firmly grasped her daughter’s shoulder and rolled her face-up on the mattress. The sight made her suck in her breath in fear. April was pale as a ghost – nearly colorless. The eyes that had twinkled like diamonds when April was an eight-year-old were dull and bloodshot; dark circles under her eyes emphasized her exhaustion. She’d been through this with others at the clubs so many times before.
“You were out partying last night, weren’t you?” Dolly demanded, knowing the truth all too well.
“I’m tired. I wanna sleep,” April mumbled as she rolled over on the bed, turning her back to Dolly.
“I told you not to go out! Where’d you go? Who were you with?” April’s head screamed with pain with each of her mother’s increasingly loud questions.
“I thought you had to work this morning. I was just doing some laundry to help you out. Gimme a break,” April said, and rolled over again onto her stomach.
The phone rang, rang, and rang again. Eventually, it stopped.
“Where were you last night?” Dolly asked again, this time in a louder, more demanding voice.
“No place. Can’t I get a little sleep on a Saturday morning? Is there some new law?”
“Don’t give me any lip, April,” Dolly said as the phone rang again. She knew who it was. She had an appointment with the district manager at 10:00 a.m. to discuss the store’s summer promotional plan. She knew she was going to get grilled on sales statistics, customer traffic counts, and sales trends. She didn’t want to risk her new promotion by keeping him waiting.
“Hello? Hi, Harriet. Yeah, I know what time it is. Tell him I had car trouble, and I’ll be there in fifteen minutes. Keep him busy. I don’t know, show him how clean the place is. Tell him about the couple who got carried away in the dressing room last week. Give him all the details. He likes that kinda stuff. Make ‘em up if you have to, but stall him, OK? Gotta run.”
“You’re grounded until I get home. Got it?” Dolly barked to April as she raced out the door. “Grounded. Stay here. Inside. No visitors. Understand?”
April rolled over and said nothing, her head pounding like bricks falling on a steel drum. Even the noise of a passing car was enough to tear into her head. There was no danger of her getting out of the bed for the day.
The sales meeting went pretty well, all things considered. Dolly had good numbers to report for sales traffic, amount of average sale, and inventory turnover. “I told the girls to think about the customers as a package deal. You know, see what they bought, and always suggest something else that would complement the sale,” Dolly said.
The district manager had heard every store manager’s success claim a hundred times before. “Give me some examples,” he said.
“Well, for the first-time customers, for example, we always suggest trying flavored sex lubricants,” Dolly said. “First-timers are often a little shy and embarrassed, and they don’t want to admit they’re looking for some of the kinkier stuff. The lubricants are good, clean fun. They only cost a few dollars, but the profit margin is high. Since I took over, lubricant sales are up 37 percent – about $200 extra profit a month – so you can see how well my idea is working.”
“Hmmmm,” the district manager said, looking at the sales-by-category printout. “Yes, I see. Good job. What else have you been able to do?”
“Well,” Dolly said, clearing her mind of her personal problems and focusing on the job at hand, “Look at the dance outfits. You’ll see that we sold five more in the first two weeks of this month than all of last month combined.”
“Is that a fluke, or did you do something?” he asked.
“That’s my work,” Dolly said with a big smile. “I was a dancer for a few months after my divorce. I know a lot of the girls on the circuit. When I got the promotion to manager here, I called all seventeen of the club mothers – you know, the women who manage the strippers in the clubs. I know most of them and told them that they’d get real good prices if they shopped here.”
“Good prices – you mean you’re giving discounts?” the manager asked, a quizzical look in his eye.
“You bet I’m givin’ dancers a discount. It says in the Fantasia Lingerie Sales Manual, page 17, ‘Store Managers are authorized to grant discretionary discounts up to 10 percent to preferred customers who spend at least $200 a year in the store.’ Heck, the typical dancer who shops here spends $500 to $800 a year, and some of them twice that. Our basic markup on everything except movies is 200 percent – twice the cost. An outfit we sell for $75 costs us $25. We can afford giving a ten or twenty percent discount to a dancer who spends a lot of money here. A 10 percent discount makes the $75 outfit a $67.50 outfit, but we have only $25 in it. That’s $42.50 profit on a $25 cost, or 170 percent markup. We only need an average 150 percent markup to meet all of our profit goals, as long as we do $440,000 a year in gross sales. I only give the discount to the top 5 percent of our customers. About half of them are local regulars, and the rest are strippers. If what I’m doin’ holds up, we’ll do $600,000 this year.” Dolly permitted herself a modest smile, though she felt like the cat that swallowed the canary.
“I like that,” the district manager said. “It shows initiative and understanding of the market. Keep up the good work, Dolly. Keep sending in the reports on time every week. See you next month.”
He wasn’t out the door five minutes before a call came in for her. “Hey, Dolly, this is Ruthie at Captain Willie’s. Can you come in early, say, 2:00? Coupla girls called in sick. Yeah, the usual. They probably got fucked up at some bar last night. They said they’re sick, but they’re probably just hung over. In any case, they ain’t gonna show. Be a doll. Come in at 2:00, OK?”
It was already 1:15. Dolly sighed and shook her head. This was the third time in two weeks Ruthie had called with the same request. Why can’t Willie keep reliable help in the place? she wondered. And why am I the one who always has to bail him out? Dolly was still tired from last night, not to mention holding down her two jobs. Now April was acting up, and her father was no help at all. April was supposed to go off to study nursing at Horry-Georgetown County Technical College after graduation. Dolly needed the money from her second job to put April through school. “Yeah, Ruthie, I’ll come in,” she said with a sigh. Lord, I’m pushing forty. When will it get easier? Dolly thought.
She dialed April at the apartment, but the line was busy. Shoot, girl! she thought. I need to get through to you. Get off the darn phone.
Working at Captain Willie’s wasn’t the pits, and it was certainly a step up from her former night job as a cocktail waitress at The Pink Zone, one of Myrtle Beach’s all-nude strip clubs. At Willie’s, she at least got to wear decent clothes: white shorts and a navy blue “Captain Willie’s” golf shirt.
At the Pink Zone, all the cocktail waitresses wore sparkle stockings, garter belts, pink thong bikini panties, and tight white push-up bustiers with pink laces. Even though the servers – unlike the dancers – were supposed to be totally off-limits to the customers, they still got groped and propositioned almost every night. The hassles came mostly from jerks playing grab-ass, but occasionally, a drunk wanted to see more boob than the costumes displayed and literally took matters into his own hands. A bouncer usually appeared to keep him from doing any serious damage, but fun, it wasn’t.
The first time a new server complained to the management about the grabbing and touching, she was told the two basic rules:
1.Never piss off a paying customer.
2.When propositioned or groped, duck it, live with it, or work somewhere else.
The majority of the servers were single mothers or college students paying their own way. The base pay for servers was minimum wage, but a hard-working waitress at the Pink Zone could make $15 to $20 an hour extra in tips. Most of them just gritted their teeth, smiled at the customers, dodged the hands as best they could, and hung in there until closing time.
Dolly rolled