Of Fleshpots and Moneybags

Scotch and journalism can impart the courage to undertake duties one might otherwise flinch from.

Not being a Scotch drinker, I must rely on journalism, in the service of which a colleague and I toured one of the new establishments called a “gentleman’s club.”

Their billboards are everywhere--too omnipresent for the liking of people in towns like Chatsworth, where the billboard of a demi-clad woman with breasts the size of igloos had to cover up or come down. In the sports pages, the ads appear alongside others that hold out the prospect of more hair, bigger penises, a better golf game, a faster hard drive.

Who says business is fleeing Southern California? “Gentlemen’s clubs” are a growth industry. By the airport, in North Hollywood, Gardena, Van Nuys. Four have opened in the city of Industry in 18 months, a sheriff’s investigator tells me, and more are on deck.

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This one featured “Southern California’s most beautiful dancers.” They all do. Candi, Amber or Bobbi come “direct from Las Vegas,” or more likely from day care or computer class or watching the soaps, to undress on a neon-illumined runway, at whose rim the customers--the gentlemen--sit so attentive and poker-faced before strenuous exhibitions of flesh so intimate that a few visits could get them board-certified in ob-gyn.

Promising abandon, the place delivered dreariness. Its vices are regulated: alcohol cannot be sold in proximity to completely naked women, only half-naked ones, and then only the top half. A patron of the black-painted “lap dancing” booths is enjoined to keep his hands behind him while the young woman (whose mind is probably on day care or computer class) grinds convincingly on his knees.

In the women’s bathroom, the stall doors have been removed. “Lewd conduct such as masterbation is prohibited”--so says the ill-spelled sign near the lobby cash machine.

And to think of the shock 50 years ago when Glendora resident Sally Rand--the darling and scandal of the 1934 Chicago World’s Fair, the woman who put “fan dancer” into the lexicon of raciness--danced a benefit at Grace Episcopal Church. Some of the gentlemen were quite put out that she did not take off more.

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The “gentleman’s club” of Sherlock Holmes’ London served manifold purposes, among them a refuge from women, children, servants. L.A.’s clubs have as much to do with gentlemen as Hooters, the restaurant chain, has to do with barn owls. Yet they too allow a refuge, but from a certain kind of woman--a co-worker, perhaps boss--in favor of women who, for a price, are always complaisant, always pretty, forever smiling and silent.

To call them “gentlemen’s clubs” instead of “strip joints” is in keeping with our love of the elevating euphemism, as potato-chip deliverymen are “executive snack route consultants.” The head of the LAPD’s porno unit, Det. Bob Navarro, perceives in the up-market decor and bold promotion “almost an appeal to the people who come in there--’Hey, you’re OK if you come in this place, you don’t have a problem.’ ”

He sees immense problems, a unified field theory of sleaze and lawlessness: nudie shows, porn, prostitution, rape, child molestation. “We just try to chip off the big pile of caca here. It’s just a process.”

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Regulars show up as early as 4:30 p.m, which marks them as workers at the blue-collar industries on the streets around the club: machining, plating, recycling, metalworking.

What becomes of such workers after they spend 15 or 20 years of strength and muscle and have nothing left to sell the high-tech market is a subject for political discourse. The same can be asked of women who have a few years of limberness and looks to sell.

When I first wrote about “Madam Alex,” the Beverly Hills madam, Heidi Fleiss’ mentor, she appraised me head to toe. “If you’d come to me a few years ago,” she pronounced, “I could have made you some real money.” Last week, one “gentleman’s club” dancer told us that her boyfriend remarked with a touch of rueful envy, “I show my [penis] and I get thrown in jail. You show your [breasts] and get $300 a night.”

Clothed men feel in control of naked women. Naked women feel in control of men’s wallets. And the clubs’ owners get $3.75 for a cup of coffee, a percentage of the lap-dancing take, and don’t have to so much as take off a necktie.

So consider the morality not just of fleshpots but of moneybags, when almost anything is assigned a mercantile value. A Houston strip club trades shares on the stock exchange. Demi Moore gets $12 million to play a stripper, and I don’t think they use stunt breasts.

What is amiss when enough twirls around the fire pole, enough syncopated squirms in a man’s lap, can earn a young woman more than being a new-minted teacher or lawyer or CPA?

A decade ago in Hollywood, I met a woman of about the same age as the women stripping for the gentlemen of the club. She had been on the street since she was 12, an ex-junkie, a mother of three. She couldn’t make tacos fast enough to keep a minimum-wage job. But she could make $20 in 20 minutes, dancing naked. Considering what she was at 20, I sometimes wonder what she has become at 30.