The Owner of A Strip Club

I've owned my strip club for over a decade, and over that period, I learned strippers and escorts aren't only interested in money. If their sole concern was money, they would've started an OnlyFans account and filmed pornos. My girls worked for me because I offered them a way to keep their personal lives segregated from their careers. This privacy would allow them to transition away from the sex worker career eventually.

Leona planned to transition to a more dignified career after college. She had started working for me four years ago, as an eighteen-year-old college freshman. Raymond's University charged fifteen thousand dollars a semester in tuition fees, and she had to pay for her living expenses on top of that. If Leona hadn't gone into sex work, she would have graduated with crushing debt. If she had gone into porn, she would have left a digital trail that would be discovered by future employers during background checks and result in denied jobs. Becoming a stripper is the goldilocks option. At the cost of her dignity, Leona was able to earn enough money to graduate debt free while simultaneously being able to hide her past occupation from her employers and future social network.

After she leaves my employ, Leona plans to never mention she used to be a stripper to anyone. Not her employer, not her friends, not her future husband or eventual children. Her plan would have worked if she hadn't been my best stripper. I had run the numbers and calculated Angel earned me a hundred grand annually in direct sales- men paying to see her, specifically, strip- and many times that indirectly through food and sales. I paid her sixty grand in salary, meaning I made at least forty-thousand in profits from her. My other strippers had margins of ten thousand or less.

I couldn't let her quit so, a week after she graduated, I invite her to my office to talk. I assure her she isn't in trouble and congratulate her on graduating college. I ask if she has started searching for a job and whether she intends to put in her two-weeks notice soon.

Leona tells me she has made her resume and begun applying to different companies on Indeed and LinkedIn. She's waiting to hear back. In a month, she should have her first interview, but I don't have to worry. She will notify me when she is ready to quit. She promises to do her final two weeks.

I thank her for her time and tell her that is all I needed to hear. She hears my dismissal and turns around. Behind her, I open a filing cabinet. While she walks to the door, I reach within the compartment and pull out my handgun. Leona reaches the door and tries to open it. She fails. The door is locked and the mechanism to disarm it is beneath my desk. I aim. Leona turns to tell me the door is jammed, sees the gun, and freezes. I fire. The bullet sinks into her chest without leaving a mark.

Her hand flies to her chest, searching for a wound that isn't there. "You shot me."

"I didn't shoot you."

"You're holding a gun."

"I'm not holding a gun."

Angel remembers me shooting her, but between the testament of her memory and my words, she believes my words. I'm still holding the gun, but between the evidence her eyes provide and my words, Angel believes my words. That is the power of the gullibility ray.

Her gaze leaves my weapon and meets my stare. She defaults to why she had initially turned. "The door is locked," she says. "How do I unlock it?"

"Aren't you going to wait for your new schedule?"

"My new schedule?"

"You wanted to take on more hours, right? That's why you asked to speak with me. Now that you're done with college, you can start working here full-time." I worry Angel is going to say something that contradicts the story I'm going to be spinning- something like 'I'm only taking on extra hours until I find a different job' or 'I needed to kill time while waiting for the interviews to start'- so I don't give her a chance to talk. Instead, I continue to remind her of events that never took place and use the memories to justify the present and shape a favorable future.

In my story, Angel had evaluated the jobs she could get with a bachelor's degree and no disclosable work experience. She had compared the salaries of entry-level jobs with what she was making as a part-time stripper, and then considered what she could make if she worked for me full-time. She realized her current job was superior to anything else she could get, so she approached me yesterday to tell me she wanted to work full-time. We had spent the evening negotiating her pay, perks, and responsibilities. At the end of the night, I had written a new employment contract which she had signed.

"That reminds me," I had been holding the gullibility ray this entire time so I take the opportunity put it back in the cabinet I had taken it from. In that cabinet, there's a second item, which I now take out. A manilla folder. "I am keeping the original copy of your employment contract for my records, but I have a spare for you to reference at your leisure."

I had written up this contract the same day Angel had graduated and forged her signature, but the document is still binding because I said Angel signed it and Angel remembered signing the contract. No one would know it was forged.

Despite remembering having negotiated and signed the contract, Angel doesn't remember any specific provisions because I hadn't told her of any. Consequently, instead of putting the document away, Angel studies it. She immediately notices something amiss. "Why am I getting paid fifty thousand dollars a year?" Before I had used the Gullibility Ray on her, I had been paying her sixty grand to shake her ass for me part-time.

"I gave you a raise of twenty thousand dollars," I tell her. "You used to make thirty-thousand. Now you're working full-time, you'll make fifty." The thought I might one day give her a pay raise to forty thousand dollars makes me smile.

"I used to work twenty hours a week. I'm working forty now. It's still a lower hourly rate."

"You used to spend twenty hours dancing. Very physically demanding work. Creating promotional material is easier and you'll be doing that ten hours a week, so you’ll only be dancing for thirty hours a week. I wanted to pay you forty-five, but you talked me up to fifty."

Angel's frown becomes a self-satisfied smile. "I forgot I negotiated the pay raise. I was expecting to see forty-five thousand at the top of the contract. Fifty caught me off-guard. I was worried it was a typo." She pauses. "What sort of promotional material am I going to make?"

"You don’t need to worry. I'm not going to change the terms of our deal. You're only going to be doing things you've already agreed to and are in your contract. A few short videos for our website and advertisements, pictures for flyers- that sort of thing." Things that would establish a digital trail, linking Leona to her Angel persona and barring her from finding respectable employment.

Because finding respectable employment is no longer a consideration and because she believed she had already agreed to my demands, Angel doesn't object. Instead, she focuses on a different aspect of her contract. "Why does this contract say am I in debt?"

I didn't like using the gullibility ray on my girls because using the ray meant keeping track of a lot of incongruities. Take, for instance, Angel's compensation. I told her she used to make thirty grand annually and she remembered working for me for thirty grand, but her bank statements reflected her receiving sixty thousand dollars annually. Consequently, I needed to either give her a genuine raise so there weren't incongruities in her statements or I needed to convince her the extra money she had been receiving wasn't her income.

"That's the forgiveness clause you requested," I explain that because her previous salary was only thirty thousand dollars, she couldn't afford to pay both her living expenses and her tuition. Consequently, I gave her an extra thirty-thousand dollars per year as a loan, which had turned into a hundred-twenty grand loan over her four-year education. "Don't worry about paying off the loan," I say. "I'll forgive it after you've worked for me for two years."

"Thank you."

"For the loan or the forgiveness?"

"Both."

We are smiling. Her smile is grateful. I imagine mine to be predatory.

Angel looks over the contract one more time before moving to put it away. I stop her.

"I thought you said I could keep this?"

I had, but now that the contract had served its purpose, I am disinclined to let her keep a copy. As long as I have all the physical copies, I can change the contract whenever I need to, forge her signature, and convince my gullible Angel she had negotiated and consented to the provision in our original, fabricated, meeting. My shenanigans will be more difficult to execute if Angel has access to physical copies of the contract and notices the contract evolving.

"That's the original," I tell her. It isn't. "I need to hold onto that contract for my records."

Angel asks if I can photocopy the contract or if she can take a picture of the contract. I tell her both her requests are against the law and she believes me. She doesn't ask again. "There is something I can give you, though." I take out the other item in the manilla folder. "Your schedule."

She picks it up, and true to my promise, there are forty scheduled hours on it- thirty dancing and ten promotional. She thanks me for making it so fast and I wave her off, telling her I was just doing my job.

She turns to leave and I unlock the door for her to go. Before she can exit, however, I stop her. "I almost forgot to ask. I asked you if you'd be willing to relocate to Nevada and you said you'd think about it. Have you made a decision yet?"