Hella Nation - Evan Wright [27]
“But those girls you see in the corner, doing the old whatever, they will consistently make two or three hundred a night in tips, which is more than I do. There are cameras in the club, there are security guards, and the cops come in here. If a girl is caught doing anything wrong, she’s fired on the spot. But there are girls that will let guys feel them up. Or they’ll put a jacket over the guy’s lap and jerk him off. There’s not a lot of that here, but it goes on.”
Our conversation lasts an hour and a half and costs $36, plus a $20 tip.
CLUB PARADISE, next to the Empire 900 Motel on Olympic Boulevard, strives for a sixties cocktail-lounge ambiance, with dark red walls and swoopy velour lounge chairs, but it nevertheless remains a dump along the lines of the Flamingo. It operates under the same time-clock, punch-card system, but here all the girls are Latino, as are about eighty percent of the men. Tonight many of the girls wear bikini tops and plastic hula skirts, since it’s Thursday, which is always “Hawaiian Night.” Others wear pretty white dresses suitable for Sunday confirmation, and a few are dressed in filmy, see-through things, such as the young lady in a green-chiffon genie outfit that provides more or less naked views of her white thong panties and brassiere.
The surprise at Club Paradise is not the show of pathetic Hawaiian costumes, nor the displays of flesh put on by some of the girls. The surprise is the dance floor. Club Flamingo-style grinders form a distinct minority. Most of the dancers here skillfully execute formal Latin dance moves. White skirts billow and hula skirts blur as the girls are gracefully flung about by men who seem to know what they’re doing. Even the klutzes—young, skinny guys in plaid shirts and jeans who probably spend their days washing dishes or operating leaf blowers—attempt the minimum of a box step, holding their partners stiffly, looking at their feet as they count.
I meet a thirty-year-old white guy, Phil, by the (nonalcoholic) bar. He leans against the wall with his hands buried in his pockets throughout our entire conversation. Despite his boyish blond features, he exudes a shifty vibe, perhaps because he never makes direct eye contact, as he continually looks over my shoulder at the girls wandering the room. He says he’s a customer-service representative for an express-mail company and has been coming to hostess clubs for five years.
“Where else can you go and see hot chicks in miniskirts, and you clock ’em in, and two minutes later you’ve got your hand on her ass?” Phil asks. “You want to feel ’em up, you can. You go to a regular bar and they sock you for drinks. Chicks don’t talk to you, anyway.”
“What are the rules here?” I ask.
“Money rules, my friend,” Phil says. “Here at the Paradise, the girls are nicer. At the Flamingo, there’re some nasty girls. Real hotties. But they’ll hustle you for everything you’ve got. Get this, I used to see this chick at the Flamingo. She had real big, big cans. There was a lips tattoo on one of her titties. She disappeared over a year ago. Then, a few months ago, my buddy and me were watching a porno—two dudes doing the same chick. It was her, the chick from the Flamingo. She was in a porno!”
“How many girls have you dated from the clubs?”
“Twelve. I got most in the sack, but not all. The last one was number eight.”
“Number eight?” I ask.
“Number eight. It’s the number on her dance card, a girl from a club on Spring Street. Her name’s Eve. She’s hot. A couple of weeks ago I got her to my parents’ house—I live with my mom and dad—and got her into my bedroom. I stripped her and ate her out.
“The trick to getting some from a girl is she has to see you around a few times. If there’s a girl you dig, clock her in three nights, and