David Holthouse
Behind the scenes on just another Friday night at the greatest strip club in Alaska.
Photo by Kerry Tasker
There’s $6,000 on the desk in one-dollar bills. Six bricks of 1,000, next to a cash counting machine with a name tag: Bob Marley.
“Because it’s always jammin’,” explains Dawn Harris, general manager of the Great Alaskan Bush Company.
Inside the Bush Company office—a small, windowless room in the upstairs of the club, which is off-limits to patrons—money is literally falling from the sky, or at least the ceiling. Harris is demonstrating her new favorite gadget, a handheld, trigger-operated Cash Cannon, which resembles a radar gun (except with party lights) and spits out $100 in ones in six seconds.
Strip club patrons “make it rain” by throwing money into the air. The Cash Cannon is designed to encourage heavy precipitation. Except like Bob Marley, the damn thing keeps jamming. “I just got five of them, but they only work right with brand new bills,” says Harris.
Which means she has to order a lot of crisp money from the bank. But that’s a tomorrow problem. Because right now it’s eight p.m. on a Friday night, and Harris is “multitasking like a motherfucker.”
At the moment, after holstering the Cash Cannon, that entails counting stacks of twenties for the downstairs ATM, entering new employee records into the company’s database (the Bush Company is always hiring), finalizing the menu of local craft beer, and fielding a phone call from a dancer who’s running late because, she claims, “I put my stripper shoes in the washing machine and they broke.”
After encouraging the tardy performer to expedite her shoe repair, Harris sends the deejay a reminder that Bush Company house dancers are not allowed to choose their own music.
“Our target demographic is 40-plus-year-old guys with a lot of disposable income,” she says. “If you’re that guy, and you have a party at your house, are you going to want a bunch of 25-year-old girls picking the music?”
Harris next turns her attention to the surveillance screens that cover most of a wall. Worthy of a small Las Vegas casino, the cameras feeding them cover every nook and cranny of the cavernous downstairs. Harris works a video-game style controller, zooming and panning.
The club is filling up fast. Thirty-five of the 57 dancers on the Bush Company payroll are working tonight. About 15 of them are doing table dances, one-on-one performances for customers that start at $20 per dance. Harris moves a camera from table dance to table dance, making sure the dancers are obeying the house rules.
Those rules are spelled out in a new hire information sheet titled, “Welcome to the world famous Great Alaskan Bush Company.” They include:
“You may hold your client’s hand; client may put his arm around your shoulder, but no lower.”
“Do no sit on a client’s lap or drape your legs over his/hers. No lounging on the client. Do not lie down in the booths.”
“Tables are for cocktails, not your ass.”
“While table dancing, no part of your body is allowed to be closer than six inches from the client. The only exception is: You may place your hands on his shoulders or your foot on his knee while dancing. This is a no contact club. No grinding, sitting, sliding or putting your breasts in the patron’s face or hands.”
“No simulated copulation. No rubbing your crotch. No sucking, licking, or kissing your breasts or fingers.”
“Topless table dancing only. Do not remove your bottoms or pull them to the side to expose your genitalia.
And finally:
“If a client tries to touch you, explain the rules and move back a little further. If he persists, inform a doorman.”
Harris pans right, passing a table dance in progress in a corner booth in one of the far corners of the club. Seeing something she doesn’t like, she stops, pans back left, and zooms in to take a closer look.
The dancer is straddling the customer’s leg, riding it like a mechanized bull in time to the Scorpions’ 1988 power ballad, “Rhythm of Love.”
Rule violation.
The dancer changes positions so that she’s on all fours, with both knees on the customer’s leg and her hands on the wall in front of her.
Rule violation.
The customer begins fondling her breasts with one hand and rubbing her buttocks with the other. The dancer brushes the hand off her breast but maintains her position while the ass massage continues.
Rule violation, rule violation, and rule violation.
Harris snatches up the phone on her desk.
“Hey Alex, I need you to tell Winter up in the corner that if she doesn’t keep that fucking man’s hands off her body that she’s going home.”
She hangs up. A security camera shows the front doorman put a phone back on the wall and then approach the dancer and her customer. He leans down and says a few words, addressing both of them in turn. The customer gives a chagrined smile and snaps his finger in an exaggerated, folksy way, like, “Gosh darn it, you caught us.” The doorman backs away and the table dance resumes, with Winter’s hands now on the customer’s shoulders and her body a virtuous half-foot away.
Harris remains displeased, now with the doorman. “I wish he would have handled that differently,” she says. “I told him to talk to Winter. The customer should overhear that and get the message, but I don’t want anyone directly reprimanding a customer in those circumstances. He’s a man. He just paid $20 of course he’s going to try and touch his dancer. He doesn’t work for me, she does. It’s her job to instruct him in what he can and can’t do. Because if she allows it, why shouldn’t he think it’s okay?”
“We expect a certain amount of misbehavior. We’re not hiring angels.”
The Great Alaskan Bush Company is a product of Anchorage’s oil boom era, when strip club operators didn’t place the same premium on decorum, let alone legality, that Harris enforces today.
When the original Great Alaskan Bush Company opened in 1979 in downtown Anchorage, about half the dancers had pimps, according to the club’s founding owner, Edna Cox. In a 1985 Anchorage Daily News profile, Cox estimated that she’d run so many pimps off that only one in 10 of her dancers had one.
“I’m death on pimps,” Cox told reporter Nancy Montgomery. “I don’t believe a woman should work and turn her money over to a man.”
(The Bush Company now has a zero tolerance policy on soliciting prostitution.)
Described in the Anchorage Daily News profile as “a Catholic grandmother who neither smokes, drinks, nor eats meat,” Edna Cox moved from to Anchorage from Dallas in 1948, and later became a hotelier and real estate investor. At one point she was business partners with Vernon Hickel, brother of former Alaska governor Wally Hickel.
In 1978 Cox invested in Club Savoy, a downtown night spot that she transformed into a rock ‘n’ roll club rechristened The Animal House. The following year she bought out her partners and turned the The Animal House into the Great Alaskan Bush Company.
Early going was tough. Angry pimps slashed her tires and shot out her windows. Seattle mobster Frank Colacrucio tried to muscle in on her operation. With the help of a formidable (and loyal) security team, Cox prevailed. Almost overnight, the Bush Company was a phenomenal success, which Cox attributed to its upscale décor and ambiance. The Bush Company outclassed competing strip clubs by a long stretch to become one of the best-known strip clubs in the country, as well as the biggest and most profitable establishment of its kind in the history of Alaska.
“I tried to make the appearance not so seedy and the atmosphere more wholesome. Where a person could come and not be ashamed of anything,” Cox told the Anchorage Daily News. The same article quoted a patron declaring the difference between going to the Bush Company and a typical strip club “is like going to see a Broadway play and going to see some cheap adult movie.”
The Bush Company has always been a family business with a female owner. Edna Cox ran the original Bush Company with help from her son, Billy, and his wife Vicki. Vicki took over the current Bush Company not long after, and opened their second and current location on International Airport Road in 1986. (The original downtown Bush Company closed long ago.) Vicki Cox died in 2011. The club is now co-owned by her son and daughter—Edna Cox’s grandchildren.
Following tradition, Justin Cox and his sister Shannon are hands-on owners, dividing their time between Arizona and Anchorage to oversee the business on alternating two-week schedules. Harris is a constant presence. She began working at the Bush Company as a cocktail waitress in 1988, then was promoted to bartender, then floor manager, and then, in 2001, to general manager, a job she’s held since.
“When I started here in ’88, the pipeline era was winding down, but it was a wilder club, because Anchorage was a wilder city. More free-wheeling, free-spending,” Harris says. “Used to be, at the end of the night, when the house lights came on and we swept up, it was nothing to look down and find a couple of hundred dollars just scattered around. Guys dropped money in here all the time and didn’t even bother to look for it. Now you’d be lucky to find a dollar.”
One thing that hasn’t changed at the Bush Company over the years is the club’s knack for theatrical elements, from the fancy detailing of its Disneyland-for-adults Wild West dance hall interior design to the intricately choreographed and costumed burlesque routines performed by its top dancers.
State law prohibits Bush Company dancers from making any physical contact with customers while they’re on stage—the only time the dancers are fully nude. The stage is separated from the club floor by a red padded rail known to dancers and regulars alike as “the meat rack.” Men line the meat rack to get a close-up view. They often tip well. But the real money for Bush Company dancers, Harris explains, comes from table dances.
It’s known in the industry as a “hard hustle.” Dancers work the floor of the club, chatting up customers, trying to get them to buy a table dance or two. Or 10. It’s eat what you kill. No limit, but no guarantee. The key to making a good living as a Bush Company dancer is simple, Harris says. “Poise. Attitude. Confidence.”
Edna Cox had a favorite pearl of wisdom for newly hired Bush Company dancers. She passed it on to Vicki who in turn passed it on to Harris, who uses it to this day: “Remember, you have the pussy, so you have the power.”
“The best tits come from Utah. Talented surgeons in that state.”
Harris is still keeping an eye on Winter. The power ballad ends. Winter pulls her top back on and waves bye-bye to the customer with the roving hands. As she turns and walks away, the camera shows her chewing gum.
Rule violation.
Harris grabs the phone. “Send Winter up, please.” She takes a puff from a nicotine vape pen.
Twenty seconds later Winter knocks on the upstairs office door. Harris presses a button to release the security lock and the dancer enters. “Oh, Winter,” Harris says.
“What?” the dancer replies. “He was grabbing my boob and when I felt it, I moved his hand away.”
“And what about his hand all over your ass?”
“Well, I didn’t feel a hand on my ass.”
“Honey, if you’re numb from the waist down, it’s time for you to go home.”
“I’m not numb, I just don’t think he really had a hand on my ass.”
Harris cues up the security camera footage, on which the customer is rubbing Winter’s ass like the Karate Kid polishing the hood of Mr. Miyagi’s 1948 Ford Super DeLuxe.
Winter sighs in defeat, busted. “Okay,” she says. “I’m fucking up.”
“It’s your job to keep his hands off you,” Harris says. “Also, you were chewing gum, and you were straddling him.”
“Straddling?”
Harris stands up and puts a leg up on her desk to demonstrate. “You had one leg here and one knee here and you were doing this. You can’t have your chucky on his leg, okay?”
“Chucky” guidelines appear in the Stage Rules section of the Great Alaskan Bush Company new employee handbook, to wit: “Do not insert anything into your chucky. You may pat your chucky but do not stroke or rub it.” (When performing on the elevated staged, Bush Company dancers are required by club policy, to strip completely naked. On the club floor, however, they are required by state law, to wear at least a thong at all times. Table dances are topless only.)
After Winter leaves, Harris clarifies that despite the unfortunate incident, Winter is one of the Bush Company’s best house dancers. She’s also one of the Bush Company employees who are transient, working a rotational shift. Dancers on the pipeline schedule typically have regular gigs at clubs in other states, often Arizona, California or Nevada. They travel back and forth. In summertime, peak season, the club’s employment rolls swell with up to 40 transient dancers, bringing the total to over 90.
“A lot of Vegas dancers come up here in the summer, because summers are dead in Vegas, then when we start to slow down in the fall, they’ll go back to Vegas, then come back up for a couple of weeks around PFD [Permanent Fund Dividend] time, then Vegas, then back up here in January, February when the crab fisherman are coming in, then back to Vegas, then up here for the summer again,” says Harris. “There’s definitely a circuit.”
Dancers who undergo breast augmentation surgery often take a month-long detour through Utah. “The best tits come from Utah, no question,” says Harris. “Talented surgeons in that state.” She estimates about half the Bush Company dancers have implants. “The key to our success is offering variety in all respects when it comes to our dancers: height, body shape, hair color, skin color, demeanor, style, and breast size, both for natural breasts and surgically enhanced. We don’t have one standard. Different guys like different things, and we want to make sure they can all find what they like at the Bush Company.”
According to Harris, about 30 percent of Bush Company dancers are “career strippers.” For the rest, she says, stripping is a stepping-stone. “I have a lot of dancers who are doing this to pay off their student loans,” says Harris. “Others, they have another job, but for whatever reason they’re going through a challenging time and need the extra income. Or maybe they just want the extra income. A lot of my dancers have professional careers other than dancing. I have one who is a registered nurse. I have a dermatologist. I have an air-traffic controller. One is going to college for her master’s in psychology. They defy all stereotypes. And they work hard. Try doing aerobics for 12 hours in high-heeled shoes.”
“Do not insert anything into your chucky. You may pat your chucky but do not stroke or rub it.”
Justin Cox’s earliest memory of being in the Bush Company is from when he was eight years old. His mom, Vicki Cox, brought him to a staff meeting when the club was closed. He remembers a bartender named Jackson spraying him with the soda gun behind the bar. That was 26 years ago. Jackson still bartends at the Bush Company. It’s that kind of place.
When he’s pulling a two-week shift in Anchorage, Cox is at the club most nights from around 10 p.m. to close. Tonight he’s come early to deliver a champagne bottle rack. For a long time, Bush Company bartenders just stacked champagne bottles in a cooler. Now and then bottles tumbled out and broke. No one gave it a second thought until the club recently upgraded its alcohol offerings to include local craft beers and some very nice bottles of champagne. Two bottles of pricey bubbly fell and shattered recently in a single night. Hence the new rack.
Cox says he and his sister tread carefully when it comes to making changes to their family’s legacy business. “Our philosophy is, continue making the Bush Company a better version of itself,” he says. “It’s a constant balancing act between not fixing what isn’t broken and keeping up with the times. We make subtle improvements, but not radical changes. Even upgrading the beer and wine list was a big step for us.”
The Bush Company co-owner admits that managing exotic dancers is not without its special challenges. “We expect a certain amount of misbehavior,” he says. “We’re not hiring angels. Also, they’re conditioned not to take ‘no’ for an answer. They spend all night long on the floor treating every ‘no’ they get as nothing but jumping off point for the next stage in negotiation.”
There are two categories of entertainers at the Bush Company, explains Cox: house dancers and showgirls. Showgirls are elite. They get the best shifts, the best spots on the nightly line-up, bigger lockers, more vacation time, and other perks. They get to pick their own music for their elaborate dance routines. Their performances, with costumes, props and themes, give the Bush Company legitimate claim to the adult entertainment industry gold standard descriptor, “show club.”
Showgirls have to live in Alaska full-time, and typically spend about a year as a house dancer before they’re promoted, if they’re promoted—only a select few house dancers make the cut. “It’s not easy to become a showgirl,” Cox says. “You have to be an exemplary employee. You have to go the extra mile. It has to be more than just a job for you. For example, this summer we had a group of guys call up, and every year they meet up to go safari hunting, but this year they came fishing in Alaska. On short notice, they wanted to rent out the entire club one morning before we opened. So I called our showgirls, and they were here like 90 minutes later, at 11 o’clock on a Saturday morning. Showgirls are no bullshit. They get it done.”
One of the Bush Company’s most popular showgirls, Sylvia, stops by the office to chat. She’s a career stripper who grew up in a military family, moving back and forth between Alaska and California. She began doing adult magazine photo shoots when she was 18 and started dancing in gentlemen’s clubs when she was 21. She’s now a young 37 and single, with two small children. She was hired as a house dancer at the Bush Company three years ago and promoted to showgirl a year later. Sylvia has danced in a dozen other clubs in Fresno, Sacramento, San Francisco, and Reno. “A lot of places I worked were supposedly high-class, but the rules weren’t solid, or they weren’t enforced like here,” she says. “They pull the weeds here [at the Bush Company] when they have to so they keep a clean work environment. It’s hard working at clubs where girls are doing extra favors or they’re drugged up, because if they’re drugged up, they’re stealing from the other dancers. They don’t allow any of that here.”
Sylvia also prefers working for a woman manager. “Dawn’s a beast. She doesn’t put up with any shit, but she’s fair, and she’s not trying to take advantage of anyone,” she says.
Bush Company showgirls are minor celebrities in Anchorage. They are comped at bars and showered with discounts at clothing stores and tanning salons. “As a showgirl, I don’t hide my entertainer identity when I’m outside the club, I live it, I dress the part, act the part, wherever I am,” Sylvia says. “I was at Chuck E. Cheese with my kids and a customer sees me, and he’s there with his daughter, and he says, ‘Look honey, it’s Sylvia,’ like he’s spotted a movie star or something. It feels good.”
Sylvia has several showgirl routines in her repertoire, including a take on Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz and a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader striptease. Her all-time favorite, though, is a sperm bank nurse show. “Basically, when you do a show, you’re on stage for three songs. The first song you present your character, the second song is all teasing, and the third song is a wet show, where you get fully nude,” she says. “For sperm bank nurse, I come out wearing a white nurse outfit, but instead of a red cross it has a sperm symbol on the chest and ‘Deposit Here.’ I pass out little plastic collection cups, and then for my third song, for the wet part of the show, I have a mixture of hand lotions and I pour fake sperm all over myself. I used to hand out squeeze bottles and let the customers near the stage squirt it at me, but they always wanted to aim for my face. I was like, ‘Come on guys, not the face!”
The conversation turns to Bambis, slang for new girls who’ve never danced before, and the telltale signs of their inexperience. “They don’t know how to move yet. They just stand there and play with their hair a lot,” says Harris. “And they wear the wrong shoes. They wear regular high-heeled club shoes, rather than stripper shoes.” (Custom-designed stripper shoes have reinforced ankle supports, thick, no-slip rubber soles and round heels, rather than square, so they don’t snag on fabric or catch corners.)
“And they come in wearing regular panties and lingerie,” says Sylvia. “Men don’t want lingerie.”
“They get lingerie at home,” adds Harris.
“They want fantasy, a complete fantasy,” says Sylvia. “We fart glitter.”
Sylvia opens the door to leave and ZZ Top’s “Legs,” blares into the office, serenading her exit. A short while later Harris makes one of her regular passes through the upstairs dressing room, a few doors down. A dozen or so dancers are putting on clip-in hair extensions and make-up, but, contrary to popular conception, no body glitter and no heavy perfume. “Guys don’t want to go home looking or smelling like they’ve been to a strip club,” Harris says.
Roaming the dressing room, Harris calls out, “Everyone here on the [stage schedule] list?”
A chorus of voices answer, “Yes, Dawn!”
“Everybody behaving themselves?”
“Yes, Dawn!”
Harris leaves the dressing room just in time to catch a dancer who’s late scurrying up the back stairs. Harris fixes her with a stare.
“What’s going to happen next time?” she says.
“You’ll send me home.”
“That’s right.”
“Can’t I just pay you a little extra or something?”
“That’s not how it works here, and you know it.”
The dancer nods and Harris gives her an encouraging pat on the shoulder.
“Now get out of those clothes and get to work. Go get that money, girl.”
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