Strip Clubs: The Economy’s Silent Victim

Strip clubs have a special place in the psyche of the Papageorgiou boys. My brother and I grew up listening to Al Bundy’s tales of the Jiggly Room and countless hours of Howard Stern talking about the Scores Club. While your 21st birthday consisted of you happy and drunk, surrounded by innumerable college friends, I spent mine alone at the Crystal City Restaurant, blowing out a candle on a cupcake served to me by a dancer named “Illusion” and getting hit up for $1 bills. In the years since, I’ve come to have a love-hate relationship with strip clubs (mostly hate), but when the idea made the rounds to spend my brother’s 27th birthday at a strip joint, it was met with zero resistance on my part.


Before I go on with my tale, let me elaborate upon my problem with strip clubs: They never get me turned on. (Stop screaming “You fairy!” at your monitor. I can’t hear it.) Sure, sometimes you’ll see a really attractive broad hit the stage and it’s a thrill, but most of the time you’re sneaking furtive glances at an average looking chick’s tits and avoiding eye contact at all costs lest she zero in on you in the crowd and come bug you for a lap dance after her time on stage. And for those that have never had a lap dance, let me summarize the experience for you: A dead-eyed 20 year old grinds her vag against your crotch and then bends over to show you her asshole with the discretion of a dog taking a dump in the park as “Mississippi Queen” blares in the background. Actually, after typing that, I’m trying to remember what it is I have against lap dances. Right, the price tag: $30. I know my hierarchy of vices, and $30 is there to buy 150 Wendy’s chicken nuggets, not get a case of chaffed wang.

My brother and I spent a few hours before the trip to pervert Mecca doing the usual birthday things: Unwrapping gifts, family dinner (I devoured a burrito from the Cheesecake Factory the size of a stillborn calf. Probably not the best idea when you’re going to have the weight of a stripper and her daddy issues in your lap later that night), as I waited for the A-Team of perverts I had assembled to arrive at the door. Once together, we hopped in my ride (tragically, not a black GMC van with a red stripe) and set sail for the crown jewel of West Virginia: Vixens Club.


I’ve been to about seven strip clubs in my day (seven is a nice, middle-of-the-road number. Not too pervy, but you can also tell I know my subject matter), and Vixens does a better job than most.

The audience is titanic and consists of a vibrant pastiche of horny life, ranging from college kids to migrant workers to married men (big audiences are great because it means you won’t be hit up for dances as often), and the dancers typically have a nice Suicide Girls look going for them. (Don’t click that link at work. Yes, it’s Wikipedia, but it’s still got some topless chicks. Good for Wikipedia!) If ever there was a shining diamond in the rough that is unincorporated Bunker Hill, West Virginia, home to countless gas stations selling chaw and Confederate flag merchandise, truly Vixens is it. Which made the scene that greeted my upon our arrival all the more tragic.


I’ve seen some depressing shit in my day, but I can say with certainty that my night would have been cheerier had I instead set foot inside a Bosnian orphanage. The formerly vast crowds were reduced to 20 people, at best. The strippers, once young, lithe and full of silicon were now the dregs of the dancing world: The mommy who came back to work too soon, her enlarged areolas and soft tummy driving you to fling dollar bills at her just to get her off stage and back home to feed her out-of-wedlock child. The foreign hottie with jacked teeth, who looks great until she opens her mouth to talk (she was a Ukranian, and it took every ounce of willpower I had not to scream, “In Soviet Russia, lap dance pays for you!” at her). And the ugly girl reduced to disturbing tricks involving her private parts to make a buck. Tonight it was a girl who would roll herself into a yoga-like position on her back with her vag facing the sun, fold a dollar on top of it and then queef it into the air. And this wasn’t a small queef, either: I’m talking height. Like, Mount St. Helen’s volcanic eruption height. I’ve never before wanted to giggle and pour bleach in my eyes at the same time.

Eventually, a stripper made her way to our table and started telling her sob story: Since the economy tanked, business had been awful, with tons of the dancers leaving and the crowds being a shell of what they once were. I zoned out immediately, because: 1. I hate giving people I don’t know money 2. I really had to fart because of that gargantuan burrito earlier and she was squatting dead-even with my crotch, meaning if I let rip, we could have been kicked out and 3. Her story sounded like the plot of Roadhouse except it was the bad economy trying to shut her club down, not Ben Gazzara. My brother eventually buckled and took a lap dance, but I’d like to think it was more born of altruism than arousal.


We drove home that night mostly silent, still haunted by the things we had seen. I know firsthand that the job market is awful, that money just isn’t flowing, that times are the worst I’ve ever seen. But it didn’t truly hit home until my trip to Vixens. Do I want to live in a world where fathers don’t have the spare cash to let their college-aged sons receive the lap dances they wish their wives could still deliver? Where Latino laborers don’t have money for both Corona and the white strippers that prey upon their various inferiority complexes? A world where married men can’t afford to be bled for a $1,000 a week by a dancer who hasn’t even given them a squeeze job yet? Sometimes, I look at it all and have to think: What would Al do?

Tagged as: Al Bundy,  no ma'am,  strip club.