(Author's note: I'm revisiting this story to add back in the deleted sex-scene, which is mostly my own imagination, because so many readers felt this story was like birthday cake without the ice cream. If you like the newer version, or not, please comment.)
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This is one of those stories that could have started with "I have a friend who ..." or perhaps "Once when I was young ..." However, neither of those is strictly true, although this story is essentially factual. The names have been changed to protect the innocent or guilty; take your pick which applies. This is not my story, but rather the story of one close to me. I have pieced this together from comments and a few shared secrets from the lady in question and from her husband as they try to get past these times and these events. All this took place more than a decade ago and you will surmise, dear reader, that some of this has been filled in from my imagination, as I could not have witnessed the specifics, nor were those details shared with me. Other parts of it, are right on the money, and if not in the proper sequence, are as complete as my knowledge allows.
The lady of this tale is called Katherine and during this period her live-in boyfriend was Daniel. I say lady with the greatest love and respect because she is exactly that, a lady of the highest order. She is soft spoken and loving to a fault. She cares deeply for everyone around her and cannot love in half measures, but rather throws her entire soul and being into any relationship. During the years she spent with Daniel, I saw her change from a modest and circumspect woman, very demure in her dress and manner, to one quite bold and provocative. I concluded that she had grown out of her childish modesty into a normal sexually active young woman. I tried to like Daniel, although he seemed beneath her. I guess my reaction was normal for one in the role of parent; you always want the best for your child, but a grown child makes his or her own decisions with little regard for your wishes. It's only recently that I learned that what I could not warm up to in Daniel was the tiniest part of many things that I detest with every fiber of my being.
Kati was always the most precocious of my brood of four, perhaps it was her tawny red hair or her startling green eyes, but privately I think it was her quick and eager mind. If she had just spent half the energy that she devoted to taking the easy way, the fun way, to more serious pursuits, then life would have been a breeze for her. Instead she partied and played fashion plate and dated bad boys. She was working at Knockers, the beer and pizza joint with the one-size-fits-all tees and shorts the waitresses were required to wear when Daniel and his buddies picked her table. Later, Daniel would often comment about how well Kati's uniform fit her. The standard "small" shorts and tees would have been cute on her petite frame. I say "would have" because, like most of the Knocker's girls, Kati had implants, and the full D's looked huge on her 32 inch chest. Knocker's made no bones about exploiting its all girl staff.
It wasn't long after when nineteen-year old Kati and Danny decided to share an apartment together. This was also when we began to see less and less of her. It seems that holidays were always with Danny's folks or there were jet skis to ride or a trip to the mountains or some other activity that my life partner and I were not to be a part of. Kati accumulated more cute, but borderline-sluttish outfits. She had her belly button pierced and later her tongue. She even commented that the tongue piercing gave her something to do besides eat and she hoped it would help with her dieting. Kati was still looking for the easy way it seems. I later overheard her telling her younger sister, "Guys love tongue toys when you go down on them." I was biting my own tongue not to admit that I had heard and I secretly rejoiced when hers came unscrewed and she swallowed it. The tongue is a healing place and a hole only stays open if you keep it constantly filled, so this at least was a passing fascination.
During these early stages of her relationship with Danny dark clouds began to appear. We were on a shopping trip and I offered to buy her some darling little boy cut panties which she dismissed out of hand with the remark, "Oh, I've stopped wearing underpants, Danny doesn't like them!" I again bristled at Danny's controlling ways, telling myself that Kati was old enough to make her own decisions and live by them.
Knocker's was a pathetic excuse for a job. Each server was responsible for the tab for all assigned tables, even though entire parties frequently exited the door right past the hostess. While the server was back in the kitchen picking up an order or doing a thousand menial tasks like uncapping their beers or dumping their dirty dishes, they could make a hasty exit and her pay would get docked
The first cracks in Kati's happy-go-lucky demeanor began to appear just after her twentieth birthday. She complained about Danny, saying only that no one knew what she had to put up with. Danny was too demanding and too typically male, but this was not unusual for Kati's standard volatile relationships with men.
What she did next shocked me even more. She decided to dance in a topless club in Dallas (about fours hours drive away) and swore me to secrecy that I would not tell her biological father. What can one do? If I had forbade Kati to do this, she would have rebelled and done it anyway. I opted instead to keep her secret and helped her with stage clothes and actually made a visit to the club when she was performing to make sure everything was legitimate. Kati seemed to grieve over this decision to perform. Certainly the money was good compared to Knocker's, but she seemed to have to psych herself into doing the degrading job. She would drive out on Friday afternoon to dance from 8 PM to 4 AM, crash at a cheapie motel, do it again Saturday night, then drive home and crash again. One of the other dancers, Suzie, also commuted to Dallas and she and Kati became cohorts in crime. Suzie eventually relocated there and Kati often made use of Suzie's couch instead of the $29-a-night place. This also allowed her to grab a few hours sleep before hitting the roads on Sunday morning, which helped everyone's stress level, including mine.
I first met Suzie the night I dropped into Zillionaire's and sat at a table in a dark corner of the smoky club. The smoke was so thick in the place and the lighting was so dim, I wasn't even able to pick Kati out at first. The fact that she was smoking a cigarette and had her back to me didn't help. Also, I would have never guessed it was her in that bizarre black vinyl outfit that seemed to consist of strategically placed dog leashes wrapped around her body above the connected thong. I later learned that the Dominatrix getup improved her tips significantly and that it actually belonged to Suzie. The dancers frequently traded makeup, insider information, and costumes and discussed how to "skin the fish" more effectively.
A patron of one of these clubs is a "fish", if he tips with dollar bills; he's a "skate", obviously reference to "cheapskate." If he tips with hundred dollar bills, and there were plenty of those in Dallas; he's a "whale". Anyone in between was a "shark", something to be approached with caution, lest it bite. I also learned that these clubs are full of shrewd women who mostly dislike the customers and regard it as a game, where your take home cash is your score and you lose points for doing anything that doesn't keep the money rolling in. Texas permits full nude dancing, but that involves steady payoffs to various local VIP's and ultimately the operating expenses are passed along to the dancers. Therefore, most of the clubs are strictly topless and each club has it's own set of rules and standards.
Suzie was a veteran at the young age of twenty-two. She was a voluptuous blonde with sparkling blue eyes and a cute turned up nose. She was a naturally curvy girl that you'd expect to see captaining the high school cheerleading squad (she done that) or running for senior class president. She was the perfect girl next door, save that she had scars under her arms from the implants and that she'd spent a good portion of high school on her back or knees or other fun positions. She was a very practical, very sexual, very self-assured woman, and Kati's friend and confidant. It was Suzie that tried a few nights at the nudie bar and pronounced it "bullshit". "Christ," she reported to Kati, "there I was balanced on the back of a chair so this shark could look INSIDE me, and all for the same lousy twenty bucks. Keep your t-back on Kati, the tips are just as good and you don't risk breaking your neck."
Each club had a back stage "Mom" that helped the girls dress and kept a modicum of peace, but she was paid 10% of the tips. The club took another 20% of the tips, to cover security and DJ's. Dancers bought their own drinks and food. Of course, a dancer made fifty cents on each drink the customer bought at five dollars a pop and which was essentially colored water. Dancers collected $2 for a bottle of champagne and nothing from going into the VIP room. The club got $150 for that, and the dancer got $50 from the customer. Did I mention that you had to hire two dancers to go into the VIP room and you had to buy two $50 bottles of champagne? Ah yes, the money rolled in!
Dancers love to foster the image, which is, of course, part of the tease, that table dances are more intimate upstairs (a semi-private area) or in the VIP room. Security monitors the upstairs area directly and the VIP rooms via closed circuit TV. It's actually club rules rather than state law that dancers must have something over their pussies and nipples. Zillionaire's required you to sign up to dance in rotation (pay that DJ) and otherwise you worked the tables. Dancers wore lip-gloss on their nipples and t-backs on the bottom. A t-back is an opaque thong, nothing translucent, nothing sheer. The dancer can move it around, even hold it out for the insertion of a bill, but brother, you weren't going to see the goods. Customers could never touch the dancers, although the dancers touched the customers. All of this was intended to control the situation. The dancers love it when a customer breaks the rules, because then they can get irate and get a bigger tip. If security steps in, then they get tipped bigger still, or you get ejected from the club.
Each set consisted of one dance in your dress or something that more or less passed for street wear, then during a 15 second pause you unceremoniously removed your street wear and danced a second song in your t-back. There was no stripping to it; just one dance with your breasts exposed (with lip-gloss) and one without. If a customer approached the stage, the dancer humped an imaginary partner or worked the pole, or brushed his crotch. She would typically whisper something like, "I like you, do you want a table dance?" and then shake her boobs in the fish's face. When things got slow, one dancer would come up to tip another, this time with actual kisses, actual gropes, and other contrived actions to simulate a Lesbian encounter, because this invariably improved the score.
