Life at TJ's Place

2005-04-10T01:09:00.000-05:00

Sorry I dropped out like I did. I’m still alive. I was just sick of seeing the stupid Minnesota/Olympics post up there. I was sick of blogging, too, so I just decided to cool out for awhile.

Did anybody see Illinois basketball this winter? I did. What a rush!

This is the only thing I’ve ever written that was published (and I received no money for). It’s called “Arnie’s Army.”

When I was a kid, my uncle smoked these slender black cigarettes with silver lettering, and the paper crinkled when he would take a long drag, like leaves burning and crackling. I always imagined the cigarette tasted like licorice, and I became very certain that, as soon as I was legal, maybe even before, I would begin smoking the little black cigarettes and exhale the forbidden smoke, a heady mixture of spicy aroma, like black licorice and exotic candies from Asia and the Middle East that, apparently—see my uncle as evidence—bored holes in your teeth and ravaged your face, like my uncle’s, warped by a lifetime of working in the sun, drinking and screaming. He was tall and red and his skin was striated, like canvas draped over cables. He was Leatherface before Leatherface was Leatherface, without the chainsaw and hippie kids and general bloody mayhem.

I loved my uncle completely, but years of subsequent information revealed him to be no more than a sloppy drunk, the old school kind, pooping his pants, sleeping under grain trucks, yodeling at three o’clock in the morning, the like. He once passed out with a welder in his hands. Uncle Arnold, or Arnie, as everyone knew him. I called him Uncle Arnie, and he called me “Arnie’s Army,” because I was the only one too young not to understand he was a big bleary-eyed drunk and pathetic life failure.

“HEY,” he’d shout, opening our front door, “Hey, there he is!”

Running, jumping with joy was me, “Uncle Arnie!” I’d scream, delighted. Kids really do jump with joy, it’s not a cliché. When experiencing overwhelming joy, jumping is the way normal children get from place to place. “Uncle Arnieeee!” boing-boing-boing down the hall. I’d bump into him and he would scoop me in his arms. Arnie usually smelled like a dead skunk, but Arnie’s Army didn’t care; at five years old, I usually didn’t smell so great myself.

“There’s the boy!” he would declare. “There’s Arnie’s Army!” A big embrace between two stinkers, my parents cringing in the living room.

My father, a good father, a solid provider, had very little tolerance for the likes of Arnie, especially when Arnie was “on the bum” as my father would say, but he never mistreated Arnie in front of me, knowing my uncle was my hero and I was likely to end up getting a Born to Raise Hell tattoo and become a communist, at five, if he prohibited Arnie from the house. Arnie manipulated this, of course, showing up at dinnertime once a week, roughhousing with Arnie’s Army in the living room, then meandering around like the unwanted guest he was. My father didn’t speak to him; he would sit stoically on his recliner and watch the Archie Bunker Show, as he called it, or read the paper, while Arnie moved around from wall to wall, remarking on things he remarked on every time: photographs, the latest paperback novel on my mother’s bookshelf, my father’s only bowling trophy, the awful wallpaper. “The Exorcist!” he exclaimed, picking up my mother’s latest book. “Brrrr!” he shivered, clutching himself as he set the book down. “That Devil…and what he done to that little girl?” Arnie clucked his tongue and moved on towards Dad’s bowling trophy.

Dad grunted. Mother called in from the kitchen: “Arnie…uh, we’re about to have dinner…would you like to join us?”

From the bathroom, an enormous cheer erupted from Arnie’s Army, who had been sent there seconds before to wash his hands and face. Arnie just forced a playoff with a remarkable 4-iron on 18.

“Well, by God, Sally, that’d be right nice,” Arnie said. “I believe I will.” Dad rolled his eyes, then went back to the paper.

“Hey, Skeeter!” Arnie called to me down the hallway. When I was too little to know better, I bit my Uncle Arnie on the leg and he said it felt like a “little ol’ skeeter nippin’ on my leg.” Lucky for me, I wasn’t a real skeeter; had I been, I might have ended up in detox. “Get in here, Skeeter, we’re grubbin’ up.”

Skeeter squealed with delight from the bathroom and jumped with joy down the hallway. I’ve been told that, as a child, I was rather predictable.

I can’t imagine, in hindsight, how unbearably awful those dinners were for my parents. From time to time, Arnie would sober enough to realize he hadn’t eaten in a week, and we’d get the knock at the door just before dinnertime, smiling Arnie on the front porch, just passing through. Arnie ate once a week when he remembered, and he ate the exact way he drank: two-fisted, sloppy, loud and emotional, an industrial shop-vac with forks and spoons and belches loud enough to crack china. Sometimes he sobbed while he ate.

At dinner, while Arnie molested his food, Dad would make little remarks that I didn’t recognize as being cruel: “Slow down, Arnie, unless you’re late for an appointment”; or, “Arnie, if you’d show up more often, we wouldn’t have to pay to have our garbage taken out.”

At dinner, Arnie would entertain (read that word italicized if coming from the mouth of my father) us with stories about the Vietnam War, stories about Vietnamese girls that made my mother’s cheeks turn red, stories about a heart he received from someone important because he stepped on something that removed his right foot, with a bang. My father silently endured, having been spared the draft from a legitimate medical condition that appeared just as a murmur in his heart back in 1968, but eventually killed him in 1991. He smiled at Arnie’s colorful stories, frowned at very colorful ones. One time he set his knife and fork down with some force, cleared his throat, stood and left the table.

When Arnie was finished with his meal, he wiped his mouth and always reached in his shirt pocket for the pack of cigarettes, pushing his chair from the table and draping one long leg over the other. Uncle Arnie would take a long drag and squint through the smoke, pocketing his pack of matches. The aroma was delicious. Little Skeeter, dying a slow death at the edge of the table from Arnie’s second-hand fogger, sat with his hands folded attentively, waiting for a story from his uncle.

“Your dad,” Arnie began, picking a bit of tobacco from the tip of his tongue. “Your dad and I, did you know he once saved my life?”

I knew the story, of course. A hundred times over. I could recite it word for word, but I loved hearing the story from my Uncle Arnie. My eyes went wide and I breathed, “No.” I had retired to my bedroom earlier and was now wearing a light blue T-shirt that read ARNIE’S ARMY across the front in heavy felt letters, my uncle’s gift.

“He did, by God, when we was kids.”

The story, I have learned, was not so romantic as Arnie always spun. It involved eight-year-old Arnie, naked, running through a neighbor’s backyard and my father leaping a fence and saving the naked future Purple Heart-winner by pulling a mean dog away from him before yanking them both back over the fence to safety. Arnie left out the part about the innocent bet, my father’s knowledge (and Arnie’s lack of) that the yard contained not only a mean homeowner, but a little white terrier named Sparky, a terrible, angry dog suffering from untreated psychosis, a child killer. Arnie, it seemed, did not want to tarnish my own image of my father, who was also my hero. And it was years later that I realized their mutual grudge, and their mutual love for each other. My father loved my Uncle Arnie because he wasn’t bright, he was healthy, and he went to war for his country and stepped on a land mine and lost his right foot. He loved him because no one else would. Arnie loved my father because he didn’t go to war and he was intelligent and solid, and he married a good woman and raised a good son. And when I was eighteen years old at my graduation, Uncle Arnie showed up, sober and clean for the moment, and called me Arnie’s Army and Skeeter in nearly the same sentence, tussling my hair, and then finally he called me Michael, and shook my hand. I hadn’t seen him in ten years. He died the next year (roofing a house, drunk, a driveway below), and my father put his urn and his ashes on our mantel, replacing the bowling trophy. Arnie’s Purple Heart is there, too, and a picture of all of us (Mom and Dad included), standing in front of a Christmas tree circa 1977. Underneath the photo, my father wrote in black felt-tip marker: Arnie’s Army.

2004-08-29T22:42:00.000-05:00

I'm back, watching the Olympics. Had a great time in Minnesota. I'll have a better post soon, but I just wanted to say hello and thanks for checking in.

See you soon.

2004-08-09T17:35:00.000-05:00

I’m going to Minnesota next week, leaving one week from today. I will probably not be updating the blog during that time. Why Minnesota, you ask? Why not, I reply.

Last year, my friend Greg came to the club with a guy he went to college with, and this guy lives in Bloomington, Minnesota and works in Minneapolis. So we’re going up to spend a week with him. We will drink and eat, fish and golf, and we have tickets to two Twins-Yankees game at the Metrodome, which can’t be avoided, because that’s where the Twins play baseball. I’m only mildly excited about the Dome, but I’m pumped to see the Twins and Yankees, who are both leading their divisions. I can’t wait to go fishing up north of Minneapolis, and we’re playing a course called Edinburgh USA, which is a Robert Trent Jones course (with an island hole, which I’ve never played before). I’m taking driver out of the bag and keeping it in the fairway. It really sucks playing a great course with great fairways and never getting to hit out of them.

That’s all for now, been planning a lot for the last few days. I’ll check back in a couple more times before I leave. Not sure how much, if any, I’ll blog from the road, but it won’t mean I’m dead, or someone else.

I don’t know if I’ve ever said this before, but I’m a St. Louis Cardinals fan. They so totally kick ass this year, I can’t believe it.

2004-08-03T12:28:00.000-05:00

This weekend I saw the woman who used to cut my hair back when I was about 21 years old, and I used to be in love with her so I’m going to tell this story about her because it’s fun, and because that’s why I’m here, yo.

She was 25 years old at the time and had recently divorced, which made her seem, to me, to be more mature. She was pretty, blonde and what I thought to be very shy and quiet. (This last paragraph should have started with “Dear Penthouse.”)

She had her own little salon in the basement of her condo, and the first couple times I went for a haircut we were both kind of shy and just made small talk. It’s easy in a salon with lots of other gabby people around, but it’s another thing trying to break the ice with a woman when you’re alone in her basement, just the two of you, and she’s got her hands on you.

The third time I went, she washed my hair and rinsed it in her sink. I was still reclined back with my neck on the edge of the sink. She had this huge bottle of conditioner on the counter above my head, and when she pumped it twice, most of it ricocheted off the side of her hand and splattered against the side of my face. Now, mind you, this was at a point when there had not even been the slightest hint of flirting between us. She put her hand to her mouth, like oh my God, and we both just kind of froze there for a few seconds. I'm laying there looking like the money shot in a porn film with big splats of some dude’s jizz all over my face. So I started laughing, and then so did she, which meant she at least got the joke. I told her I never dreamed I’d be on the receiving end of one of those and she really laughed and her face got even redder. I accused her of doing it on purpose and she was still laughing when she swore she didn’t. I wanted to sleep with her right there. That one little moment was like having 10 haircuts in terms of moving the hairstylist/client relationship forward. When she wiped the conditioner off my face with a wet wash cloth, I was in love.

Is it normal for a guy to fall in love with every woman who’s ever cut his hair? Am I the only one? Is it the hair salon smells, or all the incidental touching? I’ve had maybe 8 in my day and I’ve been very attracted to every one, except the old lady who briefly cut my hair in college, and the old dude who cut my hair one time when I was in 6th grade and kept trying to rub his cock on my elbows, and I ended up sitting in the chair with my arms crossed and my shoulders scrunched together.

2004-08-02T11:20:00.000-05:00

Saturday afternoon was a typical Saturday afternoon. One bartender, about 8 dancers, me, one waitress who was also training our new waitress, two security. This is a nice time of the day, in the late afternoon before the major Saturday night crowd starts coming in, and the Saturday night dancers start shuffling in.

Walt came over to me at about 4:30 and said, “Hey, heads up. A bus just pulled in.” I hate those words. I know I should get excited for the club and the dancers and everybody, because we’re all going to make money from this, but I hate busses. You look into the parking lot and you never know what’s behind all those tinted windows. I could handle it better if they came in shifts, ten guys every ten minutes, until the bus was empty. I thought about going out and asking the driver this. But to go from just this lazy Saturday afternoon where there’s one dancer on stage and you can carry on a conversation in the booth to absolute bedlam with 60 guys pouring through the doors, already drunk, is very taxing on the old Kevster’s nerves.

It was a typical drunken outing of a bunch of suburban white guys. They golfed in the morning, now the strip club, then a baseball game. Some genius had scheduled three activities where drinking ran a close second in importance to the actual activity.

They entered the club like a drunken human tidal wave. Men in groups are very excited when they enter a gentleman’s club. They filled every room in the club. We had one waitress, a waitress trainee, and one bartender. I played long songs so I could jump behind the bar and help serve. Our little waitress trainee, who was still in the shy stage and was definitely not ready to go wander out into the club with a tray on her own yet, looked like she was going to cry when I said something like, “Here comes your trial by fire.” We opened up three stages and our eight girls basically danced non-stop for the next hour and a half. I would start a song, then run over and tend bar for three minutes, then run back to the booth, start another song, give my “blah-blah-blah,” run back to the bar. Sometimes I’d let two songs go back-to-back. It was a madhouse.

Ninety minutes later it was over. Everybody collapsed. Our new waitress came over to the booth and stood with me for a little bit. Have you ever seen someone laugh and cry kind of at the same time? Like she was crying, but she would crack up laughing sometimes? That’s what she looked like. She called the bus guys a “bunch of fucking jerks,” and I told her she was going to fit in just fine here.

2004-07-29T23:28:00.000-05:00

Wow. I’m sorry I haven’t posted in awhile, but I was taking time off, and it became more time off, and more time off, etc. Then I got nervous to check my blog, so I didn’t check it for a long time, and it was a whole anxiety thing. I was split between trying to just post another post, and answering all the stuff that people were commenting about. I’m lazy. So I just stopped for awhile.

When I started the blog, I knew there would be all kinds of negative stuff because of what I did for a living (currently). So I was prepared for that. I made it my blogging policy to never be negative, never to answer flamers or trollers, never delete comments or ban people who comment (believe me, I’ve wanted to ban several—I tried once, but the fuckhead just kept going to a different place, apparently, because it didn’t stop him), and always be friendly. What I didn’t imagine was that people would start accusing me of doing several different blogs, or commenting as other people, or being dead, or in jail, or whatever.

I wrote this whole other post that was angry and mentioned people by name and all that, but I deleted it. I’ve never posted another blog. I’ve never commented as someone else, and I’ve never made an anonymous comment in my life, except once a long time ago, which I regretted (and long before I started TJ’s Place). I’ve never commented on my own blog as anyone other than me. When I commented that I was other bloggers, I hope most people saw that as sarcasm, because it was, in response to a flamer.

When I wrote my last post, I didn’t know I would be taking time off, so I didn’t tell anyone that, hey, I’m taking some time off now so I’ll be back after awhile. It just happened.

I’m not dead. I’m not anyone else. Sometimes I’d like to be. I’m listening to The Who right now. I don’t hate anyone. Funny because “Who Are You” by The Who just came on. Ironic? Please don’t read anything into that.

I took a vacation that I didn’t plan for. Now I’m back. Hello, everyone.

2004-07-20T18:04:00.000-05:00

Saturday afternoon a guy who looked Andy Dick, only more muscular, sat at the stage and was getting drunk. He was by himself. Whenever a dancer came to him, he would spread his legs out and hold his arms out, and give the sneer with his mouth open and his tongue out, like you see a guy do when he thinks the girl he’s dancing with is about to start grinding on him. It’s the ready position for stupid idiots in strip clubs, like they’re preparing to get blown in a porn video. (I could write a whole post on what different guys look like when a dancer first approaches them. I will do that. Soon.) I don’t know if the guy had ever been in a club before. We had already warned him once because he practically mauled the first girl who danced for him at the stage.

He gets up from the stage later and goes to the bathroom. When he comes out, he’s not wearing his shirt. In the bathroom, he took off his shirt and draped it over his shoulder, then walked back out to the stage and sat down. I had never seen that before. He sat down and laid his shirt across his lap, ready for action. I looked over at Big John, who was standing in the corner with a couple of his friends. They were all laughing at the guy. John looked up at me and held his hands out, like what the fuck is that? which made me laugh. I rolled my eyes and nodded towards the guy. This is clubspeak for Go tell that fuckhead to put his shirt back on. John’s 35 years old and the size of a truck, but it’s funny because he calls all the customers, even the dumbest little 21-year-old dipshit, Sir. I could almost read his lips say, “Sir, you need to put your shirt back on right now.” The guy just kind of shrugged him off. “Sir, I’m going to have to ask you to leave if you don’t put your shirt back on.” So the guy made a big move of standing up so everybody could see him and put his shirt back on, which took about ten minutes. Later on, he practically passed out sitting at the bar. Then he staggered out the door and was gone. Those are the kind of guys you’ll never see again in the club. I can spot them from a mile away. It’s like their one shot at conquering a strip club and they fail miserably, then they’re outta here.

From the Too Much Info Dept.

I played golf today and drank water, pop and lemonade all day, lots of water, like a big swig at every hole. I just got home an hour ago, and I realized I hadn’t peed since I woke up this morning. From 10:00 am to 5:00 pm, not once. The temperature was in the 90s and the heat index hit about 180 I think. Did my ass sweat today?

I grew up in Illinois, and Todd Hamilton, the guy who won the British Open, is from a town called Oquawka, Illinois, which is on the Mississippi River in the western part of the state. I don’t think I’ve ever been there, but I may have passed it boating on the Mississippi when I was in school. I bet I’ve played some of the same golf courses he has. Anyway, that was cool to watch this weekend. He seems like a good guy.

2004-07-15T13:18:00.000-05:00

I was just in my car a few minutes ago and I went to pass a guy in an SUV and he started flipping me off and sticking his head out the window screaming at me as I went by. He was going like 50 miles per hour and I just passed him. Dude, chill.

I have tomorrow off! My day from freaking hell and I’m taking it off. I’ll miss the money though, but not that much. I’m going to spend the day golfing a cool new course here, and then tomorrow I’m going to post a detailed, shot-by-shot description of my golf game, for all the women who read this and love to hear about my golfing. It’ll look like this.

Hole #1 (Par 4, 395 yards) T-shot (driver), ended in left rough. Approach, 9-iron from 140 yards, left front of green. Two-putt, par. Even par after one.

Like that for 18 holes.

My friend has an idea that there should be all-male golf courses that feature nude women on the course. But the women wouldn’t be like the strippers at outings (topless females pouring beers, taking wagers, tending the flags, flirting), they’d be more like wildlife. You know how cool it is when you see a deer running across the fairway, or standing near the tee box? That’s his idea. You might not see any for a few holes, then all of a sudden you’d hear a rustling in the trees and see two of them running back into the timber. A few holes later, you might see one standing in your fairway, then she’d run off when you got ready to hit your t-shots. I haven’t golfed with him in the last 3 years where he hasn’t brought up the nude golf course thing. We joke about it, but I honestly know he thinks it’s a great idea. We joke that then the women would want their own courses with naked dudes swinging around in the trees. But probably not.

This isn’t a joke, some of our dancers were invited to a company golf outing last summer. They’re topless, of course, and they go around getting the guys drinks and messing with them on the greens (like the pool playing) and flirting around. These are really big-money outings because they have to shut the course completely down on those days, so the wrong person doesn’t get an eyeful. Well somebody was taking pictures and it kind of turned out that there wasn’t supposed to be anything like that for their outing and a bunch of the top guys at the company ended up getting fired for it.

This last part sounds really boring, but it was actually kind of funny at the time. Our dancers made about a million dollars, went home and then the shit hit the fan. I might try to re-write this story when I have more time. I’m off to work.

2004-07-12T20:36:00.000-05:00

One night we were in the process of kicking out two rednecks who didn’t pay for their drinks. I mentioned this event one time in my comments section, but I don’t think I elaborated. So everybody’s standing out on the front porch, and these two guys didn’t want to go. They had been physically removed from the club by three of our bouncers. I feel a lot better when guys are outside of the club. Inside of the club, there are lots of things that can still be broken. I walked outside and there it was, three on two, our guys standing in a line and those two drunk idiots on the other side, facing off. Fuckhead this, fuck you that, piece of fucking shit, come on fuckhead. As the guy in charge, I’m supposed to step in and say things like, “Come on, guys, just go home, everything’s cool, you don’t want to end up in jail tonight, do you?” Then they say things like, “FUCK YOU! FUCKIN’ PUSSY!” It’s a whole back-and-forth kind of thing. Very challenging.

One of the two guys had his hand cut on the way out the door, probably thrashing like a landed fish when our security guys tried to get him out of the club. He was holding his hand up near his face and I could see that the back of his hand was bleeding down his forearm. I walked up to both of them because it looked like they were ready to throw in the towel.

I said, “Look, just go home, guys. You’ll sleep in your own bed tonight. Otherwise you’re going to spend the night in jail.” This is all standard bullshit, which carries about a 30% success rate.

The bleeding guy looked at me, for the first time, I think, because he'd been staring at our bouncers the whole time and hadn't heard a fucking thing diplomatic Kev had been saying, and he said, “Yeah? What about this?” and fucking wiped his bloody forearm right across my chest.

I looked down at my chest and said something like, “Dude...”

If I’d had a gun, I would have shot him right in the face.

So everybody goes ape-shit, of course. Pushing and shoving, headlocks, more flailing. My guys moved in like the fucking cavalry. It’s a sight to see, guys wearing tuxedo shirts and bowties, cleaning things up. I love all of them. Even the ones who steal the cover-charge money. I really do love them.

There are four steps from our parking lot up to our wooden front porch. We were all just trying to move these guys off the deck and down to the parking lot, but the one guy was still doing his flailing asshole imitation and he went down the steps backwards.

Something, I’m not sure what, on his body, went crack on the pavement. I still don’t know what it was. Probably his head. We all just stood there on top of the deck looking down, all of us going, Oh! with our hands out. It had to be his head. Crack! Like a piece of wood.

I thought he was dead. His buddy bent down and started saying shit like, “DJ? Man, get up, man! DJ?” It was like a war movie.

And all of a sudden DJ just kind of shook his head and staggered to his feet. That was that. We could hear him mumbling all the way through the parking lot as his buddy took him to the car. “Fucks! Man, no! Fuck them! Fuck ‘em, dude.” God, that guy was a fighter. Of course, he now had brain damage.
__________________________

That story is kind of funny, but I’ll tell you, we sat around for a couple weeks worrying about that one. My guess is that the guy had about 10 arrest warrants out for him and couldn’t be caught dead in a bar.

2004-07-10T21:40:00.000-05:00

Randomness

At some point every weekend, the “flower girl” comes into the club and sells roses to men, to give to the dancers or waitresses. Just one more opportunity for the guys to go home flat-broke and busted, with nothing to show for it. Our flower girl runs her own part-time business and does this on the weekends, going to all the clubs and hotspots around town. She’s nice and everybody likes her. One of our bouncers gave her a grotesque “lap dance” one time when she was in the club and had, mistakenly, told someone it was her birthday. She squealed like a little girl and her face got incredibly red.

I’ve only been to three other strip clubs as a customer in my life. You’re asking for trouble if, as the manager of a club, you try to go into another club near yours because you’ll be blamed for trying to recruit dancers and asked to leave. There was almost a fight at our club one night (I wasn’t working) when a bunch of guys from another club here in town all showed up and Mike wouldn’t let them in. It was a turf thing. Anyway, it ended peacefully with some stupid agreement that the guys could come in, but they couldn’t get private dances or sit at the stage, some total wuss-out. I really don’t think they were there to recruit dancers, I think they just wanted to check out our club. Mike has a tendency to make a really big deal out of shit like that.

If you play pool with one of the dancers, she’ll distract you by hovering her ass over every pocket you’re shooting at. You have to have an iron-clad sense of focus not to let it get to you. Last night we were watching two guys play partners pool with two of the dancers. One of the guys was an older guy with a beard, kind of fat and he was really funny. Misty was playing on the team opposite him and the first time he went to take a shot, she lifted up her skirt and started wiggling her butt over his pocket. He was a good pool player. He started lining up his shot and all of a sudden he started laughing. He turned to all of us and said, “Goddamn, that thing just winked at me!” I don’t know if I’ve ever heard a louder laugh from the barroom before.

2004-07-06T18:00:00.000-05:00

I’m glad the shelf-life of your average stripper isn’t more than 25 or 30 years of age, because their kids would inevitably all start reaching the school age where they fundraise. Fundraising, it seems, is Mom’s job. Dad will rarely bring the kid’s sign-up sheet into the office and ask his co-workers to buy an 8-oz jar of cashews for $49.95, or three 12-inch raw pizzas for $34.50, or a candle that smells like a cinnamon stick dipped in shit for $19.95. No, it’s mom’s job. We have lots of mommies in the club; luckily, though, most of them are too young (speaking of the blessed children) to begin the school fundraisers. But we do have several waitresses now who have kids old enough, and I’ve bought a lot of crap out of a four-page little glossy color catalog in the last two years. “Kev, Jessie’s going to band camp this year...you don’t have to, but if you want to, you can buy something from this catalog that will help pay for her trip.” Or, “Kev, Mikey’s going to Hong Kong with his lacrosse team this summer, it’d really help if you bought this $400 block of cheese.”

I just cough up money left and right for this shit. We had a waitress who started here one time and worked for about three weeks when she brought the kid’s fund raising stuff in. I hardly knew her, so I bought the cheapest thing I could find (I don’t even remember what it was, some kitchen utensil or something). And of course we had to pay for it up front. So the waitress just doesn’t show up for a shift one day and that’s the last we heard from her. My $11.50 gone forever! (I sometimes wonder if a person could do that for a scam? Go around the country doing that, taking jobs and making co-workers buy the phantom child’s fundraising stuff, then disappearing? I’m working the numbers on it...let’s see...carry the two...divide by 12... No. I think it would be quite impossible.)

The waitresses work a deal with guys like the Stooges. It goes: “You buy something in this book and help send Dakota to Siberia for cheerleading camp and you won’t have to tip me tonight.” Most of our regulars look like retired porn stars or ex-cons or narcs, but they have cash just falling out of their pockets. The waitresses make out like bandits, because if you’re a bar regular and you’re a good tipper, you’re always a good tipper. It doesn’t matter if I burn your house down, you’ll still tip me. You might put the dollar on the bar and tell me to stick it up my ass, but you’ll still tip. Just one of those funny things.

Kev’s latest fundraising purchase: a barrel of cheesy popcorn for 12-14 year-old girls’ softball trip to team national…thing, $13.00! It works out to two cents a kernel. I counted.

2004-07-03T18:32:00.000-05:00

Two of the bartenders are riding their motorcycles from here to California and back in September. I had dinner with one of them last night in the office and he told me all about it. He’s 21 and the other guy is 23 and they both make me feel old. I’m 27 and I shouldn’t feel old. I was so jealous I wanted to cry. We got on the computer and he showed me the route they were taking—I-80 through Salt Lake City and Reno to San Francisco, then down to Los Angeles, then back home through Vegas and Denver. I have a bad habit when people tell me about their vacation plans, I try to tell them where they should go and what things they should see. If they said, “We’re going out on Interstate so-and-so,” I say, “No, that Interstate sucks, you should go out on Interstate yada-yada.” Chances are I know nothing about either Interstate, just from what I’ve read, but I get excited about vacations so I have to say something. Of course, when he said he was coming back through Colorado, I acted like I practically used to live there, even though I’ve only been out there a few times. Just the Colorado leg of the vacation I suggested would have taken these guys about three weeks to do.

In the Viagra commercial, the guy comes running out of his house and dances on his front porch while We are the Champions is playing. What exactly has he just done? Taken his first Viagra? Popped his first boner in three years? Had sex? In the course of taking your Viagra prescription, what moment is the End Zone Celebration moment exactly? If he just got his first erection, I’d think he’d have something better to be doing than running out on his porch and dancing. If he just had sex, he’d walk out to his front porch and do like all guys do, lay down and fall asleep.

That was me doing my imitation of the frustrated stand-up comedy writer.

I’m off to celebrate our nation’s independence!

2004-06-30T21:33:00.001-05:00

I wrote this whole post about the brother of one of our waitresses who died this week from diabetes, or complications from diabetes, I guess, but I dumped it. It was about how everybody here just kind of said, Oh well, sorry, and then got back to the party. I think in other businesses, people would be passing a card around and buying flowers and planning on going to the funeral or visitation, but not here. Oh, everybody sure acted depressed for a few minutes, but that was that. His funeral is Saturday and I decided, after what I saw today, that I’m going. If my brother died and nobody from here even bothered to come to the visitation...wow. I don’t know how I’d handle that.

2004-06-30T21:33:00.000-05:00

I broke up the last two posts for obvious reasons. The car salesman slash regular who got arrested last weekend told us his story today at work. First of all, he’s like the nicest guy in the world, the butt of many good-natured jokes because he never gets mad. I schmooze him sometimes because in the back of my mind I’m hoping someday he’ll throw me a great deal on a car.

First of all, he said he was drunk. I said, Get the fuck out! He said, no, it’s true, drunker than a fucking monkey. He was with two friends, and one of them was a Cincinnati Reds fan. He’s a Chicago Cubs fan. So they’re standing near the bar and he sees a guy next to him with a Cubs hat on. Remember that he’s drunk? This will come into play shortly. So he grabs the guy by the shoulder and says something like, “Hey man, I’ve gotta do this,” and takes the guy’s hat off. He then puts it on his own head and faces his Reds-fan buddy and starts to say something drunk. The hat owner reaches over and tries to get his hat back, but he ends up knocking it on the floor. They both reach down to pick it up, but everybody else (our guy’s friends and the hat owner’s friends) think it’s a scuffle. Somebody attacks our guy from behind. He actually said it that way, attacked from behind, and the story got held up for about 5 minutes while all the guys at the bar threw in their two-cents (like, that wasn’t the last time he got attacked from behind that night, ha ha, and he was just getting you ready for your cellmate, and maybe he was a Marlins fan and he thought you were Steve Bartman and he was just trying to thank you, etc). If you don’t know who Steve Bartman is, Google him. So our guy’s friends jump in to defend him and it’s a fight. He said he never even threw a punch, he just kept trying to get the hat off the floor. Apparently it got pretty vicious and four of them ended up getting arrested. His friend that didn’t get arrested was too drunk to go bail him out, so he had to call another friend who wisely stayed home. That’s the story.

2004-06-28T12:59:00.000-05:00

A little while back I wrote a post about Walt, our head security guy, and his 14-year-old daughter being pursued by an 18-year-old kid who had just graduated high school. I had forgotten to update that story. It has a boringly happy ending, I guess. Walt’s ex-wife contacted the boy’s parents (next to castrating the kid, this was the most popular advice given on the comment board, by the way—kudos to all of you). Walt’s ex-wife went over to the kid’s house and had a little pow-wow with the kid and his parents (can you imagine that scene? I can, and it ain’t pretty). Walt said they talked to him very calmly and explained how what he was doing was wrong, like you’d tell a child that playing with matches was wrong (while standing in the street, watching your house burn down). This would have been the worst possible tactic, from the kid’s point of view. Screaming and hollering would have been much better. I’m getting goose bumps just thinking about it.

One of our regular customers (not previously mentioned), who sells cars right across the street from the club, got arrested Friday night at a bar, for starting a fight by stealing someone’s hat (??). It sounds like he thought he knew the guy and grabbed his baseball cap from his head. Well, he didn’t know the guy. This is one of those things you want to be sure of before you do it, like 100% sure, like making sure the vicious dog is actually tied up before you get out of your car. I can’t wait to talk to him next time he’s in the club. One of the Stooges will inevitably come to the bar wearing a baseball cap and taunt him with it. This will play out over the next few weeks.

I got to tend bar on Saturday afternoon because we had a last-second call-in and nobody else was home, except Kev, who’s always home figuratively speaking because Mike makes me carry a pager, which makes me feel like a drug dealer. But I like tending bar, so it wasn’t a big deal. The Stooges were talking about cars, and one of them said his “Check Engine” light had been coming on every once in awhile and he better get it into the shop. Larry said he once ignored his “Check Engine” light so long that eventually a new light came on underneath it that said, “Dude, seriously.” Man, did we laugh.

2004-06-23T19:00:00.000-05:00

Here’s one. Yesterday, we had just opened and one of the dancers came out of the dressing room crying. Moe and Curly were there at the bar, and the bartender, and a couple other goofballs. She had a toothache. It must have been severe because the particular dancer is not a crier at all. She walked out to the bar and everyone came to her rescue. What do we do? Aspirin, no she’s already tried that. Loads of it. Her nose is going to start bleeding if she takes anymore. Someone suggested candle wax. You melt some candle wax, pack it while it’s still warm and then shape it around the tooth. Takes all the pain away. Brilliant. So Brad got a lighter out and went to work melting one of our huge, dirty candles that sit behind the bar. What else? Chewing tobacco! Chewing tobacco? Yes, somebody’s toothless, gum-cancered grandfather swears by it. You have a toothache, get some Red Man, put it back over the sore tooth and pain gone. Someone suggested sucking on some ice first, then the candle wax, then the chew. Attack it on several fronts. A roomful of men with limited intelligence trying to solve a problem, in a bar. It reminded me of a scene from Drew Carey.

While this inept cluster fuck is going on at the bar, Curly told her, “Get dressed. I’ll take you to the dentist.” Crying, sucking on an ice cube, she went back to the dressing room. Five minutes later, she was gone, with responsible Curly, a dancer’s best friend. She came back two hours later and even danced. Curly is now in the dancers’ good graces, in our doghouse for making us look (and feel) like a bunch of dumb assholes, which we are. Sometimes I think I’m so down-to-earth with all this common sense, then something like that happens. The rest of the night, every time I walked past Moe, he looked at me and said, “Candle wax? Nice one, dipshit,” even though the chewing tobacco had been his idea. He has a way of doing that.

I’m going golfing tomorrow with a buddy at the golf course I grew up playing. This is a company outing or golf day. My friend works in the concrete business, so a lot of the companies that sell him equipment or supplies have golf days (preferred ball golfing, free drinks, food, door prizes). It’s a way for a company to say Thanks for buying our shit. There are only two golfers in my friend’s company, so I always get invited to go on these. I have to try and fake it, though, when anybody at the golf outings (especially a guy who works for the host company) comes up and says, “So, how long have you been with ABC Concrete?” because they get kind of pissed if they’re shelling out a bunch of money for guys who don’t even work at the companies they’re trying to schmooze. I’ve been in some pretty hairy conversations that were way over my head.

I went to a huge concrete trade show with them a couple years ago, because really the only reason they went was to golf. So we had to spend one day at the trade show, which was actually really cool. All the companies have a booth showing their stuff. They also have a drawing where they give things away. You enter the drawing by putting your business card in the drawing box. If you don’t have a business card, you fill out a little slip with your name and address, company name, your job title, etc. That way they can solicit you down the road. I filled out everything correctly, but I had to ask my friend what my job title was. He said put Estimator. He tells me I still get mail and sales calls all the time. He had to tell his secretary to tell them I no longer work there.

2004-06-21T20:08:00.000-05:00

Some of the most fascinating conversations in the club, by far, come from the waitresses. This is because we have waitresses ranging from 20 years old to about 40. Two of my favorite waitresses are Erin and Becky, who are college students and play softball. They’re best friends and work every shift together because Erin can’t drive and Becky has to bring her. Becky dates a guy who’s 29 and looks like the Swiss tennis guy, Roger Federer (with little pony tail). I think he knows he looks like Roger Federer and tries to dress like him, for whatever reason. He’s a nice guy.

Erin dates lots of guys. I’m beginning to think she’s the easiest chick at her college. She has a spiky blonde, super short hairstyle but is still very cute and has a really funny personality. Some of the most outrageous things I’ve ever heard a person say came from Erin’s mouth. I’ve even seen dancers blush at some of the things Erin says. She’s a flirt, but I also know Erin does more than just flirt. I’ve heard of women who get booty calls at 3:00 am from drunk college guys, but I’ve never met one until I met Erin, who enthusiastically admits to getting, and answering, booty calls. The theory behind the booty call is that, as a guy, you can go to the bars, strike out completely, and then stagger home and make the “booty call” to Erin, which she’ll answer and invite you over. There is also the “booty rock throw against window” like in Animal House (and countless others—seriously, has any guy ever stood outside of a girl’s window and thrown rocks up at it? Probably yes.) The only booty call I ever made was when I was in college, and I called an old girlfriend 200 miles away after a night out drinking. I woke her up and she talked to me for a little while, then, when I started suggesting I hop in my car and come visit her, she told me I was drunk and to go to bed. I bet women just love those phone calls.

The other night I walked by the waitress station and Erin called me over. There were four waitresses there. They were discussing anal sex. Apparently, a lot of Erin’s booty callers were trying to sneak in the back door recently. “Kev, you’re a guy. Why do all the boys want to buttfuck anymore?” Erin calls guys boys, all the time, which is funny. I know we call dancers girls, but for some reason I get a kick picturing one of Erin’s “boys” drunkenly trying to screw her in the ass. She asks me stuff like this all the time, like I should know. What do you say to a question like that? I said it’s a drunk thing, and that they’ve been watching too much porn. I told her if they’re drunk enough, they’ll try to stick it in your ear. One of the older waitresses, who was just standing there listening, raised her hand and said, “Uh, been there.”

2004-06-18T14:45:00.000-05:00

I didn’t die, but it was a close one. That’s a joke. I don’t post for a couple days deliberately, to give people the impression that I have a life outside of the club and this blogging. Then I’ll come back in a post and say, “Wow, what a weekend!” when really all I did was work and hit golf balls and check my blog. I haven’t been getting out much lately.

One of my neighbors is a pretty decent friend. He told me something funny the other day. He has a little Welsh corgi dog named Buster that he walks all the time around the neighborhood. People around here get very upset when you let your dog shit in their yard. My friend has been jumped a few times about it. So now he carries a little plastic grocery sack with him in his pocket, and when his dog shits in someone’s yard and that someone is standing in a window with their hands on their hips, frowning, my friend reaches down with the plastic sack, scoops up the poop and folds it up. He then holds it up to show them he scooped it up, and they smile and wave and maybe go Thank you with their mouth. He waves back. Little Buster wags his tail, and maybe offers a friendly bark. Love flows through the neighborhood again.

Only he doesn’t really pick the poop up! He’s used the same sack for several months now. He just makes it look like he’s picking it up, but he doesn’t. It’s still there. I said what happens if they come out and check to make sure you picked it up? He said no, people would not believe a person could be so shallow and devious. I said yes, you’re probably right.

Things are majorly blah at the club. This is the weekend of a huge festival in town and the parties and bands go until late late. It will be slow, which is good, but also this seems like the time that the weirdos always show up. Fantasy carwashing is in full swing, more popular and raunchier than ever (there’s probably a correlation there, but maybe not). The DOM didn’t die over the winter, as we were hoping. He’s back, and it’s just the same thing all over again. He’s been in the club three or four times already, looking like a little kid who really, really has to pee. If this doesn’t mean anything to you, you can read more about him back in the archives. It’s one of the first 5 or 10 posts, I think.

2004-06-15T20:49:00.000-05:00

Walt told me last night that a kid who graduated from high school this spring has been chasing his daughter, who just graduated 8th grade. Because it’s summer, I had trouble for a second with the ages, high school grad and incoming freshman. I did the math, calculated the ages, took the square root of whatever and subtracted blah, and the answer equaled wrong. Walt is our senior security guy and he can kill you with his pinky finger. He said the guy’s been coming over to the house during the day. Over the weekend, Walt’s ex-wife called him and told him to drive by the house to see if his car was there. I don’t care how old Walt’s daughter is, I wouldn’t want to be sitting in the backyard with her when Walt walked around the corner. She could be five years older than me, and I’d still shit my pants. Lucky for the kid, he was gone by the time Walt drove by, although I would have loved to have heard that story (or maybe not...okay, yes, I would have loved it, unless he killed the kid, then no, but...)

I have to wonder what’s going on in that kid’s mind. It’s actually been with me all day. I don’t like the looks of his future. It’s funny because Walt is just mystified and I really got to see him for the first time as a parent. He’s not talking about killing the kid, which I have to give him credit for. All the bouncers were giving him creative ways he could cut the guy’s dick off (a Sawzall and a hatchet seemed to be the two favorites), but Walt was in lala-land. He’s more worried than anything else. He was just out of it all night last night. He’s one of the good guys. I try to remember how hard parenting is when I bitch about my job.

I’ll keep you posted.

2004-06-14T13:04:00.000-05:00

Brianna is a dancer at our club who started as a waitress first, back when I was a bartender. She was a good waitress, but everyone knew that she had started waitressing just to get her feet wet because she eventually wanted to dance. All of the male employees of the club said things like There IS a God! when they found out Brianna wanted to try dancing, because Brianna’s a fox. That’s a really interesting thing, working with somebody for a month or so, fully clothed, then getting to see them naked. It was about the most excited I’ve ever been to see someone dance.

So, of course, she was great and everybody loved her. Her first song, all the bouncers and bartenders were doing the I’m-not-worthy bow at the edge of the stage and she got all embarrassed.

A couple weeks later, she opened up her set wearing her waitress outfit and carrying a tray. She was wearing glasses and had her hair up. Our waitresses wear black leather skirts, dark hose and their tops are called wing collared halters, which are like sleeveless and almost backless tuxedo-collared tops. They’re sexy in a tasteful way. They wear the collars open and bowties around their necks. So Brianna comes out wearing her waitress uniform and does her set. It was great, the whole strip-tease experience, taking off her glasses and letting her hair down, then the shirt came off (we have one dancer who dresses like a businesswoman, in a business suit with reading glasses and her hair up like that…the guys love it).

One of the waitresses, Kim, came up into the booth and stood there for a minute. She then looked at me and said, “Just so she knows, that’s the last fucking time she’s wearing that outfit on stage,” and walked away. I hadn’t even thought about that. The waitresses all took offense, and I don’t blame them. The rest of the night, the guys were all like, “Hey, when’s your turn up there on the stage?” to our waitresses. They were asking them for table dances, if they did anything special for an extra tip, the whole mess. Things like that happen all the time. We have one dancer who dresses like a little girl with pig tails and comes out on stage to the song “Lollipop” (you know, lollipop, lollipop, oh, lolly…blahblahlah) and nobody says a word (it’s amazing how fast she grows up over the course of three songs), but dress like a waitress and man, the shit hits the fan.

So, with a heavy heart, I had to confiscate Brianna’s waitress outfit. Mostly because the waitresses would have ripped her hair out if she ever wore it again, but also partly because the outfit belongs to the club, anyway.

2004-06-12T14:18:00.000-05:00

Last night was such a great night at work. I haven’t had that much fun in a long time. It was one of those nights where it feels like everybody wants to be there, everybody was in a good mood. The place was packed, all the guys were cool, we had four stages of dancers going. No fights, no ejections. Not even any real warnings to guys for getting too frisky. And the girls were great. There are nights when a lot of them just go through the motions, make their money and leave. There are other nights when they really dance. Some of our girls are really amazing dancers, but you so rarely get to see it, and especially see all of them doing it on one night. For awhile, it was like every dancer’s set was like a challenge to the next girl to top it. All the songs rocked. It was great.

And I got to see Darby dance to “Little Bit More.” That’s one of the coolest things about my job, getting to enjoy music like that. It’s like you get to hear the song for the first time twice. You hear it, you love it and listen to it fifty times. Then you get to see one of your favorite dancers just absolutely blow the roof off the place dancing to it. Darby is a little goth chick with short dark hair. She has a couple tattoos and some piercings and wears dark lipstick and eye makeup. She’s a lot more sexy than scary looking, but the funny thing is that she’s a total sweetheart. She has an incredible body and man, can she dance. It was so great. I didn’t let her listen to the song before, but I told her I had a new one and she’d have to wing it. She wung it. It’s amazing watching a good dancer like that, just improvise when she’s never even heard the song before, anticipating all the big shifts in the music and everything. When she got off stage the first time, she ran over to the booth and said, “Oh, my God, that song is so fucking awesome!”

A good night. I loved it.

2004-06-10T14:12:00.000-05:00

This rain will never stop. I wanted to golf about a thousand holes today, but no go. So I’m going to chip and putt golf balls while I think about this post, and I'll stop every once in a while stop and write. That’s what I’m doing right now.

This is the only part of my game that doesn’t take a shit over the winter, because I chip and putt all year around. My dog used to chase the golf balls. It was impossible to hole a shot that way. It’s also impossible to get in a groove when every shot you take only gets halfway to its target before a dog darts out from the bathroom and grabs it. I play a game with him sometimes with my little foam golf balls. He stands at the end of the hall and I try to chip the balls past him and hit the wall like he’s a hockey goalie. He’s unbeatable, unless I chip the ball over his head. Then he looks pissed. Satch appreciates heated competition, but he demands a level playing field. If I just keep lobbing shots over his head, he loses interest. That’s the only time I can get one past him. I bore him to death with flop shots that he can’t reach, then I sneak one past him. Also, unlike a real hockey goalie, Satch has no 5-hole because he sits on his hind legs. You have to beat him to the stick side.

Television at this time of the day is awful. My two big TV viewing times are usually from about noon until 2:00 pm, and 3:00 am until 5:00 am. There ain’t much happening on those two time slots.

I just heard a song by Tony C. & the Truth called “Little Bit More” and it’s the coolest thing I’ve ever heard. The name of the album is Demonophonic Blues. I hope the rest of the album is half that cool. I’m going to buy it right now. As soon as I heard the song, I thought of one of the dancers, Darby. When she shows up for work tomorrow night, I’ll wave her over to the booth and let her listen to “Little Bit More” in cue on my headphones. She’ll freak, because it’s the kind of stuff she loves. Funky stuff that totally rocks. She’ll demand that I play the song for her first set. I’ll be her hero. This is what I do.

2004-06-09T12:45:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I called Mitch, whose real name isn’t Mitch, Mitch. He said, “Who the fuck’s Mitch?” and I said, “That’s what I’m asking you.” He looked confused. He was busy at the bar, so that was the end of it. The names I use for dancers are all names I’ve heard of for dancers, and many of the names I use I actually know a dancer by that name, only it’s not the same dancer. The dancer I call Logan has almost taken on an identity of her own. I know her very well, I see her about every other day, but the blog Logan is becoming different in my mind from the real Logan. And I have to admit that this all is going on more in my head than in the blog here, because I write probably 400% more than I actually end up posting, so a lot of the time I have to say, Did I actually post that, or did I write it and dump it? My blog life is taking over my real life. Soon it will suffocate it and kill it and all will be blog.

I like to post interesting little tidbits every once in awhile. Most of the time when I write something like, Here’s a really cool thing I learned today, people comment and say, “Kev, you fuckin dipshit, you didn’t know that?” And I go, Nope, wouldn’t have said I learned it today if I had. Then I remember I only had 1.3333333 years of college, and those weren’t the most productive in US collegiate history.

So here’s my little fun fact of the day. If you don’t know this, you can say, “Kev, you rock, that’s the most fascinating thing I’ve ever heard!” If you do know this, bite my ass. Just kidding.

Also, it’s not my intention for this to be the sleaze-bag blog or anything, but this is gross, so, you know, fair warning. There was a radio story I heard today and I’m not sure where this happened (it wasn’t a local story), but a guy in a fast-food place was arrested for masturbating in people’s food. One of the people he did it to was a cop. Here’s the fascinating part: They charged him with aggravated battery. Isn’t that bizarre? That must be like the maximum penalty or something, but I would have never guessed they could charge a guy for battery when he never even touched someone. Then I thought about, what happens if you spit on somebody? I suppose technically that would be battery too.

Reading back on this, it’s not nearly as fascinating as I thought it would be. Oh well.

2004-06-08T14:20:00.000-05:00

My best friend Kyle works for an insurance company. He travels all over two states visiting insurance agencies. He’s the guy who tells the insurance agent, “Can I get you anything?” And the insurance agent says, “Yes, we need some more promotional water bottles and a dozen company sticky-pads,” and Kyle takes care of that for them. I tell Kyle he has the perfect job for listening to books-on-tape because he’s in his car all day. He could “read” 100 novels a year. Or I can listen to the first ten pages of one novel, he says, and fall asleep at the wheel and drive off a bridge. I tell him he better stick to sports talk radio.

Whenever he’s in the area he times it out and stops in the club, which he did yesterday. I was best man at Kyle’s wedding. I had just started working at the club and his wife wasn’t too happy, to have me, nudie club bartender, giving the toast at her wedding. I don’t blame her. I wouldn’t want a stripper being my wife’s maid of honor, to be completely honest. I’m trying to think if that’s being hyprocritical…hmmm…Yes. I’ve decided it is.

Nothing much happened yesterday because Kyle has been in the club a hundred times and we just hang out. The very first time he came in after I had become manager, we were sitting in the office together and a couple of the dancers, who had just gotten off stage, came in, still with no tops on. They said hello to Kyle, he said hello, one of them had a question for me about something, we made a joke, everybody laughed. The other one walked around the side of the desk to check her schedule. I introduced Kyle to them, they said Hey and stood around for awhile and talked. Okay, thanks, Kev. They left and closed the door. Kyle looked at me totally deadpan and said, “Dude, that was maybe the greatest five minutes of my life.”

The guy who owns the club, Charlie, didn’t make it to the meeting yesterday for the second week in a row. That has never happened before. He has some disease that’s not supposed to be life-threatening, but I can’t remember which one. I’ll find out today at work. If Charlie dies, I wonder if Ravishing Ron would get the club? If Charlie hasn’t already died, I’ll ask him the next time I see him. I’ll say, “Hey, Charlie, when you drop dead does your scumbag son get the club?” Then Charlie and I will have a good laugh. Then he’ll fire me.

2004-06-06T21:34:00.000-05:00

When I worked Friday night, I talked to a dancer named Jenna. Jenna had some shingles blown off her roof in the storms we’ve been having. She lives in a house with her 3-year-old son and whatever loser she’s currently dating. Jenna’s boyfriends move in with her usually after the second or third date. I asked Jenna, “How does a guy move in with you after you’ve been seeing each other for two weeks? Where was he living before?” They usually live with their parents or a friend. From the looks of them, many may actually be homeless. She likes the dangerous guys, but around here, the dangerous ones are usually just fucking idiots. I know two pretty nice guys who come into the club occasionally who are in love with Jenna and she won’t give them a second thought.

Her roof is leaking into her bathroom, she told me, and she doesn’t know what to do. I told her to call a roofer. She did, she said, and he told her she needed a new roof. She called her insurance man and the adjuster came out. Jenna has a $1,000 deductible because her credit is poor and the house is in bad shape. The adjuster told her the damage wouldn’t meet the deductible. She doesn’t know what to do. She was almost crying. I asked her how many shingles were off and she held out her arms to show that it was probably just a couple. She knows I used to work construction, and she’s seen me in action doing amazing feats of maintenance around the club. One time I was outside before the club opened, mentally preparing myself for my shift, making pretty shapes out of the clouds, when one of the dancers came out and screamed for me to get inside. A pipe had burst in the dressing and was spraying all over the place. They had managed to throw a towel over it, but it was still soaking the floor. I shut off the water valve and now all the dancers think I’m Bob Villa. After about 10 minutes of listening to her beating around the bush, I said, “Jenna, how about I come over tomorrow and patch your roof?” She squealed.

First I went to her house to see what color shingles she had. Then to Lowe’s to buy a bundle of shingles. Then back. Then she didn’t have a ladder. We borrowed one from her neighbor. I got on the roof. There were three shingles missing. The shingles I bought were the same color as her shingles when her shingles were new, about 30 years ago. I got busy.

Jenna came out a little while later and asked me if I wanted a cookie. She was baking cookies for something her son was involved in. I said yes to be nice, but I didn’t want to come down the ladder just to get a cookie. I told her to come up. No, she’s afraid of heights. Just throw it. The first throw I could have caught if I had taken three steps and dove from the roof and landed on the driveway. The second one hit the gutter. I told her to just forget it, she’s wasting her cookies. No, one more. She heaved this one and it went over my head, but it landed on the roof. I got it before the 5-second rule and dusted it off. She stood there until she saw me eat it, then she went back inside.

So I fixed her roof. I had to use three times the number of shingles that were missing because her roof was so old, I kept breaking shingles trying to tie them in. I’m praying the next time it rains she doesn’t come in and say the roof is still leaking.

Also, I got my heart broken on Saturday. By a guy. Named Smarty Jones. Oh, Smarty.

2004-06-04T21:05:00.000-05:00

A lot of alcoholics fall off the wagon at strip clubs. They justify going to the club because there’s more to do there than just sit and drink. They tell their friends, “But I go to ball games, and I go boating. It’s the same thing.” If you’re a recovering alcoholic and you’re serious about your recovery, you have no business coming to a strip joint. I think if you’re a recovering alcoholic and you’re considering going to a strip club, you haven’t hit your bottom yet and you’re probably not ready to quit drinking.

Here’s what happens when a recovering alcoholic comes into the club. He comes with friends and they all sit down near the stage. He orders a Diet Coke from the waitress. His friends all order a shot of tequila or Jagermeister and a beer. They make a toast of some sort, usually, “All right, let’s make a toast…here’s to BIG TITTIES AND GOOD FRIENDS!” They toast with their shot glasses or beer and Bob, the guy with two feet hanging off the edge of the wagon, toasts with his glass of pop. Soon there’s a 19-year-old brunette girl wearing no shirt standing in front of him. Her smile says, How would you like to see the top of my head moving up and down in your lap, you fucking sexy designated driver? She smells amazing. She would smell even more amazing, he thinks, if she were doused with tequila and he could lay her down and lick every square inch of her body. She does her thing for him and he tips her a dollar. He has a woody now. We’re talking major wood, the can’t-sit-comfortably kind. He’s delirious with excitement, he thinks she actually likes him and he may have a shot with her but he’s too nervous to be cool and funny. He is imagining something very warm and very wet on her perfect body moving over the end of his penis.

He finishes his Diet Coke. He sees the waitress and orders another one. His friends are high-fiving about something. One of them screams, “This is a thousand percent better when you’re FUCKING WASTED!” and they all cheer. The waitress is still there. He thinks for a second and then asks her, “Hey, can I get a twist of lemon in that?” (I’ve seen this a hundred times, any guy who is determined not to drink in the bar will eventually ask for lemon or lime wedges or cherries in his non-alcoholic drink as he’s… sliding…off…the…wagon).

Eventually, he goes to the bathroom, and passes the bar. He stops at the bar and looks around. He reaches for his wallet. He lost his battle when he first considered coming into this place.

On a side note, there is a little tavern near my house that will give you a free drink if you bring in an anniversary chip from Alcoholics Anonymous. You been sober for 30 days? Fuck that, have a beer on us!

2004-06-01T21:45:00.000-05:00

Speaking of which...

When I was a bartender, I was working by myself one night at the bar and Ron was there, sitting at the bar with some business associates or whatever. I overheard one of the guys talking about the Indianapolis Colts football team, and I could tell by the way he was talking that he was a fan. They ordered a round later and I brought it to them. This was at a point, remember, where I doubt Ron even knew my name. The guy who was talking about the Colts reached into his pocket to pay (if you’ve never been in a bar, people who buy rounds lean to one side and reach for their wallet and say, “No, I got this one,” or “No, I got it”—if you don’t, you cannot buy the round). Of course, we don’t charge Ron or his friends for their drinks, so I said to the guy, “No, man, I just got a call from Peyton Manning and he said all your drinks are on him tonight.” Peyton Manning is the Colts’ quarterback. If you’re a Colts fan, he’s God. I thought I was being really clever, but then I got worried, thinking Ron would disapprove, because I was eavesdropping. Instead, they all laughed and Ron said, “See that? That’s a good bartender...always knows what’s going on at his bar.” Then I felt all warm and fuzzy.

Moe, the contractor with the fucked-up bike, drinks Captain Morgan and Cokes in a tall glass. He ambles into the club at about 4:30 everyday and stands at the bar. He looks around like something is missing. Then he holds out his hands and says, “Where the fuck’s The Captain?” I used to tell him, when I was bartending, “He’s in the can.” Then Moe would say as he took his barstool, “Well, motherfucker, when he gets out, tell him somebody’s here to see him.” By that time I would usually have his Captain and Coke on the bar. I miss bartending.

Larry drinks Coors Light beer. Moe uses a very sharp pocket knife to poke tiny holes in Larry’s beer can, right under where his lower lip hits the can when he takes a drink. It’s the greatest bar trick in the world. After several years, Larry has an iron-clad defense of his beer cans. He takes them to the bathroom with him, he carries it everywhere. He always checks for a tiny poke-hole before a drink. Larry doesn’t live in fear, he’s just careful.

This trick is very funny, especially when it’s the victim’s first time. You poke a very tiny little hole just under the lower lip spot. The smaller the hole the better. Also, hiding the little hole among the beer can’s small lettering on the side of the can is an art form. Moe is the master, and a beer can his canvas. I’ve seen guys who knew the hole was there but they still couldn’t find it. You wait until the guy goes to the bathroom, then you poke the hole in his can. Tiny, tiny. The guy comes back, takes a drink, beer dribbles down his chin. He wipes his mouth and sets his beer can down. He thinks, like we all have, that he’s tipped the can too fast and it’s run past the corner of his mouth. He drinks again, more beer dribbles down his chin. After the third or fourth time, he begins to wonder how drunk he really is. He might even say, “Christ, I must be fucking drunk,” as he’s wiping the beer off his chin. He holds up his beer can and examines it—if Moe was on his game, I mean if he really planted the perfect cut, the guy could use a microscope and he wouldn’t find it.

Here’s a PS: if you try this, take some test runs first. Practice on your own can, in the safety of your own home. You twist the knife back and forth, back and forth, until you feel the aluminum begin to give a little. If you do it the first time in a bar, you’ll put a gash in the can that you can fit a coin through. I’ve seen it. It’s still funny, because the guy will be wearing his entire beer, but it’s better if you can sit back and watch for a few minutes.

2004-05-31T23:13:00.000-05:00

I had other issues when I posted yesterday, and I kind of skipped over the part about Charlie’s son, Ron, coming into the club on Friday. Ron’s a full-time playboy and part-time entrepreneur. He comes into the club about once a month with “clients” of his, whatever they are, but I know they are guys who have money or Ron wouldn’t be wasting his time wining and dining them. Ron always has a scheme of one sort or another that he’s trying to get off the ground. There’s a breed of human being that doesn’t have money of its own and is always seeking a “backer.” Ron is of this breed. The fact that he is always seeking a backer means his ideas are shit, because if they were any good he would only need a backer one time and then he’d be off and running. I truly don’t know what he does, if anything, for a living. I know that he doesn’t wear socks. He’s always tan.

Ron has been pretty decent to me, but everybody’s anxiety goes up a little bit when he comes in, really for no reason except that Ron can be kind of unpredictable. He’s one of those guys who likes to keep you slightly uneasy when you’re around him. I’d like to explain to Ron that this massive character flaw is probably one of the reasons no one wants to give him money, because he makes them feel creepy. You’ll be having a nice conversation with him, then he’ll say something that may or may not have been a joke, and if it wasn’t a joke it was totally rude, then he’ll walk away from you and leave you standing there with a dumb little nervous smile on your face and your mouth open.

Kev: Hey, Ron, what’s up tonight?
Ron: Nothing, Kevin, how are you?
Kev: I’m fine. How are you guys doing?
Ron: What are you, writing a fucking book?

Then he walks away. And there I stand, looking queasy and dumb, my smile saying oh, man, please tell me that was a joke. Sometimes he’ll leave you hanging on a handshake, which, in my opinion, is punishable by death. There are so many assholes in this business. But I guess this business doesn’t exactly attract the best people in the world.

2004-05-30T21:21:00.000-05:00

Another advantage of the notebook computer: you can blog (or at least write your blog on Word) while your house is surrounded by thunderstorms and tornadoes, just go on battery power and you don’t have to worry about your power going out and losing info or fucking up your computer. Of course, when the tornado hits your house, it’s another matter altogether.

I dated a dancer named Tara (her real name is something very innocent, like Katie or Julie) when I was a bartender. Actually dated dated, like going to movies and dinner and that kind of thing. She started dancing right about the same time I started bartending; in fact, I remember when she first came in and remember watching her the first time she danced. We became friends, she hung out at the bar a lot and eventually we went out after work one night (morning) and had a relationship for a couple months. We’re just friends now and have that kind of relationship that’s just a little bit different than being friends with other people—the we’ve had sex so we don’t have to be cute around each other now friendship. Not long ago she told me when she was drunk that I was the only guy she’s ever fallen for, but she’s not in love with me now.

When we dated, we used to talk about how we were going to do this only for awhile, to save up some money and yes, we were both going back to school. She had dropped out like me. She wanted (wants?) to be an interior designer or decorator. Everybody knows what I want to do. We still smile at each other when we talk about that.

The reason I wrote this is because Friday night I was having a really shitty night at work. The owner’s son came in with some business clients of his, and that makes everybody nervous. I was having dancer issues. Our bartender, Brad, gave the cordless bar telephone to some young guy, even though he’s not supposed to let customers use the phone. So the kid takes the call and I just let it slide and kind of forget about it. I look over probably 10 minutes later and the guy is sitting there still talking on our phone. Just like he’s in his own fucking living room, kicking back, laughing. I walked over to the bar and told Brad, “Brad, hang that fucking phone up right now.” Brad looked absolutely stunned because I’ve never spoken to him like that before, but you just can’t understand how mad that made me. Fucking people anymore. Give ‘em an inch. The guy would have sat there on the phone until the battery wore out or somebody yelled at him. And then I felt bad the rest of the night because I yelled at Brad and he looked so shocked. Nine times out of ten I would have walked up to the kid and said, “Hey, man, that’s our only line out here, we need our phone back,” and the guy would have hung up the phone, end of story.

So Tara came up into the booth, wearing her street clothes because I told her she could go home early if she wanted because it was already 12:30 and nobody had asked me yet. She saw that I was stressed out and she didn’t say anything, she just put her head on my shoulder and wrapped her arms around my waist and we just kind of stood there for awhile, then she said goodbye and went home. Some people just know the right things to do.
________________

I’ve noticed that I use a lot of (these) when I write in my blog, and it’s something I’ve never really done before when I wrote. It’s laziness. Tacking on thoughts instead of working them into the sentence. This is not very interesting.

Happy Memorial Day

2004-05-28T13:02:00.000-05:00

“Women like that are like members of a secret tribe living in a forbidden city.”
George Costanza on Seinfeld

The “Forbidden City” in the club is the dancers dressing room, and that’s kind of the perception most men have when they walk down the hallway at TJ’s Place and see that shitty old wooden door that says “Dressing Room – Dancers Only.” I watch them sometimes pass by the door—they get nervous and excited. Sometimes they touch it just to say they did. Beyond that door, they’re thinking. The Forbidden City.

Kev will now be your Tour Guide through the Forbidden City. First of all, I hate going in there. I don’t want to know what happens there. The dressing room is creepy. Whenever I go there, I always knock before I enter and say, “Is everybody decent?” All the dancers mumble something that I take as a “yeah, whatever,” and I open the door and go in. There are about 100 various stages of nakedness, and I’ve seen them all. There are many, many “bad nakeds” going on in the dressing room of a topless club. (I went into the dressing room one time and a new girl who had been dancing just a few days saw me and screamed and grabbed a towel to cover up her chest. That’s why I always knock now.)

Everything in the dressing room is loud, wild, messy, outrageous. Aside from the obvious, there is nothing in the dressing room that any man would call Paradise. The first thing is the smell, a combination of 20 different perfumes and body sprays, hair products, nail polish, nail polish remover, fresh leather. It is a tidal wave of smell that will stop your heart. Once your vision returns, you are then overwhelmed with the sight of it: there are brightly colored clothes, boots, shoes and costumes strewn all over, hanging from every hook, every shelf, on every surface. The floor is not visible, there are huge trunks laying open, contents spilling out, makeup kits. The colors inside the dressing room will trigger epileptic seizures.

Then of course there are the girls. Sometimes, if just a couple of the dancers are in there, reading or doing their makeup, it’s fine. The first time I had to enter the dressing room after I became Ass Manager, as the waitstaff calls me, there were 25 girls in there just before the 8:00 shift on a Saturday night. They were screaming, wrestling, laughing, being crude, painting toenails, using the bathroom, putting on their makeup, trying to meditate. My first time there, and I had to quiet this room and make some announcement, scared to death, embarrassed. After 20 minutes I finally had their attention. I began, “Girls, I just wanted to let everyone know—“ One of them farted. The room erupted with laughter. I decided it was best to just write down the announcement and post it outside the door.

2004-05-26T20:57:00.000-05:00

My nephew graduated from high school on Sunday and I went to his post-graduation party. I grew up and went to high school in a small town, not where I live and work now. It’s always stressful going back home to something like this, seeing people who knew me in high school and know me now. Every conversation I have with old teachers and my friends’ fathers are on the absolute surface. They’re polite and don’t ask me what I’m doing now, because they know what I’m doing now. And, yes, I’ve seen a few of them in the club. In fact, I can’t believe some of the people I’ve seen in the club—if I ever get to where I hate my hometown, I will turn it upside-down by naming names. The backlash will be felt for decades.

That’s all for another post. So my nephew Jay graduated and I sat by the fire with my brother, my brother’s brother-in-law and my brother’s father-in-law (ya followin’?) and guarded the keg from Jay and his friends. One of Jay’s friends calls me “K-Dawg” and I call him “Lil’ Bow Wow” because he’s like 4-feet 8-inches tall and listens to rap and hip-hop. He also has the attitude of a guy who’s the size of Shaq, or Peter North, if you know what I mean.

The following is an excerpt of a typical greeting between K-Dawg and Lil’ Bow Wow:

Lil’ Bow Wow: Yo, K-Dawg, what up?
K-Dawg: Yo, Bow Wow, I’m chillin’, yo!

We then go on to discuss ho's and bitches, turf, etc.

Naturally, Jay’s buddies thought I’d be their best bet for breaking down and giving them a cup of beer, which of course I did, after about my eighth. I justify this by saying it was all logical thinking and that they’d be safer having a couple glasses of beer here, at their own party, than driving off to other parties to find it (which they would have). Like the country song says, that’s my story…

Anyway, seeing your nephew graduate and stand at the beginning of his life kind of gives you the heavy feeling. You want to tell them so much. But you remember that your dad and your uncles told you the same things when you were 18, and they never really had an impact until you were older. Listen to Bob Seger. He knows.

On a lighter note, this is my favorite Deep Thought by Jack Handey:

That crow seems to be calling my name, thought Caw.

The other favorite goes kind of like this (not exact): If you ever accidentally drop your set of keys into a molten river of lava…forget ‘em, man, because they’re gone!

2004-05-25T11:43:00.000-05:00

The waitstaff had a party after work Saturday night (according to the Monday report). Around 5:00 in the morning someone decided it would be a good idea to start shooting arrows off the deck with a compound bow. If I’ve said it once I’ve said it a thousand times, it’s time to leave the party when somebody does a beer bong, vomits on the floor, and says, “Hey, let’s get out Dave’s compound bow!” It was always like that at the parties I remember. The guys who weren’t getting any decided to end the night with violence and/or dangerous activity. Hitting golf balls, tackle football, nunchuck fights, homerun hitting contests with aluminum baseball bats and golf balls. I’m amazed no one has been killed.

So the neighbor called the cops on the party, apparently. This neighbor has been awake probably since 2:15 am, when the party started. I don’t imagine she was in too good of a mood, then an arrow goes whizzing through her backyard and hits a tree and everybody on the deck cheers. I figure that was the last straw.

I wanted to tell everybody thank-you for linking me on your sites. Every day it seems like I get new referrals from somebody else, or someone mentioned the site on a forum. I visit all of your sites and try to comment when I can, but I don’t very often (comment). I’m shy, you see. I even sign up for some of the forums just so I can see what’s being said about my site. Pathetic? Yes. I’m a pig. But thank you.

2004-05-22T22:07:00.000-05:00

Our new feature has a boyfriend and I met him last night for the first time. He was creepy. I always expect to see Fabio or someone like that, but it’s usually not the case. Feature Boyfriend was small and almost embarrassingly shy. He had the clammy dead-fish handshake and didn’t make eye contact. He recoils from sudden movement or loud noises. You know the guy. He was the boy on the funny home video show who teases the hoofed animal, or the kangaroo, at a zoo, and gets viciously kicked, or hacked-on (by the llama he was hitting in the chest, with a stick) and psychologically scarred forever. He was a bed-wetter as a child, and probably tortured neighborhood pets. I am assuming all of this, of course, but I’m pretty sure I’m right. I didn’t like him, and he was the type of person who could care less if anyone likes him, especially Midwestern hicks. In his world, we are here to provide him corn, and beef, and runways to make emergency landings on when he flies between the coasts.

I’m always curious about those relationships. Our feature this week was beautiful and funny and had a great personality and a body made possible by modern science, then you see her boyfriend/manager/errand boy/thong-washer and you wonder what the situation is. He looks like me when I was in 8th grade. I imagine he fears for his life during sex sometimes with her. Relationships are complex. When I am with Sarah Michelle Gellar people will say the same thing about me. Look at the geek. I will flip them the bird and say, “Yes, but I am boning Sarah Michelle Gellar, when she lets me, and you are not.”

I just walked a mile in his shoes and understand the relationship perfectly. I wish him well.

2004-05-19T22:48:00.000-05:00

This afternoon, Walt, our bouncer, found a leather pouch of some sort that had been run-over in the parking lot. He picked it up and looked at it. I think he thought it was drug paraphernalia, because he sniffed it, then sniffed his fingers.

I found Walt in the bathroom a few minutes later with his head in the sink, running cold water over his eyes. The leather pouch he touched and sniffed was a pepper-spray canister holder, with the little canister still in it. It had been crushed by the tires of a car. When Walt picked it up, he smelled it, which irritated his eyes, then he rubbed his eyes with his hands that had the chemical all over it. Walt is the toughest person I have ever met. He was a mess. It makes me wonder how those assholes on the cop shows can get sprayed with enough Mace to kill a buffalo and still keep coming after the cops.

Is it true that in some jurisdictions, if a cop wants to carry a Tasor gun, he has to first be shot with one? And in order for him to be an instructor, he has to be shot again? I heard that yesterday and I’m not sure if I believe it.

2004-05-19T22:43:00.000-05:00

I got a comment today from Tanya, who said she had a dream about my blog. In her dream, she made a comment on my site, then the next day I devoted an entire post to her.

Seriously, how often do you get the chance to say, “I just made someone’s dream come true today?” It doesn’t happen to me very often. I will seize the opportunity now.

This post is all for Tanya. She said her dream was that she commented on my site, then the next day I devoted a post entirely to her. So here it is. Thanks for making me feel like a superstar.

If you go to her site, please be nice. She’s a sweetheart.

2004-05-17T20:05:00.000-05:00

We haven’t had a “feature” in a couple months, and I just found out at the manager’s meeting today that we will have one this week. I just met her an hour ago and I will hate her by the end of the week, if not by the end of tonight. For anyone who doesn’t know, a feature is not a normal dancer. She’s a minor nude or porn celebrity, like a former Penthouse Pet, or Miss Nude World of 1997. They usually have an amazingly raunchy, though totally impressive, resume. They come to the club and dance for a week and completely turn things upside-down. We have to set up booths so they can sell their merchandise, devote an employee to her while she’s in the club (for taking photos, selling merchandise, etc). Features vary. Some are nice, some are manipulative, evil, greedy bitches. What sets the features apart from your normal dancer is that a feature generally has breasts the size of medicine balls. Watermelon-sized boobs are the absolute bottom end of the scale. We usually have a dozen girls dancing in the club who are prettier.

It is usually a requirement for a feature to have a name that implies I have really big tits. The last name is the “big breast” name; the first name starts with the same letter as the last: Amy Alps, Judy Jugs, Mandy Melons. I just made those up on the spur of the moment, but I’m sure at least two of those are actual stripper names.

Having a feature in the club is very stressful for Kev. He has to actually be a DJ and not just sit on his ass and play music. He has to work the lights instead of setting them on some auto function and forgetting them. He gets screamed at by the hideous feature bitch because he played the wrong song, or didn’t promote her photo booth enough (as in, “Hey, check it out, guys…between sets, Judy Jugs will be available in the northwest corner of the barroom…get an autographed photo of you and Judy for only $10 and make your totally lame friends jealous!”). If the feature is a jerk, eventually all the regular dancers will start hating her and I will have to listen to it, in the office, praying the feature isn’t lurking around outside. I will calmly ask my dancer to please lower her voice. Actually, I’ll really say it like this, “Shh! Shut the fuck up! She’ll hear you!” They reply with I don’t give a fuck if she can hear me or not, that fucking stuck-up bitch!

This will be my week. Friday at 2:00 am will be a happy time. This winter one of the features treated me like shit all week, to the point where I really couldn’t take it anymore. I just completely shut her out. The last three days I didn’t speak one word to her. I don’t know if I’ve ever hated someone so much in my life. And then, after our last shift together, she walked into the office and said, “You hate me, don’t you?” I told her she wasn’t my favorite person in the world. She said, “Let’s go out and have a drink and I bet you’ll be loving me by the end of the night.” (Yes, I caught the loving me double-meaning part, although I think she was probably too stupid to make that clever of a comment on purpose). That was the night of the monthly staff and dancer party, where I would be surrounded by friends and women I’ve fantasized often about having sex with. I thanked her and declined. She told me it was my loss.

This is the first thing our new feature said to me after I met her this afternoon: “Please don’t tell me that little closet your bouncer just showed me is my dressing room this week?” And it’s only Monday.

2004-05-16T21:51:00.000-05:00

This week or possibly next (depending on the weather), we will begin our 3rd annual spring car wash on Friday afternoons and Saturdays. Dancers (and occasionally a waitress, if they get her drunk first) set up a car wash in the corner of our parking lot, for charity, which is our good-faith gesture to the city and the chamber of commerce, who try to shut us down about every odd-numbered year.

The car wash costs $20, and usually the car being washed has about 8 guys crammed in it all looking out with their noses pressed to the glass like little kids. The dancers can’t be topless in the parking lot. They wear bikinis, cut off jeans (by cut-off I mean something that can only be called a denim thong), wife beaters, half-shirts. There is not a bra within 200 yards of our club on car wash days. My personal favorite is the wife beater; I can’t explain how good a wife beater looks when it’s wet, on a pair of breasts. Half-shirts are good for flashing, the girls tell me. Our car washes are more about the scenery than the quality of the washing. In fact, if you bring your car in, it will be more violated than washed. Your side-view mirror will be humped, your radio antenna will be part of its first pearl necklace, the hood will be crawled on, sometimes by more than one dancer at a time. Many cars leave the wash looking worse than when they came in, but there hasn’t been any complaints yet. I tell the dancers to be careful about the flashing, because one time the car will be filled with cops and our little charitable donation to the city will be over. It hasn’t slowed them down, though.

Here is the one nice thing about the car wash, and I’m not trying to change anyone’s opinion of strippers, but the girls volunteer for the car washing and don’t make any money for it. The only thing they get out of it, really, is a better tan.

2004-05-14T20:15:00.000-05:00

I just got a Dell notebook computer and it arrived yesterday and that’s why I haven’t written anything. I’ve just been sitting here with a boner staring at my new laptop. I’m a Dell guy, if anyone gives a shit. One day when I’m famous and making twenty dollars a word writing novels, I will take this very laptop to beaches and mountain resorts, and I’ll write and drink coffee on big decks that overlook pretty things. For inspiration, I’ll look over the top of the screen and see an elk in a valley near a stream, eating something that elk generally are content with eating, or I’ll listen to the Pacific Ocean crash against rocks (which will be my rocks, on my beach). Then I’ll go back to writing bad sentences like The pounding surf hammered the rocks, like a wounded bull elk and know I just made about $200.

I get great ideas for writing (blog stuff, other stuff, the great American novel) at odd times, mostly while driving my car, sitting on the toilet, standing in line, floating in water. When I’m not staring at words on a page, the words in my head sometimes just lay themselves out and they’re perfect. Then I get home, get on Word, and I’ve got nothing. My friend told me I should carry a tape recorder; I told her that was lame because it wasn’t a laptop computer, which isn’t (lame). She said why don’t you buy a laptop then. She is brilliant. So here we are.

I will carry this laptop in my car, on my seat like I’m important (until some fuckhead steals it, of course, which will happen…in my mind, I’m already telling this computer goodbye and saying hello to my $500 insurance deductible). When I get an idea I’ll type on it one-handed, screaming down the highway with the windows down and Incubus blasting from my stereo, just like Hemingway used to.

Who saw the Lakers-Spurs game last night? Wow. I had no interest in who won, so I knew I was going to be happy either way. What a game.

2004-05-12T22:51:00.000-05:00

Three of the youngest dancers now call themselves “Kev Heads,” like the fans of a Chicago disc jockey named Kevin Matthews. They do this for my sake, trying to gain favor with me. It’s kind of cute, but it gets annoying. They ask to go home early, Kev says no. They pout. “But I’m a Kev Head.” The other night, Brad, who was bartending, told Misty, one of the Kev Heads, “You can either be a Kev Head or give Kev head.” Misty was pissed and said something terrible to both of us, then left. She will be canceling her Kev Head membership soon, I’m afraid. I can see how it will turn out, the Kev Heads will no longer be Kev Heads but Kev haters because the little Kev Head thing ran its course and hasn’t gained them much in terms of favors from Kev. They will give me the silent treatment and avoid the DJ booth when I’m there. For a couple weeks, they will never ask to go home early and they will make their schedule with Mike instead of me, even though they know it is much easier to do it with me than him. And then, a few weeks later, one of them will mope into the office at 10:30 on a Friday night and ask if she can go home early. She will have a party to go to, but she will lie and say it is something else. I will let her go, of course, and she’ll kiss me on the cheek and we’ll be friends again. All of this frustration, several weeks worth, just because they decided to do the stupid Kev Head thing. And they won’t learn a thing. In a few months it will be something else, and the cycle will start all over again.

I saw a high school baseball game last night and a fight broke out. I’ve never seen that before in my life. A fight at a high school sporting event. And it wasn’t just pushing and shoving, either. Kicking and spiking and big wild roundhouses, coaches and parents out on the field. It was fucking incredible. I was there with a buddy, watching his little brother, who’s a good baseball player and will play in college. Everybody in the stands was going crazy. I sat back and kept looking for the bouncers.

2004-05-10T19:35:00.000-05:00

Every morning during the week, I wake up to this: “Patches! Patches! Patches? Patches!” My female neighbor has a dog named Patches. She is too lazy to put the dog on a leash, so she just lets him run wild outside. In ten minutes, she comes to her back porch (which faces my house) and begins:

“Patches! …Patches! …Patches! …Patches? …Patches!” She may say the dog’s name 100 times. She is talking on a cordless phone while she does this. She always talks on her cordless. I’ve actually never seen her without it, even the time her son got “kidnapped” (a whole other story there, the dad stopped by and gave the kid a motorcycle ride without telling crazy Mom—also, here’s good advice, don’t be the manager of a strip joint when a kid in your neighborhood goes missing. It will make for a tense few minutes). Patches, meanwhile, is humping a cat somewhere or eating garbage and has no intention of coming home just yet.

“Patches?”

I find myself aiming a lot of anger at Patches, this ugly little dog whose name I wake to every morning. He is creepy and sickly and small (or, as my dad used to say, “I’ve laid turds bigger than that dog.”). He runs up to you and barks, but zips off if you try to pet him. He is a master of the piss and run, whereby the dog races up to some property of yours that you would rather not be peed on, lifts its leg and pees for one second, then races away.

My dog, Satch, a Norwich Terrier, is the opposite of Patches. Satch is cool and loving. Sometimes I wake up and Satch is laying on my chest, looking at me. Satch lets off steam exactly once a day, when I let him out in the morning and he tears ass around the yard in circles for about one minute like he’s running from the devil, then lays down in the grass. I am trying to teach Satch how to kill Patches and make it look like an accident. I have a little stuffed toy rat that looks just like Patches and I have taught Satch to attack it whenever he sees it. I hold the rat behind my back and say, “Satch, where’s your buddy?” and Satch just sits there, watching me, and his tongue just kind of leaks out of his mouth and his tail starts to wag, very slowly. Satch will bide his time. He will be patient. He’ll wait until Patches is doing something gross that skinny little dumb dogs do, like eating his own poop, and it will be all over for Patches.

Saw Kill Bill Vol. 2 this weekend with this chick I met in a bar. I am, she says, “some dude I met in a bar.” Movie verdict: Vol. 1 was funnier, Vol. 2 was more QT, and a better movie. I liked them both, though.

This post just won the award for being the longest while saying the least.

2004-05-08T16:02:00.000-05:00

Friday was an extremely long day, starting with a round of golf, in the wind, which completely wore me out. I have no problem if people who work outside for a living are saying, right now, “Oh, pooh-pooh, Mr. Softie, are you tired after your little round of golf?” Tired’s tired, so yes, Mr. Softie definitely felt rode hard and put away wet. Then work was agonizing. After 12 hours in the DJ booth, it gets really hard to come up with different ways to tell men to make sure they tip the dancers well, and look how fucking hot this next one is, blah blah blah. At one o’clock in the morning, the guys are so shitfaced (not to mention the dancers and probably most of the waitstaff), that I could drop dead in the DJ booth and no one would notice unless the music stopped. It’s just not very inspiring work.

When I cashed out the registers, the one Mitch had been working most of the night was short over $200. This happens occasionally. It’s usually just a goof by the bartender when they rang in an order and it will show up on the tape, but sometimes it’s never explained and you have to really stop and think about it. If it’s not an overring, something happened. I was too tired to worry about it. I’m going to write in the blog one day about the staff and all the creative ways they steal money from the club (read sarcasm into the word creative).

I also think the Smoke Eaters might have taken a shit last night. By the end of the night, it was extremely smoky in the bar, which usually isn’t a problem. Late last night, my eyes were killing me and I took my glasses off to rub them, which turned out to be a huge mistake. It was like I rubbed them with a piece of sand paper. Luckily, there were eye drops in the office that probably date back to the 1990s, but they worked. This morning when I got up, my eyes looked terrible. I love allergy season. Love it.

2004-05-06T13:33:00.000-05:00

Two falls ago, I went fishing and camping in Colorado with two friends, and one of our friends who lives in Colorado. We were fishing for trout on the Colorado River and we camped for four days and three nights. Before we left the interstate and went to our campsite, we bought $200 worth of groceries at a grocery store in Avon, Colorado. We had two coolers the size of bathtubs. We slept in tents, we woke up before the sun came up and started a huge fire and sat and drank coffee. We cooked breakfast and dinner over an open fire. Every breakfast, we had steak, eggs, fried potatoes and toast. Every dinner, we had trout filets fried in real butter and lemon juice, baked beans and fried potatoes. For four days, I never watched a television, I never heard a phone ring, I didn’t check an email. We fished during the day and sat around a fire and drank beer and laughed and listened to the radio at night. It was a good four days. I could have done it for the rest of my life.

There’s no point to that little passage. Just remembering. There is something about being surrounded by mountains and all you can hear is the rippling of water. What amazes me about mountains is that I’ve never heard silence like that, like it's impossible something so massive does not make a sound. I know now that when I see in a movie someone shout into a canyon just to hear the echo, they are committing a crime against nature. The last thing I would have ever wanted to do up in the mountains that weekend would have been to shatter that silence by hearing my own pathetic voice, which I hear enough of as it is. The mountains will never ask you to shout your name at them. They ask you silently to just shut your mouth and fish, and every once in awhile, stop and look up and all around in awe.

2004-05-05T21:10:00.000-05:00

I’m writing a short story right now that was inspired by my friend, Mark, who told me last weekend that he was scared about his upcoming yearly “employee evaluation” at work. According to Mark, he hasn’t been performing very well at his office, as in terribly. His boss, who is a spook and doesn’t come out of his office much, uses “evaluation day” to unload and scare people. Mark is terrified and doesn’t handle stress very well. He will sweat and his hands will shake. I tell Mark his boss won’t fire him in an evaluation. Mark is afraid of being fired, of not being fired. Of getting a raise.

So I’m writing a short. It will be a dark comedy about a guy in Mark’s position, who has a drinking and drug problem, who is stealing from the company petty cash fund (not Mark, my guy). He is facing an evaluation and can’t handle it. So he decides that the best way to postpone the evaluation and get himself together is to burn his office down. All I know is that it will take place in a 24-hour span and have a really ironic ending. That’s all I’ve got.

2004-05-04T17:50:00.000-05:00

We had a guy on stage Monday for a “birthday party” (his buddies select two dancers, they all get up on stage, they strap him in a chair and abuse him: tear his shirt off, atomic wedgie, rip off the band of his underwear and stuff it in his mouth, write vulgar graffiti in magic marker on his chest and stomach, that sort of thing). I always play a dumb song from the 1980s by Great White or Motley Crew, one with lots of guitar. You all know the lyrics: chicks, blonde twins, that thing that wild groupie did on the back of our tour bus that one night between Denver and Vegas, tour buses, hotel Jacuzzis, two chicks in a hotel Jacuzzi, etc.

Here’s a word of advice for anyone bringing a bachelor or birthday boy in and buying him a “party” on stage with a couple dancers: If the dancer removes the guy’s belt, and you run up to the DJ booth and ask me to tell the dancer to “whip the shit out of him” with the belt, she will. She will whip your friend until either the end of the song or until someone physically pulls her off of your friend. She will enjoy doing it. The other dancer will enjoy it too, and she will hold your friend down while the other one does the whipping. Your friend will eventually crawl to the stage and curl up in the fetal position, covered in welts. So just be careful what you wish for.

Lunch was great. I did not have beer goggles when I met her, I was glad to see. She works in a bank and had an hour for lunch, which was more like 40 minutes by the time she got there and when she had to leave. Just from lunch, I think there’s a very good possibility for a relationship, so I’m going to lay-off making posts about her. One day, maybe, I’ll show her this and I know she’ll think it’s hysterical.

2004-05-03T20:10:00.000-05:00

Okay, her name is Natalie (real name). Here is an abbreviated version of the conversation I had with her on the phone today.

Kev: Hey it’s Kevin, from (name of bar) Saturday night. Remember, we’re going to Australia together in 2005?
Natalie: Hey, what’s up? (I can’t put into words how great this last phrase sounded, it was just so casual, no big deal, like you’d say after your third date. I love her now and we will have children. We’ll be cool parents, two boys and a girl.)
Kev: Not much. I’m at work. What are you up to?
Natalie: Nothing. Bored, watching TV.
Kev: What?
Natalie: I said I’m bored and watching—
Kev: No, what are you watching?
Natalie: Oh…

Now this is later.

Kev: Sorry about Saturday night, being a butthole when you were leaving.
Natalie: You weren’t being a butthole.
Kev: Well, I was, and you know what I mean.
Natalie: It was a boost to my ego, even if you were a little drunk.
Kev: That’s what I meant.
Natalie: (She said this, I swear to God.) Hey, you got the phone number of a girl who’s never went home and fucked a guy two hours after she met him. That’s not such a bad thing, is it?
Kev: (heart pounding) No, that’s a pretty good thing, actually.
Natalie: (she also really said this) So there you have it.
Kev: (diving in head-first) So, do you have anything open on your social calendar for a guy like me?
Natalie: Such as?
Kev: I don’t know, dinner, minor league baseball game? Dinner and a movie? Lunch? Tomorrow?
Natalie: Hmmm. (She really did say this, just like that, hmmm, then): I can probably do lunch tomorrow.

So there you have it.

2004-05-02T15:18:00.000-05:00

My friend Greg is in town and I went out with him and another friend last night for Italian and to check out a new club that opened up awhile back that I hadn’t been to yet. I’ve heard about it for the past few weeks from the dancers and waitstaff. The bar was very cool (we’re going there again tonight) and I met someone late in the night and had a really great conversation with her (dream vacations, his: Australia, hers: Australia). She made it very clear that we wouldn’t be bumping uglies at the end of the night, but I gave it a shot anyway when we said goodbye. Dialogue:

Kev (begging slightly, holding hands): I could make you breakfast! I’ve never killed anyone with my cooking yet.
New Friend: I’ll let you make me breakfast someday…I promise.
Kev: You know, a few days ago, today was a “someday.”
New Friend (frowning, has no idea what the fuck I just said).
Kev (also has no idea what the fuck he just said).
New Friend: Just call me…I really gotta go. My friend’s waiting.

When I walked back in the bar, my friend Greg announced to our table (six people at this point) that, “It looks like somebody’s gonna be pulling his pud when he gets home tonight.” I was drunk enough that I said, yes, I probably will.

Whenever I get home after a night of drinking, I always think it’s a good idea to fly a Boeing 777 on Flight Simulator. I’ve crashed a Triple-7 upon landing, drunk, at nearly every major airport in the world. My body count has to be astronomical. So, to the people of Rio de Janeiro, who last night witnessed my plane bounce twice on their runway, catch fire, and disappear into the mountains, I'm sorry.

2004-05-01T14:59:00.000-05:00

I'm working with my colors after receiving complaints that readers to the site were going blind. If you see some wild colors in the next few minutes, please bear with me.

2004-04-30T19:55:00.000-05:00

I work from 3pm to 3am on Fridays. I am on my break now, sitting in the office blogging and eating my dinner. I look forward to this moment all day long. I have asked everyone: dancers, wait staff and security, to let me have this moment every Friday, and they do. Brad, who is a bartender and bouncer, is in the DJ booth. He is terrible, but he’s the only one who will cover for me for an hour on Friday. He says things like, “Yo, yo, yo, check it out, guys! Here’s our next lovely lady…Britney!” He at least keeps the music going and reminds the guys to tip.

Moe, Larry and Curly are currently sitting at the bar, and Mitch is bartending. I’m looking at them right now through our two-way mirror. Out in the bar, there is a dart board to either side of the “mirror” and it’s kind of fun to sit in the office and watch people play darts. It looks like they’re throwing the darts right at you. (Interesting fact: touch a pen or a coin to a mirror and look at it kind of from the side—if there is a small gap in between the object and its reflection, it’s a real mirror; if the points meet, it’s a two-way and someone is on the other side, watching you touch a coin to their mirror and wondering what the fuck you’re doing.)

Every time I see Moe, he says, “Hey, when you gonna fix my fucking bike?” He is joking; I wrecked the thing over a year ago and have no intention of paying to fix it. I tell Moe his bike was a defective piece of shit and almost killed me. I tell him he’s lucky I don’t sue. Moe says, “Hey, motherfucker, I know people.” I tell Moe I know people, too: one named Smith and one named Wesson. We have had this same conversation every day for a year.

The last time I was behind the bar, Larry and Curly and Mitch were in the middle of a conversation, giving names to the different shits they’d ever taken. This is the kind of thing men talk about in bars. We’re not sitting around trying to solve the crisis in the Middle East. Mostly it’s Larry and Curly giving the names, because they’re older and it’s funnier coming from them. Larry has one he calls “The Beer Can” and another he calls “Howlin’ Wolf”. Curly’s best is “Shock and Awe.” The conversation was a lot more graphic than what I just described. I'm still laughing as I'm writing this.

2004-04-28T21:31:00.000-05:00

We have “road girls” and “house girls” and I know both terms conjure up lots of, you know, ugly things that men conjure up, but those are the names and I can’t change them. We have deals with other clubs around the Midwest, and the road girls show up on Mondays and say hello to me, because I’m the guy you check-in with, if you’re a road girl, on Mondays. Any sexual excitement I get anymore in this job comes from the road girls. It goes like this: I’m a guy, and on a boring Monday afternoon, a beautiful little blonde 20-year-old from Indianapolis or Peoria or Madison or St. Louis comes into the office, shakes my hand and introduces herself, and in one hour I will see her breasts, for free. This is a perk, like free coffee or a good parking space. I did not write these rules, I just adhere to them very strictly.

The “house girls” are women who live here and work regular shifts. They are like company employees as opposed to guest speakers (road girls). No one in an office gets excited when the guy in the next cubicle gets up to make a presentation. And that’s what I meant, originally, when I said this is for everyone who thinks managing a blah-blah-blah would be the blah-blah-blah. I see the house dancers naked more often, I think, than most married people see their spouses naked, unless they really swing, or are nudists. The house dancers stand in the DJ booth naked, they bitch at me because I fucked up their schedule naked, they order food at my desk naked, they use my phone naked, they come in the office and tell me the toilet has backed up naked, they sit across my desk and cry because their boyfriend is an abusive asshole naked. Remember the Seinfeld episode where Jerry has the girlfriend who is always naked? I can’t look anymore! I’ve seen too much! I know every mole, every scar, every birthmark, every nipple, I know if a dancer has put on 5 pounds.

So, to my old high school friend who came into the club Monday night, and surprised me by screaming in my face, “YOU LUCKY COCKSUCKER!”, I will be at your house one night and surprise your girlfriend as she’s getting out of the shower, and I’ll return the favor. And if you’re polite like I was, you’ll go, “Hey, Kev! No shit, do you believe this shit!”

2004-04-27T11:07:00.000-05:00

One (or all) of the middle schools must have had an in-service or something yesterday because the skateboarders were out in our parking lot before we opened up. They are in the 12-14 year old range, lost in their own world, shy to the rest. Hours on end, especially in the summer, they try one simple little jump: down our sidewalk, pop over the curb, try to flip their skateboard in the air once (I guess it would be a twist and not a flip), then land on it and ride it out. I have never seen them land this jump successfully out of maybe 500 attempts that I’ve watched.

Yesterday I walked out of our side door and got the required look from skateboarders when an adult walks out of a door, onto a parking lot, where kids are skating and shouldn’t be. They all went hang-dog and started moping around, waiting for me to chew them out or tell them to leave.

I said, “Don’t you guys ever land that jump?” They all perked up and said, “What? Huh? What?” excitedly, standing up, grabbing their boards. I said, “I’ve watched you guys for months and I’ve never seen you land that jump one time. You trip, you fall, you break your ankles. Haven’t you ever landed it?”

Okay, I have seen them land it maybe 5 times, but I wanted to see how they’d react. Besides, landing it 5 times out of 500 is right next to not landing it at all. So they took my challenge enthusiastically (a brief audience with an adult, the species that shoos them off and posts no-skateboarding signs and would be happier if they smoked crack or played video games so long as they don’t do it in our parking lots) and I stood there for 10 minutes until one of them finally hit the jump and skated off, pumping his fist. I threw up my hands and told them I could die happy now, and for them to please not kill themselves. One of them asked me if there were any “naked chicks” inside. The only women in the club at the time were two cleaning ladies.

I told him, “Yeah, it’s a pretty wild scene.”

2004-04-25T15:04:00.000-05:00

“Kev, can I go home early tonight?”

This is a phrase I hear a lot. As in 50 times a night. Usually they wait until after midnight, but I’ve had girls ask to go home at 10:30 when their shift started at 8:00. I only have myself to blame for this mess, because I generally like all the dancers and got too loose with letting them go early. The girls know I will let three or four of them go home early on Friday nights, so they started asking me earlier in the night, wanting to reserve their ticket. I make dumb rules like no asking to go home early before midnight, and to my surprise it took them all of three nights before they decided to shit all over that rule.

I try to reason with them. I say things like, “You know, Katie, out in non-lala-land where people build tractors and sell insurance and things like that, people don’t ask to go home early every other shift they work. They’d eventually be fired.” When I say things like this, the dancers look at me like I’m telling them how concrete works. I once told a dancer she could not go home early and she pulled out a piece of paper which listed how many times each girl had gotten to go home early the previous two weeks. It was this incredibly detailed list, with updates and comments and footnotes. I ignored her list and told her I thought she was channeling her energy in a really negative direction. I was almost fed my own testicles for that one.

Friday night there was a fight in the club. If you call one punch a fight. The guy who got pasted was a drunk asshole. I wanted to congratulate the guy who hit him, but I had to act stern and disapproving. He ended up going to jail.

This is a recap of the fight:

“Sit down, dickhead!”
(drunkenly) “FUUUUUCKBLAHHHHH!”
BOOM

2004-04-24T15:50:00.000-05:00

These are some old friend bloggers I had wanted to add for a long time, but I'm lazy and stupid. I'll add more as I go and try to make it look a little better.

2004-04-24T15:45:00.000-05:00

I will be attempting to add and modify a links section for the next few minutes...or hours. It will be a disaster.

2004-04-23T10:55:00.000-05:00

I love my Who’s On list. I have noticed that many university students are reading the blog when they should either be studying or attempting to get laid. You will not find any answers to your tests on this blog, guys. I love that you’re here, though. Here are some of the colleges I’ve seen on Who’s On (no particular order): Arizona, Penn, Penn State, Notre Dame, Michigan, Michigan State, Michigan Tech, Ohio University, Ohio State, Stanford, Cornell, Harvard, Indiana, Southwest Missouri State, Clemson, Missouri, North Carolina State, U of Chicago. As far as I know, I still haven’t gotten any love from Champaign-Urbana. I am definitely a Big-10 Blog, though.

Here are some other interesting “non-university” servers I’ve seen on the site: nasa.org, mcgraw-hill.com, lucasfilm.com. This can only mean that George Lucas is getting help from Nasa for researching a new movie. It will be called Nudes in Space, I think, and I will be a technical advisor.

This is the most fascinating thing I’ve learned this week: natural gas has no smell. When you “smell” a gas leak, you are not smelling the gas, which has no smell, you are smelling an additive they insert into the gas to give it a smell, so you can detect it and get a safe distance from your home before it blows up and kills your neighbors.

2004-04-21T21:35:00.000-05:00

Up until not too long ago, we would have male strippers in the club on Saturday nights. We put them in another room on the other side of the bar; we set up 75 folding chairs and had a makeshift stage. Each week, we would get two or three bachelorette parties to come in. Women go absolutely nuts around male strippers. They’re so crazier than the men that it’s not even funny. They wear hats shaped like condom heads, they bring sex toys, they play tug-of-war with dildos the size of my arm.

The male strippers were okay guys. They have a reputation for being pricks, but most of the ones I knew really weren’t. They dress like construction workers and cowboys, and it’s a requirement that there’s a fireman in the group. The cowboy danced to Wanted Dead or Alive and the construction worker danced to Everybody’s Working for the Weekend. The fireman had a huge length of actual firehose that he had stuffed with something to make it rigid. He would then straddle the hose and dangle it out over the crowd and all the women would scream and try to grab it. He was always careful not to let any of the women actually get ahold of the hose. I saw it happen one time. The guy’s hose kinked about halfway out and started to dip down toward the crowd. Before he could pull it in, one of the women grabbed it and it was all over. It just disappeared into this screaming group of women and nobody ever saw it again. We did find out later that he packed it with the Styrofoam peanuts.

Nobody ever saw it again. That was a fib. The hose finally made its way back to the stage and it looked like it had been through a war.

2004-04-20T10:37:00.000-05:00

We call our three most regular customers Moe, Larry, and Curly (we really do, those are my first non-alias aliases, if that makes any fucking sense at all.) They are in the club every day we’re open. I’ll say that again: they are in the club every, single, day. They shuffle in about 4:00 pm and eventually leave around 10 or 11 pm. They sit at the bar, they eat chips, they watch TV, they talk basketball and football and NASCAR and politics. Two of them play pool. They buy the dancers drinks. Sometimes they knock on the office door and come in and bullshit with me, or ask me to look up something on the internet.

Moe is a contractor and I once destroyed his bicycle. He’s a huge guy with glasses, a mustache, long brown hair. He’s so laid-back he could fall asleep standing up. I learned the hard way that, when you’re very drunk at 3:00 am, going really fast down a hill on Moe’s bicycle is not the smartest thing to be doing.

Larry looks kind of like Howard Stern: same hair, similar face, same build. He was the victim of a burn accident that I think won him a bunch of money in a lawsuit. His hands and forearms are badly scarred, his hands are almost unusable. When he flips you the bird (which he does a lot), he will then explain that it’s the best he can do with three fused fingers. He calls it the “Uni-bird”. I love the Uni-bird. Sometimes when somebody says something stupid, I nod over at Larry and he pops the Uni-bird like he’s offering them a cigarette. Larry’s the one who doesn’t play pool, in case you were wondering.

Curly looks like Curly. He sells and services video games and juke boxes and pool tables (including ours). He also doesn’t drink. Curly is in love with one of the dancers, Jamie, and has been for years (she’s one of our veteran dancers who was here long before I started). He’s not gross about it, though. Jamie is very nice to him and doesn’t take advantage of the fact that he would give his life for her. They’re good friends, but it’s the definition of an unrequited love.

2004-04-19T19:44:00.000-05:00

It’s Monday dinner break. Monday dinner club menu: pizza and cheesy garlic bread. I voted for Chinese, but was shot down in a huge way. One of the dancers, Tyler, is sitting across the desk from me right now, eating pizza and reading a magazine and she has no idea what I’m doing. This is probably the closest I’ll ever come to violating one of the dancers.

2004-04-18T20:58:00.000-05:00

The waitstaff and dancers had their monthly party at one of the bartender’s houses this morning after work. The parties go from 2 am until around 6 or 7 am. On nice nights, they fire up the gas grill and cook brats and burgers and everybody stands out on the deck and listens to music. They’re not as wild as you’d think, but I also don’t stay as late as I used to. I usually hear about the crazy 5:00 am – 6:00 am stuff on Monday (when I was bartending, I was often involved in the crazy stuff, but not anymore—I’m the responsible one now who has to leave the party before any fucking and pot smoking can take place).

Last night I played co-ed darts at the party and Jessica, a waitress and maybe the most attractive girl in the club, was my partner. She was very touchy with me while we played darts, and that wasn’t a bad thing. I ate a bratwurst and drank three beers and got home at a decent hour (by our standards).

Before the “tsunami” as my new Brit buddy Bruce would say, I always wanted to do a links section with my friends, but I was too lazy and I am dumb when it comes to code. It took me two weeks just to change the colors a little and move some borders. Now I feel bad, because I had some bloggers who followed my site from early on and I always wanted to link them on my page. So I’ll periodically do it here. Emily was the first person to post a comment on the site. She’s an American teaching in Korea, and her life is infinitely more interesting (and admirable) than mine. She’s also a great writer.

2004-04-17T14:44:00.000-05:00

This is a note to all wedding DJs: one song that will get people on the dance floor is Dion’s Runaround Sue. It is impossible to listen to this song without wanting to dance. If you play Runaround Sue and everyone is still standing around scratching their nuts, pack up your shit and go home because it ain’t happening. I had 150 drunk guys last night clapping their hands above their heads and shouting the lyrics. This with five beautiful mostly-naked women dancing around the room.

I always thought the Gordon Lightfoot song was called Every Highway until my friend Kyle told me one of his favorite songs was Carefree Highway by Gordon Lightfoot. In the words of Dan Tobin, now I feel like a moron.

Is it wrong that I’m writing this sitting in my underwear with my dog in my lap? Yes. Time to get down, boy.

Just one note on the Blogger notice and it will be the last time I mention it in the blog. The last couple days have been really exciting. Thanks to everyone who has viewed the site and made comments. I’ve only been doing this (blog) for a little over a month and I’ve seen so many great blogs out there, it kind of baffles me too. But I’m definitely not complaining.

2004-04-15T19:40:00.000-05:00

Last night Danielle, a road girl from Ohio, was sitting next to me in the DJ booth (road girls are visiting dancers from other clubs around the Midwest who spend a week or two as guest dancers—our girls are often road girls at other clubs). Danielle and I are friends and she spends a lot of time in the booth between her sets, especially on slow nights, mostly talking about movies. Danielle is one of those dancers who always complains about how she never gets laid. She was seated on the back counter with her legs stretched straight across the DJ booth and her feet pressing against the front of the shelf where the stereo equipment is, her legs like a gate across the entrance to the booth. Late in the night I dropped a CD on the floor and bent down to retrieve it. Danielle looked down and said, “Oh, Kev, I thought you’d never ask.” She was wearing a thong and a tiny red skirt that barely covered the cheeks of her ass. I found the CD and stood back up, only I pretended I lost my bearings and came up trying to nuzzle the top of my head between her thighs from below. I kept saying, “Wait, where I am? I can’t see! What is this?” I thought she would laugh and squeeze her legs together and try to push my head away, but she instead spread her legs and put her hand on top of my head and said something obscene, about me being a bad boy because I was late for dinner. I chickened out, of course. That will be the last time I try to out-shock her.

Earlier this week, she came up in the booth and bent over in front of me and started bumping her nearly-naked butt against me. She said, “Kev, just grab my hair and slam me a couple times like you’re banging me in the ass.” Kev gets really embarrassed by this kind of shit. She said, “Please! I just want to remember what it feels like.”

Speaking of that, the dancers and waitresses have been doing this thing lately where whenever one of them bends over, someone standing close by will come up from behind and thrust into them with their hips and say, “Anal Assault!” The last two weeks, I’ve seen waitresses and dancers flying all over the barroom, waving their arms and trying not to fall down. Rest assured, this little sport will end soon when we’re all hovering over a waitress or dancer laid out on the floor with a big bloody gash in her forehead from the corner of a table or one of the beer coolers.

2004-04-12T20:42:00.000-05:00

Spent Easter Sunday at Mom’s with my brother, his wife and my niece and nephew, who are both teenagers and really cool. We all ignore the subject of Kev’s job, which is the big pink elephant in the living room, making fart sounds. In the afternoon, I had the thankful distraction of Phil Mickelson and Ernie Els’s shootout on the back-9 at The Masters. I jumped out of my chair when Phil curled in his putt on 18, but I also realized I probably won’t have a reason to root for him anymore.

I am blogging this from the office at TJ’s. Mondays are long and agonizing and this is my dinner break. We had our manager’s meeting this afternoon. Our owner, Charlie, who is old and clueless, comes down from another city and meets with Mike and me. Charlie likes me because I am clean-cut and have short hair. He wants to know if we’ve found out which dancer is giving handjobs in the VIP Room. We tell him that, whoever it is, she’s stopped. Charlie is disappointed because he wants to be a detective and plant spies, which he does all the time in the bar, trying to catch bartenders stealing. I think Charlie is beginning to lose his mind, but I’m thankful he isn’t an old perv like you would think the 74-year-old owner of a strip club would be required to be.

On Mondays, two of the dancers and one waitress also work double-shifts like me, so we usually have a pow-wow about 7:00 and decide where we’ll be getting carryout from. The four of us enjoy being in this little Monday dinner club and we exclude other “single-shifters” who are just hungry and jealous. I drive and pick up. Tonight, we eat Italian from Biaggi’s. There is Rigatoni alla Toscana in my mouth right now.

2004-04-08T22:09:00.000-05:00

Last night a muscular young guy wearing sunglasses came into the club and sat at the stage, but refused to tip or let any girls dance for him. He just sat there with his arms crossed and stared straight ahead and drank orange juice. After awhile, people lost interest in him because he was boring and there were naked women on stage. He finally realized that he hadn’t made the splash he thought he would and got up and left. Somebody yelled "Bye, fuckhead!" when he was almost out the door and everybody laughed.

Also, Walt went outside to smoke around 12:30 am and found a kid pissing down on the hood of somebody's car from our deck. Walt said he was pissing in an arc that peaked about 4 feet above the kid's head, like a Las Vegas fountain. Walt yelled at him and the kid took off. I asked Walt if he chased the guy and he said no. He said, "I can't piss without dribbling on my shoes, how the fuck am I going to chase that kid?" I have not stopped laughing.

2004-04-06T18:04:00.000-05:00

I just discovered TerraServer USA: I'm addicted. See a zoomable satellite photo of any point in the continental USA. Here are the last 5 things I looked down at from high above:

1) Mt. Ranier and Mt. Saint Helens (Ranier looks really cool)
2) The house where I lost my virginity. It is a very small house and I don't remember that tree being there. The photo was actually taken the same year I lost my virginity! Just think, underneath that roof, Kev could be giving his girlfriend the greatest 9 seconds of her life.
3) The Royal Gorge Bridge in Colorado (this took about 30 minutes to find and was kind of a dud when I did find it).
4) The house I lived in from ages 0-4.
5) The Assembly Hall and Memorial Field in Champaign, Illinois (Fighting Illini football and basketball venues). If you look real close, you'll see the Chief, dancing in the parking lot. (just kidding)

Notice how “Area 51” north of Las Vegas is all whited-out.

2004-04-04T17:37:00.000-05:00

The golf season is in full swing here. I golfed for the first time today. My short game was good (I have a long run from my kitchen through the living room and into the back hallway where I chip and putt all winter), but I was terrible with my driver. I was a member at a country club last year, but I didn’t renew my membership this year because I didn’t golf half as much as I thought I would (I had envisioned golfing 4 or 5 mornings every week, impressing dates at dinner where the hostess would know my name, hanging at the bar after a round of golf and watching baseball games, but it just didn’t work out that way). I have a snap-hook tee-shot that my friends call “the Boomerang.” I once hit the Boomerang into a strong headwind; it made it 200 yards down the fairway, stopped, turned left 180 degrees, and eventually came to rest near the front of the tee box. One of the guys in my foursome who had never witnessed the Boomerang shouted, "Holy shit!" as the ball's left engine flared out and it started to bank hard. I usually straighten the Boomerang out about late-August (by “straight” I mean gentle draws), and during September I am hard to beat.

2004-04-03T01:38:00.000-06:00

One of our dancers, Logan, loves to dance to Bob Seger. She’s 21 years old and she gets it. She walks to the stage slowly as the opening to Night Moves is playing. The guys, who average 40 years old, go insane. They know the song. They remember what it means. And she is their black-haired beauty with big, dark eyes. While the song plays, I just sit back and watch like everyone else. She owns the room. Some of the girls are afraid of rock songs like this, with long pauses and no bass and drums. They don’t know what to do when there is nothing telling them to move. Logan loves to move in the long silences, and the men at the stage love it too. The focus is all on her. She has long black hair and dark eyes. If you saw her dance, you would never forget it.

2004-04-01T20:29:00.000-06:00

Towards the end of the night three of the dancers and a waitress watched Extreme Makeover Home Edition on television. There was another girl (me) watching with them. I have seen every episode so far, and this was actually the second time I saw this one. This is dialogue from The Big Lebowski:

Big Lebowski: Are you surprised at my tears, sir?
Dude: (taking a pull from a joint) Oh, fuckin’ A.
Big Lebowski: Strong men also cry. Strong men…also…cry.

Strong men also cry. Wimpy strip joint managers also cry.

My previous post was disgusting, by the way. He's disgusting. I hope he dies soon. I hope he doesn't have grandchildren.

2004-03-31T18:21:00.000-06:00

Dom is a guy who comes into the club. I think he’s what us Midwesterners call a “snowbird” who goes south for the winter. We don’t know his real name. Dom stands for Dirty Old Man (one of the dancers made that up, which I thought was fairly clever). He is in his late 60s or early 70s, your typical old pervert: Bermuda shorts (in the summer), dark socks, sneakers, and usually some sort of Hawaiian shirt. His legs are frail and hairless. He has an old military-style flattop haircut and he always seems to need a shave. He smells like dirty scalp.

His routine is this: he comes into the bar in the afternoon, purchases a glass of iced tea and sits down by himself far from the stage (you would be surprised to know that many of your creepiest, borderline dangerous customers are guys who come in and drink iced tea or orange juice and no alcohol). After a couple dancers have been on stage, he begins getting fidgety. He squirms around in his chair and is very busy with his hands, wringing them together and acting shaky. If you worship college basketball and your team is behind by one point for the national championship, imagine yourself watching the last ten seconds of the game. This is the way Dom looks. Eventually he starts touching his thigh with his right hand and playing with the hem on his shorts. He never has actually masturbated out on the stage area, but he comes awfully close. At this point, I send a bouncer over to ask him to calm down. He very enthusiastically complies, nodding his head, “Oh, you bet, son, you bet. Will do…will do, thanks.” (This is what Big John told me once; I won’t go near the guy.) I have told the dancers never to approach him. My bartender Mitch has asked me 20 times if he can dump a glass of ice water on Dom, but I say no. I don’t want to have to explain to the police why the dead man with the erection on the floor is soaking wet. Mitch says we’ll tell them he had a heart attack and we tried to revive him. I tell Mitch that the cops would then arrest us just for being a couple of fucking morons.

Eventually, Dom gets up and walks to the bathroom with a visible hard-on. He comes out two or three minutes later without one. He walks through the dance area and doesn’t so much as offer the girl on stage a glimpse. I pray that he is at least rubbing it out in the toilet.

2004-03-29T15:35:00.000-06:00

We had our team meeting with the dancers yesterday to inform them that used condoms were being found in the VIP booth and that one of them was doing a little more than dancing (after a week of speculation, I’ve concluded that the dancer is either giving a handjob or allowing the guy to masturbate while she dances for him). Two of the girls were not at the meeting, which was a major disadvantage for them because they both moved quickly to the front of the pack as suspects. By not being there, the other girls were allowed to talk freely about them. The suspicion will be hard to undo.

As I expected, our veteran dancers (all three of them no older than 25) were outraged. They are honest dancers, two of them are single mothers, and I know at least one of them saves and invests her money. They view jerking-off customers like honest baseball players react to steroids: it’s an unfair advantage and it gives their profession a black eye. The dressing room will not be a pleasant place for the next week or so, especially for the young ones. I feel bad for a couple of the newer girls that I know aren't doing it. I'm going to remind myself to talk to them.

Illinois lost to Duke Friday night. It sucked. Next year, the Fighting Illini will be stacked. We will be back.

2004-03-27T17:32:00.000-06:00

I live across the street from a grocery store. A car is blowing its horn in short bursts and has been for the last two minutes. It isn’t a car alarm. It has to be a little kid, or a couple little kids, messing in the front seat while Mom is inside buying groceries for dinner. It’s been funny since it started, but now it’s getting annoying.

honk!…honkhonk!…hooooonnnk!...
honkhonkhonkhonkhonkhonkhonk!…hoooonnnk!

The kids are no doubt screaming with laughter inside the car. Mom is squeezing lettuce heads in the store and has no idea what is going on.

One of the kids just honked the horn for 20 seconds straight. For a moment, I wonder if someone has pointed a gun inside the car and killed the little kid like in the movies, and he’s slumped against the steering wheel, blaring the horn. But soon they’re back to the morse code-type honking.

honk-honk-honk!
hoonnnnnnk-hoonnnnnnk-hoonnnnnk!
honk-honk-honk!

What if they really did honk SOS? You would almost have to go outside and see what the little dildos were doing, wouldn’t you? What if they honked SOS and I did nothing, then in an hour I saw ambulance and police cars in the grocery store parking lot? My town would be villified in the national news. Two small children were murdered today by a child molester moments after they honked SOS a dozen times on the family sedan’s car horn, but nobody offered assistance, thinking it was a prank. Can you imagine?

2004-03-25T08:21:00.000-06:00

Date: So, what do you do?
Kev: Let’s talk about you.
Date: No, seriously!
Kev: I manage a bar.
Date: Really? Which one?
Kev: It’s one you’ve never been in before.
Date: How do you know?
Kev: I know.
Date: Come on! Tell me which one it is.
Kev: It’s a gentlemen’s club.
Date: Like a strip club?

Kev’s answers to this question: 1) It’s not like that. 2) Yes, a strip club. 3) (tries to play it cute and put his hand over his eyes, embarrassed) 4) Would you have a problem with that? 5) No, I’m just kidding. I’m an electrician.

I have had the best results with #3. I tried #1 once, and it was like I admitted I had once trained at an al-Qaida camp in Afghanistan. #2 was a conversation stopper, probably because I tried to put it serious and straightforward, like I was admitting I worked for the CIA. When I said #4, the answer from my date was: “Uh, yeah.” When I used #5, I ended up sleeping with her, but eventually I had to give her the #2, and she thanked me for lying to her so I could fuck her. I told her I was scared, and I’m sorry, and then said “Call me,” as she was walking to her car. Satch was barking at her. Satch knows the ladies, and he never barks at “the one.”

2004-03-23T13:35:00.000-06:00

I hope everybody understands that I am using aliases here. I never thought to mention that before, but I don't want to mislead anyone. I was going to do like some bloggers do and say M. said this and P. is an idiot, but I decided to just re-name practically every person I know. That has been hard. Thank you, telephone book.

2004-03-23T08:06:00.000-06:00

It appears that one of the girls has been jerking guys off in the VIP room. I was told at Monday afternoon’s meeting that the cleaning lady has been finding used condoms on the floor in the VIP Booth (this is a semi-private room where girls do lap dances and private dances for guys). Although Mike, my boss, and Charlie, the owner, are circling the wagons, my thoughts lie with the poor cleaning lady. She is 50 years old and has a grandchild, I know from talking with her. I imagine she hates cleaning back in the VIP room anyway, then this. The VIP room at night with the strobes on and music pumping through the house is a dangerous and exotic place, the most forbidden spot in the city. In the morning, with the lights up and complete silence, the VIP room is like the backseat of a taxi. The floor is sticky from spilled drinks, there are gum and candy wrappers, the wood paneling is old and shitty looking, the seats are cheap and ugly. At night, men come to this room to have their dreams come true. During the day, a grandmother curses and picks up used rubbers from the floor.

Our plan of attack to find the handjob girl is to keep a better eye on the VIP room. Our bouncers will be told individually that they are to report anything suspicious going on up there, like slapping sounds or men moaning in ecstasy. I’m joking about this, but it is kind of serious. Next Sunday, we are going to have a mandatory staff meeting (I call them “team meetings”) with the dancers and lay down the law. Usually, team meetings put an end to stuff like this. The girls who do not jack-off their customers will go on a rampage of vigilance. The new girls will feel threatened. One or two girls may quit because of the accusations. This will be unfortunate, but it is a necessary weeding-out process, and there’s a 100% chance that, if anyone quits, it will be the guilty one.

2004-03-21T19:42:00.000-06:00

I know I'm posting too much, but I had to mention the Illini game today. They destroyed trash-talking Cincinnati in possibly the greatest game an Illini team has ever played, and play Duke next week in the Sweet 16. I will not sleep good this week. Go Illini! Please, God, give us the strength to beat Duke. My predictions up to this point (see earlier posts) have been almost perfect. We will beat Duke.

2004-03-21T18:10:00.000-06:00

One of the dancers caught me last night chatting online with a girl from Vietnam. The girl’s screen name is kietvan18 and she has invited me to view her webcam. She is in a net shop somewhere in Vietnam, where it is after noon. Soon Wade, Jessica and two dancers are watching my conversation over my shoulder.

Wade says, “Tell her to show you her tits.” I tell him I see enough tits in the course of a day. The girls laugh at this. I have talked with kietvan18 before. She’s a delicate little flower. A comment like that would devastate her, coming from someone she’s beginning to trust (Kev). Jessica, a waitress, says, “God, look how pretty she is.” She is right. The girl on the screen is small and very cute. She wears glasses and her hair is pulled back. She has on a white shirt with buttons and a collar. I type funny things to her just so I can see her laugh, because her laugh would melt a diamond.

“Ask her if she’s a virgin,” Wade requests. There are 10,000 American Wades on the internet right now, asking Asian girls such questions. I can see why people from other countries hate Americans so bad, if this is the best team we field. Misty, a dancer there who has been absolutely riveted by the online conversation, tells Wade to shut the fuck up. Wade shuts up, and before long I notice that he has left the room. The women in the club don’t like him.

2004-03-20T14:53:00.000-06:00

Last night, one of the girls climbed up on the bar, which is strictly forbidden, and tried to dance on the lacquered countertop in high-heels, drunk. All the men at the bar were making whooping sounds and looking up her skirt. I was in the back hallway watching (this is a great place to stand...you are invisible to the people in the bar and can see everything). I was hoping Big John, our bouncer at the door, would do something, but he was busy at the time. Walt was outside attending to a fender-bender in our parking lot. The dancer was April, a black girl who drinks way too much on every shift. She started dancing cautiously on the bar and even from back in the hallway I could see her heels slipping with every step she took. Finally, when it appeared no one else was going to do anything, I went to the bar myself, took her hand and escorted her down. She jumped into my arms and hugged me and I asked her to please never do that again (dance on the bar) and she said okay, then she said, “Kev, you’re so awesome! I love you!” I love you too, April.

Awhile back April walked out of the dressing room to do her set and had forgotten to put a G-string on. She got to the stage completely naked, which I know doesn’t sound like all that big of a deal but it is, and thankfully one of the waitresses noticed and alerted her. She covered her box with her hands and scampered into the dressing room, only to re-emerge 10 seconds later and skip up to the stage. The ovation was thunderous.

2004-03-19T15:04:00.000-06:00

Spent all night watching basketball at work. Illinois wins today by 19, I predicted (see earlier post) they would win by 16. Watched the game with Wade/bartender and Logan/dancer. Logan is a dancer I could see myself dating. She does not look like a dancer when she’s not dancing, more like a hot college chick. I have reservations about Wade; he is a cocky little fucker and I know he’s beaten up his girlfriend at least twice in the last year. They’ve told me the last time he assaulted her in the bathtub by holding her head underwater with his hands around her neck. I didn’t believe this until I saw Wade the next time and his forearms looked like he'd gotten them caught in a barbed-wire fence. For a week, I thought about ways I could kill him that would look like an accident. Now today I was high-fiving him at the bar as we watched the Illinois game.

Today is my big money day because I DJ the entire day and night. At around 3:00 tomorrow morning, I will shuffle into my house and dump about 250 one-dollar bills onto the floor of my apartment. I will then turn on the television and watch ESPN while I fold and count my money and paper-clip them in $25 stacks. My dog will feel neglected and “accidentally” walk through my pile of money once or twice just so I’ll pick him up and move him out of the way. He is a Norwich terrier and his name is Satch. When I get home after my long Friday shift, Satch, who has been by himself for 12 hours, is ready to play. I’ve had three steady girlfriends in my life, one live-in, family, roommates and friends, and I’ve never found anything better to come home to than a dog that worships you.

2004-03-18T20:51:00.000-06:00

Home now. I DJ’d and managed from 3-8 pm today. I ran back and forth from the TV to the DJ booth 100 times, watching basketball. In my pool, I lost the first two games of the tournament, but I’m finishing the day strong. Michigan State is losing to Nevada now. Paul Davis has fouled out and Chris Hill and the guy who wears the headband are ice-cold. The Big-10 now has only two teams left in the tournament.

Walt was my bouncer today. I would like you to meet him. He is 50 years old. He is not big; he’s slender and has a ponytail and mustache. He’s wiry and strong. He was in the military and knows martial arts. He once touched me some way with the knuckle on his index finger just above my upper lip and below my nose. It was so quick. Tap, and I dropped to one knee from the pain. Walt does not like to fight; he knows how to avoid one. He told me once that when confronted with an inevitable fight, the best way to deal with it is a quick, sharp left-handed jab to the guy’s nose, then run like hell. The jab is a shock to the system, disorienting, your eyes water, your whole body recoils. It is simply a 3-second headstart. Walt said, “Don’t ever fight a guy you don’t know unless you absolutely have to. You never know what he knows, or what he’s capable of…or what he has in his pocket.” Walt removes unruly customers quicker and more efficiently than anyone else in the club. He knows how to grab a man, what things on a man’s body to press and bend, without being detected. Men Walt removes from the club go peacefully, sometimes with looks of pinched pain on their faces. They walk on their tiptoes and say, “Okay, okay, okay!” and are out the door. I would pay him $100,000 a year if I could.

2004-03-18T15:32:00.000-06:00

While I was at dinner last night, I saw one of our new dancers named Tyler in the restaurant. Tyler is 19 and has been dancing for one week. I have only spoken to her twice. She was with someone that looked like a boyfriend, only he did not look like the kind of guy who would have a stripper for a girlfriend. Tyler looked shocked to see me, then she acted nervous and tried not to make eye contact with me the rest of the night. I know she was praying that I wouldn’t come over and say hello. At one point, her boyfriend got up to use the restroom and she looked at me. I mouthed the word relax and gave her a reassuring look and relief spread across her face. She smiled at me and nodded and started eating her food. I had just made a friend. I relived that moment, which was witnessed by only her and me, over and over again in my mind. It may have been the coolest thing I’ve ever done in my life. Everytime I looked at her after that, she was very animated, eating or chatting or laughing. Her new buddy Kev had saved her night. It’s moments like this that make me enjoy what I do. I will protect them all. They’ll smile at me like that, and I’ll see the tension drain from their shoulders and see them breathe, and it all says Thank you, Kev. You are my only friend.

2004-03-17T17:30:00.000-06:00

In other news…

I just filled out my NCAA picks and I wanted to list my Final Four before I head out for the night. This will make them legit.

Kev’s Final Four Pix: Kentucky, Wisconsin, Mississippi St. and UConn.

There is a very good chance I will have no teams in the Final Four for a second straight year.

2004-03-17T11:58:00.000-06:00

It’s St. Patrick’s Day and this is my day off. I didn’t get home this morning until after 3:00 am. We are waiving the cover charge tonight at work for guys wearing green, and we will pour $1.50 mugs of green beer. Last year a kid came in with a neon green condom on his head, wanting to get in free. I did not know a rubber would stretch like that. He had the condom pulled down over his nose and his head expanded like a blowfish when he breathed. We decided to let him in for free and he blew the condom up once again, then let it fly off his head. Everyone cheered.

Illinois plays Murray State Friday in the first round of NCAA tournament. I’m going to the club early to watch the game with Wade, a bartender at the club and an Illini fan, and Logan, who is one of my favorite dancers, a sports fan. She wears ballcaps and college sweatshirts to work. I promised them I’ll spring for pizza. I love March Madness. Illinois is playing the 5-12 seed game, which is the game everyone picks for upsets. Illinois won’t lose to Murray State. We will have big games from Deron Williams and Luther Head, and we will win by 16 points. We will beat Cincinnati the next game with a monster game from Dee Brown and Roger Powell and play Duke for the Elite 8. We won’t beat Duke. If we beat Murray State and Cincinnati, I will predict then that we will beat Duke, but not now. You just can’t call three in a row.

I’m meeting two friends for dinner tonight at Outback Steakhouse. I will have the ribeye so rare it will say “ouch” when I bite into it. My friends, who aren’t allowed in the club by their significant others, will sit entranced the entire night while I eat red meat and fried onions and drink beer and tell them stories about strippers.

2004-03-16T19:12:00.000-06:00

I got a phone call while I was in the office by myself yesterday and the club hadn’t opened yet. A woman wanted to speak with the manager. This is usually a mother, and the context of the conversation can be extremely varied. From something like If my daughter dances one more time in that fucking club, I swear to God…to Kelly’s boyfriend beat her up last night and she can’t come in, but she wanted me to call you because she’s afraid you’ll fire her if she misses her shift tonight. Mothers.

The woman on the line sounded young, tired, most certainly dealing with other issues in her life than the reason for this call to me.

“Hello,” she said, then hesitantly, “I just wanted to say, you know, I’m trying to raise my kids and be a good mother and I look in the sports section today and here’s your ad there with a woman who’s almost naked. How do I do it? I mean, what do I say to my kids when they see that? They’re sports fans, you know, I can’t tell them they can’t look at the sports page anymore.”

We run our weekly ad in the newspaper. It is tasteless with a near-naked dancer and lots of suggestive copy. I have nothing to do with them; in fact, I read the sports page myself and I’m embarrassed every time I see our ad, knowing people I know read it too, and think of me.

“I haven’t seen it ma’am.” She wants a fight, but I deal with women every night who want to fight. One of my specialties in the club is my ability to be disarming. “I can understand that it bothers you…I’m not the one who does the ads. I’m sorry if it offends you. I just don’t know what to say about it.”

She says, “I know,” and breathes loudly in the phone. I feel bad and I want to say something profound. I want to buy her a drink and hold her hand. I want to kiss her fingers and maybe we will be lovers. I will liberate her and she will liberate me. We’ll fly to Vienna and hold hands and walk down a cobblestone street, surrounded by mountains. She sounds young and insecure. Maybe this is why I do what I do. “It’s just hard to do this, you know?” she finishes.

“I know…I’m sorry,” I say. “I really am. If it was up to me, that ad wouldn’t be there.”

“That’s alright.” She sounded like she may be crying. “That’s all…thanks.” She hung up.

2004-03-15T17:23:00.000-06:00

As a manager, alcohol is your number-one challenge. The girls get drunk and do stupid things, like get tangled in their heels and fall off the stage, or throw a drink in the face of a customer, or slap him. Last month, a man tried to tip a girl with a dollar bill kind of low (he tried to stuff the dollar bill directly under the small swatch of material that covers her vagina), and she reached back and slapped him viciously in the face (generally, the dancers are fueled by alcohol and try to do harm when they slap a face, not just use it as a warning). Big face slaps bring the house down. They are loud, they knock men out of their chairs. They usually stop the show, and usually things are resolved fairly quickly. Drunk guy gets hauled to his feet by our bouncers, the dancer is standing behind him yelling things like, “GET THAT FUCKER OUT OF HERE!” looking ridiculous, with a fistful of dollar bills in her hand, wearing a G-string and high-heels, otherwise naked. Anyway, the girl who slapped the guy cut his eye terribly with her fingernail. We took him into the bathroom and it looked as though his actual eyeball was cut and bleeding. I took one glance at it and about passed out. There was blood all over his face and blood now that had soaked down into the collar of his shirt. His buddies finally hauled him away. He probably could have sued us for about a billion dollars, but it was the last we heard of the situation. I suspect, from the looks of the guy, there were several groups and official organizations that would have frowned on him drinking in a strip club. He looked like the kind of guy whose wife or girlfriend would have removed his business had she known he was seeing a strip show, too. So he disappeared, with a bloody eyeball, and we never heard from him again. The girl is still dancing, still drinking, still stopping the music with big whopping face slaps.

2004-03-15T17:04:00.000-06:00

My name is Kevin and I am an assistant manager at a topless strip club in the Midwestern United States. I will call our strip club TJ’s. It is a gentlemen’s club, and on a scale of 1-10 in terms of classiness, I would give TJ’s an 8.5. That is not to say that our place is like a church ice cream social. There are fights, there is violence at times. Once or twice a week, a man will remove his penis from his pants and try to touch one of the girls with it, usually during a private dance (lap dance, table dance, etc). We all sit about uneasily sometimes when a dancer runs from the dressing room announcing that her boyfriend is coming here to kill all of us. Our club has nearly been shut down several times in the past, once because we had allowed underage guys in the club and got caught, and one time when a 16-year-old had really good fake IDs and danced for two weeks in the club. We used to serve burgers and sandwiches and French fries, but the health department put a stop to that (I was glad--I never ate the things, either...the whole notion kind of grossed me out).

I love to write, and I've done it since before I was a teenager. I'm 26 years old and a college dropout. I've worked at TJ's for about 16 months as assistant manager. Before that, I was a bartender for 6 months. This job is not all it's cracked up to be. I will try to give you a daily glimpse into both my life and life inside a gentlemen's club. It will be mostly fun. I hope you enjoy reading.