How to American Read online

  The DJ booth sat a few steps aboveground. It was a five-foot-square dim wooden box, featuring a simple sawed-out view hole. It had a good vantage point of the whole place, like the sniper towers in San Quentin. The booth had an old Dell computer with all the favorite strip club music, from Mötley Crüe to Jeremih. Other than the sound system and microphone, the most essential part of a strip club DJ booth is the light board. Lighting in a strip club is just as important as the music. Different girls look better in different lights. For instance, I learned that black girls always look better in green light. Not trying to start some new racial stereotype. It’s just a fact. Try it sometime.

  A tall, intimidating man greeted me. “You’re the new DJ? I’m Beast.” He was the bouncer who, in fact, looked like a beast. Beast was probably in his thirties, but a lifetime of meth and alcohol made him look like a weathered fifty-year-old. He was a skinny six-foot-four white guy with a cleanly shaven head and tattoos on his face. I later learned that he was a member of the Aryan Brotherhood when he was in prison, so I’m sure he wasn’t too hot on this little Chinese boy spinning at his club. Beast claimed to be a recovering alcoholic, but I’d always see him in the bathroom with a plastic Smirnoff bottle at the end of his shift. I never had any problems with him, but we never really had a heart-to-heart over a nice bottle of wine, either. He always kept to his Aryan self.

  Everyone at the club had nicknames, the kind you earn in prison. A man named Chef was the bar manager. He was short, but tough. Chef looked like if Joe Pesci was on welfare. As a bartender he was responsible for overcharging the customers for a splash of Mountain Dew, but more importantly, he was responsible for keeping everyone in check. Chef was in charge of making sure everything was operating smoothly at the club. He was Shooter’s trusted old-school boy. One time, Chef told me:

  “I was out of action for a year. Now I’m trying to get back on the grind.”

  I naively asked, “Why were you out for a year?”

  “I lost my big toe.”

  It doesn’t get more gangster than losing your big toe. I was guessing he lost it because he owed some money to some bad people. This is the kind of stuff you only hear about in Martin Scorsese movies.

  “How did you lose it?” I sheepishly asked.

  “Diabetes.”

  Diabetes doesn’t care if you’re a gangster, it’ll fuck you up.

  I was never intimidated by Beast and Chef. I thought they were super cool real-life gangsters, but I always treated them like normal coworkers. After getting to know them, I soon realized none of them really wanted to be where they were in life; they just fell into it because of a tough upbringing, drugs or alcohol. If they had a choice to put on a tie and work an honest living at a bank, they would. But the mistakes they made in the past haunted them and would always follow them around. It wasn’t “cool” for them to work at a strip club; it was the absolute last resort. And the same could be said about the strippers.

  We had an eclectic group of strippers at Fantasy Showgirls. It was like a brochure for community college dropouts. We had an Asian girl fittingly named Jade; a Latina girl uninspiringly named Latina; and two black girls named Milan and Saucy, although every week Milan would change her name to a different city she had never been to. I always thought that was ambitious of her. Saucy was indeed very saucy. She would talk trash and start physical fights with the other strippers. These were definitely not USC students working their way through college; these were career strippers who looked like strippers.

  I once came into work to witness Milan and Saucy wrestling on the ground. Beast and Chef just casually stood there, passively saying, “Hey, guys, break it up.” Breaking up a stripper fight is very similar to dealing with little kids throwing a tantrum. The more you yell at them, the more they are going to yell back. All you can really do is to stay calm and wait for them to tucker themselves out. The stripper fights didn’t involve a lot of punches. They went directly for the most expensive part on a stripper; the weave. A winner was determined when one stripper successfully removed the other’s weave. Saucy got the better of Milan that night. Milan put up a good fight but I think she just rocked a loose weave. That was the first time I saw a weave detached from a girl’s head. I was caught off guard. They never taught me the anatomy of a stripper’s weave in health class. Underneath the weave, Milan looked like a fry cook with a netted cap.

  One of my jobs was to make sure the strippers went onstage in a timely manner. I always ruled by kindness. I was not trying to be a saint; this was merely a work strategy. I was trying to bring professionalism into a shitty strip club. I wanted to give these strippers something they had never experienced before: a man who was genuinely kind to them. On the business end, this worked brilliantly. Their shifts were always on time. The girls rotated every three songs like a group of Olympic synchronized strippers. But it didn’t help me in scoring with any of the girls. I guess nice guys do always finish last, especially in a strip club. As a nice strip club DJ, I became a trusted friend of the strippers. This also meant I became the last guy they wanted to have sex with. They would sit next to me naked and talk to me about their boyfriends, and I would sit there and nod my head, trying to conceal my boner.

  I didn’t even think being friend-zoned by strippers was possible, but I made it happen. I watched naked women dance in front of me every day, but I still couldn’t get laid. The strippers sat in the DJ booth naked and told me about their problems, but I still couldn’t get laid. There was a stripper giving a hand job ten feet away from me in a VIP booth, but I. Still. Couldn’t. Get. Laid. I couldn’t imagine a more sexually frustrating experience. I had such blue balls my scrotum looked like the Cookie Monster. I wanted to be Guam Felix, but I was just the good innocent Hong Kong Jim. I was actually innocent enough to have a crush on one of the strippers.

  Paige was a beautiful nineteen-year-old girl who was our newest dancer. I had a crush on her the moment she walked into the club in her Daisy Dukes. Paige looked like a bright college girl who didn’t belong in a strip club. She always had the cutest smile on her face. The main reason I wanted to work in a strip club was to hook up with a couple of strippers, but Paige—I would marry Paige. She was the girl next door from a Nicholas Sparks movie. I was head over heels for this girl. After her three-song routine, she would always come by the DJ booth to have a chat. That was the highlight of my day. “How did I look out there?” she would ask me, with the prettiest smile on her face.

  “You looked great.” Trying to remain composed and not propose to her in the strip club.

  Then she would lean over me with her naked body and pick out the songs she liked for her next dance. “That new Jeremih song goes well with you,” I suggested. I was pairing R&B songs with strippers like a sommelier at Spago suggesting which red goes best with the beef Bolognese.

  This sounded like a romantic dialogue from a Pretty Woman sequel. I thought we were going to live happily ever after. But in reality, I was just an innocent schmuck and she was just doing her job. Pretty Woman is bullshit.

  I walked her to her car every night, but I was always too shy to ask her for her number. Weeks went by and I still couldn’t muster up the courage to ask her out. I finally gave myself an ultimatum. As I nervously walked her back to her car, I asked her, “You got any plans tonight?”

  “I’m going to my boyfriend’s house,” she casually replied. My heart sank.

  My crush had a boyfriend; that’s a familiar scenario that I’d experienced consistently since middle school. My mind was in denial; it tried to keep my hopes alive, hoping maybe one day she would break up with him and run into my arms. Days went by and I was completely out of sorts. I had to talk to someone about this, so I talked to Shooter. Like a college roommate, I went up to Shooter and said, “Paige is pretty cool, huh?” Hoping to prompt him into a nice conversation about Paige.

  Without skipping a beat, Shooter said, “Paige, she’s a pathological liar, you shouldn’t believe a word that comes out of her
mouth.”

  Shocked and unconvinced, I asked, “Really? How do you know that?”

  Shooter laughed and replied, “I fucked her.”

  My innocence died with those words.

  LAP DANCE SALESMAN

  Shooter taught me the most important thing about selling lap dances was the showcase. A showcase is when the DJ calls all the girls onto the stage for a roll call and pressures the customers to get lap dances. The designated song in our club was the classic strip club anthem “Girls, Girls, Girls” by Mötley Crüe. Shooter didn’t have many rules, but he was very clear that that song must accompany every showcase. After every third stripper, I would play that song and belch out in my strip club DJ voice: “All right, gentlemen, it’s time for our showcase! I want all my girls to the stage right now! We have Jade, Milan, Paige, and the oh-sooooo-sexy Sauceyyyyy. We are doing two-for-one lap dances right now! Get two lap dances with your favorite girl or get one lap dance with two of your favorite girls at the same time! Don’t be shy and don’t be tight with your wallet. I want everybody in the VIP! Two-for-one lap dances, next ten minutes, two-for-one lap dances right now!” I would keep repeating that until every customer got a lap dance. The club was never that busy, which meant I just kept screaming at two customers until they finally caved in to the pressure.

  Combining the microphone skills I learned from being a comedian and my salesmanship from being a used car salesman, I became an incredible lap dance salesman. According to Shooter, lap dance sales went up 44 percent the first week I started working there. I never took Shooter as an accounting wiz, but apparently he was meticulously keeping record of every lap dance sold at his club like Ernst & Young. Shooter was very impressed. He told me I reminded him a lot of himself. It’s always a good move to compliment someone, then tell him he reminds you of you; it’s like patting yourself on the back using the other person’s hand. Shooter started giving me more responsibilities at his establishment and really took me under his wing. I felt like Henry Hill earning the trust of Jimmy Conway in Goodfellas; I felt like a made guy.

  Shooter trusted me so much, he started to have me deliver the cash box from the strip club to his house. In hindsight, this was such a stupidly dangerous job for someone without any protection. I could have easily gotten robbed or killed during my cash delivery trips. But at the time, I didn’t put much thought into it; I was just happy that Shooter entrusted me with his cash. Every night Chef would hand me the cash box and I would hop into my Toyota Celica and drive to Shooter’s apartment at three in the morning.

  At Shooter’s apartment, there were always a couple of goons passed out on the couch. Till today, I’m not sure if they passed out because they had partied too hard, done too much drugs or that was just their permanent dwelling. I learned to not ask too many questions in a gangster environment. I was always on high alert. I knew there were guns, drugs and a lot of cash in that house. It was a volatile place. But then I’d see old Larry from the car lot there, and that eased my mind. It was like going to a new friend’s house and seeing an old friend already chilling there playing video games, except Larry was usually binge-drinking instead of playing Halo.

  One night, I struggled through the shift with a fever. I popped a couple Advils but it wasn’t helping much. I made my usual 3:00 a.m. delivery to Shooter’s house. There was a different vibe about Shooter that night; he was quiet and serious. I would usually just drop off the cash and leave, but Shooter wanted to have a talk with me. I was in no condition to have a serious talk with a gangster; I was ready to collapse from my illness. I told him I had a fever and I should probably go home, but he insisted I sit down in his kitchen.

  He grabbed me a glass of water and said, “Take this.” He put an unmarked bottle of pills in front of me.

  I asked, “What’s this?”

  He simply replied, “It’ll make you feel better.” All I could hear was Denzel from Training Day saying, “Didn’t know you like to get wet” after he tricked Ethan Hawke into smoking PCP, or as he put it, “Sherms. Dust. PCP. Primos. P-Dog.”

  I politely declined the pills and Shooter said, “It’s not going to kill you. You don’t trust me?” There was an intense moment of silence as I sat there, half coherent, contemplating my next moves. Should I just take the pill and hope for the best, or scamper out of the house and go into witness protection?

  Shooter let out a rare laugh and said, “I was just kidding! It’s just Vicodin, take some if you want.” I took a deep breath, I might have peed my pants a little. Shooter’s tone got serious again.

  “You been doing a great job at the club, kid, and everyone trusts you. I just came into some money and I’m going to be opening up a new club. I want you to run it for me.”

  Time stopped and my brain cranked into hyperfocus. I knew this was one of those life-changing crossroads. People always say your life comes down to a few key decisions that define you; this was clearly one of them. I had to decide if I wanted to become the underworld strip club king or continue to tell jokes at the Comedy Palace. For a twenty-two-year-old who watched too much BET Rap City, this was the toughest decision of my life. “Think about it,” Shooter said. I spent the next three weeks thinking about nothing but that. It took spending Christmas at the strip club for me to finally decide on my path.

  A STRIP CLUB CHRISTMAS

  It was the saddest Christmas ever. I had no family in San Diego, so I went to my usual nine o’clock shift at the strip club on Christmas night. A few girls came in, hoping to make some money off people’s sorrows. But the place was empty all night. I was actually pretty glad that it was; I would have felt really bad for whoever left their family behind to spend Christmas at a strip club. Chef called for an early midnight close. And just when we were about to shut our doors, a pair of drunken college kids around my age stumbled in. A tall white boy and his smaller Indian buddy; both were drunk as hell. Beast kindly told them to leave as we were already closed for the night, but these kids wouldn’t take no for an answer. “It says on your Yelp page you close at two!” the tall one exclaimed. I was surprised we had a Yelp page too. Beast probably had no idea what Yelp was; I doubt he had to use it in prison. Beast calmly repeated, “We are closed for tonight.” Still not satisfied, the smaller kid said, “That’s bullshit!” Beast just stared at them with his murderous eyes. The pair finally thought better of it and stomped out. I was sure these kids were going to leave us a one-star review on Yelp, but we could care less. Our customers were not Yelpers.

  I didn’t think much of it and continued my closing routine, cleaning out my DJ booth and shutting down the old computer. Suddenly, Beast walked over to Chef and said, “They are still outside talking shit. Let’s go.” Without hesitation, Chef grabbed a two-by-four antique table leg that he had stashed behind the bar. “Motherfuckers,” he said. He said it in such a determined way, I heard it like a war cry from Mel Gibson in Braveheart.

  Chef and Beast romped out the door. I wasn’t sure what to do, so I sheepishly followed a few steps behind. By the time I got outside, there was already a brawl in the middle of the street. Chef was beating the Indian kid with his antique table leg and the tall kid wrestled with Beast. I wanted to jump in, but I froze. My brain was smart enough to see what was going on and it stopped me from proceeding. I just stood there and watched it like a movie.

  Chef swung his table leg and gave a couple good licks to the Indian kid’s midsection. Then he rushed over to Beast, pulled the tall kid away from him and threw him to the ground. Beast gave him a hard kick to the midsection. The tall kid writhed in pain. The smaller guy got up slowly and started to limp off. Chef hit him with another stiff table leg to his ribs. The kid gasped, but barely any sound came out. There was a fear of death in their eyes as Chef stared them down. Chef and Beast finally relented before this turned into a homicide and the college kids hobbled away as fast as they could. Chef screamed out to the distance, “Don’t walk, motherfucker! Run!” I stood there and I couldn’t move. Holy shit, what the fu
ck just happened?

  I was numb from fear, the fear of fighting, fear of getting arrested and fear for my own life. These were just a couple college kids like myself, but now I’m on the other side of this world. At that moment, I realized I’d joined the dark side. I was no longer a stupid college student like them; I was now on the other side as a grimy strip club employee who hung around gangsters. I finally had a sobering moment when I thought to myself, Is this who I want to be? Do I really want to be a gangster?

  The next day, I tried to play it off like it was a cool story. I bragged to all my buddies at the Comedy Palace about what happened.

  I told Tarrell, “I went outside with Chef and Beast, and those kids were scared. Chef beat the shit out of them with a table leg! Then he screamed, ‘Don’t walk, motherfucker, run!’ It was the most gangster shit ever.”

  I made myself sound like such a cool gangster dude. But deep down, I knew what happened was fucked up. Telling my friends was probably my therapy to cope with it. I felt completely out of control.