Max’s Audi came in hot. He stepped onto the Avenue and cocked his head as he sized up the pickup’s blackened hulk.

Max is never at a loss for words. His mouth is always moving — always. But this? This stunned him silent — the spectacle of a bombed-out pickup blocking his club’s front door.

“What… the hell?” he finally called from a good 20 yards away. Tonight’s manager, Alec, held his arms wide.

Ace, the bellowing lunatic behind this catastrophe, circled the truck’s frame, muttering about “the painting, the woman in the old painting.”

Max ignored him. He leaned against Whispers’ exterior wall, one Puma pressed to its aluminum siding, and set about searching his phone’s security camera app for footage of last night’s debacle. It was hard to miss.

He shook his head, unable to pry his face from the screen, which showed a $96,000 Ford pickup engulfed in flames blasting across the Avenue and screeching to a stop smack in front of Whispers’ front door.

“Jesus,” Max said.

His thumb scrubbed the recording backward, replayed it, then played it again.

“I mean, I mean,” Max stammered, his eyes still locked on his phone. “Why would you do this?”

Ace ignored him and returned to searching what was left of the truck’s cab for his lost treasures.

“You could have parked this thing… anywhere,” said Max. “Why here? Why?”

Ace couldn’t answer the question any better than Max. Ace, in an apparent meth-scorched rage, stood on the truck’s accelerator until the engine went up in flames, then tore up an alley and across the Avenue. Things must have been getting hot fast inside that Ford’s cab. Ace had been running out of time. He had to stuff the thing somewhere — so of course he stuffed it in front of Max’s strip club.

“You’re, like, gonna have this thing towed, right?” Max asked. “I mean tonight, right?”

“No can do, my man,” said Ace, his head buried deep in the truck’s cab, which reeked of smoke and melted polymer.

Max bit his lip.

All Ace cared about was what he claimed to be a very old, very valuable painting, and his cache of jewelry, both of which had gone missing. He’d been hollering about them all day.

“They stole my shit, man!” Ace started up again. “I mean, who does that, man? Who fuckin’ does that?”

Max spun and marched back to his Audi, which tore from the curb and disappeared.

Ace’s lips formed a wild grin, and he pointed to a small gap between the sidewalk and Whispers’ wall. The hole was just wide enough for a fist. Or a rat, the fat ones we see skittering along the Avenue’s gutters.

“In there!” Ace said. “They stashed it in there! My painting! My jewelry too!”

I’d hit my limit. The club had been empty for hours. Ace, with his charred truck, his flailing and his screaming, had seen to that.

Even so, Alec said this: “Well, let’s have a look!”

Ace bolted for the gulch. Alec followed. Owen gave me a wink, then joined them.

“It’s in there!” Ace said. He pressed his face into the hole. “I think I can see it! Yeah, man! Yeah!”

Ace rattled off what seemed like a thousand rapid-fire sentences. Thieves. Stash. Jewels. Painting. Jewels. Probably planned to come back for it. Alec and Owen squatted next to him. They looked Ace in the eye and nodded along as he spoke.

“Let me try,” Alec said. He rolled to his belly, then reached deep inside the hole before pulling back an empty hand.

“Nothing in there,” Alec said, shaking his head and offering a small frown. “I’m sorry, man.”

Owen reached in next.

“He’s right, brother,” said Owen. “Nothin’.”

It’s worth pausing here to recap: Ace (or some version of him) showed up last night, shrieking and driving his roaring fireball pickup up and down the Avenue, its back alleys and side streets.

Flaming pickups draw attention, the kind strip clubs and coke dealers try to avoid. Alec could have smacked Ace upside the head. Owen had better reason to run him off with the aluminum bat he keeps by his cash register. But that’s not what happened.

In a moment when all indications suggested Ace was long gone, Owen and Alec treated him like he still existed. I watched while a drug dealer and cathouse floor boss handed a relapsed and raving meth head a bit of his former self. “Here,” they seemed to say, “I think you dropped this last night.”

Ace sniffed, then wiped his nose with the back of his hand. I couldn’t tell if it was gratitude or grief. Was he all there? Not a chance. But, at least for now, he’d stopped screaming.

I never saw Ace again. But his pickup’s scorched wreck slouched against the curb for at least a week. The cops were no help, and Max had a hell of a time finding a towing outfit willing to take the carcass off his hands.

So I started working Ace’s pickup into my mic routine: “We’re running a special raffle this week, gentlemen! Get a half-hour VIP room and you’re automatically entered to win a brand new truck! It’s parked right out front.”

The loose-wire inside Ace’s brain still sparked hot and bright. Once again, here came that wild, menacing look. It rolled in hard and fast.

“Fuck, man!” Ace shouted. “Fucking fuck! Who took my painting! My jewels! Are you sure you’re not fucking with me!”

Alec and I exchanged glances.

Backup arrived just in time. Owen, who runs a “convenience store” three doors down, had a front-row seat for last night’s mayhem. He spotted Ace and closed in fast.

“Ace! Ace! Ace!” Owen called out. “Chill, man! You. Have. Got. To. Chill!”

Owen’s “convenience store” is a front for his true enterprise: cocaine.

His business interests have endowed him with an outsized influence over the Avenue. Along this stretch, where power too often arrives with gunfire, Owen has become the neighborhood’s wise elder statesman and de facto ambassador.

Ace tore open one rear door of what was left of his king cab, and a hodgepodge of whatever spilled out: a single boat shoe, a putty knife, an old Skil saw, assorted hardcovers, a worn-thin t-shirt from Iron Maiden’s “World Slavery” tour and more. Ace began taking inventory. I suspected it was all that remained of his material possessions.

Owen leaned into my ear and muttered through gritted teeth, peeling his lip the way he does when he’s communicating something both secret and urgent. “I dunno what the fuck happened here,” he said. “This guy’s usually alright.”

Owen and Ace go way back. Owen was just 14 when he’d left Morocco and arrived in the U.S. His parents enrolled him in a high school just four miles from where we stood. “I barely spoke English, man. Hardly a word. I was scared shitless, you know?”

Owen nodded toward Ace. “And then here comes this guy.”

“There were about five of us foreign kids — Morocco, Algeria, Somalia, and Ace just kind of took us in,” Owen said. “Could have hung with anyone. In-crowd kind of guy. Just a good dude, ya know? Didn’t want anything back. Not a fag. Never even had product to move. But he showed us the ropes, helped us fit in. That’s a rare fuckin’ thing, right?”

As he spoke, Owen kept his eyes locked on Ace like he was clocking a loose Bengal. Ace pulled from the truck’s remains a tangle of clothes hangers, jangled them, flung them to the pavement.

After high school, Owen said, Ace became “DJ Ace,” and before long he was hosting one of the city’s most popular drive-time radio shows.

“But dude gets into meth,” Owen continued, his head bobbing along with each syllable. “Disappears. Cleans up. Didn’t hear from him for years.”

“And then, last night, Ace is back! Out of nowhere and all fucked up and screaming like a motherfucker! Jesus! And he’s driving this truck all over. Real crazy like. He keeps throwing it in park and revving the engine, just grinding the fuck out of it. Past redline. And I’m like,‘Whoa, man! Hold on!’

“He’s got the truck in the back alley, and he’s standing — fucking standing! — on the accelerator. He won’t stop, man. And I can just hear the thing coming apart. I can smell it melting down. I kept telling him, ‘Don’t do that, dude! You’re gonna ruin your truck, man!’”

But Ace kept at it, gunning the engine for an hour or more, until it exploded.

The Ford’s engine, all eight cylinders, went up in flames.

“It’s all on fire now!” Owen says. “There he goes! Bookin’ it out of there! And, well, it ended up here.”

Lucky us.

Stay tuned for part 3, coming tomorrow.

Picture this: It’s 2020, and Iran’s top general, Qasem Soleimani, has survived the attempt at Baghdad International Airport to blow him off the face of the earth.

How? Doesn’t matter. The drone glitched. The missile hit the wrong SUV. A hungover intern blew the time zone.

Now, everyone’s aboard Soleimani’s plane, ready for takeoff, when he decides he and his Quds Force boys should blow off some steam. “Screw Tehran,” Soleimani calls out. “We’re going to Whispers!” Cheers fill the plane.

And then, 6,800 miles later, right in front of the club, the Trump administration cockblocks everyone with a Hellfire missile strike.

Or something like that. It was as good an explanation as any for what I encountered on a summer evening as I rolled up to the club. I swerved the motorbike around a debris field of blasted chunks of drive shaft, brake pads, twists of polypropylene trim and melted tire rubber.

All of it led to the warped and blistered carcass of a very large and very expensive Ford pickup.

“What the hell happened out there?” I asked Alec, who was perched in the manager’s usual spot behind Whispers’ bar.

“Dude, I haven’t a fuckin’ clue,” said Alec.

The truck’s carcass was so imposing, you might stroll by and never notice the “Live Nude Girls” sign flashing overhead. Whoever’d caused this disaster had applied themselves. It was a fine bit of work, even for the Avenue.

Most remarkable, though, wasn’t the wreckage itself, but the unexpected mercy bestowed on the man who’d caused it. This mess, I was told, was the work of a formerly popular drive-time DJ named Ace, who’d found methamphetamine the way one finds the Lord, then fell off — and fell off hard.

Ace, manic and geeked to the gills, had unleashed a series of stunts that destroyed his truck while inflicting a new level of fury on a neighborhood accustomed to terror. Eighteen hours later, stranded in a nightmare from which he couldn’t wake, Ace still wandered the Avenue, trailing chaos as he went.

By every standard, anyone who’d torn this big a gash in the world deserved — what? A ticket? A talking to? A stomping? Ace gave all of us every reason to tell him to fuck right off.

Yet, the louder Ace hollered, the more ferociously he flailed, the more closely people listened. I watched as Alec and a neighborhood coke dealer named Owen handed Ace back some splintered piece of what was left of his dignity. It was something to see.

A few guys braved their way through the wreckage until they’d found the club’s door. I jumped on the mic and introduced Heat — then Harley, Halo, Ember and Zora. And that’s when the screaming started.

The Avenue sends us plenty of screamers. But this was different. It was the howl of a man suffering a soul-shattering breakdown. Everyone could hear it, even over the boom, boom, boom of Pretty Ricky’s “On the Hotline.” Ace’s bawling was sure to spook any customers who hadn’t been driven away by the burnt husk of his pickup.

Alec rolled his eyes. His torso listed until his butt rolled off his barstool. I figured he could use a second set of eyes, so I called a stage break and followed him into the street.

We found our wild man just beyond the club’s doors. An orange t-shirt and a pair of shin-length pinstripe pants hung off his bone-thin frame. A curly mushroom cloud of salty hair blasted off his scalp, and a tangle of beard covered much of his face.

The guy was nuts, but it was clear he wasn’t from these parts. Just enough light still flickered in those eyes, you knew a human soul was in there somewhere. The Avenue had yet to claim him. He had a place to be, and it wasn’t here.

“You took ‘em!” Ace shrieked, his face now inches from Alec’s. “My painting! My jewelry. Dude! Did you take ‘em?”

“Naw, man, I didn’t do that,” said Alec. He wiped away a spray of spittle, then flashed a broad, gentle smile.

Alec is six-foot-four and nearly 330 pounds. A budding EDM artist and producer, he is the biggest, kindest and most unflappable man you’re likely to meet.

“My painting!” Ace hollered. “It’s, like, the 17th century. It’s a lady. You know, royalty!”

Ace shut his eyes tight and jumped in place. “Fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck!”

“My jewelry,” he screamed again. “It was my grandmother’s and some of it was her mom’s. I could sell it for twelve Gs, maybe fourteen! Who took it!”

Some force had seized Ace’s body. He pinwheeled his arms so powerfully it appeared he was trying to fling them from his torso. Then he froze, fell silent and yanked the neck of his shirt over his head. He just stood there, not moving. He was like a sculpture the Vatican keeps in the basement because Michelangelo dropped acid before summoning it from its marble block.

Just as swiftly, Ace resumed his tantrum.

Our job here was clear: Keep this screwball out of the club and away from the girls. Alec stepped toward Ace, blocking the man’s path to Whispers’ door.

“You flexin’ man?” asked Ace.

“Naw man,” said Alec. “I’m just fat.”

Ace laughed, then clapped Alec’s shoulder. “You’re alright, man!” Ace cried out. “You’d do great in prison, bro!”

“Sir, I have a perfectly clean criminal record,” Alec said.

I had to bite my lip to keep from laughing.

Stay tuned for part 2, coming tomorrow.

If the guy spoke English, he didn’t let on. His overalls and sun-worn skin suggested he’d been traveling from job to job. When I spotted him at Whispers’ rope line, I figured he was taking the rare chance to celebrate a fat check.

But there was no check. Not that we could see. He’d done 15 minutes in a VIP with Lex, and now she was pleading with him to pay up — first in English, then in the broken Spanish she’d been practicing on Duolingo between stage sets. She followed him on his third trip to the ATM, as if to assist in case he didn’t know how to operate it. From behind the bar, Otto held Lex’s customer in his bulldog glare.

The guy just shook his head, as though he’d thought the VIP room — and Lex — were free, among the endless wonders beyond the Rio Grande.

It was the usual desperate choreography that swells when a dude can’t (or won’t) pay, all of it unfolding to my left, just below the booth. I’m mostly blind in that eye, so when a stripper’s about to get hosed, I feel it before I see it. It starts like this, and then it gets worse. Some girls scream, grab for a wallet, threaten bodily harm. The thing’s about to go off. Any second now.

My body braced, the way it did when I was five and the air thickened hours before Mom and Dad turned the house to thunder. I was the kindergartner with a trick knee.

But Lex didn’t scream, grab or threaten.

Instead, she did something I’d never seen a stripper do: She called the cops. It was a bold move — and a surprising one for three reasons:

1) The goal, obviously, is to keep the law outside the club. Lex’s 911 call temporarily shut down the VIP rooms and sent Otto on a wild treasure hunt for loose condoms.

2) Lex is a fervent Marxist. Her politics align squarely with a Soviet revolution long over by the time she was born. This Mexican migrant worker was the last person I’d expected her to throw to the jackboots.

3) Lex hates cops.

If guys knew the damage inflicted on a burned stripper, only the worst cretins would do it.

A string of bad nights means missed rent, a late car payment, fewer groceries for the kid at home. On the nights I don’t ride the motorbike, two or three girls cram into my Volkswagen; they can’t afford an Uber home.

Luring a guy into the back of the club requires the following: the deployment of one’s seductive powers, as much learned as instinct; negotiations — financial and often carnal; persistence, stamina and pure luck.

It can take hours to work a mark. Low-balling girls swoop in just as the deal’s about to close. And once a girl is leading a guy by the hand, she’s got to steel herself for whatever she’s agreed to do back there.

All for nothing.

Why don’t the girls insist on money up front? Increased exposure to prostitution charges, say the clubs’ lawyers.

There’s not much anyone can do when a guy rips off a dancer. Gone are the days of back-alley beatdowns. Extortion won’t get the job done either. I once heard a bouncer threaten to follow a freeloader home and collect the fee from his wife. You should have seen the guy’s eyes bulge with terror. It was a hollow threat, good for a laugh, no more.

Also entertaining was the night Alec, a Whispers manager, wedged his six-foot-four, 330-pound frame into a VIP room’s door, then read a terrified welsher the riot act for nearly an hour. Alec’s voice roared from the back of the club while I did my best to keep from busting up on the mic.

I once found myself negotiating with an NFL player whose teammate had just taken a Sizzle Haven girl for more than $4,000. “These girls work hard,” I said. “If you’d just talk to him, I’d be grateful.” I mean, four grand. A goddamned NFL pro. What would you have done?

And there was the well-shellacked guy who scammed Starlet. She lunged for his wallet. He popped her in the face. And a Whispers bouncer named Zane tossed him to the sidewalk, minus one Nike. A cheer went up from the girls as the manager, Deven, threw open the club door and hurled the stray sneaker at his head.

I shined my phone’s flashlight on Starlet’s split lip. No stitches needed, we all decided. I packed her a bag of ice from the bar.

Tonight, Lex was content to leave matters to the badges. She later told me why: She’d choked down one too many pitiful nights, and she was running out of angles.

Her sugar daddies had turned cheap. Even the married guy in Dubai, whom she’d never met in person but had been talking with online, started skimping. He’d happily paid to have her lips filled and anus bleached. But now it was all “kid starting college in Amer-ee-ca, blah, blah, blah,” Lex said.

Meanwhile, Lex’s beloved 1982 Ford Bronco was on life support. After closing, we’d poke our heads into the alley, assess the likelihood of gunfire, then pop the hood and see what we could do. (I am neither doctor nor mechanic. Here too I held the flashlight.)

Rent. Food. Gasoline. Bronco repairs. Rave tickets. Ketamine. Not a penny for any of it.

This was no time for proletarian unity.

“He’s not gonna support my struggle,” Lex said of the dude who’d bilked her. “I’m not gonna support his.”

It usually takes a couple of calls to summon a patrol car. The second call invariably involves begging. Yet, here came the cops, inside of five minutes.

Three officers walked Lex’s freeloader out to the sidewalk. Lex wrapped herself in a fuzzy red bathrobe and joined them outside. Otto, unnerved by Lex’s strategy, remained behind the bar.

The cops would ask Lex’s chiseler a question in English. He’d reply in Spanish, and then came the answer in English through one officer’s speakerphone, thanks to a translator the department keeps on standby.

Before long, Lex’s “customer” was in cuffs. The cops, Lex said, told her they suspected he was not long for this side of the border.

One of the officers, all small-town Eagle Scout, had been referring to Lex as “Ma’am” since he’d rolled up. “Then what happened, Ma’am?” “OK, what do you need from us this evening, Ma’am?” He stepped into the club and asked if any of the girls wanted “to give a statement.”

“You don’t have to,” he said. Even from the booth, over the music’s thump, I could hear his voice was calm, soothing.

“Did you really arrest him?” asked Halo.

The cop scanned the faces of the half-dozen strippers gathered ’round. Breasts poured from sheer bodystockings, teddies and slingshot bikinis. Skin everywhere. Brown, white, black, everything in between. I watched his eyes wander to the stage, to the back of the club, where several VIP curtains hung askew, then back to the girls.

The officer shrugged.

“Theft of services,” he said.

“Thank you!” called the girls.

The cop smiled, folded his notebook and ambled back to the Avenue.

Tis now the very witching time of night,

When churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes out
Contagion to this world: now could I drink hot blood. And do such bitter business as the day quake to look on.

— William Shakespeare, Hamlet

After more than eight hours in a strip joint’s DJ booth, there can be no better way to get home than by motorbike. Your body’s already vibrating, and the bike’s rumble has a way of bringing you down easy as it carries you back to civilization.

In a car, you move past the world. On a motorbike, you’re in it. And yet, this is the last time of night anyone should be riding a motorcycle through the city.

Three a.m., the “Witching Hour” — or “Devil’s Hour,” if you prefer. That’s the exact moment I most often fire up my Limey cafe racer and rumble away from Whispers’ curb.

“Devil’s Hour” was coined by D&D players. (Strike that — occultists.) Its premise, like all things Satanic, is pure contrarianism. Christians have Christ. Satanists have the Antichrist. Christians have the cross. Satanists have the inverted cross. And, because Jesus is widely believed to have died at 3 p.m., Satanists have designated its opposite, 3 a.m., as “Devil’s Hour,” when demons and evil spirits unleash every flavor of pain and destruction.

Based on my late “Witching Hour” rides, I can’t entirely dismiss all of this as mere superstition. Statistics tell a similar story.

Most gunshot wounds roll into emergency rooms between 11 p.m. and 4 a.m., according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. Two-thirds of car crashes between midnight and 3 a.m. are the work of a drunk driver. ER visits of every variety peak between 2:30 and 3 a.m., according to several studies — and the later it gets, the more ghastly the injuries.

All you have left, save a few junkies, “outside girls” and raving head cases, are puffed up and well-armed street pimps, who seem to believe their penises gain a centimeter with each bullet fired.

The hours may not align exactly with Satan Standard Time, but you get the idea. Mystics, now centuries dead, left us a theological explanation for why Hell’s legions savor this dark hour: It marks a pause in the Christian tradition of regimented prayer known as the Liturgy of the Hours. By 3 a.m., the devout are fast asleep. The spiritual airwaves fall silent, and Lucifer’s armies roam unchecked.

This is, of course, absurd. Still, the mystics got at least one thing right: An eerie disquiet does fall over the city at this hour. The silence is loaded —"dead calm” doesn’t do it justice. You get the sense something stirs among the stragglers still loose in the world.

That something, I think, is this: “Devil’s Hour” signals a breaking point. It arrives once the day has proved too much — once people are drunk enough, high enough, heartbroken enough, hopeless enough and pissed enough to cause real damage, the kind that leaves marks. Bedlam is always imminent. But by 3 a.m. it’s gained strength, like an undertow ready to swallow anyone too tired to reach the shore. Demonic intervention? Optional.

The club doors lock. We all say our goodnights. And off I go.

First order of business: escape the menagerie of human misery that is the Avenue. This means catching every green light — and getting creative when I can’t. Under normal conditions, blitzing an “orange” on a motorbike is a sure way to find your leg — severed shin to foot — dangling from the bumper of an old lady’s Buick.

These are not normal conditions. There’s no such thing in this part of town. By closing time, the sane have long ago returned home and thrown the locks. All you have left, save a few junkies, “outside girls” and raving head cases, are puffed up and well-armed street pimps, who seem to believe their penises gain a centimeter with each bullet fired.

The goal here is to keep your head on a swivel and keep moving. (Sound advice for any DJ.)

I rolled up one summer night on the shop where I bought my motorbike and discovered two guys had just backed their pickup through its glass doors, reduced a portion of the store’s brick to rubble and toppled several motorbikes. A couple out for a late-night walk caught the caper on video, which showed the men looting the place for $1,000 leather riding jackets. The police had been called, but never arrived, so I hung around until the general manager showed up. A call from the alarm company had jolted him from bed. Hair mussed, he pressed his palms into his eyes as he assessed the damage. This, he said, was the third time the shop had been hit this year.

The Avenue soon gives way to a twist of playful s-turns. Hunched over the bike’s drag bars, I’ll roll on the throttle, counter-steer and lean — dip, dip, dip and out — then wring the throttle harder as the bike charges a hill. At its crest comes the honey-rot smell of hay and dung. The city zoo is tucked back there in the trees.

And then it’s a rocket-ship ride across the long reach of a high bridge. The skyline stretches above. The moonlight cuts slivers on the water below. The bike has found its stride. Everything is perfect.

Or not.

Near the mouth of this bridge I once came upon an SUV tipped vertical, resting on its front bumper against a tree. The remains of a silver convertible scattered across the road. I was about to throw the kickstand and rush in when two fire trucks rolled up. Everyone, even the occupants of the mangled sports car, appeared to be in one piece.

I turned the bike around and felt my chest turn hollow. I’d have to ride a quarter mile the wrong way up the divided thoroughfare to make my retreat.

Nearly a year earlier, I’d been driving to Sizzle Haven on a similar — but faster — divided highway when a Harley Davidson, with a powder-blue Porsche hot on its tail, careened head-on toward my Honda at 70 mph. Both missed me by inches. I punched my windshield, then called Lisa at her desk and delivered a stirring oratory enumerating the reasons “people around here need a kick in the dick,” and why I’d be honored to deliver it.

Lucky girl.

I wasn’t interested in giving anyone reason to kick me in the dick — and I wasn’t interested in getting dead. So I took it easy, ready to yank the bike to the shoulder. Mercifully, no headlights appeared and I found my way home by way of an alternate route.

Not far past the far side of that bridge — assuming you can reach it — is a brightly lit tunnel. Pour it on hard again. The 650 twin screams. Punch out the other side, and the air turns to brine, with a hint of petroleum and rust from the shipyards.

Then, more curves. Left, then right — and then a long straightaway.

It was here I once slalomed a smoky debris field: big, shredded hunks of aluminum, polymer and rubber. An upside-down Lexus appeared in the haze and I swerved around it. A police prowler, its lights a-disco, blocked the highway ahead. No way was I turning around tonight. My helmet bobbed as I rolled past a cop dropping flares. He waved back.

There was the night I spotted, just below an overpass, a cluster of cops scurrying around a sheet-covered lump. My mind leapt back years, to a newsroom nightshift when, standing on a rural road in the glow of my Subaru’s headlights, I dialed the sheriff’s office’s PIO. “I dunno, Charlie,” I said. “The bump under that sheet looks pretty little.” And it was. Charlie later explained that a slight-framed high school girl had been clipped by a car during a summer night’s walk with her sister. I’d later read that the similarly meager lump I’d encountered on my way home from Whispers had been a local college girl. She’d jumped.

Almost home. The bike’s shocks genuflect as I roll off a quick dip in the highway. You’d hardly notice it in a car, but on a motorbike this little divot turns your insides weightless and tingling. I’ve ridden over it a thousand times. Yet, it caught me off guard the night someone stole one of the cafe racer’s mirrors. (Proof that nothing at all is safe on the Avenue.) I’m nearly blind in my left eye, and clearing myself unaided by said mirror proved nothing less than harrowing. I’d been rattled and I’d forgotten about the dip.

And now, the night’s final thrill: gun it on one last straightaway, the kind my old Sportster-riding buddy Clint once described as “straighter than a nun’s ruler.”

My bike is fast, but it isn’t (thank the heavens) built for speed. It’s no Panigale, no Speed Triple. It’s a heavy-framed, modern-day street fighter, built much like the ’75 BMW R75 I rode in college.

Still, here, in the middle of the night, when this long stretch proves empty enough, I’ll give my bike the old Italian test drive. This was especially true in the weeks just after I’d bought this machine. “Let’s see what this thing can do,” I’d tell myself. I’d inch it up to 80 one night. Eighty-five the next. Then ninety. And, finally, 100, just for a moment, before easing off.

On too many nights, though, none of this is possible. Here, more than anywhere, my way is blocked by plodding and zig-zagging Accords, Tundras and Siennas, their drivers almost surely hammered.

These situations are a 7–10 split. Linger behind, at 15–20 mph below the speed limit, and you’re sure to lose your mind, wondering all the while what the jackass ahead is about to do. Slam the brakes? Dive for the ditch? Drift into a Jersey barrier? And yet, those wheels keep dipping into my lane, which makes passing dodgy business.

So I hang back, trying to spot a pattern in the cars’ meandering path. Finally, an opening. Drunk fuck-wit veers right. I jerk left, then pour it on, my jaw clenched as I whiz by.

Soon I’m listening to the bike’s click, pop, creak as it cools in the garage. It’s funny. No matter what the club has taken out of me, I’m disappointed each night when these rides end.

It’s 3:32 a.m., maybe 3:50 if I hung out and yakked after closing — or if “Devil’s Hour” did its thing and the ride turned ugly.

It’s a Wednesday night and Curt, a retired Sizzle Haven DJ and bouncer, has stopped by Whispers to catch up with an old friend, Darren, who’s managing the club tonight.

Curt is relentlessly happy. Every time I caught a glimpse of him, his face was plastered with a wide, warm grin. His eyes sparkled to match. And a big, curly shock of auburn hair hung to his shoulders, framing a thick and bushy beard.

He almost looked like one of those Jesus paintings that hang in old ladies’ homes. The man was structurally calm. He’d done several tours in Sizzle Haven’s booth, and he’d hauled more than his share of flailing drunks from the club. But if there was a combat-hardened strip club vet in there, Curt had long ago buried it deep. A tranquil, give-no-fucks stillness had settled into him. He expected nothing, and he had nothing to prove.

It’s possible that Curt had brought this same constitutional steadiness to the gig. To me, though, he seemed like a man honorably discharged and grateful to be free of what Marines commonly call “The Suck.”

He spent the night bouncing in and out of the booth, sharing war stories and giving me an old-fashioned and genuinely good-natured hard time. I liked him from the start.

I was seasoned enough by then that the booth felt like a second home. But beneath the swagger, I think Curt sensed an edge on me, the white-knuckle strain that comes with the job. In his own way, he was letting me know he’d been there and, in an act of kindness, prodding me to lighten up.

His were the kind of inside jokes only a strip club DJ would get. I’d cued up a song off Ivy’s list and introduced her to the stage when Curt snuck up behind me and barked the words DJs hear with maddening frequency from the fussiest of strippers: “Could you change the song?!”

I couldn’t help but spin around, body stiff, eyes wide.

“Ha!” Curt shouted.

He laughed so hard he had to brace himself against the booth’s rail. It took a full beat for the knot to leave my chest. Then I was laughing too.

“Well played, sir,” I said. “Well played.”

“And these screams — screams like you’ve never heard — are coming from the locker room. You could hear it everywhere in the club.

Curt returned to the booth sometime around midnight. He told me about the sprawling, brick warehouse where he lived, worked on motorcycles, attempted to resuscitate Japanese sports cars he’d saved from the wrecking yard and DJ’d for hundreds during sweaty, Molly-infused blowouts.

From the locker room, we heard the screams of two Whispers girls who’d been circling each other all night.

“Fucking bitch!”

“Dumb cunt ho!”

Darren leaped from his barstool. Curt didn’t follow.

“I should tell you the story of the worst stripper fight I’ve ever seen,” Curt said.

I called Velvet to the stage, clicked off the mic.

“Dish,” I said.

“So it was a few years ago,” Curt said. “At The Haven. These two girls were super drunk. And they’re talking in the dressing room. You know, casual chit-chat. Suddenly they realize they both have the same boyfriend. I mean, not just a boyfriend, but serious — they’ve both been dating this guy for months.”

“Jesus,” I said.

“Right,” said Curt.

“I was on the door that night,” he continued. “And these screams — screams like you’ve never heard — are coming from the locker room. You could hear it everywhere in the club. So the manager, Otto — you know Otto?”

I nodded.

“Yeah, so Otto busts into the locker room to break it up. But he’s in over his head and he gets on the radio and calls for help. You should have heard him. Real fear in his voice, which isn’t like Otto at all.”

“He’s a big dude, and I hear he carries a big gun,” I said.

“Exactly!” said Curt. “So I come running. I get in there and these girls are going hard. They’re throwing punches. They don’t always connect, because, you know, hammered! But when they do… fuuuuuuck. Like a cage fight, man. It took me, Otto and another bouncer at least 15 minutes to break these chicks up.”

“Let me guess,” I said. “One of them was Bella.”

“Good guess!” said Curt. “Not this time. It was Divine — and Angel. You know them?”

“I know Divine,” I said. “Angel must have bailed before I came onboard.”

By the time it was over, Curt said, Otto’s lip was bleeding and the other bouncer, who was at least 6-foot-six and 300 pounds, limped in tight circles, “trying to straighten out his fucked-up knee.”

And the girls? They’d locked in a twisting, writhing cyclone so ferocious their long hair snarled into a single impossible knot. One combatant bound to the other.

“So now Divine and Angel are slumped back-to-back on the locker room floor,” Curt continued. “They’re leaning against each other. And they’re a wreck. Can’t catch their breath. Big red welts on their faces. Angel’s neck is bleeding from where Divine clawed her. And then there’s the hair situation. They can’t stand up. They can’t even turn to face each other, so they’re staring at opposite walls.”

“What did you do?”

“I ran to the back office, hunted around until I found some scissors,” Curt said.

“Shut up!”

“That’s what the girls said! I told them, ‘I hate to break it to you ladies, but this is the only way I can get you two loose.’”

“They had to love that,” I said.

“They made some noise, but they were resigned to it soon enough,” he said. “They just wanted the whole thing to be over.”

Curt stood over Divine and Angel, chopping through their sweaty, knotted locks with what turned out to be very dull scissors.

“And now they’re friends!” Curt laughs, slapping the side of the DJ booth with a big, hollow thud to drive the punchline home.

“Why are we fighting when we should go kill this dude?” said Divine, still facing the locker room’s east wall.

“He had a small dick and was a bad fuck anyway,” said Angel, talking in the opposite wall’s general direction.

“For sure,” said Divine. “Hey, Curt, how’s it going up there? How bad is it?”

“You don’t want to know,” Curt said, the scissors chewing more than cutting through the girls’ hair.

“Ow!” said Angel. “It’s pulling!”

“I love you, girl,” slurred Divine.

“I love you too,” said Angel.

“I’ll never forget it,” Curt told me.

After 2:30 a.m., once we’d cleared the club’s floor and locked the doors, I killed the sound board, shut down the iMac and brought up the house lights.

This moment arrives each night with an unsettling jolt. We spend hours in darkness, under fire from an endless fusillade of skull-pounding beats and red flashing lights. Then the speakers go quiet and the lights turn bright. Eyes narrow, ears ringing and body throbbing, you feel like a bat flushed from its cave on a bright afternoon.

Curt, all-too-familiar with this discombobulating ritual, chose the moment to shout, “What about that VIP room? Isn’t somebody still back there?”

My eyes flashed once again and, by sheer instinct, I swung around to check for a running timer on the iMac’s now dead screen.

The room spun, and this time it was me who seized the DJ booth’s rail. Stranding a girl in a VIP room is like forgetting a zookeeper in a tiger cage well past feeding time. I was panting.

“Ahhhhhhhhh!” said Curt. Once again that wild, luminous smile. This time he pointed a finger. “Gotcha again!”

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Someone asked me not long ago why I call Whispers and Sizzle Haven “the city’s two roughest strip clubs.”

I was surprised to find myself stumped.

It’s not that I had reason to second guess my judgment. And it’s not as though I haven’t set foot in every one of the city’s strip joints. (You are free to think of these expeditions as either journalistic research or “journalistic research.”)

The distinction is self-evident. And yet, why indeed?

Every strip club suffers its share of problems — and most of those problems are the same: stiff competition leading to all manner of jealousy, calumny, vendetta and drama; booze and drugs, consumed by both dancer and client; every variety of grift, clip, nick and hoodwink; handsy patrons, club-floor brawls and more.

There’s no hard data or algorithm for tracking this kind of disarray. Neither VICE nor Maxim publishes a Strip Club Bedlam Index. Science abandons us here. We’ll have to trust our guts.

The difference when it comes to the madness at Whispers and Sizzle Haven is a question of frequency and scale. The clubs where I DJ are simply... more.

Things don’t just go wrong in these clubs; they go catastrophically wrong. And when they do, the trouble comes on faster, bigger and scarier.

The girls are more likely to throw punches, short-change patrons, strew condoms across backroom floors and, of course, scream at the DJ during their stage sets. And the DJ, God help him, does his best not to yell back.

And the patrons? They’re more likely to rip off the girls, even slap them around. Customers have been known to fight over strippers — and to stake their claims with a Glock.

Why these clubs are this way is even harder to nail down. Trouble seems coded into Whispers and Sizzle Haven’s DNA. Best I can tell, it’s a matter of history — or perhaps curse.

Both clubs are built on the smoldering ashes of a 75-year-old strip club empire long ago brought down by a federal prostitution and racketeering sting.

They’re owned by a trio of battle-scarred industry veterans doomed to call the same plays from the dog-eared pages of a thin and faded playbook.

There’s Neil, sole heir to the fallen dynasty, who did a skosh of federal time after the cops closed in. The morning the FBI came knocking, Neil is said to have answered the door wearing only a purple silk robe, its pockets stuffed with approximately $16,000. He was in the company of at least three strippers. Today, Neil’s business card reads “consultant,” thanks to a lifetime ban from the strip club game.

Then there’s Max, a former DJ who stuck around long enough to snatch a piece of the real action. Max lives in a constant state of frenzy, thanks to either mounds of coke, undiagnosed mania or both. He is by far the least tested of the bunch, and he worships Neil. Max’s end of a phone conversation usually includes the following oft-repeated phrases: “Well, Neil says...,” “It’s just like Neil told me the other day...,” or “Neil wants me to....”

Lastly, there’s the real money behind the operation: Loretta, a long-retired dancer with thick skin and an iron will. Loretta won big in her divorce from another fallen strip baron, then sank the cash into Whispers and Sizzle Haven before decamping to Tampa.

All three would have you believe they’re running respectable night clubs. Yet, all three are so old school they can’t begin to imagine these joints as anything but brothels hiding in plain sight.

And the fruits of this strategy? The reviews are in. Yelp and Google are not kind.

“Stay out of the VIP rooms! A girl named Crimson stole my wallet.”

“The girls are hot. Some are very cool. But the club is gross. The lap dance area stank like mildew. The girl in my lap was sexy as hell, but the smell made me want to gag.”

“My buddy got a VIP room with two girls. They took him for $1,500. Stay away.”

“Stripper stole my phone.”

“I won’t be back and I’d never recommend this club to anyone.”

And then there’s these reviews of Whispers.

“Everything about this place is a giant red flag. Watch out for scams. These girls know how to hustle.”

“Depressing! I’ll come back next time I feel like killing myself.”

“One girl offered a blow job but had a herpe on her lip.”

This — the whole bloody and hellbent mess of it — is what makes these clubs the city’s meanest and most unapologetically depraved. A cross-town competitor occasionally makes a run at the prize, but Whispers and Sizzle Haven never stop throwing elbows.

Little-known fact: Strippers don’t like to strip.

Not all of them, anyway. And certainly not at Sizzle Haven, where dollar bills too often drift to the stage in flurries instead of blizzards. The real action’s in the back of the club — on the couches and in the VIP rooms.

Yet, dance on stage the girls must. That’s the grind. Blow off just one stage set and the club can nail you with a $60 fine. (On top of the $90 in “rent” a dancer pays each night.)

There is, of course, a covert strike team of girls who will do anything to dodge both stage and fine.

These dancers deploy any number of tactics:

• Bribe the DJ. (It works!)

• Appeal to the DJ’s and the manager’s human decency. (Those stilettos are torture. And besides, these girls work hard. They need breaks.)

• Hustle. (That is, feign injury.)

• Fuck someone in charge. (Not right then and there, exactly. Best to keep one’s options open, of course, but generally it pays to already be fucking the boss.)

And then there’s the most badass and cunning scheme of all: sabotage. The girls cut the cable connecting the DJ’s mic to a small dressing room squawk box.

The club floor’s Frigidaire-sized speakers can twitch a Richter needle yet somehow can’t reach the dressing room. Maybe that’s because the girls are all cloistered in the “smoking booth” where they puff on Camels and blunts. Maybe it’s the hum of blow dryers or the chatter of girls staring into mirrors while they glue on lashes and trace their lips with MAC Dazzleglass.

Hence the little speaker affixed high above a bank of red lockers.

It’s supposed to work like this: A magnetic field captures the vibrations of a DJ’s vocal cords, transforming them into an electrical current. That current travels through a copper cable until it jostles a cone inside the speaker. In this way, these electroaccoustic vibrations become critical information the dancers need to do their jobs — notably who’s on stage and who’s up next.

Unless someone hacks the speaker wire. In that case, the signal trickles out the end of a frayed cable and becomes… nothing.

“Where the hell have you been?” asks Remy, that night’s manager.

“Why?” asks Jasmine, who’s wearing only a black g-string save for two black, electrical tape Xs hiding her nipples. “Am I supposed to be onstage?”

“Uh, yeah!” says Remy. “You were supposed to be onstage twice in the last 45 minutes. Twice! What the hell, Jasmine? Seriously!”

“But he never called my name!” says Jasmine, pointing an especially damning finger in my direction.

“Did you call Jasmine’s name?” Remy hollers.

This is dangerous territory. The less said the better. I nod, then pretend to adjust the levels on the sound board. Neither Remy nor Jasmine seem to notice I’m playing a song off Jasmine’s playlist — 03 Greedo’s “In the Morning.”

“I’ve been in the locker room for the last hour and I didn’t hear a damn thing!” says Jasmine. She places a hand on her cocked hip, then jerks her chin toward the lap dance couches. “And by the way, it smells like stale pussy back there.”

Remy cast his eyes skyward, a silent plea to Heaven.

Again and again some variation of this exchange will play out through the night. All night. Cashmere. Vixen. Bella. Sin. And then, sometime the next morning the day manager will discover one of the girls has knifed the wire.

Which is why Adrian, the head DJ, is now standing over me, exasperated but resigned, a 75-foot twist of cable slung over his shoulder.

“This stuff is extra thick,” he says. “They’re gonna have a hell of a time hacking through it this time!”

There are dancers who own a stage. The DJ calls her name. She glides, swaggers, struts up those steps. She’s feral, manic, lawless on the pole. Steady, professional, no bullshit on the club floor. DJs love these dancers. They want to marry them.

Remembering these girls exist keeps one sane in moments like this. And yet, in a weird way, you can’t help but respect a stripper who’s willing to hack a live wire to get out of working.

Such is the infinitely multifaceted relationship between DJ and dancer. Many of them you love. Most of them drive you a little batshit. And a few of them make you want to slam your head through the drywall.

Tonight marks at least the fourth time Adrian has had to rewire the dressing room speaker. Sizzle Haven’s shadow ops team is, if anything, relentless.

Before long, Adrian’s up a ladder. He’s shoved aside a foam ceiling tile. The top of him has disappeared into the rafters. Even over the throbbing hip-hop I can hear him up there huffing and grunting.

Otto, tonight’s manager, is feeding the cable up to Adrian.

“Jesus,” Adrian growls. “Why do they have to do this shit?”

Otto, steadying the ladder below, laughs.

Adrian coils the line and throws it Indiana Jones style. It’ll take several tries before he’s hurled it far enough to reach the dressing room. With each throw, I hear the cable skitter overhead.

“Yes!” cries Adrian.

“Now you got it!” says Otto.

And now the awkward part.

“Sorry!” Adrian says, then flops to the floor, which by all appearances hasn’t been vacuumed in at least a decade. Adrian, flat on his back, wriggles between my motorcycle boots until, phone flashlight aglow, he’s reached a tangle of dusty wires beneath the sound board.

“Fuck!” comes Adrian’s voice from way down in the filthy darkness. “Jesus fuck!”

For a moment I’m 11, my heart pounding as I help my dad with a home improvement project gone bad. (“Hold it straight, damnit!”)

Still, I keep the Main Stage running: Chloe, Bella, Spice, Nikki, Heat. And I can’t help but marvel that I’ve somehow gotten good enough at this gig to do it while standing, boots akimbo, above my snarling boss.

“Yeees! Here comes the jaw-dropping and gorgeous Autumn!” I say.

“Fuck me!” says Adrian.

I rotate a few more girls on and off the stage before Adrian shimmies from his cave, his face red like the stage lights. He’s arched his back, walking on one shoulder blade, then the other.

Adrian disappears into the dressing room, stands tippy-toe on a creaking formica counter and reaches, stretches — more, more — until he’s connected the cable to the speaker.

“Say something on the mic so I know it’s working again,” Adrian says.

“All right!” I growl. “It doesn’t get better than this! Coming to the Main Stage now is the lusty, luscious Adrian! Adrian, by the way, is doing half-price lap dances and VIP rooms! You won’t want to miss it — trust me!”

Adrian’s face appears in the dressing room door. He arches a brow.

“It… works,” he says dryly.

Jasmine sighs.

It was Christmastime. A tree, fake and flocked, lit the corner between Sizzle Haven’s two stages, which both ran full-tilt.

The floor was packed, and the bodies made the air hot and thick.

Nearly 60 dancers gleefully worked this booze-lubed crowd. The girls formed an ant trail, leading guys to and from the couches. Other girls draped themselves over men at the ATM, which spit thick stacks of 20s. The curtains were drawn on all eight VIP rooms. It was pure Christmas magic.

Remy appeared in the DJ booth, the way he does when the night’s chaos has sent him spiraling. He’s barely old enough to be in the club, never mind run it, and yet he is by far our most fastidious manager. He takes his work far too seriously. It’s my job to talk him down. Remy does the same for me, because, despite appearances, I secretly take my work too seriously. We’ve struck an unspoken pact to keep each other sane. It’s possible these midnight therapy sessions have saved lives.

“What’s up?” asked Remy, who’d just helped a bouncer eighty-six an especially drunk and handsy tech bro.

“I’m trying out some new Christmas promo material,” I said.

“It’s been a little busy out there,” said Remy, still catching his breath. “I haven’t been listening.”

“Good,” I said. “Because it’s all terrible.”

“Lay it on me anyway,” he said. “I could use the laugh.”

“OK, how about this? ‘Get your yule log on back on those lap dance couches!’”

Remy groaned.

“Or this!” I said. “‘The Baby Jesus wants you in those VIP rooms, and this is no time of year to make the Baby Jesus cry!’”

“Tell me you did not fucking say that on the mic.”

“Sure did!” I said.

I’d been saving the best for last.

”’Get yourself a lap dance or a VIP room! It’s the Christmas present that unwraps itself!’”

“There you go!” Remy said. “Not bad!”

This gig comes with its kicks, to be sure. Its biggest downside — aside from floor brawls, screaming strippers and the occasional gun — is that it traps DJs in the same grind.

You’re stuck in a rhetorical hamster wheel: Introduce the dancer to the stage. Tell the guys about the lap dance couches. Talk up the VIP rooms. Get another girl onstage. Then repeat — ad infinitum.

You might as well be hosting a public radio pledge drive. (Except the listeners get tits instead of tote bags.)

“All night. Every damned night,” Adrian, the clubs’ head DJ, told me shortly after I started this gig. As if performing the most Shakespearean of deaths, he threw himself against the back of the booth’s squeaky office chair and flung his eyes toward the ceiling. “Over… and over… and over again,” he said.

The liturgy of the skin trade is its own cruel hell. It can turn your brain to oatmeal. And so, when the tedium sets in, I can’t help but break from the script. I start riffing.

Veteran DJs know this is dodgy business. Going rogue on the mic risks pissing off a dancer, maybe all of the dancers. A drunk patron may think you too smart for your own good. One of the club’s owners might agree and fire your ass.

And then there’s this: No one comes to a strip club to hear the DJ. Of life’s immutable truths, none can be more enduring. The job is to keep girls on the stages and to keep the girls happy. Period.

And yet, every DJ develops his own alter-ego, and screwing around on the mic, for better or worse, helped me discover mine. When you bomb, good God, you strike the earth like a meteor. But if you manage to make a few people laugh? Well, it doesn’t get better than that, does it?

It’s a matter of finding the guardrails — and proving yourself to the owners, managers and, most importantly, the girls. Once they know you can keep the car on the road, nobody cares how fast you take the corners.

Easier said than done — especially when you’d never laid hands on a soundboard before your first day on the job and the last time you held a mic was more than two decades ago, when you were howling “White Wedding” at confused Spaniards in a Costa Blanca karaoke bar.

Which is to say I was trying to accomplish everything at once — learning the gig, winning over the girls, finding my voice and testing its limits. Steadier and saner souls would surely have taken it slow and stuck to the script, until they’d proved themselves at least.

Me? I figured, “Fuck it. I’m a goddamned strip club DJ! Let’s have some fun with it.”

Torpedoes be damned.

I began keeping in my screen’s top-right corner an ever-evolving list of captivating adjectives to describe the dancers. I use it for intros and outros.

“There she is, the dangerously alluring Spice!”

“It doesn’t get better than that. Give it up, gentlemen, for the wildly seductive Luna!”

Blaze, who’s more than once shrieked at me from the stage, beamed after I’d exalted her as “powerfully provocative.”

“Damn right!” she said. “I am a powerful Black woman!”

“Yes you are!” I shouted over Flo Milli’s “Never Lose Me.”

And yet, this was not always a winning strategy. Bella, who eats DJs alive, took umbrage when I proclaimed her the “bewitching Bella!” She thought I was calling her “a witch,” and screamed as much as she dismounted the Main Stage pole.

I, of course, intended no such thing and decided to set her straight. I read over the mic an assortment of synonyms for bewitching: “Mesmerizing! Captivating! Entrancing! Irresistible!”

“See, Bella?” I said. “Not so bad, right?”

Bella held up a middle finger.

In hindsight, my skirmishes with Bella were escalating toward a formal declaration of war. This smug vocab lesson amounted to a passive-aggressive shot across her bow.

From there, my missteps grew worse — and weirder.

“Little known fact!” I barked late one night into Whispers’ mic. “Our VIP rooms are a favorite of none other than Mötley Crüe’s Vince Neil. That man’s been in every strip club in America. He knows what he’s talking about. So be like Vince! Get your asses back to those rooms!”

One guy out on the floor, a blue-collar type — no-shine and no-horseshit, from the look of him — slammed his palms against his knees and snapped his head back toward the booth. Every inch of the man seemed to cry out, “Are you kidding me with this shit?”

Of course I was kidding him with this shit.

I’d been on the job just a week when Adrian marveled at how comfortable I sounded on the mic. “You’re a natural,” he said. “New guys are usually scared out of their minds.”

It wasn’t long before he’d decided I’d become too comfortable. “Dial it down, man!” he told me one afternoon on his way to a back-office staff meeting. “Cut the comedy routine and fly under the radar.”

He had a point. I reined it in — until I didn’t.

My schtick has since become one part pragmatism, two parts showmanship — if you can call it that. Each night brings any number of minor-grade calamities. Most can be quietly smoothed over with a bit of DJ black magic. Should the voodoo fail, I figure it’s best to be transparent, cut the tension by making whatever broke down a part of the show.

This strategy has made me Kermit the Frog to Whispers’ and Sizzle Haven’s X-Rated Muppet Show.

Case in point: Vixen went AWOL one night, then the Main Stage went dead. Half-panicked, I pleaded my case to a knot of girls within earshot of the booth. They rolled their eyes. That’s when I spotted Raven, a warm-hearted goth girl who’d — I am not making this up — sharpened her eye teeth into fangs.

“Raven, I’ll totally buy you a Diet Coke if you’ll hit the Main Stage,” I said into the mic. Raven shot me a thumbs-up and headed for the stage. “You’re the best!” I said.

There was the time Blaze yowled at me because I’d chosen “the wrong fucking song” — from her own fucking playlist. “Gosh, Blaze,” I said, leaning into the mic. “You seem upset. Is there something else I can play for you?”

Blaze seethed. A few dudes, who’d been shifting in their seats moments earlier, sniggered.

And on another night, with nearly 40 dancers on Sizzle Haven’s roster and the club again jammed wall-to-wall, I couldn’t get Nikki to show up for her stages.

It’s hard to be pissed at Nikki. She can be… mercurial, but she’s also scatterbrained and funny as hell. Nikki happens to be the club’s biggest earner — and she always tips the DJ — which means she could slash a customer’s throat and not get sent home.

Hours passed. When it appeared Nikki was about skip her fourth consecutive stage set, I clicked on the mic and hit the soundboard’s reverb button.

“Nikki! This is the Lord, your God! Get thine ass to the stage!”

“OK, that one was funny,” Adrian said.

My worst was soon to come. Nearing 2 a.m. on a Friday turned Saturday, I unleashed what is surely the most atrocious hustle any strip club DJ has uttered into a microphone.

In my defense, I was bleary, numb and shell-shocked after running nonstop stages for more than seven hours. It had been a good night. Whispers had stayed busy. The money rolled in. And I was starting to get the hang of this strip club DJ thing; I’d pitched a nearly perfect game.

We were winding down the stage. It was time for me to make my last — and critical — VIP room pitch of the night. And so, dog tired, disembodied and cock-sure, I said this: “And now a word from my good friend and Berlin’s top skin trade DJ, Dr. Hymenboobie!”

An apocryphal German strip club DJ took shape in my mind. He was clad throat to ankle in leather, black and slick, his pants so tight they threatened to split at the loins. And his lips, thin and pursed, barely gripped a dangling zigarette.

As if possessed, I heard myself call out in the lousiest of German accents: “In Ber-leen, vee are kinkiest city in all of Europe. Vee go oonce, oonce, oonce all night long! But vee are not allowed zee Vee-Eye-Pee rooms! Vhy?! I do not know vhy! But you Americans haff zee Vee-Eye-Pee! You must get to Zee Vee-Eye-Pee!”

I braced for the incoming clear stiletto heel sure to be hurled at my head. None arrived. Lex, my greatest ally and closest friend among the dancers, looked my way with what can only be described as genuine concern — as though I might be suffering a psychotic break or perhaps a stroke. Her very pretty and already big brown eyes turned huge. Her jaw hung slack. She slowly shook her head as if to say, “My God! What have you done?”

Had anyone else been listening, they were stunned silent.

I do not think myself particularly clever. And yet, Dr. Hymenboobie’s unexpected, delirious and ill-advised appearance marked a kind of milestone: Somehow, if only for a moment, I’d managed to get out of my own way.

I’d been spontaneous, unfiltered and audacious — while speaking into a microphone, in front of strangers and within earshot of a holdout faction of strippers who still wanted the new DJ dead.

For the first time in years I’d forgotten to care what other people think. I’d stopped caring what I thought. The witnesses for the prosecution and defense who had been testifying endlessly in my head for as long as I could remember were dismissed. The judge called a fucking recess.

It was as though a cluster of brain circuits long burnt out — the neural wiring that had once made me me — had glitched, then showed signs of life.

I couldn’t have told you at the time exactly why I’d taken this savage gig. I couldn’t explain it to myself. But the reason I’d been spending night after night in these dark rooms suddenly made a flicker of sense.

Never again did I summon my imaginary friend from Berlin. Not in the booth at least. The bit had been preposterous — but that’s why I couldn’t let it die.

Dr. Hymenboobie became the name of my (European, but not German) motorbike, which hurls me each night between two worlds: one a wild bedlam, somehow dragging me along an improbable path back to the human I used to be; the other a “respectable” and relatively sane family life, where I owe Lisa and Sean nothing less than my old self.

They groan whenever, over dinner or in the car, I lapse into Dr. Hymenboobie’s mangled Bavarian accent. Before long, though, I’ve got them laughing.

It should be noted for the record, by the way, that Dr. Hymenboobie was dead wrong. I Googled it. Of course VIP rooms are allowed in Berlin. Everything is allowed in Berlin.

Otto told me the heat was on the way, and I got to work.

If you’re going to survive a vice squad raid, you’re going to need a proper playlist. So I queued up Jan Hammer’s Miami Vice theme — because of course I did. Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power.” Fugazi’s “Merchandise.” The Sex Pistols’ “God Save the Queen,” Aretha Franklin’s “Respect.” And — the coup de grâce! — The Clash’s “Clampdown.”

I may be new to the strip club game, but I know this: You can’t have a police raid without The Clash.

And yet I left out one very important track — ostensibly the most essential vice raid song of all: AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck.”

If you hear “Thunderstruck,” Otto explained, you know the Man just walked through the door.

“Thunderstruck” is a red distress flare, shot high and arcing across the sky. It’s the potted French marigold left on a Cold War-era Berlin windowsill signaling the operation is compromised, your cover blown.

“Thunderstruck” means: Stop banging that customer in the VIP room. Stop twerking on the couches. Stop snorting lines in the ladies’ room. Whatever you’re doing, stop — just stop. Get yourself to the front of the club and stay there.

“All the girls will know what to do when you play it,” Otto reassured me. “At least I think they will.”

AC/DC’s 1990 masterpiece is remarkably suited to this purpose, because it builds and builds, both anxious and exhilarating, until — boom. Everything about “Thunderstruck” tells you trouble’s on the way.

These occasional vice operations are a matter of routine — more inspection than sting. They’re like a health department visit to a restaurant’s kitchen — except instead of roaches and tepid beef, they’re sniffing out stray condoms and underage girls.

“We should have had a staff meeting about this shit,” I muttered, then dragged CCR’s “Fortunate Son” into the deck.

The cops don’t need probable cause to get through a club’s doors — but they’re looking for it once they’re inside. Club owners put up with this because they have to; these raids are a condition of their “adult entertainment” licenses, which are so hard to come by they’re like gold.

No one, even in this cutthroat business, wants to see anyone’s strip club license torpedoed. That’s why it’s become common professional courtesy to spread the word once the vice squad starts making its rounds.

Last week, it was the Ember Room up north, Blush on the south end, the Sin Den downtown. By Monday, smart money had it that Sizzle Haven was next.

Sure enough, just after noon, five plain-clothes cops and city inspectors pulled their badges and high-stepped over the velvet rope.

“Remember,” Otto murmured, his eyes focused on the inbound officers, “this thing’s no big deal.”

I had “Thunderstruck” ready to roll, and I cranked it — right in the middle of K Camp’s “Racks Like This,” which happened to be the first song of Cashmere’s stage set.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Cashmere shrieked, then marched down the Main Stage’s steps.

The vice inspectors didn’t seem to notice. They moved swiftly, fanned out across the club.

Still, we had a problem: Cashmere, it appeared, never got the “Thunderstruck” memo. Almost no one had.

We had about a dozen dancers in the club and roughly the same number of customers on the floor. Only four of the girls had gathered near the bar. That left eight dancers loose and up to Heaven knows what in a club full of cops.

I still had two VIP timers running, one for Vixen and one for Envy. Neither had surfaced by the time “Thunderstruck” wound down and my vice raid playlist rolled on to N.W.A.’s “Fuck the Police.”

Otto couldn’t remember when our friends at Vice last dropped by. Most of the dancers, we figured, had forgotten the drill; the new girls never knew it to begin with.

No matter. A quick dive into the DJ app showed that “Thunderstruck” had made its way into regular rotation on several of the dancers’ playlists1 — which meant our clever signal wasn’t worth a damn.

It had been stripped of its shock value and its super-secret decoder ring message. Put another way, “Thunderstruck” no longer got anyone’s attention, nor did it have anything to say — at least not when it comes to vice cops in a strip joint.

“We should have had a staff meeting about this shit,” I muttered, then dragged CCR’s “Fortunate Son” into the deck.

The cops rifled through thick stacks of paperwork and cracked open heavy D-ring binders, paying especially close attention to each girl’s business license.

Neil emerged from Sizzle Haven’s back office and stood stiff and silent as he observed all of this. Minutes seemed to pass before he took a new breath.

It had been more than a decade since Neil had done a stretch in a federal lockup. The feds nailed him on a RICO charge, stripped him of millions and banned him from the strip club business. Yet, here he was. Neil owned a sizable stake in both Whispers and Sizzle Haven. On paper, though, he was a lowly “consultant.”

Rumor had it he’d been slipping enough white envelopes to the right people to avoid attention. But from what I could see, Neil needed these cops in his club like he needed a fourth divorce.

He gaped at two officers who quickly disappeared into the dressing room. Who knows what they might find back there? Neil closed his eyes and shook his head. For a moment, I thought he might be praying.

Had Neil known Envy and Vixen were still back in those VIP rooms, he’d probably have stroked out on the spot. He seemed too preoccupied — perhaps at this stage dissociated — to notice when I flicked on the mic and called time on both rooms, even with a good 10 minutes still on the clock.

“Vixen, your time is up. Time is up, Vixen,” I said, doing my best to sound like these were average VIP rooms on an average day.

“Envy, your time is up,” I continued. “Time’s up, Envy.”

Three minutes passed. Four. Five. The cops were sure to break for the back of the club at any second. We were out of time.

Otto quietly slipped back to the VIPs, yanked open the curtains, made sure everybody’s junk was stowed and, with all the subtlety he could muster, herded two strippers and two startled dudes to the bar.

We couldn’t have cut it closer — nor could we have been luckier. Envy and Vixen appeared to have slipped into a small group of dancers without anyone noticing. A couple of vice cops soon donned black latex gloves, clicked on their mini Maglites and headed for the VIPs.

By the time it was over, our visitors had found nothing amiss with the club’s paperwork and, much to Neil’s relief, nothing worth smoking, snorting or injecting in the locker room.

But they did find something.

“What do you make of this?” Otto asked me.

He held in his palm the blue, torn corner of some kind of laminate plastic wrapper. No logo, no label, no letters or words. All of that would have been attached to its counterpart, which was nowhere to be found.

“You lost me,” I said.

One of the vice detectives had discovered this little slice of deep-blue cellophane under a VIP room couch. Otto watched as the cop inspected the wrapper, turned it in his fingers again and again.

Then the cop waggled the bit of plastic in front of Otto’s face. “If there were lettering, a logo, anything that suggested this came from a condom,” said the officer, “I’d hit you with a fine. You dodged a bullet here, man.”

But Otto wasn’t so sure there’d been reason to duck.

Jazmin was now on the stage, and I had A Boogie Wit da Hoodie’s “Still Think About You” bumped up — too far up. The higher the stress, the louder the music. It’s how I blow off steam.

“I dunno,” Otto hollered over the music, studying the blue sliver of plastic. “I think it may be a peanut wrapper.”

“A penis wrapper?” I hollered back.

“No, man! No!” cried Otto. “You know — like Planters? Peanut wrapper, man! PEA-NUT!”

“Give it up for the radiant and ravishing Jazmine!” I growled into the mic. “And get back to those VIP rooms! You can’t spell F-U-N without V-I-P!”

Brianna burst from Whisper’s ladies’ room, eyeballs bulging, hands cupping her crotch.

“You OK?” asked Otto, tonight’s manager.

“I burnt my vag!” Brianna said.

She pogoed in place, still gripping her privates.

“You what?” Otto and I called out.

“I’m on my period, and I couldn’t find the scissors!” Brianna said.

Anyone who thinks working in a strip club is sexy has yet to pass the open door of a locker room where several dancers are shoving tampons between their legs, then scissoring the dangling filament.

Why the scissors? Strippers cut their tampon strings so they can keep on grinding during their periods. Barring the rare disaster, guys are none the wiser.

Except tonight the scissors were nowhere to be found. So Brianna grabbed a lighter. She figured the flame would burn right through the string.

Things did not go as planned.

The Bic lit the string like a fuse. The flame climbed, straight into Brianna’s nethers where, starved for oxygen, the fire mercifully choked out.

My night shift was just beginning. The club’s floor was empty — the quiet before the storm — and I’d been updating a few of the girls’ playlists.

“OK, OK,” I said, holding my palms aloft. “Let’s work the problem. First, are you hurt?”

Brianna retreated to the restroom. She clomped a heel up on a toilet seat, peeled aside her pink slingshot bikini and, to the best of her ability, assessed the damage.

“I think I’m OK,” she said upon her return. “Just got pretty hot down there for a sec.”

“So, no emergency room? No urgent care?” I asked.

“Don’t think so,” Brianna said.

O

There are too many moments in this business when you can’t believe the predicament you’re up against, nor the words emerging from your mouth. By the time you’ve stopped noticing, you know you’ve been in the game too long. This was one of those moments.

“Bactine?” I asked. “Neosporin?”

Otto smirked. His shoulders began to bounce. What at first appeared a medical emergency had turned endlessly entertaining. He tried like hell not to laugh.

“No, no,” said Brianna, and then she too began to giggle. “The tampon’s a little torched, though.”

“Jesus,” I said.

Otto was now face down on the bar and howling.

“You have an auxiliary backup tampon?” I asked.

“Yup,” Brianna said.

“Right on. Do…” — I waggled my hand, an erratic and vague gesture — “…that.”

“We’ll find the scissors,” I continued.

This bodega, like so many gas stations and mini marts, is endowed with what I call the glass “Case o’ Trouble” — a scratched and fingerprint-smeared display loaded with low culture and the flimsy promise of danger.

Scissors happen to be a hot item at Whisper’s — for reasons both reproductive and pharmacological. The girls (and some DJs) use them to perform surgery on Backwoods cigars, which they roll into blunts.

I clicked on the mic. As if paging a traveler to an airline counter, I said: “If anyone has the scissors, please bring them to the bar. Scissors to the bar, please.”

Harley poked her head through the dressing room’s curtain, shrugged and shook her head.

“Huh,” I said, then realized the mic was still on.

Otto searched behind the bar. I scoured the booth, flashlight in hand.

Nothing.

Off I went to the bodega across the Avenue, which is owned by a young and lovely Indian couple.

“You don’t happen to sell scissors,” I said to the woman behind the counter. Her eyes were fixed on a laptop screen, which showed two men in brown business suits hollering at each other in a news studio some 8,000 miles away.

“Ah, no,” she said. “Sorry.”

I scanned the shelves of the glass case between us.

This bodega, like so many gas stations and mini marts, is endowed with what I call the glass “Case o’ Trouble” — a scratched and fingerprint-smeared display loaded with low culture and the flimsy promise of danger.

Little bottles of Fireball. Powder-filled capsules to make her horny and him up to the job. Colorful bongs and glass pipes. Kerchiefs, t-shirts and trucker hats displaying pot leaves or the American flag. (Bonus points for a furious bald eagle soaring in the foreground!)

Then there are the switchblades, pocket knives, nunchucks and other “weapons,” most of which are sure to come apart in your hands long before they see a fight.

Whenever I encounter one of these “Cases o’ Trouble,” I imagine a single salesman, a “Peddler o’ Trouble,” lurching from store to store, boxes of this trash stacked in the back of his dated and dusty Chrysler “Minivan o’ Trouble.”

Who, I wonder, is this guy? An ex-con with swastikas tattooed on his knuckles? The divorced owner of a used car lot seized by the IRS, who was cut in on the action by a guy he met drowning his troubles in a bar? Who’s his supplier? How profitable, exactly, is the business of purveying try-hard badassery?

“I’ll take one of those, please,” I said, pointing to a plastic container brimming with “flip-knives” — pocket blades you can flick open with the speed of a switchblade. (And, thanks to a gaping hole in the law, without running afoul of the cops.)

Closer inspection revealed skulls and chains — all in the motif of an Iron Maiden album cover — etched into each of the knives’ handles. I chose a red one, flipped it open and ran its blade along my thumb. Predictably dull, but maybe just sharp enough to get the job done.

Twelve dollars poorer, I sprinted back to the club and presented Brianna with the knock-off Iron Maiden knife.

“Seriously?” she said. “I mean, thanks and all but — seriously?

I shrugged. “It’s what they had. I’d, uh, spritz it with rubbing alcohol first.”

Brianna snatched the Iron Maiden knife, disappeared into the can and reemerged smiling.

She couldn’t figure how to unlock and fold the knife. Beaming, near ecstatic, she now brandished its big, red blade in her right hand. Any clueless soul who’d just paid his cover might have assumed Brianna had taken great satisfaction in committing some unspeakable atrocity in that ladies’ room. All that was missing was the blood splatter.

“Victory?” I asked.

Brianna nodded.

“What do I owe you?” she asked.

“Don’t sweat it,” I said. “You’ve been through enough tonight. This one’s on me.”

Otto reached out from behind the bar and gave Brianna’s bare shoulder a playful nudge. “You’re the only stripper I know who’s set her snatch on fire and lived to tell the tale!” he said.

“Hey!” I said. “How about I introduce you that way on the mic?”

Brianna narrowed her eyes, mustering as much menace and peril as one can after setting one’s privates alight.

“Try it,” she said.

The days start creaky and groaning.

It’s as though the club is a living being cursed to an eternity of debauchery — night after night, one party to the next. Each morning we find it corpse-pale in a puddle of its own vomit, head the size of a zeppelin and swearing to God it won’t survive another night of this.

And yet it does.

With each hour, each new girl on the stage, each new guy through the doors, the club shakes off the pain of the previous night’s excess until it’s roaring once again.

During my DJ career’s early days, I found myself playing Jesus to Whispers’ and Sizzle Haven’s oversexed Lazarus. That’s because rookie DJs are almost invariably dayshift DJs — and dayshift DJ’s are tasked with the slow and excruciating work of resurrecting the club.

You start the day with less than a handful of girls in the rotation. Hours pass between customers. The girls sprawl across banquettes, wrapped in blankets, Netflix on their phones, drifting off. You bring down the music, just a little, because keeping it cranked feels a little sad. It’s like you’re blasting the HiFi at a high school rager everyone skipped.

It’s a bright day outside, where normal, functioning adults are living normal, functional lives. And here you are, stuck in a cave with bored, barely dressed women while the thump, thump, thump of contemporary hip-hop drills through your skull.

There are good and practical reasons for deploying a rookie DJ to the day shift. Day shifts come with fewer girls, fewer customers and, most of the time, fewer complications.

It’s like any other gig. You put in your time. If you survive, if you can deliver, they call you to the majors. You get your shot at the big time. Until then, here you are.

Bringing the club back to life each morning amounts to a sequence of simple rituals.

First, I’ll head for the stages. Each of the three steps leading up to both “Stage 1” and the “Main Stage” are illuminated by red LED strips. Phone flashlight in hand, I’ll reach beneath each stage and twist four dimmer switches until I feel an especially satisfying click, which brings the steps’ lights to life.

Next, I fire up the booth. Switch on the iMac. Arrange the DJ app and VIP timers across the screen. I’ll launch the lighting software and switch all the stage lights to red. (Because it looks cool — and when it comes to stage lighting, it’s as good a place to start as any.)

I’ll snatch the manager’s clipboard and type into a text file the names of the four or five dancers already in the building.

The mixing board lights up with the punch of a big and sturdy button, its level meters and peak/clip lights ready to dance.

The girls are back there in the locker room. They stretch on their fishnets, help each other into their sheer bodysuits, one hook and one eyelet at a time. They line up at the mirrors, stroke on mascara, dash and dab their pursed lips with Ruby Woo, Dragon Girl and Exhibitionist Cream.

I’ll spin up a playlist — hip-hop, always hip-hop. Failure to play hip-hop amounts to wading, feet bare and bleeding, across a piranha-choked stream.

My boss, Adrian, once told me the girls like to begin the day with classical music. So I queued up Phillip Glass, Unsuk Chin and Roxanna Panufnik.

“What the fuck are you playing?” asked a dancer named Sin, who’d appeared on the booth’s steps as if out of nowhere.

“I heard you guys like classical in the mornings!” I said.

Sin arched an eyebrow.

“I’ll switch it up,” I said.​

“Thaaaaaank youuuuu!” she called over her shoulder as she faded back into the darkness.

(I also once made the mistake of kicking things off with Echo and the Bunnymen’s “Lips Like Sugar.” The day did not start well.)

So hip-hop it is.

I’ll choose tracks that begin slow and mellow(ish), then quicken the pace, building energy and anticipation. We’ll begin with “Whenever” by Megan Thee Stallion. Then Gunna’s “Got Damn.” On to “Nokia” by Drake. And then, say, “Dum, Dumb, Dumber,” by Lil Baby, Young Thug and Future.

This attempt at building anticipation, setting the pace, helping the dancers get their minds in the game would be far more effective if it led to… something.

But often it does not.

Instead, we wait… and wait… then wait some more.

That’s the hardest part.

When the club is dead, dancers enjoy the luxury of sliding into a deep somnolence.

But the DJ? No matter how deep his stupor, he has to be ready to bring himself — and the club — to life the moment a dude cracks that door.

Daytime customers are traveling businessmen, fresh off the plane and killing time. Graveyard-shift construction crews just clocked out. Old widowers out for some fun before their afternoon naps. Your average maladjusted and likely dangerous perv. And family men — professionals who’ve snuck off for a lunchtime indulgence, the wife none the wiser.

The lot of them trickle in. One here, another there. A group of three. Then more. Each, no matter the time of day, expects the charged eroticism promised by the blinking, neon sign outside reading. “Live nude girls.”

There’s no question a daytime strip club visitor has tempered his expectations. Still, were any of these guys to catch a clear view of the limp and listless scene inside, they’d likely recoil and disappear.

And so a strip club DJ’s discipline is to create an illusion: That the club’s been running full-tilt, nonstop all day — and that it’s packed with guys, every one of them so drunk on Tecaté and tits they can’t imagine being anywhere else on a Tuesday morning.

You learn — even in your stuporous state — to watch for the visual cues and feel the shifts in energy that signal a lone customer’s arrival. Each crack of the door floods the velvet rope line with bright, orange sunlight. You spot the manager’s shoulders shift, hear the old barstool’s springs squeak as he stands to collect a cover charge.

Before long, you’re on top of all this before anyone else knows what’s happening.

You nudge up the already throbbing music, flip the mic switch and start talking — just talking. Say whatever you want, so long as you’re barking at imaginary customers who are ogling an invisible stripper on the stage.

I usually dive into a promo: “Get back to those VIP rooms! OK! Here comes Nova!”

My voice jolts the girls from their blankets. They toss their phones and get ready to hustle.

The scene recalls an old Western — the candy-striped saloon pianist drifting off, boots up, bowler hat tipped, cigarette burning hot near his lips. The batwing doors swing wide and he’s airborne. He’s tickling those keys before his butt comes down in the seat — Dada-da-DA-DAda-DA!

This schtick also conjures a slightly more contemporary film: “Weekend at Bernie’s,” where Andrew McCarthy and Jonathan Silverman puppet a corpse around town in a ruse to prove its former owner is still alive.

There are, of course, false alarms.

“Here we go! Here we go! Remember to get back on those couches, now! Here comes...”

“Mailman!” Asia calls out from the floor.

“Alright, now! It doesn’t get better than this! Get ready for...”

“That’s my DoorDash!”

“Yeeeeeeees! Here we go!”

“One of my regulars!” says Luna.

Many of the girls keep appointments with “regulars,” who have arrived, not to soak in the club’s galvanized climate, but for an afternoon VIP room tryst. Which is to say the place can become more brothel than strip club during a day shift.

Luna throws her arms around her guy, whispers in his ear and leads him by the hand to the bar’s credit card terminal.

The afternoon wears on like this until more and more girls are signing onto the rotation and more and more guys are settling in out there on the floor. The club — suddenly, improbably — feels invigorated, eyes wide, blood coursing.

A daytime DJ will get to enjoy an hour or two of this — the hinted promise of the thrumming, buzzing night ahead.

By the time the club starts really picking up, the night DJ will arrive. Fist bumps will be exchanged. The daytime DJ will then hand over the controls of a revived club, senselessly determined to charge once again headlong into the night.

The first rule of DJing in a strip club is this: Stay in the DJ booth. The booth is where the job happens. Beyond its confines, a DJ is useless.

I was not in the booth. I wasn’t even in the club. On this Tuesday night I found myself out on The Avenue, chasing a topless stripper named Star — who was chasing three customers who’d just ripped her off.

Star is nearly six feet tall and endowed with the body of an Olympic runner. Smooth, taut breasts. All muscle rippling beneath her shimmering, deep-Black skin.

She is the last stripper you want to burn — and the last stripper you’re likely to outrun.

Darren, who was managing the club that Tuesday night, had also burst into the street. He’s been in the business long enough to have worked with Star’s mother, who hung up her clear heels nearly a decade ago.

“Star!” Darren shouted, surging between the dancer and her offending clients. “Don’t make me call your mom!”

Everything started to come apart around 10:30 p.m. when three new faces showed up at Whispers’ velvet rope line. There was a dude in his early 20s, head-to-toe in tan army fatigues.

We’ll call him Boris.

Then there was his girlfriend. Brunette. Barely 18. All of four feet 10. Eyes narrow, jaw cocked and clenched — tiny and unassuming but all ambition and danger. She was like a little switchblade tucked into a pink sock.

Let’s call her Natasha.

And the third guy? You’d think this poor fellow had just come to in an ice-filled bathtub, his kidney well on its way to a black market buyer. Face ashen. Eyes glassy. Red t-shirt stained, stretched and drooping at the collar. Like Boris, he appeared to be around 21 or 22.

We’ll call him Kidney Boy.

Natasha locked Star in her razor-blade stare and cracked a crooked, taunting smirk — the kind of smirk that says everything while appearing to say nothing at all.

None of this looked right, but you couldn’t put your finger on exactly what made it wrong. We figured these were friends, out for a wild night.

It was a little true, but not true enough. Over the next two hours, Natasha would roll out a con targeting both Kidney Boy — and Star too. Boris, happy to have a girl grinding in his lap, ran alongside the thing the way a Labrador chases the family car.

Strip clubs are no strangers to grift, but what Natasha pulled off was something special. She handed over one credit card after another at the bar, then plucked thick stacks of 20s from the corner ATM. None of us wanted to notice that Natasha had gotten hold of Kidney Boy’s wallet, then set about draining his checking account and scuttling his credit.

Off to the lap dance couches Natasha would go, Boris and Kidney Boy at her heels. Then to the stage, where the trio flung blizzards of ones. And then back to the VIP rooms, all three of them, each with a different girl.

In hindsight, I’m not sure Kidney Boy knew where he was or why these beautiful, half-naked women couldn’t get enough of him. I watched his wide, vacant eyes scan his surroundings as Star gripped his hand and led him back to a private suite.

Over the next two hours, Natasha would drop more than $2,500 of Kidney Boy’s money. Nobody throws scratch like that in a skid-row dive like Whispers, certainly not on a Tuesday night. Still, none of us asked questions. Nobody wanted to.

We told ourselves Kidney Boy was blackout hammered, one of those guys having one of those nights. Only later did it occur to anyone he’d probably been roofied. The poor bastard didn’t stand a chance.

All of the girls had been paid by the time Kidney Boy’s credit cards hit their limits and the ATM stopped coughing twenties. Everybody, that is, except Star. She was still owed $500.

No one wants to see a stripper shorted. But this was especially bad for two reasons. 1) Star goes crazy when people rip her off, and God help them if she’s drunk. 2) Star was drunk.

She fixed her eyes on Natasha, whom she quickly realized had been calling the shots from the beginning.

“Give me my money!” Star shrieked. “Give me my money or I will fucking kill you, bitch!”

Natasha locked Star in her razor-blade stare and cracked a crooked, taunting smirk — the kind of smirk that says everything while appearing to say nothing at all.

“Five hundred dollars,” said the smirk. “I took you for five hundred dollars, and there’s not a goddamned thing you can do about it.”

I have seen my share of angry women. When I was seven, I once looked on with a mixture of terror and awe as my mom repeatedly swung a TV tray at my dad’s head. (He was drunk, but quick.) I’ve never encountered a woman so consumed by rage as Star.

Her eyes widened, and her lips made a wicked snarl.

Star shrieked, then lunged.

Natasha rushed the club’s door and flung it wide. Boris and Kidney Boy followed.

Star gave chase. Her black-lace bra ripped open, and her tits were free in The Avenue’s cool night air. Cars honked.

Star hurled a bar glass with remarkable precision at Natasha’s head. Natasha ducked, and the glass shattered against Darren’s 1986 911.

“Aw, Jesus Christ! Are you kidding me with this shit, Star?” shouted Darren. He paused to run his fingers over a fresh dent in the Porsche’s candy-red paint.

Darren was clearly out-matched. None of us had much sympathy for the petite Natasha, who was sure to be ripped to shreds should Star catch her. Still, no one wanted to see Star in handcuffs.

So I put the DJ app on auto-play and abandoned my post.

A few guys remained out on the club floor. Luna danced well past her two-song set to keep them occupied, even though not one of these dead-enders could be bothered to toss a buck.

I tore into the street and raced to cut off Star, who was gaining on Natasha.

It was a perfect goddamned fiasco. Bodies, caught in the flickering light of the overhead “Live Nude Girls” sign, darted in every direction.

“Star!” Darren kept shouting. “Star! Listen to me! Star!”

All three of Star’s prey dove into their shit-brown Honda and, Natasha at the wheel, sped up The Avenue. Star waved her arms, screaming after them.

Darren stopped again to mourn his dinged Porsche.

“Jesus, Star,” he said.

“What the fuck do you expect?” Star screamed back.

Darren fixed his eyes on Star over the rims of his glasses.

“Less lippy, more strippy.” he said.

Me? I was relieved to be back in the booth — where I belonged.

“That Luna’s a game-day player! Let’s give it up for the Lovely Luna!,” I belted into the mic. “Now here comes the very sexy Star! Go get ‘em Star!”

“Don’t tell her that,” Darren said.

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It was just after 1 a.m. on a Tuesday, and Whispers was dead.

The floor was empty. Most of the girls had decamped to the locker room, where they passed a blunt rolled with surgical precision from a Russian Cream Backwood. Darren, tonight’s manager, perched behind the bar, his face lit by the glow of his phone screen.

It was the kind of lull smaller clubs can fall into late on a weeknight.

I passed the time mixing an odd cocktail of disco, post-disco funk, yacht rock and soul:

The Bee Gees’ “You Should Be Dancing."

Kool and the Gang’s "Get Down on It.”

Toto’s “Georgy Porgy.”

Al Green’s “Tired of Being Alone.”

“Boogie Wonderland” by Earth, Wind & Fire.

And then The Jackson 5’s “Never Can Say Goodbye.”

The Jackson 5 jolted Darren from his phone screen. His right brow arched.

I knew that look. These tumbleweed-blown hours have a way of summoning great philosophical discourse — and whenever that eyebrow went airborne, I knew a Strip Club TED Talk was afoot.

“You know?” Darren said. “Michael Jackson was so talented his music was probably worth a few kids getting molested. I mean, if that’s what it took to share Michael’s gift with the world, I think I can accept that."

The best part of this gig? You never know what’s going to happen — and you never know what anyone’s going to say.

People you respect — the folks you love working with the most — unleash sentences that would tear through a dinner party like a cruise missile. All you can do is laugh. You’re no longer a civilian. You work in a goddamned strip club — and it’s entirely possible you’ll never be the same.

Darren happens to be among the most morbidly funny humans I’ve encountered. His mind is like a Twitter feed run by Oscar Wilde, Toni Morrison, George Carlin, James Brown, and Frank Zappa — with both Lucifer and Jesus themselves taking an occasional turn at the keyboard.

Darren serves up these bunker-busters with such sharp, eloquent and soft-spoken wit, you can’t help but hand it to him.

In fact, Darren may be the only man since the 1960s to survive telling a rape joke — an actual, Jesus-Christ-you-did-not-just-say-that rape joke — in the company of a half-dozen women.

Not only did he escape unscathed, the strippers gathered around him howled. Real heaving, lung-deflating, doubled-over laughter.

Hand to heaven — I saw it myself.

“Thanks, Darren,” Lex said, still gasping as she wiped away a tear. “We’re all going straight to hell for that one.”

It’s not that these girls are immune to offense. None of them — well, very few of them — were born to barbarian tribes. And many of them, in fact, have been raped. So if they don’t like what you have to say, they’re not afraid to set your clothes on fire just to watch you burn.

Yet, the girls let Darren be Darren. Why? Because he’s decent, and they all know it. Beneath his spiky cynicism and devilish wit is a rare kindness that shines through, as if by accident.

Almost exactly a month before Darren unleashed his seemingly suicidal rape joke, I spotted a young woman sitting out there on the club floor. She gnawed on fried chicken fingers between big pulls from a cold glass of Diet Coke. And she cheered on the strippers with a vigor I’ve never seen from even the rowdiest of male patrons.

The woman shook a clenched fist high in the air and bobbed her head in time with the music, her sandy blond hair flying wild. Future’s rap anthem “Like That” filled the club, but from the look of it our new customer might as well have been at a metal concert.

I couldn’t get my head around what I was seeing. But I liked it.

“Where did she come from?” I called over my shoulder.

“I found her dumpster diving behind the club,” Darren said. “She lives in a tent a few blocks up The Avenue.”

He spoke as though he were ordering a salad.

“She’s alright,” Darren continued. “She’s having a hard go is all. Said she’s on the run from her parents.”

His shoulders rose, fell.

“Or something like that.”

Let’s pause here to recap: Darren, a battle-hardened veteran of the strip club business, discovered a homeless woman digging through the club’s back-alley dumpster, invited her into the club and sat her down with a hot meal and a cold soda.

He appeared to have done this just to make her feel special, let her have a little fun — and catch a break from all the shit.

Had Whisper’s owners, Max and Neil, been around, they would have laughed Darren straight out of the business.

“I’d love it if we could bring her on, you know, as a dancer,” Darren said.

I studied the woman’s silhouette, backlit by the throbbing stage lights. She couldn’t have been more than 22 — slender, curves for days, high cheekbones. Cute — and all bottle rocket.

Darren was right: She’d probably do great here.

He’d no doubt marked this woman as easy prey for the street-pimp wolves whose blacked-out Yukons and atrociously bedazzled German sedans prowl The Avenue.

Strippers aren’t the only hustlers in a club. Darren is always on the lookout for any chance to drive more money through the club’s doors — always working an angle or hatching some scheme.

For a moment, it occurred to me this might not have been the big-hearted gesture I’d taken it for. Maybe Darren: A) found a hot chick, B) cared not a bit that this hot chick happened to be in our dumpster, and C) smelled opportunity where most would have smelled trash.

The move would have been nothing less than visionary — if, that is, Darren had been thinking strictly like a strip club manager.

“Right,” I said. “It would be rad if she had some money coming in and could get off the street.”

“I should hope so,” Darren said. “But there’s more to it than that, isn’t there? I want her to make a few friends in the club — get tight with a circle of girls who have her back. That counts more than anything, right?”

I was wrong. Darren had not been thinking strictly like a strip club manager.

I turned Darren’s words over in my head as I ran stages throughout the night. Strip club DJs don’t get weepy in the booth — that’s not cool at all. But for a moment, damn it, I found myself choked up and had to stuff it down.

I don’t think anyone noticed — mostly because I couldn’t stop smiling.

Sometime after midnight, it struck me that Darren had probably been up to more than he’d let on.

During their brief conversation behind the club, he’d likely marked this woman as easy prey for the street-pimp wolves whose blacked-out Yukons and atrociously bedazzled German sedans prowl The Avenue.

She was broke, desperate and unable to return to her family — almost surely for reasons as soul-crippling as they are typical. By the standards of The Avenue, this chick was raw meat.

Darren, no doubt, worried he’d soon spot her working a corner. In his small way, he was trying to spare her that.

The woman finished her chicken wings, rattled the ice in her glass, thanked Darren, and vanished.

We never saw her again. Who knows where she is or what’s become of her?

But Darren tried. He bothered to try.

⚠️ Warning: This dispatch is full of spoilers. If you haven’t yet seen Anora, go watch it. (Seriously.) Then come back and read this week’s edition. ⚠️

Less than four minutes into Anora, Sean Baker’s tragicomedy about a stripper swept up in the chaotic life of a Russian oligarch’s son, I found myself seizing my partner Lisa’s arm. We laughed so loud we should have been booted from the theater — or at least shushed.

“Dude, the DJ is a fuckin’ asshole. I swear to God,” says Anora, played by Mikey Madison.

“How old is he?” asks another dancer named Lulu. “Like 40? Shit.”

Those lines hit a little close to home.

Yet, as Lisa and I watched Anora sweep the Oscars on March 2, a chill rolled over me, the hair on my arms stood up and I felt pressure building behind my eyes.

I almost cried… over the goddamned Oscars.

During his acceptance speech for Best Original Screenplay, Baker, who wrote, produced, directed and edited Anora, said: “I want to thank the sex worker community. They have shared their life experience with me over the years. My deepest respect. Thank you. I share this with you.”

“Fuck yeah!” I heard myself shouting.

I’d tolerated many of my colleagues, grown fond of a good number of them — and, with time, had come to even trust a few and consider them friends. Yet in that moment, I understood how much I was in their corner. Every last one of them.

I couldn’t help but see Anora’s five-Oscar haul — Best Picture, Best Actress, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay and Best Film Editing — as a victory for the dancers I work with in the clubs.

For Lex, who shares with me the bristly bits of her love life, hoping I can decipher the behavior of the men she dates…

For Zora, more chemist than cook, who offers me bites of her vegan burritos and French dips and shares her recipes with Lisa and me…

For Velvet, who squared her shoulders and walked taller, her face bright, her eyes sparkling, after the owner of a fledgling club hired her — a Black woman who strips — as a consultant…

And for Halo, who weaponized herself with a killer makeover, including a stunning blue-and-silver wig and silver lamé body suit to match, then took home three grand in a single night after landing a whale of her own…

…And for so many others at Whispers and The Haven.

To prepare for the role, Madison spent months working with strippers who showed her how to hustle, twerk and pole dance — how to walk like a stripper and how to speak like a stripper.

Baker has also written, directed and edited Starlet, about the San Fernando Valley adult film business; Tangerine, about two Los Angeles sex workers who set out to avenge a cheating boyfriend and The Florida Project, in which a single mother living with her daughter in an Orlando motel turns to sex work to survive. Baker regularly consults sex workers for his films and has long been their advocate.

Anora opens with Ani, as she’s called throughout the film, accepting the hasty marriage proposal of a despicably wealthy 21-year-old client named Ivan. She yearns to be seen and loved in the primal and vulnerable way we all do. Ivan, however, yearns to be a drug-infused chunk of veal who’s been handed everything yet understands nothing.

This isn’t going to end well, and the audience is consumed by an ever-creeping dread as the film unfolds.

The Brighton Beach fixers and knuckle-draggers charged with babysitting Ivan soon kidnap Anora and hold her hostage while Ivan’s scandalized parents swoop in via private jet to annul the marriage.

Along the way, virtually no one will so much as glance at Anora. She suffers indignity after indignity until, by the film’s end, these cold-blooded, Armani-clad zillionaires have burned her soul to ash.

The thing about trauma is one dose may knock you back on your heels. You’ll get pissed, sure, but you’ll soon regain your footing. But a second? A third? You fall to pieces. You turn on yourself. And you somehow find yourself trapped in a flywheel that brings on the same pain again, again — and again.

Anora, young and wonderfully naive, is shoved headfirst into that death spiral. It’s what makes Baker’s film more about the risks of lowering your defenses than about stripping.

Hard-earned experience has taught sex workers to keep their guard up. And yet they invariably let it down, lay bare their tenderness — because they’re human, because they want to be seen and they want to be loved.

Of course they do.

The risks of “letting (people) in” is a common topic around the clubs. I recently found myself doing my best to console a dancer, her chest heaving as she tried to stave off a panic attack, after a man she thought she could trust had humiliated and abandoned her.

That’s what happened to Ani — except it was at the hands of a mob instead of a single suiter.

Anora’s final scene left audiences perplexed and ruminating, the way good movies often do. But after months in the clubs, the scene made perfect sense to me.

Anora and Igor — a henchman (played with nuance and heart by Russian actor Yura Borisov) sit alone in a car. Igor — unlike the others, even Ivan — sees her and shows her compassion. Anora straddles him in the driver’s seat, then fucks him. But when Igor tries to kiss her, she begins to sob and pounds her fists against his chest.

Why? Because Ivan’s parents and their lackeys have, quite cruelly, convinced Anora her humanity begins and ends with her livelihood. She knows she can fuck without fragility because that’s what she does for a living. Things get dicey only after Igor offers her real intimacy. A mere kiss can put her back on unsteady ground, in dangerous territory, so she falls apart, flies into a rage.

The shame and degradation she’s suffered in recent days pour out of her. Ani’s not falling for that again. Her body won’t let her.

Anyone in her situation would feel the same.

That’s the paradox I’ve observed in sex work — not for every dancer, but for too many.

Last month, as Anora raked in seven BAFTA awards, Madison gave another shout-out to sex workers: “You deserve respect and human decency,” she said. “I just want to say that I see you.”

I see you.

Here’s how badly sex workers need seeing, and how enthusiastically they can respond when it happens: As the lights came up after an October screening of Anora, a group of strippers slipped off their Pleasers — those towering stiletto heels designed for strippers – and clacked them over their heads.

It’s common for dancers on stage to spread their legs wide, then clack together their Pleasers. Why? To draw customers’ attention.

In other words, they’re asking: ”Do you see me?”

This week’s dispatch kicks off a series of posts discussing the politics, ethics and the cultural impact of strip clubs.

Zora’s customer pinned her right hand to the VIP room’s wall. He held it high above her head, stretching her arm straight and long.

His tongue slithered up her armpit, each lap slow and wet.

Lick. Lick. Liiiiick.

Zora rolled her eyes toward the club’s black ceiling. Her hand wasn’t so much pinned to the wall as gripping the edge of a cliff — she was dangling, trying to hold on.

And hold on she did. For 15 whole minutes. I don’t think I could have done it. Women are remarkable, often in ways they shouldn’t have to be.

With the horror now behind her, Zora climbed into Whisper’s DJ booth and began to recount this nightmare.

“Oh my God,” she said, her voice breaking into a sardonic laugh. “It was the worst!”

Zora is smart, sophisticated, savvy. She’s danced for at least one big-name celebrity in Vegas. She’s a pro. So I couldn’t help but wonder why she didn’t tell this ass marmot to knock it the fuck off.

I didn’t put this question to Zora for two reasons: A) I’d wager Zora walked out of that VIP room with $500 or more, and the answer may be as simple as that; and, B) What Zora earns, and what she chooses to endure while earning it, is her business and her business alone.

But there’s the key word: choose. The girls choose to be here, right? And they choose what they do on the lap dance couches and in the VIP rooms, right? Right?

I’ve been asking myself lately whether, after more than a year in the DJ booth, all of this – calling these women to the stage hour after hour, the room timers set on the computer screen, the used condoms discovered at night’s end — has become too normal.

The girls are Whisper’s and Sizzle Haven’s talent. We men — managers, doormen and DJs — are the clubs’ infrastructure. We play the music. We promote the VIP rooms, keep track of who’s in them and for how long. We do our best to enforce the rules and boot the cretins. Most important of all (by the standards of Strip Club Land) we swipe the credit cards and take the cash.

The question is: Are we paying attention to what we’re doing — and how it impacts the women around us? Or, come to think of it, how all of this madness reshapes the men (and some women) who walk through the clubs’ doors?

I keep coming back to Hannah Arendt’s phrase, “the banality of evil” — that is, a sequence of simple practices that, alone, don’t seem to amount to much, but add them up and you’ve got a larger system that’s as oppressive as it is destructive.

Evil may be an overcooked characterization of a strip club’s bustling nightly rhythm. Still, look closer and our jobs become, well, ethically ambiguous.

Case in point: Lex was having a tough week. She returned home each night with barely enough cash to cover the gas she’d burned driving to the club.

Monday? Nothing. Tuesday? Zilch. By Wednesday it was starting to get scary.

Just after 11 p.m., Lex hooked a guy for a 30-minute VIP room. Score. I shot her a quick text. “I’ve never been so happy to set a timer 🤘,” I wrote.

“Finally!” Lex responded. “Thank fucking god! 😜.”

I cheered Lex on — because she’s a colleague and a friend. I want her do well. But lord knows what those two were up to back there. Did her financial situation pressure her to do more than she was normally willing to do — and for less money?

Sex work — like nearly all things this side of, say, Jim Crow laws or the Holocaust (which is what Arendt was talking about) — is no one thing. It’s not all bad. But it’s not all good, either.

“Porn means female slaves,” — Gloria Steinem.

There are two mantras I’ve tried to drill into my teenage son’s brain over the years.

The first is this: “Very few things are black and white. Most of the time, the universe happens in shades of gray. Think of it like a perfectly exposed black-and-white photo. There’s a broad spectrum of lights, transitioning to ever-deeper shadows, until it reaches black. If you can see the world that way (which isn’t always easy) you’ll be ahead of most people in the room.”

And the second?

“You’d be shocked how fast things can go from zero to stupid.”

Both, I suppose, are well-suited to a strip joint — and American political discourse.

Politics, now more than ever, wants to view all things in black and white, right or wrong, righteous or evil. The world, according to prevailing groupthink, is made up of oppressors and victims. What’s most pernicious about this sort of groupthink is that it categorizes people and assigns them, often uncompromisingly, to one role or the other. Not much room for shades of gray there.

Yet, even prominent feminist thinkers have managed to disagree on the perils and virtues of strip clubs and other sex work.

One wing of the feminist movement says all sex work is exploitative, degrading and dangerous to women. Period.

Another feminist faction is all about self-empowerment, which includes reclaiming and exalting women’s sexuality. Your sexuality is your power, goes this line of thinking. You want to use that power for financial gain? Go for it.

After all the nights I’ve spent DJing in strip joints, which side do I think is right?

Both.

Shades of gray.

Journalist and activist Gloria Steinem is perhaps most responsible for establishing feminism’s longstanding “Sex Work = Bad” doctrine.

In 1963, a young and slender Steinem wedged herself into a hopelessly tight and skimpy Playboy Bunny outfit, stuffed it (as instructed) with plastic dry cleaning bags to enhance her décolletage and infiltrated Hugh Hefner’s New York Playboy Club.

A decade after Hefner published his first Playboy edition, and three years after he’d opened his first club, the Playboy Bunny had become a cultural icon. A man who moved among the Bunnies was a man in his prime — powerful, sophisticated and virile.

Steinem’s two-part account of her adventure, published in Show magazine, slapped a male-centric culture upside its face.

Admirably, the piece was no screed. Instead, it reported with crisp precision a sequence of maddening events. There was no missing its simple message: Men’s cultural, economic and sexual aspirations dehumanize women.

“Porn means female slaves,” said Steinem, who would go on to co-found Ms. and New York magazines. “Eros has an idea of love and mutual pleasure and free choice. I fear that pornography is taking over sex when in fact it’s way more about domination.”

She said porn, but she might as well have been talking about strip clubs.

Steinam’s Show magazine series helped establish her as a central figure in what became known as feminism’s second wave. Disdain for sex work of all kinds became a pillar of feminist orthodoxy.

Then, in the early 1990s, along came post-feminism with its eye toward empowering the individual woman, including an unprecedented (and long overdue) celebration of her sexuality. (This, by the way, is when women started telling men, “I have a clitoris, and you’d better learn how it works, motherfucker.”)

Here’s post-feminist writer and university lecturer Camille Paglia running roughshod over Steinem’s position: “The feminist line is, strippers and topless dancers are degraded, subordinated, and enslaved; they are victims, turned into objects by the display of their anatomy. But women are far from being victims — women rule; they are in total control.”

Money doesn’t put a man in charge of a stripper, Paglia continued. Because cash isn't power — at least not inside a strip club. “It's a confession of weakness,” she said. “Men have to buy women's attention."

Paglia pulled the pin and lobbed a hand-grenade under what feminists thought they were supposed to believe about sex work, sexuality and who’s really in control of this whole business.

“…Women are far from being victims — women rule; they are in total control.” — Camille Paglia

In her book, “Sexual Personae,” she observed — correctly — that heterosexual and bi “men are run ragged by female sexuality all their lives.”

“From the beginning of his life to the end, no man ever fully commands any woman. It’s an illusion,” she said. “Men are pussy-whipped. And they know it. That’s what the strip clubs are about; not woman as victim, not woman as slave, but woman as goddess.”

She's right.

Based on what I see each night from the DJ booth, most of the men who enter the club become entranced. They’re struck dumb. And I understand why.

I work alongside these women every night. I’m accustomed to seeing them in the nude. My job keeps me plenty preoccupied, and I keep things professional. Because I want to be useful — and the last thing these ladies need is a leering DJ. Even still, I occasionally glance at the stage and think, “Oh my giddy aunt….”

A stripper at the top of her game is transfigured. She becomes a deity, and the stage becomes an altar. The men on the club floor worship her.

In most cases, it's not a matter of if those men will crack their wallets, but when. For men, the exchange of money, whether it flutters down on the stage or bounces off satellites between bank accounts, becomes more ritual sacrifice — tithing — than business transaction. (For the girls, it’s rent.)

I am exaggerating not at all here — and for those inclined to shout “Blasphemy!” I’d point you to the writings of Catholic mystics about the “Divine Feminine.” They know what they’re talking about.

The seductress is, indeed, the true feminist.

That’s why, for millennia, men have both feared and hated women’s sexuality. A man who blames a woman for his lack of self-control is, of course, a preposterous and cruel fuckwit.

(Women, too, by the way, have been guilty of this. It amazes me that the following sentence — often spilled from the lips of nattering Stepford wives — is so baked into the zeitgeist it’s become cliché: “What did she expect going out dressed like that?”)

And yet these men (and women) have been right about one thing: A woman’s sexuality, her erotic magnetism, is among nature’s most powerful forces.

Heads exploded in liberal circles in 1990, after Paglia wrote a New York Times column championing Madonna as a feminist luminary.

What’s so subversive about that?

Madonna’s entire personae was so sexually charged, MTV had just banned her “Justify My Love” video — which Paglia described as “pornographic,” “decadent” and “fabulous.”

“Madonna has a far profounder vision of sex than do the feminists,” Paglia wrote. "She sees both the animality and the artifice.”

Who, then, is in charge out there on the clubs’ floors, on the lap dance couches, in the VIP rooms? Who’s playing whom? Is it the girls… or their male customers?

Sex work is dangerous. It can also be ridiculous. But Paglia has so upended mass-market feminism’s formulations about men, women and power that, push her logic a step further, and violence, like money, becomes a sign of weakness. Paglia’s thinking is almost Biblical: “The first (brain-dead bros with muscles and money) shall be last; and the last (those purportedly exploited and powerless strippers) shall be first.”

True, all of this means exactly dick to a stripper getting slapped around in a VIP room by a batshit customer — especially if one of us bouncers, managers or DJs fails to get there fast enough.

But most nights — even when a guy’s attempting cunnilingus on a girl’s armpit — the question of who’s wielding the greatest power is murky, fickle and fluid.

The way Paglia sees it, Whispers' and Sizzle Haven's dancers are capable of tearing a man apart. The girls most adept at this have figured out what Madonna learned decades ago: Their sexuality is a superpower.

Lex once told me this superpower is her favorite part of the job. She’s gorgeous, streetwise, battle-tested and razor-sharp, which can be a wildly dangerous cocktail when a man’s blood is rushing from his brain to his groin.

“I love getting inside guys’ heads,” she said, her lips curling into a devious grin.

She spoke of the joys of mindfuckery with such passion, her breasts, barely covered by a slingshot bikini, bobbed in great waves as she pounded a fist into her palm with each syllable.

“You throw them something they aren’t expecting — anything! — and they freeze,” she continued. “You should see their faces. They look so vacant and witless.”

God,” Lex said, “I love it so much!”

I’m pacing the sidewalk in front of Whisper’s, motorcycle helmet in one hand, phone held to my ear with the other. The motorbike leans on its kickstand nearby, tick, tick, ticking as it cools.

The sun’s down. My shift’s about to start. I’ve got my boss, Adrian, on the line, and I’m pissed as hell.

“This is not what I signed on for, Adrian!” I can hear myself barking into the phone. “If this is how it’s gonna be, I want a raise, a fat raise – no, strike that. No amount of money is worth this. I’ve got a jizz-handling fee, Adrian! And you can’t afford it! You hear me? You can’t afford it!”

What do I hear on the other end of the line? Laughter. Wild laughter. The kind that sucks the air out of your lungs.

“Oh my God, you kill me!” Adrian says. “You’re just killing me, man!”

Only when I hear Adrian howling does the horror of my situation melt away. I shake my head. A smile breaks. And now I’m laughing, too.

The trouble started with Remy, a young and especially fastidious manager. As employees go, Remy is reliable, loyal, dedicated. All of this is to the good.

Except Remy is obsessed with used condoms. He knows they’re hiding somewhere in the club, and hell if he’s going to let them get away with it.

Remy used to kick off our shifts together with a report of the previous night’s condom count.

“Twelve in the lap-dance area alone!” he’d say.

“That’s a lot of condoms,” I’d reply.

I suspected at first Remy might be a bit of a sniffer. But he’s alright. Remy’s prophylactic preoccupation is baked into his work ethic. The way he sees it, he’s doing his job and doing it well.

Evidence of sex in a strip club can bring crippling fines and, if the heat comes down hard enough, send club owners and managers to jail. The feds might even seize your club and sell it at auction.

That’s why Max, one of the clubs’ owners, often dons latex gloves, slips on a blinding headlamp and goes spelunking in VIP rooms.

Remy, ever the star employee, is following Max’s example. He’s a condom–hunting machine. Focused, relentless.

And now he wants my help.

Last night, after the club closed and the girls bailed, Remy slipped on his own pair of latex gloves and waved me back to the VIP rooms.

“Check this out,” he said. “They’re stuffing the condoms between the couch cushions. A few nights ago I reached in and pulled five or six condoms at once out of a single couch.”

Remy plunged his hand into the couch’s crease, the way a veterinarian dives into a breech heifer’s birth canal. I felt a dry heave coming on. Thank God his hand was empty when he yanked it back.

“And look over here in the lap dance area,” Remy said. “They’re lifting the seats and shoving the condoms below. He gave one of the seat cushions a yank, revealing the lap-dance couch’s hollow core. It was empty.

“Each night, after we close, I want you to go through each couch, both in the VIP rooms and lap-dance area,” Remy told me. “Lift up the couches, too. Look beneath them. Check behind them. Make sure we get everything.”

I nodded. What else could I do?

Remy, plainly stated, is a good guy. We’ve each talked the other down in the midst of midnight chaos. Most often it’s been him talking me down. So I didn’t share what I was thinking at that moment.

What I was thinking was this: “Nope! I play music. I’m a DJ. DEE-MOTHERFUCKING-JAY! Not the house spunk-chaser. This ain’t happening!”

My brain didn’t stop there.

“And who, by the way, stuffs a freshly loaded condom down a couch? Wear it into the can and toss it there, for Christ’s sake! Or maybe bring a Ziploc?”

I kept my mouth shut. Out of respect for Remy. And because I didn’t want to unleash a scorching rant after what had otherwise been a good night.

Still, I kept thinking during the ride home about a different night when another manager informed me he’d just used a paper towel to pluck a condom from a urinal.

“It seeped on me,” he deadpanned.

His face was pale, and he held his right hand aloft as though it had been stung by an especially dangerous species of jellyfish.

My throat tightened just thinking about it. Throughout the following afternoon, I kept seeing Remy shove his hand inside that couch. “Five or six condoms!” I kept hearing him say. His voice stayed in my head all day.

”Five or six condoms!”

By the time I finally had Adrian on the phone, I was both desperate and incensed.

Adrian helped establish an organization-wide policy leaving the handling of strange dudes’ spooge to the clubs’ owners and managers–and only the clubs’ owners and managers.

This, of course, doesn’t change the fact that any number of surfaces in those clubs, including the mixing boards, may be at least lightly glazed.

And here’s a thought sure to keep you staring at the ceiling all night: Can you be sure the same isn’t true of elevator buttons, the cash in your wallet, the counter at Starbucks?

Nonetheless, Adrian’s intervention spared me an unspeakable fate. It left me to focus on sharpening my game in the DJ booth—a handful in its own right.

This week’s dispatch is the second of a two-part series. You can read Part 1 here.

This scene from “Casablanca” sums up the situation nicely.

Tucked away in a drawer somewhere is a list of two dozen rules Whisper’s and Sizzle Haven’s strippers are expected to follow.

The first says this: “Sizzle Haven and Whispers will not tolerate the following: fighting, stealing, prostitution, drug dealing, drug use or alcohol on the premises.”

Except all of those things happen all the time in both clubs.

The girls are getting stoned. They’re shoving their heads into open dressing room lockers – out of security cameras’ view – and snorting lines. They’re selling each other drugs. They’re not just taking pills – they’re smoking them in the bathroom. (It smells like dust burning off a long-dormant baseboard heater.) They’re swilling White Claws and MXDs. They’re fighting, usually over something stolen.

And, yes, they’re offering sex for money.

That’s why the heading above those 24 commandments governing stripper conduct reads “Club Guidelines.” Not rules – guidelines.

Guideline No. 1 wasn’t written for the strippers. It was written for the cops. Should the city’s vice inspectors come sniffing around, the clubs’ owners can point to Guideline No. 1 and say, “See? We don’t allow that kind of thing around here.”

It’s a prop in what amounts to a big theater production. It’s a classic case of “Schrödinger’s cat” – that thought experiment of quantum physics, where a cat inside a box is considered simultaneously alive and dead until someone pops the lid and finds out for sure.

Everyone, even the cops, knows what’s going on inside Whispers and Sizzle Haven. Proving it is another matter.

Ask the clubs’ owners about any of this – especially what happens in a VIP room or on a lap dance couch – and they’ll look at you as though you’re speaking Mandarin. They’d prefer, if at all possible, to stay out of jail – and for their strip joints to remain open for business.

Plausible deniability – that’s the key to the whole operation.

Reasonable doubt. Feigned ignorance. Selective memory. And the phrase, oft-repeated in the clubs, “That’s above my pay grade.” All of this makes it maddeningly difficult for vice cops to pin a prostitution charge on a strip club.

One veteran Whisper’s manager said he tells new girls “the rules.” Then he sends in an experienced stripper to explain “the real rules.” No dancer can ever truthfully tell a cop – or a jury – that the clubs’ operators gave them the green light to screw for cash. At least that’s the theory.

Some girls have sex in the club. Some don’t. And nobody’s made the rounds with a clipboard surveying who’s doing what.

No matter how many condoms you find abandoned in the VIP rooms and lap dance areas, there’s no telling who left them there. (Also unclear, for Pete’s sake, is the obvious question of why these men can’t clean up after themselves.)

Even if you knew the culprit, a soggy condom tossed near a lap dance couch isn’t dispositive evidence of prostitution. Ridiculous, you say? Stay with me.

One Whispers manager named Alec, an especially kind, sincere and diligent rule follower, explained that some patrons wear condoms even though they never unzip their flies.

Why? Perhaps they’re awkward, introverted, unlucky on Tinder and unaccustomed to a woman’s touch. Or maybe they have wives or girlfriends but the taboo of visiting a strip joint leaves them all at once nervous and exhilarated. Either way, they’re excited, which makes for a hair-trigger dick.

They wear condoms in case they come during a perfectly legal lap dance. It’s a simple matter of friction, and it’s more common than you might imagine.

Early in my DJ career a petite, brunette dancer named Sparkle stopped by Whisper’s booth with a friendly reminder. DJs play each song for three minutes before fading up the next. That way lap dances become a measurable quantity, sold by the unit. Forty dollars (more or less, depending on the girl) buys you three minutes on a couch.

But DJs are human. (Especially the rookie ones.) A momentary distraction is all it takes for a song to play too long.

“I don’t mean to be critical,” Sparkle said. “But could you make sure the songs stay at three minutes? Sometimes it might be best to even keep it under three minutes, you know? I’m telling you this, because…”

Sparkle’s face twisted like she’d just belted a shot of whiskey. She paused, searching for a way to speak the next words aloud.

“…he… he… came on me,” she said.

Right through his trousers. Onto her thighs and crotch.

“Oh my God!” I said. “Jesus! Yes! I’ll keep an eye on it! I’m so sorry that happened!”

“Thank you!” she said. “Thank you so much!”

Sparkle was far more polite than she needed to be given the circumstances.

Proving girls are selling so-called extras in the club gets trickier from there. You and I both know the vast majority of those derelict Trojans and Skyns have seen combat. But they don’t prove a guy paid for sex – even though we all know he did.

Stray condoms may risk a city fine and unwanted attention. But prosecutors typically need more than a single prophylactic to hang heavy-hitting prostitution charges on a strip club.

That’s why vice squads are known to send their undercover cops into the clubs to buy – with taxpayer dollars – lap dances and VIP rooms.

This is dicey territory for several reasons.

Say a dancer offers one of these undercover cops sex for money. A good defense attorney will argue the clubs’ operators had no idea this dancer was providing extras. And if the club’s owners are smart, they’ll draft a statement thanking the authorities for alerting them to the misconduct and announce that the offending stripper has been summarily banned from the club. (Odds are she’ll quietly be allowed to return once the heat blows over.)

A defense like that isn’t pure bullshit. It is hard to keep track of all that’s transpiring during a chaotic and busy night. From my vantage in the DJ booth, I can see managers racing to stay on top of everything happening on the floor. They’re too busy to monitor every VIP room, check in on each lap dance.

Throughout the night, I’ll glance toward the club’s barely lit lap dance area, just to see who’s back there. Girls giving lap dances won’t be available to do their stage sets, so I skip their names, call the next dancer on the list.

“I can never tell what’s going on back there,” I told Otto, one of the clubs’ managers.

“No one can,” he said with a shrug.

And yet, here’s where a club’s plausible deniability falls apart: Each VIP room is equipped with a camera, ostensibly to record footage that can be used to prosecute anyone crazy enough to attack a dancer. I can’t imagine the clubs’ owners don’t review that footage – at the very least for a thrill or a laugh – which means they’re all too aware of everything happening in those rooms.

I’ve always wondered how long the clubs hold onto that VIP room video. I suspect the owners are paranoid enough to delete it nightly. The last thing I want is for my friends and colleagues to get busted. Still, a district attorney would be well advised to seize that footage, assuming they’ve sufficient probable cause for a warrant.

There’s another reason it’s difficult to bring down a strip club: What begins as a sting operation has a way of turning into a party.

A group of Tampa undercover cops spent $421 on lap dances, smokes and booze – for both themselves and the dancers – at a strip joint called the Gold Club. None of the cops were clear on why they’d come to the club. Some said they were after drug dealers. Another said they were chasing down a shooting suspect with ties to a dancer. Another officer said they were investigating rumors of prostitution. No matter. The cops walked out with not a single lead.

A Houston detective visited the Fantasy Plaza in search of a 16-year-old runaway who’d been dancing at the club under a fake ID. He found the girl – then paid her $40 for a lap dance.

Two years of police work swirled right down the drain last year after an Internal Affairs investigation revealed 13 Dallas-area cops “had been engaging in inappropriate contact” with suspected hookers during a sting operation targeting 10 massage parlors, according to a local news report. The district attorney’s office dropped all 32 criminal charges against 28 suspects. The cops also had to return two seized vehicles and nearly $250,000 in cash.

Then there’s the Seattle detective who bought more than 300 lap dances between 2000 and 2005. He and his fellow vice cops said they spent tens of thousands of taxpayers’ dollars getting up close with strippers. Some of those girls even grabbed the officers’ dicks.

The Seattle city attorney’s office brought misdemeanor charges against 200 strippers during the same period but secured a mere 43 convictions.

Even the cops make it hard to bust a strip club for promoting prostitution.

Fly low. Don’t draw attention. That’s how most clubs stay out of trouble.

Except people in Strip Club Land aren’t always good at staying under the radar.

Heat doesn’t come at first from allegations of prostitution — not usually, at least. It’s some other fuck-up. A club owner bribes a mayor, maybe a couple city council members. Or the tax returns look a little funny. Any variety of graft will do the trick.

Consider the case of the Electric Blue Café, a strip joint in the tiny town of Tolland, Connecticut, about 20 miles northeast of Hartford.

Authorities began investigating the club in 2023 alleging the Electric Blue’s dancers had for years been providing extras. And boy did the Electric Blue bring down the heat. Before long, seven federal, state and local agencies had joined the investigation. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security got in the game. So did the IRS’s criminal investigation unit.

In May, a federal grand jury handed down a 12-count indictment against the club’s owner, its manager (who also kept the books), and a bouncer, who was in charge of recruiting dancers. In addition to facilitating prostitution, the Electric Blue has been accused of failing to report millions in income to the IRS as well as fraudulently applying for and receiving a federal emergency loan during the pandemic.

The Tolland town council decided in November to shut the club down.

It’s what happens when hubris and stupidity obliterate plausible deniability.

On a recent evening, I happened to be standing in front of Sizzle Haven not far from Max and Neil, the clubs’ owners. A regular, an enormous bulk of a guy, a salt-and-pepper ponytail trailing down the back of his 49rs jersey, burst out the club’s doors.

His phone rang and he answered it.

“Who me?” the customer said into the phone. “I’m great! I just got the best blow job of my life!”

“You hear that?” Max asked me.

“I didn’t hear a goddamn thing,” I said.

This week’s edition is the first of a two-part series.

There’s Velvet and her guy over there at the cashier’s counter, shoulder-to-shoulder, nervous, giddy and grinning like near-strangers booking a Vegas wedding chapel.

He plucks a credit card from his wallet and hands it to the manager, who swipes it for a cool $100 – which is what it’ll set you back to spend a half hour in a Whispers’ VIP room. That money goes to the club. The rest goes to Velvet. By the time this is over, she’ll likely close $500, maybe a grand.

Back they go, Velvet and her guy, to one of eight dim rooms. He slouches on a faux leather couch. She pulls the curtain. And whatever’s going to happen… happens.

How much sex goes on in a strip club? Difficult to say. Depends on the joint. Depends on the girls. My estimate: around 60% of Whispers’ and Sizzle Haven’s dancers have sex with their customers, assuming those customers can afford the fee.

A 2011 survey of sex work in Baltimore strip clubs puts the number lower. Forty-three percent of the dancers who took part in the study said they’d offered sex for money inside a club during the previous three months.

Look closer, though, and my educated guess isn’t far off. Sixty-one percent of those dancers said they’d “engaged in transactional sex” inside or outside the club, and 67% began doing so only after they started dancing.

We don’t talk about sex in the clubs. Not often. Because it doesn’t happen – even though it does.

We know sex is happening because we find used condoms and their wrappers flung on VIP room floors, throughout the lap-dance areas, in men’s room urinals. A dancer named Heat asked me to buy condoms for her at a nearby mini-mart, and I did. I once spotted a bottle of lube balanced on the armrest of a Whisper’s lap-dance couch.

One dancer told me the locker room garbage can fills each night with mouth wash, swilled and spit post blow job

Strippers can be blunt. They’re endowed with a weapons-grade sense of humor that comes with this kind of work.

After one long and especially gainful night at Whispers, Lex looped her arm in Monique’s, pumped her fist in the air and shouted, “Two broken-down hookers off into the night!”

I couldn’t stop smiling.

I judge these women not a bit. Who can say what’s led them here? Some are in this game for the thrill. Some are helping their families, helping each other. Others are just in it, doing what they know how to do best.

I should note here that were I to spot a flicker of coercion, I’d quit and call the cops. So far, that hasn’t been necessary.

Still, more than once I’ve had to ask myself: Do I work in a strip club or a brothel?

Strippers refer to services transgressing city and state laws as “extras.” Some girls do extras. Some girls provide some extras but not every extra. Some offer no extras at all.

Every girl has her limits. Play with my tits, but I won’t touch your dick. I’ll touch your dick, but I won’t put it in my mouth. I’ll put it in my mouth so long as it’s covered. Kissing? Out of the question.

Lex won’t let a guy go down on her. She won’t let him finger her, either. Gross, she says. “The bacteria! I hardly let that happen in my personal life!”

But a dick veiled in latex? Far more sanitary.

A lot of the girls keep to the same standard, which turns upside-down the baseball-diamond-sex-act ranking system of our youth.

You probably grew up thinking it goes like this: A first-base kiss? No big thing. A second-base fondle? Sure. ‘Round we go to third base, where we’ll be reaching down each other’s pants. Getting serious. Things aren’t out of hand – not by the standards of Coach Brown’s sex ed class – until, well….

Yet, in a weird way, the girls have a point: Let nothing near your most delicate of delicates unless it’s hermetically sealed. So a lot of them skip the bases and go for the homer. More hygienic by their way of thinking – and more lucrative.

Do any of the girls fuck bare? Some do – for the right price, goes the rumor. The girls sneer as they name names. It’s rancid gossip. No telling if it’s true.

Some claim they can juice big money from a mark without even unzipping his fly. One of these girls, Kendra, a battle-scarred veteran dancer, said she’d become a mentor of sorts to a younger stripper who would, by default, drop to her knees in every VIP room.

“Girl! You don’t have to do that!” Kendra kept telling the younger dancer. “Hustle the dude a little first! You’re not even trying!”

“But she just kept doing it!” Kendra told me. “Blow job! Blow job! Blow job!”

Her hand cut the air, a dismissive swipe.

“All she wanted was her money – for her drugs. Get back to her motel. Get high with her boyfriend. She didn’t care.”

I had no idea about any of this when I signed on to DJ in these clubs. Strippers offering extras are the stuff of frat-party legend.

Yet, from the beginning, two simple facts about Sizzle Haven and Whispers suggested extras were afoot.

First, both clubs open at 11 a.m., hours earlier than any of the city’s other strip joints. Why? So girls can book time with their regulars, who sneak off during early lunch breaks. The girls typically schedule these rendezvous via direct message on Instagram. The appointments continue into the afternoon, evening and on past midnight.

Second, Whispers’ and Sizzle Haven’s VIP room curtains start way up by the ceiling and flow in heavy, black ripples all the way down to the floor. VIP rooms in most other clubs aren’t nearly so private.

The evidence that Whispers and Sizzle Haven are part brothel piles up from there.

One dancer told me the locker room garbage can fills each night with mouthwash, swilled and spit post blow job. The dancers also keep plenty of baby wipes around for cleaning up after VIP rooms. They often send DJs to the store to buy them.

Velvet was leading a bald, six-foot-six Black man back to a VIP room when she glanced over her shoulder and, jerking her upturned thumb, mouthed, “Turn it up! Way up!” The club’s speakers were already booming. I smiled, nodded, gave the crossfader a nudge.

I once glanced over my shoulder toward a lap-dance couch close to Sizzle Haven’s DJ booth, where I saw Bella’s head bobbing in a portly man’s lap.

You can often tell whether there’s been sex in a VIP room by what happens after the fact. Guys who’ve just come can’t go fast enough. They’re straight out the doors.

It’s a simple matter of what science calls the “refractory period.” The dopamine sneaker wave that just crashed over a man’s brain has receded, making way for a spike in libido-killing prolactin. The nitric oxide needed to stiffen his dick is now depleted. His glans is too sensitive to touch. His parasympathetic nervous system has lulled him into a walking coma. Add it all up and he has no use for a strip club – not until tomorrow.

As her guy bolts for the doors, a stripper who’s just provided extras will head straight to the ladies’ room. She’ll urinate to prevent infection, then spritz key bits of her anatomy with an isopropyl spray bottle kept beneath the sink.

A short, brunette-bobbed stripper named Wish recounted how she’d been straddling a customer – mid-act – when Naomi, possibly the club’s top earner, flung open the VIP room’s curtain.

“Do you have a condom?” asked Naomi.

“Sure! Over there, in my purse,” Wish said.

Wish told us she continued to ride her customer as if none of this were out of the ordinary. The guy’s face went pale – his eyes growing ever bigger – while Naomi rifled through Wish’s purse until she’d found her prize.

“Thanks!” Naomi said.

“No worries!” Wish called back.

Naomi yanked the curtain shut, gone as quickly as she’d appeared.

“I mean, I was a little busy!” Wish recalled. “I can’t believe the dude stayed hard!”

A cluster of dancers gathered around Wish giggled and howled – some doubling over, others wiping away tears.

“I thought Naomi didn’t get down in the rooms!” one dancer said.

“She is tonight!” Wish said.

There was no way I was driving that hooker’s Cadillac with a Glock 9 still tucked beneath its driver’s seat. Not a chance.

“Let’s be clear,” I said. “The weapon’s out of the car?”

“It is,” said the cop, her hair pulled tight in a bun, her little frame bulked up by a Kevlar vest and bristling with gear.

“We’ve got the gun,” she said. “We’re running it against the national database.”

The officer gestured toward the Cadillac and its owner, a small-shouldered brunette hooker now sitting in its passenger seat.

“If it’s clean, she’ll get it back. She’s got a license for it. She didn’t have a concealed permit, so the gun shouldn’t have been under the seat.”

Envy had hustled Remy. And now here we were, stumbling into a situation we understood nothing about, involving an armed hooker who hadn’t worked at the club in nearly a year.

Whisper’s phone had started ringing after 3 a.m. — and kept ringing, then rang and rang some more.

The dancers were long gone, and I was helping Remy, that night’s manager, shut down the club. Remy yanked bundles of cash from the registers, counted them. I wiped down the stage and pole with rubbing alcohol, squeegeed the stage mirrors, slipped on a pair of latex gloves and hauled a few trash bags to the back alley dumpster.

Nothing good could come of picking up Whisper’s landline at this hour. Some slurring voice would ask if so-and-so girl was here tonight – and if she wasn’t, where the fuck was she? Were we still open? Why the fuck not? Or it would be kids prank-calling the club. Kids love to prank-call strip clubs.

So Remy let the phone ring.

When it became clear it would never stop, Remy huffed, picked up the cordless handset and barked, “Whispers!”

“What?” he asked. “You’re what? Well, OK. Hang tight. OK-OK, haaaaang tight. We’ll be there once we’ve locked up.”

Remy turned to find me looking at him with a bemused smile. He rolled his eyes, shrugged, smiled back.

“One of the girls is in trouble,” he said. “Pulled over. Suspended license. Cops won’t let her drive the car, so I guess she’s kinda stuck.”

He said nothing about a gun.

“Which girl?” I asked.

“I dunno,” Remy said.

“You don’t know?”

“I couldn’t pin down her voice,” he said, holding out his upturned palms, which rose and fell with each syllable. “It’s that thing where you’re supposed to know who it is — because the person on the phone is talking to you in that familiar way, like they expect you to know their voice. So you play like you do. You know, hoping it’ll come to you? And when you still can’t figure it out, it’s too late to ask and you’re fucked. So I don’t know who was on the phone. But it was one of the girls. She’s a few blocks away.”

“What does she want us to do?”

Remy shrugged.

“Drive her car, I guess?” he said.

“Drive her car where?” I asked. “Home? Where does she live?”

“Dunno,” Remy said.

He returned to counting the cash laid out on the bar.

Half-told, upside-down, back-assward stories bounce around the club, rapid-fire, like tiny Superballs. Each time the Superball whizzes past the DJ booth, I learn a bit more of the latest unfolding mayhem. But you never manage to catch the ball, stop its trajectory, inspect it in your hand. So the stories never quite add up. The ball keeps bouncing, ricocheting, whizzing by.

Now, in an empty and dead-quiet club, it occurred to me the girls themselves keep ricocheting across the city, night after night, long after we’ve gone home.

3:35 a.m., and Remy and I were out on The Avenue. Even at this hour, a thick glut of cars rolled by. Some cars stopped, and the girls working the street leaned into their windows. A spray of junkies, drunks and screaming psychotics made the working girls, all smooth skin and bright lingerie, shimmer like jewels tossed in a sewer.

“She’s two blocks up on Elm,” Remy said of our stranded mystery dancer.

He slammed Whispers’ big metal front door, and his feet left the sidewalk as he gave its handle three vigorous yanks.

“I’ll follow you,” I said.

Off we went, Remy leading the way in the Maserati SUV he’d bought at a semi-reasonable price because of the less-than-sustainable number on its odometer. I followed in my old Mini Cooper until we found the black Cadillac, flanked by two patrol cars.

Remy and I had assumed — wrongly — that we were coming to the aid of one of the girls who’d been working in the club that night.

Instead, it was Envy. She hadn’t danced at Whispers for months. She’d quit stripping altogether, I’d soon learn, and had been meeting customers “outside,” as the girls call it.

I didn’t recognize her, not at first. But Envy remembered me. She waved from the Cadillac’s open passenger door. “Thank you, guys!” she called out.

Remy, in fact, had never met Envy. She’d been in this game long enough to learn how to get what she wants, what she needs, especially when in a jam. So Envy had spoken on the phone in that familiar way, suggesting by sheer mindfuckery that Remy already knew her, knew her so well he’d been working alongside her all night. She was that good.

Envy had hustled Remy. And now here we were, stumbling into a situation we understood nothing about, involving an armed hooker who hadn’t worked at the club in nearly a year.

All of this started when the cops pulled over Envy’s boyfriend after he’d picked her up at a nearby motel.

Some girls, whether they work in the clubs or “outside,” have “boyfriends” who fall into the category of “pimp.” Other girls are partnered with real, honest-to-God boyfriends (or close enough). In many cases, it’s both: The girls’ honest-to-God (or close enough) boyfriends can’t or won’t find work, so they lean on the girls – sometimes hard – to pay the rent. Girls in the clubs refer to this third, hybrid subspecies of male partner as the “dusty boyfriend.”

The baby seat behind the Cadillac’s rear-left passenger door suggested Envy’s guy was either an honest-to-God (or close enough) boyfriend or a “dusty boyfriend.”

Now, the police had Envy’s gun – and her guy, whom they’d taken to the nearby precinct for questioning. And there sat Envy, with a jacked-up driver’s license and no boyfriend to drive her car.

The cops never told us why they’d stopped Envy’s boyfriend or why he was in custody. (Envy didn’t either, and we didn’t ask.) Also unclear was whether the cops had probable cause to search the car or how they’d learned of the gun under the seat.

All we knew was that the police had pulled over a Black man driving a black Cadillac with a black Glock beneath its black leather seat. It may have been as simple as that.

“What do you need us to do here?” I asked the officer with her hair pulled tight in a bun.

“Just move the car, because she can’t,” she said. “You can work out with her where the car needs to go.”

Don’t ask too many questions. Drive the fuckin’ car. Help the hooker out. Easy enough.

And so, assured the Glock was no longer in the car, I slid behind the Cadillac’s driver’s seat. We were off, toward a 7–11 where Envy planned to meet her guy once the cops turned him loose from the precinct, which was less than a block away.

Remy followed in his Maserati so he could give me a ride back to my car, which was still parked on Elm Street.

The Cadillac stank of cigarette smoke and an endless array of possessions cluttered its innards: A bowl, Nikes, boots, panties, a box of laundry detergent, jeans, assorted lingerie, bottles of nail polish, socks, mascara, a bag of baby wipes and another bag of Pampers, a spoon, Camel Crush boxes, empty Russian cream-flavored Backwoods wrappers and more. So much more.

“You’re not dancing anymore?” I asked as we drove.

“Naw,” Envy said. “I’ve been working outside.”

“How do you like it?”

“It’s way better!” Envy said. “You don’t have to compete with the other girls like you do when guys come into the club. It’s way easier to get customers. You make way more money.”

“You use a motel room?”

“Yup,” she said.

“Do you feel safe?”

Envy considered this a moment and said, “Yeah, I do.”

“Good,” I said.

I cranked the Cadillac into the 7–11’s parking lot.

“I’ll be fine here,” Envy said.

“You sure?”

“Totally,” she said. “Thank you!”

“Anytime,” I said.

I held out my fist. Envy bumped it with hers.

4:25 a.m., and Remy and I were winding along a steep and curvy street leading back to my car. A silver Honda Accord shot past us in the oncoming lane.

“Oh, fuck!” Remy shouted. “That was Max!”

Max, one of the clubs’ owners, had probably stopped by Whispers to collect cash from the safe for deposit in the morning.

“You sure?” I said. “Yeah, Remy said. He can’t find out about this. We’re not supposed to be doing anything – I mean anything –with the girls working ‘outside.’ He could fire us.”

The policy reeks of flaming horseshit, yet it makes a deranged kind of sense if you live in Strip Club Land. With so many girls working the streets around the club, you don’t want to draw cops’ attention, give them the idea that the club is more brothel than strip joint. So you put up a firewall between your dancers and the girls outside. It doesn’t matter how many condoms you find in the VIP rooms at night’s end. It doesn’t matter that the cops already know what’s going on in the club. Just don’t draw heat.

“Are you sure he saw us?” I asked, then realized a Maserati Levante doesn’t blend in, especially at this hour.

“I guarantee you he’s going to be asking me what we were up to,” Remy said.

“How about this?” I said. “I had a flat. We had trouble with the spare and drove to 7–11 looking for one of those fix-a-flat cans.”

“That’s pretty fuckin’ good,” said Remy, a broad smile breaking. “That’ll do the job.”

Remy sent me this text later in the day: “So Envy kept blowing up the Whispers phone even after we left until we got there to help her and Max answered and he said she should’ve just got an Uber 😂. He didn’t really care. He was laughing about it.”

Thank God Remy sent that text, because Max stopped by Whispers that night. It would have been pretty awkward had I started talking about a flat tire instead of a hooker.

“I wouldn’t have gone,” Max told me. “She made her choice. She’s on her own.”

He sounded like a Baptist minister counseling the parents of a wayward teen. He seemed to believe what he was saying, the irony beyond his reach.

“It’s safe here at the club. She doesn’t have to live like that,” Max continued.

“Honestly, man,” I said. “We had no idea what we were getting into.”