"I have to whisper this in your ear because we’re not allowed to talk about it on the floor,” said Cassandra. “And after I explain it, we will refer to it as a number one and a number two.”
A “number one” was explained by Cassandra as your basic lap dance at 20 loonies—or Canadian dollars—a pop to have a naked lady dancing all up on you. The “number two,” on the other hand, was not your average strip club fare—and it just so happened to be on sale that night.
“A number two is when I take you into the Champagne room for a lap dance and the best blowjob of your life,” explained Cassandra. “I’ll give you a lap dance first, and then you have three songs to come. Since it is a slow night, I will give you one for $80, which is a very reasonable price.”
“No, no thanks,” I said, trying not to be rude as her hand grazed the inside of my leg. “I just sat down, and I’m on my first drink; maybe later.”
“Is the price too high? You can be honest with me. We can negotiate,” said Cassandra in her Eastern European accent. “I am very skilled when it comes to deep-throating. I bet you can’t last all three [songs].” She flashed a cigarette-stained smile and winked at me.
I’d been to Cristal Gentlemen’s Club and The Sundowner—popular strip clubs on Niagara Falls, Ontario’s Lundy Lane—several times before, but I’d never been solicited for any type of sex until that night. It is these types of conversations that allow strip clubs and massage parlors to fly under the radar as underground brothels in the tourist town that has become a mecca for all kinds of shady behavior.
Niagara Falls is situated across the Canadian border, only a half-hour drive for most students, less than 20 miles northwest of the University at Buffalo’s Amherst campus. With the legal drinking age set at 19, an abundance of strip clubs, and two major gambling joints just a stone’s throw from UB, it’s no wonder why the Ontario border town is such a draw for many UB students.
But what may begin as a night of partying in what seems like a lawless Canadian wonderland can sometimes leave students with more than a bad hangover the next morning. Whether the consequences are a night in a northern slammer or a just a tough lesson on life’s seedier side, if students aren’t careful, they can get more than they bargained for.
Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap
Cassandra, a stripper at Seductions Niagara Falls, was opening the door for me into the shady illegal underbelly of strip club prostitution. Canada’s prostitution laws are nothing if not confusing. Under section 213 of their criminal code, any act of prostitution that is solicited from a private place or residence and then carried out in a similar venue is not illegal. This means that you are able to call up an escort service and then proposition the escort for sex as long as you do it out of the public eye—like in a hotel room or your house—without fear of prosecution.
However, when a solicitation for sex is made in a public place—like in a strip club, massage parlor, or on a street corner—it then becomes a criminal offense. Similarly, any paid sex act that takes place in such a public venue is also illegal.
“We administer our law based on the communication,” said Sal Basilone, spokesman for the Niagara Regional Police. According to Basilone, one cannot be arrested unless an officer of the law overhears the exchange between the prostitute and their customer.
Arrests usually come at the hands of the Ontario Provincial Police, who follow up on rumors about prostitution in clubs and tips about suspected brothels. “Our morality unit goes in to investigate the situation,” said Basilone, who then explained that pending the outcome of the investigation, prosecution follows.
Basilone says that Seductions is not currently being watched by the authorities, but even so, the club was less than forthcoming in my attempts to contact them.
When I called Seductions, my questions went repeatedly unanswered and I was referred to different representatives of the club three times. When I was finally able to speak to the manager, I pressed him about the availability of oral sex in his establishment.
He asked me where my information had come from, and when I told him that several sources and I, myself, had been propositioned by a stripper he proceeded to hang up on me without responding. Further attempts to contact him have gone unanswered.
Border Line Insanity
But prostitution alone is not the only way for a college student to get themselves into a tight spot in Niagara Falls. For those who have frequented strip joints, it is well known that drinks—not blowjobs—are what gentlemen’s clubs usually push upon their patrons. In a town where the legal drinking age is a full two years younger than across the border, there is often an increased expectation for students to push themselves to their drinking limit.
Alex Brown, a 20-year-old junior media study major at UB, visits Niagara Falls a few times each semester because he cannot legally drink at bars in Buffalo. “If you’re younger and don’t belong to a frat or whatever, it’s really fun,” he said.
Last Halloween, at the age of 19, Brown narrowly escaped a public intoxication rap while drinking with his friends on Clifton Hill—the popular strip of bars that line the road which descends down into the Canadian side of the Falls.
Decked out in a skeleton costume replete with face paint and all, Brown bar-hopped all night, reveling in the holiday’s celebration. “I was drinking a lot,” Brown said.
Sometime after 2:30 a.m., the night began to catch up with him. “We were in Rumours and I wasn’t feeling too good.” He stepped outside and proceeded to get sick on the street. According to Brown, a group of police officers spotted him and attempted to put him in custody for public intoxication.
“I convinced one of the officers to let me go into the bar to go to the bathroom,” he said. He then says that he escaped through a window in the bathroom and made a run for it. “It was fucking freezing. We parked on the American side that night.”
According to Brown, he then proceeded to run clear across the footbridge and avoided American customs upon his re-entry to the country by hopping the fence. “I could have gotten in pretty big trouble if they had caught me,” he said.
Once he had made it across the border, the inebriated Brown remembered running away even farther. “I ran, stumbling, blacking out, by people’s houses,” he said. The rest of the night remains hazy for him, but his ordeal was not over.
“I woke up in this hotel room by myself,” he said of the next morning. Apparently, he had used a bank card in order to get a room. But he found himself without cash, his friends, or a ride home from the American Falls—a 25-minute drive from his dorm room on North Campus. He walked over a mile in the cold—still wearing his full costume and makeup, covered in mud—to get a calling card. Brown said that he then called a friend in Buffalo from a payphone and waited outside in the chilly fall weather for a ride home.
Matt McKenna, a junior history major at UB, also ran into alcohol-related problems in Niagara Falls when he and a few friends traveled to Niagara Falls all the way from his house in Rockland County to celebrate his twentieth birthday this past summer.
He started drinking immediately. “I don’t know why I drank so much before we left, I think I was thirsty from the drive,” he said. A female friend acted as the designated driver for him and rest of his friends, and before they even crossed the border, they were held up at customs. “Megan and I were the only white people [in the group],” he said, noting both their lack of passports and the extra scrutiny that minority students are often subjected to.
Once in Canada, the group continued to hit the bottle heavily. They ran the gamut of Clifton Hill bars, stopping at the often crowded Boston Pizza, The Daily Planet, and the laid back Wild Shroom—McKenna’s personal favorite.
By the time they stopped in a Wendy’s after the bars had closed, McKenna was so drunk that he threw up in the restroom, and he said that he slipped in his own vomit into the stall.
According to McKenna, as they were waiting to pass back through customs, he made an expletive laden comment to an elderly woman also crossing the border, and he was pulled aside by security.
“If I had been sober, I would have been, ‘whatever, sorry,’” explained McKenna, but instead, their car was briefly searched and they were once again held up at the border before they were allowed to enter back into the U.S.
Crossing the Line
Like Brown, McKenna was able to avoid any real consequences from authorities—not to mention the more dangerous effects of alcohol poisoning, of which their vomiting was a symptom—and as UB students, they were lucky.
UB’s rules and regulations allow for the Student Wide Judiciary (SWJ) to discipline UB students for off-campus infractions—even if the event happened in a different country and is already being handled by outside authorities.
The SWJ isn’t particularly vigilant in their prosecuting of Canadian violations, but still, the possibility exists and it does happen. “It depends on if we’ve received an official report,” said SWJ official Todd Camenash, “but we don’t go looking for it.”
Depending on the severity of the violation, the SWJ can hand down sanctions to the student that range from simple warnings to community service hours to expulsion from UB.
But sometimes the school’s punishment is the least of a student’s worries. Michael Stewart, a graduate student of history at UB, recalled a trip taken to Niagara Falls during his undergraduate years. His friend was pulled over while driving after not having committed any traffic violations whatsoever, according to Stewart.
“The officer just asked him if he was drinking,” he said. “My friend didn’t want to lie so he said, ‘yeah.’ Then the next thing we knew he was immediately arrested and taken in for a DWI. He wasn’t even given a breathalyzer.”
“They took him down to the station, took his ATM card, drained his bank account, didn’t give him a receipt, and then told him he was banned from Ontario as they set him free. It was really screwed up,” said Stewart.
In Canada, the “legal limit” at which you can drive is the same as in New York—a Blood Alcohol Content (BAC) of 0.08. Unlike in the U.S., though, it is up to the discretion of the police officer whether the driver is impaired with a BAC lower than the limit. According to the Canadian Department of Justice’s website, “A person can be convicted of the criminal offence of impaired driving when there is proof beyond a reasonable doubt of the person’s impairment. A person who is actually impaired by alcohol can be convicted of impaired driving, whether or not the person’s blood alcohol content was over the ‘legal limit.’”
According to the Niagara Regional Police’s Basilone, Stewart’s ordeal isn’t too out of the ordinary. Normally, when the person pulled over is Canadian and there is “reasonable expectation” that they will attend court, the person is released on what is called an OICPTA—officer in charge promise to appear.
However, if you are American, things might not work out so easily. “If geography doesn’t ensure that there will be attendance in court, or if they indicate that they won’t be attending court even if they are ordered to, more often than not they will be released on cash recognizance of $300 American or $500 Canadian,” said Basilone. “If they show up in court at their first appearance, then the money is returned or held in trust at the Crowns Office until the court matter is completed.”
‘Big Fun, Big Trouble’
Still, sometimes consequences can be measured in more than just dollar amounts and disciplinary action. For one UB senior organic chemistry major who wished to be identified only as Nicholas, a night out at Seductions will probably stay with him for the rest of his life.
“[The strippers] are extremely persuasive; I didn’t even really want mine. It was my birthday, and I was completely inebriated and taken advantage of because of that,” he said. “My friends set me up with a lap dance as soon as we got there, next thing you know we’re in the champagne room, and she is trying to sell me a blowjob. I’m just sitting there yelling out ‘no,’ shaking my head back and forth. Then after two songs arguing over it, I finally gave in.”
The stripper made Nicholas apply a condom to avoid disease, and then gave him the service she had promised. For him, it was an empty experience—anything but sexy.
Nicholas now sees the whole ordeal with a bit of an ironic distance. “I would never do it again, but it was so funny,” he said. “She kept stopping to tell me to hurry up and come. I could not help but laugh every time she asked. It was just so ridiculous.”
As I sat there at Seductions, being propositioned by Cassandra, I realized that I would never want the blowjob—legal or not. What may have seemed like a good time in theory would have just made me feel dirty. Condom or no condom, I would have felt like I had gotten something that I couldn’t get rid of.
People see going to Canada like going up into the Wild Wild North. Just like decades of teenagers crossing over into Tijuana, Mexico, they think of Niagara Falls as a lawless underage drinking sanctuary where your mistakes will never haunt you.
But in this new post-9/11 world of homeland security and terrorism-sensitive border patrol, what were once considered laughable youthful indiscretions can now carry serious consequences.
The friendly border between America and Canada is one of the easiest in the world to cross. We can hop back and forth within a couple hours without so much as a passport. As students, we often take advantage of this without even recognizing it as the privilege it is.
Sometimes it is hard to remember in all of the mayhem that can be had in Niagara Falls that it is a real place, with real rules.
Whether it’s the risk of permanent banishment from Canada that graduate student Michael Stewart’s friend faced or simply the act of waking up the next morning with a feeling worse than just a hangover, it’s best to remember that actions have consequences.
Because if you ever have to pray that “what happens in Ontario, stays in Ontario” you might just learn another lesson: with big fun can come big trouble.
