Most of the men who fell prey to these scams were married and couldn’t afford to take any legal recourse against the women. These waitresses had a host of shrewd attorneys at their beck and call. Some of the dancers got wind as to what was going on and attempted to alert Adrian. However, Adrian and his wife were in denial and simply wouldn’t listen. As a matter of fact, any dancer that said anything negative about the waitresses was fired. Meanwhile, thousands of dollars escaped the hands of Adrian and his silent business partners. Instead, the money went into the pockets of the waitresses and dancers involved in the scam.
In the past, I had always worked in clubs that were very strict, or at least tried to operate with some semblance of order. In this particular club, there was virtually none, with the exception of the attendance policy. The dancers were required to show up for work on the days they were scheduled. If they called in sick, or didn’t come in, they were fined $300, which had to be paid before they could return to work. Outside of mandated attendance, the dancers were free to do as they pleased as long as they made money for the house.
The amount of substance abuse that took place in this club was alarming. Both management and employees were chronically drunk and high. By the end of the evening, many of the dancers could be found passed out on the dirty floors of the dressing room, or collapsed over filthy toilet bowls in the restrooms. Nobody even bothered to revive them before the club closed. Subsequently, these women were left laying in filth until the club reopened the next night at 8:00 p.m.
Adrian and his unscrupulous management team did everything to encourage these women to continue their self-destructive behavior. Management exercised control over them by supporting their habit of choice. If the dancers were unable to fund their addictions, the owners would lend them the money until they got paid. Death came to several of these women. Windy, who was formally diagnosed bipolar, had spent most of her life frequenting mental institutions. She was prescribed Lithium, but claimed that she couldn’t take it because it made her sick.
She came from a very dysfunctional family that was incapable of helping her.
Windy was alone in the world and very ill. She would frequently talk about committing suicide. “I might as well kill myself,” the pretty young woman would say,
“I’ve got nothing in my life, no boyfriend, no husband, no life… nobody wants me. My only family is the people that work at the club,” she insisted. One day, Windy didn’t show up for work. Her landlord called the club and told the bartender that Windy was found dead in her apartment. Apparently, she drank down a bottle of battery acid. Her personal belongings consisted of nothing but a few stuffed animals, broken down furniture, and some costumes that she wore up on stage. The strand of black boa feathers that she once used to dance with, hung wearily over an old wire hanger in the dancer’s dressing room, untouched for several years. They were eventually used as a dog leash on one of the customers.
Windy, wasn’t the only tragic figure that walked through the doors of the Vegas Star lounge.
The story of Tabatha was equally as disturbing. One evening a truck driver walked through the front door of the club carrying an unconscious woman that he had found laying in the parking lot of the club. The stranger asked the doorman if the woman belonged to “us.” Ironically, Vegas Star didn’t employ the unidentified woman. The management team happened to have been standing nearby when the man carried in the woman. Adrian decided that he could use another dancer and instructed the truck driver to “throw the bitch in his office.” This is where she spent the night after being raped by Adrian and the two doormen. The next night, the poor woman was up on stage stark naked and stumbling around drunk. The audience and the management heckled and laughed while some of the customers threw cigarette butts at the woman’s crotch. A month later the woman was found dead in a nearby field, by an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.
Tragedy, illness, and monumental personal problems touched the lives of just about every person who worked at this club. The morale was very low. We all hated our jobs, and we made damn sure that the customers knew it. As far as we were concerned, the customers could do no right. We hated the men who spent money on us and despised the ones who didn’t.
Our distain for the customers was certainly not unwarranted. Most of the men who patronized strip clubs had absolutely no regard for the dancers, and even less for their wives and children. Some of us went out of our way to pay the men back for their infidelities by humiliating them in various ways.
The antics we resorted to were rather humorous, or at least we thought they were.
I was the mastermind behind a few of them. Our prime targets were the married men who solicited us for sex, yet claimed that they were happily married. We always made sure that these offenders left with some type of derogatory message on the back of their shirts or suit jackets written with bright-red lipstick. The messages varied, but most of the time we wrote something like “strip joint junkie,” or the word, “sucker.” Some of the dancers chose to scribble the name of the club across their backs for the entire world to see, especially their wives.
Men who chose to expose their sexual organs while we were on stage were another group of deserving candidates. Most of the time, we would dump a cup of scalding hot coffee on their laps or a glass of ice water in hopes of curtailing their masturbating.
A few of the more creative dancers would deliberately drop their lit cigarettes into their suit or coat pocket or snuff their cigarettes out on the men’s exposed penis.
Sometimes we would stick large wads of chewing gum in their hair or toupees without their knowledge.
Last but not least was a form of humiliation that we called the “squirt gun treatment.” We’d fill up plastic squirt guns with blue ink or hair bleach. Then, we very discreetly sprayed the backs of their heads or clothes with it. This was one of our favorite stunts and was primarily used on cheapskates. These were the men that would come into the club at 7:00 p.m. and stay until closing. Besides the fact they out-stayed their welcome, they were also non-spenders. These men absolutely infuriated us because as long as they remained in the club, we had to keep going up on stage to dance. It didn’t matter if there was one customer or one hundred. Most strip clubs advertised continuous nude dancing which meant that a dancer must be up on the stage at all times. When we were forced to dance for these types of men, some of us would rebel by playing obnoxious music or just standing on the stage fully clothed while drinking coffee or smoking cigarettes.
The more insightful customers took the hint and left.
There was nothing sweet or sexy going on in strip clubs, at least not the ones that I worked at. They were primarily battlefields. Where an ongoing war took place between the dancers and the customers. The men basically disliked us and we loathed them. Our ultimate goal was to turn their wildest fantasy into their worst nightmare and most of the time we succeeded.
This club was no different than the rest of the clubs in the sense that it too generated quite a lot of revenue. The thing that set it apart from all the others was that there was absolutely no intervention from management as far as what went on in the place. There was also no mandated prostitution, which gave the professional hustlers a free reign to basically do whatever they pleased. The dancers and waitresses were able to charge the customers as much as they wanted to. There was no ceiling on prices. Nor did anyone monitor the time that we spent with the customers. We left them as quickly as we could once we got their money.
The clientele typically spent anywhere from $1,000 and up in less than an hour for not much more than a couple of flat cokes and some staged erotic conversation from the dancer or dancers of his choice. It wasn’t uncommon for men to spend at much as $10,000, or even $20,000 for the company of a woman. Those who had never been exposed to this type of business would probably find these tales difficult to believe, but it happened time and time again.