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

Her dream date was eagerly rubbing her back. I interrupted the happy couple so that I could ask Sefra to go into the dressing room with me. I used the excuse that I needed to borrow one of her costumes.

Sefra excused herself from Angelo, and together we walked toward the direction of the dressing room. I explained to her that I had landed a big spender and that I needed her to join me in the booth. Sefra ditched her worthless customer, and joined Rudy and I in the booth. When Rudy met Sefra he was in seventh heaven.

“This must be a dream!” he exclaimed. “How did I get so lucky,” he asked. Rudy was totally mesmerized by our presence and couldn’t spend his money fast enough.

He ended up spending quite a lot of money on the both of us that evening. Rudy was one of the few customers that actually left happy even though the man basically received nothing for his money. He began to pay homage to the club on Tuesday nights.

After about eight weeks worth of Rudy’s Tuesday night visits, Sefra and I decided that he would probably make a good candidate for a lunch date. When we approached Rudy with our lunch date proposal, he was very receptive to the idea.

We began to see him on Monday afternoons for lunch at a restaurant located inside of a shopping mall. The three of us always met at the same place and time every week. There were two reasons why we chose to have lunch at a restaurant inside of a shopping mall with Rudy. The obvious being that there was a lot of people around. The other reason was that Rudy would occasionally take the two of us on shopping sprees, so we wanted to keep everything under one roof. I completely controlled these lunch dates, and also the price of them. Sefra and I charged Rudy $4,000 for two hours of our time at the restaurant. I absolutely hated to go to lunch with this man, even though I knew that I was going to make a few thousand dollars for just a couple hours of work. Our lunch escapades with Rudy lasted for approximately one year, and then his funds began to run out.

This was usually the case with most steady customers. Eventually the well would run dry. Rudy began to come up short with our lunch money. There were a few times that he only brought $2,000 along to the restaurant and expected Sefra and I to split it. Rudy insisted that he was having financial problems and had to cut back. Realizing that the party was over, Sefra and I cut him loose and turned him over to one of the other dancers that we worked with. Rudy ended up spending some money on his new friend for the next couple of months, and then disappeared from the scene completely.

After our stint with Rudy ended, Sefra and I didn’t run across another viable lunch date candidate for quite some time. However, I still made a sizable amount of money off of the customers that we cultivated together at the club.

Night after night, the two of us carefully combed the crowds of men looking for a lucrative opportunity. Every evening we ran across a new and exciting assortment of unsavory characters. Because Sefra and I were veterans in the business, we had become virtually immune to all of the maleficent personalities that we ran across.

Just when we thought that we had met the most perverse individual that ever walked the face of the earth; an even sicker one would cross our path. This was the case with “needle man.” My co-worker and I met this person one night while we were cruising the room. This fine specimen of a human being was sitting alone. Not one dancer had approached him since he came into the club. Sefra and I had nothing better to do, so we decided to pay him a visit. At first, he wasn’t especially receptive to our company; but eventually we were able to break him down.

Strip clubs were notoriously dark, making it difficult to clearly see the person sitting next to you. This man was extremely difficult to understand. At first, we thought that he had some sort of a speech impediment, because he mumbled when he spoke. Anxious to get on with the scam, Sefra and I bypassed the waitress. We asked the man if he wanted to go to the love booth with us. The man nodded his head yes. “Do you have any money on you,” I inquired. He shook his head no. Then we immediately hit him up for a credit card. He opened up his wallet and handed Sefra his Master Charge card. She took the credit card from the stranger and went to retrieve the waitress. Before I knew it, Sefra and the waitress had returned. The waitress told the customer that if he spent $3,000, he could spend a very long time alone with Sefra and me. The man mumbled something but none of us could make out what he had just said. The waitress, who wasn’t the most patient of people, shined her flashlight on the man’s face. “Are you O.K.?” she asked. The man didn’t respond. The waitress continued to scan the man’s face with her flashlight. “What’s that on the side of your mouth?” she inquired. The customer quickly covered his mouth with his hand. The man was obviously trying to hide something. “What’s on your face?” the waitress asked again. The customer said nothing. “Are you deaf or something, move your damn hand!” she ordered. The man didn’t cooperate so the waitress took it upon herself to move the man’s hand for him. She deliberately shined her flashlight on the area of his face that he was trying to conceal. There was something hanging from the right side of the man’s mouth. Further investigation revealed that this man had half of his mouth-sewed shut with a needle and thread. The needle still dangled freely from the corner of his mouth. His lips looked misshapen and heavily scarred as if they had been burned in a fire. The three of us could hardly believe what we saw. To say that we were repulsed would have been an understatement.

Sefra grabbed my arm. “What the hell is that?” she asked me. “I don’t know,” I replied. “The guy is some kind of a masochist. I can’t deal with this,” Sefra pleaded. “What do you care?” I said. “It’s dark in here, and you don’t have to look at him!”

“Give me a break,” Sefra said as she lit up a cigarette. I glanced up at the waitress. She was still shining the beam of her flashlight on the customer’s mouth. I could tell by the look on her face that she was absolutely disgusted; however, she continued on with the sale pitch. “Well honey, are you ready to go party with the girls?”

The gruesome individual managed to mutter something that sounded like a “yes.” The waitress took the man’s credit card and proceeded to run it through for $3,000. After the customer signed his voucher, Sefra and I took him over to the booth, but instead of sandwiching the man between the both of us like we usually did, we made him get in the booth first. I ended up sitting directly next to the man because Sefra refused to. Sefra sat on my lap. “What are we suppose to do with this creep?” Sefra whispered to me, “I can’t believe this shit!”

I started to laugh, but Sefra didn’t find the situation as humorous as I did.

She didn’t have a strong stomach like me. “Why don’t you give the guy a little kiss?” I told her. Sefra brushed her heavy hair away from her pretty face. “Very funny,” she said. Sensing that Sefra was getting restless, I sent her to get me a cup of coffee. “Do you think this freak will spend anymore?” she asked. “How the hell should I know,” I said, “just hurry back.” Sefra jumped off my lap and headed toward the bar.

I was now completely alone with this monster. Due to the fact that half the man’s mouth was sewn closed, he wasn’t exactly a candidate for conversation. Besieged by curiosity, I decided to ask him if he was the one who sewed his mouth closed or if someone else had done it for him. The man pointed to himself. Then he began to slide up the shirtsleeve of his left arm. Baffled by the man’s action, I lit a match so that I could see what he was trying to show me. The entire surface of his arm was grotesquely scarred with what appeared to be cigarette burns. The ghastly sight left me speechless. I couldn’t believe that I was actually sitting in the booth with some scarred up freak that had just signed a credit card voucher for $3,000.