I wish I had all of their names to post on the site, but unfortunately I don’t. I must resort to including them all, mostly nameless, in one post. If you have any of their names, please contact me through the contact tab at the top of this page.

I’ve made a previous post in response to a Nebraska political figure who was running on the platform that clubs like Shakers are sources of “trafficking” that need to be more regulated. While I wouldn’t describe what goes on at Shakers as “trafficking,” the club is undeniably a brothel.

In so many instances, I heard and saw brothel activities at Shakers. While I didn’t participate in full service myself, which often angered the customer base, it is my firm believe that the full service sex workers who provide for clients in Shakers are the reason it stays in business, despite the club’s lack of advertising. Sometimes at the beginning of my shifts when I would watch customers bumble into the club from their farms or factories or wherever else in the rural breadbasket of America’s underbelly, it reminded me of watching an episode of “To Catch a Predator” with Chris Hansen.

In the wasteland of grotesqueries that was the Shakers client base, one geriatric, hefty man named Gary really stands out to me. Gary was the type of customer mainstream America was afraid of, the type of customer one might see in a John Waters film or Texas Chainsaw massacre. His face looked like it was melting off, or like he had skinned another person’s face and was wearing it as a loose mask over his own face. His eyeballs drooped like a frying egg yolk in the hot sun. He sat in his truck in the parking lot long before Shakers opened in the evening, and often had baked goods that he prepared for everybody. Some of his recipes included cream cheese pinwheels and pork bread. One time I asked him if he ever ejaculated into the batter. He wouldn’t answer a yes or no, and instead just laughed. Gary would sit on the stools in front of the stage and tip one dollar per dancer, per set. However, because I usually did not get fully nude, Gary would often withhold a dollar from me. He would inform me that he was punishing me for not getting fully nude, and complain about it to the DJ. Sometimes if I was getting a lot of money from other customers and got fully nude for them, Gary would hold a dollar up after I got off stage and wave it around, in an attempt to get me to walk over to him. He wanted to reward me with one dollar, for getting fully nude. I usually did whatever I could to avoid him seeing me. He didn’t want to get up off of his stool to hand me the dollar, so he would just make high-pitched noises, like one might make to a small mammal in order to make it come over. I didn’t go by him though, because I didn’t care about his stank dollar. This made him more angry and confused, which caused him to complain more. Gary’s favorite dancer was a trollish little recovering addict named Sash, who wore a diaper and dressed as a toddler. She would often sit on his lap and receive massages from him, while staring defiantly at me, as though she had one over on me for doing that.

Gary would sometimes bring his relatives into the club, several of whom worked at the Hormel pork factory. Some of Gary’s relatives get by in life by stabbing and murdering pigs for a living. They would share tales of things like neck stabbing rates per day, or pigs escaping from where they were delivered in the factory, and group efforts to try to find them hiding in other departments of the factory. One of Gary’s pig murdering relatives, with a name that escapes me, had a problem with me reading in the club and doing mathematics. Although he didn’t spend money, he didn’t like it that I wasn’t acknowledging his presence while he was in the club, so he would ask me if I was in school, or do dumb impressions of me reading, like an old fashioned schoolyard bully. He was a dumb guy with nothing going for him, so it confused him why someone would want to read a book or learn.

Because Shakers was paranoid that I was going to sue them, the owner and DJ used to have their friends come to the club and pretend to be normal customers. The DJ would have various perverts and biker friends of his ask me questions about my job and my thoughts on him. Because I am not stupid, have been in the industry for a long time and understand human behavior, it wasn’t really a secret to me that they were attempting to be clandestine spies. One man who stands out was named Rick. He owned a roofing company and employed scabs to do his manual labor. Rick would get drunk before coming to Shakers and quote my blog to me while we were talking, but then not admit to knowing anything. When things became really tense at Shakers near the end, he threatened to spray battery acid in my face mafia-style, in order to get rid of me.

A tisket, a tasket— a basket of deplorables. Even when the club was slow, it was pretty easy for me to make money off of other people in this basket of deplorables, because they were not used to speaking with articulate dancers who were willing to talk dirty. Being in Waverly was like going in a time machine to like 1940, and whoa Nellie, did they get excited easily. There’s not much else going on out there for them. Unfortunately for dumb people in Nebraska, many of them were unable to discern the difference between talking dirty and being an actual prostitute. That made a lot of people really pissed off. While I am really good at fighting men and asserting myself, I do sometimes wonder what the less assertive, younger, newer dancers did when they started at Shakers, surrounded by so many prostitutes and dedicated customers. Most of the VIP rooms don’t have cameras.

The National Sexual Assault Hotline for RAINN is 1-800-656-4673.