Epilogue

Two Months Later

"So the door guy is just on the other side," my new manager waves at the screen that separates the booths from the rest of the floor. "If anything happens, a guy gets rowdy, just holler. He'll come over and fuck him up."

I nod matter-of-factly, like it's all business as usual to me. The club isn't as big as my old one and it's a little farther from the downtown core, but somehow it's never empty. The manager is a woman, a bleached blonde who still sports the eighties poufy bangs and tanned skin the texture of a Birkin bag. But everyone tells me she really stands up for the girls. Within the first five minutes, she cheerfully tells me that she stripped for nearly twenty years before marrying the owner of this place.

Then again, who am I to judge. To each her own.

"That's all I ever knew," she says, waving her hand and flashing the rings piled on all five fingers. "So now I make sure all my girls are happy, you got that, bébé?"

I nod.