Fitting $600 into a G-string is easier than you think. Catching that money as it cascades from the sky in a twirling, fluttering, cloudburst of singles is harder than you might imagine, especially as Lil Jon’s “Get Low” blasts through overworked speakers and you’re upside down on a shiny, silver pole.
But this is not about how to get money, it’s about how to blow your federally fattened dough-stack on writhing, naked women at Nashville’s flesh emporiums. In the swamp-thick heat of our interminable summers, there is no respite like the cool darkness of a loud and windowless club full of naked single moms. For that reason, I struck out (and out, and out) to Nashville strip clubs to discover how best to let the stimulus package trickle down to some of the hardest-working women in Music City.
At first, it seemed that I might have trouble spending much at all. In comparison to the twin, tit-jiggling meccas of Miami and Atlanta, Nashville strip clubs are a low-cost, low-return investment. The cover at most clubs is $6 and is almost never more than 10. Because of moral posturing disguised as quality-of-life regulation—that is, the Sexually Oriented Business laws—all Nashville strip clubs are BYOB. The upside of this is that nobody’s pushing you to drop two Benjamins on a bottle of Ketel One or a round of champagne for the girls. At Christie’s—the Cadillac of Nashville cathouses—there’s a $10 door charge after 6 p.m. and a two “drink” minimum (juice and soda!), which comes to a mere $20.
The downside of the SOB laws is that lap dances are illegal. This leaves us with “hover dances”—in which a naked woman gyrates in your general vicinity without making physical contact with your body or clothes. This will cost about $25. If stripping were drinking, a hover dance would be a Shirley Temple. So what does that leave for the guy who’s got bills and wants to get dirty?
Making it rain.
The practice involves throwing hundreds of dollars into the air while strippers gyrate under the leafy green fallout.
If you have a working brain and live in Nashville, you’ve heard that “Pac Man” Jones & Co. shot up a Vegas boob bar during a making it rain melee. Since that time, the practice has become as popular in Nashville as tramp stamps in an Antioch strip mall.
“The making it rain thing is really popular right now,” says Déjà Vu general manager Carol Vannatter. “Ever since Pac Man did it.”
Vannatter says that most guys prefer to toss their wad (of bills) all at once, often $300 at a time, though occasionally men will throw stacks of 20 or 50 singles. (I call this making it drizzle.)
And it is filthy.
The juxtaposition of cold hard cash and smooth young flesh, ringed by an audience of leering, liquor-addled men who grow poorer by the second, is an indictment of something, though, while watching those girls strip, I forgot what.
Not that it matters. When the song is over, the naked women just pick up the money, maybe smile shyly, and head backstage.
“It happens all the time,” Vannatter says. “People spend a lot of money in here.”
