I wanted to avoid the house fee but wanted to maximize profit, so for the first five months, I worked the three-to-eleven shift, clocking out just as many girls were getting there. Then I got smarter and I would work a double, starting at three in the afternoon and not leaving until two in the morning. I could skip the house fee, establish my guys, and stay with them when the later girls rolled in.
I was a machine and got up to working six nights a week, with at least five of them being doubles. If I wasn’t at work, I was spending money, and who wanted to do that? Plus, I truly loved dancing. I had regulars, and my favorite was Bear, this big huge guy who always wore Hawaiian shirts. His white hair and beard gave him the look of a polar bear. He was definitely a creature of habit, coming in every night at midnight after finishing his job as the nighttime manager of a Benny’s Car Wash, and taking his usual spot on the top ledge to stay the last couple of hours. Once I saw he came in every night, I always made a point of dancing for him. Bear was never a big spender. He would tip a five onstage, and he only got table dances if it was a two-for-one, which they did every hour. Table dances were only ten dollars, but he always gave a twenty, and he always closed the night out with me. That meant Bear was good for between twenty-five and fifty dollars a night.
But late on a Friday or Saturday night, there’s always a guy who wants to go into a VIP room and you can get six or seven hundred dollars, so the girls would ignore Bear to make that money. Not me—I would always give Bear the last dance of the night.
Girls would be like, “This guy wants to give you a hundred dollars for a table dance.”
“No, I only dance for Bear.”
“What’s wrong with you?” was the constant refrain.
“He’s twenty dollars every night,” I said. “Every week. Every month. Do the math.” He was sensitive about things, and why be rude to him one night to get two or three hundred dollars off this guy who I’m never gonna see again? It’s the long game, and Bear taught me it.
Perhaps more than the money, doing the last dance every night with Bear meant that I would never go home in a bad mood. He wasn’t some drunk tourist thinking he could do whatever he wanted because he threw money at me.
Another guy started coming in to the club named Brian. By then I had broken up with Andy. I had given up trying to fix his darkness. Brian was handsome and tall, so preppy that he didn’t look like anyone I’d ever been with. But he was funny and we clicked in conversation. He was twenty-six, and we started dating February 7, 1998, a month before I turned nineteen.
Brian and I moved into a house we rented together, and we were very happy. We were so living the American dream that we even got a dog, a Sheltie we named Sasha.
Part of the American dream is making money. I am a firm believer in capitalism. And I noticed that the girls at the Gold Club who invested in breast implants got more tips. I was already a 36B, heading to a C, but I wanted to go bigger. There were three doctors in Baton Rouge who did everyone’s boobs, so I started comparison-shopping at the club, asking the girls who they went to and deciding whose boob work I liked best.
I chose Dr. Charles Gruenwald, a suave-looking guy with prematurely gray hair and absolutely no bedside manner. When I went for the consultation, he came in the room and said, “Lemme look at them.” Phump, off came my shirt and he was immediately hands-on, making judging grunts. I told him I wanted to go up to a 36D.
“Okay, okay,” he said. He barreled through an explanation of his proposed procedure, then jotted down a price on a piece of scrap paper. “Gonna be this much,” he said. “Let me know if you want it or not.” And he walked out.
I almost didn’t go back, but I decided to go ahead with it because he could put implants under the muscle, through incisions in my underarms. I scar really badly and wanted to avoid incisions under the breasts or on my nipples. Plus, this way I would be able to breastfeed if I ever chose to have a baby. Because they have to pop the muscle away from the bone, it’s a much more involved and dangerous surgery; some doctors just won’t do it. So, Dr. Grunts it was.
On a July morning in 1999, Brian drove me to the surgery and waited for me outside. I wasn’t really nervous—I just wanted to get it over with. I had been working even more than usual, saving up for being out of commission at the club for about two weeks. The surgery was twenty-two hundred dollars, and I bet today it would be fifteen grand easy.
Because they go in through your upper body, I knew it would take a while for the swelling to go down and for the implants to settle. The muscle has to relax and you have to massage the area as part of the recovery. You measure how far your boobs have dropped by how many fingers you can fit between your breast and your collarbone. When I woke up from surgery, it was one finger, so my boobs were way up high.
They started to look good really quickly, and I was excited for the swelling to finally go down so I could wear all the cute 36D bras I’d bought from Victoria’s Secret. But at the two-week mark, when most of the swelling was supposed to be gone, they were still huge. None of my new bras were fitting me, so I went to Victoria’s Secret and they measured me.
“Honey, you’re a triple D,” the sweet lady told me.
I almost shit my pants. I went back to Dr. Grunts. “How big are my fucking tits?” I asked. He was supposed to give me a 450 cc’s on one side and 475 on the other, because everybody’s got one bigger than the other.
He hemmed, and hawed, clearly not wanting to tell me. Finally, he opened the chart and said, “You’re 575.”
I almost shit myself again.
“I filled them up till I liked them,” he said with a shrug.
“You’re a fucking asshole,” I hissed.
“You are a very broad cavity with wide shoulders, and everyone who does that comes back and gets ’em bigger,” he said. “They looked so good that I didn’t want to cut you twice.”
That’s what stopped me from suing him, but I was a cartoon character until they settled.
It helped that I got a lot more tips. Instantly. Now I’ve gone on to win many Best Breasts trophies. And every time I accept one of those, I thank him by name. Best twenty-two hundred dollars I ever spent.
I also named my breasts because I love them so much. Thunder and Lightning. I’ve had the same implants since 1999—they’re almost old enough to drink.
For the next two years, I continued to work at the Gold Club more than sixty hours a week. I was happy making money and saving up to buy a house. I had my regulars and I never did anything illegal, mainly because I was a good girl and also because I was hopelessly naïve.
The Gold Club was well known, so they would have feature dancers come in. A feature dancer is someone who is known for her pictorials or films. She can travel all over and draws her fan base to a club. She is paid by the club, keeps her tips, and when she performs—usually about two shows a night—the other house girls all stop because the feature is the star attraction.
When features were there, I made it my mission to talk to all of them, because I wanted to be one someday. Most of them seemed standoffish and cold, and I have now learned why. It’s not necessarily the women being chilly, it’s that clubs really hate when the features try to “recruit” or give their information to get their best house girls away.