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.