AFTER MY TALK WITH MY dad, I finished what I needed to on the case I was working there. It’s a simple, well … not-so-simple hack and monitor of a large corporation out of Atlanta that suspects one of their chief financial operators to be laundering money. Tedious but easy, since the owner had given me full access to their secure network, camera systems, as well as the cameras in the CFO’s penthouse paid for by the company. It’s taken me spending two months deep in cyberspace, but I’ve finally uncovered almost all of the fucker’s dirty secrets.
Maddox hadn’t come in by the time I finished up, and I needed to get over to Dirty Dog, so I saved my shit and left. I avoided stopping by my dad’s office. Instead, I pulled out my phone to call Shane—my soon-to-be club manager—in order to be too busy to talk to anyone I passed.
“Headed to Dirty, want to meet me there?” I ask when he picks up.
“Already there.” And he disconnects.
I laugh to myself and toss my phone over on the passenger seat of my truck before pulling myself in.
Shane’s been a damn good friend since we met during my short attendance at the University of Georgia. I say short because I was more interested in partying than I was going to class. How we met was unconventional, at best, but he’s been around for almost a decade and proven his loyalty to me more than once.
By the time I make the half-hour drive to what used to be Club Carnal, I’m about to come out of my skin with excitement about today. When I told my dad I had enough entertainment booked, I wasn’t kidding, but a large part of that is because about seventy-five percent of that entertainment is in-house.
Dirty Dog is, in a sense, my play on Coyote Ugly. Only, because I know where the money is from experience, we won’t have smoking hot chicks dancing on the bar. We’ve split the old club into two sections, which is the main reason I bought both surrounding units and knocked down some walls.
The entrance is on the side now, going into the first building on the side of the old club. When you walk in, there is now a large ‘holding area.’ Our hope is that we’re so popular that there will always be a line, but by creating the holding area, no one will ever have to stand in the elements. It was a bitch getting that set up with fire codes and all, but we eventually decided that unit would stay intact with just a single black door added inside to lead to Dirty Dog. Our way of saying fuck you to building code and the fire marshal’s rules; even if we’re the most popular club in the southeast, the holding area will never fuck with the club’s max out capacity since it’s a large area in its own right.
Once through the door separating the two, you hit the sanctuary. In the center of the room is a large square bar with a thick wooden finish built to withhold the heavy bodies spotlighted throughout the night.
When I first decided to play off Coyote Ugly, Shane was the first to jump on board. All I told him was that we would have dudes dancing and not chicks. That was enough for him. When I told Cohen about it, his first assumption was that Shane was gay, but he couldn’t be further from the truth.
It’s simple really. Girls flock to clubs. Girls love seeing men who know how to work their bodies. When the girls get one look at the talent at Dirty, it won’t be long until they’re going to be rushing us. Any man with a brain would be able to look past anything when you basically guarantee massive amounts of horny women. Which, if everything goes as planned, will be the reason that we don’t just succeed in having a successful club but we fly through the top of all the popular ones around.
I shouldn’t have been shocked with Cohen’s concerns about Dirty. Unlike my dad, he didn’t voice them because he doubted me; he just couldn’t see the big picture like I could. To him, he thought we would turn into a gay club with little success because we aren’t exactly a town with a need for one. I wasn’t going to let him know the reason why I was so sure we had this.
The idea for this place came to me back in college when it became crystal clear that sex, men dancing, and booze were all you needed to build an empire on a party life. No one knows about the six months I worked at a strip club out of pure boredom and a sex drive that was borderline sex addiction levels bad. Pussy just fell in my lap when I danced at the club in Athens.
Since Shane had spent the last five years stripping, continuing well after I left town, he knew more than anyone the untapped market I was about to break into. Women loved men. Plain and simple. They went stupid over half-naked ones, and when you threw in some carefully placed hip thrusts, well … you might as well be a fucking god.