Wages & Tips

Payment of wages would be undertaken every two weeks. I would make a lousy seven dollars an hour, yet the atmosphere (ahem…girls) was well worth it. I later realized that my job was more like a waitress or a hustler. My wages were consisted mostly of tips. The tips from that place were wonderful.

The tips came from 4 different areas, and they are as follows:

1. 20% of total tips from The Bar
2. 20% of total tips from The Waitresses (huge money maker)
3. 20% of the tips from The DJ (DJ’s always lied about his end)

The dancers also tipped out at the end of the night, and I later found that a good portion of your night was spent keeping them happy. You would carry their luggage, bring them drinks, hail cabs, bounce somebody they didn’t like, and feed management a line when they went AWOL for a few minutes. At any given time, there were 10-15 dancers working and I would later be on the payroll for 4 to 5 of them each night.

At the end of the night, all the doormen would toss their earnings into a box, and the tips were equally dished out to those who were working. Fewer doormen equaled more money. Obviously you would not own up to that extra $20 in your shirt pocket. Sundays turned out to be my biggest earner because I was the only one scheduled on Sundays, and I would clear $200-$400 on my own.

The best tip I ever received was when one of our regular girls (Stephanie) had a guy drop $2000 on her for private dances. Later that night, I helped Stephanie move a couch out of her apartment and she tipped me $200 and told me that I “was a good guy”.