Episode 11 ❤️‍🩹 1975 : Do you Spit or Swallow?

How to do the strip joint short con known as The Champagne Hustle

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If you’re in the house, you’re working.

You’re on the bar, on stage or working the floor. On stage you’re untouchable—maybe you scan the room for who’ll put cash on the bar for champagne when your dance is done—but once on the floor you have to be pleasant, seductive.

Neither of which have ever been my long suit.

Tell him how handsome he is, how desirable, run your fingers down his arm—or call him a piece of shit, figure out what he needs to hear. As long as there’s champagne in front of you. A $20 nip buys him a fast five at the bar. More time requires more money. The girls are friendly and the champagne, endless.

No champs? Toss a smile over your shoulder, give him an eyeful of your sweet ass walking away.

He can sulk.
Or he can offer you a $10 glass (cheapskate) or a bottle of champagne.

The Champagne Hustle was the life’s blood of go-go bars. A girl’s time was measured in bottles—the bigger the bottle, the more time she’d spend with you. A small screw-top bottle—a nip—was $20. At the end of the shift, if you’d sold $200 or more in champagne, you took home 10% of your sales.

Spit or swallow wasn’t a question; (almost) everyone spit.

Girls were given a champagne saucer¹ and a chaser in an empty frosted glass.

Historically, the frosting on those tall highball glasses has been strictly an aesthetic choice. In a strip joint, frosting hid the fact that—other than a few ice cubes—the chaser glass was empty. A frosted chaser glass was a tool, it’s is misdirection. It’s the shell, the bent playing card in a street game of three-card monte.

Sip your champers, then appear to take a “sip” of the chaser while letting the rotgut champagne—screw-tops or magnums, it was the champagne equivalent of boxed of wine: bottom shelf, a sloppy drunk, and a mean hangover—let that dribble into the chaser glass.

Done properly, a girl could potentially “drink” bottle after bottle of the horrid stuff, and never get drunk—as long as she maintained a good relationship with her barmaid.

A Champagne Hustle was a short con, and like every con, it was about appearance and misdirection and everyone had a role to play.

1. The Roper is the outside man. Usually a kind of down on his luck guy, he’s not good enough, or not good enough anymore, to work inside. Maybe he’s a drinker, a hustler on the skids. Ropers are flyer guys or men at the door hawking “Three stages, all nude, all the time” even thought we weren’t—nude that is. Ropers bring in the Marks. JJ Huntsberry will eventually fall this far, ending up a flyer guy on 8th Avenue.

2. The Marks believe you really like them and they’re paying for that fantasy and the denial we afford them when we say, “I really like you, I want to sit with you but, the boss says…” They want to feel like insiders. They will never. Never. Ever. Be insiders. No matter how much they spend. Every man sitting at the bar is a potential Mark. Even the ones who think they’re not. Especially the ones who think they’re not.

3. The Operator/ Mechanic runs things, moving the shells, shuffling cards, putting champagne on the bar. Most often this is the barmaid; she keeps an eye on the spit glass—emptying it well before it overflows with spit & cheap champagne—and removing the champagne glass before it’s fully empty, hustling a second or third or bigger bottle for the dancer.

4. The Shill is an accomplice, someone who pretends to be another player, to convince the Mark to take the next step. This is a dancer or floor girl/bgirl, her job is to appear outside of the machinery, at its mercy.

   1. A dancer and her barmaid can switch roles back and forth between each other, depending on the Mark.

5. The Muscle / Cooler is a floor guy or a manager. Sometimes someone visibly menacing. Robbies Mardi Gras had heavyweight champs Jake LaMotta² and Niño Valdés³, both past their prime, but still intimidating. Paul’s Mardi Gras had Nunzio; he was smooth, well-dressed and had a sympathetic manner. Marks always felt he was on their side. Girls did too. He wasn’t, he was the ultimate Cooler.

Me? I’d never been one to spit out perfectly good alcohol, and I’d always considered any and all alcohol—especially that which I didn’t have to pay for—to be perfect and good.

Dancers spit, they don’t swallow.

Drunk girls don’t spit, they swallow.

Drunk girls are accidents waiting to happen. They wake up next to men they never meant to fuck. For free.

Drunk girls get sent home, because they’re not earners.⁴ Cheap champagne is the worst hangover, ever. Trust me on this, I’m a drunk girl.

Most days though, I “restock” the bottles, taking the ones with labels that aren’t too battered or worn from sitting on ice, filling them with ginger ale from the soda gun and twisting the caps back on.

That’s right, twist tops. We is classy.

I keep one or two spit glasses aside, unwashed, leaving some spit in there to make drinks for the assholes. There are always assholes.

I never get great, or even good, at hustling champagne for myself from behind the bar.⁵ And everyday brings new distractions of feathered hats, sherbert-colored polyester pimp suits and matching patent leather, crocodile or alligator shoes—crocogators in orange, lime green or grape—sitting at my station.

Pimps don’t buy titty bar champagne. They buy Golden Cadillacs and Grasshoppers. Cocktails to match their outfits and coat their stomachs. Cocktails that need to be shaken. They come to see me shake, to see the new girl JJ Hunstberry’s grooming. JJ is top dog, if someone can grab me away from him, I’d be another feather in their cap.

No one knows he sends me home untouched at the end of every day.

The pimp parade left less room for the middle-class white guys, the scotch & soda, gin & tonic boys. The Marks. The ones who buy the champagne. The meal tickets.

Meal tickets are intimidated by pimps.

The girls complain to management about the pimps.
The meal tickets complain to management about the pimps.
Management complains to me. About me.

The thing is, a pimp had more in common with the go-go bar owners and managers than the bosses wanted to admit—the difference was just one of semantics.

• A pimp by definition is: a person who solicits customers for a prostitute or a brothel, usually in return for a share of the earnings; a panderer; a procurer.

• The Times Square bosses solicited customers for strippers and/or live sex shows, in return for a share of the earnings. In other words, panderers and procurers.

It was strictly a difference of perspective, skin color, and legality.

Ralphie’s got me in the office, again, in the middle of a shift. His jowls shake as he yells at me for the gabillionth time. “Jus’ give the n***** their fuckin’ drinks, take the money and walk. Ya not here to talk to n*****.”

But no one else talks to me, I think…

I’d never gotten the hang of making friends in my old life either.

📌 PS - If you enjoyed this, please consider restacking it & sharing it with your people? It’ll warm my cold, dead 🖤.

Do we choose our friends, do they choose us, or is it all just proximity and circumstance?

1. Champagne saucers, or coupes are out of style; you’ll rarely see them outside of old movies now. They have short, thin stems and wide, shallow bowls some say were modeled on the breast of the French Queen, Marie-Antoinette.

2. Jake was before my time. More about Jake here, and of course, you can watch Raging Bull.

3. Nino worked in both Mardi Gras, Robbies and later, Paul’s. A sweet, half-blind giant, the girls loved him but customers were intimidated by his physicality and loyalty to the girls.

4. In 1975, you got paid to be on stage, kept all your tips, and got commission on your champagne sales. The bar owners got what was in the register. Sometime after I left, bar owners wised up and dancers had to pay a fee to work. They got fined if they were late and a million other small infractions. Tips have to be split with house mothers, floor managers, deejays and on and on. These days, it’s possible, to leave at the end of your shift owing money to the house. But the bosses hadn’t figured that out yet….

5. Fast forward to the next bar where I still suck at hustling champagne for myself, but I’m getting better at stealing off the bar, shortchanging customers, and just telling them I’m taking X amount as a tip, thanks, blow kisses and wink.