Amateur Night at the Bubblegum Kittikat

by Victoria Fedden

  Amateur Night

  at the

  Bubblegum Kittikat

  VICTORIA FEDDEN

  Copyright © 2013 Victoria Fedden

  All rights reserved.

  DEDICATION

  To Millie, in the hope that you can learn from my mistakes. To Mark, for everything, and to strip club employees everywhere.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I owe endless gratitude to so many people who helped make this book a reality. Thank you first and foremost to my husband Mark, for his patience, enthusiasm, understanding, business sense, and for taking the baby so I could write. Many thanks to Brian Hill for his artistic vision. This book, in part, owes its existence to Stephanie Klein, for encouraging me over lunch one summer afternoon to go home and just start writing the book already. Luckily, I listened. I will forever be in debt to Professor Papatya Bucak for her constant encouragement, selfless assistance and belief in my writing. Deep appreciation to my friends Jeanne Genis, Courtney Watson and Gloria Fiedler for reading my rough drafts and providing honest and excellent feedback and to the real “Olivia” and “Angelina” for helping me through a rough time and still being there for me today. Thank you to the many kind readers of my blog “Wide Lawns and Narrow Minds” for sticking with me over the years, being my cheerleaders and keeping me writing. Thanks for letting me share my stories with you. Finally, I must express my profound gratitude to my family for their unconditional enthusiasm and for never telling me that I couldn’t.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Amateur Night at the Bubblegum Kittikat is a memoir. The events described in this book really happened to me and they are written with my own bias as I remember and perceived them. They are not meant to be exact, word for word portrayals (which would be impossible anyway) but are instead my recreations and dramatizations of occurrences and conversations. In a few cases I mildly compressed timelines. Throughout the text, I changed identifying characteristics such as, but not limited to, names and physical features to protect peoples’ privacy. This book was written with love and compassion and not to spite or offend and as crazy as most of it is, it is true.

  SONG ONE

  FULLY CLOTHED

  1

  I was starving and I wasn’t going to get a dinner break because we were so busy that I didn’t even have time to pop a shrimp tempura roll in my mouth while I cut cigars and signed up hopefuls for the Amateur Contest. I didn’t even like sushi, but in a strip club there’s always leftover Japanese take-out sitting around, and when you’re as hungry as I was, you don’t tend to be too picky. I’d just put my third, blonde tanorexic on the Amateur Night sign-up sheet (she’d called herself Finesse, God help me) when some young kid, totally trashed, threw up on the lobby’s black marble floor right in front of my cash register, so there went my appetite anyway. He’d looked underage to me, but hey, I wasn’t the one who’d let his fake ID slide. The bouncers were supposed to check IDs outside and all I did was take his fifteen dollar cover charge. I wasn’t security. I was the hostess.

  A couple minutes after we got the barf mopped up, three stretch Hummers pulled up with three separate bachelor parties and all hell broke loose when Temper got a thirty thousand dollar tip from a guy older than my dad who’d shown up in a yellow Lamborghini and refused to take off his sunglasses. Inside. At night. Thirty Gs is a lot of money, even at the Bubblegum Kittikat where ten thousand dollar tips were fairly common place, so it caused the entire place to go into a state of hyper-chaos. Great for me because I loved the entertainment. I could just sit back at my register and watch the drama unfold. It was certainly a lot more fun than the drama in my own life.

  The line to get into the Amateur Contest would soon wrap around the building. It was our most popular night and we had almost twenty girls signed up so I’d have to turn the rest of the hopefuls away or the contest would go on ’til last call. The funniest thing was that earlier, before the shit storm hit, my coworkers had tried to goad me into signing up for the contest. I’d worked the door for more than six months, a record of sorts, without giving in to the temptation to strap on a pair of clear heels and take the stage. It was time, they said. Everyone had to try it at least once, and think of the money. I thought about it a lot actually, considered it seriously, which was crazy because until only recently if someone had told me I should try stripping, I’d have done a spit-take and joked that most men would probably pay to have me put my clothes back on. The dancers seemed super human and goddess-like, an entirely different species of woman than the mousy girl I’d always been. Six months at the club had changed me though. I wasn’t so mousy anymore but I still wasn’t sure I could take that final step. I was an outsider there and this wasn’t really my world. Was it?

  To think, a year earlier I couldn’t have even comprehended the idea of going to a strip club, much less working in one, but there I was with my hair teased and my ass poured into a leather mini skirt. Hot as hell, thigh-high, patent boots had replaced the clunky Mary Janes I used to clomp around in when I worked as a kindergarten teacher’s aide. People asked me all the time how I could go from working with kids to working with exotic dancers. It’s crazy, but wrangling strippers isn’t a lot different than trying to keep order in a classroom of five year olds. The issues are the same. Someone’s looking at me. Someone’s touching my stuff. She took my toy. He hit me. Yes and even “he bit me.” That’s mine. No, it’s mine. Sit in your seat. No name calling. Keep your hands to yourself. See, there’s no difference. The biggest difference was me. I laughed to myself when I thought of how much can change in less than a year and where life can take you when least expect it and when you have no choice left but to take a chance.

  Everyone at the Bubblegum Kittikat had a story, including me. People who’ve led ideal lives generally don’t end up at working at strip clubs, high-end or not and I was no different. I’d come to the club timid, abused, bullied, afraid of the world and of myself. If you asked most of the dancers, they’d tell similar stories. Like me, they’d tell you that the club had been there for them, had taken them in, saved them even when they’d needed it most, because the club was a family, albeit a dysfunctional one that could turn on you at any second. More than a family, the Bubblegum Kittikat was its own parallel universe and you had to be careful not to get sucked into its black hole. The black hole was different for everyone. It depended on your weaknesses. For some it was drugs; others succumbed to greed or vanity. Even the drama was addicting and you had to be strong to resist its constant pull. Few could. Myself included.

  The Kittikat, as it was known, billed itself as “Klassy” but when you spell classy with a “K” how seriously can you take the claim and for that matter, isn’t “high-end strip club” one of those oxymorons like absolutely unsure and casual sex?

  If you asked me when I was three what I wanted to be when I grew up, I actually would have told you I wanted to be a hostess, but I meant in a restaurant, not the topless bar where I ended up working the door. I traded in my hostessing aspirations at around six years old anyway, deciding I’d rather be a mermaid, and when I dropped out of high school in the middle of eleventh grade, I had no career prospects at all. My late teens and early twenties were a series of jobs meant to get the bills paid and the Kittikat was no different, at least not at first. I took the job because I had to pay my lawyers, because I was bored and depressed and because I had something to prove. I certainly didn’t think I was going to learn anything.

  By the time I walked through the mirrored doors of the Bubblegum Kittikat, South Florida’s finest gentlemen’s club, I’d gone through a total of twelve jobs. Strip club hostess was my lucky thirteen. I was twenty-six years o
ld and had recently moved in with my parents after my fiancé and I broke up. We’d been engaged for three years, together for seven, and he refused to set a date or to even think about wedding plans, saying he didn’t believe in marriage and I’d pressured him into getting the ring. Our fights had escalated before he changed the locks on me in June, although they’d always been pretty bad. In the beginning he only hit me a couple times a year, but towards the end of our relationship he was backhanding me across the face at least once a week.

  I kept the abuse a secret, because from the outside it looked like we had the perfect life. We lived in Atlanta where he worked for one of the most prestigious law firms in town. He was educated too, so when you picture my ex-fiancé get rid of the trailer park image. Preppy to a fault, he obsessed over golf and was all about the country club lifestyle. He was movie star gorgeous with green eyes that made women stop to compliment him wherever he went. That’s why I used to think he was way too good for me, like I was Wal-mart to his Neiman Marcus. Why would someone like him want frumpy me with an overbite, a slouch and my hair pushed behind my ears?

  I loved our house probably as much as I loved him. We lived in a grey, Cape Cod cottage right in Midtown and I didn’t want to leave it. It symbolized so much to me. Even more than the picket fence life I longed for, that house meant that I wasn’t a loser. I had bought it myself with money I saved and a first time homeowner’s loan. It was my house. I’d owned a house at twenty-three years old and that was a pretty big deal to someone who’d grown up moving constantly. My arrival in Fort Lauderdale on June 12, 2000, at age twenty-six, marked my twenty-ninth move.

  Evan and I had been living together in a rented apartment when I decided to buy the cottage. I’d given him the option to go in on it with me, but he’d refused. My name alone was on the deed and that’s important because when we broke up, he sued me for part ownership.

  Evan was smarter than me, had more money and had access to legal resources I could never dream of, so he concocted a plan to get rid of me and steal my house, which had gone up in value exponentially since I’d bought it. He changed the locks while I was visiting my grandparents and told me not to come back. I know you’d think that wasn’t possible, but citing some obscure law, he was legally considered my tenant and I was considered his landlord apparently, and it was all too confusing to even explain, so although this was wickedly unfair, it was totally legal to steal my house and leave me homeless.

  Thank God for my parents, even though I’d vowed nearly a decade before never to live in South Florida again. I’d never forgiven them for uprooting me in the tenth grade and moving out of New York to Fort Lauderdale, a place where I never belonged, but when you’re left on the street, you’re devastated, scared half to death and your heart is so broken that you can’t eat or sleep or walk straight because you feel like you’re going to die from anxiety and despair, then you just need to go home and try to get yourself straightened out.

  But if you have parents like mine, the first thing they’ll do is get you a job at a strip club.

  2

  My first morning in Florida I woke up way too early. When going through a traumatic break-up, I firmly believe that you have every right to sleep in. In fact, if you would like to sleep for seventeen hours straight and not move from the bed for a solid week, I am perfectly OK with it. But no. At my parents’ house, this simply wasn’t possible.

  I couldn’t sleep in for several reasons and none of them made me feel any better about my unfortunate situation. First, my parents have an inexplicable aversion to any sort of window treatments, so if you’re staying at their house and you don’t get out of bed before eight am, you’re in danger of getting a blistering sunburn from the intense concentration of ultra-violet rays that blaze through every window in the damned house making it feel like it’s about 125 degrees. I nearly burnt alive in the guestroom bed with the scratchy, bedazzled comforter that my mom got on closeout. My mom’s a compulsive shopper and the woman is obsessed with Tuesday Morning, Marshalls and TJ Maxx and could my mother possibly own something that was not covered in sequins, beads, rhinestones or large plastic jewels? Just something? Couldn’t she for once just purchase a simple cotton bedspread that was not printed with an elaborate scene involving an epic battle between what appeared to be snow leopards and…robots? No, it wasn’t robots, it was just a weird configuration of beads that ended up looking like robots when your eyes were swollen shut from sobbing, you were sleep deprived and when you were practically blinded by the sun, because although your mother could buy bead encrusted bedspreads, she could not buy window shades.

  The second reason, well really the second and third reasons that I couldn’t sleep had to do with my father who was listening to the classic rock station on the radio and had The Who turned up so loud that the bass was literally rattling the windows. As if that were not enough he sang while he cooked eggs and onions. In our family, you don’t even dare eat an onion unless it is shriveled and black beyond recognition, so my dad burns his onions first and then mixes them into scrambled eggs. I have to admit, the eggs and onions are pretty good, but they stink and that morning the entire house smelled like burnt onions.

  The sun, The Who and burnt onions would have been sufficient to rouse even the deepest sleeper, but alas, there was more. This was Casa Azul after all – my parents’ house, so of course there was more. They tend to overdo everything. Light, noise and bad odors were mild irritations, and in addition to these three things, the dogs were barking so frantically that I almost thought intruders had stormed the house and were stabbing my mother and sister to death while my dad made eggs, but my mother was already enjoying probably her third or fourth cigarette of the morning, so I knew she was alive and well. I could smell the smoke. The phone rang, a door slammed (probably my younger sister Natalie, equally as irritated as I was about being woken up), and torrents of water fell from the sky with a deafening roar that nearly drowned out The Who and the dogs.

  It couldn’t be raining though, because as I mentioned earlier, the sun was shining all too brightly. It certainly looked like rain. It splattered on the patio and poured from the eaves and the calm surface of the pool was dappled with spatters and speckles like raindrops. Water beaded on the Saint Augustine grass in the side yard, dripped from the date palm’s fronds and puddled under the oleander bush. For all intents and purposes, it was raining, but there were no clouds in the sky. Not a one. And it was so bright that we may as well have been on the sun and not light years from it. This didn’t make sense. It shouldn’t rain with the sun out under any circumstances and especially not when I was going through the worst breakup in the history of all breakups and had just lost my house, my best friend, my cats, my stuff, my jobs and my fiancé.

  The instant I opened the bedroom door my parents’ psychotic, 150 pound Doberman lunged for me, hackles raised and teeth bared. I nearly peed my pajamas, and slammed the door shut so the dog wouldn’t disembowel me before breakfast. This dog was certifiably wacko -something about him growing too large and his brain being too big for his skull. Dobermans are not supposed to be 150 pounds. Regular sized they are scary enough, but at that size I can assure you they are the most terrifying thing you have ever seen. The dog had attacked several people already and more than one vet advised that he be put to sleep because DUH, he was extremely dangerous. They sent him to special dog training schools and all of the trainers agreed.

  “This dog has to be destroyed. He’ll turn on you one day,” they said.

  My parents didn’t listen because they aren’t in the habit of listening to things involving common sense. They loved the dog and the dog loved them. They couldn’t imagine him turning on them because he was a 150 pound teddy bear when he was alone with them. Yeah, I thought, a 150 pound teddy bear with fangs bigger than my index finger and a taste for fresh blood

  In order to avoid being forced to put the dog down, my parents had him fitted with a shock collar and they each carried its remote control whe
rever they went. That way if the dog went ape shit on someone, before he could maim or dismember a person, one of my parents could essentially taser their dog, knock him out and save whomever the dog had been attacking. It’s a great mental image, isn’t it? A one armed child and a tasered dog. Beautiful.

  Trapped in the guest room I began to scream for my mother to come get the dog, to shock it, to hold it or whatever she had to do in order for me to be allowed out of the guestroom.

  “What is the matter with you?” she asked through the door.

  “Your god damned dog won’t let me out of the room!!”

  She laughed hysterically, or maniacally. Pick one.

  “I got him!”

  I inched out. She held the dog by his collar while he growled.

  “Cut that shit out! Do you want me to taser your ass? Stop it. That is your sister!”

  Yes, overnight I had become the older sister to a one year old, 150 pound Doberman with a serious mood disorder. That sounded about right. For my whole life my parents had been referring to their pets as their children. Growing up I had three monkeys as siblings; actual, honest to god monkeys. By this point the monkeys had gone to live “on a big farm” somewhere where they were rumored to be playing with lots of other monkeys in monkeyfied bliss.

  The smaller dog came running, a hundred miles an hour down the hallway, his black nails skidding on the tiles, sending him slamming into the baseboards before he latched onto my leg with his very sharp teeth. The small dog was probably equally as psychotic as the big dog, except, when a dog is only eight pounds, its psychosis just doesn’t merit the same degree of concern. This one I just shook off in the way that you might brush some toast crumbs or a Daddy Longlegs off your pants. The small dog definitely instigated the big dog. He totally egged him on because as soon as the small dog arrived the big dog resumed lunging and snarling, while the small dog jumped straight up and down yapping as viciously as an eight pound Miniature Pinscher can manage.