When we closed up shop for the night, we'd head way down Bourbon Street to Lucky Pierre's, a strange old place that used to be a whorehouse (and later burned to the ground). We neophytes could only nod dumbly and hope to aspire. Bunny Hellene, an old pro held up as our shining example of poise, grace and earning power, made $15,000 a year, according to Paige, the Bunny Mother. My first year I made $10,700, not bad back then for a kid just out of high school. We declared pennies on the dollar in tips. "Girl, you are getting fat!" Jade would laugh. Later, she began to put on a rather alarming amount of weight, and Viola, the wardrobe mistress, had to keep letting out her costumes. She'd bend over in her blood-red satin costume to take her shot and her enormous olive-skinned breasts would nearly flood onto the green felt, leaving her opponents in a state of slack-jawed wonder. A total Filipino babe with almond eyes and cascades of wild black hair, she was spared the horrors of waiting tables and got to play bumper pool all night long in the Playmate Bar. Sonny packed heat.īunny Jade was the Pool Bunny, as in bumper, not splashing. There were strict rules about not wearing jewelry "on the floor," but Geri's gasp-inducing diamond bracelet always peeked from beneath her Bunny cuffs, and no one said a word. There was sad-eyed Wanda, the Gift Shop Bunny, whose name tag said "Un" because she was the Un-Bunny, and Geri the Door Bunny, outrageously beautiful, astonishingly dumb, whose boyfriend Sonny was a scary mobster. I was starry-eyed and thought I'd hit the big time. They had no illusions about what the job was: glorified cocktail waitressing in a birdcage costume, satin ears and killer shoes. I found out later that they called me "HG" behind my back, for "homegrown." Most everyone else was local, working class, with that heavy Yat accent. There were 28 of us girls at the New Orleans Playboy Club, and we were girls, not women, make no mistake. Our room was $70 a month, with hot plate, mattress on the linoleum floor, skeleton keys to open any door in the spooky old ancient house. You tend to be, at 19, as long as your luck holds. This neighborhood was a bad place to be at high noon, much less after midnight, for a white girl alone. I'd get off work at 2 in the morning and take the streetcar up to Jackson Avenue and walk three blocks north to the room I rented with another Bunny, a girl who'd drifted down from Little Rock, Ark. Phone calls were a nickel and the streetcar was 15 cents. Across the street was the Acme Oyster House, where I wolfed down drippy roast beef po' boys for months until a light bulb went off and I ordered one with oysters. The Playboy Club was on Iberville, in the French Quarter, an old carriage house tucked between Felix's Oyster Bar and Moran's Restaurant. I would marry a cop of easy virtue, pose nude in Hef's magazine, appear in some of the worst movies ever made and lie on the AstroTurf floor of the Superdome with former football star Paul Hornung, wondering why he had such bad cigarette breath. By the time I escaped its humid clutches, the Big Easy would fill me up and wring me dry. I didn't know it yet, but I would spend the next seven years in the City That Care Forgot. I was 19, with big, proud titties suitable for framing, and wearing enough Maybelline to sink a barge in the Industrial Canal. 12, 1973, with $34 in my pocket and the promise of a job as a Bunny at the New Orleans Playboy Club. I stepped off the Braniff flight from Tulsa, Okla., at Moisant Field on Jan.
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