auto-bio 3

At the same time I was working at Nitelife I was still trying to make money other ways. My boyfriend R. got a number for a bachelor party company at a party we went to that was porn-star themed (porn stars were very chic in 99) that had actual porn stars attending. It was the second time that year that I got to meet Ron Jeremy, but that's a story for another time. Anyway, I didn't end up getting steady work with the bachelor party company but I did work one night with the owner and I was very impressed with her professionalism and success. She told me if I needed money I should just go to Little Darlings and "do some lapdances", cause that's what she did when short of money. Also she was friends with the manager so I just had to mention her name. I don't think I even had to audition. I really had no perspective, I was flying blind and took almost any advice I was given, especially from industry professionals. In retrospect it was probably stupid to go work there, because I had to go get another license, which was more money out of my pocket. You see, in San Diego they made exotic dancers (and still do, in all but two clubs) go to the police station and get fingerprinted and checked for warrants if they wanted to dance within city limits. You also have to pay two hundred dollars or something and you get your photo on a card with huge letters that say NUDE ENTERTAINER, even if you work at topless bars and never get nude. The thing was, Little Darlings was in Lemon Grove, a different city, and so I had to get another license for another two hundred dollars. There were advantages to working there that would benefit me later, though.
L.D. was part of the ginormous Deja Vu chain of strip clubs that were rapidly taking over most major cities to become the Starbucks of strip clubs. In the five years I worked in San Francisco, for instance, they bought five clubs and partnered with four more. Any girl that got blacklisted from them very quickly ran out of places to work. Today there are only three clubs in that city not at all affiliated with Deja Vu. Privately owned clubs might have more trouble with cops raiding and whatnot also.
Little Darlings focused on getting as much profit off dancer effort as possible. Instead of encouraging costumers to tip dancers they encouraged them to get lapdances, which they then took a piece of from the dancer. At Nitelife after they finished up a stage set, the girls (that's what dancers were called, "girls", at every club I've worked at) would walk around the room and collect tips from everyone. That's at least a dollar from everyone in the room, not just the guys at the tip rail. That's why it was real easy for me to go home with a decent amount of money without really knowing how to hustle at all. At Deja Vu strip clubs, if you want to survive long at all, you have to learn how to hustle.
In order to promote lapdances Little Darlings (and all Deja Vu clubs) would do things called "blue-light specials". That was when everyone had to stop what they were doing and come out of the dressing room and come up on the stage and clap and look sexy and excited to be there while the deejay played "Girls, Girls, Girls" by Motley Crue and yammered nonstop about whatever lapdance special was going on. Usually it would be a two-for-one, but sometimes they had free passes or three- or four-for- ones. I did many, many blue light specials in the years I worked for Deja Vu. (OfficiallyI think they were supposed to do one every half hour, but thankfully a lot of the small clubs weren't that vigilant). Although I suppose they were sometimes useful to generate customer interest, most girls I knew really resented being told what to do and when to do it when we weren't even on the payroll. Even worse was how they choreographed how we filed up on the stage in a line, made a circle, and clapped hands in unison (one manager actually clapped his hands all exaggerated, in front of the stage, and we were supposed to sync up with him). Then we had to stay up there until the deejay finished his spiel, then file down as he named us all off in order. It was a bit humiliating, and part of life at Deja Vu. My personal feeling was, I know how to hustle and present myself, don't fucking try to do it for me. Gosh, am I ever glad I don't work for them anymore.
to be continued, more about Little Darlings........................

auto-bio 2

Let's see..other stuff I remember from my first strip club, Nitelife: The deejay used to play Lords of Acid and The Cardigans for me. This was before I accumulated all my own cds and got super-anal about deejays playing songs that I specifically picked out. The deejay was really big and bald, with glasses and an earring or two. He had some kind of silly nickname like Skippy or something , but I don't remember what it was. He was as cocky as most strip club deejays at larger strip clubs, but he was always professional and I don't remember him ever being a dick about anything.
They had a huge dressing room with rows of tall lockers. One of the biggest dressing rooms I've ever changed in, come to think of it. There was also a House Mom, a fixture in most large strip clubs. She was really nice. She told me her name, then said, "but you can just call me Mom." After the liquor ban ended and it got more busy she always had party snack plates with veggies and dip set out on the counter, and an assortment of body spray, makeup, beauty products, shoe grips, etc. in another area. As I mentioned before, she was the one who would safety pin our g-strings to our pantyhose. House Moms are usually thirty- or forty-something ex-strippers.
Also in the dressing room was a space for this couple to bring in these stripper outfits on a rolling wardrobe rack to sell. I never bought any because all my money was being saved to have a place to live again, but I remember one of the items I was interested in was a swimsuit that you could tan through, or so the wife claimed. I haven't seen anything like it since. It wasn't see through, either. Bringing stripper outfits into the club is an ingenious business plan that is actually quite common. When strippers get bored, they like to shop with their sizable amounts of cash and it's quite convenient to do it right there at work. Sometimes they will even custom-tailor outfits for you.
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auto-bio

I started doing sex work in June of 99, after a series of unfortunate events left me with no place to live. I was told I would have to move out in a week, so I looked at newspaper ads for some ideas. I came across an ad for girls to work on an adult website, living in a house in Tijuana, Mexico. The pay was listed as 1100 a week, plus being able to stay in the mansion by the beach. After a few meetings with the corporate-types that were running this venture, they hired me and I moved down there from where I'd been living in San Diego. The mansion was sparsely furnished but pretty big. It was in a gated community by the beach. It had like eight bedrooms and servants quarters downstairs. They talked big plans like having 20 girls in there and cameras in every bedroom, but there only ended up being like 5 girls before the whole thing got shut down two weeks later. I worked eight days straight and didn't even fucking get paid. I had a place to live for two weeks and all the food and alcohol I wanted, though. What happened was that (they said) the house got foreclosed upon. They had been renting it and so had to leave immediately. Those motherfuckers wouldn't even let me have any food to take with me. Then they jerked me around for weeks, saying the check was in the mail when it wasn't. The name is Mike Honda, from Santa Monica. Son of a bitch.
So I learned my first and lasting lesson in the adult entertainment industry: Money Talks, Bullshit Walks. Show me the fucking money, or get the fuck out of my face.
At this point I was still homeless, so I couch surfed until I could track down more jobs doing nude photo shoots. I also did a little amateur porn with my boyfriend. The pay ranged from 200-375 per session, but the money was too far and between so I decided to get more steady income at a Strip Club.
Nitelife in North Park, San Diego was the first strip club I actually worked at starting July 1999. It was a topless club that had lost it's liquor license for thirty days and so was totally dead. All the regular girls had left for the month so they placed an ad in the paper for more girls, which I answered. Because they weren't serving liquor, they were allowed to have fully nude girls on stage. For lapdances and walking around on the floor we had to completely cover our asses either with shorts or with -get this- opaque tan pantyhose cut into shorts under "t-bar" g-strings that were safety-pinned by the House Mom in the dressing room. I had two weeks to get accustomed to dancing in a mellow and sparsely populated club before the liquor ban was over and they had a "grand re-opening" one Saturday night. The place was totally packed, all the regular girls and customers were back, and now we had to wear full opaque pantyhose under our g-strings. It was a pretty clean club (not that I knew any better at the time), no touching at all whatsoever. As in all the clubs in San Diego there was a six foot rule-if you took anything off on stage you had to be six feet away from the customers. Also there was a six inch rule in lapdancing; you had to be six inches away during the lapdance, no grinding, no touching, no sitting in laps. At other clubs in San Diego people kind of overlooked these rules but at Nitelife they were fucking Nazis about it. In retrospect I totally understand why: after all, they had just had their liquor license suspended because a girl briefly touched *herself* on stage over her underwear and tights, so why would they tolerate for one second any customer touching a girl when all the dances were out in the open for anyone to see? Once I did a dance for a drunk Mexican and as he was struggling up afterwards he grabbed me around the waist for support, which threw me off balance a bit. Next thing I knew the no-neck 300 pound monkey-suited "doorman" had the guy in a headlock and was maneuvering him out the door before I could even get my money. When I naively followed them out and told the manager that I didn't get my ten dollars yet (that's how much "couch dances" cost, table dances were five, and of course I had no clue how to hustle for tips yet) the doorguy turned on me, saying to the manager, Roger, "He had his hands all over her! She was letting him touch her!" At that point I gave up and considered it a lesson learned. Two lessons, actually: 1) Always, always, ALWAYS get the money before the dance and 2)you are on your own. Never assume anyone will take care of you, it is not necessarily in the interests of the security to protect you. Their job is to protect the club. It is YOUR job to protect yourself, and you are usually better off being your own security. As the years went on I learned a lot of subtle ways to do that.

madam x

Chez B was so freakin fun...it is Pandora's birthday this week and Sat. was the first night of it. Wed. is a pajama party at Bondage a gogo, and also my first night of go go dancing there. Ilove how chez b is such an industry party, and a lot of those industry people don't consider themselves "too cool" to get a lapdance from their friend Rocketgirl!! In the past, working at other clubs like the Hungry I, I was always happy when my friends came in, but also kind of bummed cause I knew they wouldn't get dances...so I couldn't really hang out with them for too long because I needed to make money. That's what's so great about badunkadunk, I can have fun and hang out, AND go home w/cash! Best strip club of all time....(now if only they could fix that stage..) Oh yeah, and they had these lesbian documentarians in there filming us for the second time and they got footage of me giving a super-sexy lesbian-lapdance for my friend Trixxie-Treat. Yummy!!



We had a Lusty Lady meeting last Tuesday and I was of course shooting my mouth off a lot and expressing my opinion on subjects because I'm not going to go to a mandatory dancer meeting at nine in the morning before I work my other job until 8pm and then just sit there in the corner not saying anything, right? I thought I might have annoyed people with all my outspokenness, but then when I got to work again on Friday I see a sign posted with nominations for a new Jr. Madam (manager), and someone has nominated me! I don't know who did it either. I asked Nicole who shares a locker with me, and my other friend Amber who I've sort of hit it off with since I've been working there and they both said they didn't. Davina also got nominated but I think she's going to Guam. She accepted, though (they leave room on the paper to accept or not). If she wants to do it and gets elected I won't hate. She's been there a lot longer than me and I know she's capable. Fancy that, though. That's good for my self-esteem. I just barely passed probation last week and I could already be one of the bosses! It's nice to work in a place that doesn't try to oppress free speech or progressiveness. It's a breath of fresh air compared to some other jobs I've had.