May 01, 2003 @ 12:58 a.m.
In which our heroine's job hunt led to a den of iniquity

There's a story I've been meaning to tell you all for some time, dating back to my search for a new job over the Summer holidays (that's December for you Northy folks). It's a tale of an innocent girl led partly astray. It's a tale of being so in need of a new job that one is willing to work both Friday and Saturday nights, all the time. It's a tale about the time I applied for a job which involved bossing around strippers.

I was still working at the porn store, and so sick of the damn place that anything seemed good in comparison - I was even applying for call centre work. It was mid-December and I'd been intensively looking for a job since my exams had finished in early November. Since I worked a Saturday morning-to-afternoon shift at the shop, I would buy the Saturday Age, and sit and read the hefty employment section in the first few quiet hours of business.

It was in the local newspaper that I first saw the advertisement: a large, well-known strip club in the CBD was looking for a new "Dance Manager". I hesitated to apply at first, since the job ad didn't give too much away. Eventually I figured that I'd find out if and when I got interviewed, so I got drunk on Cointreau and the company of my housemates, and set about writing a bunch of application letters (one of which was for the library job I now currently hold - kids, alcohol is good). I sent off the letter and my resume and basically forgot about it.

A week or so later I got a call from a woman named Karen asking me if I'd be willing to come in for an interview the following day. I said a hearty yes and promptly set about decimating my wardrobe in search of something to wear. The question I'd had to ask myself when I got the interview for the job at the sex shop came up again - how do you dress 'appropriately' for a job interview in the sex industry? For the porn store, I'd gone for demure and slightly formal, but slightly more casual than I perhaps would for something else. So I went for that again - black slacks, pink stripey blouse with pink singlet underneath, usual makeup, hair down. The only real difference was that I wore my boots with the four-inch heels (also known as my "come and fuck me but hurry up because I'm going to fall over any second now" boots).

I arrived ten minutes early and did a quick makeup check before stepping inside the door. Despite my rather admirable patronage of Melbourne's finer nudie establishments, my potential employer was not one I had been to before, so I took the opportunity to glance around while I filled in the official application form. It was your fairly typically decorated up-market strip club - you know, they'd gone for high class but had hired an inbred interior designer from Moe by mistake. It was gold, and tackiness, and ostentatious couches, and horrible carpet.

Karen was rather late. I waited about 25 minutes for her, which gave me plenty of time to contemplate the framed photograph of the topless blonde while I eavesdropped on the receptionist's phone calls. I wondered what would happen if I bumped into anyone I knew. I wondered what a nice girl like me was doing in a place like this. I wondered if I should ask to use the toilet, or just trust my increasingly full bladder to deal with things.

Eventually Karen came down the imposing flight of stairs and greeted me. She was a tiny woman with shockingly bright red hair, whom I judged to be in her early-to-mid forties, allowing the possibility that she was in her late thirties and had just tanned too much in her youth. She led me up a different flight of stairs that was more like a fire escape, making small talk and telling me what was going on that day with "the girls". One such girl passed us going down on the stairs; I'd been looking down to be sure of my steps in the heels I was already regretting, and when I heard Karen say my name, I snapped to attention and found myself eye-to-nipple with a large set of false breasts. I blushed, not really being accustomed to such things at eleven thirty in the morning, and mumbled a hasty hello to the woman Karen had been introducing me to.

We reached the landing. "My office is next to the girls' change area," Karen announced, and indeed it was. We walked through a group of bored and semi-naked women, who gave short nods and muted hellos in our direction, and I wondered idly what it would be like if I bumped into someone from Uni ("What are you doing here, Rev?" "Umm...what are you doing here?" "Umm..."). We made our way into a small room, whose windows consisted of two-way mirrors, so when whoever sat in there doing paperwork got bored, they could sit and watch the strippers get ready with no interruption.

We got down to business. Karen was bright in a brittle sort of way, and she talked the proverbial mile a minute. Five minutes into the interview and I already felt bombarded, because it was less, I realised, an interview at this point. I was being filled in on the job and its pros and cons, and I had the sense that things would only proceed if I seemed unfazed by it all. Which, apart from Karen's rapid-fire speech, I was.

I found out that the job would involve making sure all girls on shift were where they were meant to be at times, and keeping an eye on both them and the men to make sure no funny business occurred. Karen pushed herself away from the desk to illustrate the "forbidden triangle", the area of lap that the girls are forbidden to touch, straddle or get too close to. I would have to make sure the girls were soliciting enough customers and not slacking off, but not soliciting in that way. I was instructed that I would have to develop a really good bullshit radar, as girls are not meant to be let off their shifts early without an extremely good excuse - of course, being tired, feeling sick, or struggling to battle misanthropic and/or homocidal feelings whilst dancing naked infront of the nth non-tipping, grabby redneck of the day are not considered good reasons. On top of all that, I was expected to spend a fair portion of my time on the floor chatting to customers, making sure they were having a good time, and trying to convince them to buy lap dances.

"This job can be very fun and rewarding," Karen said, which I seem to recall is something often said of working with the terminally ill as well. "But it can also be very difficult. It depends on the girls a lot of the time. They can be sweet as pie, or they can be complete bitches. Sometimes they'll act all nice and try to get out of doing the rest of their shift because they've made enough money. Bear in mind that it is considered the dance coordinator's job to make sure there are the required number of girls on the floor at all times, so people who are too lenient tend to find it bites them in the arse." I assured her that despite my sweet and slightly clueless demeanor, I was not one for taking shit from partially clothed women, especially not ones who seemed to be under the false impression that in badly-made fluro bikinis were the height of erotic dress. Okay, perhaps I didn't phrase it quite like that to her.

"You'll also need," Karen continued, "to have an excellent memory. Especially because the shifts you'll be doing if you get the job are on Friday and Saturday nights, either starting at 6pm and going through to 3am, or starting at 9pm and going through until four. It's the busiest part of the week, and we tend to have 60 or so girls on at once. You'll need to know everyone's name pretty quickly in order to organise them effectively. Asking after someone using a vague description won't get you terrible far."
"Yeah, I guess 'she's the blonde, tanned one' doesn't really help in this business," I quipped.
No, it's not terribly helpful."

The rest of the interview went quite well, I thought, although I still felt slightly weighed down by all the information that had been dumped on me, and had mixed feelings about the job. On one hand, it paid reasonably well for relatively few hours, would be somewhat interesting (at least for a while), and would definitely offer a lot in the way of anecdotes - and I'm a girl who doesn't leave the house without being armed with a bunch of anecdotes. On the other, it would mean not being able to go out on a Friday and Saturday night (when most of my friends are free and willing to socialise) for the duration of my employment there. I had no doubts that between creepy and/or sleazy patrons and bitcy girls, my healthy level of misanthropy would grow a lot more. I was surprised to learn that there had been relatively few applicants, and that I was supposedly one of four people being interviewed. I said goodbye to Karen and the receptionist and stepped out into the day with mixed feelings.

Walking back to the tram stop in my now torturous shoes, I got to overhear the mobile phone conversation of a man walking about five metres behind me. This was not because I was making any effort to eavesdrop, but rather because he was talking very loudly to the person on the other end. So for most of the way back to the tram stop, I got to hear all about the restraining order his ex-girlfriend had gotten, and how it's complete bullshit because he's "not fucking stalking the bitch".

Sometimes, I just really love Melbourne.

<<|>>