Tonight was a Saturday night which means it was aggravating, chock full of douchiness and littered with bachelor parties. Saturdays have never been and will never be any fun to work whatsoever, they're like the week's equivalent to trying to chew razor blades and rock salt and then spit a Picasso.
But surprisingly enough, it was my fellow Floor Guys who pissed me off the most tonight, not customers, cabbies or baffled female drivers.
Why you ask? Well before I get into it, let me give a little bit of background history for those new to the blog and too lazy or ambivalent to slog through my archives.
The last strip club I worked at before this one was, among MANY other problems, staffed by thieves. The VIP Hosts regularly pocketed the majority of money they made, money they were supposed to split with us poor bastards who had to work the main floor, commonly referred to as The Zoo, or Gen Pop.*2
It didn't even occur to me at the time just how much these assholes were stealing from me and the other guys. It was only after I started working at the current club I'm at (which does a fairly similar amount of business) that I thought back to those days and realized it wasn't merely a few bucks here and there. They stole thousands of dollars from me during my year there. Thousands. I shit you not, dear readers.
So that brings me around to tonight.
We're training a new guy at the club and quite frankly he's not very good. I don't really expect him to last but he seems to have a sponsor in one of the managers, otherwise he'd be gone already. So the little cadre of long time Floor Dudes decided he wasn't entitled to a fair split of the tips at the end of the night. He got shortchanged.
I made my opinion known that I didn't really agree with or like doing this to anybody. By being there, doing his job he was owed a fair share of the money just like everyone else. My opinion was duly noted and totally ignored and I'm not happy about it; it's a cunty move. I don't really care if he's not going to make the cut or not at the club, while he's there he deserves his fair share.
This makes me into a thief and puts me in an uncomfortable position. Yes he's kinda annoying, doesn't know how to make money and would be fuck all useless in a brawl except maybe as a crude two handed weapon. That being said he's eager to help, very gung-ho and happily accepts all the shit jobs with a smile and a nod.
So I can't tell him we're fucking him because I need this job and can't alienate the formidable power base the Floor Guy Bloc represents. I also can't protest too loudly to the other Floor Creeps because I'll be told in no uncertain terms that if it upsets me so much, split my tips with him and shut the fuck up, at which point I may burn a bridge or two.
SO, here I am. A bit more well paid and a lot more disgusted with myself and those I work with.
But this was only the beginning of the whole turd taco. Read on and splash on some hot sauce to kill the bacteria as you go along.
Anyway, there's a guy who comes in pretty frequently and spends a decent amount of dough, and tips us modestly every time he comes in. It's usually a $50 tip for every champagne room he does and he's been doing it for years. Those fifties have really added up.
So this gentleman is handicapped. He's wheelchair bound and his life is made easier when someone can help him in and out of his car. He's not a small man, I'd estimate he weighs between 215-230 lbs. Luckily for both him and me, I am blessed with the ability to fairly easily lift humans his size because I are all big and stuff.
And recently he's been running low on money. After 2 or 3 rooms, his card starts declining. He used to spend all night in VIP rooms, spending lavishly on girls who didn't give two shits about him and tipping extravagantly, but now he can no longer do it. Possibly his settlement cash is tapped and now he subsists on a budget, I don't know. All I know is that the Floor Guys running the rooms have turned their back on this dude now that he can't spend huge money anymore. Like the years of tipping generously don't mean shit.
Just like a typical 'entertainer', he doesn't matter to them anymore because he isn't lining their pockets like he used to.
It's fucking despicable and it pisses me off.
I dislike attitudes such as this intensely.
Then things got even more kick ass:
At the end of the night this kid is broke. He needs a ride back downtown to his car, but the club's shuttle bus sits too high for even me to easily lift him in and out of. So does my truck. I asked all the other guys if I could borrow their car to drive him the 3 miles to town and all of them refused to do it. Every last one.
So I call a cab, wait outside with him for 25 minutes or so until the cab shows up. I then help him into the cab and help get his chair stowed, then follow him to town and help him transfer from the cab to his car and stow his chair again. Then I pay and tip the cabbie, who was pretty goddamn thankful that I followed them to the car because the guy was all of 5'6" and 140 lbs and would've been roughly as useful as a marshmallow hammer.
This is what taking care of those who've taken care of you is all about and it should extend to all facets of life, not just the business side.
To forget someone who's helped put food on your table, gas in your car and pants on your ass, just because he's not in a position to tip over-generously anymore, is just a reprehensible, dickshitty move.
Utterly without class.
And Then...
I get back to the club from helping the customer out. This is after I've already taken 2 of the insert local NFL team's name here players back to their cars downtown. At this point in time we've been closed for an hour and a half, plenty of time for the remaining 5 Floor Bitches to have done their normal crappy job of cleaning the club and maybe picked up the slack for the guy who's driving drunk giants around and deadlifting a 200 lb guy in and out of cars.
But no, no slack was picked up. I was unpleasantly, but not entirely, surprised to find the club's 2nd worst job had been thoughtfully saved for me.*3
Make sure you read the above footnote before you continue, esteemed Herderite. I don't have any sort of statistics on how many readers immediately read my footnotes, interrupting what can loosely be referred to as the 'flow' of the blog, as opposed to those who plow through the main body of the post and save the footnotes as a kind of literary dessert. But the information contained in the above footnote, while not vital, is actually pretty important when taken in context of of what I'm about to write. Go ahead, I'll give you a moment.
Insert sounds of me urinating here
There. Everyone caught up?
Excellent.
The thing that sucked most about the other Floor Dicks 'saving' me a cleanup job is that we had a barback tonight, so scratch Main Bar and VIP Bar off the job list. The Floor Staff then tipped the cooks some dough to do the Trash for us, so knock that off the list as well. The VIP rooms are kept up as the night goes along, there were no crazy parties in any of them, so it was done before we even closed, ergo whoever claimed that job is a cunt. One of the Floor Wolfs convinced a new waitress that sweeping the patio is a waitress job, which it isn't, it's just an old Floor Guy Mind Trick.
Oh yeah, and no one bothered to do the front of the club, so it will remain scuzzy looking all through Sunday and until around 6 PM on Monday which is when I will arrive at work again and sweep up the weekend's leavings.
So, to summarize; There were only 4 jobs left for 5 Floor Men present in the club, the 6th one being me of course, downtown squat lifting a cool but heavy, dead weight guy in and out of cars while my hernia gives me the physical equivalent it saying "You know if you keep this kind of thing up, stuff like picking up other humans and moving them around, then someday you can look forward to shitting into your own scrotum."
I gotta tell ya, I got pretty pissed off and I ain't kiddin neither.
That pretty much sums up the the night. It was not a good one.
To expand on the second half of the title, let's go a bit into the tangled politics of strip club management.
I'm not going to go too deep, I don't want to do anyone harm. But I'll brush upon the basic problem inherent in dealing with strippers and the abject misery it must instill in all Mismanagers everywhere.
You see the reality is that strippers, provided they're on the top half of the one-to-ten scale, can get a job within an hour of being fired from a club. The threat of termination doesn't hold the terror that it would for a steel worker, a fireman, a teacher or even an illiterate dishwasher. Strippers, once the lifestyle has consumed them, don't care about shit anymore but making money and partyin' yo.
The point being that as a Mana-Jur of a strip club, your main conundrum is having enough dancers to actually operate a strip club. The majority of clubs I've worked at have had issues with not having enough girls working at any given time. To further complicate the equation, it's virtually impossible to keep strippers working if they're not making money. So you, as a Manager, have to balance a number of fiscal issues that grow ever more complicated the larger the club is.
Are you with me so far? You can't be all fascist about fines and house fees when you rarely have enough girls to go around. They'll just say "Fuck you", snort lines of oxy off the hood of your car before they piss on your tires and go get a job 1.7 miles away.
So where am I going with this, you ask?
Here's where I'm going. We have so many new dancers over the past few months that I can't even keep track of half of them. We have so many that the ecosystem hasn't been able to sustain their numbers and some have already left the club for greener pastures. There is a fair number of dancers who will do this after one bad night.
But at the same time the management is tolerating a number of problem girls. Problem girls whose jobs have been safe because we didn't have enough staff to comfortably fire them. Now we do, we have more than enough.
But still the higher ups won't pull the trigger. The strippers in question cost the club more than they make it, we've never had a bigger roster of talent, and most of them are slouches anyway, grim and unmerry.
This is the perfect time to cut dead weight yet we're still saddled with these unscrupulous stink-leavers that make the whole club look bad. I don't understand it. Even axing a select list a 5 or 6 dancers would reduce the drama and crime quotient by several factors.
Yet there they stand, seemingly above reproach. Tauntingly bulletproof for no apparent reason.
Fuckles all, I hate it.
Your beloved Uncle Herdy,
-The StripperHerder
*1 I had originally titled this installment "A Douche-Turd Wrapped In A Cunt-Muffin", but upon rereading I felt it lacked eloquence.
*2 The lower level of the club: the space reserved for the teeming masses, populated by the cash bereft, the roided-out UFC wannabes and anyone who doesn't make a sweet-ass six digits a year salary or isn't willing to spend stupid amounts of money.
*3 Although others' opinions and descending lists may vary from mine, here is my version of the end-of-the-night-cleanup job list in order of shittiness, 1 being the worst/least desirable and 9 being easiest/I'm doing that:
9) VIP Rooms- Total breeze most nights. A couple of glasses, some nipple tape on the floor and you're done. Floorotaurs don't mop anything short of barf, poop or pools of blood. A strategically placed couch can hide a multitude of sloth.
8) Foyer/Front of Club- Usually a snap. Run a quick damp mop over the foyer, and sweep up a few dozen cigarette butts and Bob's your uncle.**
7) Dance Room- 15X25 ft room subdivided into 30 little cubicles where the 'couch dances' take place. Almost never gets mopped by the core clique of Floor Yaks. They usually just do 3 feet down each hallway so it looks like it's been mopped. No one ever checks.
6) Patio: A few glasses and a bunch of sweeping butts, with an occasional guest appearance by some gut gravy. I only rate it below Dance Room because it's outside so sometimes it's jungle hot and others it's Siberian cold.
5) Bathrooms-Unless something unspeakable has been perpetrated in one of the stalls, some fecal nightmare or half digested gyros soaked in Fireball shots spattering the walls to a height of 6 feet, it ain't so bad. If one of those things don't happen, then cleaning the bathrooms are normally pretty easy. Quick sweep, slop o' the mop and Barb's your aunt™.***
4) Main Bar-The level of suck with this job varies greatly depending on who was bartending. Some bartenders are better then others at making your cleanup job easier, and some just give you money to make their problem go away. Others, however, are inconsiderate bitches. They don't lift a finger to clean their bars and they don't tip you a dime because even though you may be doing the job of barback for them, you are officially a Floor Host and therefore, based on job description, she doesn't have to give you squat.
3) VIP Bar-Both farther away and always staffed by the "B" teamers. Despite it's grand title, it's a smaller, more cramped bar with all the allure of a K Mart food court and all the glamour of sad clown porn. It is also the farthest away you can get from the dumpster and still be in the building. Definite pain in the ass.
2) Dressing Room-Dungheap. Flophouse. Factory of Illusion and Sorrow. The Special Effects Room.
There are many names for this horror and one does not face it lightly. It has broken better men than me through the years and will undoubtedly continue to do so. One must trudge up the Stairs of Despair, walk the Desolate Hallway, and Enter the Room Where the Death of All Hope Lives and Keeps It's Star Wars Collection. The accumulated detritus of 50 alcohol swilling strippers in an enclosed place is staggering. Make up, baby wipes, bottles, glasses, to go containers, dead underwear, forsaken hair extensions; these are but a few of the challenges that await the Floor Host Errant.
1) Trash-Not surprising to anyone who's worked in a bar/restaurant. Trash cans can be not only heavy, but really nasty smelling- unholy unions of stale beer, old food (that was shitty even when it was fresh), vomit, cigarette butts and even less appealing stuff all commingling to produce a stench that is somehow greater than the sum of it's parts.
It can be vexing.
Trash also has a tendency to leak, usually all over anything you got back from the dry cleaners that very day.
Trash sucks. It is worth it to pay the cooks $20 to do it.
**For American readers, Bob's your uncle can be translated as "And there ya go." or, "Bada-bing Bada-boom." or even, "And that's that, motherfucker."
*** I made that one up. Feel free to use it if you want.
