To borrow in part from a self-conscious moment in the latter portion of the book itself, Brent Jordan's "Stripped" is perhaps best described as a marriage of "Sex and the City" and "The Sopranos." A breezy yet disturbing work, Jordan's effort is a quasi-memoir of his 20 years spent bouncing at a strip club, detailing the corruption, crime, glamour, decadence and scandal of one of America's most famous skin joints: Cheetahs Las Vegas.
Jordan succeeds wildly, blending the occasionally grizzly aspects of his often rough-and-tumble job with a marvelously fluid and chatty writing style. The material is dense, troubling and ailing to the reader's soul, yet the pages turn easily and chapters are never so long as to drag into the over-cerebral.
More importantly, Jordan deftly renders all of the book's characters (with one possible exception) into fluid shades of gray, never casting black and white strokes to paint complex people in equally complex situations. As he abruptly tells of "beatings" delivered under customers by himself, other bouncers and management (later following up with a morally painful account of how to falsify a police report), the reader is prohibited from taking sides because these veritable shades of gray are so wantonly manifest. Even Jordan refuses to paint himself in the hero's role, instead eventually scribing of himself, "There will be a reckoning for me one day. I have amassed an overwhelming karmic debt that may never be repaid."
But Jordan is still an overwhelmingly loveable narrator. His brutal honesty and often moralistic recollections of some rather amoral acts amass a certain ethos with the reader that far outweighs his character's indiscretions. And while the self-professed satiric nature of the book leaves it in a certain nomadic territory between fact and fiction, one must believe that, chillingly, the narrator and the characters are all too often genuine incarnations.
Moreover, Jordan doesn't hesitate to name names. Long after the glitz of the film "Showgirls" wore off the famed nightclub, law enforcement cracked the internal corruption in what has become known as "Operation G-String." In particular, Jordan paints club owner Mike Galardi in a light that is eerily reminiscent of Steve Rubell, but perhaps a touch more brutal, slightly slimier and far cheaper.
The establishment bodes almost worse. Jordan's tell-all memoir shares a laundry list of scams that range from over-charging for lap dances to filling emptied bottles of top-shelf liquor with rail equivalents. Most memorably, he shares the club's policy of paying off taxi cab drivers for delivering clients. In a competitive marketplace, he explains, whichever club has the highest such tip for drivers will have the best flow of customers. How far would drivers go to earn this perk? "I even have had a group of tourists tell me they had asked to be dropped off at their hotel, Caesar's Palace in one example, and still ended up at Cheetahs," Jordan writes.
As Las Vegas continues to be America's fastest growing city, gambling graces countless television channels at all times of day, Dennis Hof lays claim to a show on HBO and adult entertainment becomes increasingly mainstream, "Stripped" is a timely and ultimately enjoyable work. And while it would seem easy to categorize the book's successes as tabloid-style tales in an era when sex sells more than ever, the reality is that strong character construction, an over-abundance of quality anecdotes and crisp writing are what truly make "Stripped" worthwhile.
Grade: A/B
