Jimmy Yang - How to American

The DJ booth sat a few steps aboveground. It was a five-foot-square dim wooden box, featuring a simple sawed-out view hole. It had a good vantage point of the whole place, like the sniper towers in San Quentin. The booth had an old Dell computer with all the favorite strip club music, from Mötley Crüe to Jeremih. Other than the sound system and microphone, the most essential part of a strip club DJ booth is the light board. Lighting in a strip club is just as important as the music. Different girls look better in different lights. For instance, I learned that black girls always look better in green light. Not trying to start some new racial stereotype. It’s just a fact. Try it sometime.

A tall, intimidating man greeted me. “You’re the new DJ? I’m Beast.” He was the bouncer who, in fact, looked like a beast. Beast was probably in his thirties, but a lifetime of meth and alcohol made him look like a weathered fifty-year-old. He was a skinny six-foot-four white guy with a cleanly shaven head and tattoos on his face. I later learned that he was a member of the Aryan Brotherhood when he was in prison, so I’m sure he wasn’t too hot on this little Chinese boy spinning at his club. Beast claimed to be a recovering alcoholic, but I’d always see him in the bathroom with a plastic Smirnoff bottle at the end of his shift. I never had any problems with him, but we never really had a heart-to-heart over a nice bottle of wine, either. He always kept to his Aryan self.

Everyone at the club had nicknames, the kind you earn in prison. A man named Chef was the bar manager. He was short, but tough. Chef looked like if Joe Pesci was on welfare. As a bartender he was responsible for overcharging the customers for a splash of Mountain Dew, but more importantly, he was responsible for keeping everyone in check. Chef was in charge of making sure everything was operating smoothly at the club. He was Shooter’s trusted old-school boy. One time, Chef told me:

“I was out of action for a year. Now I’m trying to get back on the grind.”

I naively asked, “Why were you out for a year?”

“I lost my big toe.”

It doesn’t get more gangster than losing your big toe. I was guessing he lost it because he owed some money to some bad people. This is the kind of stuff you only hear about in Martin Scorsese movies.

“How did you lose it?” I sheepishly asked.

“Diabetes.”

Diabetes doesn’t care if you’re a gangster, it’ll fuck you up.

I was never intimidated by Beast and Chef. I thought they were super cool real-life gangsters, but I always treated them like normal coworkers. After getting to know them, I soon realized none of them really wanted to be where they were in life; they just fell into it because of a tough upbringing, drugs or alcohol. If they had a choice to put on a tie and work an honest living at a bank, they would. But the mistakes they made in the past haunted them and would always follow them around. It wasn’t “cool” for them to work at a strip club; it was the absolute last resort. And the same could be said about the strippers.

We had an eclectic group of strippers at Fantasy Showgirls. It was like a brochure for community college dropouts. We had an Asian girl fittingly named Jade; a Latina girl uninspiringly named Latina; and two black girls named Milan and Saucy, although every week Milan would change her name to a different city she had never been to. I always thought that was ambitious of her. Saucy was indeed very saucy. She would talk trash and start physical fights with the other strippers. These were definitely not USC students working their way through college; these were career strippers who looked like strippers.

I once came into work to witness Milan and Saucy wrestling on the ground. Beast and Chef just casually stood there, passively saying, “Hey, guys, break it up.” Breaking up a stripper fight is very similar to dealing with little kids throwing a tantrum. The more you yell at them, the more they are going to yell back. All you can really do is to stay calm and wait for them to tucker themselves out. The stripper fights didn’t involve a lot of punches. They went directly for the most expensive part on a stripper; the weave. A winner was determined when one stripper successfully removed the other’s weave. Saucy got the better of Milan that night. Milan put up a good fight but I think she just rocked a loose weave. That was the first time I saw a weave detached from a girl’s head. I was caught off guard. They never taught me the anatomy of a stripper’s weave in health class. Underneath the weave, Milan looked like a fry cook with a netted cap.

One of my jobs was to make sure the strippers went onstage in a timely manner. I always ruled by kindness. I was not trying to be a saint; this was merely a work strategy. I was trying to bring professionalism into a shitty strip club. I wanted to give these strippers something they had never experienced before: a man who was genuinely kind to them. On the business end, this worked brilliantly. Their shifts were always on time. The girls rotated every three songs like a group of Olympic synchronized strippers. But it didn’t help me in scoring with any of the girls. I guess nice guys do always finish last, especially in a strip club. As a nice strip club DJ, I became a trusted friend of the strippers. This also meant I became the last guy they wanted to have sex with. They would sit next to me naked and talk to me about their boyfriends, and I would sit there and nod my head, trying to conceal my boner.

I didn’t even think being friend-zoned by strippers was possible, but I made it happen. I watched naked women dance in front of me every day, but I still couldn’t get laid. The strippers sat in the DJ booth naked and told me about their problems, but I still couldn’t get laid. There was a stripper giving a hand job ten feet away from me in a VIP booth, but I. Still. Couldn’t. Get. Laid. I couldn’t imagine a more sexually frustrating experience. I had such blue balls my scrotum looked like the Cookie Monster. I wanted to be Guam Felix, but I was just the good innocent Hong Kong Jim. I was actually innocent enough to have a crush on one of the strippers.

Paige was a beautiful nineteen-year-old girl who was our newest dancer. I had a crush on her the moment she walked into the club in her Daisy Dukes. Paige looked like a bright college girl who didn’t belong in a strip club. She always had the cutest smile on her face. The main reason I wanted to work in a strip club was to hook up with a couple of strippers, but Paige — I would marry Paige. She was the girl next door from a Nicholas Sparks movie. I was head over heels for this girl. After her three-song routine, she would always come by the DJ booth to have a chat. That was the highlight of my day. “How did I look out there?” she would ask me, with the prettiest smile on her face.

“You looked great.” Trying to remain composed and not propose to her in the strip club.

Then she would lean over me with her naked body and pick out the songs she liked for her next dance. “That new Jeremih song goes well with you,” I suggested. I was pairing R&B songs with strippers like a sommelier at Spago suggesting which red goes best with the beef Bolognese.

This sounded like a romantic dialogue from a Pretty Woman sequel. I thought we were going to live happily ever after. But in reality, I was just an innocent schmuck and she was just doing her job. Pretty Woman is bullshit.

I walked her to her car every night, but I was always too shy to ask her for her number. Weeks went by and I still couldn’t muster up the courage to ask her out. I finally gave myself an ultimatum. As I nervously walked her back to her car, I asked her, “You got any plans tonight?”

“I’m going to my boyfriend’s house,” she casually replied. My heart sank.