*Author's note: This post, as you may have guessed by its abject fucking tardiness, has been worked on over multiple nights of potato-booze consumption. Like many of my posts it is a literary golem cobbled together from several night's worth of bitch-clay and sent stumbling towards the interwebz by a drunk writer.
Therefore don't look for a clean, linear narrative, transitioning smoothly from topic to topic. Rather expect a choppy bunch of gripes strung together with shitty or nonexistent segues and you won't be disappointed.
I published my first Plight of the StripperHerder post on Oct 2, 2010. It sucked, but it was my first one so I don't allow myself to feel bad that it sucked. I hadn't the slightest idea at the time that I'd still be writing the damn thing seven years later, but here we are. I'm still writing and if my numbers are anything to go on, you're still reading.
So let's do some FUN STATS, because I enjoy telling you all how mind bendingly surreal this job can be.
-Number of dancers I've worked with who have died since my last post: O again. Not sure what's going on.
-Number of customers who've lost their phone since my last post: 113
-Favorite customer cringe quote since my last post "I don't mean to sound racist, but y'all got too many niggers workin here."
-Number of people in a single group I let into the club for free because we were relatively slow at the time and they were being cunts about paying the cover charge: 15
-Amount of money I was tipped for saving them $150: 0
-Number of champagne rooms I have set up in a row without being tipped a dime: 9
Nine fucking rooms without a single measly penny thrown my way. ME, the guy who decides what time the room starts and stops, how far you're allowed to go no matter how willing the girl is and what constitutes an offense I'll throw you out for and an offense I'll completely fucking ignore.*1
-Number of times I got asked for money by homeless people tonight while stopped ANYWHERE downtown for more than 45 seconds: 7. Although to be fair it was actually 6 because the fourth time was just an angry dude in a pile of blankets laying against a building a hundred feet away who as soon as I stepped out of the bus, starting yelling random and hostile ass shit at me.
"I'm from Chicago, motherfucker! You don't know what dat means but I do! Suck my dick, bitch! You white motherfuckah! I knew Reggie, yeah, dat Reggie. You a piece of shit, boy! Popcorn and hurricanes, son! Marsupial! I hate you pale ass skin, you honky fuck! I'll fuck you up! Don't need no crackah motherfuckah looking down at me, boy! I'm a ribald, Barbara Cuisinart all up yo blouse, Meagan!"
I enjoyed the coherent insults almost as much as I enjoyed his off the wall non sequiters and later that night, just before I returned to the club to work the door, I rolled by where he was sleeping and lobbed a 12 ounce bag of deluxe nut mix toward him, figuring he might be hungry when he woke up.
I often make attempts to justify my own existence, such as this, when I'm sure no one is looking.
My PR dept has urged me to do a "good deeds" post so people don't equate the real me with my online persona, but I keep telling them to fuck off and die, if my readers found out I wasn't a complete chunk of garbage, they might stop reading.
Tipping your Floor Staff is important, trust me.
For a relevant example, I set up a VIP room tonight for a holdover dayshift dancer (read: gross, stupid, unattractive and shoulda been gone by 7pm) with a clueless customer who had asked me 5,000 questions about how he could pay for the room. I was very patient and friendly with him, which is unusual for me, even though my Floor-Guy Sense was telling me this dude wasn't gonna throw me anything by way of a gratuity, and, you're not gonna believe this, but I was right. A big fat 'fuck you' drawn through the "Tip" line.
Right. So that's how it was gonna be. No problem.
At this point the disgusting stripper asks if they can go in the "Big Room", which is larger and more luxurious that the standard one on one room. I knew from speaking with the day shift Floor Squid that this particular unappealing day shifter doesn't tip for shit (as I already suspected), so my answer to her was "No. The Big Rooms cost more."
She was very indignant about this and went to ask the other Floor Schnook about that and he backed me up because he doesn't like her either. When I led her to one of the standard small rooms and I had a moment alone with her, I told her she didn't get the room upgrade because her cheapskate ass customer didn't tip. Had he thrown me $50, not only could they have enjoyed the Big Room, but she could have done whatever she wanted to him because I wouldn't have even glanced at the camera or thought twice about it.
What DID happen though is I watched the room very carefully and when I caught her with her hands down his pants, I went to the room and told them to knock it off, hands away from the genitals! Bad scumbags!
I did this with a certain amount of satisfaction. What was even more satisfying is that I was standing out front of the building having a smoke when this miserly dicksmear came out of the club. He looked pissed off and put upon, like someone had just jizzed on his favorite stuffed animal. I really hammed up the friendly goodnight to him and he expressed to me that he felt he had been ripped off because all the things his off putting choice in hags had promised would happen in the champagne room, didn't. My barging into the room and telling them to quit groping each other's slime generators was just the cherry of what he perceived to be a shit sundae.
I got a bit serious for a moment and asked him if he wanted some advice. He grudgingly said yes and I told him that if he'd tipped me something, I would've looked the other way to a degree based on his tip level. For $50 I wouldn't have even turned the camera on because she's a haggard dayshift harpy and thus, most likely a prostitute. But since I KNEW she wasn't gonna cough up a dime and was very keen on going to Big Room 2, which has a large blind spot in the camera coverage and everyone knows this, I wasn't about to let that happen since I would make exactly zero dollars off the whole situation.
So, I continued, for a mere $200 instead of $150, she probably would've done some sick shit to your member and I wouldn't have known about it because she would've done it in the blind spot which gives me plausible deniability and I wouldn't have cared much anyway. But by being cheap, I concluded, he assured that I would be watching every move in the room. Like God.
An angry, vindictive God. And to be completely honest, I really enjoyed ruining his day. I acknowledge that this makes me a bad person, but I've come to terms with that and my demons and I frequently grab lunch together.
Her thinking that I would just allow her to do whatever she wanted, regardless of legality or remuneration, starkly illustrates how strippers think differently from you and I. This is what we folk in the narrative biz call a segue. (Seg-Way)
There are a number of differences and most of them can largely be attributed to:
1) Youth. All young people are idiots. I was an idiot, too.
This is something you come to know after turning thirty.
2) Beauty. It affords a lot of advantages to ambitious (or greedy) young women in a society that is still primarily male dominated and obsessed with hot chicks.
3) Inexperience. Life hasn't kicked some of these bitches down the stairs yet. Their biggest setbacks have been losing an Ebay auction for a madly priced Italian handbag, or failing to conceive from the drunken intercourse with a certain NFL cornerback.
4) They haven't learned the value of a dollar. Most of these young ladies either haven't worked a real job where you slave away for eight hours a day for $9-12/hr and you have to show up on time, or have promptly forgotten what it was like to be in an occupation where you make X amount of dollars for your time at work and that was that.
But now they're in an industry where they can make thousands of bucks in a single night and are constantly offered large sums of money in exchange for sex acts. This clearly has a negative impact on their worldview.
I literally just worked a night where two of our dancers whom I'll refer to as E.T. and Impala, made almost $12,000 each. In seven hours. This is roughly four grand short of someone's yearly income who makes minimum wage and works 40 hours a week. They made $1700 an hour. Now I don't know where you're from, average reader, or what kind of background you hail from, but to me $1700 an hour is a metric fuckton of money. Potentially life changing money, in fact.
I expect them to have the common sense to pay off some bills, but I'd bet that they just blow the rest of the money on stupid shit they don't need because Pop Culture tells them they need it.
I've hacked away at this post long enough. It's almost two months overdue and slaving away at it anymore isn't gonna change all that is wrong with it, so I'm gonna hit publish and try to live with myself.
Good eve,
-The StripperHerder
*1 If I had a barbarian name it would be Bathor the Untippable. Or Durkan the Disgratuitous.
