When Tex "Stinky" Reeves was mangled to death by a construction crane in 1974, his son Biff "Smelly" Reeves, a yoga instructor and heroin addict, inherited the business. Through a series of what he called "costly business decisions," i.e., the repeated decision to buy heroin with money which should have been spent on payroll, supplies, and taxes, Biff nearly drove Stinky's into the ground. Because of his widespread reputation as a "smackhog," the sort of women who gravitated to Stinky's were, to be kind, Ladies of the Lower Orders. Only the most desperate, over-the-hill, unemployable sort of erotic dancers dared apply at Stinky's. Because of this, Stinky's revenues declined for years. The high rollers went elsewhere, replaced by a brooding, shiftless clientele mainly composed of junkyard workers, incontinent old men, and homosexual serial-killing teams.

Things looked grim for the club until one morning late in 1998 when Biff "Smelly" Reeves, walking through some grasslands near Stinky's, was pecked to death by a flock of hostile pelicans. But what may have been a personal tragedy for the Reeves family turned into a business boon for the club.

When Biff's son, Rick "Stank-Ass" Reeves, acquired Stinky's, no one had much hope for the club's future. With fourteen felony convictions for drug
possession by the time he turned twenty-one, Stank-Ass seemed cut from the same cloth as his father Smelly.

But as the legend has it, while Stank-Ass sat alone in Stinky's late one night after closing time, "zonked out of my gourd from smoking Mexican tar all night," a vision of his grandfather Stinky Reeves appeared to him. "He just walked right up to me at my barstool," Stank-Ass told a reporter for The Portland Tribune, "kind of like with ghosts in the movies, where you can sorta half-see through them, and he put his hand on my shoulder. He said to me,
'My boy, you've got some really ugly women here. Make it work for you.' And then he was gone. And then I started writing my business plan: get the ugliest chicks you can find; sell beer at cost; fill the bar with yahoos who get so drunk on cheap beer, they think it's some kind of conceptual hipster fun to throw tens and twenties at ugly women to get dressed; and then charge the dancers FIFTY PERCENT of their tips off the top in order to compensate for the loss I take on beer and overhead. So far, it's been a fucking goldmine. I haven't even had to kick heroin, and I'm still making a profit!"

Yeah, Stank-Ass, but you're also providing a service. As I leave Stinky's, I realize I've spent only three dollars on beer and am plastered beyond the ability to speak. I've also spent about twenty dollars on the "unstrippers," but I had a good time doing it. As I drive home swerving between lanes, I realize that for at least another day, I don't want to kill anyone.