Any place that serves hooch will develop regulars over time. Like calluses, moles or back hair they just sort of eventually end up always there, part of the scenery as it were. Our club is no different. We have many regulars who frequent the environs anywhere from once a week to every single fucking night. And these critters come in a conveniently small number of subspecies, which I will detail somewhere below.
Regulars are a never ending source of frustration and wonder to those who work the club. I feel like the majority of regulars are all but invisible to almost all the club staff. We see them so often that unless they're a big spender or lavish tipper, they become what amounts to sentient furniture ambling about the club. Just parts in a moving background, as bland and ubiquitous as a black disc of old gum on a sidewalk.
I forget sometimes, having been relentlessly fried on the griddle of Hospitality for the past 20 years, that humans generally speaking, are social animals. I know this because I used to be one, I remember it distinctly. Feeling a nonspecific sense of goodwill towards fellow man and a subliminal hint of comfort from grazing with the herd.
I'm glad those instincts have been burned out of me. For the most part, I'm perfectly content on my own.
I sometimes think to myself "What went wrong in his life where he has to hang out at strip clubs on most nights?" And then, to be fair, I think to myself "What went wrong in my life where I never hang out at strip clubs on any nights?"
Anyway my point is that most if not all of the varieties of Regulars are lonely fuckers. They crave human contact and seek it out in lame, seedy places. Their "friends" are the other restless, troubled souls that drift from club to club, making the meaningless rounds, shaking the hands, spending no money.
I don't get this behavior at all. I blame this on the several streaks of sociopathy that stain my psyche, the foremost being I don't enjoy being around people I don't know and have no real desire to meet new people. I put up with having to be around unfamiliar bipeds because that's what functional humans do and I am able to mimic a functional human with roughly a 70% accuracy at least.
I blame the service industry as the chief culprit in making hateful and skittish. I used to enjoy meeting new folks and doing new things. I was fairly outgoing when I was younger, before I became a Hospitality Slave for life. I made friends easily, developed relationships that have lasted decades and was reasonably comfortable in a wide ranges of social situations.
After twenty years in the security aspect of the Service Industry however, I very rarely see any of my old friends, I haven't made a new friend in ten years, I prefer not to leave my apartment if I don't have to, I immediately think the worst of everyone and I don't like being around any sort of crowd.
As you can imagine, this severely limits any sort of social life that most would refer to as 'normal'. My occupation is the polar opposite from 90% of the people I know: I work when they're off, most of them work weekdays and are off on weekends, I'm asleep when they're at their jobs. Of the 52 Saturdays a year, the day most people go out and do stuff, I will have maybe 4 or 5 them off. And I have to request ALL of those.
Saturday nights are pretty much an 'all hands on deck' scenario. Herdin strippers and rustlin drunks while my friends do fun shit and have parties.
Fucking Service Industry.....
So the above describes most of the Lesser Orders of Regular, usually nice guys, but dull, broke and sadness inducing.
The Higher Orders? Well those twats have readily available money and aren't shy about spending it. Sometimes they are a pain in the ass to deal with but come with appropriate levels of tipportunity. High risk, high reward. They can be as petty and shifty as an East St Louis meth whore. Vindictive when displeased.
Such as this one Regular I'll call Salvatore. Ole Sal is an industry lifer and owns a piece of a couple of different successful bars. He's always a gentleman, dresses very dapper, and is an absolute fiend for slutty stripper pussy.
So he was in the other day and I was glad to see him. If a dancer catches his fancy, he'll do a VIP room with her and if he gets 15 minutes or a half hour, he tips you $50. Hundred bucks if he does an hour. Like clockwork.
Until I fucked up, that is.
I saw a guy on camera getting all handsy with a girl on a couch dance so I went back to tell him to take it down a notch. It was Salvatore. I didn't recognize him from the camera view and when I realized my mistake, it was too late. He gave me a look and I babbled some bullshit about my Manager watching the feeds and ran like hell.
Damn.
When the song ended, Sal and the dancer went for a champagne room, which I had to set up. He did an hour with the girl and tipped me $25. My actions bore repercussions it seemed. Since I was working solo at the time and didn't have to split that money with anyone else, I cost myself $75, just like that.
VARIETIES of Regular (Lower Order)
Moper
Restless Randy
Social Moth
Friend Guy
The Mentor
Buffet Guy- get everything you can for the smallest money output possible
Baiter
Drug Dealer, Amateur
Local Stud
Regular (Higher Order)
Fetishist
Rich Drunk
Club Owner
Grey-Ponytailed Monied Swinger
Drug Dealer, Professional
Rich Drunk is the critter you want to land in your trap-line and if you can't manage one of them then Fetishist is he next best thing provided they drive a German sports sedan. These are both very weak willed creatures when it comes to the fairer sex and will tip extravagantly when their creepy desires can be met by reasonably good looking meth whores. You know, like those with no obvious and weeping facial sores and whatnot.
They're not hard to find, but making them comprehend the Floor Guy/Meth Whore dynamic is not always easy. Meth makes one paranoid, I can attest to this because I used to dabble in meth. After five days without sleep, one is able to hallucinate things with absolute clarity which will absolutely NOT be as much fun as it sounds. I'd suggest that any meth binge should have a 72 hour limit if one is to easily hang onto objective rationality.
Because at day Four, it all goes out the window and you can't reasonably be considered sane anymore.
I mention this because at varying points in my career, coke, meth, ecstasy or heroin have been the drug of choice among the dancers and denizens of the clubs I've worked at. Their popularity seems to ebb and flow depending on the times.
When I started in the industry, circa 1999, coke was still king. Everything moved on a film of cocaine and to illustrate the point I'll tell you my first Owner story.
My first strip club job ever was as a chef at a high end strip club. I wasn't a brilliant, highly educated and accredited chef, but merely a competent cook that had trained under two accomplished chefs and worked previously in a variety of kitchens. From fast food to four stars.
That being said this kitchen was easy and the people I cooked for were astonishingly easy to please, leading me to the conclusion that the former "chef" was a giant weeping genital wart, rather than something capable of crafting delicious food.
Indeed, management revealed to me that this obese cheese-stain had been stealing so much steak and seafood from their food distributor that unless they paid $13,000 up front then the distributor would no longer supply us with food.
So we did what any sane strip club management club would do and switched distributor, and I was given a clean slate with which to order food. I was also given the freedom to make up my own specials on a daily basis and was allowed to order in special ingredients to make those specials happen.
In short I was given the free rein and resources to make special dishes that most 'chefs' in the industry are rarely given the opportunity to do, especially with as little formal training as I'd had and with no questions asked as long as it produced a profit.
In retrospect it was the single best culinary job I'd ever had, and in true industry fashion I lost it because I didn't sell drugs. The other "chef" James supplied weed and other shit to a bunch of people and my days per week got cut to one. He couldn't cook most things for shit, but he had cheap, good bud.
I was fucked.
But I digress, one day the Owner came into the kitchen and asked me for a strainer. Not understanding what his intentions were I went and got him a colander. "No, no, no!" He says. "I need a mesh strainer. You know, something like a screen door kinda thing."
So I got him a small 'screen' strainer and he proceeded to pull a bag with 3 giant lumps of cocaine out of his pocket and began to grate them onto one of my stainless steel prep tables. Soon there was a pile of blow that looked like something out of the movie Scarface and he feverishly started to load it into about a dozen glass vials using a piece of parchment paper as a funnel.
It looked like he'd done this before.
When he was done there was still a considerable amount of ya-yo on said table and he instructed me to clean it up.
YES SIR! I scraped that shit into 5 lines the length of my middle finger and made them disappear over the course of the next 90 minutes. The kitchen had probably never been cleaner.
Time to clean those fryers.
That was my introduction to a strip club owner and I was pretty pleased with it. Things would take a downturn as I met new club owners over my two decade career, but they weren't always selfish cunts, just usually.
So that's that as they say. Signature abrupt ending is still a thing.
I will say that due to changes they've made to this site since I last published anything, they've improved the photo editing feature to the point I could only make it work once before becoming pissed off because it used to work just fine.
So I apologize about the lack of pics and footnotes, both treasured 'Herder trademarks, but bear with me. It's been a while. I didn't expect to finish this draft, but I was looking through the ole slush pile and there it was. More than half done.
I couldn't resist.
Miss you guys,
-The StripperHerder
Because at day Four, it all goes out the window and you can't reasonably be considered sane anymore.
I mention this because at varying points in my career, coke, meth, ecstasy or heroin have been the drug of choice among the dancers and denizens of the clubs I've worked at. Their popularity seems to ebb and flow depending on the times.
When I started in the industry, circa 1999, coke was still king. Everything moved on a film of cocaine and to illustrate the point I'll tell you my first Owner story.
My first strip club job ever was as a chef at a high end strip club. I wasn't a brilliant, highly educated and accredited chef, but merely a competent cook that had trained under two accomplished chefs and worked previously in a variety of kitchens. From fast food to four stars.
That being said this kitchen was easy and the people I cooked for were astonishingly easy to please, leading me to the conclusion that the former "chef" was a giant weeping genital wart, rather than something capable of crafting delicious food.
Indeed, management revealed to me that this obese cheese-stain had been stealing so much steak and seafood from their food distributor that unless they paid $13,000 up front then the distributor would no longer supply us with food.
So we did what any sane strip club management club would do and switched distributor, and I was given a clean slate with which to order food. I was also given the freedom to make up my own specials on a daily basis and was allowed to order in special ingredients to make those specials happen.
In short I was given the free rein and resources to make special dishes that most 'chefs' in the industry are rarely given the opportunity to do, especially with as little formal training as I'd had and with no questions asked as long as it produced a profit.
In retrospect it was the single best culinary job I'd ever had, and in true industry fashion I lost it because I didn't sell drugs. The other "chef" James supplied weed and other shit to a bunch of people and my days per week got cut to one. He couldn't cook most things for shit, but he had cheap, good bud.
I was fucked.
But I digress, one day the Owner came into the kitchen and asked me for a strainer. Not understanding what his intentions were I went and got him a colander. "No, no, no!" He says. "I need a mesh strainer. You know, something like a screen door kinda thing."
So I got him a small 'screen' strainer and he proceeded to pull a bag with 3 giant lumps of cocaine out of his pocket and began to grate them onto one of my stainless steel prep tables. Soon there was a pile of blow that looked like something out of the movie Scarface and he feverishly started to load it into about a dozen glass vials using a piece of parchment paper as a funnel.
It looked like he'd done this before.
When he was done there was still a considerable amount of ya-yo on said table and he instructed me to clean it up.
YES SIR! I scraped that shit into 5 lines the length of my middle finger and made them disappear over the course of the next 90 minutes. The kitchen had probably never been cleaner.
That was my introduction to a strip club owner and I was pretty pleased with it. Things would take a downturn as I met new club owners over my two decade career, but they weren't always selfish cunts, just usually.
So that's that as they say. Signature abrupt ending is still a thing.
I will say that due to changes they've made to this site since I last published anything, they've improved the photo editing feature to the point I could only make it work once before becoming pissed off because it used to work just fine.
So I apologize about the lack of pics and footnotes, both treasured 'Herder trademarks, but bear with me. It's been a while. I didn't expect to finish this draft, but I was looking through the ole slush pile and there it was. More than half done.
I couldn't resist.
Miss you guys,
-The StripperHerder
