Titles Posted Later Today
I thought it would be fun to take the next couple of months to revisit my first book "Lapdancer", as I have a new book called "Juliana Beasley/ Sete 2010 coming out in the spring this year.
The following is a short story taken from an interview that I did back in 1999-2000 with a manager from a strip club in Monsey in Rockland County in New York state. The owner told me that I would have to work there to photograph there.
Some of the following photographs have never been published before. Look for more writing and pix in the weeks to come.
I dance a set of 20 minutes, rush to the changing room, grab my Contax, attach my heavy Quantum battery to the side of a g-string that would begin to sag from the weight of it , and hit the floor. In in a half hour's time, I have to play producer, convincing customers to let me photograph them with dancers, collect model releases and snap shots. I hear my stage name over the speaker, "Now, performing Nico!" I dash back to the dressing room, put away my equipment in my duffle bag and reapply my make-up and run back on the stage with a stellar smile on my face.
“The Million Dollar Question”- John
I started out working as a bouncer at a place called Erotique back in the early ’80s. It was the first big club to come into the area, a big strip club. And it was not nude. It was just topless, and there was no alcohol and no lap dancing. Then I went to another club called T & A. Again, no alcohol, no lap dancing. I came here in the early ’90s, and it was totally nude. And so the girls were up on the bar getting their money and stuff. And then one girl came up to me and said, “A guy wants a lap dance.” I had never heard of it. So I went back to my boss, and he knew less than I did. And so what we did is, we put about six chairs towards the back of the club and said, “These are chairs you can lap dance in.” And at that time we told the girls to charge ten bucks per song, and we would get three bucks out of it.
And it got so popular, it was like a mad house, the line to get in and sit on these chairs. And the funny thing was, they did it in front of everybody else. Nobody got shy, nobody was embarrassed. Me, I would have been embarrassed with an erection with a pretty girl sitting on me and everybody else gawking. Because at that time you did have people leaning against the posts or whatever, just looking at the customers with the girls. And the girls didn’t seem to mind—and they were pretty girls.
Eventually my boss, he got this idea. We took out part of the kitchen and we turned that into a lap dance room. We put like little cubicles up, with no doors because we wanted to see what was going on, and made like eight to nine stools. And then the girls were charging twenty-five bucks, and we would charge the customers five dollars just to get into the room. It just took off. People were coming here not to see the girls on stage, but to do the lap dances. And I always said lap dancing is probably going to put prostitution out of business. And what I meant by that is if a guy comes and gets a lap dance and he puts on a condom and if he does spill a little bit, it’s not going to get it on his clothes. Now there’s a plus; you call that safe sex. I think that’s what a lot of men look at it as. They’re not going to take any disease home. They’re going to come to a place like this and if it happens, it happens—you know, if they have an orgasm. Then they go home to their wives.
I’d never heard of it until we started doing it about nine years ago. I’m sure it happened before. But I think since we started doing it, word-of-mouth got around and now all the other clubs around here are doing it. And we advertise: “The best lap dance around.” And that’s what really works for us. We’re known as the club with the lap dance. We used to be called “Up Close And Personal”—the way the girls got on stage and got up in front of the guy. Believe it or not, some of these guys spend thousands of dollars a day on getting lap dances—a day.
Now we’ve even got VIP rooms in the back, where the guy can go in a little private room. There’s cameras in there. And these guys are paying a buck and a quarter [$125] for a half-hour, so they can get a private lap dance with a girl. It’s amazing. It really is.
They don’t know I have cameras back there. I have two different cameras, one an infrared—they think if they turn the lights off I can’t see them. Because let’s face it, I got to support my wife and kids. And knock on wood, I’ve never been shut down or raided. And a lot of clubs that have total nudity and the lap dances and the private rooms and whatever, they’ve been shut down several times. And we haven’t because of that security system.
The girls go back there. The guys tell them stories about how they like their wives, the position of them when they’re making love. Because I have sound on the cameras, too. And the guy will say, “You know, my wife likes it when she gets on her knees and this and that.” And the girls, you know, they talk back to the guys. Some of the guys like to be insulted. They like to have a girl put her high heel in their balls, you know, stuff like that. Some guys are just really weird. They don’t want to get off where other people can just walk by them or whatever. So the private rooms are worth it to them. And some of these guys are like bankers, or big shots in computers and chemists and all this. They come in, they have women’s clothes beneath their own clothes. So they undress; they got a woman’s bra on or whatever. And the girls spank them a little bit on their rear end. Things like that. But no sex goes on. Some guys don’t even want sex.
Several times I’ve caught a guy taking out his penis. And I have a buzzer back there. I hit the buzzer, and send the bouncer back there; he tells the guy the dance is over and he has to leave. I tell the guy he can come back another day. But if I catch him again—which has never happened—he’s out for life.
Don’t forget, I used to bounce before I became a manager. I was a bouncer out there for about three years. And what that means is, I was right next to the customers. So I had relationships with customers coming in and talking about sports, about wives, kids, work, etc. And a lot of guys who came in, I got to be close with, to talk to like once or twice a week. Some guys even came in three or four times a week. A lot of guys just like to come here to get away. I’ve been married seventeen years myself and I can understand…well I can’t understand spending that kind of money on these girls, but I understand when they say they want to get away for a while.
I get to see and hear why they really come here. A lot of guys get into an argument with their wives; they walk out, and they go to a bar and drink. The next thing you know, they get drunk, they go home, now they’re getting violent about it or whatever. Here, it’s a juice bar. So when some guys get into arguments with their wives or whatever, they come here, they see a pretty girl. They know they’re not taking a girl home. The girl will make the guy feel like he is royalty. You know, “Hi, honey. How are you doing?” A guy could be a fat slob with no teeth in his mouth, you know, somebody a girl wouldn’t take a second look at. But if he came in here and he spent a couple of dollars on a soda and paid the admission to get in the door and tipped the girl a couple of dollars, the guy would be treated like he was Brad Pitt.
And so he spends a couple of hours in here. And when he goes home, he feels like he’s taken ten, twenty pounds off his shoulders. He comes home and he’s in a much better mood. He speaks to his wife in a much different tone. Maybe he makes love with his wife that night because he came here and got aroused by the pretty women. And he doesn’t tell his wife where he was. Because if he ever told his wife, his wife would call him all kinds of names and think he was coming here and whoring around and whatever.
It’s just to get away where nobody else knows you—not your boss, not your wife, not anybody. And you come here and because you have a couple dollars in your pocket, you get treated like you’re the boss. You know, “Could I get you a soda?” “Hi, honey. Can I get you a match?” “What’s your name?” Every girl comes around to you asking your name. You know, they’ll listen to your story about what’s going on. And even if it sounds like you’re completely wrong, the girl’s going to tell you you’re completely right. And that’s what you really want to hear. It’s sort of a therapy.
I’m not a therapist. I’m not a psychologist. But you know what? I would think—let’s say people that rape girls—I’d rather have a guy come into a strip bar and get a couple lap dances and whatever and go home than go out looking for a pretty woman and raping her. You understand what I’m saying? That could help them also.
There’s a whole bunch of really good reasons why clubs like this should be allowed to operate and offer lap dances. Because some guys…let’s face it, there’s some ugly guys out there; their grooming is not…they smell or whatever. And these guys can come here and get a beautiful woman who would never give them a second look, who give them a lap dance, wrap their arms around their neck and whisper in their ear. It’s almost like a date.
Don’t forget, some of these guys are not married. They will probably lay in bed for weeks at a time while they save up their money and think about, “Wow, I know Vanessa’s going to be there on a Wednesday. I’m working overtime this week. Let me go there and see my baby.” They call them regulars.
These guys get thinking that they’re the only guys in these girls’ lives, know what I mean? They send them flowers, candies, Christmas gifts, all that sort of stuff.
I sit back here with my two bosses and sometimes we’ll see a girl in the lap dance room with a guy, and he’ll put like twelve hundred dollars on his credit card. And our question will be, “Well, Jesus, he’s back there for all this while, why the hell doesn’t he just go down to Atlantic City and get an escort?” I don’t have the answer to that. I really don’t. That’s the million dollar question.
The million dollar question. We often wonder about that around here. Because I can speak for myself. If I was not married or I had problems with my wife, instead of coming here and spending four or five hundred dollars and then going home with a big old hard on, I would probably go somewhere, down to Atlantic City or to New York City, so that I can get an escort that’s kind of classy, and pay the five hundred for I don’t know how long. And then I’m definitely going to get what I went there for.
