Hella Nation - Evan Wright [30]
VERONICA IS THE ONLY DANCER I encounter who leaps from the viewing couch and insists we dance. Coming from any other girl in a hostess club, an aggressive move like hers might feel like a hustle. But Veronica radiates joy.
She holds my hand over her head on the dance floor and spins. Her smile flashes each time her eyes lock onto mine. She is dark-skinned, with delicate features. She tells me she comes from Brazil. Her mother brought her to America when she was eight.
“My mother was difficult.” She wraps both her arms around me, then springs away.
“How so?” I catch the dervish in my arms again.
“My mother whipped me. She burned me. She suffocated me. She knocked out two of my teeth. She scarred my back. And there was a little sexual abuse, too.”
Veronica reels off this list of horrors in a cheerful singsong. She tells me she hopes to go to school someday to become a psychiatrist, so she can help other girls with backgrounds like her own.
Later, we go to the TV lounge. Veronica raises her skirt and shows me her bare ass, wanting to know if I like it. She admits she’s not sure if she wants to go to medical school first or act in porn movies.
Veronica is twenty-one, and her body looks perfect, but she is saving for plastic surgery. She has $2,100 stuffed in a sock hidden somewhere in her apartment that will cover breast implants.
“I will make myself look like a Barbie doll,” she says. “I’ll be perfect.”
SERGEANT ROBERT VELIZ, of LAPD Central Vice Unit, sighs wearily throughout our interview. His beat is to investigate dance halls for lewd conduct and prostitution. I sense he is frustrated, and might have more on-the-job satisfaction if he could arrest more citizens.
The problem with dance halls, as Veliz outlines it, is that some customers do utilize the girls purely for sexual gratification. However, no one can be arrested unless caught committing a lewd act (such as direct hand-to-genital contact), or unless prostitution can be established (i.e., a customer pays a girl to perform a specific sexual act). If a man tips a dancer generously because she allows him to rub himself on her leg, and he climaxes as a byproduct of their dance, no crime can be established. In short, Sergeant Veliz cannot arrest citizens for what occurs in the privacy of their own pants. By all accounts, the used condoms I observe in the restrooms of various clubs are merely leftovers from lawfully obtained frottage.
“Who is most exploited in the clubs?” I ask Sergeant Veliz. “The customers or the hostesses?”
“Indirectly, the girls. Directly, the men,” he says. He adds with a final sigh, “Those girls work the guys any which way they can.”
Taxi-dance halls sprang up in the 1920s and 1930s in major cities across the United States in response to a social-reform movement that had sought to wipe out prostitution. (The same reformist wave sweeping the land also ushered in Prohibition, the Hays Commission and the federal government’s first serious efforts to suppress the leafy scourge, marijuana.) The bordellos and red-light districts that had thrived openly following the post-Civil War industrial boom were shut down by the late teens. In San Francisco, bar owners immediately began hiring unemployed prostitutes to work as hostesses. Their job was to lure customers and ply them with drinks while entertaining them on the dance floor. These establishments became known as “closed” dance halls, meaning they were closed to couples. Men only were invited; women were provided gratis.
At the same time, dance instruction academies in New York and Chicago, teaching the latest fox-trot, Charleston and tango moves, began seeing a rise in patronage. The new breed of customer seemed