by Lacey Lane
Some dancers actually go through a period of mourning when a big-tipping regular grows tired of the game and moves off in search of greener (and easier) pastures. Think about it—it’s a serious blow when a hefty chunk of your steady income suddenly stops flowing in. But the dancer regular customer relationship is a never-ending cycle. No sooner has one relationship ended when another starts anew.
I remember one wealthy guy, a restaurant owner who, over the period of seven months, wound up being a regular for five different dancers in the same club, myself included. During that time, I’d say he spent close to $20,000 in all. And not once did he get one of us into bed. At least, if he did, I didn’t hear about it. It’s a harsh fact, I know, but some guys are just gluttons for punishment and thank God for that!
Special Events
In addition to the standard offering of tits and ass, some clubs get creative and put on special events to attract attention or boost their draw on what might otherwise be slow nights. For these events, admission fees are always increased (usually doubled), but guys flock to the clubs in droves and the houses are usually packed.
Featured-dancer shows—put on by famous adult magazine centerfolds or established or up-and-coming porn stars—are common to most clubs, but it’s the multi-girl events, involving girls who already dance at the hosting club, that I’m referring to.
Foxy Boxing was one of my favorites. For this semi-violent form of entertainment—which makes Celebrity Boxing look like a love-fest—girls put on enormously oversized boxing gloves and “slug it out” with one another on the main stage in a makeshift ring. Some of the bouts are honest-to-goodness grudge matches, involving dancers who truly want (and try) to take each others’ heads off. On the other hand, some fights start off as playful contests, only to escalate into serious altercations. At one club I worked, female customers were invited to join the action. But after a brutish lesbian biker chick took out one of the establishment’s top-earning dancers just seconds into the first round, that policy was quickly abandoned. I never took part in the faux fisticuffs—I’m a shopper, not a fighter.
One of my favorite events was baby-oil wrestling. Not to participate in, mind you (I never did), but to watch the customers drooling and tripping over their tongues as the girls did their best WWE imitations in kiddie pools filled with a half-inch or so of baby oil. Mud-wrestling and jello wrestling events were also well-received by the customers, although the girls aren’t too fond of either. Mud wrestling is loathed for obvious reasons—what it does to recent manicures, pedicures, and hair-stylings is akin to lighting hard earned money on fire—and often the clubs have to reimburse the girls for their self-pampering expenditures. But at least the mud has a positive effect on the skin. Strangely, jello wrestling is more hated than its dirt-and-water counterpart. Many of the girls claim the sugary substance has a bleaching effect on their hair. Personally, I never suffered any problems with my locks as a result of contact with the quivering dessert, but I had other qualms: I’ve always had a bit of a sweet tooth and the jello nights usually induced a calorie craving that only a box of chocolate donuts would cure.
While the special-event nights are great for the house—lots of people paying steeper cover charges and drinking plenty of liquor—the dancers usually wind up getting the raw end of the deal. Customers receive hours of entertainment for roughly the price of one VIP Room lap dance. Getting them to part with more of their cash after the show is over is like pulling teeth. Fortunately, the alcohol flows like a river after the thaw and persistence usually pays off. On event nights, the clubs pay a bonus to the girls who Special Events participate, and for some—especially those who aren’t go getters—the extra money is a real gift, but the majority of the dancers I knew would prefer to take their chances solo in the VIP Room. Finding a big spender just doesn’t happen while rolling around in a tub of mud.
Participation in these events isn’t mandatory—at least not in the clubs I worked in—but unless enough girls take part to make a show, they don’t take place. Personally, I thought they were prime opportunities for the lazy girls, dancers who didn’t have the personality, or the skill, to ring the bell on their own. Every club has its fair share, just as all jobs do.
Clean-up after a messy event isn’t a problem—provided the club has a shower. Some do, some don’t. Of the clubs that did, I remember one nasty wash-down facility that made a poorly funded homeless shelter’s shower look sterile.
Again, I never took part in any of these events. Call me a party pooper, but it wasn’t worth the risk. Cut a lip, chip a tooth, break your nose, any injury that marred your face would easily result in a loss of income, possibly for a long time. While I never saw or heard about any of the dancers getting seriously banged up—to the extent that they missed more than a day or two of work—I wasn’t about to roll the bones, especially not my own.
Lessons Learned
Everyone makes mistakes. At work, at play, in life—they’re unavoidable. And during my topless career, I made my fair share. However, I was fortunate never to make any blunders serious enough to have had a detrimental effect on me. But I learned something from each and every one of the occasional bumps in the road and I used those errors as stepping stones—to improve not only my topless dancing, but also my life outside the club. One of the first mistakes I made while dancing had to do with a fear I had prior to the start of my topless career. I knew I’d eventually encounter someone at the club who knew me outside the exotic entertainment industry. It was just a matter of when. Well, it happened about four months into my new profession. I’d just finished a table dance and was heading out for a cigarette break when a guy grabbed my hand and asked me to take him back to the VIP Room for a dance. Knowing the extra money would help me more than the nicotine, I quickly agreed and, without even looking at him, led him to the back room. As soon as we got inside and I got a good look at him, I realized the mammoth error I’d made.
Jack, as I’ll refer to him in this story, was a close friend of my parents. Just two weeks earlier, I’d joined his wife, my parents, and him for a nice dinner out. Had I taken the time to look him in the eye while we were out in the club, perhaps I would have been able to ditch him and make my escape before he recognized me. But in my haste, I treated him like just another anonymous living wallet.
Standing there face to face in the better lighting of the VIP Room, I’m sure I looked whiter than an albino polar bear in a blizzard. I was certain he would recognize me at any moment and I had no idea what to do or say when it happened. Amazingly, it never did. Perhaps he’d had one cocktail too many—although he didn’t seem to be drunk—or maybe his mind just refused to make the connection, but after a few minutes had passed it became clear to me that he didn’t have a clue who I was. And if his lack of acuity wasn’t proof enough, what he said next confirmed it.
Instead of asking me to dance, he asked me if I needed a place to live. Despite the fact that he was married, which he willingly volunteered (and I already knew), Jack suggested he rent a great apartment or condo for me so he could come over and visit “every now and then.” Rather than clue him in as to who I was, I let him continue digging himself a hole—although it was starting to become a grave. Jack confided in me that he’d been unhappy in his marriage for years and that he’d done everything to make it work, but his love spark was long gone. He said he hadn’t yet had an affair—I didn’t know what to believe from this guy—though he’d thought about it for years; he just couldn’t get up the courage to act on it. Once again, I didn’t know if this was the truth or just some weird bad-guy good-guy sad-sack pick-up line.
Jack continued trying to woo me into becoming his kept woman, telling me that he had watched me dance for a few people that night and he just knew I was the right girl for him. He said he felt we had chemistry together, despite the fact that we’d never met before. Yeesh! He offered me a car, new clothes, endless nights on the town; basically, anything my heart desired and more. He told me he owned his o
wn business (true) and said he had plenty of money to keep me in high style (also true). I’d never been out on his sailboat, but according to my folks, he had a nice one.
Of course, Jack could have had more money than the Sultan of Brunei and I wouldn’t have considered being his mistress—or anyone’s mistress, for that matter. It was just so weird hearing him say all these things when he and his wife appeared to be such a happy couple. I guess you never really know, do you?
Unable to listen to any more of his come-ons, I grabbed him by the shoulders and told him to forget about his fantasy scenario. I said I thought he ought to go home to his wife and try to work things out. Take her on a great vacation and try to reconnect with her. I reasoned with him that if he truly hadn’t cheated on her yet, then maybe he didn’t really want to. Maybe he was just confused. Now, I’m no marriage counselor, but I felt I had to say something. The ball was in my court; I figured the least I could do was take a swing at it.
Jack tried to change the subject and get me to dance for him, but by then I desperately needed a cigarette—hell, I needed the whole pack—along with a good stiff drink. I walked him back through the club and to the door, then had one of the bouncers escort him to his car, telling them not to let him back in. At first, Jack tried to put up a fight, but I kissed him on the cheek and told him to go home. My soft-spoken advice, coupled with the doorman’s menacing stare, did the trick and he nodded his agreement. He also gave me a $50 tip before he split, an unexpected bonus that I considered appropriate for my good marital-counseling deed.
For a month after the incident, I considered whether or not I should talk to his wife, or at least write her an anonymous letter, letting her in on the secret I’d become privy to. In the end I decided to do nothing. Their marriage was none of my business and, although I would have hated to see her get hurt, maybe she was doing the exact same thing. Incidentally, Jack never came into the club again and he and his wife are still married. Happily? Who knows? From that night on, I never blindly accepted someone’s lap, table, or VIP Room dance offer without giving him a thorough once-over. This self-promise could wind up saving my hide in more ways than one and I’d be damned if I were going to make the same mistake twice. Fortunately, luck was with me that night and my private life remained just that.
And speaking of promises, at the start of my career in adult entertainment, I promised myself that I’d never date anyone from one of the clubs I worked at—customers or employees alike. Sad to say, I broke both of those vows. You already know about my ill-fated dinner with the budget-minded meat-loving doorman. My other big strip club dating mistake was with a guy who came in as part of a bachelor-party crew. Handsome and muscular with a great smile, I was attracted to Mike the second I saw him. After two lap dances, I could tell the feeling was mutual. Before he left, we exchanged numbers—his cell, my phone service—and a few days later we hooked up.
We did dinner and a movie on the first date and he was a perfect gentleman. Other than a playful kiss goodnight, he didn’t try anything too aggressive and I had the feeling that this relationship, if that’s what it evolved into, had potential. But five weeks and a host of dates later, I found out the inside scoop and I was disgusted. Another dancer I was friendly with was dating one of Mike’s buddies. Drunk one night, the friend let the cat out of the bag about how Mike was always bragging about how cool he was for having a stripper for a trophy girlfriend, the kind of girl you fooled around with, but never brought home to mom or, God forbid, married.
So one night after dinner and drinks, just when Mike thought he was going to get lucky, I hit him with the full brunt of the conversation. At first, he denied the statements, but when he realized that I wasn’t going to buy the denial, he tried to explain them away as a simple misunderstanding. I cut him off in mid-sentence; I’d heard enough from him and his appeal to me was now long gone. After ripping him a new asshole for what he thought he knew about my character, I turned my back on him and ended the brief tryst for good. A few weeks later Mike came back into the club with the hopes of patching things up. I turned him down, he left, and I never heard from him again.
Mike is just one of the many guys out there who look upon strippers as easy. They figure that girls who work in the sex business are nymphos with loose morals ready and willing to climb into bed with any and every man who shows them the time of day. It’s the most ridiculous belief about the industry. In fact, it seemed to me that most of the women in the profession were less apt to give it up than girls who worked in more “respected” occupations. (Watch out for those dental hygienists—they’re real sexpots!)
After ending it with Mike, I became extremely guarded with my social life. Not only did I not date another customer or employee from the clubs, but I became overly critical of the men I did go out with. I was already ridiculously picky before my immersion in the world of topless dancing. Now, I’d turned into a perfectionist. I viewed all the men who were interested in me—even those outside the clubs—as wanting me for the wrong reasons and I refused to allow myself to get close to them. Stripping elevated me to a position of power over men, a commonality shared by nearly every female exotic entertainer, and to become someone’s girlfriend, for lack of a better term, especially in our male-dominant society, was too alien a concept to consider. It was for that reason that my social life became essentially nonexistent for nearly three years. Sure, I dated on and off, but whenever I thought we were getting too close—SNAP!—the relationship, what little there was of it, was over.
It took me a long time to reconcile the difference between the men inside and outside the clubs. Even after I was finished with topless dancing, warming up to potential suitors, just for a simple date or two, wasn’t easy. I still viewed the opposite sex as a paycheck—and I was far from a money-hungry user—but breaking out of that mindset was no simple task.
Abstaining from drinking while I danced was another self-imposed rule that I violated. I always wanted to be clear minded and level-headed when I worked and, because my tolerance for alcohol is no greater than a hummingbird’s, I figured it best if I limited my cocktail consumption to one or two per night, if that. But after a few years of strutting my stuff, I began to throw caution to the wind and let my hair down a little. It was a mistake that could have cost me. One night, I had a pretty wicked buzz on. I wasn’t falling-down drunk or making a fool of myself, but I was clearly not my normal self. I had flown to another city to work in a happening club for a few days, so I was unfamiliar with the other employees. When a bouncer offered to drive me back to my hotel after work, I happily agreed to let him take me.
The drive from the hotel to the club was a mere 10 minutes. His roundabout route took nearly half an hour—and there was no traffic. Throughout the ride, he pestered me to let him take me home to his place. Intoxicated as I was, I was firm in my refusal. Problem was, with his size—a gargantuan six-feet-plus and nearly 300 pounds—and my less-than-sharp condition, had he decided to press the issue, chances are I would have been in deep deep trouble. Fortunately, his aggressiveness was limited to verbal come-ons and I eventually made it back to my hotel unscathed. But the next morning, when my head cleared, I kicked myself for being so stupid. Never again in my topless career did I allow myself to venture outside of my sobriety comfort zone. It just wasn’t worth the risk.
That night’s events—and the thought of what may have happened—caused me to tell my mother what I was doing, although I didn’t exactly confess the whole truth. I said I was waiting tables in a bikini bar to pick up some extra cash. She didn’t have a problem with that. But about a year into the lie I came totally clean. To my amazement she supported my decision. Granted, she wasn’t overly enthused about my career move, but she respected my judgment and didn’t try to get me to quit. I promised myself that I’d never give her a reason to regret allowing me to choose my own path.
More Bang for Your Bucks
Because I’m no longer trying to fleece horny customers out of their cash,
I can safely slide to your side of the table (dance) and pass along some inside information that will not only enhance those visits to your favorite jiggle joint the next time you go, but help you get more bang for your buck—perhaps even literally.
Once you’ve decided to blow off the dinner-and-a-movie you’d thought about with your significant other in favor of a night out with the guys, and your posse has voted unanimously to spend the evening eyeballing fresh T & A in an up-close-and-personal environment, a decision needs to be made. Will it be boobs and thongs or the full monty? Now, this might sound like an arbitrary decision, but if you’re at all interested in imbibing, consider the fact that most all nude clubs do not serve alcohol. Something to do with the law, I believe. And a club without a liquor license definitely needs to offer something extra special to bring people in, hence the bottomless policy.
Another important item that should factor into your decision is the quality of the women you want to view. In most major cities, topless clubs have more attractive girls than their totally bare competitors. I think it’s a simple case of class; most all-nude clubs have none. They tend to be on the sleazier side and the top-earning strippers will avoid those establishments like the plague. However, major markets such as New York, Dallas, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Chicago, and Miami usually have at least one full snog bar with quality babes.
Before journeying to the club of choice, consider how you’re going to get there. First impressions are extremely important, especially at ritzy clubs with valet services. Word quickly spreads to the girls inside—via the doorman or the house-mom—about the car you arrive in. And if you’re even considering leaving with one of the dancers (your chances are remote, but anything is possible), you’d better have a horse-drawn carriage and not a pumpkin with wheels! If you’re going with a group and everyone plans on drinking, rent a limo. Not only do they convey a sense of wealth, but if there’s a line waiting to get in, perhaps the doorman will mistake you for someone of importance and allow you to cut it. If all else fails, at least you can drink till you drown and not worry about a tree jumping in front of you on the way home.
