Party Cove Pimps

 

Gangsta rap thumps from the speakers as the 16-year-old in the yellow bikini steps up to the stripper pole. She’s standing about 10 feet from me, on the front deck of a two-story, 40-foot-long houseboat. In every direction, boats tie together in what’s known as “The Gauntlet,” a floating party rippling across the dirty bathwater of the Lake of the Ozarks’ Party Cove.

A woman who just dismounted the pole settles dizzily into a chair. “You should totally go for it,” she says in encouragement to the girl.

The boat we’re standing on has no name. The owner has sunk so many boats that he no longer names them. But it’s known by reputation as the headquarters of PC Ventures, the biggest porn purveyors in Party Cove. Marc Hinrichs and Kevin Barber own the company. Hinrichs films Party Cove’s nakedness and broad-daylight sex. Barber then posts pictures and video teasers on PartyCoveXXX.com.

Barber’s cousin is the girl on the stripper pole. She’s in town from Alaska. She looks at Barber, as if asking permission.

“Turns out she’s a partier,” says Barber, who’s from Gardner, Kansas. He wears Oakley sunglasses and board shorts. A tuft of chest hair points down at his white stomach. The 28-year-old nods approvingly and steps back to give his cousin room to dance.

A growing crowd of guys circle like sharks. There’s a shirtless bouncer on our boat with strict instructions to enforce a favorable girl-to-guy ratio, so most of the men bob in the murky water and swarm on boats nearby. Beyond them, the tree-lined hillsides envelop the scene like a bucolic amphitheater.

Hinrichs sprawls on a bench upstairs on the top level of the houseboat. The 32-year-old has short hair and a goatee. A firm beer gut tanned the color of maple syrup augments his lanky frame. As usual, he wears just yellow swim trunks with a smiley face on the butt.

He’s surrounded by a dozen or so dancing sorority types who have tied their boat up next to his. He hasn’t had much luck getting them naked yet, in part because he creeped them out earlier when they asked him to take a group picture and he tried to get them to smile by yelling, “Think 12-inch cock!”

The 16-year-old thrusts her crotch toward the big rod and slides down to the worn carpet below. She moves fast, like a child afraid of getting caught doing something naughty. Cheers erupt from the sharks.

Barber turns his attention to a curvaceous redhead in a G-string bathing suit. He slathers shaving cream on her shoulders and arms. The red bombshell arches her back and pulls down the back of her bikini as the white foam runs down her ass.

Hinrichs catches the action from above. He likes to get his partner in the shots sometimes because Barber is married. “Every once in a while, I like to put one in of him. I’ll send him a batch of files … and see if he catches it.” He chuckles before taking a swig of Miller Lite.

I have 18 hours left to go with the guys who make their living off Party Cove’s debauchery. It’s 4 p.m., and the party is just cranking up.

Hinrichs aims his camera at the woman covered in shaving cream. That’s when he spots a serious buzz kill coming his way.

From about five boats away, a guy wearing red board shorts and covered in tattoos vaults across the line of boats like he’s hopping lily pads. His name is Paul, and he’s built like a kung-fu fighter. He’s ranting incoherently, something about exploitation of minors. And he’s charging straight toward Barber.

♦

Fuck you, man. She’s 16 years old,” Paul shouts as he jumps onto the houseboat. Barber scampers onto a floating dock tied to the houseboat. Barber raises his hands in surrender, but Paul grabs him by the shoulders and slams him hard against a two-story houseboat named Uninvited Guest.

From upstairs, Hinrichs looks down pityingly on Barber. “Shit. I knew this was going to happen,” Hinrichs says. “I knew Kevin bringing a 16-year-old out here was trouble.”

That’s not the only reason that Paul is pissed. Turns out, Paul’s wife was the one getting lathered with shaving cream by Barber. And Hinrichs confesses that their dispute goes back: Paul’s wife appears in a DVD that Hinrichs and Barber sell called Party Naked Videos No. 8.

“You take advantage of people, that’s all you do!” Paul screams.

Barber crosses his arms defensively across his chest. He shakes his head.

Less than an hour earlier, Hinrichs had put an arm around Barber and asked him to be the best man in his wedding, which is scheduled for September 16. “You’re the one I can count on when shit goes down,” Hinrichs told him. The wedding party will be composed primarily of Hinrichs’ surrogate family of Cove revelers. The woman who tried to twirl on the pole before Barber’s cousin — we’ll call her Party Girl — will be a bridesmaid. Party Girl takes credit for introducing Hinrichs to his fiancée. And walking Hinrichs’ fiancée down the aisle will be a trucker from St. Louis who goes by the name Pa Party Cove. (His wife is affectionately known as Ma Party Cove, and like many of their good-time peers, they don’t want their real names associated with the Cove.)

Hinrichs and Barber formed their alliance nearly a decade ago. Hinrichs grew up in Lee’s Summit and began cruising Party Cove as a teenager while on family vacations. He says he earned a degree in industrial safety from Central Missouri State University. Instead of using his degree, he worked for a moving company and as a substitute teacher. He essentially dropped out of the workforce when he discovered that he could shuttle partiers to the Cove in exchange for gas money and cigarettes. After his divorce in 1998, Hinrichs began staging hot-body competitions at the Cove. In 2001, he added the Web site. He says profits have allowed him to buy a home near the lake that he will soon use as a base of operations. He’s now known to Party Cove regulars as Mr. Happy, in part for wearing a G-string with a smiley face on the bulge and in part for his tolerance. He has since outgrown the suit, but he claims that he can still drink 80 beers a day.

Barber, meanwhile, had dropped out of the University of Kansas when he met Hinrichs at a dinner party hosted by Barber’s future in-laws, longtime Covers who’d grown tight with Mr. Happy. Barber, who designs Web sites primarily for boat and motorcycle companies, now posts pictures for Hinrichs. They claim to post about 3,000 photos a year from Party Cove on their Web site.

After watching the confrontation from his perch on top of the houseboat, Hinrichs finally moves to intervene. He hands his camera to someone in the growing gallery of onlookers from nearby boats. The crowd yells for Paul to let up. Hinrichs’ fiancée and Party Girl stand among them, looking shocked.

Hinrichs approaches, holding a beer bottle like a police baton. It’s sheathed in a company coozie that reads “We may not go down in history, but we will go down on your girlfriend.” Afraid the fight could escalate, his fiancée rushes up and takes the bottle from him.

“What’s going on, Paul?” Hinrichs asks calmly.

Paul releases Barber and turns to Hinrichs. Paul raises the middle fingers of both hands and shakes them furiously. “I’m sick of you. I’m sick of your fucking Web site! That’s someone’s cousin, someone’s daughter, someone’s sister!”

He charges Hinrichs, but a man in a cowboy hat steps between them.

Hinrichs shouts that he doesn’t film people without their permission. He says he gets waivers and documentation that the women are at least 18.

“Fuck you, man. You don’t ask. You never ask!” Paul pushes past the man in the cowboy hat. He kicks Hinrichs in the groin.

“Ahhh!” Hinrichs yells.

Paul punches Mr. Happy in the chest.

“Ahhh!” Hinrichs yells again as he doubles over.

“You never ask! I’m sick of you and this shit. You just do something like this and you’re going to ruin it for everybody!”

Paul turns back toward Barber, but Barber’s 16-year-old cousin stands in the way. Barber takes a couple of steps back, keeping his cousin between them.

Finally, Paul bounds back over The Gauntlet toward his own boat. Along the way, he kicks a deck chair off the houseboat.

The fight has unnerved Barber. He turns to shake my hand. “I’m taking off,” he says. “Welcome to Party Cove.”

Someone in the water hands the broken deck chair up to Hinrichs. He sits down on it, ignoring that it’s wet and tilted.

“He’s just drunk,” says Ma Party Cove, who stands near Hinrichs. “Everybody’s drunk. He didn’t mean anything by it.” She moves to console Hinrichs’ fiancée, who sits cross-legged on the deck where the fight broke out, sipping a drink.

“I can’t believe he would say those things about us,” Hinrichs’ fiancée says. She sobs uncontrollably.

“Well, he was going to be a groomsman in my wedding,” Hinrichs says to no one in particular. A sheltie from another boat urinates on Hinrichs’ outdoor carpet.

“Hey, fucker, I saw that,” he says.

♦

Hinrichs puffs on a cigar. His camera hangs limply around his neck. He’s losing daylight as he scans the water for some last-minute nudity. A series of soft-core scenarios plays out in front of him. A woman shakes her rump provocatively on the back of a speedboat. A guy strokes an inflatable raft shaped like a penis, keeping it at groin level. But everyone in sight along The Gauntlet remains dressed.

Today will be a bust if Hinrichs can’t get more pictures. He needs to store them up so that he has enough shots to spread out through the winter. Hinrichs says about 600 customers pay a $10 monthly charge to see regularly updated Party Cove pictures and peruse an archive of more than 18,000 snapshots. The photos are graphic: women going down on each other on the front of a speedboat, a guy getting a blow job in broad daylight, women stripping. Hinrichs also produces Girls Gone Wild-type videos. He has released 15 of them. He says they generate a few thousand dollars a month.

Two years ago, Hinrichs expanded his business with floating concession stands. Today his pilots scour The Gauntlet in two pontoon boats to sell hamburgers, cigarettes, beer bongs, Mardi Gras beads and shorts with the words “Party Cove” across the cheeks. One pilot, who works as a plumber during the week, hawks wares to the partiers with cries of “hot pants!”

On the horizon, Hinrichs sights a pair of nude figures on the back of a houseboat. Jackpot. He shifts his beer and cigar into one hand. As he readies his camera, a half-dozen men nearby look in the same direction. They’ve learned to use Hinrichs like a porn barometer. A few boats over, Paul raises his video camera. On a yacht, a guy in orange board shorts whips out his camera.

Hinrichs stands over Party Girl, who has passed out in a nearby chair with her feet up on the stripper pole. Less than an hour earlier, she had given Hinrichs a lap dance.

Hinrichs zooms in on the fresh meat, reducing the few hundred yards between boats until he’s nearly on top of two brunettes with hourglass figures. They appear oblivious to his surveillance.

“It looks like I’m standing on the back of their shrimp deck,” he says. The rapid-fire feature on his Sony Cyber Shot catches every stage of the action: The women jump off the second story of their houseboat, swim to the back of a small speedboat and dive off that, too. They pull themselves back up on the houseboat and lie down together. Then they begin to make out. Hinrichs nails the money shot.

A yacht cruises slowly between the line of boats in The Gauntlet with a blonde on the deck. “Heyyyy,” she shouts to Paul and his wife. The blonde reaches to lift up her top but then stops. She yells across the water that she wants to make a trade. Her terms: a flash for a flash. She points at her boobs then at Paul’s wife. She nods in agreement.

“Woohoo,” the blonde yells, oblivious to Hinrichs’ camera. Hinrichs knows that shooting her will require him to aim toward Paul and his wife.

Paul hoots as both his wife and the young woman lift their tops. But the transaction occurs too fast, and Hinrichs misses the shot.

He keeps his camera trained on the yacht, waiting. A man emerges from the yacht’s cabin, cheers and rushes toward the edge of the boat. Hinrichs zooms in. He’s learned to wait for a chain reaction of nudity. The man turns, sets his feet apart, butt toward Hinrichs, and drops his swimsuit.

“Great,” Hinrichs says as the man hoots and raises his fist in a devil sign. It’s rare to get shots of naked guys, Hinrichs explains, but they draw the most hits.

As night approaches, most of the boats in The Gauntlet head toward the lakefront bars. There’s a long channel that leads from Party Cove to the main section of the lake, and Hinrichs spots the flashing lights of a Missouri Water Patrol boat blinking in the distance. Tonight alone, the patrol will charge 30 people leaving the safety of the Cove with drunken boating. Remembering his own DWI arrest in 1997, Hinrichs decides to stay put for the night.

After a trip to the refrigerator, Hinrichs estimates that there may be enough liquor to make it through the night, but it will be close. He’s more than halfway through his day’s provisions: three cases of beer, four six-packs of wine cooler-type drinks and a bottle of white wine.

Suddenly, the speakers pumping out a constant mix of party tunes cut out. “You blowing it?” Pa Party Cove shouts from aboard his speedboat parked beside the barge. They’ve short-circuited again, and Hinrichs will need to flip the breaker switch. “It’s telling you that there’s just a few boats left, and you should turn it off,” Pa adds.

But Hinrichs fixes the tunes, and the speakers crackle back to life, pumping Avenue D’s “Do I Look Like a Slut?” Hinrichs sings along, mimicking the female singers and nailing every word: I saw Mikey on the street yesterday, and do you know what he called me? He called me a slut.

A pilot from Uninvited Guest approaches and tells Hinrichs that he better be ready to leave early in the morning. Hinrichs built the boxcar-shaped houseboat himself. It can’t handle waves kicked up by the winds on the lake, let alone the wakes of the boats that will be heading into Party Cove in the morning. But Hinrichs sings over the warning.

I’m not a fuckin’ slut, you fucking cocksucker. Your mom’s the one letting everyone fuck her.

During a break in the music, he shouts as the pilot heads out: “It’s not your world. It’s my world, and you’re leaving it.”

After dark, the private party begins. Ma Party Cove paces back and forth in front of the stripper pole. She keeps repeating excitedly that she wants to play “The Game.”

The Cove has become a floating trailer park, filled with a few houseboats and dimly lighted vessels the size of double-wides. The only boats still strapped together are the houseboat, one of the concession-stand pontoon boats and Ma and Pa Party Cove’s speedboat. A chain of Christmas lights circling the top deck illuminates the makeshift dance floor.

Ma Party Cove and Hinrichs have spent the past few hours trying to outdrink each other. The trash talk devolves.

“You’re going down.”

“No, you’re going down.”

“Fuck you! You’re going down!”

Party Girl has awakened. She briefly drinks soda, then switches back to beer. Pa Party Cove stares quietly at his wife. Hinrichs finally figures out his deck chair is broken, and he tosses it back in the lake. He grumbles something about the fact that Paul never apologized. His fiancée stares gloomily at the water.

“Let’s play The Game,” Ma whines again. But she seems uncomfortable doing it in front of a reporter.

I say I don’t mind if they play.

Ma turns toward me. She looks older than 50, with leathery skin and frazzled, shoulder-length brown hair. She’s topless, and her breasts sag toward her stretched-out bikini bottom. A rose tattoo wilts on one breast.

“It’s special,” she coos seductively. “You wanna play The Game?”

“Um, I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t think so. What are you going to do?”

“Oh, you’re scaring him,” says one of the women in the darkness.

A square patch of light from the cabin falls across the center of the deck. Ma smiles and steps toward me.

“It’s a surprise. A good surprise,” she says. She grabs the stripper pole with one hand and pushes her butt out behind her. “You don’t have to do anything. Just lean up against the pole.”

“Look, man, there’s nothing to be scared of,” Hinrichs says. “Come on, she likes to do this. She’s not going to do anything you don’t want to do.”

He leans against the pole, pressing his hands up against the low-slung ceiling.

“Just stand here like this,” he says. “She’s not going to jerk you off or blow you or have sex with you or anything like that. It just feels good. We all have girlfriends and wives. And she’s never touched me or blown me or made me have sex with her, right?”

Everyone murmurs in agreement. The women on the deck offer a few words of encouragement. I look at Ma Party Cove. She touches the pole and arches her back.

“You’re right,” I say. “I am scared.” I grab a sleeping bag and escape to the pontoon boat. The party will continue without me. At least until I inadvertently crash it.

The music blasts at club-level decibels as Hinrichs keeps his standard repertoire of dance tunes on repeat. It’s past 2 a.m. when the lights go off inside the houseboat. A TV casts a faint blue light in the cabin. Craig Morgan’s “Redneck Yacht Club” — the Party Cove anthem — comes on for the fourth time of the day. I’ve got to shut it off.

I step past a pile of empty beer bottles on the front deck and tread quietly through an open sliding-glass door.

That’s when I see Hinrichs’ naked ass. He’s in front of me in the dark, one foot on the ground, one resting on a leopard-print futon. He appears to be making some kind of thrusting motion.

As I start to back out of the room, Hinrichs swivels toward me.

“Oh, shit! Oh, shit! What are you doing here?” he says.

“I just came in to turn the music down,” I say. Then I move quickly back to the pontoon boat.

The music goes dead. Hinrichs emerges from the cabin. The lower half of his body is blocked by a deck chair. A round moon hangs high in the clear sky, but I can’t tell if he’s naked. “You scared the shit out of me,” he says, breathing heavily.

I explain that I thought everyone was asleep and just wanted to turn off the music. We stand there in silence. Then he stumbles back inside.

The music kicks back on a few minutes later, and I’m left wondering what I just saw. I’m pretty sure I just caught Hinrichs having sex. And I’m pretty sure the woman on the futon wasn’t his fiancée.

Craig Morgan sings on: When the party’s over and we’re all alone, we’ll be making waves in a no-wake zone.

Hinrichs wakes up the next morning and pulls on a pair of yellow shorts. He can’t find his trademark trunks with the smiley face, which lay outside on a deck chair. Nearby sits a half-empty bottle of white wine. Ma and Pa Party Cove’s boat is gone. A few other ships anchor at odd angles around us. The shoreline looks relatively clean, but the water that rings it has an unhealthy sheen from too much booze, boat exhaust, piss and cigarette butts.

Party Girl and Hinrichs’ fiancée jump aboard the pontoon boat to take their German shepherd to shore. I tag along.

“Man, I’m hung-over,” Party Girl says as she plops down beside me. She lights a cigarette.

The fiancée apologizes for crashing early. She asks how long everyone stayed up.

“I guess I drank that wine last night,” Party Girl says. She says she can’t remember anything after the wine came out.

Hinrichs’ fiancée parks the boat on shore, and the dog scampers out. “Go pee, Reilly,” she says. The dog disappears into a thicket.

Both bleary-eyed women follow the dog’s path as he rustles through the underbrush along the shore.

“I must have been trashed, because I woke up naked,” Party Girl says.

The fiancée ignores the comment. “Reilly, Reilly,” she calls to the dog.

Reilly reappears, and we head back to the houseboat. The women grab a pack of cigarettes and return to the pontoon boat. They head for the dock at Darby Cove.

Hinrichs fires up the engine and hunkers in a chair near the front cabin. Squinting in the sun, he turns a tiny wooden steering wheel with his right hand while smoking with his left. There’s a smiley-face doormat near his feet. Beside him, a door placard reads “No suits allowed. Nude only. ”

“Fuck, my head hurts,” he says. “I never have a hangover. That big ol’ bottle of wine.”

He had intended to leave at dawn so he could cross the lake when it was calm. But it’s after 7 a.m. — prime powerboating time — and the lake boils with whitecaps. Making things worse, the dock where the fight happened is still tied to the side of the houseboat. Waves break high over the front of the deck, spraying mist. He turns the barge into a rolling wake that threatens to swamp us. He looks unconcerned. He pops open his second Diet Dr Pepper of the morning.

Finally, I ask him to tell me about The Game.

“Everyone got naked,” he says. Then each guy took a turn holding the stripper pole as the naked women rubbed against them. “The only rule is that they can’t touch your spot,” he says.

A few hundred yards off, the women flank the houseboat in their pontoon, making sure they don’t have to fish us out of the water. Hinrichs looks over at them. “I feel a little uncomfortable with them riding together,” he says. He grins widely. “I didn’t mean to have sex with her, but then everyone went to sleep, and the pole thing made me so hot,” he says. “I had to keep shushing her because she gets so loud.”

“Oh! Oh!” he calls out in a high falsetto, mimicking her orgasm. He puts his finger to his lips and rocks his hips in a thrusting motion. “Shh-shh,” he says. He smiles.

Ma and Pa must have figured out what was going on and left early, he says. “They didn’t approve,” he says. He chuckles and explains that the same thing happened before his last marriage.

When the two boats finally dock an hour later, the fiancée and Party Girl head off together to Jefferson City. They’re going shopping for bridesmaid dresses.

Hinrichs searches for a change of clothes so he can get breakfast at a nearby restaurant.

He leaves his Smiley trunks behind.