Camden, Tennessee. Trail of Tears territory. According to a 23andMe saliva test, I have .3% indigenous DNA. There are signs for the area of Camden calling it Magic Valley, and it's certainly a magickal place to stroll around and inhale centuries of a certain Southern Gothic je ne sais quoi. I highly recommend the truck stop buffet on the highway next to Teazers. It has salad, black eyed peas, and assorted other vegan-by-default cultural delicacies to warm the soul and fill the belly. I'd go there most days before work in November and December 2019, sitting for an hour or so drinking black coffee, eating plate after plate of salad, people watching at the height of the holiday season. The attached gas station store sold local vegan-by-default turnover pies, made by a woman in a neighboring town. Up the highway in Hurricane Mills, there's a charming Loretta Lynn museum and attached buffet. Sometimes after work, I'd drive into Camden to use the Casey's gas station wifi, eat a fresh vegan deli sandwich, and bask in the early AM glory of magic valley. Sometimes I'd stay in a local hotel, but many nights I headed over to the Birdsong Road Marina, to safely park in one of the RV spots and sleep in my car.

About a month before returning to Teazers in 2019, I was fired from a club called Mouse's Ear in Knoxville, for exercising my labor rights. Right after Mouse's Ear fired me, my catalytic converter stopped functioning, causing the check engine light to come on and a significant loss in engine pressure. A sensor had also malfunctioned, overheated, and melted into the body of the car. For most of my Teazers 2019 experience, I was stuck saving up money to fix everything. I couldn't just cut the converter off, because it's manifold is designed in such a way that it is permanently attached to the rest of the vehicle. Stettner's Auto Repair in Camden is where I repeatedly went during the day time, to have them work on this or that. A MAGA hat sat squarely on Stettner's front desk, with Mr. Stettner repeatedly complaining about Californians ruining freedoms to saw off catalytic converters, and how a lawsuit needed to be filed against catalytic converter designs like my car had, which ruin engines.

For a few days while in Camden, I had to drive out to Nashville's NLRB office, to do my affidavit against Mouse's Ear, which was later found meritorious. That meritorious finding would eventually lead to Mouse's Ear settling, and requiring them to fasten labor rights posters in their club, similar to the other clubs around the country that have had to put up posters after my meritorious complaints.

Steve Earle's “Copperhead Road” is a song I first heard at Mouse's Ear in Knoxville. Since then, it has become one of my favorite songs, and I've requested it at every club I've been to after Knoxville. Manager Diamond at Teazers had a severe problem with “Copperhead Road,” and many of the other songs I requested. At a certain point, she began harassing me, by putting on shitty misogynist rap songs which she described as “club music,” and banned country from being played at Teazers. She insisted I had to dance to “club music” that she thought customers would prefer. This was all the more strange given the rural location of Teazers and the local population's love of country music. An ugly stripper not from the area, named Kelania, regularly criticized the Gen-X Alternative and Country songs I danced to, as though she was unable to cognitively understand dancers who don't like dancing to disgusting crappy ass-obsessed modern rap music.

An obese dancer from Mississippi named Red, mentioned in previous posts, furiously humped customers during dances, in order to keep them buying more songs from her. While I barely made any physical contact with customers and still sold many songs, near the end of my time at Teazers, Red resorted to spreading rumors that I was “giving hand jobs,” even though the dances occurred out in the open for everyone to see, and even though she clearly saw that I was not doing those things she accused me of. Red would waddle around the club telling customers not to talk to me, saying that my behavior was going to get the club shut down. It was astonishing, but not surprising.

Diamond didn't seem at all concerned about my privacy or concealing my legal identity. For example, while I didn't tell Bobby Wayne Coleman my personal information while discussing genealogy with him, one day he revealed to me that Diamond told him my legal name, age, and occasional occupation as a welder.

After my car was fixed, after I walked through all of the Camden cemeteries I needed to visit, after my Mouse's Ear affidavit was completed in Nashville, after I determined that Diamond had driven a previously thriving business so thoroughly into the ground that it was struggling to stay open, I typed up a note to her at the local Camden library, describing her labor violations that I was not interested in following. Tennessee is a one-party consent audio recording state, so I made sure to keep my recorders on inside my bag for the entire time I was at work-- toilets flushing and all. My friend Phoenix and I discussed possibly striking in a dramatic way, but Phoenix was getting badly bullied by Diamond and Daisy, had a demure personality, and just decided to stay home instead of going back there. After expressing my labor rights to Diamond, I have one funny recording of her screaming at me,

“Are you a fuckin' lawyer?!”

Diamond's lawyer question was funny for me to hear, and for the Nashville NLRB agent to hear, because I'd been asked that before. In fact, I was angrily asked if I was a lawyer just a month prior, by Mouse's Ear owner Buddy Browning, when Mouse's Ear in Knoxville terminated me. The answer to that question is of course no, I am not a lawyer-- just a worker who knows my rights, and wants other people to respect those rights.

I had to leave Camden right away after getting fired from Teazers, and did most of my Teazers NLRB affidavit in my car, in the parking lot of a Paducah, KY McDonald's, telling the Nashville NLRB agent about all of the things that had happened at Teazers, occasionally getting off the phone to run into McDonald's for a coffee or bathroom break.