Lipsweet of Martinsburg

Description

Lipsweet was a fat squat slab of concrete surrounded by a muddy gravel lot, just a few hundred feet from the highway. Above the parking lot blared a blinking neon sign advertising the name Lipsweet with a picture of a buxom girl in a frilly dressy that revealed her leg up to and just barely past her knee.

From Ex-Con Cravings Can’t Be Refused

Lipsweet had a large back area, including dressing rooms, champagne rooms, a locker room and gym for the bouncers, a couple offices and storage spaces for the Gregarian family (who owned Lipsweet) and a locked warehouse that Teddy was pretty sure was full of guns. He didn’t ask about that door though.

From The Scarred Bouncer

The three of them were in the “champagne room” at Lipsweet, a low-class strip club of the type that Lee would never have entered without Ezra to accompany him and pressure him into it. Mom would never allow that. She would hate it. She would think this was oppressive to women.
The men here were frightening. It was a country bar, full of white men with literal red necks, wearing workpants, dirty boots and cowboy hats, plus a smattering of black men in football jerseys and saggy jeans. He smelled something smoky and floral and herbal that reminded him of the hippies and club kids in college — was that cannabis? Maybe it was a “blunt”, which he knew was something black people rapped about, but he was too embarrassed to ask Ezra what it was. Maybe, he thought, he was becoming “stoned”. Maybe that was why he was nervous.

From The Factory Foreman

It was all the same. Gray. Monotonous. Uneventful.
A lot happened — it always did. He was simply inured to it. Tonight, two men had exchanged blows over their beers, one of the dancers had run out of the room crying for reasons Teddy was not privy to, another fight had been broken up by the bouncer Buck, then there was a series of attempted groping incidents that turned into another fight that ended with Buck dragging a drunk man out by the waist of his pants, then a man had vomited in the men’s room and again Buck was the one who dragged him outside, and then Buck had to punch out some big farmboy who threw a couple good hits in his attempt to get backstage to see his “girlfriend” (a dancer he had been stalking).
The dancers had to deal with that stuff a lot. That was just how it went at Lipsweet, a strip club on the outskirts of town. Buck kept the riffraff away, at least at the club and in the parking lot (and sometimes, at their homes — Buck often sorted out boyfriend-related troubles for the dancers).

From Aroused by Ex-Cons