‘Welcome to The Pink Pie, ladies! Breanna, thanks a mil, honey. You can go back to reception now – only another half-hour to go before the doors open! Lots to do! Lots to do!’
‘Yessir, Cap’n.’
Breanna turned to leave the office but Gordy yelped suddenly like he’d been kicked in the shin and ran to stop her. ‘Wait! I almost forgot!’ He scurried to the printer, took the sheet of paper that had been printing when we walked in, and handed it to Breanna.
‘Solid message here, sweetheart. Solid message.’
She looked at the page and I could see the exact moment where she masked her annoyance with a cheery smile. ‘Thanks, Cap’n! I’ll file it with the others.’
‘Now don’t just file it and forget about it.’
‘Oh, of course not.’ An awkward moment. Then she left.
When she walked out of the room, Gordy turned to us with a big dopey grin and jabbed his thumb over his shoulder.
‘I do that kinda thing all the time. Find motivational quotes to give to my staff. Management 101. You have to pinpoint people’s weaknesses then give them the tools to overcome them. This is only me and Breanna’s second night working together, but I can see that girl’s weaknesses a mile away. I’ve already found three quotes to help her. It’s gonna make a big difference to her life, let me tell you.’
‘That’s great,’ I said.
‘It really is,’ he agreed.
He grinned at us. We smiled back. We all stood there grinning at each other like idiots for another minute before Gordy snapped out of it and went to a closet for our uniforms. He handed me a hanger bearing a black mini skirt and a black blazer with ‘The Pink Pie’ embroidered over the breast pocket in hot pink writing.
‘You’re on reception, Yola, so this is what you’ll be wearing. Zulema,’ he handed her a hanger holding a black waistcoat with the same pink logo, a pair of pink sequinned panties and pink fishnet tights. ‘You’re waitressing, so this is your uniform.’
Zulema, horrified, took her hanger.
‘There we go!’ he said, standing back to grin at us some more. ‘Now just to be clear, you can call me Gordy or you can call me Captain. Whatever you like. Personally, I prefer Captain, so call me that. It’s from my days in the Coast Guard. Old habits, you know.’
He bobbed his head up and down almost violently, those Hollywood-white teeth glaring at us. He obviously wanted us to ask about the Coast Guard, but I seriously couldn’t get it up for this guy. Zulema was also too flabbergasted by her uniform for small talk, so we didn’t say anything. He eventually gave up and sent us down to the dressing room.
In any case, we’d find out that same night through the stripper grapevine that his Coast Guard days were literally that – a few days – though he looked for any opportunity to persuade people that he’d served for years. When he was sixteen, he’d gotten ‘someone’ (Ugly) to get him a fake birth certificate to prove he was eighteen so he could join the Coast Guard. It all worked and he got into the Coast Guard even though he was underage. Then after eleven days protecting the seas and shores of Trinidad, he turned seventeen and his mother mailed in a birthday card with a big glittery 1-7 on the front. When the Coast Guard secretariat opened the mail to check that there was no anthrax or whatever in the envelope, they discovered Gordy’s secret and he was out on his ass and banned from ever joining Trinidad’s armed forces again. That’s when he’d started working for Ugly and how he’d ended up general manager of The Pink Pie fifteen years later.
So there you have it.
Back in the dressing room, preparations were in full swing, the strippers primping and glamorizing, chattering and squawking with raucous laughter. Mamá was painting one naked girl’s nails and chatting. She looked like she was actually enjoying herself.
I tried to find a private corner of the room to get changed but it was a waste of time. In the end, I stripped down like the rest of them and donned my uniform. I was mortified. The skirt was about the width of a headband and looked even more obscene when I stepped back into my black patent heels. Glancing in the mirror, all I saw was leg, a never-ending highway of bare skin. Then I put on the blazer. That wasn’t so bad. It fit well, looked good over my black T-shirt.
I looked over at Zulema. She was wearing her uniform but she could’ve just wrapped herself in pink dental floss and called it the same thing. Her huge breasts were busting out of the scant waistcoat, and the sequinned panties were, well, sequinned panties. As for the pink fishnets, there’s probably no sluttier item of clothing on the planet. I had to stop myself laughing. She was a caricature of a hooker. I went over and gave her a little hug. ‘You look hot, marica, don’t worry,’ I said, holding in a laugh at the misery in her face.
‘This is, like, so humiliating,’ she moaned.
‘Don’t be silly.’ I waved a hand across the room. ‘You fit right in!’
We hung around in the dressing room a while longer, both afraid to go out and learn what our new jobs required of us. Meanwhile Mamá was having a whale of a time, blazing through the strippers, painting their nails, spraying their hair into place, rubbing them down with tanning wipes, applying their false lashes, finding scissors for the strippers on their periods who needed to cut off their tampon strings (tricks of the trade!). So much for being prudish. To look at her you’d think Mamá was born for House Ma’aming.
Creamed, tanned, powdered, douched, the girls were wriggling into their different costumes now as opening time drew nearer. There were a couple French maids, a nurse, a football referee, a Swiss milkmaid, half a dozen slutty schoolgirls in crotch-skimming tartan skirts, while some girls kept it simple in lingerie and netted dresses. With all the genitalia packed away, I realized then why Mamá was so at ease – we knew more than half of the strippers! I looked at the girl who was bent over with her ass cheeks pulled apart while my mother, the woman who raised me, sprayed fake tan into her ass-crack. The girl had been at our Christmas lunch! I scanned the room and saw that all the girls who’d been at Christmas lunch were there. There were tons of familiar faces! I pointed it out to Zulema and we went around the room saying hi, chatting with the girls who’d slept on our couch and shared our bathroom until our little reunion was interrupted by Gordy busting in through the door, an unnatural grin plastered to his face.
‘Ten minutes, ladies! Ten minutes and I need you all out on the floor!’ Gordy pointed at Zulema and me. ‘You two need to be at your posts! Ten minutes, just ten minutes till opening!’
His eyes ran down my body. ‘That T-shirt isn’t part of the uniform. You need to wear your exact uniform, Lola.’
‘Yola,’ I said, looking down at myself then back up at him. ‘But there was only the blazer and the skirt.’
‘That’s the uniform! Hurry up and get that T-shirt off – I still need to brief you on reception. Ten minutes till opening!’
He stayed right there while I took off my T-shirt and put the blazer back on. Now it was Zulema’s turn to laugh at me. The blazer had just one dinky little button in the middle to keep it together. My entire bra and stomach were exposed. Where was a noose when you needed it?
I didn’t dare glance in a mirror, but with the room covered in them, it was impossible to escape my reflection. There’s no other way to say it – I looked like a whore, but being so exposed also made me feel weirdly confident, like I could do whatever I wanted, and screw whoever judged me for it. Maybe those demure jeans and T-shirts had been holding me back all these years from being the ball-busting sexual free spirit I was meant to be. I had a sudden flash to Aunt Celia’s memoir, remembered all the sequinned mini dresses, skimpy hot pants and camel-toe-highlighting spandex jumpsuits she’d described from her disco days. Verga, she really did have all the secrets to not giving a fuck. Who’d have thought dressing slutty would make you feel so liberated? Maybe there were things to be learned from strippers after all.
‘C’mon, ladies. Let’s hustle!’ Gordy was calling me and Zulema over, flashing us his zircon-stud
ded watch.
Zulema was sent through the pink drapes at the reception area. Sancho, as bar manager (good luck with your inventory, Ugly), would be showing her the ropes.
Gordy stayed with me at the reception desk. As it turned out, despite my Jezebel’s work attire, my job was actually going to be a proper receptionist job and then some. Like a normal receptionist, I had to answer the phone and take table bookings and so on. Then things got a little more strip-club-centric. I was in charge of checking the stripper roster on my computer and making sure everyone turned up for their shift. Gordy organized the roster and every stripper had to work at least three nights a week. If someone was a no-show or late, I had to call her up to see where she was, then report it to Gordy. The strippers also had to pay a house fee at the beginning of each shift – one hundred dollars – so my job was to get the cash from each of them as they came in, then check their names off the list on the computer to record that they’d paid.
‘At the end of the night, you’ll also be tallying up all the dances the girls have done. The girls have to pay a house commission of ten per cent for every lap dance they do. There are doormen inside with clipboards who take note of the dances each girl does. At the end of the night they’ll hand you the clipboards, and then you tally up what each girl owes the house and you get the money from her before she leaves at the end of her shift. Everything needs to be entered into the system so we can keep track.’
I was amazed. I’d expected some grotty one-room club with cum stains on the furniture and downtrodden drug-addict strippers looking for quick cash for their next fix. But Ugly hadn’t been kidding around – this was some first-world shit. I also couldn’t believe how ingenious it was to own a strip club: your employees actually had to pay you to work there. Even if no customers came, the house would still make money because the strippers had to pay the house fee just to be able to work. Hats off to all the exploiters of the world who’d come up with the strip-club system.
So there I was, tits, stomach and legs on display, waiting for our customers to arrive. The strippers, all freshly minted by Mamá’s magic and trussed up in their cheap costumes and lingerie, streamed past me and through the pink drapes. The doormen eyed them all up and down, but didn’t say anything. Then one stripper was stopped. The doorman grabbed her by the arm.
‘What the fuck?’ she yelped.
‘Hand it over.’
‘Hand what over?’
‘Give it to me.’
The doorman yanked her gold purse from her hand, unzipped it and took out a plastic straw that had been melted shut on either end. There was white powder in it. The doorman took the straw, pocketed it and let the girl’s arm go.
‘No drugs at The Pink Pie.’
She called him a pendejo but he only laughed, tapped her on the ass and sent her through. Then he gave me a wink. ‘What’s your name, sweetie?’
‘It’s definitely not sweetie.’
He and the other doorman cackled, not meanly. They left their posts and came to introduce themselves. They were like Tweedledee and Tweedledum, huge matching black men, visions of virility. They called themselves by their last names: Hazel and Harrison. I liked them. They didn’t stare at my meagre cleavage for one thing, or at my bare legs. I guess there was no need when there were women traipsing around almost naked. We chatted away until Hazel got a warning in his radio earpiece that our first customers had arrived, then they returned to their posts and put their game faces back on.
When the heavy door finally swung open, Breanna was there, smiling obsequiously as she held the door for a group of older men in suits. Each of them looked familiar – I was sure I’d seen them before in newspapers or on political posters stuck to lampposts. They looked perfectly at ease. This clearly wasn’t their first time in an illegal strip club. They stopped at my desk and reached for their wallets to pay the cover charge, but as I’d been instructed, I told them there was no cover. This earned me a few corny pick-up lines and an offer to get taken home later that night, which I politely refused.
I understood then how Ugly’s business would work: he’d let the politicians, oligarchs, and policemen have the time of their lives for ‘free’, so they wouldn’t ever raid or shut down his place, and Ugly would still make a killing off the dance commissions and the bar. Brilliant.
As Hazel and Harrison held the pink curtains apart for the men to enter, electronic dance music pumped alluringly out to the lobby, tantalizing with the promise of tits shaking rhythmically, of asses clapping in time to the beat.
Not long after, another group came. Then a third and a fourth. Customers were pouring in. More politician types and men who looked like they referred to themselves as ‘serial entrepreneurs’ and ‘self-made’.
Between greeting customers, I played solitaire on the PC and chatted with Hazel, Harrison, and the in-transit strippers en route to the dressing room to freshen up or change outfits. They each had the frazzled air of a daycare teacher sapped by having to entertain small children all day. Except that unlike daycare teachers, they were all understandably a little bit drunk.
Zulema came out once around two a.m. ‘It’s, like, crazy busy in there! I can’t keep up with the drink orders. My feet feel like they’re going to fall off from walking in these heels all night and …’ and on and on she went until she paused for breath and pulled a wad of hundred-dollar bills from her bra. ‘At least the tips are pretty fricking amazing! Sucks for Vanessa – she’s stuck in the back room on glass-washing duty. Total downer. The guys in there are, like, throwing money at us.’
That’s when I realized that even though Zulema and the twins had wound up in the pink fishnets and sequinned undies, I was the one with the shitty end of the stick.
Before I knew it, it was four a.m. Once the club was officially closed and emptied of customers, the lights brightened, the music was switched off, and all the strippers filed past me, back up the stairs to change into their regular clothes. While they did this, the doormen from the main floor (floormen?) came out and handed over their clipboards. Again, I was surprised by how orderly the whole system was. Every clipboard held a spreadsheet with each girl’s name at the top of a column. Below her name, there was a tick entered for each dance she’d done, and next to the tick, the time of the lap dance was entered. My job was to count the ticks then work out the total each girl owed in commissions.
I sat there with a calculator, clacking away, entering the due amount in another spreadsheet. When I’d only just finished tallying up the totals fifteen minutes later, the girls came down the stairs and formed a line right up to my desk, each pulling a wheelie suitcase behind her and holding a little purse bursting with cash. These were seasoned strippers. They knew they had their dues to pay.
The first girl wasn’t one of our illegals, so I didn’t know her. But she was Latina, so I spoke to her in Spanish.
‘Name?’ I asked.
‘Charity,’ she said.
‘Two hundred and seventy-five.’
‘Coño. That shit ain’t right. I didn’t do that many dances.’
‘Says here that you did.’ I showed her the four clipboards.
‘That ain’t right!’ She jabbed one of the clipboards with a bright pink claw. ‘I never did no dance at three twenty-seven! I was on break then. I called my sister. Check my phone. Take a look at my call log. Three twenty-seven my ass.’ She started digging through her purse for her cell phone.
One of the floormen, Branson, walked up. Hazel had told me Branson was the head floorman, so he had to stick around in case any of the strippers contested the clipboard entries. He was a big motherfucker. Even bigger than Hazel and Harrison. Which is saying something. And he had a face like he was just looking for any excuse to knock someone the fuck out.
‘What’s the problem here?’ he asked, his voice a gravelly devil-sounding thing. Charity looked up from her purse and quaked.
‘You write that I do a dance at three twenty-seven,’ mumbled Charity in stilted Engl
ish. ‘I didn’t.’ I was amazed at how much of her confidence had instantly been drained by the switch to her second language.
Branson took the clipboard with his name at the top and gave it a cursory glance. ‘Says here you did.’
‘But—’
‘I don’t make mistakes. Pay your fee.’
He put the clipboard down and stared at her. Charity couldn’t hold that gaze for even half a second. She handed over the money. I put the cash in the register and noted in the spreadsheet that she’d paid her commission. The next girl sauntered over. She had that news anchor thing – big hair, big smile, deep dimples.
‘Scarlett,’ she said, flashing me those dimples.
Scarlett was a big earner. By the looks of her chart she’d burned more calories lap-dancing that night than she would have at a Zumba class.
‘Seven hundred and sixty,’ I told her.
‘Puta madre, Maribel! You did well tonight, mami!’ hollered someone a few girls back in the queue.
Maribel? Then I realized I’d been dealing with their stage names.
Scarlett/Maribel had no problem paying her fee. She knew she’d raked it in. Her breast implants had paid for themselves tenfold. Good for her. Most of the girls weren’t that easy. Almost everyone had to be put in her place by Branson’s demon stare. When I was finally done collecting commissions and the strippers had all gone home, Branson relaxed. His face looked less homicidal and his sociopath’s voice was gone. He was just a normal guy, tired and ready to clock off work.
One Year of Ugly Page 22