Hella Nation - Evan Wright [25]
The eroticism of the moment is, of course, highly odd. Not only is Priscilla a complete stranger, but when we finish dancing to a few songs, she clocks me out on a punch card, whispering, “I’m not allowed to ask for a tip, but most customers feel comfortable tipping us at least fifty percent of the bill.” The matron behind the counter tallies the minutes. I pay twelve dollars to the house for half an hour and slip Priscilla a five plus one dollar.
She returns to the couch behind the waist-high fence in the viewing area and waits for her next customer. Still feeling the flush of our intimate encounter, I wave to her on my way out. Priscilla scarcely makes eye contact. She engages a swarthy man in a gold shirt in a direct stare. He rises, apparently taken by the sight of a clean-looking girl, and approaches her for a dance.
IN 1932, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO sociologist Paul G. Cressey published The Taxi-Dance Hall: A Sociological Study in Commercialized Recreation and City Life, the summation of a five-year study of dance halls in Chicago. This form of entertainment had then, as now, a dubious reputation, but Cressey was more concerned with what he saw as the alienation, loneliness and moral ambiguity of urban life. He believed the taxi-dance hall expressed a fundamental truth about modern relations: a mobile, rapidly changing society produces cities inhabited by rootless, detached people who connect with each other primarily on the basis of mutual exploitation.
The postmodern reader, picking up Cressey’s volume after a visit to Club Flamingo, or Club Paradise, or Dreamland, is struck by the convergence of his observations and one’s own. In a passage that could describe the “corner girls” of the Flamingo, Cressey writes: “At times certain dancers seem to cease all semblance of motion over the floor, and while locked tightly together give themselves up to movements sensual in nature. . . . These couples tend to segregate at one end of the hall, where they mill about in a compressed pack of wriggling, perspiring bodies.”
Cressey occasionally seems a little too fascinated by displays of sensuality, but he was no sexual moralist. What interested him was not that the taxi dancer functioned similarly to the prostitute in terms of hiring out her body, but that she also seemed to be selling her affection, emotional intimacy and the illusion of romance. He believed this barter of simulated emotions between the sexes—what he called the “pecuniary nexus displac[ing] personal relations”—was both a cause and a symptom of the psychological disorganization and demoralization that typified the modern urban experience.
Cressey grows increasingly pessimistic as his arguments stretch across three hundred pages. Everyone is alienated by the process. Loneliness increases. It becomes worse and worse, until we arrive in present-day L.A.—sixty-seven years beyond the scope of Cressey’s tome—and discover that the phenomenon he despaired of is bigger than ever. Los Angeles has more “hostess clubs,” as taxi-dance halls are called today, than at any other time in its history. There are about fourteen such establishments, according to club owners, most of them clustered downtown within half a mile of the convention center. They employ several hundred young women every night, and draw thousands of customers each week.
The clubs seem to bolster L.A.’s claim to being the most alienated city in America. But for a place whose citizenry is as jaded as L.A.’s is supposed to be, why do thousands of men in the city spend as much as several hundred dollars each per night to dance and hold hands, when the same money could buy direct gratification from any number of local massage parlors and out-call hooker services? Is it really possible to buy emotional intimacy, to soothe big-city loneliness by dancing with a stranger?
I AM ON MY SECOND DATE with Priscilla. (It’s not realistic to consider a paid encounter a date, but it’s impossible to avoid