The time has come for Keith McCracken to pry his feet from the strip-club floors and go home. Like a leper-healer in a leper colony, McCracken was stretched too thin in our city, his resources have been tapped, and he's realized that some dancers are terminal. As Las Vegas' own stripper savior, the collector of used-up women has spent the last year commuting from one strip club to another, trying to gather up their self-esteem and wrap them in it, nurturing their psyches so that they may one day have a husband who can make them bloom.
I met with McCracken at a Denny's last year ("Savior of Used-Up Women: Saving strippers with Keith McCracken," Las Vegas Weekly, March 6). This week, I met with him again in the same Denny's and learned that he still carries that issue of the Weekly with him. Though he's leaving town, his mission remains the same. But while some of the downtrodden may blossom, there's at least one woman in town he's made wither.
Colleen Zamudio is a 52-year-old disabled woman with a puff of gray hair and cardiopulmonary disease. She lives in a tiny one-bedroom apartment Downtown and is always looking for ways to supplement her SSI. Months ago, she responded to an ad McCracken placed in the Nifty Nickel: "Tired of nightclub dancing? Need a friend you can trust? I care and can help! No Strings!" It didn't quite work out as she hoped.
"He has cost me a lot, and I'm a wreck right now," Zamudio spits. Her electricity may be shut off in the morning because of two bad checks she says McCracken wrote to the power company to cover her bill. Now she's $150 in the hole because of required fees and worries that her nebulizer, which she needs to breathe, may not have the electricity it needs to work in the morning.
She says that she responded to Keith's ad because she was hungry, and needed help. She'd never been a stripper, but she once had a job at a dance hall in California, so she figured she'd try her luck. They met for dinner, she says, and he paid for the meal and bought some snacks for her to take home. They've kept in touch ever since, and she's become involved in the computer salvage business that McCracken runs. Over time, she'd ask for help when she needed it, and he'd seem to comply—until the checks bounced. She says he also took a phone card from her and a CD for her computer. Now that he's leaving town, she figures she'll be left in the lurch.
"All his promises turn into water," she laments. "And they go through a faucet real quick."
McCracken admits that he took Colleen's calling card, but insists she's someone he knows through business, not someone who's on his salvation list. "Colleen is different. She's a business associate. I've tried to make things go smoothly for her," he says. "I'm not perfect. Sometimes I make promises, and it takes a while to keep them, but eventually I keep my promise."
He says he's going to leave her some computer parts before he takes off to California, and quickly changes the subject to discuss his move. Oh, and the former dancer and her child who have joined him at Denny's, and whom he's taking home to live with his wife and family.
Melissa, a thin, 24-year old blonde with fair skin and a sprinkling of freckles across her nose, alternates between proudly gazing at Keith, smiling in admiration, and growing irritated like a teenager would at her father, obstinately looking away, or becoming annoyed when a topic of conversation comes up for the hundredth or so time.
"He's really like a dad," she says while still in admiration mode. "I never really knew my real father. He's the closest thing I've ever had to a real dad."
He's helped her financially, and takes care of her 2-year-old daughter when needed. The three have been living together for months. In return—he says—he gets to see from her perspective what it's like to toss away an important part that you never really get back. It's a discussion that seems to remain on repeat, and came up more than once during lunch at Denny's on Monday.
Keith: "[A dancer's] beauty's not really sold. Or is it?"
Melissa: "Sure it is. The ones that aren't pretty don't make as much as the ones that are."
"How much of her, I don't know what you would call it, her integrity or her honor, how does it hurt people? Guys don't understand. They see the entertainment, and they buy it and they get as close as they can and they touch what they can if the girl lets them. It's meaningless nonsense, all the contact they have in the club, it's not a guy she knows at all, it's not a significant person."
"What are you doing, are you asking a question or making a statement? What are you doing?" demands Melissa.
"Well, I guess the question is what part of you, what little Pac Man is eaten away when you do this? Do you feel like you've lost something when you share this with strange guys?"
"No, not really."
"You're a pretty strong individual, with a lot of ... you're pretty tough."
"A little bit of self-respect, maybe, but other than that …"
"It's not as though you're in a brothel, that would be different. But don't you think you would have been better off had you never gone into it at all?"
"Yeah, but I didn't have that choice."
She's one of many Keith says he's helped. He's gotten about 40 or 50 calls from the ad, but says that once he met Melissa he wanted to really focus on her, and with limited resources just wasn't able to help every lost sheep.
He plans to write a book one day, warning young women to stay out of dancing and spinning the tales of the dancers he's met along the way. But in the meantime, he'll live in San Diego with his wife, his daughter, and Melissa and her daughter. Maybe he'll frequent strip clubs like he does here, trying to talk dancers out of the business, or maybe he'll take a break for a while and focus on all of the blooming flowers in his own home.