Some people just smell like Republicans

Posted by Laura Conaway at 7:47 AM, September 3, 2004

"Bush will be here tonight, right?" a self-described "boring banker" asked me at around 1:00 a.m.

I certainly hoped that the president would come in. More specifically, I hoped that two shimmering American flags would unfurl across the club and he would suddenly appear in the middle of them. But as I had not yet made enough money to pay for a cab ride home, I was ready to settle for anyone remotely connected to the president—a convention gaffer, the White House gardener, the photographer who tracks the activities of first terrier Barney.

"Where are the others?" I asked the two lone GOP'ers in the club at 3:00 a.m. I've gotten pretty good at picking them out by now. A navy blue blazer is usually a dead giveaway. So is a pink polo shirt. And as one stripper put it tonight, some people "just smell like Republicans."

"I think a lot of people wore themselves out partying hard Monday and Tuesday night," one guy said. I could vouch for that.

But within half an hour, the population of the club had doubled—from 100 to 200. They were wearing those ridiculous patriotic ties again. The strippers wasted no time in untying them.

In my section, a black stripper in a lime green dress draped her arm around a man's waist. "I love Republicans!" she cooed.

"Seriously?" the men around her asked, with evident insecurity.

"No, seriously. I love Dubya." On her dress, she had pinned a button with a picture of the president wearing a cowboy hat. "I love Dubya!" she shouted.

A short man with spiky blond hair took my hands in his and stared at me. He recognized me as a fellow Midwesterner, he said—he was from North Dakota. "I have to go home tomorrow," he said, still holding my hands. "I know," I said, because there was not much else I could say.

A blond woman with a businesslike face stumbled over to us. "Are you having fun?" she asked the man, protectively. Then she turned her attention to me. "You're not videotaping us, are you?" Tonight's GOP crowd was somehow both reckless and anxious.

Satisfied that I wasn't going to betray them, she stared at me earnestly and asked, "You're voting for Bush, right?" "I don't know," I said. ("I don't know that I'll be able to sniff away that many brain cells by November," I thought.)

"He was awesome tonight," she said. "Awesome. He's protecting us."

Mara Hvistendahl, author of this blog, is a freelance writer, magazine intern, and perhaps now unemployed strip-club waitress.

GOP'ers, that girl on your lap doesn't like you. At all.

Posted by Laura Conaway at 7:45 AM, September 2, 2004

The New York Times ran a story today about how the city's luxury strip clubs have been sitting empty all week. This is a bit baffling, honestly. At one club, at least, tonight, a barback instructed a waitress to keep at hand a good supply of speared olives and lemons "for when 50,000 Republicans show up." In the dressing room, meanwhile, the dancers popped speed-like pills in preparation for a long night.

This particular waitress—sadly, me—did not see the night out, as she was overtaken by what appeared to be a chicken finger-induced illness shortly before midnight. But even at that early hour the club was filled with a good number of people, a sizeable portion of whom were men in suits. The club's normal weekday summer crowd consists of couples looking for adventure and "Guidos from Brooklyn and Queens," as one cab driver described them, so the wave of suits means either that a) Wall Street has returned from the Hamptons (an event, according to my customers in the champagne room last night, that is not due to take place until next week), or b) the delegates, perhaps fired up by Zell Miller's declaration that "God is not indifferent to America," had come in for another night of spiritual fulfillment.

There have, indeed, been other new additions to the club's crowd this week. By early evening, the bar was surrounded by men in red T-shirts that read "We Won! Continuing to prevail…" on the back. They were members of the Communications Workers of America, a union that endorses Democrat John Kerry.

The convention has brought in a number of new groups—the Coast Guard, the police—but this was the first one connected to the protest movement. Perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not, as the union members talked with the strippers (who later declared them "really fucking cheap"), the staff discussed the previous day's arrests. The consensus among those who had, in fact, sampled the "mystery meat" of the city's jails was that risking arrest in any way showed complete idiocy.

It is pragmatism, then, that keeps my co-workers off the street, for they are overwhelmingly anti-Bush. The Republicans are appreciated for their money (although the delegates from out of town are decidedly low tippers), not their policies. It was "America's mayor," indeed, who forced the club to build along the desolate streets of the far West Side, outside of the heart of the city. The Federal Communications Commissions' campaign to sanitize the content of a certain shock jock's programming has further angered the dancers. And certainly the GOP's ignoring of certain sectors of the population doesn't help.

Yesterday I saw a youngish Republican point to the sparkly dot on the forehead of the South Asian dancer gracing his lap. "What's that?" he asked. "A bindi," she answered matter-of-factly. "A what?" he asked. "A bindi." They went back and forth in this way for some time before she said, with some hostility, "It's my heritage."

This sort of tension has been brewing for several days now. If the Republicans, buoyed by Bush's nomination, get randy tomorrow night, it may boil over.

Lap-dancing for equal opportunity

Posted by Laura Conaway at 7:07 AM, September 1, 2004

Aside from the guy who held a lollipop up to a dancer's breast and sucked on it, the Republicans were generally well-behaved tonight.

Now, at a strip club being well-behaved entails heavy drinking and consistent lap dances. One group of three men who confessed to being in town for the convention bought at least $400 worth of lap dances, which breaks down to a little over five dances each. They were equal opportunity employers, sampling every race and body type, giving the dancers—many of whom are immigrants or children of immigrants—the very shot at fortune Arnold spoke of in his speech. But as one man told me around 2 a.m. that he had been drinking for eight hours straight, it's quite possible they missed the speech.

Through a little Internet sleuth work, I later discovered that one of them was a former chief of staff for a House Appropriations Committee member. As far as I can tell, he is now an executive of a lobbying firm, working in defense and homeland security.

Meanwhile, a Wall Street deal went down in the champagne room, sealed with a pair of lap dances. The timing of this transaction had nothing to do with the convention, of course—the guys told me they were looking to close the deal before everyone returned from the Hamptons—but it was entirely appropriate. I thought of introducing these corporate customers to the political ones, but then I reconsidered. They probably already knew each other.

The club was not nearly as full as on Tuesday night. At most, I met a dozen men and one woman who were connected (their red wristbands and candy necklaces, souvenirs from a convention party held down the street, easily gave them away) or seemed to be connected to the convention. The rest—including Mr. Pioneer, who had promised to visit me every night this week—took their lechery elsewhere. As I counted out my tip money, I thought of what the massage girl had said to me on Sunday, when we were discussing whether things would pick up for the convention. "If they're not in here getting fucked," she said matter-of-factly, "then they're over at the"—and then she named the gay bar down the street.

Well, maybe. Or perhaps they've just worn themselves out.

Fundraiser tips big, tries "whack-ass shit."

Posted by Laura Conaway at 7:29 AM, August 31, 2004

Most of the Republicans in the club tonight were obviously—almost ridiculously—identifiable. If they weren't wearing red, white, and blue ties or handkerchiefs, they were donning straw cowboy hats with buttons on them that read "Wild Wild West Saloon." (The hats came from some party held at a nearby bar). At one point, a man combined the two looks, wrapping his stars-and-stripes handkerchief around his hat in a fashion statement that was pure Bush.

But one man there was more subtle in his allegiance. He was dressed in an understated suit with no visible patriotic accessories, his black hair slicked back neatly. Only by looking at his cuff links—silver things punctuated by black stars—could you tell that he was a Pioneer, meaning he'd raised at least $100,000 for the president's re-election. (Of course, he showed them to me within five minutes of making my acquaintance, so he wasn't all modesty.)

He was clearly at ease in the club. I was a good waitress, he told me, and he knew how to tell them: He had owned a strip club. He kept a dancer at his side and bought several dances from her.

After three dances, she separated from Mr. Pioneer and found me. At this point we had the classic waitress-stripper exchange of information—how much money did this guy have? And was he cheap?

"I don't know if it's going anywhere with him," she said. "I know he has money, but I'm not going to sit here all night for $60. He's married. With children." I wasn't much help. He hadn't tipped me yet. But I could confirm the married bit. There was a nice silver band on his left hand. It went rather well with the cuff links, actually.

Before long, though, she had attained what is every stripper's nightly goal: He took her into a private room. The rooms rent for anywhere from several hundred to a thousand dollars an hour.

Meanwhile, the straw hat contingent of the club was partying away. There was not a still dancer in the place—and not a hint of shame, either. I remembered reading that the Boston strip clubs had sat empty throughout the Democratic National Convention—not because the Dems are more virtuous, I think, but because they can't afford the political risk.

The Republicans, meanwhile, seem to believe they're invincible. When I asked one table of guys whether they were coming from the party for delegates, one said, "No, we would never do that." He looked at his friends and laughed. "Yeah. But hey, don't tell anyone, OK?" His voice seemed devoid of anxiety.

As I was leaving the club tonight, I saw Mr. Pioneer's stripper. "Hey, did you do all right?" I asked.

She shook her head. "It took so long to get him in there, and then when I got him in he tried to do all this whack-ass shit to me."

I wish I could reveal what exactly "whack-ass shit" entails, but strip-club etiquette is to not ask.

On balance, I have no complaint with Mr. Pioneer. He told me he knew how hard my job was and left me a 35 percent tip. Appropriate, really, because Tuesday's convention theme is the compassion of the American people.

Republican family values: I'm propositioned on GOP's first night in town

Posted by Laura Conaway at 7:14 AM, August 30, 2004

The first customer of the night, a friendly guy with a head of neat cornrows, was a prophet. "Should be busy," he told the bartender. "The Republican convention's here. There's a lot of cats in town looking for a little entertainment."

Sure enough, a few hours later the delegates began to trickle in. The first group I waited on told me they were from D.C. A mix of young, attractive men and women, they seemed more interested in flirting with each other—"I'm going to make sure I sit right across from you," a man with lacquered hair said to a giggling blond—than in watching "the girls" on stage. The group shelled out a few twenties for dances, but purely for the novelty of it, it seemed. Otherwise, they acted unimpressed. "This is it?" one man asked me.

Other delegates followed in ones and twos, and I started to see driver's licenses from the South attached to men who displayed ever-increasing levels of naïveté. A Texas man sitting alone in front of the stage balked at the price of his glass of wine and insisted that I ask the bartender what brand it was.

When I returned with an answer, his indignation had subsided. "Why aren't you up there dancing?" he asked me, gesturing to the woman gyrating. (On the list of questions frequently asked of a strip-club waitress, this one is rivaled only by "Can we see some girls over here?") "Listen," he said, his already thick drawl slurred by alcohol. "I like buying beautiful women expensive clothes. I like taking them out to any restaurant in town." He went on, detailing his gentlemanly ways, for some time. I noticed he had a red, white, and blue ribbon pinned to his lapel.

Then he said, "I like playing with two girls at once—but that's not a requirement. If I wanted to pay for a girl to spend the night with me, I could." He wrote his cell phone number on the back of a business card. "But that makes me uncomfortable." He handed me the card. I saw the name of an energy firm.

(I get propositioned like this about once a week, but usually by couples.)

The man later told someone in the club he was a Washington lobbyist. I wondered if he would try to add a clause allowing "two girls at once" into the Republican Party's plan for a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage.

But don't get me wrong: Certainly not all of the out-of-towners were lewd. In other corners of the club, family values were on full display. When I approached a man sitting with the Massachusetts delegation to ask him if I could get him anything to drink, he—mistaking me for a stripper—pointed to the lone woman in the group and cried, "That's my wife!"

By the end of the night, the club had filled with men in polo shirts and women in flouncy dresses. I hurried from one table to the next, explaining to half of them, it seemed, that no, we didn't carry Miller Lite. The tables grew cluttered with empty glasses, champagne corks, and passes from the Lynyrd Skynyrd show that had been held at a nearby club in the delegates' honor. When it came time to close, no one showed any intention of leaving.

The deejay turned off the music, someone flicked on the lights, and eventually the club cleared out. The horny Republicans have a big day ahead of them, after all. John McCain's opening the convention Monday. The day's theme: A Nation of Courage.