The associations you find yourself entangled in when you work in the strip club business can be anything from 'fucking love affair' to 'one of us must die' or any nuance in between. In any given moment you may be allied, neutral or at war*1 with any random Dancer, Manager, Waitress, Bartender or other Floor Schlub.
Gotta stay sharp out there, people.
Trying to keep track of of all these relationships can be a challenge. Mostly I find the easiest way is to not give a shit about any of them unless I absolutely have to. My default settings are Giant Honest Idiot alloyed a bit with Allergic to Horseshit and sometimes this is a detriment to my income. I have many opportunities to scam money that I don't take advantage of and sometimes I regret that I didn't because the victim in question turned out to be a miserable thong-yanker. The kind of hammered shit-blanket that just begs to be dragged somewhere cold and dank where some corrective therapy can ensue.
Grim therapy. Beatings in dark rooms. Corpses floating in the river, possibly with a sad lonely trilby hat or somethin floating next to one of them....
Sigh. The old days....
Anyways, I find that my relationships with dancers tend to fall into one of these four categories:
1) I am their big brother.
I am their protector, their enforcer, their fucking Shogun Warrior and sometimes, if I don't run fast enough, their shoulder to cry on. A prime example of this brothering happened a while back where a large, incredibly drunk customer was leaning over a table of cringing strippers, screaming at them while he poured sweat onto the table. I had warned him repeatedly about being nice to the girls but at some point he just couldn't think anymore so I ended up having to put him on the ground.
Hard.
After the standard five minutes of death threats and ghetto talk, the rest of the team got him out of the building and he has since apologized, although all evidence indicates he's still a piece of shit.
2) They want to fuck me.
Sure, these are few and far between nowadays, but they still happen. And normally it isn't anything special about me, some girls are just really, really horny and like dick in general, not necessarily my dick in particular.
3) We have a symbiotic relationship based on mutual financial gain and tempered with a deep respect for each other's assets and skills.
Sounds like a fancy way to say I help her make money and then she gives me some of it, no? Well it is. I know the species of customer she is best at working on and I throw her at those customers as soon as they come into the club. We both bring something to the table and those somethings complement one another.
Me big. Her pretty.
4) They want me dead.
Not exaggerating in the slightest. Quite a few dancers over the years would've happily put a bullet right in my fucking face and then done horrible things to my rapidly cooling member. Or , had they the ability, beaten eleven kinds of shit out of me while yelling mean things and looking for some stairs to push me down.
What can I say? I have a fan club.
Lucky for me all of those types are on too many drugs to remember how much they hate me and therefore I have remained bullet hole free thus far.
LEVIATHAN HOLLERS FROM THE DEPTHS
The above subtitle, while dramatic, has little to do with the following vignette. The dancer in question is by no means a Leviathan by anyone's measure, merely a finely featured carp. A possum in a prom dress.
For the purposes of this narrative, I'll call this stripper Bellatina because I've never worked with an entertainer by that name.
Bellatina is what we Floor Dongs refer to as a 'Problem Dancer'. Every last one of us is sick of putting up with her bullshit, shaking down customers and de-escalating her ghetto fueled confrontations with random patrons. She's the type of person who, when you're trying to resolve the situation, just stands there and yells insults and deprecations at the customer continuously, making any sort of resolution unlikely. She doesn't listen or obey when you tell her to shut the fuck up and give you a minute to get to the bottom of the whole stinky fucking mess.
She actively buggers your attempts to obtain money for her.
Before I launch into this sad narrative, kind readers, please be aware that when dealing with any form of security/authority, be it a bouncer or police, just be calm. Be polite, cooperative and compliant because no matter what your goal is, your cause and your claims are much more likely to be received favorably if you're not being a shrieking, disrespectful cunt.
That being said, here's what went down:
A customer I'll refer to as Victim X had allowed himself to be cajoled into doing a 15 minute champagne room with two dancers at the same time. Being a complete strip club rookie, this was the first of several mistakes he made that night. As always, whenever I have a chance to make a list...
The StripperHerder presents: The List Of Victim X's Mistakes
1) Getting a room with two strippers at once: Sounds exciting, no? Two beautiful girls at the same time? Golly! Unless girl on girl is your specific thing, you'll find that getting a room with two chicks simultaneously is ultimately counter productive. They tend to focus on one another and leave you as an afterthought unless you brought an eight ball of coke to the party.
2) He picked the wrong girls: Yeah they look nice, but so do coral snakes. Bellatina is a good lookin woman, I'll give her that. She is able to camouflage her innate hood-rattedness pretty effectively, trapping her prey like a venus fly trap.
Her accomplice in this instance was Miley, a bleach blond suicide girl wannabe with shocking pink hair and a flexible approach to the truth.
3) He paid them in advance. In cash: NEVER GIVE THEM THE MONEY! I can't stress this enough. If you're going into a champagne room with any amount of dancers, a Floor Guy will be setting that room up. He'll take your money BEFORE THE ROOM STARTS and record the transaction somewhere.
Giving strippers your money before you're actually in the room and being asked by the tuxedoed Floor Ape for said money is asking for it to be stolen.
4) He changed his mind about having two dancers at once very late in the game: At the last moment, before a Floor Guy took charge of the transaction and placed them in a room together, Victim X decided he didn't want Bellatina in the room after all, just Miley. But he had already given his $300 to Bellatina because he's a babe in the woods and accidentally stumbled into a wolf's den
5) He failed to recognize the inherent criminality and shiftiness of Bellatina: Her camouflage has been perfected by years in the industry and to the average joe customer, she appears to be an attractive, fun girl rather than the conniving rag stain that she actually is.
Fucking bitch.
So anyway poor Victim goes into his 15 minute champagne room with Miley, sans Bitch. He had already given Bitcherella $300 before he decided to delete her from the room and when he asked half of it back she told him that she'd give it to him when he got out of the room while Miley upped the seduction/distraction dial to 10. Between the two of them this pitiable, befuddled bastard agreed to find Bellatina after the room was done so he could get his $150 back.
Oops.
I found him, a broken man, sitting dejectedly in a booth at the end of the night and he asked me if I could help him. He told me his sad tale and although he didn't remember the malevolent stripper's name, he described her and I immediately knew my night was about to go to complete shit. He was very collected, clearly not blind drunk and very reasonable. I felt bad for the lad.
But I felt even worse for myself because I could already picture the shrieking and I'm sure I visibly winced when It dawned on me who he was fleeced by. The pretty looking war-cunt.
So I track the dancer down and ask her what the hell was up. She claimed, of course, that the guy had given her the money as a tip. This sounded highly unlikely and I fucking well told her that. I assured her that this was not the case, that some normal, working class dude certainly didn't just give her $150 for no reason.
I bring her to her prey and when he very calmly tried to tell her that he did not intend for her to keep the dough, but that she had, in fact, scammed him, Bellatina instantly reverted to her trap*2 trash self by screaming at him, cursing like a blog writer and generally showing her true colors.
Knowing with utter certainty that this was going to happen, I was already putting myself between her and the hang dog customer because her next move would be to get in his face and scream louder. Dude just hung his head, defeated. Couldn't get a word in edge wise and wasn't the kinda guy to get in a screaming match.
I got my Manager, Sir Grinhorn McFlurry XII and explained exactly what happened and he told Bellatina to either do the room or cough up the scratch. Bellatina refused to do either, sticking like a lamprey to her "It Was A Tip" defense. At that point all you can do is terminate the girl's contract. You can't physically force her to give back the money and the cops don't give a shit nor want to deal with it.
So in closing all we could do is say we fired her*3, and promise him a free Bottle Service VIP treatment if he would come back to the club. Kinda like, 'hey, don't let one evil, greedy entertainer give you the wrong impression, let us show you the true gloriousness of how a strip club experience should be.'
I hope it works, he seemed like a good dude and he was astoundingly calm considering the circumstances.
The fact that we didn't fire her really grates on me. I know, I know, why the fuck should it surprise me anymore? We've caught her scamming before and we'll bloody well so so again. In fact since the incident I was writing about in this post, a similar situation arose where a customer got ripped off by her and after he left she said, with no indication of shame or irony, "well I would've given him his money back if he'd just asked."
She is our pain.
I am the Rodney Dangerfield of my club.
I get not respect. I don't know why this is but it fucking enrages me and I'm not putting up with it anymore. I am going to have a 'sit down' with my scheduling manager, Sir Ramjet Gnar'nutz VII and explain my sense of unhappitude.
Let me elucidate a bit. At this club there are two start times for Floor Bums, 6:30 pm and 8:30 pm. Since we get raped by the gubbamint tax-wise before we get our checks, our hourly pay means fuck all. Thus there are no advantages to being an early guy, just two extra mind numbing hours of empty club and chatty dancers to deal with. No one with real money to spend arrives before 9 pm.
That being said, how the hell is it standard practice for guys who have been at the club for far less time than me to always be rewarded by getting the much more desirable 'late' shifts? I am freakin 6:30 across the board. I can count the number of 'late' shifts I've had this year on two hands while a guy who's been here for 2 less years than me has 3 out of 4 of his shifts starting at 8:30. These new cunts get better shifts than me and later shifts than me.
It's fucking infuriating and it's time to put my size 15's down on the matter once and for all.
That's all I have to say at the moment. Like I stated on my Facebook page I am essentially done with the Herder for now. I feel like I've covered the bases over the past 6 years and am devoting what tiny amount of energy I have to other projects of which I'll keep you informer about.
I am also currently looking into getting the 'Herder published in book form or possibly as an ebook and I would suggest to you, valued fan, that purchasing one would no doubt inspire me to continue writing the Plight.
If you haven't already checked it out, I encourage to seek solace at my other blog, http://darklordsjournal.blogspot.com/
Check periodically for other details...
Das unt Hober,
-The StripperHerder
*1 This applies to me much more than some other Floor Guys because I'm a dick. I've been trying to change that over the past few months, with a fair amount of success.**
**Keen Kenny Deen on the other hand gets along with EVERYONE because he's a super nice dude. Give ya the shirt off his back, ya know.
*2 I honestly don't even know what "trap" means and hope I am using it in a proper context. I'd hate to offend anyone.
*3 I was told she had been fired and yet 3 days later, I'm working with her again. 3 days. Like Jesus.
