This is a place where one man can spend thousands of euro in an hour or sip only Coke all night long; where the currency is not money but champagne; where often nobody is really interested in the champagne’s quality or taste, but rather finds its value in the size and quantity of the bottles; where the sanctity of the sparkling drink of the gods and the missionary position are lost in the blue confusion of fake orgasms and sex noises.
It works as simply as a jukebox – to get music, you have to stick in a coin. If you want a girl to lavish attention on you, pay for her champagne.
The cheapest option is a €25 glass of bubbly, which gives you 15 minutes of an affectionate and solicitous bond with a girl at the bar. Pay twice that price and your ‘date’ drinks piccolo, the 250 ml bottle. In this case, the time you spend with her is doubled, but the storyline stays the same. Next: the demi-bouteille, a 375 ml bottle that costs about €180 for half an hour. This ‘denomination’ grants a little bit of comfort, because both of you can move to a dim semi-private lounge, as well as the confidence that physical manipulation will be involved. And last, but not least, is the ‘full house’ for the standard bottle, the price for which varies. It kicks off at €250 for questionable swill, which is reasonable damage considering that in addition to a drink, you get screwed for an hour in the séparé – a private room, most commonly upstairs. You could be asked to pay up to €650 for Cristal or Dom Perignon, where, of course, you cough up not only for sex but also for the champagne’s snobbish name, fine finish in the mouth, and the supplementary fondness and devotion. Sad to say, these pricey bottles – and the one-and-a-half litre magnums that go for €1,000 or more – are a rare occurrence in these clubs.
The uniqueness of such places is that while you, the customer, are having leisure time with your ‘pick’, her mind is constantly dividing the amount that you’ve already spent by five (this is how much commission the house pays her), adding her €60 daily salary and planning how to badger you to buy another bottle, all the while smiling or laughing hard enough to make sure that all of these calculations in her head are not reflected on her pretty face.
Most of the clubs open at one in the afternoon and cease their trading at about four in the morning. Of course, the run has to be split – there are day and night shifts. Even though, practically, there is no big difference between the two spells, the contrast in the clientele is huge.
The day shift – fuck, I hate it! – is all about the married and the perverts, but more often the married perverts. As a rule, they drop by to use their lunch break for a dull, uncomplicated quickie, or for depraved ‘activities’ they have never had the guts to share with their wives and girlfriends. They don’t drink much and have limited time. That is why the club is usually boring and full of freaks, but in the end, who cares if you can get the bottle?
On the other hand, the night transforms the club and fills it with a party flavour – the music is louder, the customers are drunker and the laughter gets more sincere. Even the girls’ sweat looks like a piece of cake. The problem is that the boys often get carried away by the alcohol and the thundering crowd, so their brains switch out of sex mode. If there is no sex, there is probably going to be no bottle either.
But enough, I don’t want to bore you. Let’s set in motion my adventure that, by the way, began without me.
3
One year before the helmet guy, my sisters, Natalia and Lena, decided to go to Luxembourg to make some extra bucks. Irina, their best friend, had gone there before. When she returned, she kept on boasting about big money she had earned there. Moreover, after just a few days of being back at home – in gloomy Kherson, our small town in the south of Ukraine – Irina looked around, crinkled her nose, and fancifully decided to throw a grand in US dollars at a trip to Istanbul, simply because she wanted to hang out with Natalia, who, by that time, had already been living in the big smoke for five years.
Back in the nineties, I wasn’t the only one in newly independent, barefoot-but-proud Ukraine, who felt a nasty bitterness about Irina’s blow. It didn’t matter what occupation or job you had – doctor, teacher, scientist or student – all ex-Soviet folk struggled equally, seldom able to stretch their money further than the rice or potatoes on their plates.
Funny, when Natalia asked what kind of job it was, Irina, with an innocence in her voice that didn’t match the hussy look in her eyes, just prattled, ‘Dancing in a nightclub.’
‘Whatever! For that cash I would eat from the dirty floor!’ flashed through Natalia’s mind. She was fed up with trying to make a living by doing a ‘proper’ job. Therefore, it was a perfect moment for Irina to plant seeds of doubt in my sister’s soaked-up-in-suppresseddepression head…
Well, imagine our shock when, a few months before the end of Natalia’s final grade and the school exams, she decided to drop out and take off. She wanted to escape from run-down Ukraine with no hope for its future – where the best-case scenario would be her selling goods from Turkey or China on the free market – and run to unknown Istanbul, with no guarantee that she would even get a job but with the faith that somewhere there, if she worked hard and used any opportunity, a better life would be waiting for her.
When Mom found out about Natalia’s big plans, she took her for a long walk. A few hours later, at a family meeting, standing in front of us in the middle of the living room, she announced, ‘It definitely is an avant-garde decision, but I am inclined to support Natalia’s choice.’
My sister cried out, ‘Da!’
Our father became furious and started yelling ‘Mad women!’ and then ‘I can’t fight all four of you!’ Luckily, our mother knew how to handle him. She added, ‘Yuri, our girl is determined to start an adult life with or without us, so I suggest we do anything to make it with us.’
He stopped arguing, but stayed hellishly mad. Of course, eventually, our father found peace, together with the principal of one of the local schools, who agreed to issue a school-leaving certificate for a straight-A student for only fifty US bucks – with Natalia’s name on it.
Natalia moved with Mom to Istanbul. Even though my sister never regretted her decision – she went overseas, lived in a big city and had a real adult life with real adult dreams – it wasn’t a summer camp for her either.
By that time, Mom was holding Russian language courses for Turkish entrepreneurs in small and medium-sized businesses. They sold their goods – leather, textiles, clothes and shoes – to traders from Russia and Ukraine. She managed to find a job for Natalia, making tea and coffee in some shipping company, which ran from a huge and sophisticated office, with a long set of wall-sized windows over-looking the Bosphorus. My sister got the best deal, that’s for sure, considering she didn’t speak Turkish and had no work experience. Her big, dark eyes, her childishly cute but at the same time intricate face, and mop of curly burnt-umber hair, together with her slightly heavy hips, which were balanced by bursting-at-the-seams boobs on a tight body, got her her first job, paying $300 per month.
During these years, Natalia mastered the Turkish language and used any opportunity to get the hang of all types of office work, including how to manage the re-supply of cargo ships. She even learnt about shipping brokerage. She had also got herself involved in a tiring, full-of-empty-promises relationship with her boss. The fucker was married with two kids, and was almost twenty years older than her. He loved to impress Natalia with a good dinner at a fancy restaurant and clumsy sex for dessert in the apartment he rented for such occasions. He generously shared endless wisdom about life with her, as well as gifts of cheap jewellery that he presented to her as if they were diamonds.