Fringe Florida: Travels Among Mud Boggers, Furries, Ufologists, Nudists, and Other Lovers of Unconventional Lifestyles by Lynn Waddell Page B

street several times over the years, but have never
    been inside the Mons, something I feel guilty about since I’m an area
    reporter with a background on the subject. I researched for the movie
    Showgirls in the early 1990s and interviewed dancers in most every
    nude and topless club in Las Vegas. I’m long beyond squeamish.
    Given my insight into the mechanics of the flesh industry, Joe’s suc-
    ap
    cess is a mystery. He can’t sell alcohol and only makes money off the
    Mar
    door. Nonalcoholic nude clubs I’ve visited skidded by selling ten-dol-
    t
    lar sodas and offering questionable backroom encounters with danc-
    Fo
    ers who wore evening gloves to cover the needle marks in their arms.
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    By all accounts that’s not the Mons modus operandi, and none of the
    K e
    Mons dancers I’ve met fit that image. Sure, some of Mons’s success can
    ht
    be attributed to its mystique. There’s a novelty in saying you’ve been to
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    a club from the national headlines. But what keeps customers coming
    back, or even risk their lives to get here?
    Down the street a kitschy alien spaceship flashes like a beacon atop
    2001 Nude Odyssey, one of Mons’s competitors. A couple of college-
    age guys leaving a hotel bar a few doors down don’t even glance at
    it. They dart out across the busy highway, laughing as passing drivers
    blow their horns. One in an SMU ball cap briefly loses his flip-flop and
    narrowly avoids becoming roadkill.
    Does the Mons offer big-screen NFL replays and an unlimited sup-
    ply of opium as well as nude women who will rub breasts and butts all
    over you?
    I’m about to find out. Well, as much as a straight woman can.
    Inside the mirrored foyer, the door girl texts on her cell phone be-
    tween bites of a to-go salad. She stops cyber chatting long enough
    to take the SMU fans’ money and waves them through. The cover is
    twenty dollars, and if you look past her you can get a peek at why you’re
    paying it. On stage, a woman’s bare booty jiggles like Jell-O on a bumpy
    road.
    Beyond the threshold, Mons is a voyeur’s dream designed with the
    practicality of a Golden Corral. Mirrored walls and ceiling tiles allow
    customers to see dancers from almost every angle. A disco ball hangs
    proof
    from the ceiling, one of the few modest attempts at decoration. Multi-
    colored spotlights frame the stage.
    Reflective of Joe’s matter-of-fact personality, the club makes no pre-
    tenses about what it’s selling. Plain and simply, Mons is a lap dance
    factory. Continuous black leatherette couches that look like bench
    seats for a 50-yard-wide Impala snake through the room. There are few
    tables. No TVs, no cozy booths, and no private VIP rooms, which are
    staples at most strip clubs.
    Not that there’s a need for separate rooms at this point. Only forty
    customers are scattered about, including a handful of women with boy-
    friends or husbands.
    ad
    Being the only unescorted female, I draw curious glances from a
    ir
    couple of geeky guys in glasses with shirts buttoned to their clavicles. I
    olF
    take the nearest seat and cease to exist. A clothed middle-aged woman
    eg
    is no competition for a three-ring circus of bare nubile flesh.
    nir
    On the octagonal stage, a woman scales the stripper pole like an
    F
    army cadet climbs a rope. She descends slowly, holding on by only her
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    inner thighs. Her long, wavy brown hair cascades toward the floor.
    She poses like a swan in flight, her body horizontal to the stage, back
    arched, neck stretched, and legs parted like scissors. The acrobatics are
    so artistic I forget she’s wearing nothing more than 8-inch platforms.
    Based on their expressions, the people sitting around the stage haven’t.
    On the back of the stage, a skinny blonde wearing only a cowboy hat
    forces her small breasts together to accept dollar bills from a couple in
    their late fifties. Along the front, a dancer in a string bikini top per-
    forms contortionist feats for a couple of guys in designer