“I’ve been waiting for you to come out and talk to Ken.”
“What for?” I said.
“It’s over. I’m through with the creep,” Sefra pleaded, “Will you just listen to me? He’s crazy. He wants $20,000 of his money back.”
“So did the last 500 idiots that we’ve dealt with,” I sarcastically replied.
“Look,” she said, “If you go talk to him, maybe we can get rid of him.”
“Why can’t you get rid of him,” I asked.
“Because you’re better at it than I am,” she said. She was right about that. Sefra wasn’t good at “cleaning up her messes.” I kept my cool and reluctantly accompanied my partner in crime over to the table where Ken was sitting. His arms were tightly folded against his chest. I could tell by his defiant body language that he was angry. This was the side of Ken that I had seen from the very beginning; the side that Sefra refused to acknowledge.
As I approached Ken, I managed to muster a big phony smile. I put my arm around his robust shoulders while giving him a quick kiss on the cheek, but Ken wasn’t especially receptive. He turned his face away from me, and threw my arm off of his shoulder. I could feel my temper begin to escalate. Still trying to be civil, I asked the man to tell me what was wrong. Ken unfolded his muscular arms long enough to take a drink from his glass of coke. “Look,” he said, “I just found out that I have to leave the country permanently. I need $20,000 of my money back from you two and I’m not leaving this place until I get it.” My patience had now officially run out. This guy might have been able to intimidate Sefra, but he certainly didn’t intimidate me. All of a sudden, I lost my temper. I took his glass of coke off the table and flung it directly into his face. To add insult to injury, I told him that his $20,000 was long gone, every last dime of it. “Consider yourself ripped off!” I said, as I walked away from the table. The stocky man didn’t respond to having a drink thrown on him. Instead, he remained calm, and just wiped the dripping coke off of his face with the sleeve of his shirt. Five minutes later, he left the club.
Sefra was absolutely livid with me. “I can’t believe you just did that!” she screamed, “You can’t do that to a crazy asshole like him.” Sefra was concerned about him retaliating. I couldn’t have cared less. In my professional opinion, there were some customers that you just had to dump, and Ken was one of them.
After things cooled down between Sefra and me, we decided that it would probably behoove us to not show up for work for the next couple of nights. To avoid the possibility of Ken returning to the club later on in the evening, Sefra and I left work a couple of hours early. That night, I made it a point to watch my rearview mirror closely while driving home from the club. Although I wasn’t overly concerned, I certainly wasn’t oblivious to what these customers were capable of doing.
My roommates were still up partying when I got home. As usual, they asked me how my night was. I told them the latest episode. Most people found my career fascinating, and loved to hear all the horror stories about the clubs. The majority of the tales were so outrageous that a portion of my audience found them difficult to believe.
It was close to 4:30 in the morning before I got to bed. I tossed and turned for close to an hour before I succumbed to taking a couple of my prescription sleeping pills. These pills offered me some relief from my life, which I was in dire need of. Up to this point, I was able to dismiss my career as “just some stupid job.” But for some reason, I wasn’t able to justify being in the business any longer. At forty-five years old, I should have been long gone from the strip clubs. The fact that I wasn’t ate at me constantly. I couldn’t understand why I allowed myself to remain in some dirty dump watching men suck on boots and hump restaurant booths. In a way, I felt that I wasn’t much better than the sick men that patronized the clubs. Year after year, I kept complaining to everyone about my life; however, I did nothing to change it and I couldn’t figure out why. Finally, the sleeping pills kicked in and I drifted off into a deep, painless, drug-induced sleep.
I was woken up several hours later from the incessant ringing of the telephone that was next to my bed. My answering machine was set to pick up after two rings, but for some reason, it wasn’t working. I took the phone off the hook and drifted back to sleep. A few minutes later, I heard someone knocking on my bedroom door, calling my name. It was my roommate telling me to pick up my phone. I asked her who it was. She told me that it was Sefra. Apparently, she had called my roommates line, because she couldn’t get through to mine. Still relatively sedated from the sleeping pills, I instructed my roommate to tell her to call me back later. My roommate, who was obviously angered with me, began to bang louder on the door and shouted, “You better pick up the damn phone, it’s an emergency!” What kind of emergency could Sefra possibly be having, I thought to myself. Knowing Sefra, it was probably something stupid and incon-sequential. I reluctantly picked up the phone for no other reason than to get my roommate off my back. I asked Sefra to tell me why she felt the need to call me so early in the morning. “Sorry to bother you, but I thought that you might like to know that you don’t have a job anymore. The club burned down last night!”
Sefra exclaimed. I was so tired that I couldn’t even think straight. The first thing that popped into my mind was that this was some type of joke. “Damn it,” I said, “somebody beat me to it! Now can I go back to sleep?”
“What’s wrong with you?” Sefra asked. “Are you taking those damn sleeping pills again?” she said, “Look, one of the dancers just called me. The club started on fire at about 5:30 a.m. I guess the police and the fire department are still there.” Sefra said that she was headed down to the club, and that she’d meet me there in forty-five minutes.
Then she abruptly hung up the phone. I was tempted to take the phone back off the hook, but something told me not to. Although it was an effort on my part, I managed to drag myself out of bed and drive to the club. The Vegas Star was approximately 50 miles south of where I lived. As I drove down the open stretch of highway, I couldn’t help but wonder if the whole thing wasn’t just some sort of a practical joke. My gut feeling told me that it wasn’t.
A surge of anxiety came over me as I exited off the highway, and began down the familiar street that would take me to the Vegas Star. I was now only a couple minutes away from my destination. I took a deep breath and continued driving.
By now the club was in plain view. The parking lot was packed, but not with the usual scores of men anxiously waiting for the doors of the club to open. Fire trucks, ambulances, and police officers occupied the premises instead. Traffic was backed up for miles. The police had blocked off the parking lot of the club in the hopes of discouraging voyeurs. Clouds of dense-black smoke ominously hovered over what used to be the Vegas Star. Now the club was nothing more than a smoldering pile of black rubbish. The man-made hell was no more.
I parked my car on the side of the road, and waited for my business partner to show up. A few minutes later, Sefra arrived with a hand full of our co-workers.
Sefra walked over to the passenger side of my car and motioned for me to unlock the door. She slid into the front seat and slammed the car door closed. “I bet you anything that Ken did this,” she nonchalantly said as she pulled out a cigarette from one of the pockets of her black-leather jacket, “I talked to one of the doormen right before I got here, and he told me that the fire department officials strongly suspected arson.”
“I’d be surprised if it was anything other than that,” I replied, “the place didn’t exactly generate a lot of satisfied customers.”
“That’s true,” Sefra wearily said as she pushed her unruly mane of hair away from her pretty face. For the next thirty minutes, we sat in silence while we watched the fire fighters suffocate the last of the flames. My emotions shifted rapidly from relief to despair as I watched my financial security collapse. I had absolutely no idea what I was going to do.