Rebeckka Black - Dance to Despair - Memoirs of an Exotic Dancer

One of the women that were held captive managed to escape from the wooden shack and made her way to a nearby police department. The police escorted the young woman back to the scene of the crime where further investigation uncovered a woman’s body that had been buried underneath a junk car. I was mortified, but not entirely surprised, because I had a bad feeling about the couple to begin with.

The most frightening part was knowing that I had actually accepted a ride to the Nite Strip Lounge from a killer. A few minutes after I finished reading the article, Mr. Roth returned to the office. He resumed his position behind the desk and lit up his cigar. “Just tell me one thing,” he said, “What was a classy broad like you doing working for a dope like Casey?” I laughed at the man’s question. He was so crass that he was actually amusing. This was the question that ultimately broke the ice between this reputed tyrant and me. I gave Mr. Roth a quick review of what I had experienced while working in the last two clubs. As our conversation continued, I learned that he and the late owner of the Ruby Garter Club had been business adversaries for years.

During the 1970’s and the 1980’s there was an abundance of strip clubs in the Chicagoland area. Club owners were extremely competitive with one another.

The Nite Strip Lounge had a reputation for having the most beautiful women and sharpest hustlers in all of the Chicagoland area. It wasn’t uncommon for club owners to try to recruit each other’s top performers. Dancers were often lured away from their current employers with the promise of considerably higher earnings at another club. Club owners recruited each other’s dancers by sending in their doorman or managers to pose as a customer. The undercover recruits would spend several hours watching the show, both on the stage and off. After hours of observation, they would flag down the dancers that interested them and extend offers of employment.

Some of the strip club owners attempted to control the dancers by threatening to have them black balled from every other club in the Chicagoland area. Some of the dancers were intimidated by this practice and never attempted to leave. The more defiant women simply quit and took their chances.

Vince Roth was famous for black balling his employees and he openly admitted it. If one of his dancers left to work for one of his competitors, he would call the club owner and tell him not to hire her because she was caught stealing or prostituting. Besides black balling the dancers, Mr. Roth could be terribly abusive to his employees and no one was exempt. Not even his managers or business partners escaped his wrath. He went through a lot of dancers because of his foul mouth and explosive temper. If you were a sensitive person, you were definitely working for the wrong man.

It was hell working for a person like this. Just about every other word that left his mouth was foul. As far as he was concerned, everybody was a “fucking prick” or a “fucking idiot.” Mr. Roth had a definite presence about him that many people found intimidating, and he knew it.

In spite of all of his negative attributes, and believe me there were many, Mr. Roth was a shrewd businessman. He knew the business inside and out and had what it took to make a fortune. Although many disliked him, he was the most competent club owner that I had ever met. As I got to know him, I found that beneath all the layers of garbage was a very wise and sometimes even humane man. Unfortunately, his few redeeming qualities rarely surfaced.

Vince Roth had one quality that set him apart from all the other club owners that I had ever worked for. Most club owners thrived on the misfortunes of their employees, but Vince was different. He wasn’t oblivious to the pit falls of the business and always encouraged the dancers to save their hard earned money.

He had a lot of pet peeves, but the one that bothered him the most was when women would surrender their hard-earned money to their pimps or parasitic significant others. Of all the dancers that worked at Nite Strip Lounge, at least half of them had a pimp or something equivalent sucking them dry of their money.

Saturday night was our designated payday. Our pay was put in little brown envelopes with our names written on them. We were paid in cash and the amount of the money in the envelopes usually exceeded $2,000. The dancers that had pimps weren’t allowed to take out even a penny from their pay envelopes without the consent of their pimps. Most of these women owned very few clothes outside of their stage costumes. Many of them wore second-hand clothes from thrift stores.

A prime example of this was a thirty-six year old woman who had a master’s degree. She was very pretty and considered to be a top producer. This woman made over $4,000 a week, but in inclement weather she would come into work with a horse blanket wrapped around her. She didn’t even own a winter coat. Her pimp, on the other hand, wore a full-length mink.

The first time I saw Vince Roth lose his temper was on a Saturday night. It was approximately four o’clock in the morning. Most of the dancers were in the dressing room getting ready to go home. I was standing at the bar drinking my last cup of coffee for the evening. When Vince went to the front door to throw his cigarette butt out, he happened to see a plethora of pimps lined up in their cars waiting for their girlfriends to get off work. Furious, Vince immediately called a meeting with all of the dancers and absolutely forbid them to allow their pimps to pick them up at the club in the future. He ended the meeting by telling us that if we didn’t like it, we could leave. One of the dancers, whose pimp was waiting for her outside, became angry and told Vince that she was going to quit and walked out the door. He stormed out after her and began to beat the woman in the parking lot. He knocked her to the ground, tore her purse from her shoulder, reached inside and pulled out the brown envelope that held her pay for the week. Vince took the money, shoved it into his back pocket, and threw the empty envelope at one of the pimp’s Eldorados. The beaten dancer’s pimp pulled out of the parking lot leaving the blood-covered woman to fend for herself.

Vince stormed back into the club waving a fist full of money at all of us. “If I ever see anymore of your pimps waiting for you outside of this fucking club again; you’re out of here!” Then he started to yell at his manager calling him a “stupid fucking jag off” for hiring the woman to begin with.

Anyone who works for Vince learns that the best thing to do when he becomes explosive is to ignore him. Any attempt to argue or pacify him was futile. There was no doubt about it; Vince was an extremely difficult person to work for. He worked us hard and forced us to make money even when we didn’t want to. “You lazy broads will never make this kind of money again!” he would shout. At the time, all of us thought that he was just an obsessive slave driver. But in hindsight, I now realize that the man was right.

Vince was a creature of habit. Every Monday he would show up at the club at about 8:00 p.m., just like clockwork. Dressed to the hilt in his newest ensemble, he would strut around the club showing off his new clothes to all of the dancers while reminding us that his new suit and shoes cost more than we “stupid broads” made in a week. When he was done making a spectacle of himself, he would go behind the bar and check the books to see how much money the club had made while he was away. If he wasn’t satisfied with the proceeds, he began to scream at the bartenders and the manager blaming them for the decline in business.

After Vince had finished yelling at all of us because we didn’t bring in enough money, he would ask the night manager if any “new broads” had started. If the manager said yes, Vince would go get himself a cup of coffee and stand by the bar watching each and every woman dance. If the manager hired a dancer that Vince didn’t approve of, all hell would break loose.