Big Bang Theory

Reluctant wives, horny accountants and leather slaves: A Green Door memoir

BY SKYLAIRE ALFVEGREN

In person, I claimed to be married; sometimes I was a lesbian, always delivered with a blushing tilt of the head, my version of "I just work here." Either way, I still had to give tours. Curious tourists, lonelyhearts and sex machines, all got a different spin. Voyeurs, it turns out, tend to be shy. They never came during the day -- only would-be participants.

And there was a handful of them, every day, day in and day out. I often wondered how these men -- and they were all men -- supported themselves. The enthusiasm with which they would talk the place up to whomever would wander in was astonishing, as though they were working on commission. One middle-aged brother would spend entire afternoons at the café bar, nursing a cup of coffee and asking for updates from the back, sort of like a hungry person might ask "How's the soup?" at a restaurant.

The Green Door doesn't offer senior discounts, but like clockwork, one particular white man in his 70s would show up around 3 p.m., hand in hand with one of his three wizened black strawberries. Strawberry preserves, I should say. He never looked shifty. The women always seemed tired, but they always asked how I was doing.

Once you proceed past the café and the admission booth known as "the cage," the lights get lower and lower. You have to proceed past the bank of Internet porn kiosks before making a right into the actual club. The first floor is 8,000 square feet; a "juice bar" punctuates an always-dark cavern featuring pool tables and a stripper pole dimly lit by disco strobes.

A long hallway opens up to a tiled Jacuzzi room, the "voyeur area," and something that looks like a funhouse in reverse: a dozen small rooms, side by side, painted black floor to ceiling, with black vinyl-covered mattresses, partitioned off by neon beaded curtains.

"The Orgy Room," a gaping, elevated platform festooned with pillows, has been known to hold upwards of 30 naked people at once.

The "Voyeur Area" is a lounge with couches in front of two lockable rooms with full-length windows. At night, couples would retire there, getting it on with the lights on. It was taboo to tap on the glass, and tacky to stare with one's face pressed up against the window, but people would, always single men. I often had the thought that voyeurs should be discreet, but they aren't. They're just perverts lacking social skills.

Beyond the voyeur rooms was the "Couples Only" area, a scaled-down version of the dungeon upstairs.

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