Friday night was so bad that a girl ran out the back door to avoid paying her stage fee. There was a blur of a person carrying a bag, and the sound of the bar on the door being slammed, and a gust of cold air. By the time she was already to her car, the short, round bouncer reached the door and started muttering instead of chasing after her into the night. I felt a twinge of jealousy.
But I’m sure everything is going to change once we introduce stripper cagefighting. I don’t believe anything up-and-coming in the strip club until I see it, but the new cocktail waitress who looks like a lost twelve year-old does. She was so excited that she could barely get all the details out in order. MMA fighting! With a cage! Cagefighting! With real helmets! But topless! Yeah, she’s going to do it! She was making my boobs hurt almost as much as my head. I pictured a crowd full of guys who looked like they just cleaned the garage.
Saturday was better than Friday by virtue of being my last shift before my days off. This means that I rolled in late with wet hair and a bag full of garbage from 7-11, including a Bu$ted paper. I offered it to a coworker to peruse while I got ready.
“That guy was here last night! He was sitting at the rack!”
“That’s the sex offenders page!” I probably sounded too excited, but everyone knows that reading Bu$ted and not spotting a single familiar face is a huge disappointment.
“What’s he in there for!?” the minor girl joined in. She was scared like he was waiting for us outside the dressing room.
“Girl, rape!”
The minor said we should go show the new GM so that he wouldn’t let that guy in again. I wasn’t going to do it. Neither was the other girl. She was already looking at all the Salem mugshots. She picked out a hot guy who wasn’t a sex offender and was cooing over him.
“Ooh, I bet his hair’s all curly when he gets out of the shower. Mmmm.” She is the kind of person who sees the beauty in everyone, which is a quality I always liked about her. Until she chose the same person who gave me butterflies and sweatiness and dry mouth. But now that person is gone and neither of us watches the door or checks our phones anymore.
I shared the rapist’s mugshot with the DJ. Not for security reasons, but just because I know he likes being let in on the gossip. “I think I went to elementary school with that guy!”
He asked me how my other club is, the one where everyone knows that the weird girls are always doing weird things. I told him I witnessed a dancer stick a lollipop inside herself.
“Wa-hoa! That’s serious!”
And then I told him that apparently she uses a female condom for the lollipop. He asked me if those were the big thingies that look like UFO’s and I answered that I was pretty sure he was thinking of diaphragms.
“So then what’s a female condom?”
I tried to explain what a female condom is, and then realized that I didn’t really know. “I just know that I don’t want to do anything on stage that requires a condom!” We were both satisfied with that answer.
Recently a girl was either slapping another girl repeatedly on the vulva or fingering her, but either way it was very noisy. I didn’t look to identify what I was hearing because I was trying to hold a customer’s eye contact, lest he realize he was missing something far more exciting than talking to me. I kept apologizing, asking him to repeat his answers because I was distracted by what sounded like—to copy a really, really crass expression—soldiers running through mud.
The music at that club is so shitty that it would be an improvement if they just put a mic up to those girls’ crotches and let us dance to the sounds of wet skin rubbing. On Thursday night alone:
“Where did they find this DJ? I’m going to go up to him and tell him how much he sucks.” –hick in camo sweatshirt
“This isn’t the right music for you. You need something more smooth like how you dance.” –older black business guy
“Why is he playing Limp Bizkit?” –hipster nerd
The worst part isn’t even that the music is complete dogshit, but that I am expected to tip the DJ 10% of my earnings for playing complete dogshit. And that I am not allowed to choose my own music. And then there’s the way that he grabbed my wrist and rubbed it with his thumb and said that he was just checking my skin color when I had told him what kind of music I like to dance to. And the fact that he displays every dancer’s tip out amount on a dry erase board.
I owe two young hipsters for helping me turn around my mood early enough to redeem the night. At the start of every song, they would ask why he was playing it and how it was possibly a good choice. They had me fired up, waving my hands around and yelling, “You don’t even know!” Then I remembered to ask if they would like lapdances. That’s my hustle; first I complain for forty-five minutes and then I go in for the kill.