Last night was pretty crazy…it’s been quiet for a few nights and then this. First of all, this Russian customer came in who is a bit of a regular and causes a circus every time. He has this one dancer who he likes to spend his time with, a ginger Russian girl with frizzy hair who he loves. She wasn’t there last night so he went a bit AWOL. Thank God I wasn’t serving him…ok so he is a big spender and tips well, but he is also a complete idiot. Let me paint the picture for you… He swans in trailed closely by his wife, his PA, the floor manager, the general manager, the security guards and a swarm of girls, I mean literally 30 dancers crowding round him and trailing his every step in the hope of being picked to have a ‘sit down’. The floor manager, lets call him Gaz, runs ahead frantically preparing the VIP room for his entrance, moving chairs a couple of inches to one side, picking up the reserved sign and putting it back down again, shaking the curtains, fluffing the pillows…basically stuff that doesn’t need to be done (he is really good at that which is an essential skill for his job).
So the Russian enters the VIP room in a flurry of activity and is roped in, leaving the crowd of girls trapped behind the rope and building rapidly, with the addition of other curious girls that have noticed the commotion and can smell the money. Now comes the waitress…thankfully not me but my friend Kumi. She is shouted over by the floor manager and told to take the order. The time I did serve this customer, my experience was cut short by the fact that as I was serving his champagne he was talking to me in Russian and looking at me with complete disdain. Apparently I was doing something wrong, but I didn’t know what and I couldn’t understand what he was saying to me. I tried to be charming but he had already made up his mind and called Gaz over. ‘Change her…’ he barked at him in a thick Russian accent, waving his hand at me but not looking at me. ‘I don’t like this one…this one’s not for me’ shaking his hand up and down infront of me the way a camp person does when describing their disgust at a particularly bad outfit someone might be wearing. So I was unceremoniously turfed out of the VIP room and swapped for another waitress. Wanker.
This time my friend Kumi was to his liking, although that probably wasn’t exactly a blessing as he kept pulling her to sit on his knee and manhandling her, obnoxious bastard that he is. He ordered crystal rose which is about the most expensive champagne we do, so this was good for Kumi as we get paid by service charge and tips. However, when he realized his usual girl wasn’t in…things started to take a turn for the worse. He emerged from his VIP room (again trailed by his wife, his PA, the floor manager, the general manager and the security guards) and proceeded to trawl the club searching for someone he liked. But this search wasn’t just based on looks, the girls had to pass a variety of tests to be the chosen one. The first girl he wanted to check out was actually already sitting with a customer by the stage. He interrupted their conversation and told her to get up and dance on the stage for him. There was already a girl on the pole on stage so the manager chucked her off and told the other girl to get on. She danced for about 15 seconds with the obnoxious Russian standing 6 inches away, scrutinizing her, before he curled up his lip in distaste, waved his hand at her as he had done with me, and walked off. Bastard.
Then he moved on to another group of girls and began to prod one of them to feel how firm she was, squeezing her arm gently like you do to check the ripeness of an avocado. Still he hadn’t found his princess, another girl discarded for being too ripe, as the epic search continued. He moved purposefully upstairs…which is bad news for Kumi as once he places an order upstairs, he is then the customer of the upstairs waiters and Kumi can no longer serve him, meaning she misses out on great service charge and a potentially massive tip. Wanker.
5 minutes later I went upstairs to ask the chef to warm up my spaghetti Bolognese that I had brought in for dinner and saw the whole restaurant area full to the brim of scantilly clad girls standing with fixed smiles on their faces while the Russian stood analyzing closely, before grabbing one girl and sitting her down at the table with him. Now I know it must seem unbelievable that the girls would put themselves forward for this kind of treatment, they are certainly not forced to, and some of them would do nothing of the sort. But this guy can spend up to 40 grand on girls in a night and tips a grand at a time so I guess you have to weigh up how much dignity you are willing to lose for a deposit on a house. Anyway, the infatuation with the chosen girl was short lived as, I heard later, when she was dancing he decided her arse wasn’t good enough and sent her away. In the end he wound up with his PA sitting on his lap and his wife about to kick him in the face.
But this wasn’t the only excitement of the night. I got to serve a Hollywood actor, one of whose films is among my top 5 favorite films ever. I won’t say who it is, or the film as that might give it away. But he’s big. He was a lovely guy but by the end of the night he was completely annihilated. And I mean completely. After an hour or so talking to girls, he had got bored and wandered over to the bar to talk to the Philipino busboys and buy them a round of drinks. There he stayed for the rest of the night, he didn’t even have one dance… Before long though, it got ugly…he was swaying and slurring and for some reason took his top off and wouldn’t put it back on. It was all my effort just to get him to work out what the bar bill was. As we were doing the bill he fell over and I had to pick him up, and try to hold him straight, topless and sweating…nice. At that moment it all seemed a little bizarre as when you meet a famous person, you don’t know the person at all, you only know the characters they played and his characters were a world away from the vulnerable man I had in my arms. It must be really hard to be that famous, you can’t just go out and get fucked and be relatively anonymous. EVERYONE will know…and I don’t just mean everyone in your friendship group, everyone on facebook…I mean the whole fucking WORLD… Can you imagine? The worst part was that someone in the club, don’t know who but most likely one of the managers, had called the paparazzi and so they were waiting outside in eager anticipation of snapping the most humiliating picture possible. Now there’s a lowlife job if there ever was one. Ok, so people in the public eye should be careful of how they represent themselves, but we are all human, we all have our problems and issues and, although some people are paparazzi whores, most famous people just want to be left alone at times like these. No chance. And worse are the people in the clubs who call the paparazzi to come down, they get a cut of the picture fee if it gets sold so in typical strip club fashion, never mind scaring away celebrities (this guy will never come back) as long as there’s an extra buck involved, it’s fair play. Bastards.
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