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and also spoke of helpful managers who protected them from abusive johns. But were the experiences these women described common or idiosyncratic? Was there a set of close ties like in the Chicago projects, where the gangs looked like the enemy within but were in fact intimately tied to their neighbors? How did the clubs compare to the Internet? To the back pages of the alternative weeklies? And how did all the players and levels tie together? I would have to get a lot more
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’s before I could call it serious research. And I still needed a consigliere to help me put a frame around it.
    Then it happened. I found my strip club Analise and the new world finally began to open for me.
    His name was Mortimer Conover. I met him in a bar in Hell’s Kitchen, where he stood out because he was an old-school sport who always wore a jacket and tie and pocket square. He must have been in his mid-seventies, but his passion for the ladies of the evening was undiminished.
    â€œI can travel the whole world in one night,” Mortimer liked to say. “I can go to Russia and Missouri and Mexico and the Dominican Republic and never leave the neighborhood.”
    Mortimer held down the corner booth of a bar on Ninth Avenue, the same place he’d been patronizing for the last twenty years. Completely nondescript, with a sign that read “Bar” hanging over a wooden door, it was the sort of place you could walk by and not even realize it was there. Inside it was nothing but a line of booths and bar stools, which bore a vague resemblance to a watering trough in a feedlot. Mortimer sat in the back opining on politics, sports, great Irish politicians, and the mysteries of female psychology.
    He followed predictable patterns. First an old-fashioned. Then a glass of water. Then multiple glasses of red wine. Periodically he would walk out back and light his pipe. When he started slurringhis words, he would switch to tea. Between drinks, he would slip in a few moments with a lady friend.
    Of his past, Mortimer said little. He had been “in business,” he said. His crippled right hand had been injured in “the war,” though he would never specify which war. His son, John, was a construction foreman who lived in Elizabeth, New Jersey. His grandchildren were all in high school and he carried the photos in his wallet to prove it. His heartbreak was his daughter-in-law. “I’m a sexual predator, according to her,” Mortimer explained one night, his voice wistful and bruised.
    Eventually, Mortimer told me the story. When he was already in his sixties and retired from his job, he’d approached a woman in a strip club with an offer of money for sex. She turned out to be an undercover police officer. A furor ensued. His son nearly refused to pick him up from jail, and his daughter-in-law, a devout Christian, cut him off completely. No more invitations to Thanksgiving dinner, no more weekends with the children.
    Mortimer kept me company on many nights as I waited around for a sex worker to grant me an interview, but I never noticed any health issues. That changed the night he collapsed on the floor of the bar. One minute he was holding court as usual and the next he flopped down writhing in obvious pain. His lady friend rushed to the bar phone and speared out the numbers for 911 with her long fake nails. A heart attack, everyone figured.
    It was a stroke. When Mortimer came back to the bar a month later, his left hand was a claw like his right hand and he couldn’t even grab his drinking glass. His eyesight had weakened, and now he wore thick black eyeglasses. He limped and needed help walking or climbing stairs. When I helped him to the bathroom or into the garden to smoke his pipe, his hand shook ferociously.
    Everyone in the bar seemed to adjust naturally to his new state. The bartender put a straw in his drink and even found some straws that held up in hot tea. Mortimer now felt nervous carrying