The Naked Truth: The Real Story Behind the Real Housewife of New Jersey--In Her Own Words (13 page)

It was time to take charge of my life, but my support system was weak. I had no contact with my father and barely spoke to my mother. I had no boyfriend, and all of my close friends were in Florida, a place where I could no longer stay. I had to leave everything I had known for the past seven years and start a new chapter of my life somewhere else. Probation was to last for the next five years; my goal was to complete my probation without incident and put this Miami phase of my life far behind me. It would be difficult, but I was up to the challenge when I considered the alternatives. At the time, moving to New Jersey with Kevin seemed to be a smart option. In fact, it was my only option.

Kevin constantly stayed in touch with me after we met at
the club. Let’s put it this way: we were more than just friends. He was traveling back and forth to Florida and he made it a point to find me and see me when he was in town. He told me many more times that he loved me and promised over and over to keep me safe. After a stint in prison, having eight serious indictments against me, and receiving probation (by the skin of my teeth and the grace of God), that’s exactly what I needed to hear. Plus, Kevin had told me he was an FBI agent—a man of the law. Starting the next phase of my life with someone who could truly protect me seemed like the perfect fit.

When I finally told Kevin that I wanted to leave Florida and be with him after months of his trying to convince me, he was quite happy, to say the least. We drove all the way to the Garden State in his Porsche, and as soon as we arrived, Kevin put me up in a motel in Little Ferry, which is a blue-collar town just south of Hackensack. It was the kind of motel where you pay by the hour, not by the night, and it was riddled with hookers, drugs, and pimps. Used needles and empty plastic baggies containing drug residue were actually in the corner of my room when I checked in. I couldn’t bear to sleep in the bed—the pillows and bedspread were so full of stains that I wouldn’t even venture to sit on it. I unpacked some of my clothes and draped them over a chair, the only reasonably clean piece of furniture in the room. That was where I would sit during the day and sleep at night. The bathroom was no better—it was disgusting. I would put on sweatpants and a baseball hat pulled down low and go to a nearby diner to use the ladies’ room. Clearly, the
motel was a far cry from the posh high-rise condo that I had just left in Coconut Grove.
So much for Kevin keeping me safe,
I thought.

While this was not a safe place for me, it certainly was for Kevin: he knew that by parking me there, he was free of worry. No one at the motel would be of interest to me. I had no phone to contact anyone, only a pager. I didn’t have access to a car to take off in or even any clue where I was. There was no easy way for me to leave the area surrounding the motel unless Kevin came and picked me up. He’d come by and take me out for a bite to eat. But sometimes he wouldn’t show up for days on end. Already he was in complete control of my life.

I stayed at the motel for about three weeks. The longer I stayed, the less safe I felt as I became more aware of the number of crackheads surrounding me. I was now living in their world, and the irony was that I was on drug probation! As I walked down the street in Little Ferry after living there for nearly a month, something clicked and I got the feeling that it was time to get out of there before something terrible happened. I grabbed all my stuff and called a cab from a pay phone and asked the driver to take me someplace safe. “Go to a Bennigan’s,” I said to the cabbie, figuring that a chain restaurant would at least be in a decent town. He took me to the nearest Bennigan’s, but to my dismay it was in an even seedier location than my motel was.

At Bennigan’s, I called a car service and told the dispatcher I was lost. A driver arrived and I asked him to take me to the

nicest nearby town he could think of. He drove me about thirty minutes to Englewood Cliffs, an upper-middle-class town just across the Hudson River from Manhattan.

In town I walked into a friendly looking neighborhood pizzeria, ordered a couple of slices, took out my notepad and paperwork, and began to regroup. The people who worked at the pizza place were nice and let me sit at a table for as long as I liked and didn’t hassle me. After about five hours, Kevin paged me. He asked where I was and I told him. Shortly after, he showed up in a rage to pick me up and caused a huge scene. Much to the other customers’ shock and dismay, he dragged me out of the pizza place, threw me into his car, and began to interrogate me as if I were a suspect in one of his FBI cases.

Kevin, paranoid and high on coke, accused me of prostituting myself to the customers and the fellas who worked at the pizza place. I tried to calm him down by explaining that I was there only because I felt unsafe at the motel and simply didn’t know where else to go. I told him that I had only a few more weeks in which to renew my probation status in New Jersey, and I had to get settled into a place that seemed acceptable to the court officers. I said that it would be impossible to do that in the sleazebag motel where he had left me.

Unable to accept my reasoning, and without warning, Kevin exploded and punched me in the left side of my face. The blow was powerful and extremely painful. But what was even more painful was that this man who supposedly loved me and had
promised to keep me safe had just hit me. As soon as I stood up for myself and my rights, the control freak within Kevin snapped. He couldn’t handle it, and he reacted with violence. I was confused, defenseless, and in complete shock.

Now, for most women, this would be a clear red flag to get the hell out of the relationship. However, when you grow up being abused, you don’t even know what a warning sign is. I wasn’t taught whom or what to stay away from by my parents. I wasn’t shown the right way to behave and how others who supposedly love you should behave toward you. Not to mention I was lost. I was alone. I had no home. I had no job. And I didn’t know that I was heading into an even darker and more dangerous place than when I’d lived in Florida.

soon after that incident in the pizzeria parking lot in New Jersey, I moved to New York City and began working nights as an exotic dancer.

Kevin wanted me to get into the business to make money for the both of us. He had admired the way I danced at the nightclubs in Miami and felt I could bring in a significant income as a dancer. He introduced me to a girl named Rosario who worked as an exotic dancer in the city; Rosario had been instructed by Kevin to make me her protégée and teach me how to be successful on the dancing circuit. She lived in a modest apartment in Astoria, Queens, on Nineteenth Street
and Ditmars Boulevard. I moved in with her and she began to show me the ropes.

Rosario was a full-figured Puerto Rican. She had a good grasp of the business and how it worked, so I listened to her advice. Rosario taught me many things, including an important survival lesson that stuck with me. “Don’t date the customers,” she advised. “Never mix business with pleasure.”

She brought me to a club called the Baby Doll in Chinatown. I came into the place as Beverly Merrill, auditioned, and was hired. I danced under the name Danielle, in a tiny bikini. I was used to running around all day in Florida in a bikini, so I was comfortable in my “costume.” Plus, I was getting paid to do what I loved to do best in Miami—dance.

I didn’t have to take my top off, which would not have helped me anyway because I didn’t have big boobs back then. Luckily, I didn’t need big boobs to make money as a dancer. While everybody was getting fake boobs in the late eighties, I stood out as 100 percent natural, which people found attractive.

Back in those days, nobody could touch me or the other dancers at the strip clubs—it was against the law to have any physical contact between the dancers and the patrons. In fact, the ABC (Alcoholic Beverage Control) was cracking down on many of the strip clubs throughout New York City and taking to jail all the girls who were allowing the customers to touch them or were flashing the patrons. Thankfully, I wasn’t working when any of that went down at any of the clubs that employed me. If just one girl broke the law, the authorities shut down the
club and took all of the dancers, customers, owners, and managers to jail. Everyone got locked up. Today it seems as if the strip clubs are all about lap dances. Correct me if I’m wrong, but from what I’ve seen, maybe they should just get a room!

There was no lap dancing back in the day, and touching the dancers was strictly prohibited, so I had no problems with the law. I also had no problem taking a man’s entire paycheck every night. They were going to give it to somebody, so why not me? What the guys thought about when they left the club wasn’t my concern. I had a bar and a bartender between the patrons and myself, and I collected tips by hand after the guys tossed money at me onstage.

The Baby Doll was a small, dingy club with just a few scattered stages to dance on, each no bigger than a kitchen table. The clientele mostly consisted of bikers who didn’t seem to have a lot of money to spend. I knew I wouldn’t stick around long. My philosophy was that if I was going to dance, I was going to try to work at the best places so I could make the most money possible.

Soon, I began dancing at a new club near Wall Street in downtown Manhattan. Unfortunately, the clientele was not much more upscale than what I’d dealt with before, even though it was in the heart of the brokerage community. However, one successful and wealthy Japanese doctor who frequented the club a few nights a week took an instant liking to me and began tipping me quite heavily. Little did I know, but another dancer at the club named Lilly was his mistress. When he started taking
an interest in me, she quickly let me know about their close relationship: he paid her rent on a $3,000-a-month apartment in Manhattan and dressed her in expensive furs and jewelry. She made it clear that she didn’t want to lose her meal ticket and comfy lifestyle to the new girl on the block.

Actually, Lilly didn’t have anything to worry about. I let her know right out of the gate that I was not interested in the Japanese doctor in that way—he was just a good customer of mine who paid me well and, for me, that was it. Lilly still didn’t like the tips and attention he was giving me and became extremely insecure about it. Sadly, like most dancers in the business, she was working hard but not putting away and saving the money she made. Women like Lilly thought the tips and fast cash were going to last forever. However, I immediately recognized that an exotic dancer had a short shelf life. You need to get in and get out. Saving for a rainy day was absolutely necessary, and I couldn’t believe the other girls couldn’t see that, too.

I may have been new to the dancing circuit, but I wasn’t naive about life or how men think. I saw Lilly’s downfall coming a mile away, but clearly she couldn’t see the forest for the trees. One night I approached her in the dressing room and said, “He showers you with money, and all you do is blow it shopping. When he leaves you and moves on to a younger girl—which he ultimately will—then you’re going to have nothing.”

She heard me, but I don’t know if she was really listening to the meaning of my message.

The Japanese doctor kept returning to the club and throwing
money my way, and one night he took me aside and told me that I had the beauty, ability, and personality to do much better at a more upscale establishment. He suggested that I check out a club called Gallagher’s in Long Island City, Queens.

Working at multiple clubs simultaneously wasn’t unusual back then. These days, dancers in New York City work at one upscale club, such as a Scores or a Hustler. However, in the eighties, it didn’t make sense for a dancer to be working in the same place every single night. Dancers could rotate their schedules by working in as many as twenty different clubs at one time—even state to state—hopping from one to another if they wanted to. Sometimes that meant dancing in two clubs in one day. It was smarter to appear in a club once a week, but no more. This way, customers didn’t get bored by seeing you too often or take your presence there for granted. Working on one scheduled night a week at a place made for a more novel experience for the customers, who looked forward to seeing you at their favorite local spot. This kept the experience fresh and kept the men coming back.

I walked into Gallagher’s and was immediately met by the manager, Eddie, a big, hulking presence in the place. He took me to see Bruno, the on-site owner. Bruno’s office was downstairs by the dressing room, and as we talked, I could see the other gorgeous dancers staring and checking out their new competition—me.

I instantly had a good feeling about the place. The stage was big and impressive. It was clean and rocking, six-deep at
the bar, with every stool taken. The huge place was packed, and you could clearly see that everyone working there was making a lot of money. This was the kind of place where I needed to be.

Bruno invited me to go onstage for an audition, and after my performance I got immediately hired. He asked me when I could start. I asked what their strongest night was. He said, “Friday,” and I responded, “See you then.”