Las Vegas Weekly

March 16, 2009 · 10:16 AM

A return to work, where the vibe is unkind

By Justice

Illustration: Justice

The good news is that I didn’t get involved in any violent incidents upon my return to work. The tension was thick. “Are you here to clean out your locker?” a girl asked me when I walked in. “No. I’m working tonight.” Other people who used to talk to me just don’t anymore. Staff members who used to be overly friendly, like sexual-harassment-between-the-two-of us-is-okay kind of friendly, are not even making eye contact with me. I certainly couldn’t help but feel like I was about to get punched or at least tripped. There was a puddle of spilled drink on stage during my stage set and my mind instantly went to thoughts of conspiracy. I imagined a dangerous cartoon banana peel as I stepped over the slippery pool of vodka red bull with an elevated sense of paranoia.

Things, I would say, are already better and getting even better though. There had been a great deal of unfair treatment that went away when the scheme came crashing down. Along with allowing and participating in credit card fraud, there were a handful of other things that were being allowed. Being that the wound is still fresh, I don’t feel especially comfortable going into a whole lot of detail about the specific privileges that a few strippers were receiving but I suppose I can share a little.

One thing in particular that pissed off a lot of girls at work was that management allowed certain girls to never pay the nightly fee to work or the additional fee to stay off stage, yet they were at work and not going onstage. As I mentioned in a previous blog, strippers in Las Vegas must pay to work for every shift they work. Another fee must be paid to the club if a girl would like to be excused from stage performances, which can be irritating and ill-timed when you’re spending time with customers. So the majority of strippers were paying roughly $100 dollars a night to work (depending on if they chose to stay off stage or not) and only making money that they actually earned while a few girls weren’t paying anything to work and also stealing large sums of money from customer credit cards. Of course people were going to be upset. I’m just wondering if they assumed it would all last forever.

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