The heroin overdose death of the Dollies strip club customer is described in detail in chapter 9 of Life of an Exotic Entertainment photographer which you can now buy at Jack Corbett books in three editions, black and white paperback, full color paperback, and eBook. Which looks and functions great on your smart phone provided you get the free Kindle reader from amazon.

To bring everyone up to date. In my last post I described in detail my father’s love for cars that were fast and well-engineered. And how I followed my father’s footsteps by supercharging my 1993 Mazda Miata sports car. (you can read about equivalent performance in the 2021 Mazda Miata) Marriah, a stripper from Dollies Playhouse starts becoming a very loyal friend of mine. She loves driving my Miata sports car. Since I have two DWI’s, I start using Marriah as my designated driver. But I am unaware that Marriah doesn’t have a driver’s license.

Although my father was driving his new Toyota Lexus 400 150 miles per hour when he was eighty. While trying to wring 151 miles an hour out it.

And eventually succeeding, I’m trying to get my supercharged Mazda Miata to exceed 140 miles an hour. But when a stroke devastates my father after his 81st birthday, his days are numbered. He is dying 2000 miles from my home in Collinsville, Illinois.

I now have a new web site designer in Dirt, a 19 year old college student from Springfield, Illinois. Dirt’s also doing a cartoon strip for my alphapro.com web site that mirrors my experiences in the Saint Louis East Side club while I was writing Death on the Wild Side.

Keep in mind that this is in 1997. There’s no Facebook. And no one is shooting digital in the U.S. strip clubs. We have the Lost Angels chat room on my alphapro web site. The internet back then does through phone lines. While most Americans are not even aware that an internet exists. The managers and strippers at the Dollies love us. We were in those days “the Only Game in Town”. While Dirt, my young sidekick is getting a lot of attention from the club’s strippers.

He shouldn’t even be at Dollies. Because it’s against the law for Illinois residents to drink until they have reached 21.

Even though the strip club is very meticulous when it comes to underaged customers, this is no problem for Dirt. He’s with me, a published writer and the man with the digital camera who makes things happen.

A few days before the final day of my father’s life, Dirt and I had spent the night at Marriah’s Collinsville home. Marriah has a new roommate, Taylor. Who’s one of the best looking strippers working at Dollies. Both strippers are totally mesmerized my their new found ability to converse with people all over the world in our Lost Angels chat room. We spend hours chatting with our friends in the Lost Angels. All four of us drinking a lot of beer together. But Marriah and Taylor are both heroin addicts.

I’ve been doing a lot of heroin runs with Marriah. Which I think is a total waste of time. Dirt shares my disdain for heroin and all the other drugs a lot of the Dollies dancers are doing.

But both of us are willing to overlook the girls’ additions to heroin. We have a great time with them at Marriah’s house. While both strippers enjoy our company as well as we enjoy theirs. Dirt and I are content to have a few beers while chatting in the Lost Angels. And when the two women take their bathroom breaks together, we overlook their shooting up together in the bathroom.

Dirt and I notice virtually no changes in the two strippers when they emerge from Marriah’s bathroom. Their behavior has not changed. While both Marriah and Taylor eagerly rejoin our chat in the Lost Angels.

A week later, all four of us are looking forward to spending another night at Marriah’s drinking beer and chatting with our friends in the Lost Angels. But my father’s dying in Phoenix, Arizona.

I’ve visited him twice, flying all the way out from Saint Louis. And each time I expected to be with him at his death bed. But each time Dad’s had a partial recover. This time will be different, however. Because my sister’s and his girlfriend have all agreed to take him off his life support. Pneumonia has set it. And I am remembering how many years ago my dad had predicted that he would die from Pneumonia.

We are midway through our evening at Dollies when I check my phone messages. My nephew has left a message from my father’s hospital room. My father has just died.

Dirt and I have to abort our plans to spend the night with Marriah and Taylor. Immediately. So I tell the girls, “I need to drive Dirt all the way to Springfield, IL. And then I need to be calling my nephew and my sister’s from my farm.

My farm’s 75 miles from Dollies, but I must take Dirt back to his parent’s home in Springfield. Which means I must drive 100 miles and then drive another thirty miles from Springfield back to my farm.

The next morning, Marriah calls me. There’s been a heroin overdose death this morning at my house.

A few minutes later, Taylor calls me. Taylor’s voice is unsteady. “Marriah and I woke up this morning and found Marriah’s customer dead on her couch. His face was blue.”

Marriah had been counting on me for her ride home. And since she didn’t have a car, she had asked one of her customers to take her home from Dollies. It’s likely that both girls had gone back to Marriah’s house with the customer.

Now before anyone gets the wrong ideas about the customer’s heroin overdose, I want all of you to get a clear understanding of what Dollies was like back in those days and the social comradery that existed between a club’s best customers and its strippers.

I won’t deny that a lot of Saint Louis Metro East strippers had sex with their customers.

But I also want to impress upon all of you that a lot of people frequented the Saint Louis Metro East clubs for the social aspects. The clubs were fun. Managers and strippers were typically very outgoing fun people to be around.

A lot of girls ask me to take them home after their club closed. And took a lot of girls out to other clubs and bars after their club closed.

I remember very well an excellent example of the social comradery that existed with many of us. One of Dollies best customers was a tug boat captain. The man worked a thirty days on and thirty days off shift. I won’t forget his telling me, “I don’t have time for all those bars in Saint Louis. They are so boring. Here in the East Saint Louis strip clubs it’s never boring.”

That’s the way it was back then. But I can describe it all so much better in Life of an Exotic Entertainment Photographer. Because only then will you get a true sense of how it was having a vibrant social life that centered around strip clubs.

It’s likely that the Heroin Overdose Death of the customer occurred promptly. Marriah and Taylor needed a ride. They had been counting on Dirt and me.

As for the customer. I never met the guy, but I think he was from West County Saint Louis. And that he was a Middle Class guy with a few bucks. And that he was out for a lark. Driving two strippers home would have made his night. While getting to spend the night with two strippers would have given him a lot bragging rights with his West Country friends. At some point Marriah and Taylor would have started shooting up. And if the customer expressed any interest in heroin the two women would have been all too willing to accommodate.

I didn’t press either of the girls for any details. Because I was more concerned about my father’s death. But when the two strippers asked me if they could drive down to visit me at my farm, I readily agreed. Because I was helping two friends out.

Since neither woman had a car, one of Taylor’s customers drove them to my farmhouse. I had never met the man before. But all in all he seemed to be a pretty nice guy. And very normal to me. All of us had a couple of pizzas while drinking a few beers as we discussed Taylor’s and Marriah’s options.

This had not been the first Heroin overdose death Marriah had to deal with.

A previous husband had died from a heroin overdose. And Marriah was with him when he died. So Marriah was terrified at the prospect of having to deal with the police. And so was Taylor.

“I am going to get lost where I won’t be found for awhile,” Taylor told me. Bill here will let me stay with him until this thing blows over.”

“I want to stay with Jack. I will be fine here at his farm with him and his friends we will be chatting with in the Lost Angels,” Marriah replied.

“But Marriah, I think you should leave Jack alone. He has enough to do contending with his father’s death.”

Taylor left my farm with her customers. While Marriah stayed. I don’t remember how long. Whether it was for a single week or for as long as a month. But Doctor Doom soon joined us. Doc had moved out of Marriah’s house, thinking that Marriah was becoming too reckless and vocal concerning her addiction to heroin. So now I had two heroin addicts staying with me.

For three or four days I watched Doc and Marriah going through heroin withdrawal

But it was nothing like you will ever see in the movies. There was no kicking and screaming. I didn’t see any drama at all. I only observed two good friends getting sick. As if they were suffering from the flu.

By now it was getting pretty obvious that Marriah was not planning on ever going back to her house in Collinsville. So we rented a self drive U-Haul in Collinsville and left it for her two sons to deal with. A day or two latter one of her sons drove it to my farm full of clothing and furniture. We unloaded the U-haul next to my barn and stored all of her stuff inside.

Two or three weeks later, Marriah’s house burnt down. One can only guess whether this was intentional or not. I had to pay for the U-haul of course. But I will say this for Marriah. She paid every cent of it back to me. And now that I look back at my many experiences with many American strippers, I can’t remember a single one of them ever failing to pay back any money they ever borrowed from me.

In my latest book, Life of an Exotic Entertainment Photographer, I claim to be the first photographer to do digital photography in the strip clubs.

I hate to brag, but there’s never been a book like Life of an Exotic Entertainment Photographer. And there won’t be. And now in a new world of covid 19 we are likely to never experience the great comradery we had back then. You can now buy Life of an Exotic Entertainment Photographer at Jack Corbett books.