On a weeknight (Wednesday or Thursday) around early June,
2009, I was working at V------- Gentleman’s Club in H--------, AL.
I was standing and talking to several fellow employees, had
been at work for about 1 ½ hrs, when I looked over at one of the tables and saw
a customer seated at a table. I walked over to the man and he looked familiar,
but didn’t realize initially who he was.
I sat down and I asked him his name. He lied and gave me a
false name (I don’t remember the name he used) but at that moment I realized
who he was and remembered his name.
I regularly ask certain questions of customers such as their
names, what they do for a living, where they’re from. This conversation was
only for a few moments. He lied about all of those answers.
Then I said “That’s really funny, because I swear you look
just like this guy named Brother Greg who’s the pastor of the church, Brandon
New Vision in Florence, Alabama, where my mom is the worship leader.”
He looked embarrassed and caught and admitted that I was
right. He asked, “you’re not going to tell your mom, are you, because she will
be really angry?”
I agreed in the moment, that I had no intention to tell my
mom. But, I was shocked that he was there and could see his embarrassment about
being caught.
I asked him why he was in H-------, AL and he said he was
attending some type of church conference or workshop that week.
He spent some time sharing with me his reason for being in a
strip club—that the burden and responsibilities of being a pastor, having
people depend on his guidance and help them with their problems was really
overwhelming for him. I understood him
to mean that he needed at that point some female soothing to deal with his
stresses.
So we sat there and we talked, I shared some personal
struggle in my own life with him. I then brought up my mom again and he stated,
“oh my gosh, your mom would just kill me if she knew I was here” and several
other similar statements to that.
At that point I brought up the spirituality of a godly man
and said something about God using circumstances and people to bring you to
accountability in what you’re doing. In other words, “you’ve found me here in a
strip club, what do you think God is saying to you?”
He definitely agreed on that and I could tell he was being
‘convicted’.
Then after that, I finished the conversation and went
backstage since I had to take my turn strip-dancing on stage soon after. I was
surprised when he came up to the stage and sat in the chair right below me, while
I danced naked for him, and he tipped me putting the money in my garter. If
he’d felt bad about the encounter with me, he could’ve left the tip earlier on
the table for me or laid it on the stage rather than watching me dance and
tipping me in the way he did watching me naked from only a foot away.
My cell phone died, I needed to call my sitter about my
daughter, so I asked if he would go buy me a charger at Wal-Mart. I knew I was
using him to do this favor for me because I was fed up and disgusted that he
stayed, watched me dance and tipped me. I was mad at him and took some pleasure
in letting him go across the street and buy a charger for me—that for me, made
me feel there was some justice for myself.
When he came back with the charger, he brought up my mom
again. He asked me to reassure him again saying,” you’re not going to tell
your mom, are you?”
I agreed again, in the moment, that I would not. It seemed
to me that he had just given the tip money and bought the charger to bribe me.
Then he left.
My overall impression was that he was mostly embarrassed and
concerned about the fact that he didn’t want me to tell my mom. He never
actually apologized for being there, as a minister or as the pastor to my
family and me, knowing that I’d attended church services in his congregation too.
I was really bothered by this for days after, and I didn’t
like the fact of this pastor’s dirty, underhanded behavior going on, with my
mom serving on staff at that church with him. This is why I told her.
In later months, after reporting this to my mom, she was
telling me that she’d referred him to counseling and recovery groups and that
she thought he was “dealing with his issues” around the wrong sexual acts.
This made me angry and it really hurt me that she was
defending him when he never took any responsibility to apologize or make amends
to me.
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