 |
|
|
|
|
Live Nude Girls: Undercover at the RNC
by Mara Hvistendahl
October 2004
Of all New York City's upscale strip clubs, the most notoriously upscale is Scores, where cover, a beer and a six-minute lap dance will set a man back $59. It was at Scores that a Bangladeshi businessman racked up a $129,626 bill last fall. It was checks from Scores, media speculation has it, that helped bring about the summer's $54 million gender discrimination suit against Morgan Stanley. And it is Scores dancers who inspired Striptease, pose in Playboy, and make frequent appearances on Howard Stern's show. By May, Scores had begun preparing for the Republican National Convention in earnest.
Lonnie Hanover, the club's publicist, began talking to the New York Daily News, the New York Post, and the New York Observer about the calls from Republican delegations and the “big name entertainers” who would be specially imported for their ecdysiastic needs.
Articles began to appear with headlines like “Sex Pros Get Ready for Party.” The rest of the press latched onto the story like a gaggle of trend-crazy junior high school girls. Even the editors of the very literary magazine at which I am an intern deemed it worthy of a sentence in our August issue. Another intern called Hanover and got from him the juiciest detail yet: the club was going to hire “100 extra girls” for convention week.
One rainy Friday night in early July, I painted my nails, sprayed my hair until it was stiff, applied eye shadow and lip gloss, stuffed my bra, put on tight black pants and a tiny shirt, and took the subway down to the dark stretch of 11th and 12th avenues between 20th and 60th streets, where many strip clubs took refuge when Rudolph Giuliani cleaned up midtown in the late 1990s.
Inside, Scores was cold and dark, with clusters of black vinyl chairs surrounding a shiny stage. On one wall was a large mirror, and on the mirror were many handprints. There were a number of women of varying shades and getups sitting listlessly at the bar—there, like me, for the open call. I took a seat. After a while, a skinny Italian manager with the darting eyes and ticcing head of a seasoned cocaine user introduced himself as "Ralph" and took me into a private room. I tried not to think about what normally went on in the room and gushed about my waitressing experience. “You know, I can be shy at parties and stuff, but somehow when I'm working I'm totally outgoing!”
Ralph called me back the next week to tell me I was hired as a cocktail waitress. When I came in for my first night of training, I saw that he had scrawled “I LIKE” across the top of my application. I was strangely flattered.
Three nights a week for five weeks, I donned black velour hot pants and a matching halter top studded with fake diamond buttons as I shuttled drinks from the bar to couples and groups of men lounging on fake leather chairs. The job wasn't unpleasant—I made good tips, and I liked the rest of the staff—but I slept very little and rarely saw my friends, and on slow nights I stood watching the strippers, shivering in my little outfit, and had trouble remembering that I had ever been anything other than a strip club waitress. Outside the club, I was more hopeful. I fashioned flashcards out of photos of Republican bigwigs and quizzed myself, and I talked to editors about the story. Two weeks before the convention, the Village Voice agreed to run it as a daily blog.
The first night of the convention, the club filled with delegates (I didn't personally confirm that they were all in fact delegates, but there seemed to be no other explanation for the influx of men in polo shirts and women in flowered dresses), and I smiled at my luck. Not only were the Republicans raucous, they were also naïve and provincial. I watched them get lap dances and down bottles of domestic beer (over the course of the week, many would express disappointment that the club didn't carry Miller Lite), and I was fascinated.
Even the nasty ones were compelling—and I thought I had encountered every breed of dirtiness in the preceding month. One Republican delegate, a big Bush fundraiser who runs a business in Florida, showed me the cufflinks he had received for being designated a Pioneer fundraiser and then proceeded to take a stripper into a private room and try what she later described as “wack ass shit” on her (his choice of stripper, incidentally, seemed to suggest a protestor fetish, as the woman had long blond dreadlocks). A second, who was formerly an assistant to a Republican congresswoman, charged $400 worth of lap dances on his credit card. A lobbyist for a Dallas energy firm offered me fancy dinners and new clothes for “playing” with him and another girl (although this, he added magnanimously, was “not a requirement”). He even gave me his business card. He was noticeably less frisky when telephoned three weeks later for comment, and seemed to have purged the strip club visit out of his convention memories. “I think strip clubs are boring,” he said. “Why would I go to a strip club when there's all the free parties?” Then why did a Scores cocktail waitress have his business card? A case of impersonation, he said, “people can tell you that they're someone they're not.” And, although he vehemently denied ever being on the Scores premises, he questioned the propriety of any reporter who chose not to identify herself as such. “I'm in the public relations business, and frankly, I don't think that's ethical,” he said. Finally, he said he was not at the RNC as delegate but as a lobbyist. He'd attended the DNC as well, where he avoided Boston's strip clubs as completely and categorically as he did New York's.
Even though I didn't reveal any names in my posts, and none of the Republicans I wrote about were of flashcard-worthy importance, other people were as intrigued by their exploits as I was. Gawker, the media consumer's online water cooler, linked to it on Monday. A few days later, it was one of the top forty new links on the Internet, and by the end of the week the blog had attracted well over 50,000 hits. The New York Times sent a reporter to the Penthouse Executive Club and then ran a story on how the Republicans were not visiting strip clubs (this, I flatter myself in suggesting, was their attempt to jump on the bandwagon), while the Washington Post sent a photographer to Scores West (a friend of mine watched the bouncers turn him away). More significantly, the blog's readership extended beyond the New York media clique; my mother reported that the president of her Midwestern law firm read it every day, while my father printed out each post and brought it to the rural Minnesota bar he owns. The farmers and small-town workers who comprise the regular stool-warmers there loved it, he said.
At some point, the extent to which this country cares about Republicans' sex lives began to disturb me. I believe that all people—even politicians—should be able to lead their private lives in peace. I don't believe a blowjob is an impeachable offense, or that a visit to a strip club by a public figure is cause for front-page scandal. Hypocrisy, of course, is worthy of reproach, and much of my story's appeal lay in the fact that the GOP has crowned itself the great defender of marriage, but interest went beyond that, I suspected. A story about Democrats partying at Boston strip clubs would have also been good. Not quite as good, certainly, but still a juicy read. Indeed, the Boston Herald tried to write one, but, like the Times, it could not come up with any delegates.
We care about sex because the Republicans have made us care. In the past two decades, the GOP has deftly steered the public's focus away from economic issues and directed it toward a collection of ideological ones that almost entirely share a connection to sex. Forget gas prices, they tell us now; forget that you have no health care; gay couples want to get married. Before that, they had us forget that we were relatively well-off and turned our attention to a White House intern, and before that we were told to cast aside doubts about the recession and consider that women were aborting the babies they had conceived out of wedlock. When conservatives call our society sex-crazed, they are right, but they ignore the fact that they bear much of the responsibility for our licentiousness.
The Republicans are not exclusively to blame for our shift in focus, however; the Democrats and the mainstream press have raised few objections. Among the major stories of the past year were Paris Hilton's sex video, Janet Jackson's breast, and Governor McGreevey's gay affair. Without the steady diet of sexy news we've been fed, we'd be left with sports, the weather and the war.
On some level, then, it bothers me to have contributed to the mess, to know that the guys in my dad's bar were reading my posts—which, in a way, is exactly what Republican strategists would have them be doing—when they could have been dissecting Zell Miller's proselytizing. To be sure, the Democratic Party, which has somehow become connected to an article of summer footwear, can't afford to appear any weaker, and should continue to attack Republicans for their hypocrisy (the next obvious fighting point: Lynne Cheney's lesbian romance novel). To that end, I was happy to use my bra-padding skills to serve as the left's sexual foot soldier. But such fights need to share space with other, more important ones: the destruction of the continent's forests, the wholesale political abandonment of truth and reasoning, the fact that half of the nation's population lacks access to good education, good food, and good doctors. When the President starts guaranteeing me health care, he can have all the lap dances he wants.
Mara Hvistendahl can be reached at mara.hvistendahl@gmail.com.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
