Every goddamn year I forget how much January sucks. I remember that they suck, but always forget just how bad they are until I have to live through one again.
Like now.
The days of $200-300 shifts seem very far away, like an island receding slowly into the distance as you cling to your flotation device and watch the fuselage of the aircraft you were just riding in sink beneath the surface of the ocean you recently crashed into.
Then, just when it seems like all hope is gone, the first shark fin appears....
That's what Janu-fuck-you-ary is like in the service industry. A profound sense of hopelessness that only deepens as the month crawls by on a trail of overdue bill notices. And what's worse is that January gives way to February, which is just as bad. February is like a pod of orcas showing up to fight the sharks over who's going to get to drag you to a horrible death.
Assuming you survive Jan and Feb and haven't become homeless or chosen to dine on a .45, eventually March will show up and with it, flickers of life. With the speed of income tax returns nowadays, generally March will breathe a bit of money back into the place as folks scuttle from their winter dens and spend ill advised money on something with tits.
That's where I'm at, esteemed readers. I'm treading water but something keeps brushing my feet and I don't like it very much.
Recent studies indicate that some strippers are in fact, shitty sociopathic people.
Story at eleven.
It turns out that I've worked with some real gems in my career. Oh I could tell you about the girls I've worked with who are lawyers, doctors and physicists*1 now, but that wouldn't make as good a story as those who've ended up like most people picture a stripper ending up, i.e. in a crime scene photo or a mugshot. The industry, as a whole, isn't known for attracting well adjusted, socially responsible people.
It actually, believe it or not, tends to attract druggies, drunks, the lazy, those incapable of holding down a real job, crazies, victimizers, petty criminals, arch villains and miscreants of every spot and stripe.
I should know, I'm one of them.
The thought of having to get a real job again terrifies the living shit out of me. I wake up in cold sweats thinking about time clocks, limited days off and someone caring about when people show up for their shifts. I've been a night person so long, daylight, and the heavy responsibility it brings, is scary.
So, getting back to the topic at hand, here's some crap some of my former charges have gotten up to since they've left the club.
1) Stabby: I'm sure I referred to her by some other name when I wrote about her before, but I can't remember exactly what it was and I don't feel like going through my archives to figure out what it was, so I'll call her Stabby because it seems even more appropriate now in light of some recent revelations.
Apparently Stabby was involved in some sort of kidnap/attempted murder shit in good ole Methizona, USA. Not sure of the details, but someone almost died and Stabby and her buddy, Heroin, had a fairly significant role in it. From the rumor mill I've picked up that she's looking at around 30 years or so locked up. Thankfully the State had already taken her wee babby from her, or it would probably be a junkie prostitute by now as well. I'm sure she'll roll on anyone she can to cut a deal, but I sincerely hope that she goes away for as long as possible because I've seldom had the misfortune to work with a crappier souled human being.
2) Gladys, Miriam and Chloe Mk VII: All three of these gals have received a shiny, brand new DUI in the last 3 months. They join a massive and frequently revised list of other strippers from our club who also lost their driving privileges this year. One of them killed a dog before flipping her SUV in a ditch, but I'm not gonna say which one it was to protect her dignity.
3) Chloe Mk IV and Aliyah: Both of your boyfriends were coke dealers? And BOTH of them were taken down at the culmination of a year long drug ring investigation? Golly. And to think that one of you only lost their Mercedes and Wave Runner while the other one lost a child they probably weren't all that invested in anyway. You both got off lucky.
4) Starscream: How anyone couldn't see that you were a 20 foot tall jet-robot-killing machine thingy I'll never know. Kudos to your plastic surgeon for the outrageous tata's. But I knew you were going to be trouble from day one and I was right. Now, unsurprisingly enough, you're wanted for the murder of Ironhide.
I hope you fry for it.
5) Git and Whorsley: Again, I had other names for these two silly cunts but I don't feel like going through the two hundred some posts to discover what they were. Suffice to say that Git and Whorsley are two good looking chicks around 24-25 years of age. When I say they were good looking, I mean to say that Whorsley was decent to look at but her body showed the evidence of a recent war with a baby that she had clearly lost. While Git on the other hand, Git was stunningly beautiful. Not my ideal mind you, but a gorgeous girl is a gorgeous girl. Had a body to cry for.
So what the hell happened to them you ask? Well I'm not sure about Whorsley, I've only seen her once or twice in the less that two years since she got fired and well, she's still alive and appears to still be making poor decisions.
Git on the other hand is like one of those internet pictures you see of someone side by side with a picture of them after a decade of crack abuse. It hasn't even been two years since her and Whorsley got shitcanned and it's fucking shocking I tell you. I saw her the other night and she looked like a haggard, pioneer-style thirty-five year old, all edges and canyons shaded with a dull grey palette.
Apparently she's discovered a way to burn the candle at three ends.
6) Foot Disease: Had a babby with a Floor Guy from a rival club she used to work at and is currently busy destroying his life. We get the details through the titty bar grapevine and they're grim. I feel like he has a large measure of blame coming his way for his failure to pick up on her obvious instability and for jizzing in her as well. Seems poorly thought out to me. She has bucketloads of crazy just laying around her apartment for anyone to see and yet I understand that sometimes you can't see them buckets because a pussy is in the way.
It's called Twat-Blindness and it's a real thing.
7) Vodzilla: Her only recent development is that she is still alive. Somehow.
And in closing....
I'd like to do one of my incredibly famous Lists about stuff I have absolutely no empathy about. It goes something like this:
1) "I'm Freezing To Death Because I'm Too Domesticated To Even Consider Wearing A Coat When It's Six Degrees Out":
It's six degrees outside, you fucking invertebrate. Wear a coat. A sweater. A goddamn hoodie. Wear something besides a $75 tee shirt or a mesh halter top. Either that, or don't complain to me about how cold it is outside as I shove you out the door so the Manager can count the tills. I know how cold it is outside because I've been escorting strippers to their cars for the past 45 minutes but had the common fucking sense to put a coat on because it's six degrees out.
You fucking harbor monkeys. I love to watch packs of you scurry from bar to bar as I drive by in my warm, angry limo bus. Leering out steamed up windows at a bunch of hypothermic suburban cunts scuttling about like some hairless rats darting from sewer grate to sewer grate. Your cheese is a $7 Bud Light, you fucking rat fuck.
If, at the end of the night you choose, of your own free will, to wait 30 minutes for your fucking Uber rather than to get in that nice warm cab that will do the same goddamn thing for you, then that's your own problem, douche. Shoulda worn a coat.
2) "I lost my phone. This is a crisis that you need to be concerned about."
That's where you're wrong, valued customer and I'll tell you why.
There has yet to be even a moderately busy night when I have not had some misbegotten helmet-muncher come up to me and launch into a story about how and where it lost its phone. By company policy I'm not allowed to scream "I DON'T CARE!" in its face, therefore I tell it to check with the DJ and thus the problem goes away for the time being. This is literally the only advantage I see in working the door, I'm stuck there so I can't help dribbling morons search for whatever stupid thing they lost.
It's amazing to me that I've had the same phone for for almost six years now and have yet to lose it a single time. Perhaps this is because I'm not constantly on it, able to ignore my surroundings due to the fascinating world contained in my goddamn phone.
Continuing on this theme, here is a short list of other things I've never lost at a bar:
1) My coat
2) My wallet
3) My sunglasses
4) A hat
5) Any article of clothing whatsoever
It's really not that hard to keep track of your stuff. If you've ever lost things in a club more than once, you might be a complete lipdragger and should stop going out. Find a book with some pretty pictures in it and stare at it for a while instead.
Sigh. It's ridiculous how often the ATM comes up in this blog, isn't it? Such a simple machine. It's only goal in life is to give you money if you just ask it in the right way. So tranquil.
But not at our club, nope. Our malevolent ATM machine, clearly powered by the souls of executed child killers, lacks the basic human emotions to see that your drunk ass just needs to buy a few more dances. You just need a few more bucks and you're certain to nail that dancer. It doesn't care if you're hammered, in fact it has no way of knowing if you are or not other than 16 failed attempts to withdraw cash from your own account.
It doesn't ask any arcane questions or prompt you to solve a complex mathematical equation to receive your dough, merely complete a simple set of tasks that you've successfully performed hundreds if not thousands of times before. The fact that you're too sauced to do them doesn't befront the machine at all, it just don't care.
And neither do I.
So with all that being said, I sign off for now. Come back next time when I make a convincing case for something-something because of yada yada.
Gluten Nacht,
-The StripperHerder*1
*1 OK, the plural part was an exaggeration. I only know of one former stripper who is a doctor, one who is a lawyer and one who, I shit you not, holds a Master's in Physics. Whether she uses it for anything or not is unknown to me, but I saw the fancy paper and heard her talk some baffling talk.
