I Worked at a Strip Club for 4 Months—And It Nearly Broke Me
A raw, unfiltered look at the dark side of easy money—where confidence is fake, power is predatory, and staying too long costs more than you think.
The first time I ever had a panic attack, I was getting ready for work.
Not about to walk on a stage to public speak. Not rolling into brain surgery. Just work.
But that night felt different. I was on the phone with my husband—he wasn’t going to make it home before I left, like he usually did. Working nights and him days, we were like passing ships. I was dreading my shift. The weight of it was already pressing down.
He noticed I was off—repeating myself, stumbling over basic sentences, breathing heavily—and kept me on the line while rushing home.
By the time he walked through the door, I was on the floor, hyperventilating.
That job?….The door girl at strip club.
And four months in, my body knew what my mind was still trying to deny: the darkness was sinking in.
I was absorbing the energy of the place—of the people—like poison through osmosis.
There was only one option left: leave, and never go back.
This isn’t a story about strippers.
It’s about what happens when “just for now” becomes a soul-deep surrender. When fast money numbs you. When an environment doesn’t just break you—it rewires you.
How I Got There
I was twenty-three, newly married, and freshly relocated from the Midwest to Florida.
My then-husband had just received a severance package when his company moved out of state, and we used it to kickstart a new life down South—him diving into a startup with business partners already lined up, and me scrambling to bring in a second income. The bills were real. So was the pressure.
A local friend—someone I’d hit a few strip clubs with previously, including my bachelorette party—was working as a waitress at one. She swore it was “easy money.” They were hiring a door girl.
Hmmmm…keep my clothes on…be close to my only friend in a new city…be in the club scene, meet new people & leave with cash in my pocket? It sounded like harmless chaos. I was young, naive, and thought it might even be fun.
Wrong.
Four months later, I was done.
The glitz was a lie. The fantasy was poison. The people were depressing.
The club scene? Dead to me. And my ears are still ringing.
Meet Your Three Captains of Dysfunction
Every toxic workplace has its cast of characters. Strip clubs just make them more... concentrated.
Captain Perv – The Walking Lawsuit
This was the head manager. The big boss and I mean BIG. The guy whose primary thrill was turning bartenders and waitresses into strippers. Sorry.....dancers. We weren't allowed to call them such "derogatory labels like strippers," he'd say with a straight face, like slapping a prettier word on exploitation somehow made it classy.
His sales pitch? "I’ll give you $500 right now- for just one set on stage." And here's the sick part—most of the girls took it as a compliment when he approached them. Like being deemed "worthy and beautiful" enough for his proposition was some kind of honor.
It was gross watching my friend start sliding down that rabbit hole. One minute she's serving drinks, (mostly dressed) the next she's naked on stage between shifts, going to the after parties, screwing bartenders, and making out with the “hot DJ” she and I secretly called "David Silver" because he looked just like the guy from 90210.
And it worked nearly every damn time. Girls who started serving drinks would see that kind of money and think, Why am I busting my ass for tips when I could make rent in one night?
He was a predator in khakis, hunting for insecurity and financial desperation. The kind of man who mistakes manipulation for leadership and calls it "opportunity." He'd watch young women compromise themselves piece by piece, convincing them each step was their choice.
Disgusting.
Captain Douchebag – The Thief with Tacky Style
Stocky Italian guy. Thought he was God's gift because he was sleeping with half the dancers. Left the club during slow shifts to take his stripper girlfriend to other bars, then told me to lie to Captain Perv if he called.
But here's the kicker—this piece of shit was stealing money from my drawer.
Twenty dollars here. Fifty there. One night, over $200. When your drawer comes up short as the door girl, you have to pay the difference. I went home in tears, telling my husband I'd made negative $200 that night.
The worst part? He sat there watching me cry, knowing he'd stolen from me.
I only figured it out when I was training another girl. She went to get change from him on a jam packed Friday night, came back, and counted it three times. "This is fifty dollars short."
I sent her back to him with the whole stack. He pulled fifty bucks out of his pocket, handed it to her, and said, "I just wanted to make sure you were going to count."
Mother. Fucker.
I made the mistake of trusting a manager not to steal. I didn’t count the change stacks on busy nights because I was trying to stay efficient with a line of customers out the door. That was the last time my drawer ever came up short bc I counted all of my stacks from that point on.
Captain No Bullshit – The Only Adult in the Room
Boston accent. Cold as winter. Direct, no-nonsense, zero tolerance for the circus around him.
Everyone warned me about him when I started. "He's a prick. He's mean. He doesn't laugh."
Turns out, he was the only one I respected.
He was there to transition from Boston to Florida, kinda like me. He treated it like an accounting job, not a lifestyle. He didn't sleep with the dancers, didn't steal from employees, didn't try to turn anyone into anything they weren't.
He was professional. Honest. Reliable. I always felt relieved when my shifts were with him.
And because I was one of few there who wasn't completely fucked up, he was actually nice to me. My friend who got me the job even commented on how differently he treated me.
The lesson? Sometimes, the person everyone calls "difficult" is just the only one refusing to lower their standards and play a dark game.
The Darkness You Don't See from the Outside
To the ones just passing through, it looked like a party.
The lights, the beautiful glittered bodies that smelled like a Bath & Body Works store, the bumping music, the drinks—it all screamed loud enough to feel like fun. Like fantasy. Like freedom.
That’s what most people saw…sensual women of all shapes, sizes and colors, men with money, and a room pulsing with attention.
But stay long enough, and you’d see something else.
The beauty was strained. The money came with strings. The fantasy had a price.
And the longer you were there, the more you realized: some of us were just visiting.
Most were already buried in it.
And some things stay with you forever.
To this day, whenever I hear the opening motorcycle revving in “Girls, Girls, Girls” by Mötley Crüe, I flinch a little.
That sound meant Double Feature—when all the dancers had to hit the stage at once to offer 2 lap dances for the price of one, and I had to track a flood of merch, a spreadsheet and an extra envelope of cash to protect from Captian Douchbag.
Just one of the many side effects of working in a place that rewires your nervous system while pretending it’s all just fun.
The Underage Incident
One Sunday night, Captain Douchebag told me a group of 15–20 people would be coming in.
“Don’t card them,” he said. “Just take cover and send them to VIP.”
Obviously minors.
They gave the code word, handed me cash for entry, and every single one dropped a fifty into my tip bucket. I made over $700 in five minutes.
Did I know it was wrong? Of course. But it wasn’t my circus. I wasn’t the one unlocking the champagne room. I was just following orders.
And at 23, with the music pounding and everyone else playing by their own rules, I thought, What the hell do I care?
The Human Decay
“David Silver” was one of three DJs at the club. I talked to him the least—mostly because I couldn’t stand how checked out he always looked. He was in his late forties, spinning the same tired playlists for 20 years and cycling through women like drink specials.
One night, he played an extended Madonna remix I’d requested—eight minutes long. Just enough time to wander. He left the booth, strolled over to the front door, leaned on the counter, and started talking like we were old friends.
Told me he felt empty. Had for years. Said he was sleeping with different women almost every night and “dating” one of the dancers now—air quotes and all—but still felt hollow as hell.
I just stared at him and asked, “Then why the hell are you still here?”
He shrugged. “Where else am I gonna make six figures playing music? I’ve been doing this too long. I don’t know how to do anything else.”
Six figures. And still miserable.
A man who had everything most guys chase—money, women, attention—but couldn’t look at his pretty face in the mirror without flinching.
The Regular Who Haunts My Dreams
I called him Don Julio—and not because of the tequila.
(Also, turns out I had the wrong damn artist in my head for 20 years. But we’re keeping the name, because it still fits.)
He never said much—he didn’t have to. His presence spoke louder than any of the drunk men yelling from the bar.
Always immaculately dressed in sharp suits. Always surrounded by what I could only describe as a crew of other men and a rotating harem of women dressed like they were going to homecoming— who clung to him like he was royalty…maybe he was. He was a VIP member, which—yes, that’s a real thing at a strip club, in case you didn’t know.
He’d glide through the front door, opened up by the valet guy, and proceed past me without stopping, just flicking a few bills into my tip jar like he was tossing crumbs to a bird. He had access. He had status. He didn’t need to wait in line or make eye contact.
And then there was that night.
He brought his own CD—Enrique Iglesias. (not Julio…duh) The song? "Hero."
Both the Spanish and English versions.
(Stab me in the ears now!)
He paid the DJ $100 every time he played it.
And the DJ did.
Over. And over. And over.
For hours, that damn song played every other track. Spanish, English. English, Spanish. It looped like a psychotic soundtrack.
To this day, if I hear “Hero,” I swear my eye twitches.
The Breaking Point
After a few months, I started dreading work. Showing up late. Swapping for easier Saturday afternoon shifts just to avoid the chaos.
Then one night, getting ready to leave for work, I had my first panic attack. Tingling hands, racing heart, couldn't breathe, couldn't move my fingers.
My husband came home, I breathed into a brown paper bag like a movie cliché, and I never went back.
The doctor said what I already knew: that environment wasn't good for me. It was eating me alive, and my body was staging a revolt.
The Four Who Were Actually Different
But here's the thing about toxic environments—they don't corrupt everyone equally. Some people are just immune.
There were four of us who stood out like lighthouses in that darkness: me, Captain No Bullshit, and two dancers named Shelby and Amy.
The Untouchable
Shelby was the absolute prettiest girl in the club…IMO, and the only one I allowed my husband to get dances from when he came in. Early twenties, getting herself through college. But she was different. She kept to herself, chose her song sets strategically, never sat on customers' laps, never drank fake drinks with them for extra money. She'd dance, give them a professional kiss on the cheek, and move on to the next customer.
No lingering. No performance of false intimacy. No desperate flirtation.
When she finished school in December, she got a full-time office job and just... stopped. Came in, said goodbye, told everyone why she was leaving. The managers didn't care—dancers were a dime a dozen to them. But that's exactly what made her exit so powerful. She wasn't part of their ecosystem. She couldn't be bought, trapped, or turned.
The Strategist in Stilettos
Amy was tiny, early twenties, there to save for a house. But this girl was a strategist. She knew her ideal clients were older men, and she knew they came in at different times than the younger crowd. So she'd work specific shifts and pick 80s music—not because she liked it, but because "the men who like me like that music."
While other dancers were fighting over spots in the hip-hop sets so they could "dance" and be catty about it, Amy was running her own market research operation.
Both women had something the long-term dancers didn't: real confidence.
They weren't there for validation, attention, or to prove anything. They were there for money, period. And because they weren't emotionally hungry, they couldn't be emotionally manipulated.
The difference was stark. The other dancers would sit on laps, flirt, drink fake shots (charged full price to customers), go into the private rooms, and perform thirsty desperation disguised as confidence. Shelby and Amy never drank with customers, never acted like they needed anything from them beyond payment for services rendered.
That's what real confidence looks like—you don't need to perform it.
The Outsider on the Inside
I was the girl who walked through the fire and didn’t smell like smoke.
I didn’t blend in—but I didn’t try to.
I wasn’t there to be seen, touched, flirted with, or pursued. And somehow, that made me invisible and undeniable at the same time.
As for me? Captain Perv never once approached me inappropriately.
During our quarterly cleaning day, he sent me home early because I'd "done triple the amount of work anyone else did without being asked." I was never invited to the after-parties, never hit on, never pulled into the sexual chaos that consumed everyone else. Even within the "sexy clubwear" dress code, I stayed modest and covered.
We four had something the environment couldn't touch: Integrity. Something I learned does not come cheap.
The Uncomfortable Truth I Learned About Humans
I was young. Naive. The kind of naive that doesn't even know it's naive. I didn’t have the words for what I was witnessing back then, but something about it all stuck with me. The behaviors. The choices. The way people moved when they thought no one was watching—or when they thought no one cared.
Years later, after diving deep into human psychology and behavior, I finally started to make sense of it. I began to understand the fears, the insecurities, the conditioning. It didn’t excuse everything I saw, but it helped explain it.
This isn’t about judgment. It’s about clarity. These are the uncomfortable truths I learned about people—truths that first cracked open in my early twenties, and only made sense decades later.
Rank Doesn't Equal Integrity
Captain Douchebag taught me this lesson the hard way. I was young, naïve, and assumed that being "higher up the chain" meant you were more responsible, ethical, and moral.
Wrong.
Power without integrity is just organized corruption. Position doesn't make you principled—it just gives you more opportunities to prove you're not.
Beauty Doesn't Equal Confidence
This was the biggest mindfuck to watch. These gorgeous women—perfect faces, perfect bodies, men throwing money at them—and yet most of them were desperately insecure.
Real confidence doesn't need validation. Shelby and Amy had actual confidence, which is why they could do the job without being consumed by it. The others were performing confidence while secretly starving for the attention they pretended not to need.
If you're truly confident, you don't stay somewhere that slowly hollows you out just because people tell you you're pretty.
Not All Attention Is Good Attention
This lesson applies to both sides of that equation.
For the dancers: being desired by desperate, lonely men throwing money at a fantasy isn't actually validating. It's just monetizing male delusion and your insecurities.
For the customers: They don’t care about you. Sorry, not sorry.
I knew guys who genuinely believed the dancers cared about them. They'd spend hundreds, even thousands, thinking the flirtation was real. These men would come back night after night, convinced they had special connections with women who were literally paid to make them feel special.
It's weaponized loneliness on both sides. The dancers using male desperation to pay bills, the men using financial power to purchase the illusion of being wanted.
Everybody loses in that transaction.
Environment Is Everything
Seeing that place with the lights on during cleaning day was horrifying. Everything looked dirtier, older, sadder. It smelled like stale cigarettes and broken dreams.
While I cleaned my entire section plus areas I wasn't even assigned, everyone else half-assed their work, asking "what should I do next" while giggling and smoking cigarettes.
The environment was a black hole. If you stayed too long, it would suck you in. The darkness was contagious—it got into everyone eventually. The cynicism, the desperation, the moral flexibility.
Some environments don't just influence you—they infect you.
The Real Lesson (For Those Brave Enough to Hear It)
This isn’t really a story about strip clubs.
It’s a story about what happens when you ignore your gut, trade your standards for convenience, and tell yourself you’ll get out before it gets bad.
At 23, I didn’t know what I didn’t know yet. I thought I was different. Smarter. Immune.
I wasn’t.
Here’s what I learned:
Those jobs “just for now” can quietly erode your identity.
That people who say they’re leaving rarely do—because comfort is a cage with padded walls.
That the wrong environment will numb you so slowly, you won’t even realize you’re disappearing until you are gone.
That saying “yes” to one small compromise is all it takes to start becoming someone you don’t recognize.
Everyone has a version of that strip club—some place, some person, some pattern that looks harmless until you’re drowning in it.
The question isn’t whether you’ll end up there.
It’s whether you’ll have the guts to leave before it costs you everything.
Stay too long in the dark, and you forget there's light. But leave while you still remember what light looks like, and you can find your way back.
Some experiences teach you who you are. Others teach you who you never want to become. This one taught me both.
What environment in your life needs an exit strategy? Hit reply and tell me - I promise I won’t judge.
If this hit a nerve, there’s more where that came from.
My book, I Am Amazing: How I Healed from Trauma, Transformed My Life, and Broke Free from the Past, goes even deeper into the real-life stories, raw lessons, and brutal wake-up calls that shaped the woman I became after walking away from places like this.
It’s not pretty. But it’s real. And if you’ve ever felt stuck, silenced, or slowly disappearing—you’ll see yourself in it.
Gripping read. You study people well. In my mid-20's, I drove a cab in a big city overnight. A lot of similarities, especially with the type of people and quite a few "gentlemen clubs" picking up both the men and later the "dancers." To escape that crowd, I switched to daytime driving. A lot of doctor visits and grocery stores...opposite of the nighttime riders. Thank you for rekindling the memories. Long ago, on roads far away. Thank you for writing!! P.S. I'm loving your book, too!