I first met Diamond in the Summer of 2012. I still don't know her real name. It's so exhausting thinking about Diamond, because she's such an awful person. That's why I've procrastinated for this many months in continuing the series-- because I hate that woman to an extreme degree and don't want to think about her. Thinking about her gives me trauma fatigue and makes me want to lay down for a nap every time I start to make this post. That being said, in 2012, she was relatively unremarkable in terms of being abusive and harassing dancers. Diamond was simply a bartender/server/kitchen helper in 2012. In 2019, she was a manager.

Diamond was her dancer stage name, which she used because she also danced at Teazers. I didn't see her dance until 2019. She is an unattractive old lady of Italian-American descent, with short bleach blonde hair, and large fake tits bolted onto a petite, muscular, V-shaped frame, which she proudly flaunted around the club, as though she thought of herself as attractive. I've encountered a lot of small masculine V-shaped women with fake tits in strip clubs, who are proud to be there. I can only deduce that they were so void of femininity early on in life that they are making up for lost time within the walls of the club. Diamond is from the Rochester, New York area. She migrated down to my ancestral homeland of rural West Tennessee a couple of decades ago, so she could work at a truck stop strip club and flirt with disgusting perverted truck drivers all night. It's likely one of the few places in the world where someone as gross and disgusting as she is able to feel special.

Below is a photo of Diamond in the kitchen of Teazers when she was younger:

In the Summer of 2012, I was on a road trip, exploring the lower half of the United States. Tennessee is where most of my estranged maternal lineage has lived for a couple hundred years. I combined a genealogy trip with a strip club trip, a practice I have repeated throughout my adult life, in order to afford fine cuisine and study time.

There is a desperate hopelessness to the Teazers geographic location, wooded and haunted and weird. Patsy Cline's airplane crashed within walking distance of one of the Freemason cemeteries where some of my long lost kin are buried. When Michelle Obama's bill to help prevent childhood obesity in school lunches was launching, I was sitting inside of a Pizza Hut in this community, eavesdropping on some morbidly obese locals, who were angrily discussing how the Obamas were impeding on their freedoms. In all likelihood, I was related to some of the folks in that pizza hut, but they never would've recognized me and I certainly didn't say anything to them. Nobody knows who I am out there, but I often know who they are.

I found Teazers on TUSCL.com. When I called in 2012 to ask about work, a female manager named Cameron answered the phone. She told me that I would need to come in to meet her first. She had a sweet, cheerful Tennessee honey twang and a high pitched voice like my own. When I went in to meet her, she and I hit it off right away. She was almost nine months pregnant at the time, with big blue eyes, porcelain skin and prominent cheekbones. Cameron introduced me to the owner, who was a bearded older male from Michigan. Bob Seeger's “Turn The Page” was the song that was playing when I first entered the building. The owner was leisurely strolling around the club in blue jeans, while Cameron did most of the work, which included running the DJ booth until the DJ arrived, bar tending, running the registers, and of course controlling the dancers in a managerial fashion. Back in 2012, I didn't know what the Economic Realities test was with regards to independent contractor determination, but I did think it was fucked up that Teazers took $5 out of every $25 dance I gave (a predetermined price set by the club), and I was bothered that they enforced a variety of rules upon me that I didn't have to follow at Oregon strip clubs. Wooden paneling covers most of the interiors of Teazers. Thick cigarette smoke fog swirls throughout the building, intertwined with the scent of sizzling steak. I only worked there for a shift or two during that trip. I returned to work there for a day or two a few months later, while passing through the area on a different road trip.

The next time I decided to work at Teazers was in late 2019, when I was running out of other viable options, due to my labor activism, lawsuits, and blacklisting. By viable options, I mean that from my 2012 experiences, I thought I could dance at Teazers without having to make physical contact with the customers, I could earn a middle class living, and I would not have to dance to crappy dubstep or misogynist rap music all night. I called the club to ask if I could come back to work there. Cameron didn't answer the phone though. Instead, Diamond answered. I asked her if Cameron was still the manager, to which she replied no, and informed me she was the new manager. I was instructed to come into work so she can see me in person before determining if I could work there. She told me that it was mandatory to work a certain number of full shifts per week.

Upon my return, I asked Diamond what happened to Cameron. Diamond informed me that the dancers didn't like Cameron, because Cameron “played favorites” with the dancers-- a practice I never witnessed. She then informed me that Cameron was stealing money from the cash registers and safes, which caused the owner to initiate a police investigation in an attempt to catch her. Diamond told me that the police and owner were unsuccessful in catching or convicting Cameron of these crimes, which made me happy. Remembering beautiful poor Cameron run around the club so pregnant in 2012, doing so much of the work while the owner didn't appear to do much of anything, I was happy to hear about her potentially redirecting the profits of a miserly exploitative piece of shit strip club owner. I didn't say any of that stuff to Diamond though.

The small dressing room in Teazers was down a few steps at the back of the stage, just as I remembered. With cinder block walls, limited heating and modest flooring, it was nothing to brag about in comparison to the lavish dressing rooms of Vegas or Chicago, or even the modest homey ones of rural Minnesota. In 2019, the dressing room wall décor were photographs of Diamond, which were not there in 2012. Other changes in the dressing room included a specific area of tables and chairs that Diamond claimed as “hers,” with her dancer supplies in the area, and her name on various items. The dressing room aesthetic was abnormal compared to other strip clubs. While there are often alpha females involved in strip club dressing rooms, the extent to which Diamond established her presence was odd. It was entertaining to me in a novel way to see a New York Italian engaging in such behavior in such a place as rural West Tennessee.

Most of the dancers at Teazers in 2019 were unattractive, and unable to engage in interesting conversation. Compared to the several dozen per shift who I worked with in 2012, many of whom were conventionally attractive, the amount of dancers in 2019 was about ten total. I was informed that many of the dancers I met in 2012 were travelers who knew Cameron or who heard about the money making potential of Teazers and considered it an economically desirable place to work, despite the commute. All of that was gone in 2019. Upon my 2019 return, it was very easy for me to surpass other dancers in the lap dance selling tally, simply through customer conversation and steady eye contact. The other dancers were baffled by my tally, and secretly engaged in conversations about the possible root of my sales tactics. Most of the 2019 dancers engaged in hardcore grinding activities with the customers, the extend to which I did not witness in 2012. Their dances were illegal in a prostitution way, but the dancers were mostly in denial about doing them. What made their denial more strange was the fact that they made repeated attempts to label me a prostitute, even though they were able to see me dancing and visually know that I was not engaged in any illegal activity or barely touching at all.

For those unfamiliar with strip club politics, sometimes if one dancer is making significantly more money than the others, she will get labeled a prostitute, even if she does not engage in illegal activity. Ironically, often times, the people doing the labeling do engage in illegal activity themselves.

Among the dancers, Diamond was the biggest bully. Her managerial position gave her power that other dancers did not have, so she was able to randomly accuse people of prostitution and threaten to fire them whenever she wanted. You can read the dry affidavit linked at the top of the page to get a full understanding of Diamond's behavior as a manager. In a nutshell, she abused and harassed every attractive woman who worked there as a dancer, accused them of engaging in prostitution, bullied them into quitting on a regular basis, incited violence and bullying from other dancers, and pressured women to engage in degrading acts on stage. Business was slow at Teazers while I worked there in 2019, which surprised me, because it was quite busy in 2012.

The DJ in 2019 regularly told me that Diamond had caused this lull in business, by intentionally getting rid of attractive dancers and keeping ones who did not threaten her ego. The extent to which she flexed these powers was comedic. I was informed that Diamond had only been a manger at Teazers for less than a year, and that the owner wanted to find a new manager. In 2019, I did not see the owner I met in 2012, but was informed that he was the same one.

Diamond Doesn't understand labor law, so when she started exerting pressure on me to follow arbitrary rules that she didn't enforce on less successful dancers to follow, and when I did not follow those rules, she fired me. She very clearly misclassified and very clearly got rid of me for my protected speech in the workplace. This post isn't as elaborate or detailed as I wanted it to be. She is so detestable and it has taken so long to get this up already. I should hope in subsequent Teazers posts, I will discuss more instances with Diamond, workplace violations, and the colorful social landscape of Teazers.