'The meanest girls in the city'
Chapter 1
I prefer to hear
Christmas music in July
while I am being threatened
with death by
a woman
– Charles Bukowski
There was a moment – one fine and fleeting moment – when it appeared we might get Bella off the stage before she lost her mind.
One of Bella’s favorite songs, “Work” by the Memphis rapper Key Glock, pounded from the club’s near-Volkwagen-sized speakers. The stage glowed red, just the way Bella likes it. And there was Bella, swiveling her hips and twirling around a brass pole.
All was as it should be. Or so it seemed.
Bella was more poltergeist than stripper. She was the most diabolical among a coven of dancers who could, in mere seconds and by means of ferocious tantrum, bring the club to its knees.
The “wrong” song, the “right” songs played in the “wrong” sequence, the “wrong” hue of stage lighting – any “mistake,” perceived or real, could summon these dancers’ wrath.
And summon their wrath I did.
They’d howl and bawl, right up there on the stage, leaving any number of men shifting in their seats with not a clue what strange horror they’d stumbled into.
Not once during my visits to strip clubs on both coasts had I witnessed a dancer come so completely and irretrievably unhinged. Such a spectacle was beyond my imagination.
Which is to say I’d expected none of this when I signed on as a DJ in two of the city’s roughest strip clubs – here at Sizzle Haven, a sprawling, cavernous building tucked into the city’s northern industrial district, and at Whispers, its smaller sister club some 20 miles to the south.
I hadn’t a clue what I was doing when I took the gig. Never before had I DJ’d so much as a house party or Bar Mitzvah. Everything was new and foreign: the DJ and lighting apps arrayed across the iMac’s screen, the sound board’s dizzying constellations of levers, knobs and flashing lights and, perhaps most imperative of all, the hip-hop to which most of the girls dance.
Yet, Adrian, the clubs’ head DJ, had been willing to give me a shot. The city was woefully short on DJs, he explained. Besides, he figured I was unlikely to fuck the dancers or sell them drugs.
I’ve quit the job three times and been fired once. And yet, night after night, I somehow find myself back in the DJ booth.
In the months to come, I found myself time and again taking cover under a withering blitzkrieg of stripper rage. The city’s vice squad raided one of the clubs. There would be a middle-of-the-night rescue mission to save a stripper-turned-street-hooker whom the cops had detained for illegally concealing a Glock 9 beneath the driver’s seat of her Cadillac. I’d chase after a dancer who, still topless, burst into the street trying to catch – and by all appearances kill – the customer who’d ripped her off. I’d break up a locker-room girl fight so brutal it drew blood. I’d help forcibly toss from the club a guy both drunk and stupid enough to punch one of our girls in the face. We’d call in the police after Whispers fell under siege by a pack of pimps whose running gun war had been erupting all around us for months.
I’d single-handedly touch off a club-wide stripper riot with an ill-advised joke on the mic. Condoms and their wrappers, abandoned in the lap-dance and VIP areas, would need disposal at night’s end. I’d learn that the clubs have a not-too-distant history of entanglement with organized crime. I even rushed to the assistance of a dancer who’d accidentally lit her vagina on fire.
I’ve quit the job three times and been fired once. And yet, night after night, I somehow find myself back in the DJ booth.
Through it all, Bella has been my biggest challenge. Among Sizzle Haven’s midnight council who screeched and squealed from the stage, Bella was the worst.
When the other girls exploded, there remained at least some hope of sifting through the debris and learning what went wrong.
Not so with Bella. You could never figure what she wanted, or how to give it to her. Her rage came on as fast and senseless as a suicide bombing. All you could do was hit the deck.
Bella, I’d later learn, was both hated and feared by every DJ unfortunate enough to call her to the stage. She made sport of getting DJs fired. She accomplished this by deploying a carefully calculated and exceptionally ruthless two-step strategy: First, she’d scream at them until she’d worn away their defenses. Second, she’d climb inside their heads and ransack the contents.
Less than an hour earlier, I’d been on the mic extolling the wonders that are the modern strip club’s VIP room, when Bella’s voice rang out from the darkness. “You fuckin’ suck!” she shouted. It hadn’t even been her turn to be on the stage.
Today marked my third shift at The Haven, and I’d yet to figure out Bella’s game. I was making every mistake a strip club DJ has ever made – and probably coming up with some new ones.
Hour after hour Bella and the witches of Sizzle Haven continued to work their dark magic, and to great effect. The more mistakes I made, the more the girls yelled. The more the girls yelled, the more mistakes I made. Their unholy screeching had a way of tearing open my chest, leaving a black and hollow nothingness, save for panic and failure.
Imagine you’d sent General Patton off to war and he’d come home a foul-mouthed Scooby-Doo.
If I had it to do over again I’d have taken all of this less seriously. I’d have found a way to step outside the chaos and, with bemused wonder, observe it from a more distant vantage. Just about anyone, I suppose, could say the same about any number of difficulties long past.
Still, sitting in a dark room while people scream at you, over and over, hour after hour, has a way of scrambling every signal broadcast from one’s frontal cortex. Before long, much of what I’d learned during my short DJ bootcamp was now beyond my reach. Any success seemed the work of provenance, adrenaline or blind luck. What was once a rookie DJ’s fledgling knowledge and emerging craft had been reduced to a panicked and chattering mind.
Imagine you’d sent General Patton off to war and he’d come home a foul-mouthed Scooby-Doo.
“Fuck! Fuck! Holy fuck!”
Now, here I was in the booth, my stomach an aching and twisted knot, my hands trembling over the cross-faders.
And there was Bella, writhing around that brass pole.
I studied her every move. And then, right on cue, I faded down the Key Glock song and cranked up what was supposed to be the second song of Bella’s stage set: Lloyd’s “Feels So Right.”
That’s when Bella stopped dancing. Just. Stopped. Cold.
Oh, fuck.
She began to shout, shriek really. Heaven knows what she was yowling about this time. The music’s thump, thump, thump overwhelmed her voice the way a big wave swallows a surfer.
Bella’s lip peeled. Her eyes flashed. And, still squalling, she stomped down the stage’s three LED-lit steps and disappeared into the club’s blackness. I hadn’t a clue what sin I may have committed.
Otto, one of Sizzle Haven’s managers, couldn’t begin to guess either. He’d been in the strip club business for decades, and he gave not a single fuck what the girls said to him, or about him – or at what volume they said it.
Years of smoking cigarettes through long nights had left his skin leathery and hanging loose from his skull. He was known to keep at all times a .44-calibre Desert Eagle hand cannon strapped to his rib cage. I liked him. He was quickly becoming a mentor and a friend.
Otto placed one foot on the DJ booth’s step, hung his right elbow on the booth’s rail and let his arm dangle. His narrow and bloodshot eyes followed Bella’s stiff and indignant march toward the locker room.
“Meanest girls in the city,” Otto said, his eyes still clocking Bella.
He shook his head and let loose a deep and gravelly laugh.
“Jesus Christ,” he said. “Welcome to the jungle.”
Coming in DSCDJ’s next dispatch: How, exactly, does a reporter end up playing music in dark rooms full of naked women?