I don't know what to tell you kids. Uncle Herdy is getting real tired of this occupation. A lot of this has to do strictly with economics, i.e. my ability to put up with tedious fuckshittery is directly linked to my income.
And lately, that income has been appallingly low. As in: I normally pay all my bills for the month on the first and have the entire month to build my money back up so that I can do it all again come the next month.
At the beginning of September, as usual, I did that. Now, with only a week left in the month, I'm not even halfway to my "normal" level. If I were to pay all of my October bills now, in the amounts I normally pay, I'd be 100% broke. Rifling couch cushions for ramen money and so forth.
I wrote a haiku describing my frustration:
My mask bone china
Scorn light glow like sun through cloud
Scowling at drunk fucks
Money at the club has been shit for most of Spring and almost all of Summer and as my balance dwindles, my contempt and apathy grow like hateful sponge on an abject reef. I can deal with all the junkies, dealers, drunk twats, vomit, rudeness, assorted dickshittery, arrogance, pedestrian intellects and other fucked up nonsense...
WHEN I'M MAKING SOME FUCKING MONEY.
When I have to put up with elevated levels of moron, slapdash management, 31 flavors of asshole and am going broke doing it, I get annoyed.
Tonight for example contained what I felt to be unreasonable amounts of irritating dick-slurry, considering my recent levels of compensation, that is.
Do you sense a list coming on?
I sure do.
Irritating Dick-Slurry up to my knees, Vol 1
1) Management drops the ball again.
It'd be more accurate to say that Management didn't even show up to the field, or to stretch the metaphor further, even have any idea what sport it was supposed to play had it shown up. Some of you may be wondering what the hell I'm talking about right now, what could they have done to earn such scorn?
Well, I'm gonna tell ya.
There was a major event in town tonight and it was the ONLY one. The only plausible reason for anyone to be in The Town™ as it probably drew between 15,000-20,000 people. You'd think that just maybe, that might be an event you want to try to promote the club at, by picking a few cuties and sending them out under my watchful eye to hand out free passes to the herds of dude-sheep that would be clogging the streets when the event was over.
I mean, it's a thought, right? Not even a deep one.
I was on the bus, training my replacement, which by the way is a whole fucking thing all unto itself, but it's so messed up that I'll have to address it in a future post unless I happen to be far more productive that I suspect I'll be.
SO, we're on our first stab through The Town™, when I notice all the activity around a particular venue. I texted my Manager, Sir Wilfred CuddleRage XIX, alerting him to the presence of an Event. He texts me back within 2 minutes that it's the Whoever Show at the Wherever Arena.*1
So I text him back "Can you get me a couple of girls to hand out passes? There's about to be a mass exodus of pre-enebriated people of a certain age and income class which is JUST what we're looking for and they'll have to shuffle past our hottie to get to their car and a whole bunch of them are going to take free passes from our girls because they are pretty and drunk men respond very keenly to that.
Which I might remind you is the very core tenet of our entire industry."
I'm paraphrasing here. I believe what I actually sent was "Need pass-sluts NOW! Soon people lotz!"
His response was, and I'm NOT going to paraphrase, I'm going to quote directly...
"I can ask."
I'm gonna go make another drink while I let that one sink in a moment.
Seriously. That's what he sent.
I'll be right back...
That's better. Vodka is good as an antiseptic against soul-rot. At least that's what my doctor tells me and he's Russian so he would know.
Where was I? Oh yeah, "I can ask."
Ummm...you're the fucking boss, dude. You can't force dancers to promote because they are independent contractors and have to be handled with kid gloves. That being said, brute force is not your only anti-stripper countermeasure. You could have cajoled, bargained, offered free house fees (which is the standard compensation for promoting) or made promises you ultimately didn't even have to keep if you wanted to be a dick about it.
What you chose to do was nothing.
With the following assets at your disposal, I might add:
4 Fucking Floor Hosts
3 Goddamn Waitresses
2 Friendly and 1 Bitchy Bartender, all cute.
1 New Shuttle Driver
Roughly 30 Strippers, Assorted*3
And the challenges facing you at the time:
Maybe 10 Customers, 12 max. You were staffed for up to 100 or so customers and had, to be charitable, 15 at best. You could've found a way to send hot chicks into the masses, like a surprise calvary charge.
Seems like it may have been possible to scrounge up two or three girls doing fuck all and offer them a free house fee good til midnight whenever they wanted to use it. This would've allowed them to work for free even if they checked in at midnight, instead of having to pay $75 up front.
Why not? The potential reward outweighs the payout by lots and lots of mathematical stuff I can't articulate because I suck at math.
I'm not going to get pedantic about it, I have other human stupidity to cover. It just seems to me that keeping tabs on major happenings should be within a Manager's purview, especially in a mediocre market. Some are better at it than others. Sir Wilfred seems to actively resist it.
2) "I are Alice. Am Waitress thingy are to bring drinks for you. I have a pen."
Alice isn't the brightest star in the constellation, but golldern it she's a determined little thing. Literally scurries about the club, wee legs pumping away like a tiny dog trying to keep up with a tall human. Moves like a squirrel fleeing with two cheekfuls of tasty walnuts, eager to stash her prize, but frequently distracted by other promising looking ground nuts.
I don't know. I like her. But she can be a bit silly from time to time, dumb as things that feed on algae. Yet she wants to be good at her job. She actually cares still.
3) Last week a dancer was called 'Sunshine'. Now she's changed her name to 'Jordan', but didn't tell anyone.
Strippers deciding to change their name, sometimes in mid shift, is aggravating. There are no rules for changing your stage name other than if we already have an "Amber" we don't let any new hires take that name. Maybe this is why 20% of the entertainers I work with can't make their stage calls, they've forgotten what dancer name they're currently performing under.
I mention this because I recently set up a VIP room for a dancer that I've worked with for 8 years across 3 different clubs and when I asked if she was still using the stage name Euphoria, she said "no", we already have a tedious bitch named that so she was going by "Alphonsa".
So I go to the DJ and tell him that "Alphonsa is gonna be in a champagne room for a half hour and he's all like 'Who the fuck is "Alphonsa"? I shrug and describe to him your standard Mk II Mexican Fake-Tittied Stripper chick and he has no idea whom I'm referring to because we have so many Mexican fake-tittied girls working here.
So I go back to the champagne room and ask her again what her stage name is and she says "It's Lexi."
That's not what you just told me bitch. You said "Alphonsa", plain and simple. Now, in 3 minutes time it has somehow changed. Make up your drug-addled mind. Remembering what your 'professional' moniker is shouldn't take two tries. Doesn't make any difference how long you've been in the industry or how many goddamn stripper names you 'performed' under, it should be something you remember at all times, because a stripper that can't remember their stage name is about as useful as a dishwasher who refuses to use water.
It would be like coming into our club three nights in a row and when I greeted you and asked for ID, I'd say my name was Bill On Monday, Cassius on Tuesday and Just Ted on Wednesday, just to fuck with you.
I'd like to take this opportunity to state that World Class Strippers NEVER change their name, only hackneyed, stretch marked, droopy/fake tittied winkle-gashes do. Thinking perhaps in their opioid-dependent excuses for brains that by changing their names they will somehow change the course of their misbegotten lives and negate the constant rain of poor decisions they make.
Fucking useless.
Yet no matter how many track marks a gal may display, there are always guys lining up to throw money at them. This is because they are prostitutes and dudes love reasonably priced sex. Most of these guys couldn't get laid if they didn't pay for it, so an obvious heroin addiction just adds to the danger and allure of an already uncommon experience.
"I fucked this junkie ho! Spuzzed on her mug because that's what porn dudes do. Cost me $32.41, with tip. Stained the seat on my Fiat something fierce."
OK, that's enough of that so-called List.
It sucked and I apologize for that yet at the same time have no intention of fixing it. If you found it unsatisfactory in a StripperHerder's Best Lists sort of way, I urge you to forget about it and move on with your life. If you just can't let it go however and simply must have vengeance upon me, then start driving for Uber or Lyft and get in front of the Bus when I've decided one more 'no use of turn signal' was the perfect amount for me to go all ostrich-rape crazy and make an example of you with my V-10 powered War Shuttle. See what that gets ya.
Whether or not I die in a hail of gunfire or you die under the wheels of my Party-Panzer, someone's got a great lawsuit*2 and it ain't gonna be my team....
Thus you (or your surviving family) gets sweet revenge against me, a would-be Mad Max villain with a faggily painted Battle Bus, by suing eighteen kinds of shit out of a company with relatively deep pockets that will most likely settle out of court for several times what your smiley, selfy-taking ass would ever amount to.
Shame on me. I'm getting all off track again.
Here's some slices of the past two night's headcheese. Enjoy.
-There's this thing where 'problem' dancers will try to assert their power over your average strip club patron (loser) by threatening to get said losers kicked out if they don't buy dances from them. This practice was the main reason I quit Sally's Snizz-Market; I got sick and fucking tired of shaking dudes down for scam money, or throwing them out for some invented slight. Never mind the theft I endured at the "Senior" Floor Guy's hands, the strong arm bullshit involved with the corporate ethos there disgusted me.
Especially since after I intimidated a guy into coughing up what he didn't owe in the first place, the strippers involved usually tipped anywhere from 'crappy' to 'Lap my whore-crust, Floor-Bug!"
If I wanted to do this kinda stuff, I could've become a leg breaker for some sort of organized crime outfit. It's not like I haven't had chances, or haven't worked for 'questionable' people. And by 'questionable people', I mean businessmen with clear ties to organized crime.
Cuz I have.
That's all I'll say about that.
And now I'd like to remind all my readers that frequently an installment of the Plight that you may be reading might very well have been written over the course of several nights. This is one of those.
Normally I like to mention it, you know, for transparency. Which I strive VERY hard to maintain.
So, I'm mentioning it here. Everything you read up until "That's all I have to say about that" was written after a brutal Saturday night, and everything after it was written after a brutal Wednesday night.
Let me break it down for you:
I can't do this shit much longer.
This is a fact.
My escape used to be driving the fucking shuttle, and I hadn't realized what a longevity booster it was to my career in drunk-tolerating, but now that it's virtually gone, I'm in a world of service industry shit, folks.
I never acknowledged how short I was on patience with everything: strippers, customers, pieces of shit, more strippers, regulars, other humans, drunks, management and even my fellow Floor Dudes.
I'm fed up with it all.
Current plan is to be so bad at my job that management is forced to fire me, collect unemployment for as long as I can get it and work on my script while I rapidly succumb to poverty, hoping I can sell a finished script before I repaint the walls with my thinky bits.
It's what I came up with on short notice, maybe something better will present itself.
And finally, remember when I said that this installment, like so many others, was penned on multiple nights?
Well here we are three weeks later from everything written above and my attitude has changed dramatically. The reasons for this are twofold:
A) The money has improved markedly through October, and
B) I researched and put myself on a couple of natural mood boosters and they work really well. Turns out my body wasn't producing enough feel-good hormones and as a result I was a completely miserable sack of shit in every facet of my life.
I'm much better now, thank you.
Later,
-The StripperHerder
*1 In all honesty I should've been aware of this particular Happening because as the primary Driver of Das Shootle, it behooves me to know when opportunities and obstacles are going to be thrown my way.**
**How's that for honesty and transparency? You whining, post-liberal Utopia-Thugs.
#anythingsoffensiveifyoutryhardenough #imoffendedbythathashtag
*2 The NEW American Dream
*3 Sounds like a Christmas song, doesn't it?
**How's that for honesty and transparency? You whining, post-liberal Utopia-Thugs.
#anythingsoffensiveifyoutryhardenough #imoffendedbythathashtag
*2 The NEW American Dream
*3 Sounds like a Christmas song, doesn't it?
