Fringe Florida: Travels Among Mud Boggers, Furries, Ufologists, Nudists, and Other Lovers of Unconventional Lifestyles (8 page)

for political office. He’s been arrested more times than he can count

(he estimates about 150) and canonized in the documentary
Strip
Club

King:
The
Joe
Redner
Story
.

He’s Tampa’s most despised and most admired iconoclast. Church

folks view him as the devil incarnate, while strip-club lovers consider

him a god. Some local politicians complain that he exploits the First

Amendment for personal gain. Many others, including some who’d

rather get indigestion than a Mons lap dance, applaud him for slap-

ping conventional norms on the ass and battling a government they

view as heavy-handed.

“Joe’s a local folk hero,” says Kristopher, who, as it turns out, is an

editor at a national trade publication for strip-club owners. (Yes, it’s

based in Tampa Bay.) He adds, “Some people call Joe the local Larry

Flynt.”

In 2010, readers of
Creative
Loafing
, Tampa’s alternative newspa-

per, voted Joe as Tampa Bay’s “Best Troublemaker.” That’s a little mis-

leading. Joe would give you his last fruit smoothie. But if you took it

proof

from him, he’d step on your broken toe and broadcast to the world that

you’re a bastard thief and your breath stinks. Then he’d likely take you

to court and win your last dime. In the face of adversity, his scrappiness

and chutzpah cannot be exaggerated.

When Bob Buckhorn, then–city councilman and latest Tampa

mayor, led a charge to outlaw lap dancing, Joe replied on a portable

sign in front of the Mons: “Bob Buckhorn is an asshole.” After some-

one complained about the profanity of the word “asshole,” he changed

it to “dildo.” During one of his many battles with his nemesis Ronda

Storms, a local politician and fundamentalist Christian, he posted:

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“Ronda Storms, Censor This You Retarded Fat Fascist Pig.” A recitation

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of Joe’s hostile signs could fill pages.

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His nasty verbal comebacks could fill a book. The chair-tossing in-

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cident on a local public-access show made national news and went vi-

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ral on YouTube. The confrontation started when a Republican Internet

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talk-show host called Joe a liar. Joe called him fat. The political pundit

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got hot. Joe said, matter-of-factly: “You called me a liar. I’m not a liar.

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The Mon Venus mar-

quee is a beacon for

many Tampa Bay visi-

tors. Photo by author.

proof

I called you fat. You are fat.” The pudgy pundit stomped off the set curs-

ing. Joe couldn’t resist calling him “fat boy” one more time. The pundit

threw a chair at Joe and hit him in the head. Joe just laughed. After all,

he’s faced much worse.

Joe got death threats, he says, when mobsters tried to muscle their

way into his earlier strip club. He says he told them he would die before

letting them control him. The threats stopped.

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No one is too sacred for Joe’s barbs. Once after a church group carry-

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ing wooden crosses protested outside the Mons, Joe showed up outside

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their chapel the next Sunday with about forty of his friends, dancers,

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and their children. The angry strip-club band waved signs and shouted

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that parishioners were anti-Christ. The church group hasn’t been back

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to the Mons.

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Over the years Joe has increasingly taken on other causes, using his

mouth and his wallet to fight what he thinks is unjust. He counterpro-

tested the members of Westboro Baptist Church—a congregation no-

torious for picketing soldiers’ funerals due to the military’s tolerance of

homosexuality—when they demonstrated outside a Tampa rock con-

cert. Joe called them hypocrites and shouted through his bullhorn that

their minister was gay.

When the Hillsborough County Commission passed an ordinance

against any acknowledgment of Gay Pride Week, Joe declared himself

gay and sued on grounds that it violated his First Amendment rights.

WFTS Tampa ABC Action News anchor Brendan McLaughlin later

asked Joe if he truly was gay, and Joe responded: “I’m gay, I’m black,

I’m an Indian, a Jew. I’m everyone and anyone who has ever been op-

pressed for anything other than their bad character.”

By the time Joe donated use of his city park to Occupy Tampa pro-

testers in 2011, he was solidly one of the area’s fiercest social activists.

Admirers clamored to his Facebook page to post tributes. “The estab-

lishment sees Joe Redner as a nuisance,” wrote Cary Strukel. “I see Joe

Redner as a self-made man who is willing to stand up for the rights of

those who are not even willing to stand up for their own rights!”

Joe isn’t at Mons tonight, but has given me full access to the club

proof

and dancers with the exception of their dressing room—which is fine

by me since it’s on a live pay-per-view website. I have no desire to be an

extra in the fantasy of some man sitting at his computer in Topeka.

We’re scheduled to meet next week at Joe’s nearby office. I’ve inter-

viewed him on the street several times over the years, but have never

been inside the Mons, something I feel guilty about since I’m an area

reporter with a background on the subject. I researched for the movie

Showgirls
in the early 1990s and interviewed dancers in most every

nude and topless club in Las Vegas. I’m long beyond squeamish.

Given my insight into the mechanics of the flesh industry, Joe’s suc-

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cess is a mystery. He can’t sell alcohol and only makes money off the

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door. Nonalcoholic nude clubs I’ve visited skidded by selling ten-dol-

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lar sodas and offering questionable backroom encounters with danc-

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ers who wore evening gloves to cover the needle marks in their arms.

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By all accounts that’s not the Mons modus operandi, and none of the

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Mons dancers I’ve met fit that image. Sure, some of Mons’s success can

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be attributed to its mystique. There’s a novelty in saying you’ve been to

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a club from the national headlines. But what keeps customers coming

back, or even risk their lives to get here?

Down the street a kitschy alien spaceship flashes like a beacon atop

2001 Nude Odyssey, one of Mons’s competitors. A couple of college-

age guys leaving a hotel bar a few doors down don’t even glance at

it. They dart out across the busy highway, laughing as passing drivers

blow their horns. One in an SMU ball cap briefly loses his flip-flop and

narrowly avoids becoming roadkill.

Does the Mons offer big-screen NFL replays and an unlimited sup-

ply of opium as well as nude women who will rub breasts and butts all

over you?

I’m about to find out. Well, as much as a straight woman can.

Inside the mirrored foyer, the door girl texts on her cell phone be-

tween bites of a to-go salad. She stops cyber chatting long enough

to take the SMU fans’ money and waves them through. The cover is

twenty dollars, and if you look past her you can get a peek at why you’re

paying it. On stage, a woman’s bare booty jiggles like Jell-O on a bumpy

road.

Beyond the threshold, Mons is a voyeur’s dream designed with the

practicality of a Golden Corral. Mirrored walls and ceiling tiles allow

customers to see dancers from almost every angle. A disco ball hangs

proof

from the ceiling, one of the few modest attempts at decoration. Multi-

colored spotlights frame the stage.

Reflective of Joe’s matter-of-fact personality, the club makes no pre-

tenses about what it’s selling. Plain and simply, Mons is a lap dance

factory. Continuous black leatherette couches that look like bench

seats for a 50-yard-wide Impala snake through the room. There are few

tables. No TVs, no cozy booths, and no private VIP rooms, which are

staples at most strip clubs.

Not that there’s a need for separate rooms at this point. Only forty

customers are scattered about, including a handful of women with boy-

friends or husbands.

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Being the only unescorted female, I draw curious glances from a

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couple of geeky guys in glasses with shirts buttoned to their clavicles. I

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take the nearest seat and cease to exist. A clothed middle-aged woman

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is no competition for a three-ring circus of bare nubile flesh.

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On the octagonal stage, a woman scales the stripper pole like an

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army cadet climbs a rope. She descends slowly, holding on by only her

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inner thighs. Her long, wavy brown hair cascades toward the floor.

She poses like a swan in flight, her body horizontal to the stage, back

arched, neck stretched, and legs parted like scissors. The acrobatics are

so artistic I forget she’s wearing nothing more than 8-inch platforms.

Based on their expressions, the people sitting around the stage haven’t.

On the back of the stage, a skinny blonde wearing only a cowboy hat

forces her small breasts together to accept dollar bills from a couple in

their late fifties. Along the front, a dancer in a string bikini top per-

forms contortionist feats for a couple of guys in designer shirts. In an

amazing display of elasticity, she crosses her calves behind her neck

exposing her hairless vagina inches from their faces. For added effect

she rolls over and slaps her bare ass. They tuck bills under her garter.

None of the dancers look over twenty-five or wear larger than size 6

jeans. Without exception they have the thin, toned bodies of cheerlead-

ers and the flexibility of a Slinky. No hint of cellulite, no saggy breasts,

or implanted basketball-size hooters. Just a range of firm B to D cups.

I don’t know whether to be impressed or depressed.

Unlike most strip clubs that reek of cigarette smoke, spilled beer,

and things you don’t want to think about, the air is clear enough to

get a whiff of passing dancers’ perfume. Most of them wear little more

than that. String bikinis, shorts that look like panties, push-up lacy

bras, tight midriffs that expose the underside of bare breasts, short

proof

skirts exposing rears. On stage or during a lap dance it all strips off.

That is, except for the 8-inch platforms that invariably give the dancers

a slight zombie gait.

A curvaceous waitress in a tight T-shirt and jeans serves me a soda

that costs only two dollars. The club’s most expensive drink is four dol-

lars—Red Bull, for those times when a cavalcade of bare vaginas isn’t

enough to keep you awake, or rather, sober you up. Seriously. Mary, the

night manager, says drunken patrons have passed out in the club.

The waitress says most customers arrive drunk. “There’s a bar across

the street, a topless bar on the other side of the car wash, then there’s

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their cars,” she says, indicating where they imbibe. When I explain why

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I’m here, she smiles. “I guess you don’t want any singles,” she says,

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handing back my change. It doesn’t register that she would otherwise

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assume I am there to stuff dollar bills down a woman’s garter. That re-

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alization comes later, on the darker side of the room.

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The acrobatic pole dancer, Frenchy, agrees to talk for no charge,

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which has more to do with Mary’s introduction than the dancer’s gen-

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erosity. Talk typically isn’t free in the Mons, even to other women.

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Frenchy’s now wearing a flimsy black dress that barely covers her

rump. Offstage, she looks much younger and radiates an innocence

and naiveté. She’s twenty with a girl-next-door beauty. Her skin is as

smooth as pudding, and her genuine smile easily gives way to giggles.

She looks more like a schoolgirl trying to sneak into a Miami disco than

a woman who rubs her naked body on men for cash.

This is Frenchy’s first night at the Mons. She and her friend just

moved from New Jersey and auditioned this afternoon. She’s been

dancing since she graduated from high school, where she had in fact