7. ORLANDO FROM MIAMI - 2010 to 2013 At some point I met the porn star Nadia Nitro. Don’t get the wrong idea, she was extremely charming and talented. I think she was the last real porn star to make money on the web before Paris Hilton made sex videos aspirational, and every young girl wanted to have sex on camera for free. I wasn’t attracted to Nadia because her feet were too small. And she tried to set me up to be middle car with her bisexual porn star soul mate from LA, but that is another story. Nadia Nitro had just moved to Miami in Thanksgiving of 2009. I asked her what was the biggest and best strip club she had ever been to anywhere. She said Dollhouse. So when I set out for Nashville and ended up in Orlando around Christmas 2010, and as soon as I got my dogs squared away at a motel in Kissimmee, I drove straight to Dollhouse. It was east on Irlo Bronson, and north on 441. I had already been driving all day, and the night came in colder and sooner than I was used to in Miami. It was almost misty, with a hint of fog on the retention pond at Florida Hospital. In one day I went from baking sun and jerk chicken to the first winter I tasted in five years. On the way past the Tupperware building there was a billboard that said "Dice in 5 Seconds." I thought it said "Die in 5 Seconds." So after thinking of all the ways a person could die totally unexpectedly in five seconds, and a drive that took much longer than I expected past an endless stream of taco joints and shitholes, I finally saw a filthy little building in the dark with a sign that said Dollhouse. And there was a more exciting looking strip club that glowed more in the mist, directly across the street. Dollhouse looked like it hadn't been remodeled since the Korean War, when it might have been an armed services recruiting office. Or maybe an Old Main Street dive bar, the kind where the neon flickers. Dollhouse looked like the back of a restaurant where the dumpster is, no matter what direction you approached it from. There was no way to avoid feeling disappointed at the end of my drive. It was like the building some young people drive up to at the beginning of a horror movie, and a creepy old guy answers the door, the harbinger. But it was a long drive, and I was ready for some strip-club magic, so I went rushing in there. And I ran out of room to rush, and just about ran into the far wall. It was small. It had to be the five ugliest girls in Orlando - Mexican crack addicts with three kids - shaking it on a tiny stage. They were being watched by the seven brokest guys in Orlando, some day laborers waving crumpled $1 bills. And they were all sitting in a tiny area on chairs that wouldn’t sell for $1 at a yard sale. I suddenly remembered Nadia moved to Miami from Tampa, not Orlando. I was in the wrong Dollhouse. This place was disgusting. The lights were turned the whole way up so you could see the grunge, the music was deafeningly loud. I left as fast as I came in. Across the street was Cabaret Internationale. I only got a little taste of it that night, but it was dreamy. I rented a house right up the street within walking distance. I don’t remember if it was that night, or the next night I came in, that I met and fell in love with the prettiest stripper in Orlando. She wasn’t that pretty when I first saw her. But after a few drinks and seeing how she danced on stage and talking to her for a while, I was in love. And then she was the prettiest stripper in Orlando. And there were more where she came from. Strippers are always more likely than average to be lesbians. In Orlando it seemed like almost all strippers were lesbians. Cabaret Internationale had plenty of teenage and 20-something lesbian space cadets who thought $25 was a gigantic tip. And it was right in the middle of Orange Blossom Trail, the main north-south street in Orlando. And it had a day shift with plenty of space for new girls. So there was excellent turnover with new girls every week driving in from Atlanta, or Sumter County, or wherever. And the girls who came in there and freelanced were more worried about their sugar daddies walking in, or their girlfriends catching them cheating, than anything management might say. II-l6