When I discovered booze in my early teens, Halloween got even better*1.All the girls dressed like whores, the parties were WAY better and I could frequently get away with increased levels of borderline sociopathic shenanigans. It was a win on every level.
Then I started working in the service industry because I was an idiot and still am as it turns out. The service industry takes everything you enjoy about virtually any holiday and fucking rapes it sideways before burning whatever remains. It's the occupational equivalent of the Mongol Horde, crushing all before it and forcing any pitiable survivors to pay tribute before it wipes its dick off on the curtains and rides away laughing.
That's almost exactly what working in the bar/strip club field feels like. Thousands of angry, pony riding, mustachioed little warrior dudes shooting all of your patience and goodwill towards your fellow man full of fucking arrows and torching your crops in the bargain.
Tiny hoofprints. All over your goddamn soul. That's what you get for your efforts.
It's a very challenging industry to remain in for extended periods of time without throttling some drunk morons and smashing their asphyxiating bodies against handy walls and doorways. At least it is for someone of my temperament who has warred against the inebriated for as long as I have. Sometimes it feels like my spirit is shit-paper thin and the only thing holding it together are the threads of malice and rancor that have been woven into it over the last twenty or so years.
This is what the Service Industry can do to one's essence if one is not resilient enough to handle the bombardment of the stupid, the rude and the asshole.
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So now that I've explored how the way I make my living is slowly eroding all the joy from my life, let's get on with some genuine Halloween spooky shit.
There have been some truly odd happenings in my overly long career as a professional ditz wrangler. I honestly believe that several of the clubs I have worked at have been haunted. I don't say things like this lightly because although I believe (kinda) in the premise of ghosts, I think 99.9% of supposed 'paranormal' activity is just idiot people and perception molding itself to expectations and desires.
Hence, I'll let you be the judge. Here's a brief list of the inexplicable situations I've encountered on the job:
1) Cokergeist
I was walking through the dressing room at a club several years ago when I thought I heard the sound of footsteps moving rapidly away from me followed by a door slamming. I didn't think much of it at the time because strippers are always going in and out of the dressing room to do stripper stuff: touching up the makeup, powdering the cooch, crying, throwing up in the bathroom or changing outfits. I figured that even though I knew my driven and dedicated dancer workforce would only reluctantly leave the Floor for the most pressing of reasons, that maybe I had caught one fleeing madly to make her stage call.
It was then that I noticed a line of cocaine*2 spread out on one of the counters. I remember feeling disappointed that one of our wholesome entertainers would stoop so low and moved over to the counter to wipe the offending substance to the floor.
It was then that I heard my name whispered behind me and felt something move very fast by my face, the lights dimmed as if something vast and shadowy had passed in front of the them. I whirled around to try to glimpse who was fucking with me and when I spun back around to face the counter, the line of coke was gone.
The room was completely empty and only a fading hint of knock off perfume seemed to hint that I hadn't been alone.
Needless to say I fled the dressing room immediately.*3
2) Phantom Pasties
This is an unexplained phenomena that I have experienced countless times at my current club, leading me to believe that this edifice was built over a burial ground of some sort.
Our dancers are required by law to wear some kind of covering over their nipples since it is a well established fact that the sight of a woman's exposed baby-juice nozzles will throw virtually all males within line of sight into a homicidal rape-frenzy.
Yet many of these dancers emerge from the private dance room with no nipple coverings at all. When I ask them if they took their nubbin-cozys off so that the customer could suckle on their mom-bags, they vehemently deny it, thus leaving supernatural forces as the only possible explanation as to how them nippys got out into the open air. Obviously the dance rooms are haunted by some kind of tawdry, perverted specter that can't abide hidden milk-taps.
It's downright eerie...
3) The Haunting of Champagne Room Six
No one really knows what happened in Champagne Room Six that gave it the palpable aura of fear and discord it generates, but the two leading theories are:
-In the spring of 1974 a blonde dancer named Maggie gave a customer some head without getting the money up front. When she finished gobbling down his discharge, the man refused to pay and the two began quarreling. The argument soon turned violent and Maggie ended up clubbing the customer to death with a bottle of Rossi Asti Spumante. Legend says it took the entire Floor Staff to subdue her and drag her out of the club where she escaped, stole a car and drove it into a nearby lake. Her body was never recovered.*5
-The other story is that a former owner of the building, who also ran it as a strip club, used to perform hideous experiments on dancers in Champagne Room Six after the club was closed. The proponents of this dogma state that his intent was to create the perfect stripper from numerous flawed ones and that he ultimately succeeded only to have his creation kill him with a savage lap dance and flee to California to become an early silent film star.
Step Aside Vodzilla, There's A New Cunt In Town.
I've talked extensively about my greatest foe and the battles we've waged over the years. I'm referring of course to Vodzilla, the Slayer of all that is Right and Dignified. In a sick, twisted way I almost miss her booze fueled travesties and utter contempt for rules and boundaries. She helped provide some sort of malformed context of what I should and shouldn't expect in stripper behavior. Kind of like how you can't truly appreciate a good, dependable car until you're had a rolling turd-wagon that fucks you over and over again.
That's Vodzilla to a "T". She sets the negative conduct bar that all other strippers get measured by.
And with her effectively out of my life, there was a yawning void that fate felt compelled to fill.
Enter Elsie, the Cow of Satan.
I've mentioned Elsie fairly often as she appears to be the heir to Vodzilla's throne. We've fired her twice and she's quit seventeen times and yet she's back again to plague my serenity and to damage the fragile ecosystem that we Floor Guys are the shepherds of. She's a meth fueled logging company tearing a swath of destruction through the primeval forest of my fiscal livelihood.
Elsie is one of those chunky dancers that truly believes in her heart of hearts that some sort of midriff wrap will effectively disguise her bulbous gut. She is wrong of course but I give her points for at least showing some awareness that there's a problem in that general area.
Now if she would just do something about her giant, forlorn ass. She has the kind of butt that looks like someone, for no sane reason, decided to fill a set of nylons with cheese curds and Malt-o-Meal. It looks as if it should have cartoon style 'stink lines' radiating out from it at every angle.
Because of her lack of what I call 'attractiveness', Elsie mainly relies on the holy trinity of desperate strippers everywhere: drunk guys, pack tactics and bold faced lying. Her days of solo hunting being long over, Elsie has a small cadre of equally unappealing strippers that she will team up with to baffle, misdirect and fleece customers. They are pack hunters, normally operating in pairs to maximize the confusion they instill in their prey.
Remember the sad tale of Wee Robby MacFeeble? If not, you can read about it here:
http://plightofthestripperherder.blogspot.com/2015/06/if-you-want-to-be-complete-piece-of.html
Well Elsie the Crime Cow was one of the two dancers who ripped off that poor, wee lad. The Manager that night, Sir Hardwit d'Strangercide III, yelled at her and her accomplice until Elsie cried and walked out, quitting forever and vowing never to return.....
......Until the following Friday as it turned out.
This illustrates very clearly the pressure the Owner puts on his mismanagement team*4 to maintain an unrealistic and unsustainably high number of entertainers on the club's roster. The reality is that Sir Hardwit would rather put up with Elsie's crime spree and the general field of shabbiness she begets than to have to listen to the Owner scream at him for firing a "valuable" dancer.
Which is one of the primary conundrums of the titty bar trade as I have oft alluded to.
And that's it, folks. That's your Halloween Special. I hope it brought you as many chills and thrills reading it as it did me writing it. Scary stuff. Thought provoking and shit.
Happy Samhain,
-The StripperHerder
*1 You can literally use this exact same sentence and insert nearly anything in place of 'Halloween' and it still works.
*2 I'm assuming it was cocaine. In all honesty, it could've been any number of cripplingly addictive pills crushed into a powder.
*3 And kept going back to check that no new lines of coke were left laying around. For safety reasons.
*4 Go Team Commerce!
*5 I tend to believe this theory and I further hypothesize that Maggie drove the car into a lake to fake her own death and then covertly returned to the club where's she's been living in secret ever since, nesting above the suspended ceiling and in the ventilation system.
