Stripper's Night at the Corner Office
Jim’s a pretty good guy, for being the owner of a restaurant. You have to be, because if you dislike or disrespect your customers, you aren’t going to get any business. Considering all the crap we put him through, though, I’m surprised he keeps any of us around. All the shit we try to pull off, the times we have cops come visit, the pranks we pull on him, he certainly has the ammunition to use to get rid of us forever. It’s not us regulars who are his downfall, however. The reason his bar isn’t as busy as it could be is the obscenely brainless promotions he comes up with.
There was the time he came up with the idea of having a Stripper’s Night Out. On face value, it sounded good: cheap drinks to entice strippers to come in, in the hope that they would draw lots of guys who would then try to buy them drinks, and spend lots of money. He had ten cent wing specials and half-off appetizers for the restaurant. It was also to be held on Wednesdays, notoriously the one of the slowest nights of the week. He advertised it heavily, too: signs all over the bar, commercials on the campus radio station, and ads in all the free weeklies saying
COMING SOON
to
Jim’s Corner OfficeJuly 6, 1988
Wednesdays Are Now
The Hottest Night In Buffalo!!!Strippers Get (half) Off
Guys,
Enjoy Some “One-on-One Time”
With The Girls You Love To Watch!
It did work, initially, since on the first week there were about twenty-five strippers who showed up. It was nice, seeing all these really hot women, all dolled up and ready to get drunk and have their way with someone for once, rather than guys giving them money and telling them what to do. It was a rarity and a sight for sore eyes at the bar, to see amazingly beautiful women drinking and having a good time rather than a bunch of drunk guys wishing there were hot women drinking and partying with them. As Jim expected, and according to the usual bar percentages, there were about four guys for every girl there. There were even some women who came in to see what was up. They were mostly lesbians and some bi-curious females, and they just added to the entertainment.
I was pretty busy flying food out of the window all night, and the girls were going crazy getting drinks out for everyone. Jim was having a hell of a time trying to proof everyone that came in. It was wall to wall people, and probably close to the legal limit for the number of persons allowed in the bar. The jukebox was blasting out bad eighties hair band rock, and baseball games were on the TV sets. The pool table and dartboards were getting a workout like they hadn’t seen in a long time. As I said, it seemed on first blush to be a successful idea.
Unfortunately, what Jim did not anticipate was the presence of bodyguards and pimps. They had aligned themselves across the lounge, sequestering the strippers in their own section, effectively keeping the other customers away from them. When the strippers had to go down to the girls’ room, they were escorted. Anyone besides the waitresses who tried to talk to them was abruptly, and not very politely, turned away. By midnight, when I closed the kitchen, you could feel the tension building in the air. Between the bodyguards and pimps, and the other customers who showed up, there was an uneasy silence, with stares exchanged and whispers hidden behind cupped hands. That was when Kevin walked in.
Kevin was what you could call a “special” person. To this day, he still lives with his parents. He was a little on the short side, had a dumpy figure, and had thinning brown hair with clearly showing widow’s peaks. His impish nose held horn-rimmed glasses, which were often taped together. In high school, he rode the short bus, and attended all the special education classes. When he graduated at the age of twenty-one, we hired him for a short time as a dishwasher. He was strong for his size, and all the girls were slightly afraid of him – especially when he was stressed out. Luckily, Jim didn’t let him drink after he punched out, because Mandy and all the others didn’t want him making drunken advances towards them, or exacting a drunken revenge for too many plates brought into the dish tank. We had to let him go after six months, not because he didn’t do a good job, but because the girls were all afraid that he would snap and do something the rest of us would read about in The News the next morning.
He was quite the alcoholic, too. He was one of the few people I knew that could start out boozing in the early afternoon and still be standing at four in the morning when the bars closed, and do it regularly. We started seeing Kevin out drinking a few months after he was let go, and we had a running joke that he was actually more comprehensible, intelligent, and coherent when he drank. We weren’t sure if that was because with enough alcohol we were brought down to his level, or if with enough alcohol his IQ actually rose.
This was one of those days that he started early. I could already tell by the way he was walking that he was already pretty plastered. He had visited all the dive strip clubs on the US side of the border, trying to get his favorite strippers to come to Jim’s that night. They all called him “Kevvie-poo”, and he frequented those places several times a week. It was probably the only way he would see a nude, or partially-nude woman. I would guess that about half of his social security check was spent at The Lounge on Hertel Avenue. In retrospect, like so many other guys who showed up, he was probably anticipating leaving that night with a drunken stripper accompanying him.
Kevin pushed his way up to the bar, and grabbed a stool from a guy who was too drunk to notice. He slapped his right hand down on the bar twice, giving his signal that he wanted beer and he wanted it now. Several fellows who did not know him snickered loudly, and I could hear them making the obvious jokes. So could Kevin. Mandy dutifully brought him his half-pitcher of Genny, and poured him a shot of Jack. He tossed back the shot, and took a swig from his pitcher. He looked up and down the bar, glaring at the fellows who were making fun of him. They stopped being so obvious, and started talking quietly by themselves, still smirking and laughing. Kevin got off his stool and walked towards the strippers. He was on a mission.
As he got to the line of bodyguards, his eyes lit up, and he got a big smile on his face. “Gina! Gina! You came for me!” His voice sounded nasal, as if he were half-speaking through his nose. A blonde with obviously augmented breasts smiled and waved at him.
A large, burly hand grabbed him and lifted him partly off of the ground. “Where the fuck you think you’re going, retard?” The guy was easily a foot and a half taller than Kevin, and easily twice his weight. His arms had the same diameter as my head, and it was obvious that he was a serious weightlifter. He had a large, thick mustache, and the same hairline as Kevin, ironically. You could see his muscles tighten through his t-shirt.
“I’m going to see my friend Gina!”
“You ain’t seein’ no one over here, stupid.” He pushed Kevin back, and Kevin’s pitcher spilled some beer on him.
“No, I’m going to see Gina!” Kevin tried again walking towards the strippers, and the beefy hand again picked him up.
I don’t know if it was the way Kevin was walking, or if he actually meant for his steel-toed boot to connect with the bodyguard’s testes. The big guy, not expecting an acute level of pain from that particular area of his body, went down really fast. Several of the other bodyguards, seeing this, started lunging for Kevin. More than several of the drunks who were sick of the bodyguards and pimps saw their opportunity, and jumped in themselves.
Fists flew; chairs and glasses broke. I saw Kevin toughing it out with a couple of guys who should have, by all rights, kicked his ass. Kevin didn’t fight so much as he had an epileptic seizure. His fists and feet flew everywhere, like a little Tasmanian devil. It was wildly difficult for those guys to grab ahold of him, or even to get a punch in. This was especially true since they were fighting off about fifteen other drunken twenty-somethings. As the fighting spread through the lounge, I signaled Mandy to call 911, noticing that she was already on the phone, dialing. She mouthed back, “Already on it” and pointed to the receiver. Poor Jim was in the back of the crowd, trying to wrestle his way through to break it up. He didn’t get far, and took a few punches by the time the cops showed up.
There were about 20 people arrested, and the police made Jim close for the night. He wound up getting investigated by the city for having an illegal gentleman’s club. The next day, he changed the wording on all his signs to “Ladies get half off” and pulled the ads from the weeklies and the radio. I saw him in the office when I showed up on Friday for my usual shift.
“Fred,” he said glumly when I grabbed my apron. “I thought that was such a good idea. I should have listened to you.”
“I did tell you it was going to turn out bad,” I replied. “There’s nothing worse than strippers, alcohol, and hormonal drunken tweenagers together in the same room, with nothing to stop any potential trouble. You should have hired some of those guys to work for you for the evening.”
“I guess. Maybe next week it’ll be better.” He looked in the mirror at the largish bruise on his face, and adjusted his toupee before going out to check out the floor in the dining room.
The next week, about 30 guys showed up, but no strippers did. The week after that, we had the usual Wednesday crowd of about 10 regulars in the bar. The next day, all the signs came down; it was the end of “Stripper’s Night at the Corner Office”.
