Sunday Confessional: The Day I Ran Away From Home...And Religion

Throughout most of 1996, I was miserable.  I turned 21 in June.  I was living at home.  At the time, my father owned a route for a potato chip company.  His job was to stock the shelves in a dozen or so grocery stores in the Phoenix area on a daily basis.  I worked for him.

 I was confused, and, to put it lightly, depressed.  So depressed in fact, that I had been contemplating suicide on a daily basis for three to four years prior.  Something about my life needed to change.  Scratch that.  Everything in my life needed to change...and quickly.

It was late August when I decided that I was going to run.  I didn't know where.  I didn't know when.  I just had to run.  If I had stayed, I was going to kill myself.  Part of the initial "runaway" plan involved suicide, but I'll get into that later.

SNL Hits A Little Close To Home

About 12 years ago, I worked as a strip club DJ at a place called Cole's Platinum Club in Phoenix.  It was ghetto....GHETTO.  It sat under an overpass on the West side of town, and yes, I worked on the day shift.


One word of advice to anyone that is interested in going to a gentlemen's club:  Never go before 9PM.  Some clubs advertise happy hours.  Some advertise free buffets.  Don't buy into the hype!  


There was one dancer that I worked with named "Jordan", that was into her second year of a veterinary assistant program, but was allergic to dogs and cats.


There was another dancer that had a nasty 6-7 inch scar on the inside of her right thigh.  When I asked her about it, she told me that one afternoon she decided to do a "power slide" across the stage.  The inside of her thigh caught on a splinter on the hardwood stage and ripped her leg open.  An ambulance had to be called.  She had to have surgery to repair an artery.  The stage was never repaired.


The pièce de résistance was the dancer on the day shift that was bald and deaf.  I'm not joking.  She wore a blond wig, and would only dance to the Beastie Boys' 'She's Crafty', because the bass was so heavy, she could feel it in the stage.  Unfortunately, when you only have 5 dancers on the day shift, and they're supposed to dance to two songs per rotation, you tend to hear that fucking song a lot.


When there are less than half a dozen customers in the club, it makes no sense to have the volume of the music turned up so loud that you can't hear yourself think.  I'm not trying to be mean, but it didn't really matter what volume the music was at anyway, because she danced off beat to begin with;  so, it was always like she was dancing to another song, already.  


When the song was over, she would still be dancing.  I would have to flicker the strobe lights on and off to try to get her attention.  93% of the time, it wouldn't work.  It would be so weird to see the customers looking at her dancing to no music, then look at me, trying to figure out what was going on, then back to her.  I wasn't allowed to leave my booth under any circumstance, so more often than not, I would have to throw ice at her to get her attention, and get her off stage.  My god, it was horrible.


$6.00 an hour and 10% of what the ladies took home.  On a good day, I would go home with $50, and would have to give the deaf girl a few dollars for a cab ride home.  That was my life.