Fringe Florida: Travels Among Mud Boggers, Furries, Ufologists, Nudists, and Other Lovers of Unconventional Lifestyles (9 page)

been a cheerleader.

“What brought you to Tampa?” I ask, shouting to be heard over a

hip-hop song.

“I flew,” she shouts back with dead seriousness.

“No, why did you come here, to Tampa?”

“There’s no money in New Jersey. It’s dead,” she says.

I ask if they chose Tampa because of its reputation for strip clubs,

and Mons because of its worldwide fame. She’s oblivious to both. They

picked the city because they had a place to crash, a girlfriend’s apart-

ment, and Mons because their friend suggested they could earn good

money here. “We looked at the website,” Frenchy says, “and it looked

good.” Bottom line: Dancers don’t care about strip-club ratings. Show

proof

them the green.

Frenchy has been working an hour and half. Traffic is slower than

she expected, but she’s made $150, which doesn’t seem to excite her

until I point out that’s a dollar a minute. She earned it from lap dances,

which is how Mons dancers typically make 80 percent of their take-

home; the other 20 percent comes from stage tips.

A lap dance is in progress on the couch along the wall. Keeping one

platform on the floor, a petite blonde rubs her breasts all over the placid

face of a blubbery man in Bermuda shorts with white socks nearly to

his knees. He’s about five times her width and slides his hands down

her back to her behind. Nude Barbie grinding Santa. A sign above them

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reads lap dances are $20 to $30, prices negotiable.

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A two-way contact lap dance is about the closest thing you can get

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to having sex without penetration or hand stimulation. If you believe

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the stories of some strip connoisseurs who claim to wear condoms un-

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derneath their clothes, they are not always without happy endings. Al-

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though there’s no nipple-sucking in sight, it’s allowed if dancers are

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willing.

A lap dance lasts one song, about three minutes, and it’s not un-

common for men to drop upwards of four hundred dollars a night for

fifteen or twenty dances. Mary’s seen men spend thousands of dollars

in one night. Sometimes they later complain and bad-mouth a dancer

online to strip-club groupies. Mary merely calls it “separation-from-

money anxiety.”

Explicit fondling is one of Mons’s claims to fame and infamy. In

many American cities, including Las Vegas, customers legally aren’t al-

lowed to touch dancers above the thigh. Many locales even prohibit

nude and topless performers from dancing within 6 feet of customers,

essentially banning lap dances. Such is the case in Tampa.

I’ve actually just witnessed an illegal act. The police could rush in

any minute and haul Barbie and Santa off to jail. Such things have hap-

pened, but not in a decade.

Ninjas and the Super Bowl

Tampa’s adoption of the 6-foot rule in 1999 attracted more public out-

cry than any other action in the city’s recent history. No issue has high-

lighted the city’s dichotomy of goody-goodies and the lovers of sleaze

quite so well. You have to know the story to fully appreciate Joe Red-

proof

ner’s fame and the city’s bipolar nature. Tampa isn’t completely Sodom

or Gomorrah.

During the lap dance war, city council meetings turned into fiery

five- and ten-hour debates. Crowds swelled with hundreds of exotic

dancers with their kids in tow, fire-and-brimstone preachers, church

ladies wearing “ban lap dance” stickers, grizzled cab drivers, suited law-

yers, a radio shock jock, a hive of reporters, and a few ordinary citizens.

Yours truly, covering the spectacle for the local alternative newspa-

per, sat through all fifteen hours plus the lead-up, taking notes on the

disrobed democracy. An eighty-one-year-old lady called dancers “sin-

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ners.” A tearful Mons stripper wheeled her quadriplegic brother to the

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podium. “I need constant care, and cannot feed or bathe myself with-

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out the care that she is providing me,” he said.

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The final vote drew so many people that the meeting had to be held

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in a Tampa Convention Center ballroom that seated five hundred. Even

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still, there was an overflow, and three hundred were relegated to watch-

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ing the debate in another room on closed-circuit TV.

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Leading the charge for the morality brigade was Councilman Bob

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Buckhorn. With his eye on the mayoral throne, Buckhorn had already

gone after massage parlors and alcohol-free raves. Joe was the strip-

club king, though he looked more like a typical businessman. He wore

his hair short, his face clean-shaven, and dressed in a sports coat and

slacks.

The two men were established adversaries. Joe had recently run

against Buckhorn for the city council seat and lost miserably. This time

Joe’s empire was on the line, and he spared no expense to fight back.

He brought his high-priced lawyer and hired economists and statisti-

cians. Uncharacteristically quiet at the meetings, Joe let them make

his case that strip clubs don’t promote crime and help bring millions

of dollars into the city.

Ostensibly, Joe’s clubs (he had three at the time) weren’t the im-

petus for the ordinance. The Tampa Police Department had just com-

pleted a two-year undercover investigation of some seedy strip clubs,

massage parlors, and lingerie-modeling joints. Officers said they wit-

nessed oral sex and hand-jobs inside the businesses and dancers prosti-

tuting themselves for rendezvous outside the clubs. The city’s smoking

gun was a composite video of bawdy stage performances shot by un-

dercover vice cops, featuring girl-on-girl sex acts and one particularly

absurd contest involving a remote control toy truck with a dildo the

proof

size of a forearm mounted on its front. Customers paid five dollars to

attempt to ram the roving phallus into the vaginas of dancers lying

spread-legged on the floor. Invariably the fake penis bounced off the

dancers’ crotches. Vice cops made no arrests during their long investi-

gation, though they captured many gratuitous close-ups of bare breasts

and vaginas. City leaders considered the video too raunchy to air at the

family-filled council meeting. I viewed it in the city attorney’s office.

Although the pro–lap dance crowd outnumbered its opponents by

more than two to one, the council unanimously passed the ordinance.

Mayor Dick Greco, a former Mons customer, signed it into law before

daybreak.

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National media lapped up the salacious story. Anderson Cooper,

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then with ABC’s
20/20
, did a lengthy piece interviewing Joe and some

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Mons dancers. Comedy Channel’s
Daily
Show
with
Jon
Stewart
mocked eg

the ordinance and Bob Buckhorn. The show’s Vance DeGeneres dem-

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onstrated the effect of the ban. A Mons dancer fondled him using a

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6-foot-pole tipped with a plastic hand.

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On the conventional front, Joe and other club owners sued the

city, arguing that the lap dance is protected as free speech under the

First Amendment. Joe publicly needled city leaders to come after him.

Sounding like a Wild West gunslinger, he told Tampa’s WTVT Fox

News, “I’m not going to stop anything until the mayor comes in and

shoots me.”

In his typical fashion, Joe shared his rage with drivers along Dale

Mabry Highway by posting sign messages such as, “Mayor Greco and

His Looney Tune Police Dept Are a Joke.” He posted council members’

phone numbers. City Hall was overwhelmed with calls from irate crit-

ics, some living outside the state.

Seven months after the ordinance passed, Joe got his wish. Police

started raiding clubs all over Tampa, including the Mons.

Kristopher, a University of Central Florida student at the time, was

at the Mons with school buddies during one of the busts. “I was just

standing there and this cop carrying an automatic assault rifle, in full-

on combat gear, runs right by me . . . It was such a bizarre juxtaposi-

tion. You had these nude women and these men dressed like ninjas.”

The police grabbed up those in the act of a lap dance—women and their

customers—and loaded them into a paddy wagon. “Then they were

just gone, and everything goes back like it never happened,” Kristo-

pher says. He and his friends headed back to Orlando. “What a killjoy.

proof

I didn’t feel like getting a lap dance anymore.”

By the time Super Bowl XXXV came to Tampa in 2001, the ninjas had

arrested more than two hundred Mons lap dancers and their custom-

ers, including National Hockey League players Ted Donato and Tyler

Bouck of the Dallas Stars, who were in town for a game. Afterward in a

preemptive move, the National Football League sent letters to profes-

sional football players warning them to keep their carousing in check

while in town for the match-up between the Baltimore Ravens and the

New York Giants. Tampa Police slacked off the week of the big game,

but the threat of arrests kept many away. It didn’t help Mons that tele-

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vision crews camped outside all weekend hoping to capture a scandal-

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ous raid.

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Strip-club operators caught a break shortly after that when Hills-

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borough County Judge Elvin Martinez ruled that the ordinance indeed

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violated free speech and couldn’t be fairly enforced. Joe also wore down

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the city by insisting on a separate hearing for each of the two hundred

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plus dancers charged. The court system was overloaded, putting pros-

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ecutors in a politically delicate situation of prosecuting the dancers at

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the expense of letting off violent criminals. Joe says he negotiated a

better deal for the dancers, and their penalties were no harsher than a

ticket for jaywalking.

Since that summer, Tampa police haven’t arrested anyone for danc-

ing too close, although the law remains on the books. Bob Buckhorn,

who was out of office long enough for people to forget or overlook his

failed decency crusade, was eventually elected mayor of Tampa.

Lap Dance Alley

No one inside the Mons tonight seems the least bit worried they might

be hauled off to jail. The club fills by the minute. There are no empty

chairs around the stage. A group of young men and women who look

hardly old enough to vote sheepishly take seats along the wall. One

watches wide-eyed as a nude dancer rubs all over a man sitting less

than 3 feet away. Rather than being impressed, the young woman looks

like she’s going to throw up.

One of the geeks ventures to the darkest side of the room, where

the armless couches are back-to-back. One side faces the stage and the

other, a mirrored wall with little room to pass without tripping over a

proof

lap dancer’s foot.

A well-dressed couple in their thirties sit facing the stage and sip

O’Doul’s. They silently watch the half-nude dancer’s act as if it were

a Broadway show. The geek sits in the shadows directly behind them.

In short order, an older, heavily made-up dancer stationed there gives

him a boob facial.

Men on each side of him are getting full-friction dances, too. This is

lap dance alley.

Others seated about are checking me out, no doubt wondering what

this woman is doing there all alone, standing and watching men get lap

dances. I quickly perch on the closest seat, just two spaces down from

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the O’Doul’s couple. Soon I hear soft “oohs” and “yeahs” from behind

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and feel the tickle of someone else’s hair against my shoulder. In my

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haste to blend, I inadvertently sat behind a man who’s getting a lap

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dance by Cousin Itt.

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Ms. O’Doul’s keeps glancing at the dance behind me. I peek at the

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geek’s dance behind her. Inevitably ours eyes meet. In panic, we spin

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our faces back to the stage.

Fortunately, the walls are mirrored. They reveal that the man be-

hind me is getting a lap dance by not one, but two dark-haired women.

Stacked like Pringles in his lap, it’s hard to tell where one body begins

and ends. They are a dark mass of hair and torso with six legs, a human

spider.

No wonder Ms. Odoul’s keeps spying on them.

On stage, a tigress puts on a novel show. With her back to the men at

her feet, she hikes up her shredded dress and exposes her bare, round

rump. Then she performs a feat you might expect to see in Tijuana. No,

ping-pong balls aren’t involved, although she could probably play the

game with her ass. She flexes her gluts to the beat of the music, alter-

nating butt cheeks.

As the song changes, she removes her wisp of a dress. The bodies of

lap dance alley part. Behind me the females of the
ménage
a
trois
chat

like friends who just finished yoga class. The woman on top wasn’t a