Tina."Are you selling crack?" Tina asks, appraising my low-hanging jeans. She places a hand on my shoulder. "Jeez, you’re tense. You need a massage."Tina is six foot four and built like a lineman. She wears a sprayed-on white dress that’s slashed down one side and held together with safety pins. Her fingers do their work. I hear knots cracking like they’re bones.Less than a mile from the designer hotels on the strip, the Las Vegas Lounge is the premier spot in town for T-girls and their admirers. "You be careful," my taxi driver said to me as he dropped me off. "It’s not nice like the strip. The girls in that place are all prostitutes. Tweakers."
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The Lounge is situated by a parking lot sparsely lit with neon. Kids skateboard through the cars. There are "gentleman’s spas", a Korean "karaoke and girls" club and a gay bath-house. The Lounge itself looks intimidating with its blacked-out windows. But inside there is a familial, Cheers-esque feel.
Open 24 hours, the only light here comes from the Christmas tree beside the stage, the many fairy lights, the Gamblers’ Bonus machines and the poker screens at the bar. The air is thick with Vape smoke and the smell of Live by Jennifer Lopez. The girls sit around playing with their iPhones and feeding dollars into a jukebox playing terrible Americana, like Dierks Bentley’s "Drunk On a Plane". Later there will be a floorshow, where the girls will lip-sync to Whitney and Miley."What do you do for work?" I ask Tina.She looks at me pityingly."Public relations."Like everywhere in Vegas, the bulk of the Lounge’s income is made from gambling. But watching one girl pull out of the parking lot with a trucker from Wyoming wearing a wedding ring, and another walk the long road out to the desert at dusk in a latex dress and thigh high boots cooing "Hey sweetie," it seems clear that there is an ancillary business model in operation.
Melanie, barmaid here for 14 years, is from El Paso. She looks like a young Kathleen Turner and is a mother hen to the girls."You look pretty tonight," she says to Alexis, a blonde Latina with Cleopatra eyes and fake nails like screwdriver heads.
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"You too," says Alexis in a voice like maple syrup. "You look like Madonna." She points to Melanie’s crucifix."I’m not that old."Is there ever any trouble here?"Not really. Sometimes there’s a fight if a guy thinks he’s been ripped off by one of the girls."Does Melanie stay late to party after her shift?"God, no. I got a husband and dogs at home. They’d worry."Why the Christmas tree? It’s August.Melanie shrugs."Here it’s someone’s Christmas every day."
Tony has been a regular for over four years; a mountain of a man with a Charles Dickens beard. He wears a Lakers vest and trucker cap. He pulls on his E-cigarette then emits a huge cloud of cinnamon-flavoured water vapour. Felipe, the barman – who has a scar down one cheek and wears a T-shirt with diamante lettering – takes this as a challenge. A battle ensues, with the two of them blowing bigger and bigger clouds until it’s impossible to see anything. A T-girl in a leather jacket with huge tits looks on. So does a nervous Milly Mackintosh lookalike in a fashion-forward studded white dress."Vape war!"Tony serves food to workers at one of the big casinos. What keeps him coming back to a dive transsexual hooker bar?"It’s somewhere to go. My girlfriend left me six months ago. I help out when there’s trouble."The men sitting at the bar look relaxed. They are blue collar workers, mainly. They drink and chat about sports. Every so often, one will go over and talk to a girl and then they’ll leave together. It’s not blackjack at the Bellagio, but then Vegas is a town that caters to all tastes.
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