WHAT'S YOUR FAVORITE topless bar? When you write about entertainment in Vegas, it's a question you actually get asked a lot, an awful lot. Though the words vary—"topless bar," "strip club," whatever—the person who's asking is usually a tourist. In answering, it's easiest to just find out what they're looking for: the bachelor party of lawyers will want someplace different than a guy who just wants to avoid pushy dancers and paying too much for a cover charge. Anyway, whatever answer given avoids the actual "best" question, but for me the answer is that my favorite strip club is Centerfold Lounge on Boulder Highway in Henderson. The Centerfold is also actually the last topless bar in Henderson (though the juice bar with nude dancing and an adult store, Baby Dolls, soldiers on).
But not for long. On a recent Friday, on the message board behind the Centerfold bar penciled in blue, reads the sad invitation: "Centerfold Bash March 25: Don't Be Late." After that the Centerfold will be closing its doors, and this time for good. Though the owner did not reply to a request for an interview for this story, the employees have all been told about the demise of the Centerfold (which will be torn down, depending on who you talk to, either for more parking space for the nearby Joker's Wild or for a new motel). This is probably not a great source of misery to the municipality, which will now be done with worrying about lap dances at bars. Yet, to the customers, cocktail servers and dancers, this Cheers, the television bar where everyone knows your name—not the kind of image that one usually associates with a bump-and-grind joint—is the famed watering hole that remains the constant reference point.
Sondra has been bartending at the Centerfold since 1996. A blur of motion serving drinks, dancing about and occasionally dramatically puffing out a cigarette (in a way that is all show or indicates she's a nonsmoker), Sondra does indeed know the name of every customer. "It's always the same," she says of the bar over the years. "It hasn't changed a lot. Occasionally a different girl or a new face. We're a neighborhood bar: We are Cheers with boobs. Every day I'm here is like a favorite day. This is the best place I've ever worked in and we are like family, all of us."
Trixi, who has served drinks as a cocktail waitress at the Centerfold for three years, starts welling up with tears at the thought of the Centerfold's final night. "I've been crying all week. I am not going to see a lot of these people anymore, who I've seen every day for years. I have my waterproof mascara tonight and it is already going to shit. I've never worked with a more trustworthy group of girls. It breaks my heart the Centerfold closing."
Now retired, Mark Strussenberg has been coming to the Centerfold for decades. "Before it was the Centerfold, it was Look-In, and before that it was called Boobies, and before that it was a cowboy joint of some sort," he recalls. He sips his drink. "I'm going to be so sad to see it go. There's no other place like this. It's a neighborhood bar that has entertainment. But the main focus isn't the girls. It's all friends. It's all people who come here and know each other. I have no idea where I will go after this, I really don't.
"Right now I come four or five times a week. I've been here 20-plus years. It's amazing what has gone on here. I got legal advice here, one of the bouncers here did work on my house. I came here for marriage advice."
That last bit may not have worked out so well. "I am divorced now, but my wife had this place on speed dial."
Strussenberg has been around long enough to see everything at the bar, including a wake in the establishment about 15 years ago for a 24-year-old dancer, a mother, who was murdered. "It was very sad. I was one of two customers invited. The guy [who killed her] is still locked up in Carson City." Strussenberg's favorite memory, though, is less than a decade old and involves a wedding that took place at the Centerfold:
"She worked here quite a long time as a bartender and she met the guy here. She was married on stage. The wedding took place New Year's Eve. And we spent all day preparing for it. We cleaned everything. We had to cover the [video-poker/ machines up, because there were going to be kids for the wedding. When we were done it looked like a real nice little wedding chapel. Then we had us a wedding on the stage."
In the more recent past there was the night , Strussenberg recalls, that thieves broke into the club to try to rob the ATM using shotguns to blow it open. The plan failed but the nicks in the walls are still visible.
Of course, unlike the other topless bars which are aimed at the tourists, the dancers at the Centerfold tend to be a bit older, a bit less surgically altered and not the most ambitious or aggressive strippers. They spend a lot more time hanging out with the regulars than hustling dances. Some found that frustrating. According to Elizabeth, who quit dancing at the Centerfold two years ago: "I couldn't earn any money there, it was a place only to make friends." She wound up heading to Jaguars. It was what any sensible stripper in Vegas would do. And that's part of what makes the Centerfold so special. It really doesn't have anything in common with any other Las Vegas or county strip club. And so with the demise of the Centerfold and its unique vibe, the city of Henderson will finally be rid of topless clubs and the denizens of the Centerfold will be like any other tourist trying to figure out where to go next. But there's nowhere else like it.