America, You Sexy Bitch Read online

  When we finally finish dinner and make our way to the Palms bar, I start scanning the place for Daisy. There are tons of women scattered around the place in various states of drunkenness, but no one that resembles the woman I saw online. In her Twitter picture she is wearing a red bikini with her cleavage as the focal point, giving a “come hither” look on her face. Finally, in the corner I spot a young woman with long brown hair wearing a baby-pink A-line dress that is tight at the top and swings out at the bottom. She’s drinking a glass of white wine and typing on her BlackBerry.

  I walk over and ask, “Are you Daisy?”

  She stands and says, “Hellloooo, so nice to finally meet you! I have been looking forward to going out together for a while!” and gives both Michael and me big hugs. Now, Daisy is gorgeous and I don’t know what the stereotypical image of a stripper may be, but she is the most conservative-looking stripper I have ever seen in person. She’s wearing minimal makeup and from what I can tell she isn’t wearing extensions (which could only be said for one of us because I rarely go anywhere without extensions in my hair anymore); she could be any professional woman sitting at the bar.

  As we order a round of drinks, two of Daisy’s colleagues join us at the bar: Jessica Janson and “G-Cup Bitch.” Jessica is very tall, with very, very long blond hair, and looks like she’s about twenty-one. She’s wearing very high heels (even by my standards) and a very tight bandage-style dress. G-Cup Bitch is more petite, with red hair and glasses and, yes, G-cup breasts that are shelved nicely in a tight, black strapless top. The three women are very pretty, and really friendly, albeit very curious about why we want to meet them.

  Sapphire is the gentleman’s club of choice, and our next destination. It is supposed to be the best of the best that Vegas has to offer, and as Daisy calls it, “the Costco of strip clubs” because of its size and variety of options for both strippers and “rooms.” Sapphire sends us over a long stretch limo with neon lights that outline the ceiling, and we all pile in: me, Michael, Stephie, Josh, Kasey, Phil, Daisy, Jessica, and G-Cup Bitch: one big happy family. The ride over is initially a little tense, what with Michael’s inability to stop tape-recording and writing stuff down. I sit in the back with the girls and have girl talk. They are curious about my life in politics; I am curious about their lives as strippers. We talk about great bra brands, men, and the world of politics. They are sweet and friendly and seem to genuinely want to show us a good time and insight into their world. I have met many tour guides before who were not nearly as hospitable hosts. Does this feel weird? Of course it feels weird. I am heading to a strip club with some strippers and Michael Ian Black. The purpose of this trip is to discover different parts of America that we don’t normally encounter and to talk to Americans who we probably would not normally have conversations with. Quite frankly, I am extremely curious about the adult industry and the women who subject themselves to it. So far, the women have surprised me. They seem to be happy and well adjusted. Their attitude towards their clients is that they are manipulating them. None of them want to work a job that pays them minimum wage, so they have chosen this path instead.

  Michael: Honestly, I’m bad at talking to strippers. Maybe I’m a prude, but I can never quite find my bearings talking to women who use their bodies in this way. Part of it is intimidation, I guess, and part of it is that they make me ashamed to be a man, to be so easily manipulated. As a result, I find myself on guard with them and unable to relax. This will continue for the rest of the evening. I think of myself as shy. But that is not how Meghan describes me.

  “You’re acting like a little bitch,” she says, and I cannot disagree. The only consolation I can take is that Stephie is just as uncomfortable. She looks like Alice after falling into Wonderland.

  Daisy is thirty-two, well spoken, and gorgeous. She grew up in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, the first college graduate in her family. Her relationship with her family back in New York is strained, not because she dances, but because she left the neighborhood. “They think I should have ten babies and be on welfare.” She sighs with frustration and pats her flat stomach. “No babies,” she says. She is a proud, self-made woman, and she wants us to see her as an American success story. “Gucci,” she tells me, pointing to her wallet. “I earned it.”

  G-Cup Bitch says she mentors younger dancers. “When girls are shy, I tell them to look at men and see wallets.”

  “It’s all a hustle,” says Jessica. “They should teach classes on how to hustle.”

  “What would be the first lesson?” I ask.

  She thinks about it for a second. “To get as much money as you can by doing as little work as you can.”

  We drink at the bar for a while. Meghan’s friends Josh and Kasey join us and coo over the girls. Gay guys and strippers are a great combination. One complements the other perfectly.

  Sapphire is huge. Seventy thousand square feet, according to the owner, Peter Feinstein, who takes us on a tour of the property. Peter is from New York, probably in his mid-fifties, who started out in the health club industry. He developed a bunch of big gyms in the city until he and his partners realized they could make more money in gentlemen’s entertainment. I guess it’s not so different from the health club industry. Both have changing rooms.

  When we are walking around, Jessica pulls me aside and tells me to breathe in deeply. I do. “Do you smell that?” she asks.

  “Yeah.” It’s a weird, musty smell. Kind of unpleasant but not terrible. “What is that?” I ask her.

  “Strip club,” she says.

  So it is. I have another term for it: “dirty pussy.”

  The club is so massive that on slow nights like tonight they draw an enormous curtain across half of it and it’s still huge. Peter sets us up with a table in the back and a bottle of Grey Goose vodka, and we proceed to have an evening of drinking and lap dances.

  The lap dance thing is lost on me. Having some half-naked lady gyrate on my lap for money in public is, for me, more terrifying than titillating. Not that I don’t like naked girls. I do. But I don’t like naked girls pretending to like me. Then I just feel like one of those wallets G-Cup Bitch was talking about. If that makes me a little bitch then so be it.

  Josh and Kasey are having a grand time, throwing back vodka cranberries and whooping it up with the girls. Nermal has never been to a strip club before, and she is wide-eyed, maybe with fear, maybe with fascination. I can’t tell. Before we left the hotel, Meghan, Stephie, and I jokingly agreed on a safe word if we found ourselves in a situation we could not handle. When somebody said “puppies,” it was time to go. I fully expect Stephie to puppy up at any moment. Unless I get there first.

  Meghan: We pull up to Sapphire and meet the manager and owner, who gives us a tour of the club. We walk past the caged area where patrons check in, and into the back room where all of the calls and requests come in for casino pickup limo service. Stephie and I are invited to tour the women’s dressing area, which looks like the women’s locker room at Victoria’s Secret. We meet the “house mom,” Sandy Berrigan, who was once a dancer there. She seems protective of her girls and suspicious of Stephie and me.

  Daisy and the girls whisk all of us to the top floor, which overlooks the entire strip club and has a giant pole at the top with stairs that lead down to the main floor. When Daisy tries to get everyone dancing, and to go onto the strip club ramp with her, Michael looks like he’s back in seventh grade, frozen at the prospect of dancing with a hot girl. I’m the only one game enough to dance with her on the long, lit-up ramp. It’s awkward, but I don’t want her to feel bad or like I am not down to enjoy this experience in its entirety. Also, I want to add to anything that is going to make Michael feel even more uncomfortable.

  We finally make our way downstairs and it’s game on. Daisy takes us to a special reserved area and suddenly everyone is at the junior high dance, standing around waiting for someone to make the first move. Michael, Stephie, and Phil huddle at a table in one corner and Josh, Kasey,
and I take the opposite end, with the dancers intertwined between. I immediately start pouring everyone drinks from the vodka bottle and various juices and Red Bulls that have been placed in front of us. Josh whispers in my ear, “Drinking will get all of this moving along faster.”

  My attitude at this point is that we’re here. We are in Vegas, we are here to have a good time, and we are here to experience another side of America and Vegas. When in Rome, right? And goddammit, Michael and I need to start bonding.

  A lot of the dancers make their way towards Michael and circulate around him. Next I see that all of them are sitting there . . . talking. Leave it to Michael to get all of the dancers to start opening up about their emotions instead of doing their jobs. They all look like they are deep in conversation about something very important. I am perplexed about why Michael seems to be avoiding getting a lap dance to such an extent. If he expects me, Josh, and Kasey to carry the weight, he is delusional.

  Josh buys Kasey the first nonintellectual lap dance and, although Kasey is gay, apparently when you put a half-naked stripper on his lap, you can’t really tell the difference. Kasey is as Waspy as they come, but he looks like a slathering pig in a tub of butter. Suddenly Phil starts ordering dances, and then Josh out of nowhere has two girls grinding on him.

  I sit on the top edge of a booth, between Jessica and G-Cup Bitch. Jessica leans over and asks me if I want a dance. I say, “Not yet, waiting it out for the right girl.” It’s not that I’m particularly picky with my strippers, but tonight feels like a good night to watch and wait.

  Jessica says, “Well, at least Phil is getting dances. I told the dancers to go for the professional poker player and not the comedian.” Suddenly Josh runs up to me and yells that he’s found our girl. He points to the highest part of the stage where an incredibly tan stripper with long, blond extensions is doing a contortion on the pole that can only be described as Cirque du Soleil worthy.

  I say, “She’s perfect, Daisy, we want her. Would you mind getting her?” The dancer’s name is Phoenix and she’s from Arizona.

  Josh gets the first lap dance from Phoenix, which was probably his third of the night, and I get the second one. I apparently took it like a pro, although the entire thing is actually very uncomfortable for me. In the middle of the dance I ask Phoenix if she’s wearing Peace, Love and Juicy Couture perfume, because that is the same perfume I wear. She is. The whole thing feels awkward and just absurd. I mean, I just want to get it over with, but I also want to maintain my pride about the fact that I, the conservative senator’s daughter, handle myself better than Michael does at a gentlemen’s club. I start to feel a little guilty and, dare I say, dirty. Phoenix is a cute girl, with excellent taste in perfume. Once again, all I really want to do is ask her how she got here and if she likes her job.

  I pay Phoenix and point at Michael, instructing her to give him a lap dance. I hand her more money and insist that she is not to let him leave that booth before giving him one. “Seriously, he’s going to fight you. I don’t care what you have to do, give that man a lap dance.”

  Michael: As immune as I like to think I am to the whole stripper thing, when a twenty-two-year-old blonde named Phoenix with an amazing body is grinding against you and blowing in your ear, even a professional cynic like me can find himself, shall we say, interested. At one point, she surrounds my (fully clothed, fully limp) penis with her mouth and kind of circulates warm air on it. I am mortified and my little friend stays exactly that: little.

  Over the course of the night, I come to admire Daisy and her friends. I don’t know what dark shit they have in their lives, hopefully none, but they seem like a nice group of women: smart, confident, able, not so different from the suburban mommies I hang out with back in Connecticut. Each of them talks about how their job is a business, like any other. The difference is that they are out on their own, every night, in uncertain work environments, catering to a clientele that is often drunk or high or aggressive or whatever they are. The women say they almost always feel safe at work, although they each have a story to tell about a time when they were not. The owner, Peter, puts it this way: “Guys are animals.” As a guy, I don’t entirely agree, but there were enough animals in the club that night to convince me he knows what he’s talking about.

  I am trying very hard to have a good time. I drink several drinks, and I try chatting with some of the girls, but my efforts fall flat. “So where you from?” just doesn’t sound right in that environment. After a few hours, there just isn’t that much more to see and Daisy asks us if we want to move on.

  Yes.

  Meghan and I are embracing the spirit of “yes.” To every suggestion, the answer is yes. This will be the mantra for our tour. Yes to everything.

  Daisy suggests we go to the Green Door, a club where people have orgies.

  No.

  I’m not ready for that. I don’t think I will ever be ready for that. “How about the Palomino?” she asks.

  All of us pile into a taxi and head for an even seedier part of town. The Palomino is one of the older strip clubs in Vegas, dating to 1969. The girls are all really young or really old, and are all butt naked. They all also seem wasted, and most of them sport some sort of Hello Kitty paraphernalia: bracelets, tattoos, earrings, bags. Why Hello Kitty, I do not know, but it certainly gives the proceedings an even nastier taint.

  As aggressive as the girls at Sapphire were, the Palomino girls are worse. Hovering on the other side of desperate. They are on us from the moment we walk through the door. One girl in particular is a real problem. She is at least forty, probably Filipino, and like a shark. As soon as we are seated, she sidles up beside me, resting her hand on my thigh. “Why you not move your dick?” she asks me.

  “What?!” I have no idea what she’s talking about. I mean, I do, but I don’t.

  “Why you not move your dick?” She is slurring and has her hands all over me. “You want an upside down pussy?”

  “No thank you,” I say. I do not need to know what an upside down pussy is to know I do not want one.

  Meghan is ready with her twenty dollars, and before I know what is happening, the girl has her head between my legs, and her legs spread-eagled by my face. Her naked vagina is about an inch from my chin.

  As advertised, her pussy is upside down.

  As if that isn’t awkward enough, she then starts rocking her pelvis back and forth so that it is bumping into my collarbone. Hard. Like, really hard. Painfully so. It’s like she’s trying to fuck my clavicle. “Ow!” I mouth to the air. I want this to stop but I am too embarrassed to say anything because I don’t want to hurt her feelings. The upside down pussy is so much more painful than firing the M-16 back in the desert. The gun had far less kickback.

  “Puppies!” I say, but nobody can hear me over the music. “PUPPIES!” Nothing. I’m just going to have to ride this out. After an interminable amount of time, she stops her gyrations and asks me if I want more.

  “NO!” I yell.

  “Can I have a drink?”

  We’ve ordered a bottle of booze from them for, get this, FOUR HUNDRED DOLLARS! And now Upside Down Pussy wants to drink it? No way.

  “Yes,” I say, because I am not a man. I am a little bitch.

  Stephie has remained wisely sober throughout the evening and, as three o’clock in the morning approaches, she asks if I meant it when I said “puppy.” I nod, shell-shocked. Meghan and her friends are continuing to have a great time, getting lap dances, laughing, drinking. But I am a puddle of goo. I need to get back to my kennel.

  We stumble into the night: Meghan, Stephie, Josh and Kasey, the strippers, and me. They want to know what’s next?

  “The Green Door?” someone asks.

  I shake my head no. I can’t. I just need to go to bed. Kasey wants to go back too, but Josh still wants to drink. Josh convinces him to go out with him and the girls. Stephie, Meghan, and I take a taxi in stunned silence back to the Palms. I feel like I have a yeast infection.


  Meghan: From there it just gets later and, well, darker in every sense of the word. I’m sitting with strippers, on strippers, laughing, drinking, and sharing more life stories and bra tips. I’m dazzled by the liveliness of it all, and start to realize this is why I run to Vegas when I’m low—it’s the one place I can truly let go and not think about being judged by the people around me. As they say, you really can be whoever you want in Vegas. There are no bloggers in this room, and there are no pundits. No one is calling me a wild child in any other way than as a compliment. I’m an anonymous American, having the kind of good time that goes all the way back to the founding of Vegas in 1905 as a stopping off point for the railroad to refuel and play a few hands of cards.

  I end up genuinely liking the girls we are hanging out with. They are warm, friendly, and nonjudgmental, so I’m nonjudgmental in return. They do not seem at all ashamed of their industry and give me a new perspective on exotic dancing. Again, I am not the biggest proponent of the industry, but these girls are really sweet and don’t seem to think of themselves as victims in any way.

  As evolved and innovative as I have always felt that America is as a country, our cultural attitude towards sex and women remains something that is extremely unhealthy and puritanical. Is it possible to be an exotic dancer in Las Vegas and find the experience and the profession one of empowerment? I do not know and, like I said, I myself remain conflicted about the industry as a whole. All I know is that Daisy, Jessica, and G-Cup Bitch are each fun, respectful, and thoughtful women who share real insight with us into what it’s like working in the sex industry. They do not come off as victims and seem to understand that they have a level of control over the people who request their services.

  Whatever any pundit or politician wants to say, there is no real way to be a woman in the media and not have your relationship with sex in whatever capacity harshly judged. We seem to be regressing as a culture, or at the very least have plateaued, in that subjects such as birth control and a woman’s right to have access to birth control have returned to the forefront of the political landscape. Of all the issues facing America right now, my right to have access to birth control is pretty much the last thing I would have imagined would be a discussion in this election cycle. I mean, isn’t this something we as a country already passed during the feminist movement?