Would I say I felt safe at the Hop? I mean, it’s all relative, right? I’ve worked as a bartender at a topless dive. I’ve stripped in dirty basements. I’ve dealt drugs, the lighter stuff, mostly weed, a little coke. I’ve worked as a dominatrix in a cell beneath an Irish pub, and I’ve worked the streets before too. Stood on the corner of Main and Washington, shadiest fucking corner in town, and I eyed up passersby, hoping they’d at best ask my price and at worst ignore me completely. I was out there when the Long Island Killer was on the loose back in 2010, picking up girls who advertised themselves on Craigslist and then disposing of the bodies in burlap sacks. I was out there when girls started going from massage parlors in LA. We even did our own little investigation when three girls suddenly dipped from the Strip without a trace—we tracked their phones and found them all in a trash can behind a boarded-up Toys “R” Us, batteries still fully charged like they’d been dropped in there just a minute ago. We were running on pure adrenaline and turned up to the police station, panting and holding the phones with socks covering our hands because someone had said something about fingerprints. We were afraid of the cops but we thought we were saving lives so we got to the police station and said, “We found their phones.” And the cops just said, “Yeah.” That’s it, just “Yeah.” They shrugged, like, what did we want them to do about it?
If you’re asking if I felt safer at the Hop than out there, the answer’s yes. Out there, I had the cops called on me and I had men grab me and I had my purse nabbed and I had a gun pulled in my general direction and I had it lucky compared to most. The Hop might not’ve been what most people call safe, but it was safer, and that’s something.