Posters on the side of the building show the same girls from the GoldRush app.Tatiana the Russian ballerina. Real tits!On my app she’s described as a Russian ballerina looking for a soulmate. No mention of her tits.
Brandi, Miss Orange County 2016, is also on my app, except that in her headshot she’s wearing a dress instead of titty tassels.
And there’s Crystal.
“It all started when management asked you to make a website for the place and then decided not to pay you.”
“Assholes,” I mutter.
Crystal explains it all to me. All of the GoldRush girls were sick of our jobs, sick of getting groped by customers and management, sick of working as independent contractors with zero paid time off, no benefits, and long hours. “Stripping is sexy and all, but the job sucks,” she adds.
“So I decided to get us all sugar daddies?”
She nods.
The GoldRush matchmaking app is just the GoldRush strip club with a makeover. “You just glossed us up online.”
I look at the club. I didn’t even change any of the marketing. “Does the club know?”
“They didn’t until a couple of weeks ago when that article came out about you being one of the hottest young entrepreneurs in SoCal.” She laughs. “That was pretty fucking funny.”
Crystal seems to be softening toward me a bit. “Sorry I snapped at you about Kobra. That wasn’t your fault.”
She holds a big metal door with chipped paint open for me and ushers me in. “Welcome back.”
Like a lot of strip clubs, GoldRush probably looks better at night. A strip club in the day is like a living room decorated for Christmas in February—completely wrong. Maybe it looks sexy when the lights are low, the music is pulsing, and a girl is booty-popping on the runway. At the moment, it’s Christmas in February. Someone’s kid is running up and down the stripper walk and fooling around on the pole.
“I thought you said this place wasn’t for kids.”
She shrugs. “Not my kid, I should say.”
As I walk through, a big greasy-looking dude shouts, “Where the fuck you been, Mia?”
Crystal says, “Cut her some slack, Jake. She got beat up.”
Somehow that sounds sadder in the dull light of a strip club at eight a.m., the sun filtering through a few small dingy windows, while I stand next to a Budweiser sign and a poster advertising happy hour lap dances. Of course I got beat up. Getting knocked around is just an expected part of my life. I want to run away, back to a couple of days ago, when I thought I was a hot young Millennial on the verge of finding her condo on Ocean Boulevard, flirting with a cute scientist.
Ten seconds into this life, and I’m pretty much done. I’m going back to Ocean Boulevard. I’m going to be one of the hottest entrepreneurs in SoCal if it kills me. A little voice in my head says,Maybe that’s what happened last time.
“For real, Mia, you need me to beat him up?” he offers.
“As soon as I figure out who did it, you can totally beat him up.”
“So where’s my office?” I ask Crystal.
Jake laughs at my use of the wordoffice.I saw that coming.
My office is just a storage room in the back of the club. A desk with a computer on it is tucked among boxes, papers, and costumes.
“I think some of your stuff is in here,” Crystal says.
“Where do I live?” I ask.
She shrugs. “I think you slept here some nights. JP’s sometimes. I know you had a place with Jesse for a while, but I’m not sure if you still do. I think you moved out when her boyfriend moved in. That was just last month.” I peek inside the boxes, which appear to be filled with the contents of my life.55It seems like I might live in the back of GoldRush.
I sift through the boxes until Crystal says, “I have to get back to Kai. Will you drop me off?”
“Sure. And I better get back to JP’s.” Looking around, I can’t help but think that his proposal will be the quickest way out of here.
