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CHAPTER 9

ALINA

The only thing worse than nighttime patrons of a strip club were daytime patrons of a low-rent dirty strip club.

Nighttime patrons were frat boys on college student allowances. They were out partying with their bros. Sometimes they were douchebags celebrating a bachelor party by harassing women, pretending that they weren't still going to be back there every Friday night for a "boys' night." Or celebrating their first job.

The girls called them budget ballers.

They were loud, obnoxious, and hell to deal with, but they had an energy that was sometimes infectious. Those men were there for a specific reason; they were there to have fun. They were there to let loose, to party, and maybe pay a little extra for the birthday boy or bachelor to get more than a lap dance in the champagne room.

According to the girls, most of them paid for more but when it came down to it were too shy, embarrassed, or drunk to get it up.

Mostly, they were relatively harmless. Annoying, but fairly harmless.

Daytime patrons were an entirely different beast.

There were two types of men who came to a cheap, crumbling strip club for lunch.

The shady businessmen who got off on the power trip of demoralizing women in a way the other clubs wouldn't allow, and they couldn't afford, anyway.

And the men who used to be those businessmen, now retired, divorced, their kids refusing to speak to them. They came here because they had nowhere else to go.

There was something seedy, almost demoralizing about them.

Those older men weren't there to party, they weren't there for a night of debauchery and fun. They were there out of habit, routine.

They watched the women and made lewd comments, but behind their eyes they were dead.

We called them the zombies.

Going through the motions of life, but despite their animation, they were soulless, rotting corpses.

It was almost like they were trying to grasp a sliver of what the night patrons had but which was just out of their reach.

It would have been depressing and I would have pitied them, if they didn't work so hard to grab my ass every single time I walked past them.

There were only so many times an old man could call you a bitch for refusing to show him your tits or blow him in the bathroom before you lost all sympathy.

The zombies were all old men, who stank of alcohol, sweat, and a life of regret.

As for the shady businessmen, we called them vampires because they sucked every ounce of the will to live from the girls and gave nothing in return.

They were young, hungry, and always out to make a quick buck.

These assholes would talk big like they were high rollers but then visited low-end strip clubs, maybe cashing in ten-dollar bills for ones. They would talk like they were spending big money, and about how much they were going to make by selling counterfeit bonds or threatening some low-level senator.

They came to celebrate over lunch and to degrade the dancers. It made them feel big and powerful to boss around women with their tits out, or to put their hands on my thighs while ordering expensive whiskey and then leave a two-dollar tip.

As if two dollars made up for the way they treated me or the girls.

They thought that two dollars meant we owed them something. Like they were being magnanimous, and we needed to fall all over ourselves, display our gratitude on our knees.

Fuck them.

Those two-dollar tips didn't mean shit, and they knew it. They weren't really here to spend money, they were here to be treated like big shots as cheaply as possible, while bragging about the money they made taking from “suckers and losers.”

If the FBI ever wiretapped this strip club, they weregoing to be in a lot of trouble. But the FBI would never come here. The men on their radar would be at any establishment other than this one.