I wish we could brand all of our pillhead and heroin loving dancers with a giant "J" on their forehead in the hopes that maybe some customers would stop getting dances from them. By giving them money, one is merely shortening their lifespan as they head immediately to their dealer's house after a shift to trade all their cash for some smack or oxy's.
Even in the dimly lit environs of the club, you should, with little effort, be able to spot the track marks trailing their ways up and down a bitches arm.
Open your fucking eyes, losers.
Anyone who's OK with a junkie dancing for them has clearly never had any dealings with one before. They're despicable, gross people. Capable of any depth of degradation or self abasement to get their fix. Unless you've been among them for any length of time, you simply cannot comprehend what these chicks do on a daily basis to feed their habit. If you want that grinding your meat, more power to ya, sicko.
The only thing worse is a crackhead, who will happily blow a dog if it gets them a rock.
This is probably the single greatest shit cookie I have to eat by working in this industry, dealing with fucking drug ADDICTS. Hardcore drug addicts, not your fluffy, barely-even-criminal weekenders. For some girls this club is the last stop before death or the utter inability to even hold down a strip club job, the most forgiving industry on the planet if you have a vagina.
The same applies to drunks. The consistently drunk, that is. Anyone can have a bad day every now and then in this occupation. Strippers are pretty much encouraged to drink: by customers, by circumstance, by anxiety, by other strippers and hell, why not, by society in general. Everyone loves a drunk stripper except those charged with seeing to her safety, due compensation and control as part of their job description.
I bring this up AGAIN because tonight we had a dancer I'll call Revelation, because she's named herself after a section of the Bible, albeit a different one. This is the variety of tit-slinger that comes into work already buzzed as hell and proceeds, rather quickly, to get drunk as all fuck. Every night she works, rain or shine.
To say Revelation has been around the block a few times would be an understatement. To say she's been dragged face down around the block a few times from behind an oil leaking '67 pick up truck would be slightly more accurate and much more fun to say. So I'm going with that.
I've worked with her before at a number of clubs and she's a career path alcoholic headed for All Star status.
SO tonight, predictably, she was shitfaced 90 minutes into her shift. She, like Vodzilla, is possessed of an eerie ESP-like ability to discern any time a customer buys bottle service within the confines of the club. It doesn't make any difference if she's in the same room or even on the same floor as said customer, her BoozeSpider Sense goes off any time a liter bottle of 80 proof or better gets cracked on the floor of the club.
Then she teleports to their table and begins a devastating assault on the free liquor supply, totally content to sit and drink someone else's booze instead of making money. When it's gone, she vanishes like a mirage leaving only a faint whiff of vaginal deodorant and some uncomfortable memories.
This is what happened tonight. Hammered early and determined to get worse.
And she did.
Then I had to walk her out. Yes, she was clearly intoxicated, but I've seen worse. No, she probably shouldn't have driven, but I suggested a cab or Uber to her the requisite number of three times, the magical Floor Guy's Incantation.
And when she refused and insisted she was fine, I replied "OK" and got the fuck out of the way. I had fulfilled my legal obligations*1 and in my opinion, exceeded my job duties. I've been in this situation many times and I have a number of very strong opinions about it. Namely:
A) I didn't serve her the fucking alcohol in the first place, why isn't one or more of the bartenders policing her at the end of the night?
B) It is IM-FUCKING-POSSIBLE to stop a dancer from drinking if she's determined to do it; most of the bartenders will serve her no matter how wasted she is or failing that, she can find customers or allied dancers to buy funny-juice for her. Outside of breathalyzing her every hour on the hour or following her around with a drone all night, there's no realistic way to prevent her from getting bro-faced.
C) I'm not willing to risk putting my hands on a girl to stop her from driving when she's insistent about doing it. Legally it's assault at best, kidnapping at worst and in today's ultra-social-justice reality, I ain't risking that. I can reason, threaten, cajole, beg or belittle, but I can't yeti-hug a bitch and drag her kicking and screaming back into the club and hold her hostage while she sobers up.
D) If Management would just grow a pair and actually fire some of these loopy tequila-sponges, and fire them permanently, it would show they have some teeth. But they prefer to gum everything, or run it through a blender first.
E) If you don't want a girl driving home all kerfuckled, don't let me walk her out. They know I don't care. I've told them I don't care. Yet they keep allowing me to do it and then get upset at me when so and so was permitted to drive off all gin ruffled.
My theory is that there are VERY few cars on the road when we unleash the worst of our rolling road hazards and that of those folks:
1) Sober people will see her coming a mile away and take evasive action, thus avoiding collision.
2) Drunk people get what they deserve, which is sometimes a stripper-piloted carnage dildo with a Nissan badge.
F) I feel like once we become adults we make choices. For some strippers, making the right ones are a constant challenge, like running uphill while juggling three babies and two chainsaws, drunk and on roller skates.
G) I'm fresh out of patience for problem dancers. If you've driven home drunk on 70% or more of all the shifts you've worked, then you're probably really good at it at this point. After all, you're still alive and tottering around on two legs.
I'm willing to put in the extra effort with the dancer who is occasionally too drunk to drive. Like once or twice a year occasional. Weekly girls however, I'm done. If management wants to make a change they can, but it's too much effort for them. It's easier to displace blame unto your underlings.
In my defense I've allowed much drunker dancers than Revelation to drive home in my time and they've all survived and utterly failed to kill or even maim a single person.
Check, motherfucker.
Which is a nice segue into Dynamic Management Team
we shall fight in the dressing room and on the stage, in the parking lot;
we shall never surrender."
The greatest of which is "Have Her Come In Tomorrow"; best played on the night of our monthly Amateur Contest.
The principles are like this:
You're the Manager on an Amateur Night, you poor fuck. You have some horrendous, self-deluded amateurs come in, thinking for some ungodly reason that they are attractive or talented enough to work here*2, but of course are wrong. You really hate having to tell them they're nasty as sardine chum on an assholed toothbrush and you'd rather gnaw the ballsack off a roadkilled beaver than hire them on.
The owner would be.....very derisive toward you. He likes slender blond girls and wants many, many more slender blond girls to be hired. We agree, but how many slender blond girls do you think show up for our monthly thing, on average?
If you guessed, "a lot less than other demographics" you may be correct, sharp reader.
Therefore your move is to have the DJ or a Floor Orc tell all the girls to come back tomorrow, ironically at a time and date when You won't happen to be working, thus passing the whole awkward mess onto the next day's Manager.
This isn't a game for the impatient. Near as I can tell and through my exhaustive research, this game has been going on since neanderthal times when one primitive fuck made one of his bitches dance for another primitive fuck in exchange for a gazelle leg.
That was the Genesis.
The next move for the loser of the first round (Manager the day after Amateur Contests) is to first make a Floor Schmuck do your dirty work by telling dancers that we had no intention of hiring, but were asked to come back anyway, that the club wasn't interested in offering them a contract at this time. It deliberately wastes these ladies time and since the managers dump responsibility off on us Floor Dicks, the uncomfortable and sometimes hostile interaction with justifiably pissed off semi-attractive gals who've been led on by weak willed management usually falls to us.
Your second move is to pick one of the best of this dismal tribe and tell her that she needs to come back tomorrow night to fill out her paperwok, that for some reason it's impossible to do it tonight. This sends an increasingly agitated, acrylic-nailed Wolverine back toward the Manager who'd fired the salvo in the first place.
Check, motherfucker.
It's been going on since we crawled from the ocean and it's never going to stop.
Other sweet management games include: Guess If You're Working Or Not!, I Never Said That!, WaLk AwAy, Trainwreck Rehire, and another one of my favorites, Changing Standards.
It's a lot of fun for us Floor Staff to have to guess which set of rules apply on any given night, we often bet on it just to see who can be more wrong.
I frequently "win" Changing Standards because I'm almost always wrong in nearly all my assumptions.
Dancers and music: a sick, twisted relationship.
Strippers are extremely predictable in their musical preferences and can get very bitchy about a DJ going outside of their genres or awarding other dancers "their" song. Fortunately for us Floor Dudes, strippers, not unlike bull seals, seldom fight to the death. They just need to fuck a bitch up a little bit where other strippers can see it, thus metaphorically spraying the room with their spoor.
Their musky spoor.
But essentially, these days, 90% of strippers dance to the same sort of garbage, i.e. hip hop, R&B, rap, techno and other related nonsense about money, fucking and how great the artist is at everything. It gets astonishingly tedious to listen to, like wandering through an art gallery comprised entirely of paint-by-numbers pictures and beautifully framed candy wrappers.
Utter shite.
Back in my day, a glorious time in our history that most folks refer to as the late 80's/early 90's, things were different. They were better.
Fuck you! I SAID THEY WERE BETTER!
Back in them days, the majority of the gals still danced to rock songs. Hair metal, alternative, grunge and whatnot. It was awesome, dude! The occasional Whitney/Mariah song had to be tolerated, but most songs played, all night, featured guitars.
No drum tracks, auto tune, rapping, and those annoying little computerized cymbal beats that every song today must have.
For examples, I'll list a typical 10 song rotation from when I first started in the industry and then another similar list from last Wednesday.
The good ole days:
1) You could be mine GUNS AND ROSES
2) (Everything I do) I do it for you BRYAN ADAMS
3) Winds of change SCORPIONS
4) Cradle of love BILLY IDOL
5) Vision of love MARIAH CAREY
6) Black Velvet ALANNAH MYLES
7) Unskinny bop POISON
8) Smells like teen spirit NIRVANA
9) Give it away now RED HOT CHILI PEPPERS
10) Evenflow PEARL JAM
Compared to last Wednesday:
1) That one song about being a VIP all night SOMEGUY FEATURING SOMEGIRL
2) The rap song about being a document forger with the gun sound effects: SOmE ChICK
3) Annoying song #16 RIHANNA
4) Garglin spuzz at da club KESHA
5) Bustin on Bentley's YIL' SLAZZY
6) F**kin in a Veyron: LIL' YOUNG T-POOG
7) Anaconda NIKKI MINAJ
8) That song about endless bottle service and riding around in a Maybach TINY WEEZY
9) That genre that's just grating noises put together in simplistic rhythms PICK ONE
10) Fucked with an anchor ALESTORM*3
That last one was a surprise, yes? Read your footnotes...
Right, that's it. That's your Halloween Spectacular Extravaganza, with footnotes!*4
So fuck off now.
Pleasant Pagan Pilfered Hooby-Day, yon fucksticks
-The StripperHerder
*1 Here's the completely fucked up part, from a legal standpoint: Say one of the dancers I let drive away while drunk ended up killing someone on their way home. Technically the club, and maybe even me personally could be subject to a lawsuit.
However, if I'd yoked up a drunk girl in a full nelson and carried her back to the club both for her own good AND against her will, denying her civil liberties and whatnot, both the club and I could be plaintiffs in a lawsuit.
Fucked if I do and fucked if I don't. Hope the worst never happens, unless it's Vodzilla and a single car accident...
*2 No, I'm serious.
Listen, if I were a female and was interested in entering an amateur stripper contest, or already an experienced stripper that was too arrogant and self absorbed to be realistic about the certain truths, I would still research the market. It's not like it's quantum physics. Go to whatever titty bar you're thinking of entering said contest and see what kind of dancers work there.
Can you, with a modicum of self actualization, picture yourself as part of this particular team? Do you "fit in" in a general appearance sorta way? I'm talking body type, not race. Face rather than color.
Example from my perspective, to assuage the lefty freedom fighters who still read this blog despite knowing that they hate it, me and my industry.
God bless ya girls...
If, for some fucking crazy reason I decided one day, "I should enter an amateur male stripper contest because maybe I could win some money and possibly even get a job!" I would figure out what club the contest was at and then I would go there as a customer a couple of days prior to the contest and see what kind talent they had and if I could, being honest with myself, picture me successfully working there.
Had this situation actually been real and had I been very sincere and forthright with myself, I would've drawn the following conclusions which, being only semi-delusional at best, might've led me to believe that I was fucking dreaming if I thought I could be a goddamn Chippendale.
A) I need leg muscles for this?
B) Not a single one of these guys had to lift their gut up to show their wang.
C) Is it cold in here? I'm gonna need about 3 pints of silicone injected into my dong before I properly fill out a banana hammock like that.
D) Unlike me, none of these guys are two shades paler than a blizzard.
E) None of those guys were winded sixty seconds into a song.
F) Compared to the dudes who work here I move and smell like a wounded musk ox.
*3 Goddamn I love this one DJ named Joey who downloaded this song on my recommendation and I really love entertainer Xera, who is the only dancer we have that prefers metal and loves this song.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVu4UR5Zarw
*4 Which may or may not be amusing, there are no guaranties here, dear reader.
