by Aya De León
“You like that when I put my ta-tas in your face, don’t you?” she asked, teasingly.
“You’re so beautiful, Cleopatra,” he murmured.
“You didn’t come see me last week,” she whispered in his ear, a pout in her voice. “I was devastated.”
“I had to travel for business,” he said. “One of these days, maybe you’ll come with me.”
Lily giggled, a high, tinkling sound that otherwise seemed out of her register. “Pierre, you know that’s against the rules. Just don’t make me wait two weeks again.” She finished the dance with a soft brush of her ass against the fly of his pants and a gasp, as if she were on the verge of an orgasm. Over the years, there had been a few customers who actually did it for her like that, but Pierre certainly wasn’t one of them.
Just before eleven p.m., Lily strutted onstage. The young blonde from Guadeloupe had just stepped into the audience and was giving a lap dance to one of the customers.
He was drunk. “Come on, baby, let’s go into the VIP room to socialize.” He tried to grab her, but she slid deftly out of his grasp.
“No thanks,” she said with a big grin. “I just love dancing for you.”
One of his boys stood up and pushed her into the drunk guy’s lap. He grabbed her, and Lily could see her struggling to get away, her smile at half-mast, her eyes wide and brow furrowed. The customer stood up, attempting to march her into the VIP room.
“Security!” the girl yelled, but it was hard to hear her over the music. She twisted away, but this time without the grin. Two of the man’s friends stepped behind her so she couldn’t escape. The customer grabbed her wrist and pulled her close, then slapped her.
Lily yelled to the security guard, “Do something!” He shrugged and stayed posted up against the column.
Lily stepped off the stage in the middle of her number. She grabbed the manager.
“Why isn’t security doing anything? That guy just slapped one of the dancers.”
“He’s a friend of the owner,” the manager said. “Get back on stage.”
Lily turned back to the drunk guy. He was still pulling on the blonde. She looked around. Another girl had stepped up to dance in Lily’s spot, and most of the guys in the club weren’t paying attention. She could see the girls on all six stages were keeping up their game faces, but their eyes kept flitting to where the drunk guy was still manhandling the blonde.
One of the security guys stood up from the column he was leaning against. He began walking briskly toward the altercation. Before he could arrive to restrain the guy, the manager intercepted him and sent him back to his post. Lily could see his face was tight with anger. The club explained to the dancers that their house fees paid for security. But here they had four security guys, and none of them was going to help.
Lily was furious. She strode over to the customer and punched him in the face. He went down hard as Lily put a protective arm around the blonde from Guadeloupe and dared the drunk guy’s friends to do anything. There were three of them, and they began to square off against the two women.
Lily looked again at the manager and the security guards, all of them standing around doing nothing.
Suddenly the music stopped. Giselle stood by the sound booth, and Tara turned on the work lights. Both were stony faced and looking from Lily to the manager.
“That’s it,” Lily said. “We’re shutting this place down.”
Giselle stepped up next to Lily with the power cord to the sound system in her hand. “I’d rather blow my landlord for a free month’s rent than put up with this bullshit,” she hissed to Lily.
The patrons all began to stand up, squinting and grumbling.
“Hey,” the manager said, switching the lights back off. “Get back to work. Where’s that fucking power cord?”
Giselle passed it behind her back to Lily, who wound it around her hips a few times under her extremely skimpy Catholic schoolgirl skirt and hid both ends in her cleavage.
Once the cord was hidden, she stepped forward to the manager.
“It’s bad enough that your new policies practically force us into your VIP room, but you’re gonna let a guy drag her in?” Lily said. “That’s crossing the line. We’re walking out. Come on, girls. Let’s get our shit and all go out together.”
A handful of the girls remained on the stage. Their eyes darted from Lily to the manager. One was Hibiscus, the other girl from Trinidad; she stood on the stage in a squat. Another was a young Latina with blue hair and no papers. She had both arms and one of her legs wrapped around the pole. But all the sensuality and languor had left her body. Instead, her limbs were all tense angles as she clung to the pole like a tree in a storm.
The patrons looked uncomfortable and disoriented. They blinked against the unaccustomed light, which showed the grime on the walls, dust in the corners, and cobwebs on the ceiling.
The dozen girls in the walkout all crossed to the tiny dressing room. On the way through the club, a young black man in thick-rimmed glasses came up to Lily.
“I got the whole thing on video,” he said. “Where the drunk guy slapped her and everything. Gimme your info and I’ll send it to you.”
“Meet me in the alley out back,” she said and slipped into the dressing room.
As quickly as they could, the dancers retrieved their purses and cash from the lockers.
When they headed out through the club, the manager yelled threats. “This is your last chance to get back to work or all of you are getting fired. And who stole the DJ’s power cord?”
The alarm sounded as the girls went out the back exit and hit the alley with summer-weight jackets barely covering their lingerie. Most of them had on extra-high dancing heels, but had street shoes and clothes dangling from their hands.
Several of them changed shoes or stepped into jeans and skirts right on the street. They held onto each other to avoid letting their bare feet touch the wet ground.
The security guard who had tried to help came out, as well.
“I dunno what the fuck was going on in there,” he said. “But I can’t work somewhere that I’m supposed to turn a blind eye to some shit like that.”
As he strode off down toward the street, the nerdy black guy walked up the alley and approached Lily again. He was around thirty and handsome behind the glasses. He walked alongside the group of women as they headed down the alley to the avenue block, repeating his request for her information.
“Seriously,” he said. “I’m not trying to hit on you, I’m an investigative journalist. I can’t post it myself, because it’s illegal to film, but you want this to get out there, right?”
“Yeah,” Lily said. “Send it to a friend of mine. Tyesha at vegaclinic dot org.”
He typed the address into his phone and headed off down the street.
“Are you okay?” Lily asked the young blonde from Guadeloupe.
“I’m fine,” she said through clenched teeth. “Can I get a copy of that video? In case I want to sue the club?”
“Of course,” Lily said. “Could I have your permission to post a clip on the Internet? I’d make sure no one could recognize your face.”
The young blonde agreed as they reached the end of the alley.
“What do we do now?” Giselle asked Lily as they stepped out onto the street, which was still lively at nearly midnight.
“I gotta call my girl Tyesha,” Lily said, as they walked past the club’s front entrance. “She’ll know.”
Suddenly, a big group of white thugs came thundering down the street. “You bitches need to either get back up on a pole or get off this street if you don’t want to get your asses kicked.”
Several girls ran down toward the opposite end of the street, but some others got cut off and had to run into the building. Lily ran into the dressing room as several girls ran out the rear door and back out into the alley. The emergency alarm sounded again.
Through a crack in the door, she could see the owner, Teddy Hughes, come into the
club, a white man in his fifties, with a craggy face and unnaturally black hair.
“Are the girls all gone?” Teddy asked the manager, the one who had refused to do anything.
“Yeah,” the manager said. “Why’d Viktor have to send his goon squad? He’s supposed to be the silent partner.”
“Those weren’t Viktor’s goons,” Teddy said. “They belonged to the nephew, Ivan. Fucking Ukrainian mob. Those assholes are nothing but trouble.”
Lily slid her cell phone out of her purse and pulled up the recording app.
She hit record just as the manager said, “What’s done is done.”
Lily nearly dropped the phone when there was a sudden loud banging on the club’s front door.
She heard the street door open and close.
“What the hell happened?” a loud voice with a Slavic accent asked.
“Your nephew went too far with one of the girls. He slapped her,” Teddy said.
“That’s not what Ivan says,” the Slavic voice insisted. “He says she was a tease. She said yes at first, then no.”
“A hundred guys were in here and saw it,” Teddy, the owner, said.
“Did you see it?”
“No, but my manager here did.”
“You need to keep your girls in line,” Viktor, the Ukrainian guy, said. “We’re your biggest investors, remember?”
“And your nephew just cost you a lot of money,” Teddy said. “This is a strip club, not a brothel. Girls have the right to choose to spend time with customers in private rooms. What they do in there is not my business.”
“But the money this club makes is both of our business. Which is why I insisted that we convert that second dressing room to a deluxe VIP room,” Viktor said. “Two or three girls for the man who can afford it. Get some bigger spenders in here. Why do the girls need a second dressing room anyway? It’s not like they have a lot to put on.” He laughed.
“It’s really cramped in there,” Teddy was saying. “We have a dozen girls, and they’re squeezed in like sardines. I’ll show you.”
Lily heard footsteps heading toward her. She looked around the dressing room. There was little cover, but she managed to wedge herself between the two coat racks and pulled a forgotten trench coat over herself like a curtain. It covered most of her body, but she was still easily visible.
“First let me see the new VIP room,” the Ukrainian man asked.
Lily heard the door open to the former dressing room. This was her chance to sneak out. She crept from her hiding place in the dressing room and peeked out toward the front door. Two thickset men lounged in the lobby.
Lily snapped her body back into the dressing room. She glanced around and saw a rolling stool. The room was illuminated by a bare bulb overhead, and there were also lights around the one large mirror. Lily rolled the stool underneath the light bulb and unscrewed it a quarter turn. The overhead light went out.
With the illumination coming only from the makeup mirror, the room was shadowy enough. She ducked back under the raincoat and called Tyesha.
“Girl,” Tyesha began. “Mr. Wall Street’s stocks could definitely perform—”
Lily hit several of the numbers on the phone to get Tyesha’s attention.
“What the fuck?” Tyesha asked.
“You gotta help me, Ty,” Lily hissed into the phone. “A girl got grabbed at the club. We all walked out, but then some Ukrainian thugs came for us. I’m hiding in the dressing room. I think they’ll kill me if they find me.”
“I’m on my way,” Tyesha said. “Silence your phone. I’ll text when I get close and pull up in the alley.”
A moment after Lily hung up the phone, the door to the dressing room opened.
“Damn light is burned out again,” the owner complained.
The Ukrainian shrugged. “All these dressing rooms look the same. There’s plenty of room. Fire all those bitches who walked out tonight. If the new girls complain, fire them, too.”
Then the owner snapped off the mirror lights and walked out, leaving the door open a crack. Lily crept from her hiding place and saw that both men had headed into the office. The two thugs were still at the front door. She stepped back into the shadows and waited.
Chapter 3
Thirty minutes later, Tyesha texted that she was close. Lily looked out; none of the men had changed position.
Lily looked around the room. She spotted a blue bobbed wig that had been abandoned on the counter and snatched it up. On the coat rack, she saw a long pink raincoat that one of the dancers had left behind. She pulled it down slowly so that the hangers wouldn’t bang together like a warning chime. She rummaged around in a locker of lost and found clothes, and found a pair of thigh-high white stockings and a garter belt.
As she put on all the clothes, her heart sank. She realized she would need to leave her best pair of stilettos. If she wore them, they would only slow her down. And she couldn’t carry them because she needed both hands free. She jammed them under a pile of towels and stood at the door, her heart hammering.
A burst of laughter and the clink of glasses could be heard from the office. One of the thugs at the door got a phone call. Lily could faintly hear a siren from the street.
Finally, her phone lit up. From Tyesha: in the alley
Lily slung her purse across her chest and zipped her cell inside. She waited for the thug on the phone to speak: “You tell that dick-brain—”
She took off, swinging open the dressing room door and sprinting down the back hallway, turning off the light as she ran.
The thugs saw her and snapped into action, rushing after her.
The sound of running boots got the attention of the two men in the office, who stepped out into the hallway, carrying shot glasses. The owner also had a bottle of vodka in his hand.
The thugs ran past them. All they could see was a flash of blue wig, and long, pale legs running beneath the pink raincoat.
Lily’s stockinged feet slapped against the cement floor, followed by the thudding of the thugs’ boots.
“Catch that bitch,” the owner yelled, but Lily had made it to the end of the hall.
She hit the back exit at full speed, jamming the bar with the heels of her hands. The door opened, and the emergency alarm sounded.
Four pairs of men’s shoes could barely be heard above the wail of the alarm.
Lily exploded out of the building, a Technicolor streak of hot pink, electric blue, and white.
Tyesha’s silver compact two-door was waiting in the alley, passenger door open and dirt smudged across the license plate. Tyesha started moving the car at the sight of Lily, who ran alongside the vehicle for a few strides before leaping in.
Just as she closed the door, the four men spilled out of the building. The two thugs had guns drawn.
Tyesha watched the road as Lily peeked over her shoulder to see the men fire off two shots. She screamed as a bullet whizzed past. One of the thugs began to run after the car, but the Ukrainian shouted something, and he stopped.
Tyesha took the corner, tires screeching.
“Did we lose ’em?” Tyesha asked.
Lily was panting. “I think so.” She waited to see if anyone would come running around the corner. “And it’s too far to get their cars out of valet.”
“We did it!” Tyesha crowed, grinning and yanking off the dark wool cap she had pulled low over her face. “And your little disguise was a genius move.”
“Are you kidding me?” Lily said. “I’m the darkest girl in the place. One look at my legs and they’d know it was me.”
After they’d driven for a block, Lily added, “Damn, I shoulda taken my shoes.”
Tyesha rolled down the windows and let the night’s cooling humid air whirl through the car. Both women’s hair flew around them in the hurricane breeze.
This was it, Tyesha thought to herself, her heart beating from the close call, but her body filled with elation. The feeling she had been missing lately. The excitement, but also th
e sense of purpose. Something she couldn’t find in dating or day-to-day work. The hard grit of the fight, and the soaring taste of the win.
As they drove, Lily played the recording of the owner and mobster talking.
“Nothing you caught is particularly incriminating,” Tyesha said.
Lily sucked her teeth. “I couldn’t get it when he said ‘Ukrainian mob.’ Where are you going? This is the long way to my apartment.”
“We’re not going to your apartment,” Tyesha said. “If the mob is involved and you’re a known troublemaker, you need to stay away for a few days. We’re going to my apartment.”
* * *
Tyesha turned down the block of her brownstone to see a figure sitting on the first of the three steps that led down to her basement apartment. She drove quickly past, but she could see that the figure was female. The girl’s head was down, so she couldn’t see her face. Her hair, however, was fabulous, with pink tips that swooped from high up near her temple on one side, down to below her ear on the other. The bob was asymmetrical, but the dye job was diagonal.
“Who’s that?” Lily asked.
“No idea,” Tyesha said. “And I never give the clients at work my home address.”
They circled the block, and this time the girl’s head was up. As they drew closer, Tyesha recognized her niece, Deza. She had a similar heart-shaped face to Tyesha’s, with the same full lips and large brown eyes. As always, the girl was a walking advertisement for her hair business.
“Deza!” Tyesha shrieked, double-parking and running out of the car. As the two women embraced on the street, an SUV nearby was pulling out.
Lily got behind the wheel and took the parking space.
“I missed you so much, Auntie,” Deza said into Tyesha’s shoulder.
“How are you? How’s everything?” Tyesha asked.