Some people feel the need to be assholes and like to disparage others for not being assholey enough. It's a plague on our society and sadly enough, is only getting worse as certain lifestyles are glorified in a pop culture mentality that make it seem as if being a fucking twat to fellow humans is the way super cool people act.
As a grunt on the front lines of the struggle between commerce and the general public*1, I get to witness all sorts of extremes that most folks have to watch Worldstar and Youtube to experience. All the drama, drunks, drugs and dipshittery you could possibly ever crave, served up hot and fresh daily, double orders on Saturdays.
I don't begrudge anyone a bit of boisterousness. I've been known to occasionally get a bit high spirited myself*2, but my outright cuntishness was pretty limited and mostly confined to a slurred muttering. I'm not gonna lie, I think horrible things about most of the people I see, every day. Inside my head, I'm feel like I'm an asshole as big as any on the planet. Luckily for me I seem to have adequate filters in place that, for the most part, seem to strain my output to the world, catching most of the really unpleasant stuff thrashing about up there.
Yay, me!
So I find it extra irritating when someone feels they have to be a dick about everything and the bigger dick they can be, the better they feel about themselves and the cooler they are within their community. I have many examples I could give you, but am going to focus on one particular specimen because I am a lazy bastard and a sorry excuse for a storyteller.
I don't know what her name is. She's black, ghetto as a movie stereotype and in my experience either a total piece of shit, or someone trying very hard and with admirable success to portray a total piece of shit. I'll call her Brenda, because if she could read this it would piss her the fuck off to be called Brenda.
Brenda graces the club with her presence about once a month. She always arrives five minutes before last call with a large group of her loud friends and bitches about paying the cover. She'll complain and gripe and make a scene, then grudgingly hand over her cover. Every fucking time. It's like belittling the Door Girl and myself make her feel like she's getting her money's worth out of the cover.
I've asked to just have her and her cronies banned, but they actually spend some money so the management team won't pull the trigger. Brenda doesn't spend anything mind you, but the people she's with do and she has attached herself to them like a chubby, medusa-weaved lamprey.
Here's two endearing elements of Brenda's game:
1) Every time she leaves the club she feels compelled to tell me how "Our shit is weak." And, "There ain't be no booties up in this shit." Brenda is very distraught that we don't employee dancers that can make her titanic ass look small by comparison. You would think that after her many visits to the club she would realize that the owner doesn't hire plus sized strippers and that if giant asses are what she wants to see, she should go to A.K.'s AssHaus on the other side of town.
2) Another of Brenda's charms is her unabashed altruism.
As I was walking a dancer out to her car the other night, Brenda and her group were walking in the parking lot towards their cars as well. As another car pulls into the lot, one of the guys in Brenda's crew says to the driver that his passenger side headlight was out. The driver didn't hear him so the guy points it out to him again. This dude was going out of his way to alert a stranger about a problem that might get him pulled over, I thought that was pretty nice and it's something I frequently do as well. Sometimes, especially on well lit streets, you don't realize you've got a headlight out until someone lets you know.
Turns out the driver didn't realize and was happy as fuck that the guy told him.*3 Brenda thought it was bullshit however. She laughed at her helpful friend and said "You west side, bitch."*4 and "Why fuck you care if dat nuggah go to jail, mowwa-fakka!"
It bothered her that someone she closely associated with would try to do something nice for someone he didn't know.
Brenda is her own worst enemy, I'll leave it at that because of beer and stuff.
The sad, sad tale of Wee Robby MacFeeble.
Tis a dirge of a story is the mournful yarn of poor, Wee Robby MacFeeble. This stunted lad was born to wee, bitty parents who both nevertheless sported magnificent facial hair. At age twelve, and fully grown, he sets out into the cruel, cold world to seek his fortune among the giants.
Someone decided along the way that Wee Robby was employable in a field that clearly required no lifting over seven pounds or conflict resolution with anyone over the age of nine. And in whatever field this was, Wee Robby flourished, accumulating over $300 in under a decade. Wee Robby was the pride of his village.
Then one day Wee Robby decided that he had to see what a woman's breasts looked like so he journeyed to the Big City and went to an establishment where the women showed off their boobies and hung upside down on shiny brass poles.
It was a whole new world for Wee Robby.
It was then that two unwholesome strippers latched onto Wee Robby and brought him to an ATM machine. Wee Robby had never seen an ATM machine and was suitably intimidated, such contraptions didn't exist in his world. Fortunately for him the two strippers were there to ensure he wasn't eaten by the machine, something he was assured frequently happens. While one walked him through the the astoundingly complicated steps to withdraw money from his savings account, the other fondled his dude-bits and murmured at him seductively, distracting him from the painstaking process of withdrawing cash.
The next thing he knew his life savings were gone and the dancers nowhere to be found. He'd been bamboozled!
As he related his story to me from waist height I quickly became bored and I passed it off to a Manager who will forever curse my name for getting him involved.
The fact of the matter is that yes, he was ripped off by two predatory strippers, one who had been fired and hired back and another who should've been fired about a dozen times over, yet still stalks our floor. He ended up calling the cops, who just laughed at him. Literally, I'm not even kidding you.
It was impossible for me to feel any kind of sympathy for him because I think that if you're dumb or drunk enough to be taken advantage of like that, then you deserve to lose that money. Chalk it up to a learning experience and move the hell on.
Accept the possibility that you may be a total fucking idiot and do the best you can. If all else fails you can work in the mines.
Have a night,
-The StripperHerder
*1 i.e. A service industry employee.
*2 Read: Large, out of control, ragingly catastrophic drunk bent on ruining something
*3 This dude actually had a spare headlight in his trunk. Who the fuck carries a spare headlight except a seasoned drunk or madhat survivalist?
*4 West Side: An allusion to the helpful friend being from a more suburbanized side of town than was considered 're-ahl'.**
** Re-ahl. [Ree-all] As in "keepin it real"
