Lis Rheume uttered an explicative under her breath when she reached under the bar counter and found no clean beer glasses. It was crowded and she didn't have time to chase after Kwame just because he couldn't keep up. She was about to head to the kitchen when she saw the short muscular black kid working his way through the crowd with three plastic glass racks stacked on top of each other. She couldn't help smiling at the twenty year old as he lurched behind the bar his biceps straining under the weight of all the glass. It was impossible for a twenty year old ball of hormones to stay focused with so many naked female bodies dancing around."
"Thanks for showing up Kwame!" Lis bellowed over the music.
"I know! I know! I'm trying to keep up!" He yelled back.
Lis chortled as she helped him unload a few glasses onto the shelf and then grabbed a couple and began pouring a draft. "Don't tell me. It's these guys I'd worry about."
Kwame looked up at two black men, one of whom was built like a tank. "Sorry guys! My bad!"
They were actually more interested in Lis' athletic body dressed only in a leather vest and tight jeans but they decided to play along. For a very long second the two faces remained etched in horrible glares. The bigger man's face broke into a grin first. "Just keep those glasses coming! I'm thirsty!"
"Yes sir!" Kwame answered in a very believable intimidated tone.
Both men were laughing as they swigged their beers. The large man shouted after the barback. "My brother!"
Lis liked the bar for that very reason. Despite the high probability of violence there actually was very little in this strip joint dominated by black men. It was an average gentlemen's club, yet larger than the previous club she worked at where she had learned to bartend. That was a strip joint that was populated by whites and there were fights almost every night, some of them brutal and violent. One of the strippers had told her it was simply too much testosterone aimed in the wrong direction.
In any event it didn't seem like a place for Lis to do any kind of research. Still here she was working at a strip bar trying to wean a story out of her experience. She had no real idea where she was going with her subject matter. At first it was going to be an expose on the seedy underbelly of the gentlemen's club business. When she found that many of the people at The Body Lounge were actually very nice she scrapped that angle and decided to work on the business of a strip joint itself. She had approached her mentors at the newspaper about looking at the strip joint business from a more sterile side of things, as a small business, how it was run and how it differed or was similar to any other business in this medium sized city. They agreed thinking that it might be a good story but they warned Lis that in doing her work she would have to keep her hands clean. Despite the warnings Lis Rheume knew full well that she would be living on the wild side. She decided that she needed to work undercover in the industry. As it turned out this was the easiest part of the mission. Lis was drop dead gorgeous and while she would refuse to be a dancer there was nothing wrong with a girl that was capable of being a headliner dancer at just about any major gentlemen's club being a bartender. It certainly wasn't going to hurt business. Sure, at first glance someone would have thought that studying a bar for a news story would have been considered a complete waste of time but the adult industry had become an enormous industry worthy of further exploration and Lis planned on reporting in an honest and upfront way. Her bosses had received the first bits of work with a certain gleeful enthusiasm. They felt that their young writer was onto something interesting. So with as much effort as it took to walk into the bar wearing a short skirt and tight blouse the young blonde had landed a bartending job at The Body Lounge three nights a week.
Unfortunately the owners of these types of businesses weren't exactly open to outsiders looking into their inner workings so Lis had to be subtle. This second job bartending had worked out well. She was quickly learning how the business worked and even the manager was impressed enough with her abilities and was allowing her more and more access to the management side of the bar. Lis had worked very briefly at another establishment but found it much less inviting than the situation at The Body Lounge.
It was early on a Friday night and Lis was feeling the crowd as it grew. It would be mobbed by 9pm and she would be hustling drinks at an incredible pace by then. The bar and the dance floor combined to make up one unusual apparatus at The Body Lounge. It was a huge oval that took up a good portion of the main room of the club. The oval was just over waist high for a 5"-8" woman in heels such as Lis. Meanwhile the middle of the elevated dance floor had been carved out and a bar big enough for two bartenders to easily move around was placed. Lis was able to get to the patrons who sat on the outside of the oval via a few walkways that went from the bar area out to the outer part of the oval like spokes on a misshapen wheel. It was actually an ingenious design. Although Lis found it a bit disconnecting when a naked dancer would literally step over her and she would look up to a close up view of female genitals as she was delivering a drink to a customer. After two months Lis had gotten used to the naked bodies gyrating above her. Besides she had gotten to know the regular dancers and got along with all of them. She considered it much the same as hanging in the locker room after one of her soccer games in college. She had been a very good player and locker room etiquette was much the same at The Body Lounge as it was amongst her fellow college athletes.
At the moment Amy, Lynne and Tanya were on stage spread out in different sections so that the growing crowd could get the maximum exposure to female flesh. Tanya was part Korean but born in America. She was built like Lis. She had a fitness model's body and great legs. She was at one end of the oval squatting in front of a patron who had just tipped her so that he could get an inches away look at her genitals. Lynne was at the opposite end moving to the rhythm of the music. One thing that The Body Lounge demanded was that all the dancers actually danced and they had to look great doing it. It was what separated it from the other strip joints. Lynne most definitely had no problem with that. She was 5'-9" with long brown hair, a beautiful face, a willowy small breasted body and outstanding legs. Meanwhile Amy was a drop dead gorgeous blonde whose 5'-5" body spoke for itself. A former top flight gymnast with an athletic build, she along with another dancer, Carey, were the most popular girls at the club, in fact they drove the black men crazy.
Lis would occasionally check out the interaction between the white women and the African American customers. She was intrigued with the contrast in colors, in cultures. While Lis was no racist or bigot she had once been told that everyone carries prejudices with them and she believed it. Yet after watching the way the customers treated the dancers and her she had to be even more accepting. The black customers were almost to a man, gentlemen.
Lis mentally noted these interactions between the men and the dancers. There was more than just cash and glimpses at nakedness going on. The women at her previous bartending job used the customers as veritable cash registers coaxing money out of them to fund lives often filled with alcohol or drugs or boyfriends that basically abused them. This gentlemen's club was different. It would be wrong to say that it was all gumdrops and jelly beans at The Body Lounge. There was the occasional scuffle and some of the women were users but the overwhelming experience at the club was a very positive one. Most of the women seemed to be very much into their jobs and the men they performed for. In fact Lis found it a bit unusual and mused about wanting to write a thesis in sociology from her experiences.
She was busy pouring drinks when the deep voice of the club DJ bellowed out the arrival of a new set of dancers. Carey, Jill and Andrea were the other shift on Friday nights. With long brown hair, a tall lithe but athletic body with nice round tits and a gorgeous face Jill could have been Lynne's little sister. Andrea was sexy and blonde with short hair and deep brown eyes and a great ass. Meanwhile as mentioned Carey was the queen of the bar. She was the tallest of the six dancers with short brown hair. Although she was in her mid to late thirties she had a body that was as tight as any twenty year old dancer and she had long muscular legs to boot.
The three waited for the other girls to climb down from the stage to the bar area. Then they got on stage and began to appease the crowd with their shapely bodies. Lis was quickly becoming used to watching three scantily clad girls climb onto the stage to dance while the three going off duty mingled with the crowd and ultimately into the back rooms for private dances. Lis didn't know what the dancers had to do to earn their twenty dollars, no one ever told her but she was sure that it was no bargain.
Lynne had corralled a tall muscular black man with a shaved head. Although the bar area was pretty dark the large man wore wrap around shades. Tanya had found an older man with a very dark complexion while Amy was holding off several customers and organizing them so that as many as possible could be given some private time with the well built blonde before she was due back on stage. It wasn't unusual for black men to overpay to get to the front of Amy's line.
While it had been crowded early as the night wore on the patrons thinned out. Still Lis would make almost three hundred dollars in tips for the night and that's how things went at The Body Lounge during the summer, an early crowd that wet their whistle at The Body Lounge and then off to one of the local night clubs to try their luck with women that didn't charge for a dance. Lis' pay came from her own tips which despite being one of the sexiest women in the club didn't amount to much, relatively speaking. The men saved their money for the booze and the naked women. So in order to help spread things around more fairly the house had the dancers contribute a smaller portion of their tips to the two bartenders.
Tonight Lis was splitting the share with Helga. The platinum blonde was in her early sixties and she was in charge of scheduling the dancers as well as filling in as a bartender once in a while. Legend had it that years ago she had been a headlining dancer. Lis found the large breasted woman with the soft voice and slight European accent attractive enough to have pulled it off. And although she thought Helga was nice Lis kept her at arms' length. Rumor had it that Helga was an aggressive lesbian who had taken advantage of dancers when they were at a weak moment and that just wasn't Lis' cup of tea.
