Fringe Florida: Travels Among Mud Boggers, Furries, Ufologists, Nudists, and Other Lovers of Unconventional Lifestyles (10 page)

Mons dancer, but the man’s wife or girlfriend.

As the couple leaves, their dancer pulls on a short T-shirt and walks

around to my side. Maybe she thinks I’m waiting in line. Maybe it is a

line, and I just don’t know it. But here it comes.

“Honey, would you like a dance?”

“No, I’m just researching. I’m a writer.”

proof

She laughs, backs away, and says, “I get it.” Does she? Or is she just

aware of how little writers earn? Either way, having been hustled by a

stripper for the first time in my life, I feel a little exploited.

She moves on to the O’Doul’s couple. “Would you like a dance?” she

asks and takes the woman’s chunky hand. The two women disappear

into the shadows of lap dance alley. Skinny Mr. O’Doul’s stays behind

and sneaks glances.

Are the female customers a sign of widespread sexual liberation or

simply an indication that Tampa attracts more female libertines? After

talking with the couple who earlier poked bills into the cowgirl’s cleav-

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age, I suspect the latter.

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Jack and Sandy, who prefer pseudonyms, are part of a threesome

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who share a condominium at Paradise Lakes, a Pasco County nudist

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community. Sandy’s a nurse; Jack’s a retired cop from Michigan. Mar-

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tha, his wife, also retired, couldn’t come with them tonight. Clarifying

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their living arrangements, Sandy says that she and Martha have sepa-

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rate bedrooms and Jack goes back and forth. “I’m bisexual,” she adds.

7

“Though not so much anymore since I got with Jack.”

4

Jack rolls his eyes.

They aren’t scoping for a fourth companion, although they haven’t

ruled out getting a lap dance. “We were just bored and had nothing else

to do,” Sandy says, proving that even polyandry can get stale. “We’ve

never been here before so we decided to come down and check it out.”

“I heard about it when I lived up in Michigan. But it’s just one of

those famous things that when you live near it you rarely get around

to checking out,” Jack says as if the strip club is a national landmark.

Of course, he has also been distracted, what with sharing the beds of

two women at a nudist resort that just hosted the Miss G-String Inter-

national contest.

Little surprises Mary when it comes to customers’ sexual prefer-

ences. Back when a mother, in her forties, and her daughter danced

at the Mons, a couple of men regularly bought lap dances with both at

once, inferring incestuous fantasies. “There are some sick puppies that

come in here sometimes,” Mary says.

Wearing jeans, an oversized T-shirt, and little makeup, Mary looks

more like a friendly Home Depot garden employee than a strip-club

manager. She has bangs and a loose ponytail that’s dark with a few

strands of gray. She’s worked for Joe for twenty years. She’s been a

waitress, a door girl, and now a manager, but never a dancer. “Some-

proof

times I think I should have been because I would have made more

money,” she jokes. In seriousness, she adds. “I couldn’t do it. I don’t

judge the girls who do, but it’s not me. I’m more private about that

stuff, and I couldn’t stand people touching me.”

The stage is briefly empty, and Mary calls out over the microphone

for a dancer to take the stage. She sighs in exasperation. “We tell

them over and over that they will get more dances if people see them

onstage.”

Mary likens her job to being mom to five hundred teenage girls.

“They have so much drama in their lives. A lot of the girls come here

open and fresh, and some go from that frame of mind to being sucked

ad

into this fucked-up drama with the other girls,” she says.

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Although the club is nonalcoholic, dancers can stash drinks in the

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dressing-room refrigerator. If one gets drunk, Mary makes them sit in

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their car until they are sober enough to drive home or come back to the

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stage.

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Naturally, the club has a no-drug policy, but invariably some dancers

84

develop a habit. “Joe has put girls through rehab,” Mary says. “He will

help those who are willing to help themselves. Ones that don’t, he lets

them go.”

She says before the Great Recession, Joe kept a therapist on retainer

for dancers and offered health insurance to full-time employees. “Joe’s

an exceptional boss,” Mary says. “He’s only here a few hours a day, but

he’s always here. He lives close. I can call him on his cell and he’ll show

up in minutes.”

Joe pioneered a rather laissez-faire approach to managing dancers.

His dancers are free agents, essentially operating as vendors in his mall

of flesh. He doesn’t pay them, and they don’t share their earnings with

him. They only tip other employees—the waitresses, door girl, man-

ager, and bouncers. At night, dancers are expected to tip out thirty-six

dollars, which is less than half the rate of most other clubs.

In addition to their tip-out to other employees, dancers feed the

jukebox. They prefer that to tipping a DJ because it saves them money

since DJs typically demand 10 percent of a dancer’s tips. Plus, DJs

bring their own drama, Mary says. “A lot of times DJs play favorites,

try to get the girls to pay him more, and all kinds of stuff. Some are real

slimeballs.”

Mons dancers set their own hours, allowing them to attend class or

raise families and still earn as much as six figures a year. Most don’t

proof

work there longer than seven years, Mary says. “More than not, they

see it as their ladder to something else. A lot go to college. Some leave

and then come back because they want to make extra money. They may

want to buy a house or pay for their kid’s school.”

Standing nearby, Alana, a twenty-three-year-old dancer whose

white, lacy pull-up bra glows against her chocolate skin, says she’s

working her way through design school. She likes working at the Mons

because unlike a local topless club where she worked, she doesn’t have

to perform in a private VIP room and is not expected to do more than

dance. She says, “That other place was basically a whorehouse.”

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With money so good and the hours so loose, Mary says that Joe has

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no problem getting
Playboy
centerfold–quality dancers like Alana. She

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notes that he prefers petite women and insists that they stay trim.

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“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and some men complain that they

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would like a girl with more meat, more curves, but this is what Joe

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likes,” she says with a sigh. “Like that girl,” she says pointing to a dancer

ht

on the stage who weighs no more than 125 pounds. “She’s pushing it

9

but she has nice curves.”

4

Feeling thoroughly dejected with my physical state, I call it a night

even though closing isn’t until 5:00 a.m. As I squeeze past a horde of

incoming customers, Mary calls out: “You know you can’t write about

this without getting a lap dance. You’re going to have to come back.

And bring your husband!”

I laugh. That’s not going to happen.

Crack Whore Stories

Mons may garner the most glory, but it is but a small, though highly

touted, piece of Trampa. The area has forty-three topless and nude

clubs. The phone book and adult business directories list more than

120 other erotic businesses within Tampa’s city limits. Name a medium

of sexual pleasure and Tampa has it, homegrown. The city is heavily

spiced with pornographers of film and books, XXX theaters, swing-

ers’ bars, fetish clubs, massage parlors, lingerie modeling, and adult

bookstores.

Then there are the unlicensed outcall services and advertised paid

escorts. Tampa’s prostitutes don’t just work the streets, hotels, and

tourist haunts; they get on jets and fly to meet Johns across the coun-

proof

try. One madam tells me she based her operation in Tampa Bay because

of the beaches and the convenience to Tampa International Airport.

Paul Allen, publisher of
NightMoves,
Tampa Bay’s leading adult-

entertainment guide, naturally relishes the flourishing local flesh in-

dustry. “It isn’t quite the holy land, but it’s a very adult-friendly at-

mosphere,” Paul told the
St.
Petersburg
Times
’ Christopher Goffard in 2002. “We’ve got beautiful girls, beautiful weather. We’ve got the

best attorneys we’ll ever need. And guys like Joe Redner have laid the

groundwork.”

Paul says that three of the four largest booking agencies for strip-

pers are based in the area. The porn industry? Well, Paul’s more than a

ad

cheerleader. He founded Tampa’s NightMoves Adult Awards and week-

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long convention that annually draws national XXX-stars such as Ange-

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lina Valentine, Alexis Texas, and Ron Jeremy and filmmakers such as

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Adam Glasser, a.k.a. Seymore Butts.

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It was Butts’s extracurricular videotaping during the 1998 event that

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put Tampa on the porn map and nearly caused city leaders to spon-

05

taneously combust. The porn title alone may have caused aneurisms:

“Tampa Tushy Fest Part I.”

Butts shot his girl-on-girl fisting porno (that’s fist inserted in va-

gina) in a hotel room on Dale Mabry, not far from the Mons. Released

during the lap dance war, the film won the “Best All-Girl Sex Scene”

video award at the 2000 AVN Awards in Las Vegas. Butts was later ar-

rested on obscenity charges in California because of the film, giving

him and Tampa all the more notoriety.

Around the same time, female roommates in a west Tampa home

were showering and having sex on a live pay-per-view website called

Voyeur Dorm. The city aggressively tried to shut it down and took the

case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where it lost. The first of

its kind, the case set a national precedent and made nightly network

newscasts, shining an even brighter red light on Tampa. Then, adding

even more wattage, U.S. attorneys prosecuted the infamous Max Hard-

core in downtown Tampa. His sexually sadistic films weren’t filmed in

Tampa, but one of his thousands of mail-order customers lived there.

Since obscenity is based on the community standards of the jury, Hard-

core’s conviction speaks volumes about the vulgarity of his films. Even

Joe grimaces at their mention.

These are just the raunchy films that made mainstream news. Count-

proof

less other Tampa pornographers operate in the shadows, some topping

Seymore Butts’s crudeness. Videographer Dirty-D and his porn actress

girlfriend live on upscale Davis Island. He puts out a sordid series of

porn with names like
Tampa
Bukkake
(a woman being ejaculated on by a

horde of men), and
Glory
Hole
Girls
(women performing fellatio on pe-

nises stuck through a hole in a wall), and his ever-popular
Crack
Whore

Stories
(train-wreck stories of low-end prostitutes, which he claims are

authentic).

Although busted by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement

in 2010 for videotaping a seventeen-year-old, legally a minor, for the

ap

Glory
Hole
series, he continues to peddle his porn online. “Florida is

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great for what I do,” Dirty-D says. “People are more open and the sun-

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shine makes the bikinis smaller.” He says he also has no problem find-

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ing local actors. He shoots videos at local XXX-rated theaters, adult

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bookstores, and in the Florida room of his home. He complains his

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neighbors call the cops if his car hangs an inch over the sidewalk.

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Skin Deep

It’s important to note that Tampa battled a skuzzy reputation long be-

fore Joe opened its first all-nude strip club. Joe is more of a grandfa-

ther to the modern era of tawdriness. In fact,
Life
magazine tagged the

city the “Hell Hole of the Gulf Coast” in 1935.

Tampa political corruption was so out of hand that year that the

National Guard was called in to prevent armed factions from gunning

down one another. Tampa was like a lawless frontier town with fraudu-

lent elections, warring bands, brothels, and open gambling halls. The

city cracked down on prostitution at the behest of the Army Air Corps

when it opened MacDill Field (now part of MacDill Air Force Base) and

forced the trade underground. The title lingered due to midcentury vio-

lence between local mobsters and the Italian Mafia. During the “Era

of Blood,” there were gangland shootings on Tampa street corners in

broad daylight, scenes right out of the
Godfather
.

By the time the turf war ended, Santo Trafficante Jr. had taken over

the family business. He would go on to reputedly be one of the Ameri-

can Mafia’s most powerful dons overseeing La Cosa Nostra casinos in