“Good. Because you have nothing to worry about.” His eyes turned fierce. “You’re safe with me.”
I knew that. Temper or not, I instinctively knew he’d never hurt me. Butch looked at me like I was something precious. Like I was special for reasons other than my lineage. Reaching over, I took ahold of his hand, interlacing our fingers.
“Yes,” I said. “I am.”
Butch
Friday nights were always the busiest time at the strip club, even more so than Saturdays. I wasn’t sure why that was, but it did seem that we got more business-types in the club on Fridays, men coming by to blow off steam after a long work week. Most of the time, they wore wedding bands.
Not that I judged the men for that. Nothing wrong with enjoying a little fantasy by watching the girls, as long as they kept their hands to themselves.
I was manning the door, checking everyone’s ID before they could come inside. I didn’t care if the person looked sixty. The club rule was to check all IDs. This also helped us make sure no one on the Do Not Return list made it inside. We didn’t have to try to remember what the men looked like, which was good since there were over twenty names on the list. There were a lot of entitled assholes out there that thought they had the right to get handsy.
I had a clipboard in my hand, but I didn’t really need it. I’d done this for so long that I knew the names from memory. There was a line of men, and most of them seemed to be together. My money was on bachelor party. That was good news for the girls. Those parties always tipped well.
As I got to the end of that group, there were a few men that appeared to be on their own, as well as one man in the back that caught my attention right away. He was disheveled and looked confused. His unfocused eyes and shifty movements gave me the impression that he might be drunk already.
I kept an eye on him as I checked in the men in front of him. Once he stepped closer to me, I could see that his clothes weren’t just wrinkled, they were worn and unclean. Scanning his face and hair, I thought he looked unwashed as well.
He was homeless, I was sure of it.
“Hey, buddy, you okay?” I asked when he was the only one left outside. Unlike everyone else, he didn’t seem to be too eager to get inside.
“Are you the monitor?” he asked, not looking directly at me as his eyes wandered around.
“Monitor?”
The man’s eyes flitted over me, lingering on the clipboard for a moment. He kept shifting his weight from one foot to the other anxiously.
“Observing. Checking. Recording. That’s the monitor. That’s you.”
Okaaaay.I was rethinking the assumption that this man was drunk. For one thing, I didn’t smell any alcohol on him, even though he’d inched a little too close to me while talking. Also, the way he was talking made me think this was something else. His confusion was deep-rooted and he seemed delusional. Could be drugs, or some kind of mental illness.
“Do you work for them or against them?” he asked, his face showing traces of fear in the way his eyes widened and his lips tightened.
“Them?”
“Gotta keep them out. Not safe, not secure. They want to control all of us. Gotta shake ‘em, man, gotta shake ‘em. ”
Unease expanded in my chest. This man looked seriously scared. It wasn’t making any sense, but there was a paranoid quality to his words that made me think there was something in his mind, making him believe something—or someone—was after him.
“Where’d you come from?” I asked, looking around the parking lot, but nothing stood out as odd other than the man himself. If he was homeless like I suspected, then he must stay somewhere nearby. This wasn’t exactly the best part of town, but there were plenty of places around here that a homeless man could set up camp.
“Never tell. Gotta shake ‘em.”
A car pulled into the parking lot, its lights spilling over the two of us. The man tensed, looking over his shoulder at the vehicle. When he turned back to me, he shook his head and started backing away.
“No, no, no,” he muttered.
“Wait a minute,” I said, but he pivoted and hurried away across the parking lot. I thought about following him, worried that he might get hurt in his current state of mind, but there was a man walking across the parking lot from the car that had just arrived, and I couldn’t leave the door unmanned.
I probably could have handled that better, but there wasn’t much I could do about it now. I promised myself that I would keep an eye for the man, and if he reappeared I would do more to help him. The man seemed to be lost in his own mind, which I could only imagine was a hellish existence.
The evening continued as usual after that, with the only notable instance being the arrival of two clearly underage men that first pretended they’d forgotten their IDs, then tried to bribe me with a hundred bucks to let them in.
It was a hard no.
I got so tired of these underage guys trying to sneak into the club. It was the biggest problem that I had as a bouncer, hands down.
