Hella Nation - Evan Wright [33]
“I worked at the Flamingo for three months,” the advertising sales rep tells me during her lunch break at a mid-Wilshire restaurant. “It was right after I came to L.A. after graduating from college. I couldn’t stand sitting on the couch like a cattle call, but I used to ask myself how would it compare to working at a place like Hooters. Hooters is predicated on beer and boobs. The Flamingo is predicated on romance, however twisted that sounds. There were lots of creeps there, but lots of guys go there to fall in love. People don’t go to Hooters to fall in love.
“There was a guy who came in one night. I had never met him before. He had hair apnea—meaning it grows from your head in clumps. He asked me to stand next to him while he played pool. After his game, he walked me to the window behind the pool table. We were just looking out the window at the city, and I said, ‘Look at the blue sky-light at night.’ He said I had reminded him of a poem. He opened up his wallet and handed me ten one-hundred-dollar bills. He never asked for anything from me.”
RUMORS OF OBSESSED CUSTOMERS whose fixations have boiled over into violence also circulate freely in the clubs. Several of the girls mention an incident last spring, a fatal stabbing, or shooting. One tells me, definitely, it was a close friend of hers who was strangled in the parking lot, but it wasn’t by a customer, it was her jealous boyfriend.
“The attacker’s name was Amolak Singh,” Detective Russell Long of LAPD Central Homicide states in a telephone interview. “He was East Indian or Pakistani, although the man spoke fluent Spanish.
“The young woman was employed at the Las Palmas Club. At approximately two forty-five A.M. on April 8, Singh shot the young woman outside the Las Palmas Club when she got off work. She was wounded, but she did not die. She has recovered, as far as we know.
“An off-duty police officer was employed by the club as a security guard. He ran out when he heard the shots. He fired his gun and fatally shot the young woman’s attacker, Singh.” (Indeed, the off-duty officer reportedly shot Singh eight times, the final two rounds going into Singh’s body while he lay on the ground.)
Detective Long says Singh had had no contact with the young woman outside the club. But “he was definitely obsessed with the victim.”
MY LAST TAXI DANCE is with a girl in plum-colored velour hot pants and a matching tube top. A silver ring on her index finger covers the first two joints; it flexes in the middle and is crafted to look like a miniature leg from a suit of armor. The girl’s name is Sarah, and she says she’s an artist, but she can’t draw, so she color-copies images she likes at Kinko’s and makes collages. She says her collages are six by ten feet; I imagine the Kinko’s bills must be large.
It is a slow night, and the dance floor is nearly empty. Sarah squeezes next to me in a booth by the dance floor and puts her hand on my leg.
“I’ve never been to one of these clubs,” I tell her. “Is this a sex club?”
Sarah’s hand freezes. “No. Gentlemen come here to enjoy themselves. A lot of people say these clubs are sleazy. They’re not. These are nice girls.”
“Why do people come here?”
“Gentlemen come here to be with attractive young girls. It’s not a place to cheat. My customers say coming here is foreplay for going home to their wives. A lot of my customers are friends. We go back years.”
“You mean you know all about them?” I ask. “They’re ‘friends’ like you call them up, ask them how their day went, go to the movies, visit them in the hospital if they’re sick?”
“No,” she says, “I never see them outside the club. They’re only friends here, when I’m working.”
“You ever date a guy from this place?”
“I would never date a guy from this place.” Sarah removes her