Baring for the Bursar Bill

Shay dances naked in a dark little bar filled with big talk, small talk, smoke and music. It's a place where half-naked women smile at red-faced men. It's a place where money, lots of money, is pushed between boobs, under g-strings and hidden in bras. Some love it, some hate it and a few who work or go there never admit it. Regardless, dancing at Night Moves pays Shay's bursar bill.\nThe baby-faced brunette looks a little bored. She doesn't look anyone in the face when she dances. She doesn't smile when she's on stage. She twists, turns, takes off her clothes, puts her breasts on the faces of the customers who surround the stage and collects her dollar bills.\nAfter an act, she puts on something cut low on top and high on the bottom. Then she sits with the customers, talking, joking, having a drink and watching the other girls dance. Sometimes they play video pool with her on a little machine in a dark corner of the room. Other times they'll hand her a dollar and she'll put it between her teeth and let a girl on stage take it with her mouth. She smiles and goes along with it all, getting tips here and there for her efforts. \nIt wasn't her childhood dream. The dusky brunette didn't wile away her teenage years dreaming about peeling off black vinyl tube dresses and chit-chatting with strangers for a living. \nIt just sort of happened that way. She lived with her parents in a little burg down south. Her dad was a supervisor at a chemical plant and her mom marketed coupon books. Shay still calls her parents her "heroes." But when she turned 18, she said she didn't want to take her parents' money anymore. She moved out and, with her best friend, got a job at Deja-Vu, in Louisville, Ky. On her first day, Shay made $400.\n"It was a nude club, so I had to get totally nude," she says. "It was the scariest thing I'd ever done."\nThe tough job brought tough times. The other dancers were mean to the cute new girl, and her best friend quit after her boyfriend "threw a fit." Shay's boyfriend of a year threw a fit, too. But Shay didn't quit. They stayed together another year, fighting the whole time over her new occupation. She doesn't talk about work with her boyfriends anymore.\nThe new job didn't go over well with her parents, either.\n"My mom cried a little bit," Shay says. "They both just asked me, 'Why? Why? Why?' It's something I couldn't explain to them. Anymore, it's not talked about."\nWhen it came time to go to college, Shay came to IU, changing towns but not professions. She came to Night Moves and met Larry, the husky, gray-haired owner with a gold Night Moves pendant around his neck.\nLarry's always looking for new talent, and the copper-colored girl with natural D cups and a baby face was a shoe-in for a mostly nonsilicone club. Now, Shay's a junior, and while she and the other girls are on stage shaking their money-makers under the strobe and black lights, Larry sits in his basement office, watching television, counting his money and making phone calls. The bar business is his forte, with Night Moves being the 14th bar he's owned in 30 years.\nA 61-year-old great-grandfather and a little league coach, Larry keeps his office television turned up to drown out the constant music from upstairs. Although there are a half dozen, half-naked women less then 10 feet above his head, Larry would rather watch Tiger Woods, "And I don't even like golf," he says.\n"I've never had any sexual relations with a dancer that worked for me," he says. "My daddy told me, 'If you sleep with an employee, you might as well put your dick in the cash register and slam the door shut.'"\nShay is one of Larry's "house girls," meaning a dancer who works regular shifts. When he's not raising his grandkids, recruiting girls and supervising his staff of bouncers, dancers, DJs and waitresses, Larry plays host to the monthly "features," hard-bodied, model types who appear in calendars, magazines and, occasionally, films. \nFeatures, having to cope with a fair amount of fame, or at least infamy, adopt professional stage names that tend to be flashier than the aliases the house girls use. "Safire Blue," "Sandra Scream" and "Kloey Love" are just a few of the hundreds of girls whose framed photos fill the walls around the doors and offices of Night Moves. \nBut Shay doesn't want to hit the big time as a dancer. She wants to finish her School of Health, Physical Education and Recreation degree, find a job she likes and leave. She says she'll keep working: "Maybe another two years, or as long as I can take it.\n"You get criticized and critiqued every night," Shay says. "I've had some of the rudest comments you'll probably ever hear. I had one guy thrown out because he called me a bitch."\nShe doesn't always like how she has to treat the customers, either. She says sometimes she feels bad about taking money, "especially from drunk guys. But that's my job, and I'm good at it."\nThe job does come with benefits. While some dancers don't think its professional to drink at work or to take customers up on propositions, Shay has a sip every now and then. Once she decided to accept an offer from a customer last summer.\n"Me and my best friend," she says. "We met this guy here last summer that took us to Woodstock. He paid our airfare, gave us a hundred dollars a day, paid for all our food, all our drugs."\nShe also met her boyfriend of 11 months at work. While she still doesn't talk about work with him, she says he doesn't treat her any differently because of her profession. And, on the last Friday night in September (will check), while Kloey Love was letting customers rub her down with incandescent body paints, Shay's boyfriend waited for her in the doorway while she was leaving work. She wasn't wearing a tube dress or a g-string, but a long denim skirt and a white cotton tank top. Her tattoos were all covered up. In her hands were a thick stack of dollar bills and a Budweiser. Under her arm was a fall schedule of classes. \nShay is a stage name. Her true identity is omitted to protect privacy. Night Moves is located at 1730 S. Walnut St.