Big Bang Theory
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| The Dungeon at the Green Door |
Reluctant wives, horny accountants and leather slaves: A Green Door memoir
BY SKYLAIRE ALFVEGREN
"Are you in the lifestyle?" he asked.
It was dark, too dark to make out anything past the outline of a sweaty, hulking, recently waxed chest. I gingerly positioned my pint of Jim Beam behind a six pack of O'Douls under the bar and looked up at "The Accountant." An accountant naked but for the threadbare white towel slung around his hips. The first time I met "The Accountant" while slinging Cokes in the back bar of the Green Door, the house lights were so low you could've skinned a cat and no one would've noticed. But it's always like that: The place is dark because people are more apt to get naked when the lights are out. I conversed with "The Accountant" for a half-hour before my eyes adjusted and I realized he'd been masturbating the whole time.
Three months earlier, "lifestyle" was a word I associated with marketing companies, a repulsive buzzword found in sentences alongside "'tweener" "extreme" and "vertical branding."
But from January to March, I ran the café attached to the Green Door, the self-proclaimed "best kept secret" in Las Vegas. For me, the term "lifestyle" took on a whole new meaning. (Employees were told to refer to it as a "lifestyle" club rather than a swinger's club, "lifestyle" being a discreet and apparently more sophisticated way of saying you swing.)
Even though they traffic in sex, the Green Door is still a company with management. "We want customers to remember the experience, remember the employees, write home about it," management said. I took the suggestion to create a "character": Mine was a glitter-glam high-school revolutionary, Candy, as directed by Ken Russell.
At 28, I still get carded for cigarettes. An L.A. prostitute had once stalked me for a month, claiming I could make $1,500 a day working for her Persian pimp. My Oxford-educated, Buddhist best friend had a penchant for hookers. I'm forever in search of truth and beauty, in the gutter, a la Baudelaire, whose birthday I share. I'd like to become my generation's P. J. O'Rourke, but I can't afford a beer, let alone college.
The trannies loitering in the Commercial Center parking lot always liked my outfits, but my high ideals and lowbrow sensibility was lost on most Green Door patrons. I connected with the guys brought unwillingly by their friends, an ex-junkie-pimp, an old man whose friend used to deliver ice to Area 51.
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