My Journey As A Stripper Sitter (part 11)
continued from…
If you have ever been to a strip club and thought to yourself that you could probably do this, it looks SO easy! You usually see the managers standing around not really doing anything. Occasionally a hot chick will go up and talk to him, he’ll walk into the back and then come back out to stand around and do nothing again. It LOOKS easy. It’s not.
I figured out the easiest part – hooking up with the dancers. It’s as simple at one club as it is at the next. The sad truth about strippers is that *100% of strippers have daddy issues*. This is as true in Arizona as it is in England, or Vegas, or anywhere girls will take their clothes off for money. There is, however, a silver lining to the black cloud of being a stripper. Not all of these girls are in fact strippers. There are a select handful of bright, intelligent girls who are using it as a means to an end. Some quick money over a predetermined period of time that are working their ways toward something better. You don’t have to be a whore to be a stripper. You don’t have to do drugs. You don’t have to be an alcoholic. You don’t even have to be comfortable with yourself. But it definitely helps. I love entertainers, they make strip clubs great. But to quote a facebook page I’m a part of – I HATE STRIPPERS.
So without further digression, this particular dancer and I were not doing a very good job at concealing our away-from-work relationship, but nobody seemed to care and I never really saw the owner so it was looking like it didn’t matter. The benefit to all of this (other than copious amounts of sex) was that she was able to be on a friend level with the other dancers. I could use her for favors, I could get her help to get girls in for a shift. I picked this up quickly and exploited it every chance I got.
I was able to tell with certainty that she’d be there when I was. Which meant her roommate would be there too, and a couple of their friends. No matter what shift I was working, I had dancers. At a busier club on a weekend, not a big deal. But at a slower club during the week this was absolutely crucial. Was it the most ethical way of going about things? Not in the least. Almost the furthest from it to be honest. But, as it was, it was working for me and no one was complaining. I wasn’t playing favorites or letting her get away with anything. I held her to the same standards I held everyone else to. I wanted respect, I wanted communication, and I wanted them to work as hard as they could. After all, people weren’t just going to hand them money – they had to work for it and keep a positive attitude in order to keep the customers happy.
It was around a month or so later that we started swapping girls back and forth from the clubs. The club up the street (under the same owner) would call, ask how many girls I had and I would send them dancers or they would send me some in hopes to even things out a bit and give both clubs the chance to make money. This is when I met the next GM I was to work for.
I had already heard quite a bit about him, mostly that I didn’t want to work for him. Frankly I didn’t really want to work for this chain of clubs at all – I wasn’t making any money. But as it was, I was at least willing to hear him out if he wanted to talk. And it turned out that the first time I went down to drop off a dancer to him he did want to talk.
He pulled me aside and asked me to come back by after closing since that club was roughly four times the size of the one I was currently at and it took much longer to get things in order to leave. I told him I would and several hours later after my shift was over and the door was locked, I got in my car and drove up the street to talk to him.
After waiting outside the back door for a few minutes he opened it and invited me in. He spoke bluntly with me and got straight to the point. He told me that he had heard a lot about me already. The girls liked me, my numbers were good (as good as they could be) and that he was letting the other two managers go and wanted to know if I’d take point with him to run the big club. I didn’t want to leave the club I was at, but it wasn’t really a huge transition. All the paperwork was the same, I just needed the new codes and to figure out where all the light switches were.
After a few days of deliberation I decided to take him up on the offer. I let my GM know that I would be going to the other club and went on a walk-through the big club to learn my way around. The girls were marginally better looking, the club looked nicer in the black light and it was about a half a mile closer to my house. Other than that, after a few days I figured out that it was just as slow, just as boring, and I ended up with the same girls as I had at the other club. I didn’t have any good shifts still, I was offered Friday and Saturday day shifts which were supposed to be amazing! I honestly couldn’t get girls in there to save my life, which didn’t make one bit of difference considering it was a rare occasion that a customer would actually wander into the building. So I was being paid less than minimum wage to sit in a hot building with the doors open playing Solitare on the DJ computer until the night guy came in. What a glamorous job!
The only saving grace was that I met a few pretty interesting people. One of the DJs was dating this super cute tattooed dancer, who aside from the attitude problem wasn’t all that bad to be around. Thinking back on it, he was a bit of an arrogant prick as well. Funny how that works out, right?
The other DJ was an older guy, and was the one behind the sign in the DJ booth that read “Keep your dirty dickbeaters off the DJ equipment! This means you!” He was a former singer in a metal band (not half bad) and all around a pretty decent guy to have around.
Music selection? Well I get into listening to rap on occasion, but the first DJ seemed to ONLY play it. The second DJ would as well, but he knew his rock as well. He knew it better than me in fact and that’s saying a lot.
But my job, managing this dreadfully slow club got harder and harder as each day passed. I was losing my motivation. The one owner would come in and not say anything to me then disappear without a word, and the other owner would send my doormen out to promote events that had already ended and then get mad when business didn’t pick up. Not my fault dude!
Then the checks started showing up late. Not that they were big checks that would last me the two weeks between pay days, but it helped – a lot. On one such occasion, the GM I was working for asked me if it was possible to go down to our sister liquor club (topless) to pick up checks before my shift since they had been mistakenly delivered there. Being the people-pleaser I am still to this day, I told him I would, and made the trek out there the next morning.
I made my way out there only to discover that not all of the checks were in. The other GM (the one I had left) had already come by from clear across town, and instead of picking up all the checks he only grabbed his. I took this as a pretty blatant sign of disrespect, he hadn’t even bothered to grab the checks for his own employees. I sat and talked to the daytime manager that I hadn’t yet met, and she told me things were going pretty well over there. They looked busy enough, had a few girls there and strangely enough – even during the day there were customers there.
I went back to my part of the world and dropped the checks off with the little club then made my way back to the big one… the thought of someday working at a busy club that served liquor resonating through my head the entire shift and well into the next month. It took a little while – and it took their head DJ banging one of my regular dancers to get the GM from that club down to mine, but the end result was something I had to seriously consider of the course of the next week. I was in for the biggest culture shock of my life.
to be continued…
August 24th, 2010 at 6:21 am
[...] part 11 [...]