"You didn't want to give her up?"
"Not exactly that, no. I mean, if I was absolutely dead sure it was her, and had some evidence, I would have, because I loved that place and I was a great friend of Chase and I sure owed him a lot. But I just didn't have anything, and they knew about her anyway, so there was no point in me just jumping on the bandwagon without any evidence. And they wouldn't have the same faith in my instincts as Carmen does."
"Okay. So after Jenny's murder you got back in touch with Chase."
"No, he got in touch with me, about a month after. I'm glad he did. I was in a lot of trouble. Mentally, I mean. Jenny's ... ." Shane took a minute to get it together. "Her death. I took it hard. She and Harvey and Dana, three people I was close to ... ."
"Everybody says you feel things deeply. And it's not surprising that somebody's passing would affect you deeper than most. Of course, nobody faces the death of someone that close very well, we aren't supposed to take it well. But I hear what you're saying, you took it hard."
"Right, thank you. Exactly. That's what I'm no good saying, stuff like that. So yes, I was pretty fucked up. And one day out of the blue Chase calls me up and says 'Hey, I've got a business proposition for you. You know how you specialized in sugaring instead of bikini waxing?' And I said yes, what about it? See, Carmen was the one who taught me about it. Sugaring. And Chase says, 'Let's start a salon specializing in sugaring, with you out front as the spokesperson and main operator. We'll call it
Shane's Sugar Shack
.' And he says he's had some contacts with people out in the valley, you know, where there's lots of porn film studios and stuff, and porn actresses, and he says there's a billion bucks to be made sugaring all that twat-"
Lauren laughed and Shane grinned.
"Yeah, that's how he said it. He says, 'All the rich people out here have gardeners, right? Well, there's a fortune to be made trimming the bushes,' he says. 'Like
Shane for Wax
,' he says, 'I'll set it up, get the lease on a place, get you a shop set up. It'll be a full-service salon, you'll do hairdressing, too, but mainly you'll do the sugaring and teach some assistants to do it, too. And who knows, if it takes off like I think it will, we'll franchise, set up other salons around the region. Hollywood's not much different than the valley where hairless pussy is concerned,' he says - and keep in mind, this is a gay guy speaking, who has no interest whatsoever in pussy, shaved, hairy, trimmed or whatever. And you know how I am, I have to think things over a lot, like Carmen says - and he delivers the kicker. 'Shane,' he says, 'don't do this for the money, don't do it for me. Do it for yourself. Do it because you need it. You have to get your head out of your ass and immerse yourself in a project. This is that project, and we both know you'll be great at it. Shane,' he says, 'I can hire a thousand hairdressers and waxers and sugarpies and nail girls and whatever, but I can't hire a stand-in for Shane McCutcheon. Only Shane McCutcheon can commit to this. So think it over and get back to me. Hey, good talking to you, and I'm really sorry about Jenny. So pull your head out of your sorry butt and let's do something great together.' And he hangs up."
"Sugarpies, I love that," Lauren said. "Those are what you call your girls who do the sugaring."
"Right. Chase's idea, of course. It means both the girls who do the work as well as the sugared twats they work on. So anyway, despite what everybody says about me taking forever to process stuff, my gut, my instinct, right from the first moment was yes, go for it. But I dick around for an hour, waiting for some objection to pop up, and there's nothing, so I call him back and I say, let's go, when do I show up for work? And bang, it's like a whirlwind. We go out to the valley and scout locations and look at a dozen places, we pick one, we do the lease and all that stuff. We agree on a 60-40 split, him the 60 and me the 40 because without him even asking, I put up my arson settlement money and my inheritance from Harvey and I become what he calls a fiduciary partner, so I'm not an employee, I'm a part owner, an investor. And we rent a lot of equipment, which ironically a lot of came from Jaffe-Samchuk and Associates, the real estate tycoons in the valley porn business, which is funny because those were two guys from my ancient history, and I once had a thing with Steve Jaffe's wife. Maybe you've heard of her, she goes by Cheri Peroni now after the divorce-"
"Yes, I think I do know her, slightly, anyway. I think I once went on a disturbance call at their house, there was a wild party, too much noise. We took a guy out in handcuffs for drunk and disorderly. Cheri's a big shot in town, and her daughter has been busted a couple of times. A messed-up rich kid with absentee parents, not exactly an unusual story in LA."
"That's Cleo. Yeah."
Lauren didn't say anything but arched an eyebrow.
"No, we didn't," Shane said quietly. "She wanted to. And then she told her parents we did, but we didn't it, was a lie." She sighed. "It was a mess. I see her around once in a while, in a club or someplace. As far as I'm concerned, she radioactive, she's Kryptonite. We nod, we say hello, but there's no fucking way. Sometimes when we get older we get smarter, you know? Not a lot smarter, but just a wee little bit. And she's my wee little bit of stay away, stay far fucking away."
"Learning curve," Lauren said. They'd long finished eating and were on their second cup of coffee.
"Yeah. My curve probably isn't near as curvy as it ought to be, but it does curve a little, it bends. It's not a real good curve, kind of a squiggle with maybe some corkscrewing. Maybe a kink, here and there. But at least it's not flat-lined."
"Good to know. Back to
Shane's Sugar Shack
."
"So anyway, the place is booked solid and I'm working sixty, seventy hours a week, I'm coming home at ten, eleven at night and collapsing into bed with my clothes on. And here's where Chase is a genius. I mean he is a pure, grade-A genius. He says, 'I want to restrict you to about 15 hours a week doing sugaring on actual clients, and we may even dial it back further to ten hours. Mainly you'll teach and mentor and help manage, be available on site to meet-and-greet and schmooze, and there will be a lot of off-site promotion, visiting studio people, telling them about our services. When you do a sugar job, we'll charge a premium for your personal services, so we can bill your actual sugaring sessions sky-high because you'll be very hard to schedule an appointment with.'"
"What's 'sky-high' mean? Just curious."
Shane grinned. "I'm glad you're sitting down. I almost feel bad about what I charge. I get seven hundred bucks a session. That's seven hundred an hour, more or less."
"Jesus Christ."
"Yeah. I've got a handful of personal clients, some very famous names in the porn industry and a couple from Hollywood, names you'd know, but client confidentiality, et cetera. Chase is very big on us being discreet. And those women, they don't give a shit what I charge, because it's a business expense, just like hairdressing or anything else they do that's work-related, and it's somebody's tax write-off, the studio's, or whoever. I mean, when my session is done they don't even pay me or pay up at the register or anything, we do their billing separately, they can walk in the door without a dime in their pockets, so they really don't give a shit, and somebody in the office bills them. I think there's one or two clients who don't even know what we charge. That was all Chase, too. I'd have never come up with that strategy in a hundred years. And Chase says, 'Here's another thing about keeping you hard-to-get. If you work too much, like you've been doing up to now, and if you do too many people, if you're humping your ass off working forty, fifty hours a week, which you easily could be, you'll burn out. You'll go four, six months, and you'll never want to look at another pussy ever again.' Then he laughs and says, "Okay, maybe not you, but you'd never want to look at another pot of sugar mix or a sugar spatula, right? So we want you in this for the long haul. We need to keep you fresh.'"
"You're right," Lauren said. "He sounds like one sharp guy."
"He is. And here's another thing he did that takes my breath away. Even though I personally charge so much money, he tries really hard to keep the prices for all the other sugarpies down pretty reasonable. He did a ton of work getting competitive prices on waxing and other services, so we'd know what women were paying. And I said, so we undercut the price of waxing by five bucks, right? And he says no. He says we charge ten bucks more, just enough to keep us in the game, and we stress that we're worth the extra five bucks because we're way less painful, and five bucks more because we're all-natural, we're organic, but we're still affordable. Not that a porn actress with silicon tits cares about all-natural, but a lot of the Hollywood women do. Or say they do. I mean, you stick the word organic on something, anything, you know? We even have a joke, maybe we should advertise as being gluten-free. But organic, that's all sugar and lemon are, right? So Chase says, 'I don't want a single customer to think about making a choice between us or a waxer and deciding on the waxer because it's cheaper. I want them to decide on us because for the extra ten bucks they won't be screaming in pain, they won't walk away with a hot, irritated, raw, red pussy.' And then he said two other things that were genius."
"I'm all ears."
"He says, 'We're not going to promote
Shane's Sugar Shack
as being mainly for porn stars. We aren't even going to mention porn stars, even though they'll be our bread-and-butter at first. We're going to promote ourselves as being the shop for the average girl, the average woman, the girl on roller skates on Venice Beach boardwalk, the mainline Hollywood people and all the thousands of Hollywood wannabes working as waitresses and script girls and paralegals and whatever else they do while they're waiting to become famous. Working girls waiting to be discovered, girls on a tight budget but who know they need the trim. That's partly why we'll charge reasonable, affordable prices.' And he says, 'And here's the last thing. Women have hair lots of places, not just their pussies. And so we are going to learn how to do the best job we can with hair removal other places, arms, legs, armpits, eyebrows, women with those little moustaches they can't get rid of, anyplace hair's a problem. We are going to explore the outer boundaries of sugaring, see how far we can go with it. I don't want us to get into laser removal, because that's a whole different ballgame, but I want us to do the best we can, and if we can't help a woman out, then we should be happy to refer them to lasering or whatever. But we want them to come to us first, we want to be the first place they think if they have a problem.' So that was what he called our business model."
"Wow," Lauren said. "No wonder you're so successful."
"Yep. And that's all Chase, one hundred percent. We opened a second shop at the other end of the valley, and then one in the heart of the Hollywood studios, one in Burbank, one in Venice. He's looking at a couple other sites, even thinking about San Francisco and San Diego. So I spend a lot of time on the road, traveling from one shop to another, doing training and PR and stuff. And you know what Chase did? You ever see that movie,
