I had been working at the club for less than a week. Weary, I picked my head up from the worn, dirty vanity and glanced at the clock on the wall. It was almost five in the morning. So close. I was exhausted. More than that, I was exhausted and sick. Physically ill. It wasn’t contagious. Unbeknownst to me, I was fighting off a case of toxic shock syndrome, and it was winning. Only a few more minutes, and I could leave. I can’t say in retrospect that I could go home, because at that moment I didn’t have one—I was sleeping in my car. I had hoped to make enough money that night for at least a hotel room, a hot bath, and a meal. Well, it didn’t happen.
One of the regular dancers approached me in the locker room where I was sitting alone staring at the clock. “Jimmy doesn’t think you’re tipping out honestly,” she said bluntly, shuffling away without waiting for a response.
That pissed me off. I may be a lot of things, but being dishonest is not one of them. Emboldened by adrenaline from this insult, I picked myself up and briskly strode out of the locker room, down the corridor, and directly into the club’s office, where Jimmy sat stoically like Tony Soprano behind a massive desk, counting a pile of cash. We locked eyes. I didn’t break. I slammed a five dollar bill, a roll of nickels, and two quarters down on the desk so hard it made a loud CRACK.
“The last time I checked, fifteen percent of fifty dollars is seven dollars and fifty cents, am I right?”
We held hard in a locked gaze. His eyes narrowed as he looked down. When his gaze returned to mine, his eyes were a baffled amalgam of amused twinkle with a hint of exasperation. “Someone gave you a roll of nickels?”
I nodded. He sighed, rolled his eyes, grabbed it, and then resumed organizing and counting the pile of cash stacked in front of him.
After a moment, I asked, “So, we’re good?”
In a softer tone, without looking back up at me, he responded; “Yeah. See you tomorrow.”
He never questioned my word ever again.
“Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”
I would love to be able to say that, but it was more like. . .an unspoken understanding? Let’s call it a mutually affectionate rapport, one that lasted a little over ten years.
I liked the boys. They liked me. I kept my distance, but we understood each other. Sometimes men would be hanging out with me at the bar buying me drinks. I would then see them talking to Jimmy, and then see them not so subtly point at me. Jimmy would slowly shake his head “No.” One of Jimmy’s best friends had a thing for me. He tried to date me for years, probably would’ve married me. In all honesty, I adored him, but my weird personal ethos of not dating people I worked with allowed me to keep all of it at arm’s length. Considering the club was eventually raided by the feds, investigated for racketeering, and shut down permanently, this is probably a good thing.
One night I sat down at the bar, bored. Jimmy’s friend, the one who had a thing for me, was working behind the bar. “Hey, kid,” he said affectionately, handing me my standard Bailey’s and coffee [I stayed sober at work then; it didn’t last, but that’s another chapter]. I don’t remember the exact conversation in its entirety now. However, I do remember him changing the subject. “So. I hear you wanna be a writer.” He said. “Yeah.” I responded. He leaned forward onto the bar, and tipped his head in a flirtatious way as he looked me directly in the eyes. “Maybe someday you can write my story.” He smiled. “I just gotta wait for a few people to die first.” Whatever the look was that I had on my face caused him to burst out in laughter. He touched my hand and squeezed it fondly. “You should read The Godfather. It’s a good book.”
So, I did.
I was never a big “earner”—I was a pretty shitty earner to be honest—but they liked me being around. I became a stellar stage dancer, I minded my own business, and I didn’t ask too many questions. I would hear my name bellowed from the office as I passed by. I would stop. “Take this to Joey at the bar.” Jimmy would hand me an obscene stack of cash. I would roll my eyes and then proceed to take it to Joey, and Joey wouldn’t even blink twice at the fact that I was the one handing it to him. Other times, a regular in the bar would peel a $100 bill off a gangster roll and ask me to go talk to some other guy and distract him for some reason without telling me why. Oh, too many stories. So many memories, too many to tell here. Such a strange time in my life, but life is a strange fucking thing in general, is it not? Things that just became, you know, normal. There was never anything overtly criminal in what I witnessed, and I wasn’t going to ask questions. [Oh good Lord, I sound like Lorraine Bracco’s voiceover in Goodfellas…] In hindsight, I sometimes wonder if some of these things were “character tests”, or maybe they just trusted me? Perhaps both? I will never know the full answer.
Oblivious to me at the time, I have another skill that was evidently invaluable, perhaps even more valuable than being “a good earner:” I notice random shit that other people don’t. I can be in a situation of absolute and complete utter chaos, and I’m the one watching the quiet dude in the corner tying his shoe the wrong way. I don’t exactly know how or when they figured that out about me, but they did. Jimmy specifically did. He figured that out about me before I did. Without realizing it, I sort of became his watch crow on the fencepost, a bikini-clad canary in the coalmine, as it were. If I was watching something for longer than a fleeting moment, he would always magically appear somehow right out of thin air standing next to me, and he would watch whatever it was that I was watching. We did a lot of sitting and watching, not a lot of talking. Then again, Jimmy wasn’t exactly what you would call verbose. He was always a man of very few words, literally. You had to learn to speak Jimmy, and I did, for over a decade.
