Masha interrupts Natalia by walking into the kitchen. She is unusually sober and in a horrible mood. She grabs a bottle of water from her shelf in the fridge and looks around.
‘What are you looking at, bitches? It was the worst night ever! I couldn’t even get drunk – had to hold the umbrella for those two brainsick fools all night long.’
We all look down, trying to suppress our drunken, hysterical laughter, until she throws her ‘Whatever! I am going to sleep’ into our midst and goes back to her room.
9
Unfortunately, this kind of night happens seldom in Luxembourg. Usually the job is a case of simple perversion and stress.
The owners pack the girls like sardines into their clubs, making the business unhealthily competitive. To keep the establishment optimally profitable, they ‘motivate’ the girls with an implicit rule, called a daily minimum norm: the €250 that each of us has to make for the bar per shift. There are no exceptions, even when there are no clients in the club. If we don’t make money, they do not pay us a salary; if we do not improve our trade in the couple of days that follow, they fire us and send us back home. This shady but tangible undertaking never gets mentioned in the contract – the girls are faced with these ‘terms and conditions’ only when they get to Luxembourg.
Most of them are already jammed with debt on arrivaclass="underline" they pay the agent to organise access to the club (this usually costs between $500 and $1,000), and they pay for their flights, which include a trip to the Luxembourgish embassy in Moscow and the trip to Luxembourg itself – another $700 or $800. Obviously, they can’t simply look around and say, ‘Hmmm… I don’t like it here. I am going back home,’ then catch the next plane and face their creditors with fuck-all in their pockets. So, the ‘unlucky shift’, ‘quiet business’ or ‘difficult client’ options are, most of the time, simply not available. Instead, the dancers get so desperate to bag the damn champagne that if the customer asks them to do the Miller Plus,[2] each one of them would do it without hesitation.
This setup results in another bummer: spoilt customers, or, frankly speaking, hard-to-please, twisted assholes.
You may think, what’s the big deal? The girl is pretty, friendly, readily on tap. The customer is usually there for a reason too, which is not to check whether there are any new cocktails on the menu. Thus, the give and take between the parties should be free of complications. A case of joy and pleasure – he finds the best fit for himself and spends his time and money with the doll according to his fancy or capabilities.
Sounds awesome, huh? But so fucking far away from the real, perverse, stuffed-with-freaks-and-cheap-desperate-whores-like-me place that is Luxembourg…
In reality, to get picked, the girl has to be very creative. She has to be quick enough to get to the customer before the others. The best way to do that is always to face the entrance and never switch your brain to standby mode – not that easy, when the waiting time for a client can sometimes stretch to hours. The more vigilant you are, the better your chances of identifying and/or classifying the spender, and acting accordingly.
The quickest way to approach the customer is called, jokingly among the girls, roller skating – you’d be surprised at the speed a girl can reach while wearing extremely high heels and moving elegantly, especially when she sees a high roller. Let’s take me, as an example: as soon as the client shows up at the door, I get off my chair and glide towards him before I even recognise him. Then, if – unfortunately – the guy wants to take a leak, I walk behind him to the bathroom, guard the door, and then accompany him to where he chooses to sit, making sure that I am the first to try my luck with him.
After the girl wins the opportunity to talk to a potential purchaser, she has only five minutes to excite his curiosity, to make him choose her and spend his money on champagne.
There are a few ways of doing it successfully.
She can be irresistibly beautiful, with big boobs, long legs, a firm ass, long and shiny hair, a sharp brain, a great personality, knowledge of the language the client prefers to speak, a huge fan of anal and an antagonist of condoms. In other words, she has to be perfect.
If this foolproof set of attributes doesn’t apply, the entertainer can diagnose the client’s preferences and secret desires before she approaches him, then provide whatever it is he needs – which means she has to be a psychic and a good actress. She must grasp what the man wants and transform, consistently, into a woman-vamp, innocent schoolgirl, or whatever it is that would match his fantasies. (Don’t forget: she’s got only five minutes)
If the second scenario is also not applicable, and the girl doesn’t want to play Russian roulette with her small chance of guessing and fulfilling the customer’s needs perfectly, she also can promise him something extra. Let’s say hard-core anal, or that she will swallow his cum, or – even worse – that she will be a kamikaze and let him screw her without a rubber. Of course, many girls try to fool the client and not fulfill these promises of spicy undertakings, but most of the time the customer will complain to the manager, who always solves the dispute by deducting the amount from the girl’s salary.
So, you have to be really smart, pushy and creative to be a successful hooker – oops, sorry: entertainer – in Luxembourg. Oh, and don’t forget the Miller Plus…
10
Both of my sisters are doing pretty well, compared to the other girls. I am actually impressed with Lena’s ability to bamboozle the clients and with Natalia’s readiness to do almost anything when it comes to money. It’s interesting; they both lack these qualities in real life and real relationships: Lena can never manipulate or control her men and always turns out to be the giver, whereas Natalia, after that blood-sucking affair with her boss, can never compromise or tolerate the shortcomings of her infrequent, and usually short-lived, relationships.
The night Lena first introduces me to her craftiness is one of those ill-fated shifts in which nearly all of the girls have a good run but Lena and me. We are sitting, downcast, at the bar when two guys walk in and head towards us. We smile, introduce ourselves and learn that they are Paulo and Fernando, from Portugal, and that they don’t speak any English, or even French. The conversation is limited, but Lena doesn’t shilly-shally. She explains – with just two words, one finger and the menu – that one hour of sex upstairs costs €250 each and includes a bottle of champagne.
The guys exchange a few remarks in their native language, then Paulo explains in gestures that they want tak-tak but they can’t pay that much and would like to have two girls for the price of one bottle. Tak-tak appears to mean sexual intercourse, which we interpret from the recognisable movement of his hips that follows each use of this linguistic unit. Then, Fernando proudly points at the menu and adds that they can pay for two demi-bouteilles if that would suit us better.
Lena tries to suppress her irritation, smiles, and patiently explains to them again that tak-tak is possible only upstairs and that it is the club’s policy to allow only one girl for one bottle. Then she points at the area where we entertain for the demi-bouteilles, lilts ‘tak-tak… la-bas… pas possible’[3] and apologetically spreads her hands as if saying, ‘Sorry guys, even if we wanted to help, there is nothing we can do, so if you want to fuck you will have to splash out’.