At a more respectable establishment these women might be called exotic dancers or cabaret stars or even burlesque artists. But at Stiletto’s, where the beer is cheap and the neon “open” sign crackles through the hot summer days and deep into the night, they are strippers.
Stiletto’s is strip tease designed to satisfy the fringes of American society, an elixir for their emotionally malnourished lives. It’s a place where dirty dancing, and sometimes tricks, are traded for hard currency inside a smoky, corrugated steel warehouse on the outskirts of Fort Worth, fittingly near the corner of Industrial Boulevard and Pipeline Road. It’s a place where the lonely and wayward can sit in a mirror-covered world and imagine the g-string clad women on stage really want them.
The young and old, the rich and the not so rich, come to this clandestine club to step into the darkness, to touch the bottom of the barrel, to indulge in the nastiest of the nasty. Come Friday night, the dusty parking lot is tailgate to tailgate with pickup trucks and Cadillacs.
A timid man in jeans and tennis shoes steps through the front door and into the darkness early one Monday afternoon. The shaft of light from the opening door crinkles the face of the two customers, two strippers, and the bored, blonde bartender. Just a whisper outside the door, the thunderous music—Cowboys from Hell by Pantera—thumps painfully in the man’s ears as he approaches the bar. Before the bartender can ask if he wants a drink, a buxom black girl in a red, see-through mini-skirt and a g-string slips onto the stool next to him.
“Oh you smell good. You ever been in here before?”
“This is my first time,” he says.
“I’m Anna Marie,” she says, resting one hand on the bar, close to his stomach, and extending the other with her fingers cupped like the Queen of England looking for a proper greeting. He shakes her hand nervously and orders a beer. To Anna Marie, the sale has begun.
The girls of Stiletto’s are pros at transforming themselves into showgirl characters—crude playthings—that smile widely and chat endlessly while enduring the daily degradation of whiskey breath and stray fingers. What keeps them going, they say, is the faint hope of one day stepping out of their g-string characters into inconspicuous ones.
When the club is empty, the girls often sit around for hours sipping vodka tonics they bought themselves, dancing for each other, distracting Victoria, the bartender, from her ashtray and daytime television. Some feed dollar bills into a video game machine at the end of the bar and let hours pass as they click their fake nails against the screen.
Conversation rolls from talk of a recent brawl that left one man without three of his teeth and the other with a broken finger to what exactly constitutes a prostitute. Almost anything goes in the shadows of the main room at Stiletto’s. But the girls hint that there’s an even darker den of iniquity behind a wall of mirrors, where cash and drugs are exchanged for quick gratification. The “good girls” whisper about their strung out co-workers who duck out of sight with Chops, the daytime DJ, and reappear a few minutes later, their eyes glazed and vacant, stumbling into each other.
As business picks up, the strippers shift into high gear, lathering their bodies in hand sanitizer and perfume. One of the strippers flirts her way around the floor, trying to convince one of the patrons to take her to the other side of the room, into the dark corner. For twenty bucks, she offers to thrash in anyone’s lap for the length of one long song or two short songs. Her job, as she sees it, is to squeeze the last dollar out of every patron sitting inside Stiletto’s—the way she turns an empty bottle of hand sanitizer upside down to shake free the last clumps of gel.
Anna Marie is still working on the timid man in tennis shoes. He has ordered another beer and she has kept firm eye contact through the entire conversation. Her hands brush casually against his thighs and she touches his chest at any opportunity. “Being in this business you can size people up pretty good, you know,” she says. “I bet I can size you up easy. What do you do?”
“I work at Bell.”
“Yeah, I guessed that kinda thing. That’s what I’m gonna do.”
Anna Marie—a 23-year-old Haitian immigrant whose mother brought her to America when she was seven—has sweet dreams. She is an Applied Science student at UT Arlington. One day she wants to be “the head guy, like one of the top people in a company, where it’s part ideas and part business.You know, I have good business sense.” She decided on Applied Science because a man she danced for a few years ago said he was an executive at Bell Helicopter Textron, whose main plant is in nearby Hurst. He seemed to have a lot of money and when Anna Marie asked him how he got started in business, he said he majored in Applied Science in college.
Dancing until 2:00 a.m. and trying to get up for her 8:00 a.m. math and science classes results in a lot of Ds and Fs. During class her head throbs as she sits in the last row and struggles not to smack the perky sorority girls bounding around with their hair in ponytails.
Chops comes through the speakers between songs: “Anna Marie, next on stage, Anna Marie.”
The girls take turns twisting across the stage in two song sets. The first song is normally spent sprawled against the mirror, slowly posing for anyone who might be watching. For the second song the girls are usually topless and crawl along the edge of the stage so the men can lean over and slip dollar bills wherever they can sneak their hands. A good stage show means more dances.
The timid man comes to the stage for the second song and puts a folded dollar bill in Anna Marie’s underwear as she bounces enough to make her buttocks clap together. She spins around and pushes her breasts together near his face. The stage vibrates from the bass coming through the $70,000 sound system. Inspired by Marilyn Manson grunting out the lyrics of the Eurythmics cover, Sweet Dreams, Anna Marie gyrates in a violent frenzy, writhing and spanking herself.
A group of men in khaki shorts and t-shirts enters the darkness and takes a table near the bar. The three of them decided Stiletto’s was the best place to ease the pain of being fired from their jobs. They begin talking loudly. “We need some bitches over here.” Both of the girls working are already occupied with possible sales though, so the annoyed men leave after finishing their mugs of Busch.
After 30 minutes or so Anna Marie can tell she won’t get the timid man into the corner. She gets very close and says, “Guess you don’t really want to have fun today, huh?”
He offers to buy her a drink instead.
“I’d rather just have the money,” she says.
“I don’t have much cash on me.”
“We have an ATM.”
“I don’t think I want to use the ATM. I can put a drink on my tab.”
Her smile fades. “How about a shot,” she says.
He turns to Victoria. “Can she have a shot?” he asks.
“Can I have two?” Anna Marie touches his arm.
“Can she have two shots?”
Victoria asks Anna Marie what kind of shots she wants. “Patron,” Anna Marie says. “Both.”
Victoria delivers two shot glasses lined with salt and filled with the most expensive liquor in the house. “That’s twenty for those and four-fifty for the beers.” He pays his tab and says a curt goodbye to Anna Marie. She downs the first shot and chases it with Sprite. She never touches the other shot. Hours later the night bartender will pour it out as she cleans up glasses left on the bar.
The air at Stiletto’s stinks of a musky combination of smoke, stale beer and hand sanitizer. The scent clings to clothing and nostrils for days. Showers don’t remove it. For the strippers, that smell is part of life. They become so accustomed they no longer notice it except for the first few steps in the door.
Every week one of the employees makes a run to the store for little things. A few grocery bags sit on the bar. Paper towels. A jar of olives. And at least four or five large tubs of hand sanitizer. Each tub has a dispenser at the top, the hero of many nights. Behind the bar: hand sanitizer. Along the wall in the dressing room: hand sanitizer.
When a construction worker’s funk hangs after a hug or a drunk is drooling during a dance, the strippers rub on the sparkling gel to ward off bacteria and bad memories. The gel is also the strippers’ cleanser of choice to remove the dark black ink stains in and around their g-strings—a reminder of how filthy money is, in more ways than one.
Constantly scrubbing with soap and water would take too long and wouldn’t sufficiently disinfect skin that spends hours rolling around on the floor, pressed against the sweaty chests of strangers, straightening dirty dollar bills. The gel also creates a shine on the skin and works well on shoulders and thighs to remind men—with an unappetizing surprise—that licking is not appreciated.
It also works as a symbolic cleanser after a particularly foul or contemptuous experience. One girl pumps out handsful and gives herself a complete rubdown after a struggle with a customer during a lap dance. She keeps a smile on her face while she works to keep the man’s fingers on her butt and not in it.
The Fort Worth Police Department has a struggle of its own going on with Stiletto’s. The club is on a finger of Fort Worth that uncurls between Arlington and the gated community suburbs to the north, so the area does not see a lot of Fort Worth cops. But three or four times a month a vice officer comes in to make sure Stiletto’s is abiding by the Sexual Oriented Business (SOB) codes and sometimes writes the girls tickets for prostitution. Depending on the officer, girls can get tickets for making any physical contact with men while topless or for not wearing their painful stripper shoes. The statute, written with the hopes of making stripping less desirable, says the girls must have their shoes on the entire time they are on the floor, and the shoes must have at least three inch heels. After three citations for prostitution, a girl may no longer legally work for an SOB.
The girls are suspicious of men that come in and ask questions. They think the cops like to “get their rocks off” with taxpayer money, then write some tickets. Like the occasional bodily fluid, plain-clothes police officers are just another pitfall of the odious occupation.
Fantasia passes Ana. They hug and each declares the other the sexiest girl in the club. They quickly simulate lesbian sex, moaning and grinding together. Then Fantasia leaves Ana to her sale.
When Fantasia walks through the door she is not Fantasia. She is someone from outside the world of Stiletto’s. She walks through the room toward the dressing room in flip-flops and torn jeans and a tank top, carrying Fantasia in a duffel bag.
Twenty minutes later a rough facsimile of the girl in the tank top walks out of the dressing room. She has on eight and a half inch heels and thick layers of makeup that exaggerate her lips and bring her eyelashes to inhuman lengths. Her yellow hair extends like a flame around her face. She wears a hot-pink two-piece bikini that barely stretches over her surgically enhanced DD breasts and has a matching slip wrapped around her hips like a skirt that detaches easily on stage. At 5’9 in flip-flops, Fantasia becomes a supersized sex monster in character.
It’s Friday night, the busiest of the week. About 100 men will come to Stiletto’s this evening. Some will sip beer by themselves and pretend not to look at the girls pulsating on stage. Many will come in groups and buy each other dances and laugh at the awkward looks on their friends’ faces as a naked woman bends over between them. Most men are here alone though and they stare unabashedly at the flawed, synthetic creatures moving sensuously around the room.
Ana is queen of the flawed. One of the top earners at Stiletto’s, Ana used to dance as Kyanna but decided she could make more money with a name that sounds less black. To make enough for her and her son, she works 10-hour shifts crawling over strange men, doing the splits on stage. Like most of the girls, she works at different clubs different days of the week. She takes Vitamin C pills to heal the bruises she gets falling to her knees, entertaining her customers.
Ana is also helped by the fact that she is tiny, even in her six-inch stilettos. Her legs are fit enough that her shoes make her calf muscles bulge and she has to wear leg warmers to cover the definitions. Drunk, stoned, coked-up, Ana works to stretch every sale. She says “baby” in almost every sentence and her eyes are half closed. With a few big sales she pulls in $300 a night.
Now she is playing pool in the corner for a dollar a game with a man she’d like to pull into a private dance. Ana sinks a ball in the side pocket. “You see that shot, baby? The pussy can play. The pussy can play.” Her wig slips and exposes her hairline as she tries for the eight ball.
The maestro of this muck and mire is a man named Ray Sutton. A humble man with his hair parted down the middle and a mustache that stops short of the sides of his mouth, Ray works the room seven nights a week. From when he arrives at 5:00 p.m. until he leaves at 4:00 a.m. Ray shakes hands and settles disputes among strippers and counts the register. In his dress shirt and tight necktie he lugs a large wrench across the floor to fix the plumbing in the dressing room.
A “Renaissance strip club man,” he calls himself. He is part pimp, part host, part father figure to the girls. He is touchy-feely with the dancers; they only approach him if they want something. A schedule change. A free drink. Favor in an argument with another stripper. He calms most arguments before they get physical and sends the girls to different areas of the club like a father too tired to care about the details of the conflict.
The perfect combination of business sense and apathy to manage an SOB, he has no misconceptions about which part of society he works in. This line of work has cost him relationships, caused him shame, and paid his rent every month. Even if one girl is tearing out clumps of another’s hair or men are breaking each other’s noses, Ray knows he can’t call the police. For him nothing is made better by the presence of police officers and he refuses to invite a cop into the club for any reason. One day he hopes to save enough to start an SOB of his own.
Ray looks across the room and sees the prized jewel of Stiletto’s ready to work: Spencer, the fast-talking, big-drinking, crowd-rowdying throwback of a DJ who takes over the mic and MCs a full night of bottle-breaking good times. And even if it is slow and the strippers look bored, nobody would be able to tell from hearing Spencer. He spits out sentences as though they are just long words. “Next-on-stage-is-the-lovely-JeannieLynn! Let-me-hear-all-the-fellas-here-to-party-scream-hell-yeah! Hell-yeah!” Mindless enthusiastic chatter pours from Spencer as smoothly as the beer across his lips. “This-is-Jeannie-Lynn’s-first-time-performing-at-Stiletto’s-so-let’s-give-this-hot-brunette-baby-babe-a-beautiful-salute-fellas! Let’s-get-it-going-for-the-gorgeous-the-great-JeannieLynn!”
Ana slides next to a man in his 40s wearing a red t-shirt and jean shorts. He went to the stage to tip her last time she was up and she wanted to pay him a visit. She’s been here for nine hours and the smell of sweat is defeating her perfume and hand sanitizer.
The man in the t-shirt orders her a drink. She smiles and reveals chipped, crooked teeth. “You just like to be around the pussy, huh, baby? You love the pussy don’t you, baby?”
Fantasia sits with three Mexican men at a table in the middle of the room. After a round of drinks, two of the men chip in to buy a dance for the third, who says his name is Thomas when she whispers in his ear. Her pale, glossy skin wraps around the man as she contorts. “Do you ever take the bottoms off?” Thomas asks.
Until six months ago, they did. The club was called Showcase and was totally nude and BYOB. The owner and his son, who also own two other clubs in Fort Worth, thought it would be more cost effective to start selling alcohol. So, in accordance with the law, the age of admission went from 18 to 21. The girls also put on their pants—their g-strings—but three square inches of fabric did nothing to cover the raunchiness or change the ‘anything goes’ mentality. Showcase was dead and Stiletto’s, with an apostrophe that presumably implies a person named Stiletto owns the club, was born. The move was a success for “Stiletto” as the profits more than doubled.
But for the girls, the move meant a loss in revenue. Most believe their losses come from men spending money on drinks instead of dancers and not a decrease in private dances because of the new pants rule.
Either way, there remains a certain decrepit quality about this world. It is more than just a freedom, it is an invitation to be debaucherous and give in to vices. There is a business transaction. A brief, faux relationship. Both parties want something, and to get it, they each must give something up. For money, the stripper delivers her undivided attention and her warm body and an unspoken promise not to judge. The men come because there is no substitute for a woman, even with all her snaggle-toothed flaws. No matter how she hides it with wigs or gobs of makeup or coats of hand sanitizer, behind the fake names and fake breasts and exaggerated height is a real human woman. A woman that could always find something better to do than to hang on the words and hips of a drunk degenerate.
The man in the red t-shirt is about to experience what keeps Stiletto’s in business despite the endless string of pornography available through the Internet. Ana takes him by the hand and sits him down along the far wall. She turns around and bends over in front of him gyrating to the 50 Cent song. She backs in very close to him and lifts his hands to her hips. She grinds in his lap and he holds her with both hands. He can feel her breath on his neck and decides he would like another dance. And another. And another after that.
After the fourth song Ana hugs him tightly, then gets off of him. She stuffs four folded twenty-dollar bills into her leg warmer and picks up her bra. She slips behind the walls for another coat of hand sanitizer, her last of the evening. He pays for his drinks and leaves never having exchanged real names.
Life in Stiletto’s is actually a step up for some people. After setting up the register for the day, Victoria sits at the end of the bar in a t-shirt that says RUB MY NUTS FOR LUCK and watches her favorite syndicated television shows with the captions on. She is quick to serve the slow trickle of men that approach and she is careful and courteous when making drinks. She nods along through a conversation she can barely hear from behind the bar until a stripper comes over to talk to a possible sale. The faint green prison tattoo on her forearm and her missing front teeth speak to a much worse time in her life. A bright silver cross dangles over her chest. When the strippers ask her if she wants to drink with them she laughs and trembles and says there isn’t a chance. For Victoria, there are a lot worse places in this world than Stiletto’s.
Anna Marie has been playing a game—like solitaire with more sounds and animations—since she got here two hours ago. She works almost everyday after her classes and has the nicest teeth of any girl here. She uses her same hook, her pickup lines, but her mind hasn’t been on the sales lately. Her name is listed as the high score for more than half the games on the machine.
Another round of grades just came in from UTA. She has improved, from mostly Fs to mostly Ds, but in her major, Ds are just as bad as Fs. She talks to some of the other girls about a road trip she sometimes takes with the friends that got her into stripping. They pile into a compact car and hit the long dusty highway out of Fort Worth in the direction of a stripper’s paradise: Amarillo. They find the hottest club, dance there for a few days, and drive home richer. She often makes over $1,000 the first night there, but it steadily decreases every day she stays.
“The clubs in Amarillo are so much better,” she explains. “There is nothing else to do in small places like that and they love curvy black girls.” Her CEO dreams seem distant as she talks about leaving Stiletto’s and touring the honky-tonk havens. She thinks Wichita, Kansas, sounds like an Amarillo kind of place. And Ohio seems like that too. With enough big nights she might be able to work from home and do only bachelor and fraternity parties. “Wouldn’t that be nice, y’all? It’s just you working for you. Every time the phone rings you know it’s money.”
The conversation turns to prostitution, always a sensitive subject. “Some girls don’t think when they see the money in front of them,” Anna Marie says, and Ana seems to know she is referencing someone in particular. “That comes back on them way worse. I’m a stripper but I sleep good at night.”
Victoria comes over and refills Redbulls and Bloody Marys. She hears the conversation and heads in the other direction.
“Like you wouldn’t take the money,” a girl in a green teddy with a snap in the front says to Anna Marie.
“You know I don’t do that. She knows,” Anna Marie points at Ana.
Ana steps back and lifts her hands. Even with her fuzzy eyes and slurred speech she knows to stay out of this. “I don’t get in it, baby.”
Victoria shakes her head when she looks back at the girls during a commercial break. She will have to tell Ray to keep those girls on separate shifts. Things calm down and she turns back to her favorite show, her favorite escape, the aptly titled, “Charmed.”
The day is passing slowly and every time the door opens, it annoys Anna Marie. She has made less than $60 in seven hours and, of that she has spent more than a third on drinks and games. She cracks open her fake Louie Vuitton cigarette case and lights a Parliament. Two deep puffs and the door opens.
A man in cowboy boots enters. She puts the cigarette in the ash tray next to the pile of crumpled butts and turns away from the door for a moment.
She collects herself and takes a deep breath. She mashes her lips and rolls her eyes. Another deep breath and the cowboy is sitting next to her. She turns her head, tossing her hair into the thick, smoky air and flashes a brilliant smile of ivory white teeth. Her eyes meet with his and she rests her hand on the bar in front of him.
“Oh you smell good,” she says. “You ever been in here before?”
[ More Ten Spurs 1 | Tramp ]
