But late on a Friday or Saturday night, there’s always a guy who wants to go into a VIP room and you can get six or seven hundred dollars, so the girls would ignore Bear to make that money. Not me—I would always give Bear the last dance of the night.
Girls would be like, “This guy wants to give you a hundred dollars for a table dance.”
“No, I only dance for Bear.”
“What’s wrong with you?” was the constant refrain.
“He’s twenty dollars every night,” I said. “Every week. Every month. Do the math.” He was sensitive about things, and why be rude to him one night to get two or three hundred dollars off this guy who I’m never gonna see again? It’s the long game, and Bear taught me it.
Perhaps more than the money, doing the last dance every night with Bear meant that I would never go home in a bad mood. He wasn’t some drunk tourist thinking he could do whatever he wanted because he threw money at me.
Another guy started coming in to the club named Brian. By then I had broken up with Andy. I had given up trying to fix his darkness. Brian was handsome and tall, so preppy that he didn’t look like anyone I’d ever been with. But he was funny and we clicked in conversation. He was twenty-six, and we started dating February 7, 1998, a month before I turned nineteen.
Brian and I moved into a house we rented together, and we were very happy. We were so living the American dream that we even got a dog, a Sheltie we named Sasha.
Part of the American dream is making money. I am a firm believer in capitalism. And I noticed that the girls at the Gold Club who invested in breast implants got more tips. I was already a 36B, heading to a C, but I wanted to go bigger. There were three doctors in Baton Rouge who did everyone’s boobs, so I started comparison-shopping at the club, asking the girls who they went to and deciding whose boob work I liked best.
I chose Dr. Charles Gruenwald, a suave-looking guy with prematurely gray hair and absolutely no bedside manner. When I went for the consultation, he came in the room and said, “Lemme look at them.” Phump, off came my shirt and he was immediately hands-on, making judging grunts. I told him I wanted to go up to a 36D.
“Okay, okay,” he said. He barreled through an explanation of his proposed procedure, then jotted down a price on a piece of scrap paper. “Gonna be this much,” he said. “Let me know if you want it or not.” And he walked out.
I almost didn’t go back, but I decided to go ahead with it because he could put implants under the muscle, through incisions in my underarms. I scar really badly and wanted to avoid incisions under the breasts or on my nipples. Plus, this way I would be able to breastfeed if I ever chose to have a baby. Because they have to pop the muscle away from the bone, it’s a much more involved and dangerous surgery; some doctors just won’t do it. So, Dr. Grunts it was.
On a July morning in 1999, Brian drove me to the surgery and waited for me outside. I wasn’t really nervous—I just wanted to get it over with. I had been working even more than usual, saving up for being out of commission at the club for about two weeks. The surgery was twenty-two hundred dollars, and I bet today it would be fifteen grand easy.
Because they go in through your upper body, I knew it would take a while for the swelling to go down and for the implants to settle. The muscle has to relax and you have to massage the area as part of the recovery. You measure how far your boobs have dropped by how many fingers you can fit between your breast and your collarbone. When I woke up from surgery, it was one finger, so my boobs were way up high.
They started to look good really quickly, and I was excited for the swelling to finally go down so I could wear all the cute 36D bras I’d bought from Victoria’s Secret. But at the two-week mark, when most of the swelling was supposed to be gone, they were still huge. None of my new bras were fitting me, so I went to Victoria’s Secret and they measured me.
“Honey, you’re a triple D,” the sweet lady told me.
I almost shit my pants. I went back to Dr. Grunts. “How big are my fucking tits?” I asked. He was supposed to give me a 450 cc’s on one side and 475 on the other, because everybody’s got one bigger than the other.
He hemmed, and hawed, clearly not wanting to tell me. Finally, he opened the chart and said, “You’re 575.”
I almost shit myself again.
“I filled them up till I liked them,” he said with a shrug.
“You’re a fucking asshole,” I hissed.
“You are a very broad cavity with wide shoulders, and everyone who does that comes back and gets ’em bigger,” he said. “They looked so good that I didn’t want to cut you twice.”
That’s what stopped me from suing him, but I was a cartoon character until they settled.
It helped that I got a lot more tips. Instantly. Now I’ve gone on to win many Best Breasts trophies. And every time I accept one of those, I thank him by name. Best twenty-two hundred dollars I ever spent.
I also named my breasts because I love them so much. Thunder and Lightning. I’ve had the same implants since 1999—they’re almost old enough to drink.
*
For the next two years, I continued to work at the Gold Club more than sixty hours a week. I was happy making money and saving up to buy a house. I had my regulars and I never did anything illegal, mainly because I was a good girl and also because I was hopelessly naïve.
The Gold Club was well known, so they would have feature dancers come in. A feature dancer is someone who is known for her pictorials or films. She can travel all over and draws her fan base to a club. She is paid by the club, keeps her tips, and when she performs—usually about two shows a night—the other house girls all stop because the feature is the star attraction.
When features were there, I made it my mission to talk to all of them, because I wanted to be one someday. Most of them seemed standoffish and cold, and I have now learned why. It’s not necessarily the women being chilly, it’s that clubs really hate when the features try to “recruit” or give their information to get their best house girls away.
And some of them were just bitches.
The first one to show me what was possible in feature dancing on an artistic level was Leslie Wells. She wasn’t famous and didn’t care about getting into magazines or movies—she was all about the theatricality of her shows. A green-eyed blonde from Chattanooga, she could have just coasted on her looks and boobs. But her shows were so much more than that—they were mini skits that embraced the fun and humor of taking off your clothes in front of everyone. As I started to think about how I would structure my own shows, I modeled them after hers. It’s a strip club—it’s okay to smile. She quit performing and now is a wonderful playwright with two kids. I was honored to go see her and buy the costumes from some of her best shows. She said she didn’t want anyone to have them but me.
But the feature dancer who had the biggest impact on my life was Devon Michaels. A gorgeous, incredibly fit brunette, Devon was about ten years older than me and had a lot of success parlaying her centerfolds and covers into feature dancing and the best-body contest circuit. She gave me the number of the first photographer who ever shot me, Dan Sparks. I went to see him at his studio in Atlanta and he shot all my very first layouts in one day. Those pictures got me the covers of D-Cup, Gent, and Hustler’s Busty Beauties. The magazines identified me just as Stormy or Stormy Waters, my short-lived nom de porn at twenty.
Devon didn’t stop there. She believed in me and was so generous that she flew me to Tucson, Arizona, to meet Jacquie the Costume Lady, who still makes all my costumes to this day. Jacquie measured me and I bought my first five thousand dollars’ worth of spangled-out feature costumes. You might think all I need is a bikini, but that’s not how a real performer works. When you command a room—getting not just the audience’s attention but earning their tips—you need to be a sort of one-woman circus. You’re a ringmaster, clown, lion, tightrope walker, magician, and magician’s assistant all in one. Your clothes have to tell a story, and like any story th
ere have to be layers and reveals to keep people focused on you. There’s a reason one of the first things I did when I planned out my act was to learn how to blow fire.
Devon came through with phone numbers of agents, and using the pictorials and covers that came out that summer, I booked feature dancing gigs starting in September. My boyfriend Brian was always cool about me being a dancer—after all, it’s how we met—but he didn’t like the idea of having a live-in girlfriend he never saw. We decided to split, but it was completely amicable. I kissed Sasha good-bye and started life on the road.
I needed a roadie, so I asked one of the Gold Club’s bouncers, Mac, if he wanted to come along. Mac had been a marine and was a big guy who could get volatile quickly. A bouncer should be looking to resolve all problems, but Mac could sometimes start problems in the name of protecting me.
Nowadays, I mostly fly everywhere, but back then I drove around in my Dodge Durango with a twelve-foot trailer full of my costumes. Living on the road before GPS, I learned how to use a map and figure out the best routes for time and scenery. Mac and I just went from place to place, and I learned so much in all the strip clubs. My reputation was good, and the same clubs would ask me to come back. I showed up on time, I was polite to the staff, and I think the biggest thing was that I didn’t drink. A lot of the girls got messy and would need babysitting by the end of the night.
The summer of 2001, Mac and I were at the Cheetah club in Pompano Beach, Florida. We were hanging out in the dressing room between my two shows for the night. The DJ bombed in, coming in so hot that he hit his head on a low pipe.
“You gotta come onstage right now,” he said.
“I thought I had twenty minutes,” I said.
“Pantera just walked in.”
Mac sat up. Pantera was my favorite band after Acid Bath, but they were definitely Mac’s number one.
“It’s their drum tech’s birthday,” said the DJ. “His name’s Kat, and they wanna know if you can pull him up onstage.”
“Of course!” Mac and I said at the same time. I did the show, pulling Kat up onstage to cover him in chocolate syrup. From Pantera, there was the drummer Vinnie Paul and bassist Rex Brown, along with Paul Gray from Slipknot, and Kerry King and a couple of other people from Slayer. And one more guy, a not particularly hairy tour manager they all inexplicably called Wookie. Mac got to meet them all, and he was in thrash metal heaven.
At the end of the night, the Cheetah closed and we actually stayed a little later to clean up my dressing room. (You see why clubs love me?) We got in my Dodge Durango to leave, and when we pulled around we saw the rock gods from inside sitting on the curb.
“What are they doing?” I asked Mac. “Should we offer them a ride?”
“They’re fucking Pantera,” said Mac. “They don’t need a ride.”
“Hey,” I called out the window. “Do you guys need a ride?”
“Our cab hasn’t shown up,” said Vinnie.
“Where do you need to go?” I asked.
They told me what hotel it was, and I said, “Okay, get in.” We had to lay the seats down to get everyone in the back. Once we were on the road, Vinnie Paul said, “Play something.”
Mac and I had been listening to Mötley Crüe, so I pressed Play and “Shout at the Devil” filled the air. These six or seven guys all started singing along behind me, and we did, too.
When we got to the hotel, Vinnie said to me, “Can we buy you guys a drink?”
Before I could answer, Mac jumped in. “Yes!” We went to the hotel bar, which was probably supposed to be closed, but I would learn that when you’re a rock group you can pay to keep stuff open. There were some groupies there, and Vinnie whispered in my ear, “I need you to do me a favor.”
“Depends what it is,” I said.
“There’s this girl here who won’t leave me alone,” he said. “Will you sit on my lap and hold my hand and pretend we’re together?”
I did, and we actually had a great time talking.
“Are you guys gonna come to the show tomorrow night?” he asked us. I didn’t know there was one. Mac looked at me, mouthing a subtle “Please, please, please.”
“Pssh, yeah,” I said. “Of course.”
The show was at the Sunrise Musical Theater in Miami, so I told Mac we could spend one extra night in Florida. Wookie gave us laminates, which are backstage passes that hang from lanyards. They’re magic keys at concerts. It was the Reinventing the Steel tour, so we were backstage with Slayer, Static-X, and Sepultura. Pantera opened with “Hellbound” and closed with “Primal Concrete Sledge” before coming back for an encore of “Cowboys from Hell.” There was this great moment right before the last verse when the lead singer, Phil Anselmo, who was screaming the whole show, said a very polite, “Thank you all for coming.”
Then Vinnie said backstage, “Are you coming tomorrow night?”
We were. We followed them to Orlando, where they played the Hard Rock. I realized I was following the band. It felt weird to be trailing them in my Durango with all my stuff. They liked having me around, so I sent Mac packing with my truck and trailer back to Louisiana, and I stayed on Pantera’s bus for two weeks.
There were three buses, with Anselmo and his girlfriend Stephanie staying holed away by themselves on his own bus. Then there was the crew bus. And the bus I was on, which had Vinnie Paul and Wookie. It was the fun bus, a mix of the band and crew. Those two weeks were what got me addicted to the tour life. Waking up in a new city every day and sitting on the bus sharing stories with these great people.
It was Almost Famous. In fact, there was one morning that I got up from my bunk around 6 A.M. and went down to sit in the front lounge with the bus driver. Vinnie came down, then Grady the guitar tech—they probably hadn’t even been to bed yet. I was watching the world go by out the window when they started singing “Tiny Dancer” to me, just like the band does on the bus in Almost Famous. A couple of others joined; these were metal guys serenading me with “Pretty eyed, pirate smile, you’ll marry a music man.” In the movie, teenage Patrick Fugit’s character says to Kate Hudson’s Penny Lane near the end of the song, “I have to go home.” She holds up a hand to his face, like she’s casting a spell. “You are home,” she says.
We were this new circus family. Every night girls came on the bus. Some of the guys used to collect Polaroids of the girls, and it was my job to take the pictures. I took good shots, I have to say, because I genuinely wanted the girls to look their best for rock chick posterity. Some of them were crazy, though. One night a girl tried to steal the towel rack from the bus bathroom. We had to tackle her. Another time these girls came on—one beautiful and one as ugly as her attitude. They kicked off the ugly one, but the pretty one wanted to stay. In fact, she wanted to leave with us. As soon as the bus started in the giant empty arena parking lot, one tiny set of headlights turned on in the distance. Then the car came at us like something out of Christine. Our driver floored it, but she kept coming and almost rammed the bus. She was screaming out the window, “Give me back my friend!” And the pretty one didn’t want to go! Sorry. Maybe if you’d just been nicer.
When we got to Cleveland, Billy Corgan and the country singer David Allan Coe came to the show. Billy was standing next to me up front, singing along to every Pantera song but doing it in his Smashing Pumpkins voice. It was so surreal. There were a lot of pyrotechnics and concussive blasts in the show, and I had memorized the time from seeing the concert over and over. When I knew a loud noise was about to hit, I would elbow Billy and signal him to put his fingers in his ears. He was so cute about it. We all went to the Crazy Horse strip club after, and Billy came along. When the night was over, the back of Billy’s Range Rover was blocked by a pole, and we had to move it so all the extra people we’d been collecting could get in the back. I was the only one sober enough to drive, so I got behind the wheel super cocky, but I accidentally put it in reverse and backed it right into a pole. He wasn’t mad at all, and there was no physical d
amage—just to my ego.
I had decided Chicago would be where I left the circus. I needed to get back to work. We had a night off, so we got rooms at the Ritz. They’d wanted to stay at the Four Seasons, but the last time they were there Dimebag Darrell from Pantera threw a chair out the window and the band was banned. We got in at midmorning, and we went straight to bed. I was staying with Wookie and for some reason I fucked him. It was just a friend thing, but we passed out right after and slept all day.
We had a band dinner at this really nice steak house in the city, and the restaurant had a dress code that required jackets on the men. Fortunately, the restaurant loaned the guys some to wear. The rocker tour uniform was T-shirts, camo shorts, and combat boots—so imagine that topped with stuffy suit coats. We all strolled in like we were crashing the debutante ball, and they ended up getting so drunk. Kerry King from Slayer sat to my right, tattoos all over his bald head. Let the record show that throughout this whole ruckus, Kerry had impeccable table manners. He was the only one who knew which fork went with which dish.
There was a guy playing the harp, and at one point, Rex from Pantera went over and dropped a few hundreds in his bowl. He took the harp away and started playing it like a bass. I was just amazed they didn’t kick us out. Maybe Kerry’s good manners saved us.
After one last concert, it was time for me to go back to my own tour. My friend Exotica and her roadie husband, Vinnie, were throwing a Fourth of July party at their house in a residential area outside Chicago. Exotica was a gorgeous Latin feature dancer, and she said I could stay with her until Mac arrived with my Durango and trailer. “My friends will drop me off in the morning before the party,” I told her. “I can help set up.”
We partied all night in Chicago, and at 6 A.M., our huge tour bus rolled into Exotica’s white-picket-fence neighborhood. We parked, and the bus heaved a sigh of air brakes that I am sure woke the whole neighborhood, because suddenly people were all at their front doors. Exotica and her husband came out, too, staring with their mouths open.
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