Deer-hunting season 'huge' for strip club sales

John Carlisle | Detroit Free Press

ROCK, Mich. — You can tell it’s deer-hunting season in the Upper Peninsula. Big sacks of deer bait are stacked outside gas stations. Hunters' orange hats and jackets are piled high on store shelves.

And strippers are flocking to the woods.

During Michigan’s two-week firearm deer season from Nov. 15-30, it’s not just the restaurants, bars and stores that look forward to the influx of hunters and the extra income they bring. At the only strip club in the Upper Peninsula, hunting season is like Christmas.

“We probably do 20 to 30% of our business during firearm deer season,” said Lisa Storti, the 54-year-old owner of Big Bon’s in Rock, a roadhouse-style bar along a desolate highway in the Upper Peninsula wilderness. “We are right in deer-hunting territory. This is where people’s camps are. And hunting season is huge for us.”

Big Bon’s is pure Upper Peninsula. The walls are fake wood paneling. The stage is made of plywood. The VIP rooms each have a well-worn easy chair inside. They don’t have a liquor license anymore, so the only thing the bartender serves is cans of pop.

The place is often open until 5 or 6 in the morning, until the last dance is given and the last dollar’s spent. And the dress code among the customer is often camouflage and flannel.

Yet deer season is so lucrative at this backwoods club that strippers from across the country flock here, to a place so remote that cell phones can’t get a signal.

“I’ve heard that it’s insanely awesome. I’m so excited,” said Ariel, a 19-year-old dairy farmer who came in from Wisconsin just for hunting season. She’d never danced before, she said. Yet she’d already made around $800 on a few good nights after a short time here.

“I’m hoping to buy a car,” she said.

Big Bon's is here for them

There are a lot of men in the small towns of the Upper Peninsula who don’t run into women very often. And when rifle season and its visiting hunters are gone, Big Bon’s is here for them.

“Lots of guys who come here are lonely, lots of them,” Storti said. “They literally live in the middle of the woods. Even if they might go to another bar they might socially not be able to talk right or they just get awkward or they haven’t dated in 100 years. Here they get female companionship in an environment where they know the girls will talk to them.”

The dancers say they are providing a needed service.

“Bonnie explained it to us as ‘the girlfriend experience,’ ” said Raven, 26, who grew up in Gladstone. She travels the country to work in clubs as far away as New Orleans. But she came home to Big Bon’s, her first job, for hunting season.

“What they want is a beautiful girl that they pay to give them attention, to sit and listen to their problems, to give them advice, to be there and just be kind of a therapist. They get all the good girlfriend stuff without all the whining and griping,” she said.

They're visited by a lot of lonely regulars. There was the customer who had Lou Gehrig’s disease, whose condition deteriorated so much he couldn’t speak. He still came to the bar. “He’d write on paper and us dancers would sit and write with him,” Raven said.

And there's the widower. “His wife died a few years ago and that’s when he started coming here,” Storti said. “He’s lonely. He’s paid girls to go in the Champagne Room and just sit on the couch and talk.’”

And there was Rudy, a man in his 80s who liked to bring pizza for the dancers. “I cried my heart out when I found out Rudy passed away,” Raven said.

That feeling of family, the dancers say, keeps them coming back to work here, even after they’ve left for bigger stages.

“It’s comfortable,” said Abby Londo, 27, a former adult entertainer who now manages the dancers at Big Bon’s. She came in from Florida to work this year’s hunting season at the strip club where she began.

“It’s just a lot more friendly than other places," she said. "It’s more country and homey.”

Keeping a promise

As night buried the landscape in deep darkness on a recent evening, the hunters started pouring into the bar.

First a guy with a long beard. Then a guy in hunter’s camouflage. Then a bearded guy wearing camo. And so on through the night.

They sat in the love seats and hard chairs surrounding the small stage as one dancer after another worked the pole.

“The first time I was brought out here I went to a hunting camp, and they dragged me out here kicking and screaming,” said John Dunn, 32, of Marquette, who's a forklift operator at a nearby sawmill. “I was like, I don’t want to go to ‘the Upper Peninsula's only strip club.’ But I’ve been coming back.”

So has Kory Luke, 26, a cement worker from Gwinn. “You go down the highway and you look at it and it’s a little hole in the wall. You think it’s a bunch of ugly, hick girls or whatever. But you come in here, there’s some gorgeous women that actually know what they’re doing.”

He stood outside where about a dozen guys had gathered, taking a break from the entertainment. They may or may not have been drinking beverages they bought at the liquor store next door. Most smoked cigarettes. A few talked about a parking lot brawl last week.

In the morning they’d all be back in their deer blinds alone; by night they’d be ready to come back to this unlikely strip club in the middle of the woods.

And Big Bon’s will be ready for them.

“I made my aunt a promise,” said Storti, explaining why she works so hard to keep it going. “My aunt thought of this as her legacy that she was leaving. This is the last strip club, and she’s leaving this to the Upper Peninsula. That was her thing to always be here. She felt that men need it.”