I miss my old club, but it’s a seafood restaurant now, so what can you do. I thought the final week would be more fun than it was instead of just being depressing. I should have already been trying new clubs. It’s what I imagine it feels like when a couple has a trip planned and then they break up but decide not to waste a nonrefundable itinerary and then they use up all their vacation days for the year to have a really horrible time. Even the resident drug dealer knew to jump ship and only stopped by to share his forwarding address at a new club he felt was “safe” for him.
Also, I said I was going to go to the party store but all of those are in the suburbs. I looked on Yelp for the closest party store but it turned out to actually be strictly for quinceañeras and didn’t even have glowsticks. I decided that I didn’t like any of the bitches I was working with enough to get them tiaras or rolls of lace. Something about how they were acting in the last week was really disappointing. Maybe I was paying more attention than usual. I never tried to keep track of who was BFF’s with whom at any given moment, what with so many enemy of my enemy alliances being formed almost as fast as they were broken.
There’s the one who didn’t like me because she thought that I stole her money from across the dressing room, which would make me a master magician. She would watch my stage sets, staring so hard that you know she’s either counting the fat rolls on your back or looking for ingrown hairs. If I’m in the dressing room, she has a habit of hugging people who aren’t me.
It was almost the last shift and there were a few of us getting ready at the start of the night. As soon as she walked in and saw me, she hurled herself onto one of the other girls. She started talking in a baby voice. Not a “Happy Birthday Mr. President” baby voice or a “Who’s a good dog!?” voice. It sounded like a loud, aggressive, Betty Boop impression. Needless to say, it’s not remotely appropriate for social situations and it leaves me with no choice but to assume that she is a deeply disturbed individual.
She clung to the other girl like a starfish on a rock as the demented Betty Boop voice came out of her body like a demon, “I liiiiiiike you. I liiiiiike youuuuuu. I don’t liiiike sooooooome peeeeopllllllllle.”
Don’t worry lady, if liking me means that you would use me like a human shield while you fire off veiled insults, then no thanks. You can keep your disingenuous hugs.
The second time this happened was just recently at a new club. We spotted each other and I’m not sure who got the honor of snubbing the other first, but I’ll be damned if she expects me to be civil just because we are both castaways in unfamiliar territory.
There was another girl there that we used to work with. I was delighted to see her. She is beautiful, kind, and makes lots of money. Her presence was a good sign, like finding another mushroom hunter out in the field. Her face lit up when she saw me, and we mutually hugged (how dumb is it that I even have to clarify?) and caught up a bit. It was great to see her and I wasn’t going to let Huggy McSureShowsMe watching in the mirror bring me down.
Probably about an hour and a half into the shift, all three of us happened to be in the dressing room when Huggy embraced my friend from behind and commanded her not to be a stranger. I think she also said something about how she “gets no love.” Doesn’t she know that there is a window for when it’s acceptable to hug a person? You can either do it when you greet or when you are parting, or maybe if one of you is crying. Social cues aren’t a better late than never thing. You don’t high five someone half an hour after she’s said something or start waving and yelling “hi!” when you’re already in conversation… HELLO!
Can we talk about the girl with her ex-boyfriend/most likely pimp’s name tattooed across her chest? I really, really, want to include what the tattoo says, but I shouldn’t. Even more than I want to say what it says, I want to share the nonsensical phrase that she said she would simply change it to in the event that they broke up, as if she had thought of everything. On the day that she debuted it, I asked her how he had reacted when he saw it. He hadn’t seen it, because it turned out that he was “kinda in jail.” They broke up within two months.
She’s a natural redhead who bleaches her hair into straw and keeps her skin covered in enough erythrulose and dihydroxyacetone to stay a healthy orange. She would hang out at the club every night that she didn’t work, which was just as well because she never really made money anyway. When I asked her what club she was going to after they closed (simply out of politeness because I had asked the person next to her), she told me that she was going to go back to caretaking because stripping was “never her whole life like some of these girls.”
I would have more compassion, but I heard her talking shit the last night on someone I just adore and it was so mean-spirited and ugly. And she was doing it with the woman who would meets customers at their hotels after hours when she wasn’t too tired from doing extras all night. And of course, Uglytattoos.com and Huggy were conjoined doing two-girl-white-girl-frenetic-lower-back-jutting-out-in-unison sets all week like they were sooo cool. Did they not understand that we were about to close forever and it wasn’t a good time to be dividing their money in half?
I don’t know. Can’t we all just ignore each other like adults?