Hella Nation - Evan Wright [28]
“Go to Dreamland if you want action. The girls don’t hustle as much as the chicks at Flamingo, but do they put out? Heck, yeah. I’ve seen a girl riding a guy at Dreamland. It was real dark in there. Used to be a big fern there you could hide behind, pretty much do anything you want with a girl.”
Phil peels himself off the wall, signaling the end of the conversation. “I think Ruby’s here. I’ve been waiting for her.”
“Is she one of your girlfriends?”
“Nah, just a friend,” Phil says. “But sometimes she lets me take her into the corner and suck on her titties.”
I leave twenty minutes later. Phil still leans against the wall.
THE PARKING-LOT SECURITY GUARD grins when I tell him I’m going to Dreamland.
“Looking for a girl?” he inquires in a conspiratorial whisper.
“What’s the best technique for getting one?” I ask.
“The girl wants you to dance, to tip with all your money. Maybe she gives you something, maybe not. It all depends on how much you want to pay for a piece of beef.”
The metaphor seems appropriate when I am once again seated in a viewing gallery.
The nucleus of any downtown dance hall is the viewing gallery/selection area, wherein the girls are displayed on couches like market produce. Club Starlight, whose interior resembles a collision between the traditional Chinese opium den and a 1970s disco, deviates from the norm with a totally separate girl chamber. It is a well-lit glassed-in room, stocked with young dancers reading Cosmo and Allure, doing their nails or gossiping. It’s a high-girlie scene, like that of a beauty parlor. Men are not allowed to enter. Instead, they point to the desired girl in the window, and a matron is sent in to retrieve her.
The girls-on-couch system is almost creepier—especially in the clubs where there is no fence marking off the female territory—because it so flagrantly violates social standards. We men sit at tables across from the girls. We stare. It is disconcerting to sit among strange men, all of us visibly sober (since dance halls aren’t licensed to serve liquor) and silent. We simply stare. In Dreamland I sit next to an Asian man in dungarees. His hair is long and disheveled. He pulls his chair up close to the couch of girls, to within three feet. He sits for two hours. Occasionally he yawns, holding his gaze like a cat.
Cressey observed the same phenomenon in 1932, noting that “ogling, in fact, seems here to be the chief occupation of the male.”
Brazen public ogling that in normal social intercourse would be deemed disrespectful, hostile or predatory seems to be one of the chief perks of the five-dollar admission fee to any of L.A.’s dance halls. (A high proportion of customers never seem to dance.) But it is also a critical element of the selection process. We are customers, and we have the right to inspect what we are paying for. We are, of course, buying beauty, but we are also purchasing friendliness (if we have had a rough day and wish to avoid conflict), sympathy (if we care to talk about our problems), romantic desirability (if we hope to fall in love) or sluttiness (if we are here basically to feel someone up and perhaps obtain a hand job or similar favors).
Indeed, the whole woman-as-meat worldview is one of the illusions being sold in dance halls that quickly falls apart. It holds up reasonably well so long as the girls are just being looked at from across the room. It crumbles the moment contact is established, not merely because many of the girls resist being treated that way, but because even those who encourage anonymous, impersonal groping are making economic calculations based on their own self-interest. They are trying to get a bigger tip by exploiting the weakness of the male fantasy. United on the dance floor, the woman feels for the man’s wallet as he feels for her body.
The sign outside the Fenton Building on Spring Street is original, a two-story neon ribbon hanging on the north corner. It flashes “DANCING” in white, then blinks to red letters that spell “GIRLS.” The club itself is reached