I
don’t have eight years to make sense of secondary effects, so I do what
any potential home buyer in Coates would do: I research the turf. Two
faxes deliver great clarity: First, according to Gloria Pinke at the
Dakota County Assessing Services, the total estimated market value of
properties in Coates has gone from roughly $5 million in 1990 to $10
million in 2000 to a projected $14 million in 2004. Second, according
to numbers compiled by Chief Deputy Dave Bellows of the Dakota County
Sheriff’s Department, they received double the calls in 2000 to Coates
Corner gas station than to Jake’s strip club.
“I was the largest
employer in town,” Rich says. “I increased property values, tripled
taxes since I was there. I’m just trying to help them out, I think. I
bring them industry, business. I think it’s an asset, really. I’m doing
them a big favor. I put those fuckers in Coates on the map. I gave it
character. It didn’t have any before. Just one little incest-filled
little puke of a suburb. I brought heterosexuals to town.”
Rich
doesn’t scare me anymore. I see now that once you get used to his
furtive inflammatories and threats, it’s what he’s saying that matters.
He says what he thinks, none of the “Minnesota Nice” rhetoric that I
encountered at the House of Coates, where patron after patron denied
comment, or whispered off record that they believe in the principle of
“live and let live.” Where an older man inched away from me saying, “I
had no bimbles about it then, and I don’t have any now it’s gone.”
Where one woman made sure my tape recorder was tucked back in my purse
before she said in a top-secret voice, “Listen, I’ll tell you this:
It’s a floozy operation. And who, pray tell, wants that kinda thing in
their town?”
A young woman who works at the store won’t give her
name because after her mother was interviewed on the news, “the whole
town called and reamed her a new one, and all she said was that if you
raise your kids right, it shouldn’t matter if there’s a strip club in
your town.” Her co-worker, Sarah Hosten, is the only one in town who
will go on record—perhaps because she doesn’t live in Coates central.
“Personally, if Jake’s was a Muslim church and I didn’t like it, I’d
just turn my head and look away. It’s a free country.” What bothers her
most is how expensive the battle was, costing nearly $400,000 in legal
fees, draining the city coffers, and raising taxes.
“It’s nuts
how much money they spent. I guess it was worth it to get them out of
town, but it could have been used for a lot of things in Coates. We
don’t have our own water or sewer or police or library or even a town
hall. The council meets at St. Agatha’s church. And also, we’ve got a
lot of kids here and if they’re so concerned about children and what
goes on in Jake’s, why don’t they build the kids a park? They could
have gotten us an ambulance.”
Few in Coates know that Rich
offered to settle the lawsuit and pay a daily fine of $110 for
operating in violation of the ordinance, which would have matched the
city budget and allowed them to eliminate property taxes for all
homeowners and businesses in the city. But the city council wouldn’t
even take a vote on it. What everyone in Coates—strip-club owner,
dancers, managers, attorneys, locals, council people, and mayor—seem to
have overlooked in their 11-year war was the more readily provable
negative secondary effects that come from living two miles south of the
Koch Refinery, now called Flint Hills Resources, which is one of the
nation’s largest refineries. In recent years, Koch has had to pay some
$19 million in fines and $80 million in air pollution control equipment
for problems involving air, water, solid, and hazardous wastes.
Nearby
resident Myron Napper, one of the closest neighbors to the refinery who
lost his wife to cancer, doesn’t care much about Jake’s when, as he
explains, every other house has someone who has asthma or has died of
cancer. “This valley is nothing but blue smoke. In a five-mile radius,
there are more than fifty industries and every one of them is a kind of
polluter. Pressure from the city of Coates would help… we need wells to
be capped, mercury to be tested, and some emergency system to notify
residents in real-time if our windows need to be shut or if we should
evacuate.”
A patron at Class Act in Cannon Falls who used to
frequent Jake’s on his trucking route puts a point on it: “Listen,
pussies don’t pollute. Ya ain’t gonna die from lookin’ at one,” he
says. “It seems like Coates got their priorities all screwy. But maybe
it’s easier to fight something small when you got that big rich
refinery there. No way in hell could they take on that battle. Besides,
Koch gives more jobs than Jake’s did.”
The metaphor is
instructive: Rich Jacobsen blows into town with his moral pollution,
threatens public health and welfare, makes people sick. The pink
skin-factory is shut down, the town vindicated, and the toxic cloud
overhead continues to pass as innocent sky.
Rich, however, won’t
dissipate that easily. In fact, only 50 days after Jake’s closed, he
opened up Fat Jack’s in Bock, a town that’s the mirror of Coates, north
of the Twin Cities. So why bother with another conservative small town?
While generally stable industries have suffered economic downturn,
adult entertainment has remained one of the most sustainable industries
around. Satellite and cable companies have found that even under the
public pressure of censorship, the more explicit their offerings, the
more their market grows. Rich follows the principal tenet of supply and
demand: If it’s harder to get something, you will pay more for it.
Although
Dakota County Attorney Jim Backstrom sees a trend of strip club owners
moving to the country to prey on small towns who don’t have the
ordinances in place, Randall Tigue isn’t so sure that there is a
ruralization of adult entertainment underway in Minnesota. “My clients
tell me that from an economic standpoint, the more religious and
conservative a community is, the more money there is to be made there.
Why so much litigation comes out of Southern Bible-belt states is
because adult entertainment does real well there. People who are
subjected to repressive negative religious attitudes toward sex in
large measure don’t really believe them and don’t really practice them.
When straight-laced organizations like the Lions Club had its national
convention here, business from adult facilities skyrocketed.”
Up
in Bock, a city of 106 with two main streets forming a T, the town
meeting is a mini-replica of the U.N. in recent months: a city council
resisting all they can with sanctions and inspections (they quickly
established a moratorium against the proliferation of more adult
businesses, and took a long look at Rich’s business history), but boxed
in by previous resolutions (Fat Jack’s opened as a sports bar). War
appears imminent in the strained, tired faces of the council members,
who are divided in support. Rich’s attorneys say they are just an inch
away from legal battle. It seems the council knows that Rich has the
money and the will to go all the way, that he won’t leave his mission
uncompleted like the first time around. They may have heard about the
load of pennies that allegedly cracked the axle of the mayor’s truck in
Coates, the dead cat, the building painted Pepto-Bismol pink in
defiance. They may have heard about the $400,000 in court costs—an
attention-getter, considering there may be a few other things in their
town that demand fiscal consideration. They certainly are considering
how they want to spend the next 11 years of their lives.
Tonight,
though, Bock appears to have little in common with Coates. A signed
petition from 300 men and women is presented to the council in favor of
Fat Jack’s getting its liquor license restored. I can’t see Rich’s face
from the back of the room, but I know he is doing everything to
suppress a smile: For once, the community is mad and it’s not at him.
If the city continues to disallow Fat Jack’s from serving booze, it
will immediately become a juice bar, serving to 18 and older tomorrow.
Local bar owners are furious at the liability and headache this will
cause them, and locals don’t want their kids at the club or other wild
teens attracted from out of town.
“I want you to accept this
tonight,” says local bar owner Laura Bekius, “because I don’t want to
operate my business with 18-year-olds in town. With them around, I’m
going to need cops in town all the time. I’ve been in this business for
19 years and I know what 18 to 20-year-olds do: They will have their
alcohol in the trunks of their cars and when they get into an accident
after they’ve been in Bock, who will get blamed? Roy’s. Or my Kountry
Kettle, and I’m not willing to go to a lawsuit because an 18-year-old
has been to the strip joint in this town.”
The county clerk,
Linda Sjolberg, stops typing and speaks up. She’s visibly upset. “The
original liquor license was granted to them under false premises. The
fact that the city was told they were going to be a sport’s bar, not a
strip club, and they flew it in under the wire.”
The room
explodes for a moment, and then the mayor, Margaret Girard, asks Rich
if he’s willing to follow their ordinance of no nudity with alcohol if
they grant the liquor license—will he, in essence, keep the private
parts private. Rich mumbles no, and his attorney jumps in. “We can get
into a pissing match if we all want to. He has said that he won’t abide
by that ordinance. And if it’s going to be a costly lawsuit, then
that’s the way it’s going to go.”
The mayor asks Rich for a statement of why they should grant him liquor.
“I
believe we’re responsible business owners. We won’t create any trouble
for you. If you need help putting together any ordinances, I can help
you.” He restates an offer he made at a previous council meeting to
give them $12,000 a year or $1,000 a month. “You can spend it however
you want. I don’t want to spend your money. I want to give it to you.”