It’s Thanksgiving weekend. In honor of gluttony—and after not one but two Thanksgiving dinners—my friend, who we’ll call “Dan Kensington,” and I rent a car and drive from Seattle to Portland. I’m usually loyal to the foul, retro-cheap The Palms Motel on North Interstate Avenue—but because it’s a holiday, I book a room at the stupid-expensive Vintage Plaza downtown. As we turn right on Broadway, we pass Mary’s Club, and its neon lights wink at us: blink-blink, blink-blink! Kensington admits he’s never been to a strip club in Portland.
Every time I’ve been to Mary’s (the mother of ALL strip clubs since 1965), it’s packed—full of rowdy laughter and good-time drunkards. There’s a $2 cover at the door and no drink minimum. We sit at the last open table and order two double vodka sodas. The big bearded guy behind us tells a leather-clad hesher that he’s in the band Red Fang. The crowd is a mix of mostly twenty- and thirtysomethings, lots of couples. An impossibly tall, classically beautiful woman with a tattoo of cello f-holes on her lower back picks out a hiphop song from the onstage jukebox. Her booty clap is so refined that each one of her round, muscular butt cheeks operates independently. Kensington gasps at her upside-down pole maneuvers. Some guy sitting front stage yells, “It’s my birthday!” She leans down, gives him a healthy birthday motorboating with her near-perfect, implant-free double-Ds, and slips off the stage, falling directly on top of him. Boobs still in his face, both fall backward to the floor. With absolute grace, she climbs back onstage. People applaud, nobody laughs, and everyone tips.
We’re starting to get too drunk at Mary’s. We wanna see more. After consulting the handy-dandy map inside Portland’s free glossy stripper mag, Exotic, we note that Magic Garden is within walking distance. It’s also in Chinatown (read: lots of street food and late-night restaurants). Magic Garden has no cover and no drink minimum. Like Mary’s, there’s only one dancer, one stage. The cute but only half-naked girl dancer seems bored out of her skull. We get cheap, strong drinks from a geriatric bartender who looks like my grandma Ingrid. We try to ignore the two loud Australians playing pool, who share matching shiny bald heads. We focus on the girl, who ignores the pole and instead lazily writhes around onstage to songs by Black Lips and Thee Oh Sees. Her boredom is infectious.
We’re so drunk that we can’t find Ark Angel’s, despite locating it on both of our iPhones. I argue that we should go back to Mary’s. We start walking and stumble upon Spyce. There’s a $5 cover, but I talk the door girl down to $7 for both of us, because it’s about to close. Inside, there are two floors and an obnoxious number of dancers and poles (I think I counted five stages). The girls don’t pick the songs, resulting in god-awful Top 40 dance music. The unbelievably bossy DJ keeps yelling shit like “Tip your bartender! Tip the girls!” despite the fact that everyone’s already throwing money around like it’s rice at a wedding. We order last-call vodkas—overpriced and underpoured—and watch the women scramble to give sad cheeseballs in bad suits the last few lap dances of the night.
It feels wrong to ignore the Vintage Plaza’s extensive and expensive room-service menu, but we head to the Acropolis. For the past 36 years, starting at 7 a.m., you can find steak and eggs, steak and potatoes, or a 10-egg omelet with ham and cheese. There’s also a five-pound “Colossal Burger,” 54 different beer taps, and 300 liquor selections. There’s a fully functioning salad bar that lives underneath a dusty old disco ball spinning like its 401(k) dried up in the financial meltdown. The salad bar sits about two feet away from a stage stocked with fully nude women, who also start work at 7 a.m. As Kensington orders a $10 bacon-wrapped filet mignon, and I tell the waitress that I want my $7 steak cooked medium-rare, one of the dancers comes over to the table we’re sharing with a twentysomething couple who’re dipping tater tots into a vat of steak sauce. She turns to dance for them and her butt comes within a cunt hair of the jumbo-sized Heinz ketchup bottle. I look around at the other 15 to 20 patrons all eating huge plates of food and am fascinated by the size of the meat. “STOP LOOKING AT ME!” yells the pug-nosed owner of one of the steaks. He pleads with his companions, who look old enough to be his parents, “Why won’t she stop looking at me?!” They leave in a huff and are immediately replaced by three Latino guys who order a five-pound burger and move closer to the stage occupied by a barely-legal-looking strawberry-blond. Iron Maiden’s “The Number of the Beast” is blaring on the house speakers. The Latino Larry, Curly, and Moe banter feverishly in Spanish. The girl suddenly grabs a laminated sign that says “Dancers Work for Tips” and shoves it in their faces, then she storms off the stage and returns with the youngest, skinniest bouncer I’ve ever seen. He takes them aside. They sit back down quietly and share their burger. Curly chews with his mouth open and remains ignorant of the fact that he’s got mayo, mustard, and bun crumbs all over his face. Strawberry is contorting so that she’s upside down, long hair splayed across the bar top, legs spread-eagle around an older Asian man’s face. “Wow, wow, wow!” is all he can say. I take a big bite of bloody steak, and Kensington says, “This is America. You can have whatever you want.”
Safari advertises a 16-ounce T-bone steak for $9.75. But we’re here because we read on PortlandBarFly.com that the jungle-themed club sports taxidermy and that staff periodically feed goldfish to their multiple piranhas. The taxidermy turns out to be a single stuffed tiger that I saw last summer at the Evergreen State Fair. They do have two tanks filled with piranhas, but the fish look as old and toothless as the disco ball at the Acropolis. A babyish girl is dancing to some horrible electronic music in front of four toothless rednecks in Harley-Davidson garb. I’m the only female customer in the whole place. We sip lukewarm beer while an older Asian man sits by himself at the video-lottery machine. Kensington notes that there’s always an older Asian man sitting alone, in every strip club, anywhere, ever.
Feeling down after Safari, we drive to Devils Point. It’s early, and the girls ignore us and seem to be practicing new moves for each other. The place is floor-to-ceiling black with 100 percent hazy red lighting. It feels like a womb. The girls are playing the Dresden Dolls and old soul records. There’s a giant poster of Bettie Page. Devils Point boasts an affirming retro-feminist vibe, but it’s just too early for this place.
Like Safari and the other Devil, there’s no cover and no drink minimum (take note, Seattle). And who knew there was a strip club that makes its own hummus fresh every morning? I’m crunching a carrot and trying to figure out what sort of apparatus the naked girl is swinging on when drunken Santa walks in. He’s got the suit, the boots, the belt, the hat, the beard, and the belly. He sits down for a lap dance while Hot Chocolate’s “I Believe in Miracles” plays. I feel dizzy.
Though Santa tells us it’s not really worth the drive, we leave for Pirate’s Cove. I really want to see this one, because the building is shaped like a giant whiskey jug. After too many pirate jokes, we go inside and DJ Mexi-Dave is playing Alice in Chains. There are no pirates here, just more dancers who are oddly all starting to look the same. I want to drink whiskey, but I’m driving, so I get watery coffee instead. I lose $30 on video-lottery games, get kinda down again, or maybe just bored.
We ditch the car and take a taxi to Sassy’s. I tell Kensington that this is the rowdiest place, second only to Mary’s—it’s packed. We order two $3 powerfully built vodka sodas, and the first sip makes my nipples hard. The speakers blare Misfits and there’s nowhere to sit. The cowboy in the white leather suit is actually a butch lesbian who’s about to win a fistfight with a Mohawked punker. A bouncer with tattoos covering 95 percent of his face and neck breaks it up. Everyone else is drunk, laughing, and having fun. There are couples, singles, the obligatory lonely Asian man, and even a gay guy watching the three stages. I sit down and turn my head, which almost lands inside a dancer’s vagina. She’s clacking her giant stripper shoes together—in between smacking them on the floor—and repeatedly putting her hoo-hoo in my face. I repeatedly tip her and drink till Sassy’s gets blurry and I wake up back at the Vintage Plaza. On the way out of town, we pass the Occupy protesters. Kensington says that even though we’re 99 percenters, it’s still nice to know that in Portland we can have whatever we want. 
My husband and I always stay at the Vintage Plaza. Even if it is a little pricy the staff is friendly, it’s centrally located, and, best of all, every night from 5-6 they have a free-to-guests wine hour. Usually 4 pretty good wines to sample and they don’t skimp on the pours. Many an evening we’ve already been fairly sauced by 6 …
@1
You might have missed the point of the article.
Kelly, did you hook up with Jenny M. while in town?
Hooray for pornlandia! Thanks for the blow by blow, sounds like a terrific weekend.
No Casa Diablo?
@1 if I could afford it, I’d stay at the Vintage Plaza each (any, and every) time I ever went to Portland—especially the “Spa King” room, which has it’s own “jetted tub” which is a nicer way of saying “hot tub”
@2 – I did see Jenny Maerz! She’s as beautiful, sassy, and talented as ever
@6 – Yeah, I think she’s pretty groovy.
you got paid for this??? like, and this is all you can report? like, no interviews? no history, research or any info one of us cant get by just going there? and you didn’t stir up trouble? wtf??
I like strip clubs and hot punk girls, but the sheer number of these places really seems to drive the point home that the coolest job a hip girl in Portland can have is stripper, and honestly, that kind of depresses me.
Easily the funnest thing I’ve read all day. Lovely piece.
Union Jacks?
Mary’s Club is where strippers go to die.
I got my start as a dancer at Mary’s. They were reasonable and the girls were nice. Definitely my favorite club in Portland.
You need to get a lap dance to really appreciate all that Portland has to offer.
You didn’t do a decent “dancer’s” dive in Pornland! The Acropolis? Really? Did you get any pubic hair with your slop? Try Starz, Doc’s or Dancin’Bare next trip!
@ 15 – Doc’s is now Safari
There might be some confusion about the Safari Showclub vs. the Safari Club, which is a bar/lounge in Estacada (a small town about an hour drive southeast of the city) and has an amazing taxidermy collection but no strippers.
Where are the MALE strippers?!?!?!?!
“I like strip clubs and hot punk girls, but the sheer number of these places really seems to drive the point home that the coolest job a hip girl in Portland can have is stripper, and honestly, that kind of depresses me.”
I don’t understand how you come to the conclusion that “the coolest job a hip girl in Portland can have is stripper”, because there are a much higher number of cool women in Portland than there are strip clubs. Sure, there are plenty of cool strippers, but stripper is by far not the default employment for women. Perhaps you’ve heard strange Wonkaland-like exaggerations of the number of clubs in Oregon.
@19 – SILVERADO! Oh, Silverado…
this is so great
I went to Mary’s once for the birthday of my trailcrew boss. After buying him a dance, I decided to get one for myself. $350 of private lap dances later my friends were gone and the dancer STILL refused to marry me. I took a cell phone picture of myself drunk in a bus shelter to remind myself never ever to do it again. It was great.
@9 — and strippers in Portland think, Wow, it would suck to live in Seattle and drive down to Portland every weekend to make decent money. The grass is always greener.
It’s a real shame that Seattle features no form of heterosexual nightlife whatsoever, including your basic meatrack, pick-up bar, even a library coffee get-together where the delicate, bookish types that now inhabit the city can look at each other in frustration over the their laptop monitors.
Seattle: now featuring tales of strip clubs in other cities, in Seattle’s only functional cultural publication, The Stranger.
(This place needs to get a life. Bad.)
I mean, seriously. Strip clubs in Seattle? Christ, you can probably find more in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, where they behead people for having sex in the wrong position while otherwise fully clothed and following strict religious procedure.
Placing the sex industry aside, this city has so little heterosexuality, and such a grotesque gender imbalance, that it has come to resemble a male labor colony or penal colony. This place is a basket case. We’re reading a report on strip clubs.
In another city.
While in a city where twenty-somethings have to take out online advertisements in the modern equivalent of the newspaper “personal” section just to try to make contact with a female, one could only hope.
Work in Seattle, live life elsewhere, that’s the recipe.
No go back to Devils Point?
The Acropolis is also, and affectionately, known as The Westside Performing Arts Center.
@25: “It’s a real shame that Seattle features no form of heterosexual nightlife whatsoever”
I have a damn good time in Seattle. It lacks decent strip clubs, but you’ve absolutely failed if you lack “heterosexual fun”.
It would be interesting to read an interview with these strippers. As an outsider, I can’t think of a grodier job than grinding on the laps of strangers, many of whom are just nasty. In other cities, you assume the strippers do it purely for the money. But the Portland girls seem too much like your average, middle class, educated girls with options, so I always wonder what the hell motivates them. I’ve never really been comfortable enjoying these places because I assume the girls must have issues. I’d love to hear otherwise, if that’s the case.
@31: You assume a lot. There’s far worse and more “degrading” work than sex work and stripping, and it’s not like people always strip for life. I have more than a few friends that “went to College” and are doing just fine with themselves and their careers.
“I always wonder what the hell motivates them… Is it just about needing attention or what”
Strippers are not a monoculture. They don’t all have the same motivations. For all your judgment, you seem pretty intellectually incurious yourself.
#32, Since you state there are jobs you consider “worse and more degrading,” obviously you hold your own judgments about certain types of work.
I’m not anti-stripper, and if I weren’t curious about them, I wouldn’t want to read an interview with them.
You included the caveat, “It’s not like people always strip for life,” as if doing so would make a woman less worthy of respect than those who move on to obtain non-sex work jobs. I wonder whether you are really any less judgmental than those of us simply asking blunt questions.
@undead ayn rand – this city has the beterosexual energy of a dead, rotting corpse. sorry, but true. if portland is ‘pornlandia’ then seattle is ‘nerdlandia’
@lose-lose – ‘normalize adult regs’ wont happen in seattle, the city is prudish and ant-sex, in particular, anti-man. agreed also that the clubs here – all 4 of them – are a candy-assed joke. placing the sex industry aside, further, this area is to heterosexuality what kryptonite is to superman. its un-fixable.
@33: “You included the caveat, “It’s not like people always strip for life,” as if doing so would make a woman less worthy of respect than those who move on to obtain non-sex work jobs. I wonder whether you are really any less judgmental than those of us simply asking blunt questions.”
I indicated that it’s often a transitional job, not a career. You’re judging their entire life and attitudes on something with a ton of turnover.
@34: “@undead ayn rand – this city has the beterosexual energy of a dead, rotting corpse. sorry, but true. if portland is ‘pornlandia’ then seattle is ‘nerdlandia'”
Eh, I’ve never had any issues, YMMV.
@35: “the city is prudish and ant-sex, in particular, anti-man”
The state’s anti-sex policies are anti-woman, they’re not anti-man just because you can’t get a good titty bar.
I haven’t been to a great strip club since Honey’s closed down on Hwy-99.
I thought I went to strip clubs but actually after some time I realized I was going to see strippers.
Once I got passed the reeking buns of angels it was sanitation sanitation sanitation.
there was no club I would feel like returning to save one or two but I have many memories of women and not all sexual that I would walk across Siberia in February for.
whats more interesting the club or the dancer?
what came first the club or the dancer?
Impressive achievement;)
#36: “You’re judging their entire lives and attitudes…” Huh? Where the hell did you get that from? I neither said nor implied that.
I read an interview this weekend with Portland young adult writer Blake Nelson (Paranoid Park, Girl) where he said the 90s were a great time to be young woman, when they took themselves seriously as a group and as a gender and everyone wanted to know what girls were thinking and were interested in. He said things have swung back around and that our culture is once again very male, with women in their 20s focusing on being attractive and appealing and not being as forthcoming with their opinions.
I agree with him and think all the hipster strip clubs, burlesque troops, and suicide girls-type porn is pretty indicative of this.
@42: “I agree with him and think all the hipster strip clubs, burlesque troops, and suicide girls-type porn is pretty indicative of this.”
If you take it all at face value, while pretending that the absolutely stellar crop of feminist blogs (feministing, racialicious) and writings don’t exist, yeah.
The “hipster strip clubs, burlesque troops, and suicide girls-type porn” is hardly “riot grrrl” manifesto material, but it doesn’t have to be harmful or regressive. For all the “understanding” you claim to do, I don’t see any actual analysis of women going on, only assumptions and judgments. Perhaps you should talk to people in those scenes and find out instead of just regurgitating these cartoonish, un-fleshed out theories.
Mob– as a heterosexual dude who likes to go out and meet girls, I’ve never had a problem with Seattle. Maybe you’re looking for a really specific sort of scene, but there is totally “heterosexual night life” here.
#43, What would be the point of providing you with any kind of analysis when you haven’t paid any attention to anything I’ve actually said? I didn’t claim to understand strippers. I used the term “baffled,” in fact.
However, as a woman in my 30s who has been obsessed with female musicians since I saw Blondie on The Muppet Show, grew up reading Sassy and Bust back when in was still printed on newsprint and before it devolved into a fashion magazine, has been in all girl bands for ten years and DJ’d an international girl pop night for four, and has been seeking out and going to see girl bands regularly since the 90s, I think I’m more than qualified to speak to the change in audience and interest in girl culture. I could easily provide you with dozens of examples of this, such as how a friend’s band was turned down by a huge indie label because “They’d already signed a lot of girl bands that year,” because what was a selling point in the 90s is now back to having a quota. But you’d just dismiss them all, based on how dismissive you’ve been of everything else I’ve said.
Jesus, all you have to do is look at a line up of popular indie musicians from the 90s (Kim and Kelly Deal, Juliana Hatfield, Kristen Hersh, Tanya Donnelly, Sinead O’Conner, L7, Concrete Blonde, The Lunachicks, Mia Zappata) versus the popular indie musicians now to see that sex appeal and appearance has become a huge factor in whether a female musician gets written about. In the 90s, the girls dressed the same as the guys. Now the guys still get to dress like schlubs, but the girls who make it have to either be pretty or dress interestingly. My band is attractive and we got our picture in The Stranger without them writing a single word about our music. Of course, there are exceptions in both decades, but as a whole, that’s how things are.
Strip clubs are boring to me…I prefer massage parlors instead …they at least have better quality women than strip clubs…but that’s just me..Portland is ok,I guess…
You notice that some of the girls are barely legal or babyish. That is because teenage girls are being forcefully recruited by pimps to work in strip clubs, massage parlors, and on tracks in cities all along a the I-5 corridor, a well-known trafficking loop. We are talking about 12 to 14 year olds who think their pimp is their boyfriend, and who are forced to give all their money to him. You can see that the girls are young and bored, and often getting treated like crap, but you just chalk it up to fun.
So, “pro-man” Seattle would = strip clubs? Seriously? How about learning to interact with women correctly so you don’t have to go pay money to see some ass?
Don’t blame the city and it’s regulations for your inability to have sexy fun. If you need strip clubs to be a man then fuck you.