Reply #221: The Art of Strip Club Conversations 101... [View All]

[TorchTheWitch]

Let me introduce you to the wonderful world of The Art of Strip Club Conversations 101...

You approach someone and greet them. If they ignore you, they don't want to talk to you, and you move on.

If they respond to your greeting, then whoopie, they aren't a totally rude asshole, and you proceed to a question that invites conversation... usually "how are you?" or something similar.

If they want to engage you in conversation, it's often with polite small talk first... "Are you having a good time?" "What brings you in tonight?", etc... questions that open the door for them to talk about whatever it is they might want to talk about. This is the part where what is exchanged in the small talk will indicate whether or not they want to continue talking to you or not. If they don't, the small talk quickly goes nowhere, and you close the conversation with a "nice to have met you, have a good time tonight" and excuse yourself because there's no money to be made from that guy for you.

If they bring up a topic of conversation that would indicate they have an interest in your sticking around and talking with them, they will. They will either ask you questions about yourself or mention something about themselves or mention something that is of interest to them. This is the part where they've indicated what they want to talk about.

To be clear...
1. Asks questions about me = wants to talk about me
2. Mentions something of interest to him = wants to talk about that particular something of interest to him
3. Mentions something about himself = wants to talk about that particular something about himself

Got that? Lovely. You win a cookie (but you won't get it from me because if I ever have sole control of a cookie, it's mine, I'm eating it, and that's that).

Now we can get to the point of the exercise...

I would not have known this guy was a SEAL who just got back from Iraq if he hadn't said so (I kid you not... I didn't absorb that information through the poors of my skin or by reading french fry crumbs in beer foam as though they were tea leaves). The fact that he said so means one of two things...

1. He's a SEAL just returned from Iraq because he wants the conversation to go that way, or
2. He's pretending to be a SEAL just returned from Iraq because he wants the conversation to go that way.

EITHER WAY he's indicated by mentioning he's a SEAL just returned from Iraq because he wants the conversation to go that way. At that point, since it is my job to make him think I'm interested in what HE has indicated he wants to talk about I HAVE to ask him something about it. If I were to just make a comment that doesn't invite response, it indicates to him that I don't give a crap what he wants to talk about, and I just pretty much killed the possibility of making any money off of this guy. Sometimes this can be survived but it takes too much time... time's a wasting, and I don't make money wasting time.

Since I don't like to talk about the war with customers, whatever question I ask is designed to hopefully steer him away from a topic that I've found is not condusive to me making money since I have a lot of difficulty traveling through the mine-field of a topic that gets my fur up. Yep, we steer conversations. If we didn't they'd yammer all night, and we'd never see any greenbacks (and we don't work for free contrary to what some customers may believe). So I will ask him a tame question with a trigger word... "I guess you're happy to be back home now, huh?" The trigger word is HOME, and will hopefully steer him out of Iraq back HOME, and hopefully off the war altogether into a different topic with a series of more deliberate questions/comments designed to go where I want the conversation to go. He may not respond to the trigger, which indicates he REALLY wants the topic to stay where he first indicated he wanted it. At that point, he is trying to steer the conversation although he probably has no idea that he is.

Customers think I'm just talking with them... I'm not. Everything I say, whether it's a question or a comment, whether or not I elaborate, what my body language is doing is all me just trying to steer the conversation to the point where his wallet comes out without wasting too much of my time. I have a limited amount of time to make as much money as I can from customers, and there's a clock in my head that tells me at what point to steer harder to get a "Yes" and have the wallet come out before the clock in my head runs out and at what point to give up and move on.

He brought out the specific Fallujah topic "bomb", and that's where I got stuck. I did my best to try to defuse it with a comment rather than a question to hopefully make it more difficult for him to steer off in that direction and retake control of the conversation. My mistake was not realizing the trigger word "difficult" would have the impact on him that it did. Perhaps because of my knowledge of nastiness of some sort going down in Fallujah and my strong feeling about the war tripped me up and made me use a comment that turned out to be a poor choice to retake control of the conversation. Maybe the sympathy that I felt for him having been in Iraq got in the way... I don't know. I assumed because he so obviously wanted to talk about his being in Iraq that he was looking for some bit of sympathy and understanding since so often customers are looking for just that particularly the Iraq and Afganistan war vets.

Keep in mind that I've talked with quite a few genuine Iraq or Afganistan war vets at work. There are scads of them in this area, and they often come into the strip clubs specifically looking for some form of sympathy and understanding since men know to come to the strip clubs for that. I would imagine the vets even target the strip clubs because of the safety of being anonomous. You can cry all over my shoulder in the club and not have to worry about how that may impact your life because I'm not a part of your life outside the club.

I've said before that I try to avoid talk of the war because I find it to be a conversational mine-field... and in this case, I stepped on a mine that tops the list of Most Explosive Loss of Conversation Control.

Now, this paricular statement I just have to respond to because it's just... wow...

You are not one of them; you will never be one of them; and since you are not one of them, they will never treat you with honesty and forthrightness.

And I give a shit, why? This is my JOB. I work to make money, not friends. I have exactly zero desire to be "one of them". Maybe you should tell them that. Because all night long I have customers hitting me up for dates, asking me to dinner, wanting my phone number, etc. It's probably the most irritating aspect of this job... we all have customers that persist with this over and over again sometimes for years. It is THEM that have some totally screwed up notion we want to be picked up, we're shopping for a date, looking for Mr. Right or we're hookers in disguise.

Do I give a crap whether they treat me with honesty and forthrightness? Are you serious? Has it somehow escaped you that we are not honest and forthright with THEM? We have fake names, fake identities, even fake breasts (although a lot of us with decent real ones haven't gone the implant route, but that's a whole other story). Fake, fake, fake, it's ALL fake. They KNOW it's fake. They come and spend money because they want to be told what they want to hear. They want to feel attractive when they aren't, they want to feel that you desire them when you don't, they want to feel like they're witty and interesting and fun and the absolute center of your universe when they aren't. That's what this job is all about... fantasy.

For heaven's sake, what in the world do you think the alternate identities customers come up with are for? It's FANTASY... I pretend to be someone they want me to be to their someone they want to be because that's my job, and they come in expecting that I'll do my job (I kid you not... at work I'm expected to work... wow, who would have thought?). Guess what happens when you're actually honest and forthright with a customer... you piss him off for ruining his fantasy about you and thus you will make not dollar one from him. Not very business minded that.

Even though we aren't honest and forthright with customers, very often (maybe even most of the time) they ARE honest and forthright with us because there is a huge market of customers that come in because they're looking to unload their troubles. For their purposes, they aren't looking for someone in paticular - any dancer will usually suffice. Where they are forthright and honest with us, we aren't with them because they are specifically looking for sympathy and understanding or just someone to listen to them. They DON'T want us to be honest and forthright with them because that's not what they're looking for and not what they're paying for because they know if we were honest and forthright we'd tell them we aren't interested. It doesn't matter that they know we're faking it because our pretending makes them feel better, and that's all that matters to them.

Are there customers that think we are honest and forthright? You bet. Those are the ones that don't spend any money on you because they figure that what they believe our fake desire and fake interest and fake placing them in the center of our universe is real means they have no reason to pay us (why should they pay us when they believe that the sole reason we work is to bask in their glorious light?). They're wallpaper... they may get a polite smile or wave, but they get bypassed because they aren't worth our time. No money? Nice-to-see-you-See-ya-Bye.

Are there some customers that we are honest and forthright with about some things? You bet. A fake identity is easier to make come off realisticly when some aspects of your real self are incorporated. These are mostly stories of actual events and are chosen specifically to project humor or interest or corroboration of one of their stories or an explaination of why you can't be available to them on a certain day/time, etc.... the day the toilet broke, the time you almost hit a dog on the way to the mall, the incident where you twisted your ankle on the stairs... there are endless true stories, but they're told for a purpose which always goes back to the money.

Why do you think we talk to these people at all? If there was any real money to be made in stage tips we wouldn't say boo to any of these people. Stage tips are for paying the DJ, house fee and house mom, and anything left over is just extra padding. The real money is made when you sell dances and VIP time. To do that you have to spend your time interacting with the customers. The stage is pretty much an advertising and paying your fees tool.

The bottom line is ALWAYS the money... I would think that would go without saying, but apparently I was wrong.

As for whether or not he was yanking my chain... nope. For an explanation of why I firmly believe that other than the fact I was there and a party in the conversation, see a post I made in this thread somewhere at the very top (can't remember which number, and I'm not going to bother to look since I've already spent far too much time on this response then your snarkiness deserved... which pretty much comes out to all of the time I've spent on this response).

Congratulations. You now know more about this business than most of the dancers I work with. Now maybe if you read it, and other people read it maybe eventually we'll get to a point on this forum where I don't have to continually come across ridiculous and snarky posts on the subject of my job from people who have no bleeding clue what the hell they're talking about.

You know what? I have no idea what you do for a living... I don't even know whether or not you do anything for a living, but for the sake of argument, let's say you do. Whatever it is you do for a living if it's something I have no personal experience doing or even any informed knowledge of I'd be the very last person to make any kind of comments about how your job is done... and there is no way in hell I'd be caught dead making those comments if they're deragatory, and most especially personally derogatory. How about you ponder that one a bit and see if you can figure out what you accomplished with your post and how it reflects on you.

But I won't hold my breath.