Las Vegas, NV – An hour removed from landing at McCarran International Airport, I am sitting in what is frequently regarded (at least by the locals) as the world’s best strip club. I have joined some friends who arrived a couple hours earlier. We are seated in an area reserved for bottle service patrons, an elevated section fenced off from the rest of the club. A half-dozen used glasses ring half-empty carafes of vodka and fruit juice. The group is buzzing and there is lots of demonstrative backslapping. Howls of laughter are barely audible over the din of hard rock coursing through the place. A pneumatic platinum blonde dancer slinks down a pole on a small circular stage just a few feet from us. A scene couldn’t scream “Vegas” any louder.
I plop down on a velvety couch facing the rest of the club. I admit to finding the inverted social dynamic of strip clubs intriguing. All the girls play by Sadie Hawkins rules. At least ostensibly they do. Like everything else in this city, you’re still coming out of pocket. It’s not as if the girls are risking anything when they approach a guy. Still, I have watched dancers get upset when their dance solicitations get rejected. Maybe in some ways that rejection is even worse than a guy approaching a girl in a normal club. It’s hard for somebody to be implicitly told that they are physically unattractive no matter what the circumstances.
Next to me is a girl who goes by the name Aria*. Aria is not a dancer--at least not tonight. Her face is as perfectly sculpted as a Greco-Roman statue and roughly as warm. I decide to chat her up anyway. I introduce myself and her blank face reproduces the pre-programmed smile of a perfume girl at Macy’s . She is from San Diego which she claims to miss terribly. But Vegas is where the money is. She has offered to procure girls for some gentlemen who are acquaintances of my friends. The rate is $1,000 per hour. This is what she does. She is a fixer, a party girl: a species by no means unique to Las Vegas, merely more prevalent. She gets things people need: girls, drugs, instant entrée into the best clubs. Aria‘s got whatever you need.
After some breezy conversation, Aria excuses herself to conduct business. She is working after all. I am left to wonder how she got started in her career. I’m guessing someone scouted her after observing her in a club or something. Asked her if she wanted to make some easy money just offering to hook deep-pocketed men up with long-armed girls. Was it much of a moral quandary for her? Did she worry about her parents asking about how she afforded her lifestyle? What about relationships? Was she able to maintain a significant other? What were her tax returns like?
I won’t see Aria for the remainder of the trip. I feel a tinge of disappointment about that.
Strip clubs like nature abhor a vacuum. Eventually a couple of other girls insist on keeping us company. I tell one girl that I am treating my friend to a dance and she goes over to sit on his lap. I explain to the other girl that I don’t like dances. I haven’t for a while. Not so much for moral reasons, but a stubborn immunity to the effects. My brain is unable to detach what the girls are doing from the fact that money has facilitated this transaction as opposed to say my disarming charm. The cash nullifies the gratification. So I hand her a few twenties and tell her I’ll compensate her for her time.
We talk while her friend grinds my friend into submission. She tells me about how they both fly out to Vegas when they want to make some quick money. They are from the tri-state area and usually work at one of the large clubs near the Westside Highway. This is fairly common among dancers. Many come from LA and San Diego for the weekend. I ask her how it works and she explains that the girls pay a flat fee to work, usually $100-150/night depending on the weekend. For dances, they keep whatever they make. If a girl and her clientele use the VIP section or one of the more private and insanely expensive ($500/hour) rooms, the club takes a percentage. On a good weekend she says she’ll clear maybe $5,000. And that’s not even the real money.
She says that she doesn’t offer “take-out service,” but many of the girls (including her companion) do. If I had to hazard a guess I would say maybe 70% of these girls are pros. On any given night in this club there are usually over 100 girls working. I ask her what kind of money they make for extra-curricular activities. She points to one of the girls engaged in a lap dance, a life-size Barbie. “My homegirl working over there? She charges $2,500 an hour.” Surely that can’t be right, I scoff. A man with the means to pay that kind of money, wouldn’t he be able to just go pick up a girl? Obviously these sort of profligate transactions happen. I mean New York’s former governor is perhaps the most famous John of all time for doing just that. She waves off my incredulity. “They do it because they can. They like being able to get what they want right now, right here.” Still, I can’t really wrap my head around it. I just envision having the wickedest case of buyer’s remorse ever.
I would guess the enhanced women outnumber the natural girls at least 4:1. It’s disturbing how much (bad) plastic surgery is being regularly showcased here. But the girls wouldn’t do it if it didn’t increase the bottom line. I’m no proponent of breast augmentation, but I would think optimally a woman should only go one cup-size up from her natural physique. Anything more and her body isn’t equipped to handle the bulk. These girls completely stomp on that rule and seem to be adding three or four cup sizes to their natural frames. The result: skin stretched taut across the breast plate with two bocce balls straining underneath. It confounds me that anyone finds this attractive.
A number of songs later, I tell her that I’ve let the meter run long enough and thank her for her time. The two girls discuss how much longer they intend to stay in terms of dollars: “How much more you wanna make tonight?” “I’m at fourteen-hundred. So like five more dances?” I’m impressed at how they’ve compartmentalized their work.
My friends and I are all still on New York time and it’s after three in the morning. We are exhausted, but not sleepy. Everything in this city conspires to decouple you from your internal clock. Unless you’re outside you never have any idea what time it actually is. The city is one giant sensory deprivation chamber. I can’t believe I have three more days of this.
*name changed to protect the innocent
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