Slick (21 page)

“Lo?”

“Hi. I’m looking for Harmony Prince.”

“Who dis?” he yelled.

“I work for Mean World Records. Is Harmony around?”

“
Who
dis?”

I had to raise my voice to compete. “My name is Scott. I work at Mean World Records. We’ve talked with Harmony before. Is she around?”

He turned down the music. He took a wary pause, then a few bites of some crunchy legume. “She ain’t here, man.”

“Do you know where I can find her? It’s really important that I get in touch with her.”

“What you want with her?”

“I’m sorry, what’s your name?”

 He paused again. “McB.”

“Mick Bee. I like it. You a rapper?”

“Hey, man. Why you wanna know about me now?”

“Just curious. You’ve got a strong voice. And we’re always looking for new talent. By the way, I assume you saw Harmony in Hunta’s video for ‘Chocolate Ho-Ho.’”

He laughed. “Yeah, man. The second time. The first time I sneezed.”

I grinned along. “I know. That’s why I want to get in touch with her. We’ve got a video coming up and we want to put her in it. And I don’t mean put her in the background, man. She’s going to be a key player.”

“No shit?”

“No shit. But it’s important that I find her tonight. Extremely important. You feel me?”

After a moment’s thought, he caved. “She working now.”

“Where?”

“The Flower Club.”

Whoa. That wasn’t part of Eddie’s profile. I suppose it was too much to hope that it was just a fun place for gardeners.

“Uh, where is it? Downtown?”

“Downtown,” he said. “On Sixth and Flower. Shit, wait. Seventh. Yeah, Seventh.”

“That’s okay. I’ll look it up. You know what time she usually gets off?”

“I dunno. She usually get home ‘round one or two. Hey, you really work for Mean World?”

“Yeah. Why wouldn’t I?”

“Cause, I don’t know, you sound white. Really white. No offense.”

“It’s all right. I get that a lot.”

“Just understand that we all look out for Harmony here, you know what I’m sayin’? You fuck with her, we fuck with you. We clear?”

“We clear,” I said, oddly touched by his concern. “But trust me. She’ll be glad you took this call.”

“Well, go find her then.”

That was the idea. But this Flower Club thing made me nervous. My grand design would hit a major skid if our sweet little angel turned out to be a stripper by night.

 

 

Before going downtown, I had to stop and make a cash withdrawal, a moderately fat one. I needed some kind of financial incentive to get Harmony to even listen to me. Unfortunately, I had only seventy-four dollars on me. Then I remembered Ira’s Y2K stash, which he now called his earthquake fund. Whatever. It was ten thousand dollars worth of twenties just taking up space in his safe. Perfect.

En route to Marina del Rey, I called Ira and asked him if I could borrow fifteen hundred of it. Though he was initially hesitant to take some of the stuffing out of his disaster cushion, the money was out and waiting the moment I boarded the
Ishtar
.

“What’s the matter?” I teased. “Too scared to open the safe when I’m around?”

“I don’t recall being entrusted with your combination.”

Touché. Decked out for comfort in his ratty blue robe, he sat in his leather command chair and clicked away at his PC. He seemed to be building some kind of virtual house. I wanted to inquire but I knew that would trigger a painfully elaborate software demonstration. The important thing was that he enjoyed it.

“So what shady business are you conducting now?” he asked, still focused on his work.

“How do you know this is for business?”

“Because your personal life isn’t that exciting.”

The fact that he could say that while putting up digital drywall was an irony that escaped him.

“Actually, I’m off to the Flower Club,” I replied. “To see the strippers.”

I was hoping that would faze him. He didn’t even bat an eye. “It’s not a strip club, Gomer. It’s a hostess club.”

“What’s the difference between a stripper and a hostess?”

“Hostesses don’t strip. They’re simply paid to look nice and sit with dirty old men on dirty old couches. From what I’m told, there’s groping involved.”

“Terrific.”

“Yeah, well, that’s what you get.”

“For what?”

“I don’t know,” Ira said, adding stucco. “For whatever it is you’re up to.”

 

 

A brief history of the hostess club, courtesy of the Internet:

Shortly after World War I, a sweeping wave of moral reform washed away America’s bordellos and red-light districts. That put a lot of prostitutes out of work. A few intrepid bar owners—unaware that the bell was about to toll for them—hired many of these ladies as hostesses. Their new task was comparatively chaste: to lure men out onto the dance floor, hold them tight, and squeeze lots of drinks out of them. Eventually, these bars became closed dance halls, their admission restricted to men. The only women to be found inside were the ones who worked there. And their job, as always, was to work the men.

Once Prohibition hit, those same bar owners stopped being subtle and just made the women the business. Instead of paying through drinks, customers would now purchase tickets to dance (read: bump, grind, and grope) with a hostess of their choice. These ladies were soon referred to as “nickel-hoppers” and “dime-a-dance girls.” That may sound marginally sleazy but these were quite respectable establishments at the time. All the men wore suits. The women wore long dresses. It was like a big senior prom, except for all those nickels and dimes changing hands.

It was here in Los Angeles, the land of sexual enterprise, that the dance ticket was phased out for a more sophisticated punch-card system. So instead of charging by the song, the women were metered out on a clock. This led to their newest and most common moniker: the taxi dancer.

All right, now things were getting a little sleazy. I mean, women renting themselves out by the hour? Sounds awfully familiar. And yet as strange as it may seem, these hostess clubs weren’t just flimsy covers for prostitution rings. Don’t get me wrong. I’m sure a lot of paid sex did indeed transpire covertly in the bathrooms and dark corners of the establishments. But for the most part, the taxi dancers had a lock on one thing: the lending out of warmth and intimacy. You want to get laid, go see a hooker. You want to get
touched
, through slow dance or deep conversation, go see a hostess.

In 1932, Chicago scholar Paul Cressey tried to get to the bottom of this phenomenon in his book,
The Taxi-Dance Hall: A Sociological Study in Commercialized Recreation and City Life
. He saw the men who frequented the joints as a different creature than the standard, straight-out whore monger. He wrote: “Many of the romantically inclined patrons crave affection and feminine society to such an extent that they accept willingly the illusion of romance offered in the taxi-dance hall.”

Cressey blamed the industrialization and urbanization of modern culture for creating wave after wave of these detached, lonely men. And he naturally faulted unrestrained capitalism for enabling the development of such a cheap love substitute.

Despite his fears, hostess clubs never quite took off as a franchise. After all, prostitution did offer more bang for your buck. And strip clubs lifted the cumbersome chore of having to imagine the dancers naked. Plus, once America got thrown into the freewheeling sixties, forget about it. Subtle touching was out. Hard fucking was in. By the end of the sexual revolution, there were less than fifty hostess clubs left in the United States. Today there are about a dozen, divvied up equally between downtown L.A. and the nearby City of Industry. In these explicit times, it would seem that the hostess club was neck and neck with the Hawaiian monk seal in the race to extinction.

Personally, I found it difficult to care about the plight of the taxi dancer. My only concern that night was liberating one of them.

On a late Sunday night, the Convention Center area of downtown Los Angeles probably wasn’t the best place to walk around with $1,574 in cash, but it was such a desolate wasteland that there weren’t even any shady figures to avoid.

The Flower Club was nestled inside a four-story industrial complex that looked from the outside like an ancient textile plant. If it weren’t for the faint but penetrating bass of R&B dance music, I might have questioned my Yahoo! map directions. I had to climb two flights of mildew-ridden steps before reaching the door to a red velvet anteroom.

A bullnecked Anglo bruiser greeted me from his chair by the entrance. He wore a business blazer over his wife-beater undershirt.

“Hi. Are you new to the Flower Club?”

“I am.”

“Welcome then. Are you familiar with how things work in a place like this?”

“I am not.”

“Okay then. Here’s the deal. There’s a six-dollar cover charge, but there’s no drink minimum. We don’t serve alcohol. If you want to dance with one of our hostesses, the rate is twenty-four dollars an hour, or forty cents a minute. There’s a ten-minute minimum per hostess. Tipping is expected. It’s a common courtesy to match the hourly. We accept all major credit cards and ATM check cards, but there’s a twenty-four dollar minimum on those. And if you do use a card, it’ll only say ‘McNulty Video Productions’ on your statement. What am I missing?”

I was tempted to say “me,” but I let him finish his spiel.

“Oh, these girls have the right to refuse service to anyone. You’re allowed to touch them but you are not allowed to
touch
them. I’ll assume you know the difference. Any lewd behavior is prohibited by law and will get you ejected. By me. Our hostesses are not allowed to leave the premises with customers, even if their shift is up, so don’t bother asking. We’re open until three. And finally, have fun. My name is Chip.”

“Hi, Chip.” I wanted to leave. I considered staking out Harmony’s apartment until she got home, but that probably wouldn’t make the best first impression either.

The hell with it. If this was the lowest point of the whole endeavor, I’d be fortunate. I paid the cover charge, took my last relatively clean breath, and stepped into the smoke.

From the moment my eyes adjusted to the dim lights and haze, I realized that my mental image of the typical sex club was seriously off. Thanks again, Hollywood. I’d seen a lot of late-night crime thrillers in my time, and virtually all of them went out of their way to include some kind of den-of-iniquity scene. You know what I’m talking about. Champagne bottles, high rollers in Italian suits, giggling sluts in gold lame, and usually some sort of pool and/or hot tub to allow for further gratuitous skin displays.

Granted, I wasn’t expecting anything that upscale, but the air at the Flower Club was just pitiful. It had the social awkwardness of a bar mitzvah party, with most of the “boys” standing quietly at the nonalcoholic bar while the “girls” sat on the other side of the room, looking bored as hell on their Naugahyde couches. The only real mingling happened on the dance floor, and that wasn’t pretty either. Paunchy white men in their forties rubbed and pressed against skeezy, barely legal gals in halter tops and micro-minis, all to the funky old beat of Chaka Khan’s “Ain’t Nobody.”

I did not want to be here one second longer than I had to. The problem was locating Harmony. It wouldn’t be easy to identify her in the smoke and darkness. The only way to get a semi-decent vantage was to sit at the bar with all the oglers. I took an open stool between two Asian businessmen.

Within seconds, the man to the right of me got up and approached a diminutive Latina in a frilly, lacy underwear-as-outerwear outfit. She was probably just a fetus when Madonna invented the look. Although I couldn’t hear them, it was clear from the girl’s slightly bewildered expression that one or both of them had a limited command of English. Wisely, they connected through mock sign language.
You, me, dance now
. The girl retrieved a punch card from a large mounted wall rack and fed it into the clock. Ka-CHUNK. The meter was running. They joined the grind of dirty dancers. Within seconds, his hands were on her ass and she was singing sweet music in his ear.

What a pathetic place, I thought. What pathetic men. All of them. Whatever they were in reality—fighters or sailors or bowlegged tailors—they looked like idiots by subscribing to this paper-thin charade. I wasn’t one to extol the benefits of brothels, but at least there the client pays to scratch a physical itch. Here the men were simply buying the attentions of a pretty young thing, paying a woman to go against her natural judgment and actually give them the time of day. How sad. How degrading. Just sitting here among them, I could feel the blue-book value of my entire existence go down by hundreds.

“You might want to be careful with that disapproving look,” said a man two seats over from me. “People might think you’re a cop.”

He was in his early-autumn years, husky, and dressed in denim from collar to cuffs. With his flowing white hair and beard, his kind and wizened face, he kind of looked like God, at least the Memphis version.

“Sorry. I didn’t know I was broadcasting it.”

“You’re not. I’m just observant.” He took the empty seat next to me and extended his hand. “Dave, from Richmond.”

I shook it. “Dave, from Brentwood.”

Clearly there were no true Daves in this conversation. We shared a brief, knowing grin and then moved on with the pleasantries.

“You think this is bad,” he said, “you should try going to a place like Club Starlight. There they keep the women in this big windowed room. You’re not allowed to approach them. When you see a girl you like, you point to her in the window and the matron goes to get her for you. It’s like a pet shop. I didn’t like it. Wasn’t very conducive to a social atmosphere.”