy me a drink? Lap dance, sofa dance?”

“Uh, no. We just want a drink.”

A buxom redhead with skin white as paper bounces over. She has a lisp, bless her. “Would you like to buy me a dwink? Want a wap dance?”

“Uh, no. We just want a drink,” and here come the “dwinks.” Two gin and tonics that cost $12 each. (And this was in the early 80s.)

We didn’t stay long. Too much harassment for drinks and dances. I have a good name for strip clubs. How about “Wallet Strippers.”

Various species exist. I recall a rarity, a strip club where no alcohol was served. Close to St. Simons Island it was. Just off I-95, the highway to hell. In the early 1990s a friend and I went to Café Risqué, a real cafe. A stormy Friday in July it was. We ordered food and a lovely South Georgia girl, sans clothes, served us. A storm blew in and knocked out the power. She brought a candle to our table and sat, this dental hygienist from Waycross, Georgia. “I make more money dancing than I do as a hygienist,” she said, an apology delivered with a shy half-smile. Each day she drove to work, leading her family to believe she was headed to the clinic. I have no idea what became of her but years later a thought came to me in the middle of the night. “Suppose her dad had stopped in, having no way of knowing his daughter worked there?”

In the 1980s, a decade like no other, Garry and I went a few times to the Gold Club in Atlanta. High class. Most of the women were drop-dead gorgeous and married. They pulled in six figures a year. Patrons included professional athletes, celebrities, and a couple of adventuresome Georgia boys. Feds closed it for racketeering, proving again that nothing good happens in a strip club.

Still, do strip clubs have a place in this world? Maybe. A long time ago a colleague asked me to go to a strip club with him. He was not the type to do such a thing but life can be brutal. Early in his marriage his wife had had a radical double mastectomy. “I just want to see some, well, you know,” he said. Think what you will, but men are hardwired when it comes to certain things.

Single mothers need jobs. Like Narcissus, women in love with their own beauty seek out mirrors and admirers. Bored men need places to go I suppose. Country girls come to the city and need jobs. Salesmen entertain clients and close deals there. And beat down married men, hangdog daddies, get to see other women and fantasize.

Yes, I was young and foolish once upon a time. All that is in the past. You could not pay me to go to one today, but I will say this. The dancers, bouncers, managers, and owners are working in a time when a lot of people won’t. I’ll give them that. And those pole dancers provide a thrill some folks just have to have. And guys like a guys night out and women certainly are no exception. If you want to see insanity, watch how middle-age women turn into hormone-driven twenty-somethings when a male stripper enters the room.

And now this. A fellow told me something unbelievable. He may sue a club. “I’m an addict. They just take advantage of me and steal my money just so I can look at their _____.”

Well, why not? In this age of anything goes, well, anything goes.

 

Visit Tom Poland’s website at www.tompoland.net
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Tom Poland is the author of twelve books and more than 1,000 magazine features. A Southern writer, his work has appeared in magazines throughout the South. The University of South Carolina Press released his book, Georgialina, A Southland As We Knew It, in November 2015 and his and Robert Clark’s Reflections Of South Carolina, Vol. II in 2014. The History Press of Charleston published Classic Carolina Road Trips From Columbia in 2014 and will release South Carolina Country Roads in April 2018. He writes a weekly column for newspapers in Georgia and South Carolina about the South, its people, traditions, lifestyle, and changing culture and speaks often to groups across South Carolina and Georgia, “Georgialina.”